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The Moral Argument: a Brief Summary
Introduction
The moral argument is one of a family of arguments attempt to show that the existence
of God is plausible given some basic beliefs.1 This argument shows that the objectivity
of moral values and duties, if exist, are best explain by a divine being which has the
nature of being necessarily good. Different versions of the argument has been given,
some are plausible and some are not. However, here I am going to defend what I think
the most plausible version of the argument.
1. If God does not exists, objective moral values and duties do not exist;
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist;
3. Therefore, God exists.
This argument is valid because the conclusion does necessarily follow from the premises.2
Thus, it is sufficient to show that the premises are plausible. Note that it is not enough
for the atheist to reject the argument. The atheist has to give good reasons why at least
one of the premises is implausible. But I need first to clarify the argument by stating
what I mean by the objectivity of moral values and duties.
What do We Mean by Objective Moral Values and Duties?
First, we need to explain what we mean by moral values and duties. Moral values
is about what we call “morally good” or “morally evil.” It is easy to misuse the word
‘good’. For example, one can say that a football play is ‘good’, or that the taste of coffee
is ‘bad’, but these words in this context have no moral implications. Moral duties, on the
other hand, has to do with obligations, or what is “right” and what is “wrong.” Note that
these two notions are different despite the first impression they give. For example, if an
old woman is robbed in the street in front of you, then “it is evil to rob a person” (moral
value) and “you are obligated to chase the thief” (moral responsibility.) Sometimes, one
is confronted by many good choices, but when limited to one, there is “the right thing to
do” and “the wrong thing to do.” Other times, one is confronted by many evil choices,
but there is again a right action and the wrong action.
Second, we need to clarify what I mean by objectivity. To say something is objective
(absolute) is to say that it is independent of person’s beliefs and views. That is to say,
people’s opinions on the matter does not affect the matter itself. For example, most of
1 These
arguments are called “transcendental arguments.” Transcendental arguments are arguments
that try to show that some propositions X are necessary conditions for Y .
2 The rule of logical inference is called “modus tollens.”
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us believe that the Earth is round is an objective fact, because whether people believe
that or not is irrelevant to the truth value of that statement. The opposite of objectivity
is ‘subjectivity’. Thus, to say that something is subjective (relative) is to say that it
is dependent on people’s beliefs or opinions. For instance, taste is considered to be a
subjective matter. Some people think that coffee tastes good and others think it tastes
bad, and the statement “coffee tastes good” is not a fact, for taste depends on people’s
preferences. Similarly, objective moral values and duties imply that the question about
moral values and duties is independent from people’s beliefs and opinions. For example,
to say that the Holocaust is evil is to say that it is evil even if the Nazi thought it was
good, and it is evil even if the Nazi won the World War II and brainwashed every person
on the planet to believe that it is good.
This argument shows that without God, there will be no objective moral values and
duties. If moral values and duties exist in that case, they will be relative, subject to
individuals’ preferences. But that is not the case: Objective moral values and duties
are real. Thus, God exists. According to the Christian view, God is the ground of
moral values and duties. This argument, if successful, shows that the atheist cannot live
consistently: either he needs to deny both God and objective moral values, or accept
both, but the atheist accept one and reject the other. However, the argument faced few
objections by atheists. I am going to address the main ones.
Moral Nihilism
Premise (2) might be challenged. The atheist might affirm that moral values and duties
are relative, rather than objective. “Murdering is evil” might be relative to personal
opinion, a subject in which people disagree between themselves. “Murdering is evil,”
the atheist continues, might be relative to cultures: cultures have different moral values
that they appreciate, which contradict the moral values that others hold. There is no
reason to hold that (2) is true, let alone plausible.
Moral nihilism, even though it is popular among popular atheists, it is not widely
believed among philosophers. Philosophers acknowledge the fact that the objectivity
of moral values cannot be proven, and they are properly basic belief, but not holding
them results in many absurd situations. Is torturing a baby for fun is relatively evil? Is
a culture that supports that a morally good culture? Why do we rage when a culture
supports murdering innocents? If your friends are moral nihilists, would they think it
fine to kill their family and destroy their property? Surely they would think this is evil,
but they cannot make such claim for the person who kills and destroys might think it is
fine. We cannot prove that moral values and duties are objective, but we can help our
atheist friends to see that. Louise Antony puts it this way: “Any argument for moral
skepticism will be based upon premises which are less obvious than the existence of
objective moral values themselves.”
