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Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part Two:

August 29th, 2022 by Matt
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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.

I outlined four assumptions about the kind of requirements morality imposes upon us. These were

  1. Inescapability: moral requirements apply to us irrespective of whether following them contributes to any ends or aims we currently desire.
  2. Impartiality: moral requirements are justified from an impartial perspective.
  3. Authority: agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required and never have sufficiently good reasons for doing what is morally wrong.
  4. Accountability: if something is morally required, we are guilty and liable to blame if we fail to do it and lack an adequate excuse.  

We can now turn to my first contention: secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for these assumptions. I will make two points in support of this.

The first is that unless prudential and impartial requirements never conflict, we won’t be able to account for these assumptions coherently.[1] Why think this? Suppose it is not always in one’s long-term self-interest to comply with impartial demands. Sometimes a particular type of practical dilemma will occur. Impartial demands will conflict with prudential requirements. When they do, we face the question: What reason is there to act impartially rather than in one’s self-interest? What reason do we have for always giving precedence to impartial demands in such cases? [2]

One cannot answer this question by pointing out that we have impartial reasons to follow such rules based on the fact that other people will benefit or be harmed by our actions. The question, after all, is why I should give impartial reasons precedence in such cases. Nor can it be answered by appealing to my interests or because the case is one where morality and such things conflict. Many philosophers have argued that no answer is forthcoming. Three examples will illustrate the problem:

Example #1. Ms. Poore has lived many years in grinding poverty. She is not starving but has only the bare necessities. She has tried very hard to get ahead by hard work, but nothing has come of her efforts. An opportunity to steal a large sum of money arises. If Ms. Poore steals the money and invests it wisely, she can obtain many desirable things her poverty has denied her: a well-balanced diet, decent housing, adequate heat in the winter, health insurance, new career opportunities through education, and so on. Moreover, if she steals the money, her chances of being caught are very low, and she knows this. She is also aware that the person who owns the money is well off and will not be greatly harmed by the theft. Let us add that Ms. Poore rationally believes that if she fails to steal the money, she will likely live in poverty for the remainder of her life. In short, Ms. Poore faces the choice of stealing the money or living in grinding poverty the rest of her life.[3]

Example 2: A young woman has her heart set on getting into medical school. If she gets in, through hard work and dedication she will graduate and become a good physician. However, even after much study she has been unable to score high enough on the MCATs to be admitted to any medical school. She finds herself with an opportunity to cheat that will ensure her an MCAT score that is high enough to gain admittance to some medical school and so to eventually fulfill her lifelong dream. Her patients will not be harmed by being treated by an incompetent physician because she will not be an incompetent physician once she receives the necessary training. At most the only person who will be harmed is the person denied admittance to medical school because this young woman will take one of the available places and so leave one less slot to be filled. Assume that this person will only be slightly harmed and that somehow the young woman knows all this. It would be wrong for this young woman to cheat to get into medical school, but why isn’t it true that if she does not care about cheating, then what she has most reason to do is to cheat if she knows she can get away with it?[4]

Example: 3 Suppose your son has robbed a rich man of his jewels, the police are after him, and he asks you to help him escape to Brazil. You know you can arrange things so that neither of you will get caught. You also know that if he is caught he will be sent to prison and his life will be ruined, but if he escapes, he will have a good life in Brazil. It would be wrong of you to help him escape, but why isn’t it true that what you have most reason to do is to help your son escape justice?[5]

Cases like this suggest that, if impartial and prudential requirements conflict, agents don’t always have reasons to give precedence to the former. However, this means the total reasons in favor of doing what is impartially demanded will not always be stronger than the reasons against acting. Consequently, agents will not have conclusive reasons to do what they are morally required to do.

We can summarize the conclusion here as an inference from three intuitively plausible premises:

[1] Moral requirements are inescapable demands justified from an impartial perspective

[2] agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required

[3] If there are cases where impartial and prudential requirements clash, then either (a) agents have reasons to always give precedence to impartial demands in such cases or (b) agents do not always have conclusive reasons to follow impartial demands.

