Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One

Editor’s note: This article was orignally posted here. It is shared with the author’s permission.

This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters, ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave.

“If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” These words from Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov express a widely held intuition that moral requirements depend upon God’s existence. Most contemporary ethicists today would dismiss this intuition. In this talk, I will argue their dismissal is premature. I will defend what philosophers call a divine command theory of ethics. The thesis that moral wrongness is (identical to) the property of being contrary to God’s commands.[1] Where God is understood, in orthodox fashion, as a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving and just, immaterial person who created and providentially ordered the universe. 

Note three things about this thesis:

First, it is a thesis about the nature of moral requirements. It is not a thesis about the nature of goodness. The concept of “good, is ambiguous, as is seen by the following statements “I had a really good dip in the spa pool last night,” Or “going on a low carb diet is good for you.” Or “Carlos the Jakal was a good hitman.” The concept of the morally obligatory, or morally required, is not identical to the concept of what it is good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger, but it is not an act I am obliged to do.[2] 

Second, my thesis is that the property of being morally required is “identical” to the property of being commanded by God.  I am not saying that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they believe in God. Nor am I claiming that the word “wrong” means “contrary to God’s command.” These are distinct claims. Consider light; Light is identical to a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of the word “light.” People knew how to use the word “light” long before discovering its physical nature. And they knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Analogously, we can know the meaning of moral terms like “right” and “wrong” and know the difference between right and wrong without being aware that the moral requirements are God’s commands.[3]

Third, this is a thesis about the relationship between God and morality. It is not a claim about the relationship between the bible and morality. The thesis I laid out does not mention any sacred text such as the Bible, Quran, Hadith, Torah, or Talmud. While many divine command theorists accept that God has revealed his commands in an infallible sacred text, some do not. The claim that God’s commands are contained in some sacred text is not part of or entailed by a divine command theory itself. It is the result of other theological commitments they have. One could consistently be a divine command theorist without holding this. Divine command theories are ecumenical; they have had advocates within the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and even deist traditions.

Having clarified my thesis, I will defend three contentions.

  • Secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

  • If God exists, then a divine command theory can coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.

  • Standard objections to divine command theories fail.

I. Four Assumptions about Moral Requirements

But first, what do I mean by fundamental assumptions? Moral theories are tested, in part, by how well they account for various assumptions about morality implicit in our moral thought and practice. [4] I will begin by listing four plausible assumptions about the type of requirements morality imposes upon us.

One is that moral requirements are inescapable: they apply to us irrespective of whether following them contributes to any ends or aims we currently desire.  Consider a criminal who stands in the dock convicted of a crime; he openly admits the crime, is unrepentant and informs us that he wanted to kill and torture. Doing so did not frustrate any of his desires. Does our moral condemnation of him depend on us assuming he does not have statistically abnormal desires so that we withdraw this judgment when we discover he really does desire to kill and maim?  Moral requirements can’t be escaped or begged off by noting they don’t fulfill one’s goals or ends. [5]

Second moral requirements are requirements that are justified from an impartial point of view. Peter Singer explains:

The ‘Golden Rule’ attributed to Moses, to be found in the book of Leviticus and subsequently repeated by Jesus, tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in other words, give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the other Christian formulation of the commandment, that we do to others as we would have them do to us. The Stoics held that ethics derives from a universal natural law. Kant developed this idea into his famous formula: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Kant’s theory has itself been modified and developed by R. M. Hare, who sees universalisability as a logical feature of moral judgments. The eighteenth -century British philosophers Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith appealed to an imaginary ‘impartial spectator’ as the test of a moral judgment, and this theory has its modem version in the Ideal Observer theory. Utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to J. J. C. Smart, take it as axiomatic that in deciding moral issues ‘each counts for one and none for more than one’; while John Rawls, a leading contemporary critic of utilitarianism, incorporates essentially the same axiom into his own theory by deriving basic ethical principles from an imaginary choice in which those choosing do not know whether they will be the ones who gain or lose by the principles they select…. One could argue endlessly about the merits of each of these characterisations of the ethical; but what they have in common is more important than their differences. They agree that an ethical principle cannot be justified in relation to any partial or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view[6]

Third moral requirements have practical authority: agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required and never have sufficiently good reasons for doing what is morally wrong. Someone has conclusive reasons to act in a certain way when the reasons in favor of acting, taken together, are stronger than any set of reasons we may have to act in some other way.  If we don’t always have conclusive reasons to do what is right, having total allegiance to morality will be arbitrary and, at worst irrational.   We will have no more reason to do what is right than wrong. Or doing the right thing will be doing what we have a most reason not to do.[7]