Note also that the objectivity of moral values and duties is not derived from the
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agreement of people. The fact that people agree on “murdering is evil” does not imply “murdering is objectively evil.” Moral realism is a metaphysical principle. Moral
realism is as true as the existence of the external world: the external world exists even
if most people believe otherwise. Our understanding of moral values and duties might
be shaped or changed over time (people believed that slavery is good, and then they
rejected it), yet that has no effect of the objectivity of moral values and duties. This
situation is similar to the shape of the Earth: people believed that the earth is flat, and
then they believed that it is round, and that has no effect whatsoever on the objectivity
of the answer to the question “what does the Earth look like?” I hope that it is clear that
people’s agreement does not affect moral realism, and that knowing these moral values
does not affect their existence.
Atheists are Good without God
It seems from what is stated previously that objective moral values and duties do exists.
Does the atheist in this case challenge the first premise? The atheist might affirm that
objective moral values and duties exists, but–in order to avoid the conclusion–say that
(1) is false because there are many atheists who are good persons. We can think of all
those atheists who live their lives to help those who are in need around the world. There
are also many secular organizations that seek to give a hand to those who were subject
to natural disasters. To say that atheists are evil is to deny their good work and consider
it evil, which is very counter-intuitive because the theist does the exact same actions
and consider them to be right. Thus, (1) is not only false, the atheist concludes, but it is
obviously false.
Unfortunately, many atheists on the Internet raise a similar objection over and over
again. This objection shows that the atheist misunderstands what is being stated in
premise (1): the non-existence of God implies the non-existence of objective moral
values and duties. The premise does not deal with believing in God; it deals with the
existence of God. A person can be atheist and does the right moral action without
believing in God, and the reason is because God does exist. The condition in (1) is not
about believing in God, but the existence of God. Thus, the fact that many atheists do
the right moral action and many theists do the wrong moral action does not threaten the
truth or the plausibility of the first premise.
The atheist has to deny (1) or (2) to avoid the conclusion that God exists. But since
(2) seems very plausible, the atheist has to deny (1). In order to do that, one has to give
a plausible theory satisfies three conditions:
i. explains the existence of objective moral values;
ii. explains the existence of objective moral duties;
iii. independent from the existence of God.
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Note that the theist cannot prove by mathematical certainty that (1) is true. What the
theist has to do is to show that that (1) is plausible by examining every theory concerning
moral values and duties the atheist gives case by case. If the atheist cannot give a moral
theory, (1) is plausible. So, I will examine briefly the most contemporary theories held
by atheist to reject (1).
Utilitarianism
One view is that moral duties depend on the outcome of that action; the action is right
if it maximizes happiness and reduces suffering. This view is called utilitarianism. It is
right, for example, for a poor father to steal bread to feed his family if he is utterly unable
to provide the money, while it is evil to murder a person because it causes suffering to
many people including the victim. Even though one cannot calculate happiness and
suffering, it is clear most of the time what is right and what is wrong according to
this view. Interestingly, utilitarianism became more popular among atheists after Sam
Harris’ book the Moral Landscape.
However, this theory, as attractive as it seems, does not account for moral values.
We can ask, “why is it good to maximize happiness and reduce suffering?” Why should
we not believe that we need to maximize happiness and reduce suffering of monkeys, or
ants, instead of humans? It seems that the theory makes a hidden assumption of what is
good and what is evil, but it does not account for it. The theist can agree that there are
some actions that maximize happiness and reduce suffering, but there is no reason to
believe that that is good without justification. In short, utilitarianism fall short in trying
to satisfy condition (i). The theory that says “do unto others as you would be done by”
has exactly the same problem. Even though it accounts for (ii), it does not account for
(i). There is no reason to believe that treating others as one wants to be treated is good.
The Evolution of Morality
The atheist might say that there objective moral values and duties can be explained away
by the theory of evolution. According to this model, our moral values and duties came
about through random mutations and natural selection. Thus, our moral intution and
sense of being good is a product of evolution, just as our ability of seeing and hearing.
Since the theory of evolution does not require God, the atheist might claim, it follows
logically that the rise of moral objectivity does not require a divine being.
What can we say about this point? There is no problem in asserting that evolution
explains moral values and duties! It might be the case that evolution ineed explains
moral values and duties as it explains vision and taste, for example. However, evolution
does not account for the objectivity of moral values and duties. If the theory of evolution
is true, and it happened independent from any external interventions, then it does not
explain the rise of objective morality. For our moral values could have been different
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than the ones that other cultures have. That is to say, it might be the case that people
who live in Germany are more advance, which allow them to have more advanced moral
values and duties. Also, it is possible that if evolution happened again, we would have
developed different moral values than today’s, which means that our moral values are
contingent, i.e., we happened to have these moral values which could have been different. Thus, evolution per se does not explain both (i) and (ii). Evolution denies (2),
which is absurd.
