"If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions. They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities." (Dennis Prager, in a piece in National Review Online) The argument is wrong twice over. The existence of a god does not solve the problem of justifying right and wrong and there are solutions that do not require a god.
This one was addressed long, long ago by Plato, in the Euthyphro, where Socrates asks, "Do the gods love holy things because they are holy, or are holy things holy because the gods love them?" I've seen it said (I think by Anthony Flew) that an appreciation of the point of this question is one of the marks of a philosopher.
If the good is good because the gods like it, or command it, then the statement that the gods are good is merely a tautology, empty of content; we would still have to say that the gods were good if they commanded that we kill our fathers, marry our mothers, or torture our guests. But if the word "good" has actual content, so that saying that the gods are good means something definite, beyond "you had better praise the gods because they are more powerful than you are," then we must have the capacity to judge for ourselves that something is good, and then we don't need the gods to tell us what is good.
Ironically, this distinction is important to Ayn Rand's philosophy, though she doesn't credit it to Plato. She rejects the idea that ethical egoism means "I want this, and therefore it's good," which she calls "whim-worship"; her version is "this is good, and therefore I want it." This is something that a lot of her critics seem not to get, perhaps because the assumption that ethical judgment cannot be rational is so deeply ingrained that they see only a choice between the arbitrary commands of God and the arbitrary commands of one's own desires. That might have been true of Stirnerite egoism but it was not true of Randian egoism.
I agree with your description of her position. The problem is that her argument for why certain choices are objectively good has holes in it, sufficiently serious ones that I do not think they can be fixed. As you may know, I spend a chapter on that in the third edition of _The Machinery of Freedom_. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Problems%20with%20Ayn%20Rand.htm
I didn't actually know that, because I have been content with the second edition. So I can't comment on your criticisms. However, even if she is wrong about which choices are in my self-interest, I think her view that my self-interest must be defined by what is objectively good for me, not simply by what I want, is sound; indeed almost obviously so, given such obvious cases as addiction to heroin, or alcohol---or tobacco!
That's useful to know. I'm hesitant to acquire any more printed books because wall space for more bookshelves has become a scarce resource for us. Thanks!
'If we applied the same standards to testing moral reality — rough consistency at the most basic level of perception — the case for it does not look that much worse.'
I've seen this argument before. Michael Huemer likes to say similar things, as you point out.
I think it's totally wrong. I'm actually a moral anti-realist myself, and as you might expect, I don't find this to be at all confusing or in conflict with my intuitions, whereas a non-belief in the existence of the physical world definitely would be.
Of course I have lots of thoughts and (sometimes strong) emotions about moral behavior, but this doesn't conflict with my intuitions, because I correctly recognize that as a fact about my own psychological makeup, not about 'moral reality'.
>The solution that strikes me as least unsatisfactory is to posit the existence of moral truths analogous to physical truths,
The human brain appears to have evolved to incline us to some degree of belief or disbelief whenever it can (presumably, because otherwise we would never have a clue how to behave). To believe any theories of either morality or the physical world is to assume that those theories are in some sense “correct” or at least “better” than any alternatives of which one is aware. And that is quite sufficient to be able to cite arguments and evidence that defends them or criticises alternative views.
>perceived by a moral sense analogous to physical sight or hearing.
There is no direct perception of reality (moral or physical). All observations are theory-laden (although some theories appear to be built into us as a result of evolution).
>That describes the world as almost everyone actually perceives it;
On many things, yes. But disagreement is also common and desirable: that is competition among theories.
> there are not many people who do not see torturing small children for fun as wicked. And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests.
Consistency is one type of test. There are also thought experiments, apparently relevant physical evidence (including for moral issues), etc. But such tests never “confirm” any theory (conjecture) of “moral reality” or “physical reality”. Because the next test might be the one that we consider to refute the theory (although possibly only after giving the test itself a lot of testing and criticism).
>If a moral universe exists there ought to be a reasonably good correlation across people in their fundamental moral perceptions.
There is a universe of moral discourse, at least. And there is a lot of agreement about it. However, we never know when someone might come up with a refutation of what we had previously assumed to be “obviously right”. And we should welcome such challenges to our current views.
We get our views of physical reality from sense perceptions. It's true that we have to interpret those perceptions. But the sense perceptions themselves are mostly consistent across people — if you and I look at the same object we will usually see the same thing.
I am not sure I said that consistency confirms a theory, physical or moral. If I did I shouldn't have. My view is that if a perception passes all the tests we are able to put it to that is as much reason for belief as we can get, but not for certainty.
