On theories of ethical subjectivism (there are various stripes: emotivism and prescriptivism are two prominent varieties), moral facts are not facts about human actions or states of affairs but about the people who view those actions or states of affairs. Thus when the subjectivist says, "Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad," the predicate "bad" refers not to the slapping-act but to something in the speaker's attitude toward the slapping-act.

In my own thinking on metaethics I prefer to think of metaethical questions in the terms of moral properties. Are moral properties real? If so, where do they reside? When we think of the question in this way it clarifies the problem that many people have with ethical subjectivism. If I say, "This tire is round," I am saying that the tire possesses the property of roundness and that this property is not in me but in the tire itself. It exists outside of me. I neither create nor facilitate the property's existence. It exists whether I am there to perceive its existence or not. The tire just has this property, and my own opinions on the matter are thoroughly irrelevant.

Now consider the ethical subjectivist who says, "Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad." The substance of her ethical theory is that the property "bad" is possessed not by the act itself but by something in the mental state of the agent considering or viewing the act. So it turns out that the subjectivist is not saying something about slapping people at all; she's just saying something about herself.

Here is an observation by Victor Reppert:

One interesting point about many ethical philosophies is that while they make no reference to a theistic God, they do seem to be grounded in metaphysics, and the kind of metaphysics at work is one that a modern naturalist would have trouble accepting. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are prime examples. Plato's moral philosophy is based on the Form of the Good, which shares certain characteristics with the theistic God, and which can be known through a process of recollection where we recollect what we were aware of in a pre-existence. Aristotle is based on the idea of an inherent purpose for human life, and Stoic ethics is a response to Stoic metaphysics. No one seems to be suggesting that ethics will be all just the same regardless of metaphysics. Even if a personal God isn't required for ethics, doesn't it seem plausible that at the very least some sort of metaphysics is required that most naturalists today would have a hard time accepting. Is it reasonable to reject what Kant called a metaphysics of morals?

There's a good discussion going on in the comments section of Reppert's post. I think Reppert is right on this. The old apologetic claim that you can't have morals without God is not exactly right. The naturalist does indeed have some philosophical options for believing in a true, objective moral system in the absence of the Lawgiver of traditional theism. He can be a Platonist, for example, and there are other cognitivist ethical theories that posit some objective ground of moral facts that fit nicely with naturalism broadly defined (see this book, which I recently started but have unfortunately had to set aside, for a nice roundup of the current metaethical scene). But Reppert's point is that the available options don't fit too well with "modern" naturalism, by which I assume he means the form of naturalism that is dominant in the sciences, which is very often physicalist in character. When you start talking about abstract "facts" on a naturalistic worldview - facts like, "A square has four right angles," and, "It is wrong to toss little Jimmy into the well for laughs" - you have to do some wiggling to claim that the facts represent objective non-mental realities. A naturalist can't put a square, for example, in a test tube and study it. He can't do it with the moral fact proscribing the tossing of little Jimmy into the well either. So if he is going to say that these things are real in the same way that the chair I am sitting on is real, he has to monkey with his metaphysics so that immaterial realities can co-exist with the material realities.

This post is the first entry in a series I will be doing this fall on the validity of atheistic ethics. This topic is very important to my own faith and philosophy, and I am writing a paper on the subject for one of my seminars in Christian apologetics. I will be using this series to help organize some of my thoughts on atheistic ethics and metaethics in general. - Brian

Christian philosophers and apologists often claim that the only worldview that can sufficiently account for the objectivity (and thus the ultimate significance) of moral values is theism. Atheistic naturalism, in particular, is singled out as being particularly unsuited for explaining the objective status of moral claims. This seems to me to be true, and yet the atheists aren't convinced (but really, are they ever?). Not only does this claim seem to be very strong, it is one of the bedrock principles on which I justify my belief in Christianity. Since they are not just byproducts of natural selection or expressions of preference, moral values are clearly objective, and it is Christian theism that best explains this objective ontological status of moral values.

Upon initial reflection, this claim makes sense. Consider a world without God, the naturalist's world, a world that is physical and physical only. Matter and energy are the only sure things that exist. Other non-physical properties like minds minds or morals may seem to be real, but most likely they are only curious byproducts of the interaction of atoms and energy, and it seems very difficult to rescue them from this tragic fate. Consider, for example, someone you love dearly. She is a material entity, like a rock or a tree. In fact, the material in her - every single atom - was once non-human. "She" is entirely made up of the food that she has consumed in her lifetime (or, in the case of a newborn, of the food her mother and father have consumed). Dust she once was and dust she again will be. Why then, would you value her as something more than material? Why would it be wrong to harm her but not the same dust of which she is made? She simply is the dust, and nothing more. Certainly she is valuable to you, but if she has no objective value then your belief that she has value and ought to be valued expresses only a personal preference, and a preference that no one else is under any obligation to share. It is akin to your preference for Captain Crunch over Golden Grahams, for example, or your affinity for the Packers over the Patriots. And I think this is a real problem for atheistic naturalism.

Theism, goes the claim, has no such problem and thus makes more sense of our common sense moral judgments. A theistic world is one that allows for a significant supernatural realm. Since the one you love is more than material in this world, she has ultimate worth and value. She has a non-material soul and appropriates non-material value by virtue of her status as a creature of God, the ultimate source of all value and goodness.

