By Dima Zhyvov
This post is a continuation of the moral argument. Please see Part 1, Part 2 if you have not read them yet.
The existence of objective moral values and duties
One obvious way to avoid the conclusion of my moral argument is to deny the existence of objective moral values and duties. The trouble with such a route, however, is that it so obviously goes against what we know from our moral experience. I take it that in moral experience we do apprehend a realm of objective moral values and duties, just as in sensory experience we apprehend a realm of the objectively existing physical world. There is no more reason to deny the objective reality of the moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. Just as in the absence of some defeater, we are fully rational to trust the deliverance of our senses that tell us that there really is a world with physical objects out there, so in the absence of some defeater we are rational to trust the deliverance of our moral senses. I like the way that atheist philosopher Louise Antony puts it: “Any argument for moral skepticism will be based upon premises which are less obvious than the existence of objective moral values themselves.”[1] My claim here is that we apprehend the existence of objective moral facts in a similar way to how we apprehend the objective reality of the external world. When confronted with such things as rape, child abuse, cruelty, and the like, we simply “see” that they are wrong. Our moral sense is revolted against such actions, and rightly so. What about someone who does not have such a reaction to these acts? Does not his lack of moral indignation defeat the objectivity of our moral outrage? Not in the least. Just like the existence of colour-blind people does not undermine the veridicality of our apprehension of colours, so people who can’t see that such things as torturing a child for fun is wrong do not call into question what is clearly evident. Those who deny obvious moral truths and say, for instance, that cruelty is not a vice, do not merely have “a different moral point of view”, but they have something wrong with them. Such people are morally impaired. When confronted with their lack of “vision”, the proper response is not to try to argue with them or seriously reflect on their alternative morality “tolerantly”, rather it is to recommend them to get help, and fast. So if a moral skeptic wants to deny the existence of objective moral values and duties, the burden of proof is on her to come up with some serious defeater that would convince us to reject what our moral intuition so strongly delivers to us.
But what about the claim that socio-biological evolution renders all our moral judgments as mere illusions or useful adaptations? Could it be that the theory of evolution, with its account of morality, fits the role of a powerful defeater for the validity of our moral experience? Well, let’s examine this objection in some detail.
Philosopher of science Michael Ruse writes,
“The position of the modern evolutionist … is that humans have an awareness of morality … because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth…Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves…Nevertheless,…such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction,…and any deeper meaning is illusory.”[2]
It is important that we understand what Michael Ruse is saying here. He is not denying the reality or force of our moral intuition. He agrees that there is something sick about a man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children. In fact, he even goes so far as to say in another context, “The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says, 2 +2=5.”[3] What Ruse is rejecting is the “objective something” bit to the deliverances of our moral senses, as well as any sound foundation for moral values and duties, apart from them serving a role of an aid in our evolutionary development as a species.
Consider the following examples[4] of altruistic behavior in the animal kingdom, in which an animal sacrifices its own well-being for the benefit of another animal:
1. Male baboons threaten predators and cover the rear as the troop retreats
2. Chimpanzees with food will, in response to a gesture, share the food with others of the group
3. Dolphins support sick or injured animals, swimming under them for hours at a time and pushing them to the surface so they can breathe
4. Dogs often adopt orphaned cats, squirrels, ducks and even tigers
5. Vervet monkeys give alarm calls to warn fellow monkeys of the presence of predators, even though in doing so they attract attention to themselves, increasing their personal chance of being attacked
What these examples show is that altruistic behavior, which many take to be an integral part of any cogent moral system[5], is not peculiar only to humans but is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. This raises a valid question: what makes us any different from the animals when it comes to morality? Rationality and self-awareness, someone may quickly point out, but that response falls short in fully appreciating the question. Why think that a mere fact of us knowing that we suffer, or that other creatures suffer, imposes on us a moral obligation or a duty, in any objective sense of the word, to act kindly towards others? At this stage, one cannot simply appeal to our shared moral intuition and say, “But it is obvious!” to settle the question. Such a response would be circular and inadequate, because it is precisely the objectivity and the binding nature of the moral sense that we are now investigating. It is true that self-awareness and rationality are necessary traits which someone must possess to qualify as a moral agent with duties and obligations toward others, but are they sufficient? In the absence of God, I struggle to see how such duties or obligations can qualitatively be any different from herd morality exhibited throughout the animal kingdom with its strong altruistic impulses shared by its members.