> … the sense perceptions themselves are mostly consistent across people — if you and I look at the same object we will usually see the same thing.
I share that as a critically-preferred conjecture—but it remains a conjecture.
>I am not sure I said that consistency confirms a theory, physical or moral.
You said it and I even quoted your saying it, which I now do again: “And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests”.
>My view is that if a perception passes all the tests we are able to put it to that is as much reason for belief as we can get, but not for certainty.
There is no supporting “reason for” any theory (an apparent perception is a type of theory). No matter how many tests a theory passes, there are an infinite number of other possible theories that fit the same evidence. So, logically, we could not be seeing anything that could count as support. However, a single failed test could, logically, be a refutation. (Put another way: you can’t, in principle, support the theory “all swans are white”; but you could, in principle, refute the theory by seeing one black swan.)
It is hardly relevant to the truth or falsity of any theory what people believe or disbelieve about it (except in some self-referential cases).
People can be, and often are, psychologically “certain”. But see previous sentence.
you are interpreting him wrong. “And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests”
The important part is "the same way". He expects you to understand that he is not saying anything about certainty when he uses the word confirm. Instead he is giving an argument for why we can believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts without wasting time on the details of how we can believe in physical facts. So you are, probably by mistake, attacking a straw man.
His argument is still weak but that is a different issue.
>you are interpreting him wrong. “And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests”
>The important part is "the same way".
He and you might think that is the important part, but I think that the claim that things can be “confirmed” is important, because erroneous.
>He expects you to understand that he is not saying anything about certainty when he uses the word confirm.
I presume only that when he says “confirm” he at least means confirm. But theories cannot be confirmed.
>Instead he is giving an argument for why we can believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts without wasting time on the details of how we can believe in physical facts.
I agree that we do “believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts”. But, as I have explained, not in the way Friedman appears to argue.
Simply erroneous or does it maybe depend on certain assumptions and maybe simply on what definition of "confirm" one uses?
Can you confirm an appointment you have with someone? Can you confirm if it is raining or not by looking out of the window? It is impossible to simply answer these questions. Because it depends on wich ground assumptions you allow and therefore what you mean by confirm. To me it was clear how he used the word. To me it is also clear that the use of the word "confirm" creates value and therefore we should not get rid of it.
He also never said anything about confirming theories. That was also your interpretation.
>But theories cannot be confirmed.
Can you confirm that or is that also simply a conjecture that you believe I have to agree with?
>No matter how many tests a theory passes, there are an infinite number of other possible theories that fit the same evidence.
Given the evidence is your confidence in those infinite number of theories the same or different?
>I agree that we do “believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts”. But, as I have explained, not in the way Friedman appears to argue.
It is actually not about what we "do" believe but about what we "can" believe given a set of rules. I believe that a set of rules that makes belief in moral facts possible opens a can of worms and therefore is not a good set of rules to use.
From my understanding moral facts are the kind of facts that are supposed to give you reason to do something that you have no reason to do. We cannot say what these reasons are supposed to be or observe them in any way. Whatever set of rules allows us to say that such tings exist also allows us to claim the existence of a bunch of other weird things.
>Can you confirm an appointment you have with someone? Can you confirm if it is raining or not by looking out of the window? It is impossible to simply answer these questions. Because it depends on wich ground assumptions you allow and therefore what you mean by confirm. To me it was clear how he used the word. To me it is also clear that the use of the word "confirm" creates value and therefore we should not get rid of it.
In everyday conversation it would usually be irrelevant and confusing to quibble about “confirm” (or “sunrise”, for instance). But a philosophical exchange is usually more scrupulous.
>He also never said anything about confirming theories. That was also your interpretation.
Friedman says, “that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality”. I take “view” to mean “theory” here.
>>But theories cannot be confirmed.
>Can you confirm that or is that also simply a conjecture that you believe I have to agree with?
No, it can’t be confirmed. But it can become a critically preferred conjecture. You only have to agree with it if it seems true to you.
>>No matter how many tests a theory passes, there are an infinite number of other possible theories that fit the same evidence.
>Given the evidence is your confidence in those infinite number of theories the same or different?
It is not possible to consider more than an infinitely small sample of those theories. One’s confidence is irrelevant to the truth of a theory (except in certain self-referential cases).
>>I agree that we do “believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts”. But, as I have explained, not in the way Friedman appears to argue.
>It is actually not about what we "do" believe but about what we "can" believe given a set of rules. I believe that a set of rules that makes belief in moral facts possible opens a can of worms and therefore is not a good set of rules to use.