[4] agents do not always have reasons to give precedence to impartial demands in such cases.

If these premises are all correct, we must either embrace the assumption that impartial and prudential demands never conflict or embrace a contradiction. We cannot claim both those moral requirements are inescapable and impartial and claim that agents have conclusive reasons to follow them. 

Second, secular accounts of the kind of accountability we have to morality would, if true, undermine this assumption. They entail that impartial and prudential requirements do sometimes conflict. I noted earlier that if something is morally required, we are accountable for doing it. Historically, many understood this in terms of accountability to God. However, God cannot play that role in a secular theory. What does? Atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott Armstrong answers: “human beings” do. “We each have the authority to hold people responsible for violating moral duties. If my neighbor steals jewelry from his grandmother, then surely, I have the authority to criticize him and his action…You do, too.” [6] “Morality is enforced verbally by public condemnation or socially by ostracizing violators.” [7]. In addition, “we all have the authority to vote for representatives who enforce moral norms through formal institutions, such as by legal punishments…. We collectively have the authority to impose such sanctions.” [8]

These kinds of sanctions might account for our being accountable to moral requirements. However, they are insufficient to ensure that it is always in everyone’s self-interest to comply with impartial requirements. The” norms enforced through legal punishments,” “public condemnation,” or “social ostracization” are often not justified from an impartial point of view. Laws often endorse or permit unjust practices that fail to take the interests of a segment of society into account. The accepted mores of the groups people belong to, such as nations, and gangs, often are designed to advance the interests of the group over and above those of others. The mores we legally and socially enforce are often unjustified by facts and sound reasoning. The laws of a society can and often do persecute people who act impartially. There are familiar cases where a person becomes a member of a social group where acting immoral enhances their social status, whereas doing what is right results in social ostracization.

Even if these norms were co-extensive, agents would not be held to account in cases where a person can violate these norms secretly without being detected. There also will be cases where whatever sanctions are incurred will be more than offset by the benefits gained by non-compliance. There will be many cases where a person knows that it is extremely unlikely they will be caught, and the risk of punishment or sanction is more than outweighed by the benefits one receives from disobeying.[9]

In summary, unless we assume that prudential and impartial commands never conflict, we cannot account for our fundamental intuitions about morality. Second, secular accounts of the kind of accountability we have to morality undermine this assumption. This means that secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for our fundamental assumptions about morality.

[1] The argument from this section is influenced by the argument proposed by Henry Sidgwick (1900) The Methods of Ethics Book IV, chapter VI available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46743/46743-h/46743-h.htm#Page_496 and also John Gay (1731) The Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality available at https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/wollaston-british-moralists-vol-2#lf1368-02_head_022  I adapt their ideas in my own way. David Brink develops a similar line of argument; see David Brink, “A Puzzle about the Rational Authority of Morality” and also “Kantian Rationalism: Inescapability, Authority, and Supremacy” in In Garrett Cullity & Berys Nigel Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason. (Oxford University Press, 1997). 255–291 

[2] See, for example, David Brink, “Self-Love and Altruism” Social Philosophy & Policy 14 (1997) 123.

[3] This example comes from C. Stephen Layman’s “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 307

[4]  This example comes from Bruce Russell’s “Two Forms of Ethical Skepticism,” in Louis Pojman, Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings (New York: Wadsworth, 1998), p. 595.

[5] Ibid 595,

[6] Walter Sinnott Armstrong, Morality Without God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 98.

[7] Ibid, 98.

[8] Ibid,

[9] These last two paragraphs summarize the argument of Henry Sidgwick in “The Method of Ethics” see Book II, chapter V.  available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46743/46743-h/46743-h.htm#Page_162 accessed 25/8/22

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Thinking Matters Talk: Does Morality Need God? Part One

August 24th, 2022 by Matt
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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.

