The Moral Argument

1
Phil/RS 335

• The Moral Argument

2
Why be good?

• Like the design argument, the moral argument for
  God's existence seems more directly rooted in our
  everyday experience than the more abstract
  considerations which generate the ontological and
  cosmological arguments.
• In the case of the moral argument, the everyday
  experience in question is our concern for the
  moral dimensions of our lives.
• A common claim of theists is that only God can
  properly justify moral beliefs and judgments.

3
C. S. Lewis, "The Moral Argument"

• Famed Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis makes this
  sort of claim with a philosophical rigor rarely
  matched in advocates of this argument.
• The question that animates Lewis's analysis is,
  "How can we understand the force of moral
  judgments?"
• As our experience suggests, such judgments are
  not just expressions of taste or sentiment. If I
  assert that murder is wrong, I am not saying, and
  no one understands me to be saying, something
  like "I don't like pecan pie."

4
An Appeal to Standards

• According to Lewis, the difference is to be
  explained by the fact that moral judgments make
  an appeal, implicit or explicit, to a standard
  independent of taste or personal preference.
• This standard is objective, or at least
  fundamentally intersubjective.
• Thus, despite the protestations of skeptics or
  relativists, Lewis insists that human beings are
  in fact committed to moral standards of behavior,
  standards which they regularly ignore and/or fall
  short of (137c2).

5
Implications?

• For Lewis, this description of our moral lives
  has some important implications for our
  understanding of the world we live in.
• Lewis sees humanity as suspended between two
  competing views of the universe.
• On the one hand, the power and capacities of
  technology and science incline us toward
  materialist explanations of the world around us.
• On the other hand, we seem naturally inclined
  towards a religious or mystical account of the
  whole.
• Though this may seem like a peculiarly modern
  viewpoint, Lewis insists that we've always been
  suspended between these alternatives, and that
  there is no non-question-begging way out.

6
No Recourse?

• One possible implication of this fact is that we
  are to forever remained suspended, caught in a
  fundamental and inescapable ambiguity.
• Rejecting this possibility, Lewis seeks to
  identify a way out.
• We have a resource that we have failed to
  consider our own experience, to which we have a
  privileged, 'insider,' access.
• In a move that has old roots but into which Lewis
  tries to breathe new life, Lewis insists that our
  inner experience reveals to us the mark of the
  author of our existence.

7
What Mark?

• The telltale mark revealed in our inner
  experience is just this apparently universal fact
  of our experience of the ground of morality and
  moral judgment in a moral law.
• Though Lewis is very brief and vague here, the
  idea seems to be that the moral law is a kind of
  trace or sign of the divine in us, a sign which,
  he suggests, "we have to assume is more like a
  mind than it is like any thing else we know"
  (139c2).
• On the assumption that the only other kind of
  thing is matter.

8
Mackie, "Critique of the Moral Argument"

• Mackie's article does not directly respond to
  Lewis's.
• Instead he summarizes the standard form of the
  argument, and then considers and rejects three
  different expressions of this form the versions
  offered by Newman and Kant and then a more
  general form (in which Lewis's version could be
  appropriately located).

9
The Standard Form

• According to Mackie, the moral argument has two
  parts, which can be summarized as follows
• Morality is a series of imperatives or commands
  which require an authoritative ground.
• Morality requires grounding which exceeds any
  possible human authority, individual or social.
• __________________________
• Conclusion Morality is grounded in a
  supernatural authority.
• The stringency of the requirement of morality
  requires a source of moral motivation sufficient
  to it.
• Such motivation cannot be accounted for by
  reference to merely human incentives.
• ___________________________
• Conclusion The supernatural authority of
  morality must be a divine capable of wielding
  positive and negative incentives profound enough
  to motivate humans to satisfy morality's
  stringent requirements.

10
Cardinal Newman on the Conscience

• John Henry Newman, a catholic cardinal and moral
  theologian, argues that our experience of a
  conscience which serves as a resource for making
  moral judgments and a spur to act in accordance
  with them, serves as the source and appropriate
  basis for belief in God, "a Supreme Governor, a
  Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing,
  retributive" (141c2).
• As Mackie summarizes his argument, if follows the
  basic form of the moral argument summarized
  above. It moves from a claim about the authority
  of conscience (1) to the ground of that authority
  in the divine (2) which must have the personal
  qualities summarized (3).

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Does it work?

• As Mackie goes on to argue, the argument, though
  formally valid, is open to criticism.
• In particular, the second move, the insistence
  that the authority of the conscience must be
  grounded in the higher authority of the divine,
  does not seem self-evident or necessary.
• If the conscience really is authoritative, than
  what it authorizes would seem to have moral force
  independently of any reference to the divine.
  Thus, if the first premise of the argument is
  true, than the second and third would seem to be
  false.
• If, however, the conscience is not authoritative,
  and thus requires grounding, the resources for
  motivating the moral argument from conscience
  would seem to be lost.
• Ultimately, in as much as we don't need God to
  account for the experience Newman refers to, it
  doesn't seem to justify the metaphysical
  complexity it assumes.

12
Kant and the Moral Argument

• Though Kant criticizes both the ontological and
  cosmological arguments for the existence of God,
  he seems to offer a version of the moral argument
  in the second of his great works, The Critique of
  Practical Reason.
• Kant's version is importantly different from
  Newman's in that Kant did not insist that the
  authority of morality requires God.
• The force of the moral law is a rational, not
  divine force and is thus accessible through
  reason alone.

13
The Summum Bonum

• What reason reveals, according to Kant, is that
  the proper end of morality is the highest good,
  the unity of virtue and happiness.
• This is a unity which must be possible (if
  something is required of us, must be possible for
  us), but which neither reason nor experience
  suggests should be expected.
• Moral reason thus requires us to recognize the
  possibility of the summum bonum in God, "as this
  is possible only on condition of the existence of
  Godit is morally necessary to assume the
  existence of God" (143c2).

14
What did Kant Mean?

• As Mackie points out, it's not clear how Kant
  intended for us to understand it.
• Kant is clear that the conclusion that God exists
  is not warranted by theoretical reason, and that
  this conclusion is only required from the
  "practical point of view."
• One possibility is that Kant was saying that we
  should act "as if" there is a God, but it's not
  clear why this is required and it is clear that
  this is no argument for God's existence.
• More fundamentally, Kant seems to beg the
  question when he insists that we assume the
  possibility of the summum bonum. Another option
  is that it is a moral ideal that is in principle
  unrealizable, though one that we should strive to
  achieve.

15
God and Moral Objectivity

• The last version of the moral argument that
  Mackie considers focuses on the putative need for
  objectivity.
• As we saw with Lewis, many theists have argued
  that the only way in which moral claims could be
  objective is if they were grounded in the divine.
• Mackie's own take on these matters is a skeptical
  one. That is, he denies that moral claims are
  objective.
• Here, he's less concerned to argue this than to
  argue that even if moral claims were objective,
  it would not be necessary to refer to God to
  explain that.
• We recognize all sorts of reasons of objective
  inquiry that do not make any necessary reference
  to God. There's no reason to suppose that the
  situation is any different with morality.