Belief does not appear to be a choice constrained by known or chosen rules (https://jclester.substack.com/p/belief-and-libertarianism). But perhaps you mean what “a set of rules” logically implies or allows. Some cans of worms are better opened.
>From my understanding moral facts are the kind of facts that are supposed to give you reason to do something that you have no reason to do.
To believe (i.e., genuinely feel) that certain things are moral (or immoral) is to have a reason to do (or not to do) them. And if that is a categorical belief, then it seems it must override other preferences.
>We cannot say what these reasons are supposed to be or observe them in any way.
When I say that murder is immoral, I at least observe my feeling that it is so. (When I say that the North Pole is cold, I seem to have an analogous feeling that this is so.)
>Whatever set of rules allows us to say that such tings exist also allows us to claim the existence of a bunch of other weird things.
> The solution that strikes me as least unsatisfactory is to posit the existence of moral truths analogous to physical truths, perceived by a moral sense analogous to physical sight or hearing.
Of course, I could argue just as convincingly for the existence of spiritual truths perceived by a spiritual sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by "spiritual truths." So far as religious truths, I don't think you get agreement on religious facts to nearly the degree you get it on moral facts, so the argument is less convincing.
> I don't think you get agreement on religious facts to nearly the degree you get it on moral facts,
Some cultures didn't even consider randomly killing people immoral as long as you announced your actions openly and payed off the family of the victim. You even devoted a chapter of your book to the subject.
Earlier stories in the Torah support this as well.
1. God punishes Cain for killing Abel. At that time, there was one divine command -- don't eat from a specific tree -- which was no longer operational since people had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. But God acts as if Cain should have known better.
2. God punishes the generation of Noah because they were wicked and violent. (Ironically, the word for violent is "hamas," although the current Hamas got its name from an acronym in Arabic, not from a Hebrew word). Again, there was no divine command to the contrary.
The discovery of the scientific method -- which goes beyond making passive observations and checking for inconsistencies -- enabled enormous theoretical progress in determining what the physical facts are. I can see no analogous theoretical progress in the field of moral facts. We don't even have an academic field analogous to the natural sciences. On the contrary, we appear quite stumped by simple moral dilemmas, far from being able to derive answers from first principles. Do you disagree with this assessment? If not, how do you explain these difference based on your analogy between physical and moral facts? Are we missing something like the scientific method in the field of morality? How would it work?
I'm not sure I believe in "the discovery of the scientific method." At least, I have two historical anecdotes, one from an Icelandic saga and one from a 14th c. Muslim world traveler, that look like scientific experiments.
But your real point is that we have made more progress in understanding physical facts than in understanding moral facts. That's true, but there is no obvious reason why the two projects should be equally easy.
My point was not only that we made more progress, but that we made more progress for a specific reason, which may reveal an important difference between "physical reality" and "moral reality" (if it exists), namely, that we can do carefully controlled experiments on physical systems (that's what I meant by "scientific method"). This, I think, is very important to the discovery of physical facts, or more precisely to the development of *theories* about what those facts are. I also think this method works the same in any culture and there is no alternative that works equally well in producing "physical truths". That is why I believe it may say something about the nature of physical reality. (It's also the reason I say it was "discovered", not "invented". It doesn't matter to me who discovered it, though -- a 14th century Muslim or Galileo.) On the other hand, it is not obvious to me how a "carefully controlled experiment" to reveal a moral truth would even look like. It seems that everything we can find out about moral truth, we could find out by thinking and introspection only.
If my argument really shows a difference between moral and physical truths, I think it shows the same difference between physical and mathematical truths. So maybe a better analogy for you would be between moral truths and mathematical truths? (Of course you could also try to turn this around: the fact that we make progress in mathematics comaparable to physics, shows that experiments are not that important to progress in any field. But that seems wrong.)
P.S.
> there is no obvious reason why the two projects should be equally easy.
No, but there is another obvious reason why it would be more difficult to discover moral facts, than physical or mathematical facts, namely that in reality there is nothing to discover (beyond, say, evolutionary psychology). Don't you think your argument needs some explanation why of all academic fields "moral law" seems to be one of the most difficult? Apparently much more difficult than mathematics, physics, biology chemistry, economics etc.?
> For a defense of that position see my earlier post Moral Realism
To use an example, from that essay, how would you convince an Eskimo that he shouldn't put his aged father on an ice flow and shove him out to sea?