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Abortion: the Other side of the Argument

August 5th, 2022 by Matt
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Several years ago, I gave a talk on the morality of abortion at New Hope Community Church in East Auckland. This talk was based on my Ph.D. research at Otago University. Apparently, in the wake of recent supreme court decisions in America, some interest has been expressed in this talk. So, I attach it here.

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Evil, limited, and Indifferent deities: The Horrendous Deeds Objection Redivivus?

November 22nd, 2021 by Matt
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Last week, I was scheduled to present the above paper at the Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society at Fort Worth, Texas. Unfortunately, Auckland’s lockdown prevented this, and the paper had to be cancelled due to the logistics involved. I did, however, pre-record the talk, so it is available below:

Abstract: A common objection to divine command meta-ethics (‘DCM’) is the horrendous deeds objection. Critics object that if DCM is true, anything at all could be right, no matter how abhorrent or horrendous. Defenders of DCM have responded by contending that God is essentially good: God has certain character traits essentially, such as being loving and just. A person with these character traits cannot command just anything. 

Recently, Jason Thibodeau[1] has offered a new version of the horrendous deed’s objection. Thibodeau, asks us to imagine the existence of Yod, a being just like God, who lacks omnibenevolence. Thibodeau argues that if God’s commands can ground morality so can Yod’s and Yod can command horrendous deeds. In this paper I examine and refute Thibodeau’s argument. I look at three interpretations of Thibodeau’s of objection (a) the objection from God’s moral grounding power, (b) the objection from evil and indifferent deities, and (c) the objection from lesser deities. I will maintain all of them fail.

Appeals to moral-grounding power, malevolent, indifferent, or lesser benevolent deities, do not salvage the horrendous deeds objection.

 


[1] Thibodeau, J. (2019). God’s love is irrelevant to the Euthyphro problem. Sophia, 58(3), 437–453.

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Published: “The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Reply to Erik Wielenberg”

October 4th, 2021 by Matt
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My paper, “The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory: Another Reply to Erik Wielenberg” has now been published by The European Journal for Philosophy of Religion here.  The abstract is as follows:

Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command metaethics (DCM). The objection is that DCM “has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible”. This article criticizes Wielenberg’s argument. Section 1 expounds Wielenberg’s new “psychopath argument” in the context of the recent debate over the Reasonable Unbelievers Objection. Section 2 discusses two ambiguities in the argument: in particular, Wielenberg’s formulation is ambiguous as to whether Wielenberg uses the word “obligation” in an objective or subjective sense. Section 3 argues that this ambiguity undercuts the argument. If Wielenberg is using the word obligation in a subjective sense, his arguments do not show that psychopaths “have no moral obligations”. By contrast, if Wielenberg is using the word obligation in an objective sense, his arguments do not show that divine command theorists are committed to denying that psychopaths have obligations.

A pre-published copy is available on my academia.edu page. 

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Matt Speaks at Orewa Community Church.

September 27th, 2021 by Matt
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I was scheduled to speak on the topic “The Holy Spirit teaches” at Orewa Community Church on Sunday September the 26th. Because the government ordered New Zealand into lockdown six weeks ago, and has maintained Auckland in lockdown since, I had to do the message in an ad hoc manner by video.

The message is available below, the quality is not as good as I would have liked. But I think it is good enough for general consumption.

 

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Can a Divine Command Theory Vindicate the Objectivity of Morality: Huemer on Observer Independence, part two

September 12th, 2021 by Matt
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In my last post, I discussed Michael Huemer’s argument that a divine command theory cannot vindicate the objectivity of moral requirements. As I interpret him, the  argument is:

[1] Our commitment to morality presupposes that moral requirements are objective.

[2] Moral requirements are objective just in case there obtain facts about what is right and wrong that do not constitutionally depend upon the attitude of observers towards the objects of evaluation.

[3] If divine command metaethics is true, facts about right and wrong constitutively depend upon the attitudes of an observer towards the objects of evaluation.

I think [3] and [1] are questionable.