All of this can be set forward as either an argument for theism or, at the very least, an argument against atheism. I am concerned with the latter here. Let's make the argument against atheism a little clearer by setting it out formally:

1. Objective moral values exist.
2. Any worldview that has a non-existent or suspect basis for the existence of objective moral values ought to be rejected.
3. Atheistic naturalism has a non-existent or suspect basis for the existence of objective moral values.
4. Ergo atheistic naturalism should be rejected.

This argument is certainly valid, but are its premises true? The atheists say no. J. L. Mackie, for example, essentially rejected premise (1) by claiming that moral values are not objective. The properties of "moral goodness" or "moral wrongness" do not actually exist in a material world, and thus when we use these terms we are simply expressing subjective human desires that help us get along in life. This may not give you a reason for dancing in your underwear, but it is no argument against the truth of atheism. In other words, moral values aren't real and you are worthless. And that's that, so deal with it.

Now the theist will automatically say that Mackie's moral skepticism is consistent with his naturalism and atheism, and indeed his view seems to be the most logical one to take if you are an atheist. I know if I were an atheist, I would take this view. But many atheists aren't convinced that this is the way to go, and most of them go about arguing against the argument above by contesting the truth of premise (3).

But how do they go about this? What arguments do they make? This will be the subject of subsequent posts in this series. I will examine the counter-arguments of three prominent naturalists and provide a theistic response. It's go time.

Next time: the atheistic ethic of Kai Nielsen

A post over at the Christian CADRE blog touches on something that's been on my mind for the last few weeks. I've been reading through some of Plato's major works, and a short but interesting one is Euthyphro, in which Socrates grills a worshipper of the Greek gods on what it actually means to be pious or moral. In the dialogue, neither Socrates nor Euthyphro are able to come to a workable definition of the proper grounding of morality, and all of Euthyphro's ideas are shown by Socrates to be worthless.

I mention this because of a traditional problem in philosophy of religion known as the "Euthyphro dilemma," which you can read more about here. This dilemma stems from the following exchange found in the dialogue, with the most relevant text in italics:

Euthyphro: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.

Socrates: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?

Euthyphro: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.

Socrates: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?

This creates an alleged dilemma because (1) if God issues moral commands because they are moral, then the moral law exists above God, and this goes against traditional theism and the very concept of God and (2) if morals are moral simply because God commands them, then He could change His command tomorrow (from "don't rob banks" to "rob banks and kill all the people inside wearing pink") and abhorrent acts would then become moral. In other words, morals would be based on the arbitrary will of God.

This "Euthyphro dilemma" is supposedly the death knell for any ethical system that grounds moral imperatives in the command of God (i. e. a divine command theory of ethics). Even today, in many contemporary discussions of the subject, on atheistic blogs or whatever, non-theists act as if the issue is settled. Ethics just can't be rooted in the command of God, they say, because Socrates has already dealt with that issue definitively. (They do this quite often, by the way. We can't have any real knowledge of God anyway, for example, because Kant has already settled that! The teleological argument for God's existence doesn't work either! We know that because Hume showed it was impossible! This kind of thing wouldn't be so annoying if the arguments they were referring to were better.)

But I call poppycock on that. If we're looking solely at Socrates' argument, it doesn't even apply to theistic beliefs, and that's because the Greek gods are not analogous to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God of theism. The Greek gods - Zeus, Ares, Athena and the like - are more like glorified superheroes than God. That is, they may be very strong or beautiful or smart and have magnificent powers, but they are still finite. They are part of the created order, not the ontological ground of that order. Thus of course it's impossible for objective morals to be rooted in their command, and Socrates points out that the gods often disagree or change their mind anyway.

Now, for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Socrates was not talking to Euthyphro. We'll say he was transported seven hundred years into the future and was talking to Saint Augustine (who would have given a much better answer, by the way, than poor Euthyphro). There he poses the same question to Augustine: are moral actions good because God has commanded them? Or has God commanded them because they are good? Most sophisticated formulations of the Euthyphro dilemma simply twist the question and pose it to theists in this way. What is the proper Christian response?

Truth be told, I like this formulation of the dilemma better, because the solution is so much more illustrative of good Christian theology. Before answering, I have to admit that if one subscribes to divine command theory, and places the emphasis on the command, then the question posed carries much more force. But I see a fatal flaw here: whoever said the command of God is the ground of morality? If we're only focusing on the command itself, then we aren't actually going deep enough into the question of what grounds morality. In other words, we're not at the ground of moral grounding yet. We're still hovering over the surface.

The obvious question to ask is: well, why does God command what He commands, exactly? Answer: He commands what is in accord with His character. Thus objective morals are grounded in the nature of God: loving, relational, life-giving, sacrificial, merciful, gracious, etc. The commands that He issues only flow out of His character. So the truth is that God actually can't issue moral commands that are ultimately contradictory. So he can't one day tell someone to feed the hungry, and the next day to throw them off a bridge. God is the ground of all being and reality itself. The "good" is whatever is in accord with that ground of being - the personal God Himself - and evil is whatever opposes the personal God, not His commands but His character. In my mind this solves the problem. There is no Euthyphro dilemma.