Observe in particular that it didn't take very long for modern Canadians to go from abandoning God to convincing themselves that it's perfectly OK to pressure your aged father to sign up for the MAiD assisted suicide program.
I believe the sleight of hand is in the definition of "god". If you define "god" such that whatever it wants is defined as "good", then *if* there is such a being then it doesn't mater how evil its desires appear to every non-indoctrinated human being. It's right; we're wrong. QED.
Some Christian theologians make this pretty much explicit, for whatever that's worth. Humans just don't get to define "good".
Others want nothing to do with worshipping the kind of being that implies.
That doesn't work at all, since you still have the problem of demonstrating that what you have defined exists, which requires you to show that whatever it wants is good.
Not really because "God" for the faithful exists as a matter of fact based on faith. You are running into the Western churches problem of a legalistic God; Jews have the same problem in my view though a much better claim on that position given OT God seems that way.
The Eastern and Oriental churches take the better approach, God is simply unfathomable and to anthropomorphize God is hubris and a fool's errand. He simply seems to reveal preferences on arbitrary things and those things become "Good" (if he wants you to emulate it) or "Evil" (if he wants you to avoid it) with no rhyme or reason or rational as to the "why". If you want to sin, that's your business, eternity is a long time.
Everything else is simply amoral hence up to human ethics, not morals, to decide. God hasn't revealed a preference on eating broccoli, that's up to society. He has revealed a preference though on golden calves and turning the other cheek.
My favorite atheist philosopher put it this way: "...we do not endeavor, will, seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after and desire it." -Spinoza
I think this is exactly right. This endeavoring, willing, seeking, desiring is what we each are, not something to be confused with "opinion" - something less elemental to our being. Our evolution has built us so "what we are" is shared across large numbers of people, though I have serious doubts as to many shared values being universal. Too many counter examples. Reason promted by common drives to survive and flourish can aim for universality, but should expect incremental progress.
Thanks, David. Yes, that's a pretty accurate summary of my arguments. I'll soon do an article commenting on the many errors of another article that critiqued your post!
BTW, Plato discussed this issue and it is known as the Euthyphro dilemma. The issue is whether divine commands good solely because a god commanded them, or whether there exists a prior reason for their goodness and the god is simply reflecting that in the command.
It would be hard to view gods as the source of good in the standard Greek system, since different gods disagree with each other and oppose each other. But I am not sure those are the sort of gods Plato is thinking of.
Does Plato, or anyone in that literature, apply the argument in the way I do here, to show that either atheists can have good reason for their moral judgements or else theists can't?
Well, if a standard of moral goodness exists independently of God, then God is not necessary for there to be moral goodness.
I had a metaethics class in college (at UCLA) taught by Robert M. Adams. It covered many of the issues in divine command theory. So yes, philosophers are certainly discussing this.
I just skimmed the Wikipedia article on the Euthyphro Dilemma, and it looks pretty good.
This is one of the more compelling arguments for that position, I agree. It is improved I think by Plato pointing out that the gods often disagree a bit on the particulars of what is good, much like modern religions, making the question even more awkward. With reference to modern religions, if the god is what determines right or wrong, isn't your choice of religion essentially equivalent to saying "I like this, and I don't like that"? How does one decide which is the true religion?
Admittedly, it is entirely possible that one religion is in fact "true" in the sense that it's god is actually the font of all good, and that you just can't know ahead of time which is which because humans can't identify good from evil, and thus can't know that the religion they happen to follow is the good one, until after death if at all. I have never discussed the matter with any religious person who found that to be a solution they were willing to accept, however. Usually the possibility that their chosen religion is one of the less correct ones is unacceptable, and thus they are left arguing that all other religions are just misguided, or good enough... somehow.
I don't think divine disagreement is a philosophical problem for monotheists, although it does, as you say, make it harder for them to be sure their version of morality is correct. In principle they can have, many believe they do have, non-moral evidence that their god is the real one — miracles and such.
One counter-argument is that God revealed Himself through miracles -- the 10 plagues, the Exodus from Egypt, the 10 commandments, etc. These then establish God as God, and the divine commands are thus good.
One problem with this argument is that a modern person 3000+ years later can be skeptical of these claims. (There are responses to this, most notably the "Kuzari argument" but I have not found these ultimately persuasive.) But a second problem is that even if we personally were present for these miracles, they establish God's power but not necessarily God's goodness. (A very powerful demon could have done the same thing.)
That does not mean that people who believe these claims are wrong. It is just that the arguments are not absolutely convincing and that there is at least some faith involved to bridge the gap.