Let us begin with [3]. For [3] to be accurate, a divine command theory must entail that facts about right and wrong constitutively depend upon the attitudes of an observer. It is not enough that these facts depend upon God’s attitudes in some way or other. These attitudes must constitute moral facts in part or whole.

Why think that [3] is true? Presumably, the inference goes like this:  If a divine command theory is true, then facts about right and wrong are identical with facts about what actions have been commanded by God. However, facts about what actions have been commanded and prohibited by God are constituted by facts about God’s attitudes. So, a divine command theory entails that facts about observers attitudes constitute deontic facts.

However, it is not evident that facts about what actions have been commanded and prohibited by God are constituted by facts about God’s attitudes. In the literature, it is common to distinguish divine command theories from divine will or attitude theories.[1] Divine will theories contend that God’s attitudes towards certain actions constitute deontological facts. By contrast, a divine command theory contends deontological facts are identical with facts about what actions have been commanded by God.  Attitudes and commands are not the same things. Robert Adam’s stresses that “moral obligation is understood in terms of what God requires of us”. But, “requiring is something we do in relationship to each other it essentially involves communicative acts”. It is not logically equivalent to having a positive or negative attitude towards that action.

The difference between commanding and merely willing is significant. Divine command theorists like Adam’s defend a divine command theory because they believe “the will of a legislature imposes no obligations without being commanded”. To illustrate this, Adam’s provides some examples, where what a person desires or wills and what the command comes apart.

 “Religiously, obedience to God is in large part a matter of respect for God; and interhuman examples suggest that respect would follow commands in preference to unexpressed desires. The wait staff in a restaurant show me benevolence, perhaps, but scant respect, if they bring me what they think I want instead of what I actually ordered.” [2]

So, when a divine command theorist claims deontological facts are identical with facts about what actions God commanded, it doesnt follow that God’s attitudes constitute these facts. To get that conclusion, we need to assume that commands are constituted by attitudes. Seeing someone can command X without a pro attitude towards it, and someone can have a pro attitude towards x without commanding this is not obvious.

This brings us to [1], Suppose divine command theories do entail moral facts constitutively depend upon an observer’s (i.e. God’s) attitudes. This is only problematic if our commitment to morality presupposes that moral facts are objective in this sense of the word.  If we define an objective fact as a fact that does not constitutively, as opposed to causally, depend on an observer’s attitudes. It does not seem to me that [1] is true.

Objectivist metaethical theories’ plausibility consists of their accounting for and vindicating certain presuppositions of our moral thought and practice.  Our moral thought and practice assume that beings like you and I can make mistaken judgements. We have limited information, are prone to biases, and make errors of fact and reason. We reason about morality to discern which evaluations our human compatriots are correct and which are not. We use reasons to support and verify some judgments and criticize others showing they are mistaken.  We defend some of the evaluations of our society against criticisms.[3] We reject others as oppressive, immoral and in need of reform. We think our society made moral progress by rejecting slavery and racial segregation. We believe the Nazi’s evaluation of racism was mistaken, and Martin Luther King Juniors was closer to the truth.  We think some moral reformers who criticized widely endorse policies were correct. They have given us a better understanding of what is right and wrong. We believe certain actions, like the rape and murder of a small child, are wrong even if I or my society endorsed them.

In Ethical Intuitionism, Huemer himself emphasises several of these assumptions. He notes (i) the judgements of Neo Nazi’s and Nazi society were mistaken.  (ii) That we engage in real disagreement with our compatriots, but individually and collectively contradicting what they say and offering reasons for and against their judgements. (iii) That individuals and societies are not infallible moral judges and (iv) that human judgements can be based on arbitrary reasons.[4]

These assumptions presuppose moral facts obtain independently of the evaluation of human appraisers: appraisers like you and I who are subject to these cognitive deficiencies. Who are fallible, make mistakes, can be prejudiced and arbitrary, and ignorant of relevant facts.  They do not presuppose that this independence is only constitutive. They do not assume this independence applies to all possible appraisers. Even an infallible omniscient, impartial appraiser upon whose will everything else depends for its existence.