Moral requirements are supposed to answer questions about what we are to do. They are considerations that guide our actions.  When we learn something is wrong, that tells us what we are not to do. They cannot do this if we lack conclusive reasons to do what they say.  Suppose you and I are discussing whether it is my duty to donate to the red cross. You convinced me it is my duty to do so. The red cross knocks on my door. I refuse to donate. I suspect this would puzzle you; didn’t I concede that I had a duty to do it? If I responded with “yes, I am persuaded it is my duty to do it, but that doesn’t mean I have reasons to do it,” I suspect you would think I was missing something. I would deny moral requirements have any authority or claim on my behavior and don’t address the question, “what ought I do?”.[8]

Or suppose you heard that I had resigned from my high-paying job. You think I am nuts. How am I going to provide for my family? Why would I give up the career I always dreamt of? I tell you, I discovered the firm was engaging in unethical business practices, and I had to resign to avoid being complicit. On hearing this, wouldn’t it now make sense that I did this? I was justified in doing so. If you do, you are assuming that the fact an action is wrong justifies my refraining from doing it.[9]

Fourth, a final assumption is that if something is morally required, we are accountable for doing it in an important sense.  John Stuart Mill famously stated,

“We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it—if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures, if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency.”[10]

There is a conceptual link between something being morally obligatory and something being blameworthy. If we do what is morally wrong without excuse, others can legitimately blame us, and guilt is warranted. Moral requirements conceptually are demands people make upon one each, which we can hold each other accountable through demanding an excuse, practices of blaming, criticizing, and guilt.

Robert Adams asks us to imagine a situation in which there are compelling reasons to support you not walking on the lawn. However, these reasons give you no grounds for feeling guilty if you do, and they provide no reasons for other people to make you feel like you must stay off the lawn or to blame and reproach you for doing so. Adams concludes that while there would be a sense in which you ought not to walk on the lawn, you have no obligation not to do so.[11]

So, whatever property moral wrongness is, it is the property of being prohibited by certain standards: standards that are inescapable and justified from an impartial point of view. The fact these standards prohibit an action means agents have conclusive reasons not to do the action in question. Agents are also accountable for actions doing actions prohibited by these standards. Others can blame and sanction me if I act contrary to them without an adequate excuse. A plausible thesis about the nature of moral wrongness should account for these facts.

In my next post, I will defend my first contention: that secular accounts of morality struggle to coherently account for these four assumptions.


[1] Robert M. Adams, “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979): 76.

[2] Example from C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.

[3] This illustration comes from William Lane Craig see “Is Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? The Craig-Harris Debate” available at  https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-the-foundation-of-morality-natural-or-supernatural-the-craig-harris-deba/) accessed 19 August  2022.

[4] The implicit method here is described in Richard Joyce’s “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30 (2002): 68-69;”

[5] Richard Joyce, “Mackie’s Arguments for an Error Theory,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-error-theory.html, accessed 20/4/17).

[6] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11

[7] This argument is adapted from C. Stephen Layman’s “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 306- 307

[8] This example comes from Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1994) 6

[9] This example comes from C Stephen Layman’s “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 53-54

[10] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5 available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill5.htm accessed 23 August 2022

[11] Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 238.

Matthew Flannagan

Dr. Matthew Flannagan is a theologian with proficiency in contemporary analytic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Theology from the University of Otago, a Master's (with First Class Honours), and a Bachelor's in Philosophy from the University of Waikato; he also holds a post-graduate diploma in secondary teaching from Bethlehem Tertiary Institute. He currently works as an independent researcher and as teaching pastor at Takanini Community Church in Auckland, New Zealand.

Making Sense of Morality: Singer’s Ethics

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Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

Now I will give a brief, selected overview of Peter Singer’s ethics. He is one of the most influential ethicists today, and he takes seriously the implications of naturalism and utilitarianism. He has written extensively on animal rights, the right to life of fetuses and infants, and much more.

Singer’s Views

For Singer (b. 1946), the evolutionary, naturalistic story is a given. Therefore, the belief that humans have intrinsic moral worth is from Christianity and thus is not universally applicable or even true. He also distinguishes between humans and persons. Humans and other species do not have essences, and mere species membership does not seem morally significant. So, Singer decries the Christian, essentialist view as giving an unjustifiable preference to humans, making it speciesist.

Instead, Singer adopts functional criteria for personhood, such as having (1) the capacity to see oneself as a continuing subject; (2) a desire to keep living; (3) the capability to make choices and act on them (autonomy); (4) self-awareness; and (5) a capacity to experience pleasure and pain (i.e., sentience). Moreover, there are members of other species that are persons, such as apes and dolphins. As persons, they should be subject to greater moral protection than a human fetus or infant, which lacks these traits. Accordingly, abortion and infanticide are permissible.

As a utilitarian, he thinks pleasures should be increased and pains avoided. Still, only actual pleasures and pains should be included in the calculus; we cannot calculate other, possible ones. He also gives weight to a person’s desires, or preferences. If beings prefer to live, they are persons, so it is wrong to kill them. Killing them would thwart their preference and thereby reduce pleasures.