Note that this is not the genetic fallacy. We do not say simply that our moral values
and duties are subjective simply because we received them by evolution. Rather, we are
asserting that evolution is not a justification for the belief in moral values and duties.
For example, assume that I say to you that the Earth is round because I read this fact
from a cook book. The fact that I read it from a cook book does not disprove the fact
that the Earth is round. However, it does not justify it either. Similarly, even if evolution
is true, it does not justify moral objectivity. And as a matter of a fact, many philosophers
argued that evolution in fact implies the subjectivity of moral knowledge:
4. If human morality is a product of purely natural selection, then objective moral
values and duties do not exist;
5. Objective moral values and duties do exist;
6. Therefore, human morality is not a product of purely natural selection.
This argument shows that if pure natural evolution accured, then it follows that moralily
is illusory. To give an analogy, assume that say to you that the sky is green because I
heard it from a teacher. Surely you cannot say that I am right or wrong simply because I
heard it from the teacher, but you can say that I am wrong if you can show that what the
teacher says is only what is wrong. However, I am not going to defend this argument
for it is outside the length of this paper.3 .
Euthyphro Dilemma
We saw that moral values and duties cannot be objective in the atheistic worldview, but
can it be objective in the theistic world view? The atheist says no. Euthyphro dilemma
is an old argument given by Euthyphro, an ancient Greek thinker, to Plato. Euthyphro
said (goodness is used here as objective moral values and duties):
(i) Is goodness good because God chose it to be good?
(ii) Or did God chose it because it is good?
3 You
can find more detail on this argument in “the Moral Argument” in the Blackwell Companion to
Natural Theology.
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If we choose (i), then goodness is arbitrary. If God chose murdering to be good, then
God is a source for moral system, but not a good moral system. On the other hand, if
we choose (ii), then good is outside of God, i.e., God was bounded by goodness, thus
the existence of good is independent of God himself, which makes the existence of God
unnecessarity for goodness. In any case, the theist has a problem to solve, implying that
(1) is implausible.
Can we escape this dilemma? Note that this is not a real dilemma, for the second
option is not the negation of the first one. This dilemma gives two options: A and B,
but one can choose C or D. If the dilemma was in the form A and not A, then it would
have been a real dilemma. We, as a matter of fact, can make a third option and embrace
it: God is necessarily good, and that goodness is in God himself. God and goodness
are not saperated, if God exsits, goodness exists, otherwise, goodness is illusory. To say
that God is necessarily good is to say that God cannot be evil, and to say that God is the
source of goodness is to say that goodness is dependent on the existence of God. So,
(i) is false because God only choses what matches his nature, which is good. (ii) is also
false because goodness is not independent from God. The third option does solve this
false dilemma.
Note that God did not choose to be morally good, it is part of his definition and
nature. God’s goodness is a consequence of his perfection. God has to be good rather
than God happened to be good. Similarly, God has to exist rather than God happened
to exists, for God is a necessary being. Thus, to ask “why is God necessarily good?” is
to ask an incoherent question. This very idea can be found in the Bible. Even though
the Bible affirms that God can do everything (Genesis 18:14, Luke 1:37), it affirms also
that God cannot lie (Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2). The implication the Bible leads to is that
God’s nature does not correspond with telling lies.
The assertion that the theist is making is completely justified. The theist defines
God to be both a concrete object (as apposed to abstract objects) and a necessarily.
good. Thus, even if one believes that abstract objects do not exists in reality, that does
not affect the theist’s assertion. Also, God did not just happened to be good. Rather,
he is the definition of goodness, necessarily. It seems to me that the theist’s theory is
successful in providing a ground for such moral goodness, while no atheistic theory
does.
Conclusion
We saw that the moral argument tries to show that without the existence of God, objective moral values and duties are but illusion, which is contrary to the facts. Thus, this
argument establish the existence of a morally good being, who is the author of goodness and moral duties. We showed the absurdity of moral relativism, and that whoever
does not believe in them cannot live consistently. We examined the most popular ethical
theories that are independent from the existence of God and how they fall short in ex6
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plaining moral values and duties. On the other hand, God as an explanation is successful
in grounding moral objectivity–since he is be nature necessarily good. I do think that
the moral argument is a sound argument and does indeed justify the belief in God. If
one agrees with the premises (1) and (2), they have to agree with (3).
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