This leads me to formulating my first response to the objection which uses evolution as evidence agains
t the objectivity of moral values and duties. I agree with Michael Ruse that in the absence of God, there is nothing about our morality that makes it objective in the sense I outlined above. In the absence of God, such actions as rape and murder may be socially disadvantageous for the flourishing of our species and in the course of evolution has become taboo, but nothing in this suggests that therefore such actions are objectively wrong. We could imagine, for instance, that if evolution were “re-run”, different kinds of rules and taboos might have emerged. Were it more advantageous for the flourishing of our species that males would forcibly lie with females, then we would have been biologically and socially conditioned to treat such actions with favor and not with the kind of moral revulsion with which we currently treat them. In fact, such actions go on all the time in the animal kingdom.
But does not the mechanism of natural selection, which drives Darwinian evolution, “care” very little about producing true beliefs, but cares only about producing those beliefs that are conducive to our survival? If so, then does not this fact undermine the warrant we give to our moral intuition, since our cognitive faculties responsible for the beliefs we hold based on our moral senses are generally unreliable guides to truth?
Again my response would be very similar. I agree that in the absence of God, this would seriously undermine the trust I have toward my perceptions. However, it is question begging to simply assume the truth of naturalism and then argue from there. For if theism is true, then our moral experience, even if conditioned by biology and society, is probably not wholly illusory, but is reliable to some degree. Furthermore, the argument is self-defeating, because if it is true that our cognitive faculties are so hopelessly unreliable to serve as guides to truth, as this argument seems to suggest, then this fact would not only undermine the warrant we give for our moral perceptions and the beliefs we form on their basis, but would also invariably cast doubt on all of our beliefs, including belief in evolution and naturalism, since all of them have been produced by the same unreliable faculties.
So unless a detractor of the moral argument provides some good reasons to believe that naturalism is true, I do not see how evolution threatens the existence of objective moral values and duties. One does not adequately respond to an argument for God’s existence by assuming his non-existence from the start. This would be to commit an informal fallacy known as begging the question. If there is no God, then our moral experience is plausibly illusory. Great! I agree with that. In fact, it plays quite well in supporting the other part of my moral argument, in which I claim that moral realism is implausible on naturalism.
But perhaps an objector can re-group and offer a different kind of argument against my first premise. Instead of attacking the warrant for believing in the veridicality of our moral experience, one can use the claim that our moral beliefs are byproducts of socio-biological evolution as a defeater for the truth of premise 1. In other words, the claim might be that since our moral beliefs have been installed in us through socio-biological pressures, those beliefs are false and so objective moral values and duties do not exist. So formulated, this latter objection fails even more spectacularly than the former, since it becomes a textbook example of another fallacy known as the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is an attempt to falsify a belief by explaining how that belief originated. Such reasoning is fallacious because the belief in question can be true regardless of how it came to be held. In particular, if God exists, then objective moral values and duties exist, regardless of how conditioned we may be by the evolutionary process. At best what the objection achieves is to point out that our subjective perception of moral values and duties has evolved. However, if moral facts, being grounded in God himself, are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual and fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm.[6]
In conclusion, I do not find the arguments from the evolution of our species against the existence of objective moral values and duties good enough to serve as defeaters either for the warrant or the truth of my first premise. And in the absence of powerful defeaters I am within my epistemic rights to continue regarding the deliverances of my moral senses as strongly pointing to the objectively existing moral realm.
But how does God help to account for the existence of objective moral facts? Why do the features of morality, classically construed, require God as the most plausible foundation? It is to these questions that we now turn.
Click here to see part 4 of the article
[1]Quote taken from the debate between William Lane Craig and Louise Antony on the foundations of morality, which you can listen here
[2]Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp.262, 268-69
[3]Michael Ruse, Darwinism Defended (London: Addison-Wesley, 1982), p.275
[4]The examples are taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals
[5]An exception here is ethical egoism, which is one ethical theory that, interestingly enough, does extol behaving in a self-interested way as the very essence of morality. I chose not to cover this theory in this article for two reasons. One, it is a minority view in ethics, which is heavily criticized by moral philosophers of all stripes. Critiques of this moral theory abound and are widely available in print, as well as on the web. Two, a thorough analysis of this ethical theory would take me too far away from my present goal of outlining my moral argument and defending it against its main detractors.
[6]I drew heavily from the discussion of these issues in Reasonable Faith, 3 edition, by William Lane Craig, pp. 179-180