Two examples will illustrate this.  Take a crude relativist theory: where actions are morally required if and only if, and because, my social group approves of them. This theory is a paradigmatic example of a subjectivist theory. All most everyone rejects it because it contradicts the objectivist presuppositions of moral thought.  Yet, according to Huemer’s view, whether this theory vindicates the objectivity of morality depends solely on whether societies approval causes or constitutes moral facts.

Suppose there are two versions of this theory. (a) One claims the property of being morally required is identical to the property of being socially approved.  (b), Another claims my society can directly and immediately bring it about that I am required to do something by approving of it. Neither of these theories will vindicate the objectivists presuppositions of our moral thought. Both will entail that correct evaluation are co-extensive with the attitudes of my society. So, both will have implications that contradict the relevant presuppositions mentioned above. Nevertheless, in Huemer’s view, (b) entails that moral facts are objective and (a) does not.  Consequently,  a theory can vindicate the objectivity of morality, in Huemer’s sense of the word, yet fail to vindicate any objectivist presuppositions of our moral thought and practice.

A second example, consider a form of naturalistic moral realism whereby moral facts are facts about the causal properties of certain actions. Rightness just is the property an action has when it tends to increase or enhance our happiness. Wrongness just is the property an action has when it tends to diminish our happiness. This is a paradigmatic objectivist theory. It makes wrongness depend on facts about causal physical properties of actions. It vindicates the objectivist presuppositions of our moral thought and practice. The judgements human appraisers make about causal properties can fail to correspond to causal reality.   Yet on Huemer’s view, whether this theory vindicates the objectivity of morality depends solely on what its advocates believe about the ontology of laws of nature.

Suppose John and Mary jointly develop and defend a theory of this sort. Although they agree on the ontology of moral facts, John and Mary have different views on the ontology of laws of nature. Mary is an atheist who accepts David Armstrong’s thesis that laws of nature are a form of natural necessity[5]. By contrast, John is a Theist who accepts the view of early modern scientists that laws of nature are just the laws by which God governs the natural world. He accepts Alvin Plantinga’s[6] and John Foster’s[7] defence of the thesis that Laws of nature are divine decrees. 

John and Mary advocate the same meta-ethical theory. But, Huemer’s definition entails that Mary’s theory vindicates the objectivity of morality and John’s theory does not. Their thesis is that certain causal properties of actions constitute the wrongness of actions. John believes that causal laws are constituted by God’s willing certain regularities occur. So, John is committed to claiming that wrongness constitutively depends on God’s will.  Mary has no such commitments.

However, this difference between Mary and John makes no difference whatsoever for how well their joint theory vindicates the objectivist assumptions of our moral discourse. Consequently, a theory can fail to vindicate the objectivity of morality in Huemer’s sense and yet vindicate all the objectivist features of our moral discourse.

If I am correct about this, the kind of objectivity presupposed by our moral commitments has nothing to do with whether moral facts are “constitutional” independent of any observer or appraiser.

[1] Examples of divine will theories include those of; Matthew Carey Jordan (2012),“Divine Attitudes, Divine Commands, and the Modal Status of Moral Truths,” Religious Studies 48: 45–60; Mark Murphy (1998), “Divine Command, Divine Will, and Moral Obligation,” Faith and Philosophy 15: 3–27; Christian Miller (2009), “Divine Desire Theory and Obligation,” in Yujin Nagasawa and Erik Wielenberg (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); and Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (2004), Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

[2] Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 260

[3] Think of the perennial moral debate between conservatives and progressives, which is over what social norms to preserve and defend and what to reform.

[4] Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism, (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 49-53.

[5] David Armstrong, What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

[6] Alvin Plantinga, “Law, Cause, and Occasionalism” Reason and Faith: Themes from Richard Swinburne, (Eds.) Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey E. Brower (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 126-143.

[7] John Foster, The Divine Lawmaker: Lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 

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