Sentience is crucial since sufferings directly affect the calculus. Further, since suffering extends across species, and there are nonhuman persons, we should give equal moral consideration to any person that suffers. But, if a being cannot experience suffering (i.e., is not sentient), then there is nothing to factor into the calculus. Moreover, Singer believes that when giving such consideration, we should adopt a universal point of view.

Assessment

Singer’s views have been widely influential, and he seems to take the implications of naturalism for ethics quite consistently. After all, if all life has evolved without God, why should humans have greater moral value than other species? 

Still, there are various concerns we can surface with his ethics. First, as a utilitarian, Singer’s views do not seem exempt from various concerns we raised about utilitarianism. While he evidently would support murder and rape as wrong, and justice and love as good, still those conclusions would depend upon the calculus. So, these core morals could be overturned. Yet that would undermine several deeply held convictions.

Consider also Singer’s functional definition of personhood and the capacity to see oneself as a continuing subject of one’s life. On naturalism, can there literally be an identical person who continues through time and change? There are no essential properties on naturalism. It seems I am just a bundle of physical properties at any given time. That bundle would be identical to another bundle at a different time only if they have all the same properties. But, physical things always are changing. I am changing continuously; some may be relatively minor, e.g., my hair grows, while others may be more significant, such as my growing into adulthood.

What makes all these bundles of properties me at each of these times? The answer seems to be that there is nothing that can do that. My properties keep changing – even the cells in my body and brain. Without something that remains the same, there is no continuing subject, which is a prerequisite for personhood for Singer. Unfortunately, his view entails that there are no persons, which surely is false. Moreover, without any literal sameness of person through time and change, his other criteria are undermined, too.

Crucially, his ethics depends upon the validity of naturalism. Is it justified? That answer will affect all the naturalistic options we have considered, and any others too. To that question I now turn.  

For Further Reading

Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 3rd ed.

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 6


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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.


Making Sense of Morality: Bentham, Mill, and Utilitarianism

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Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

After Kant, the next major thinkers in the Enlightenment were the utilitarians. Two exemplars were Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) and John Stuart Mill (d. 1873). On utilitarianismno morals are intrinsically right or wrong, or good or bad. Following the trend we’ve seen, they thought pleasures and pains, and benefits and harms, could be measured empirically. Utilitarianism uses means-to-end reasoning to determine what is moral, based on the sum of an action’s consequences.  

Bentham, Mill, and More

Bentham was a hedonistic utilitarian: what action maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain is right. He treated all pleasures and pains alike, focusing on the net quantity of pleasure. But Mill realized some pleasures (e.g., intellectual ones) are better than others (e.g., sensual ones). Thus he focused on their quality. For him, we should act to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

There also is act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. The former focuses on individual acts; the one that maximizes utility should be performed. The latter looks at kinds of acts that, from experience, we know tend to maximize utility. This is helpful, e.g., in taxation policies, so that we don’t have to re-run the calculus each time we consider a proposal.  

Assessment

There definitely is a place for appeals to utility in moral reasoning. E.g., when crafting public policy, we should consider the likely consequences of a proposed action, even when a deontological principle clearly applies. After all, people have to live with such decisions. Moreover, utilitarianism appeals to people, especially in secular societies, as apparently being morally neutral. There is no appeal to God or some other set of values to determine what is moral.

However, what gets to count as a “good” or “bad” consequence in the first place? Who gets to decide that? According to whom is something (or someone) more valuable than another? Biases easily could enter the calculation here. To make such judgments seems to presuppose some outside standard, beyond utility.

Another issue is that utilitarianism seems inadequate in terms of how it treats motives. Yet, surely they are morally important. If someone kills another, it makes a major difference if it was done intentionally or accidentally. We rightly recognize that difference in the law.

Relatedly, utilitarianism undermines acts of moral supererogation, ones that are heroic and praiseworthy, yet not required. Suppose someone is jogging but notices another person in danger of being attacked by a third person with a knife. While we should expect that jogger to at least call for help (call the police or cry out, to scare off the attacker), it would be above and beyond the call of duty for that jogger to fight off the attacker and save the would-be victim. Yet, on utilitarianism, that act would be obligatory if it would result overall in net good consequences.

Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism makes net utility the basis for what is moral. Consider again our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good. If the good consequences of a murder outweigh the bad, then that act would be justified and even obligatory. The same goes for rape, whether under act or rule utilitarianism. But these results clearly are deeply mistaken, to say the least. If this justification held, it could be moral to rape another person, or murder a racial minority person who is protesting peacefully for civil rights. But, we deeply know such acts are wrong; otherwise, why would there be such uproars against these acts?

Likewise, justice would be reduced to whatever is the result of the calculation. A rape or murder would be just in a society that is predominately one race if that act would maximize the overall benefits for the majority. Yet, if these acts can be just on this moral system, we have lost justice. Indeed, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, seem to be intrinsically so.

So, it seems utilitarianism undermines our four core morals and is inadequate as the basis for ethics.

For Further Reading

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 4



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R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.