I think the best case along those lines was for Islam at the end of the first century AH. Hard to deny the wildly implausible success — a very minor power defeating and annexing one of the local great powers and half of the other. About as visible as miracles get. Obviously they had God on their side.
The case doesn't look so strong now. Possibly Muawiya's usurpation lost them the divine support.
There's also the problem that other religions' gods also have their own miracles, and thus their own claims on being the correct God to follow. So even if, possibly especially if, we accept that miracles are miracles and thus establish the god, we are kind of stuck again with how to choose the right God, or how to separate the good god from the questionable other entities that can perform miracle like things.
It is notable that much of the discussion in the West about the truth of religion focuses on Christianity vs Atheism, but for me at least the more useful angle is the cage match between every mutually exclusive religion, of which atheism is merely one. The person who argues that God = Good must further explain why it is God and not Allah or Anansi, or why Christianity and not Zoroastrianism or what have you. To me that seems like a much steeper climb without just shrugging and saying "faith".
One not unreasonable response is to argue that there is one God but our knowledge of him is imperfect, so at least some of the competing claimants are really the same being differently perceived. I think that works for at least the Abrahamic religions.
And, of course, it is how some polytheists in classical antiquity solved the problem. Zeus=Jupiter.
I think that is a reasonable response, but the problem is it still drops the problem back down to "So... how do we recognize which religion is more or less correct if we can't evaluate morality external to what we think god says?" That gets back to the Plato issue, where the classical gods disagree somewhat on what the good is, and so you can't just take the gods' words for it because they disagree. At some people people have to just pick, which implies a choice of what is the good without relying solely on the word of the gods.
I think one can make a pretty good argument that you could triangulate on the good based on the various estimates. That is, there is one God, our knowledge is imperfect, but most religions tend to agree on general moral rules, so if we stick to those basics that are generally agreed upon we can get a lot of the way there. So long as we don't start killing each other over the less well agreed upon bits we will be ok. I think that is a very good idea, but then it also doesn't get you terribly far... there's a lot of moral ground between "don't murder or steal" and questions like "is it ok to trick someone to your benefit if they are being greedy or stupid in an unseemly manner?" for instance.
I would argue that the Evangelicals don't have that third option either, because that option still presupposes that their choice of religion is the objectively correct choice, while other religions, with different preferences of gods, are thus objectively false. How do they know their religion's god is the true one, and not one of those demons pretending to be gods telling people what is good?
Exactly, you either already agree with them or you can't. *shrug* Religious moral debates often end up being so boring for exactly that reason. We need more CS Lewis types :)
Literal genocide is historically pretty uncommon — what examples were you thinking of?
The interesting question is whether religion makes doing bad things, such as killing a lot of people, more or less likely. The evidence for "less" is that several of the most murderous societies we know of were explicitly atheist.
Off hand, I can't think of any comparable cases inspired by religion. Nazi Germany was not officially atheist but I don't think the argument for the holocaust was religious. Lots of smaller scale killing that was arguably inspired by religion, but lots that wasn't.
I once saw someone come up with a list of wars throughout all history and tried to grade them based on how religious or not religious they were. So the Crusades would be maximum religion and the Punic Wars no religion (or something like that, and of course all of these things have some of both, example: Catholic France supporting the protestants in the 30 years war for geopolitical reasons).
The conclusion he came to is that there is no correlation between religion and war or religion and genocide. In fact outright genocides seem more common amongst pagans, even things like the 30 years war were more about a breakdown of societal functioning and mercenary looting then a literal desire to kill every X to the last woman and child, such as was done in the Third Punic War.
Classical Christian thought, which I feel poorly equipped to do a good job defending, was certainly well aware of these issues, and typically -- via "Divine Simplicity" -- sought to avoid both horns of the dilemma by saying that God is literally identical with goodness (and providing arguments for same). This necessarily means that goodness has quite a bit more ontological heft than might be obvious, but this (it seems to me) in practice ended up being a virtue.
The retort could then be: goodness does not exist in the atheist worldview, so there is nothing to be morally right *about*. But it does in ours (and in the real world, which is the one we believe in), so indeed, moral judgments, whether by theists or non-theists, can be correct, and are (sometimes unwittingly) a sub-species of theological judgments.
This "comment" is mostly about your other post about moral realism.
Pascal argument & Improved Pascal:
"Blaise Pascal famously argued that one ought to believe in the Catholic faith because the enormous payoff if it was true, heaven instead of hell, made it in your interest to believe even if you thought the probability that it was true was low. [...] The third is that the argument applies to many doctrines other than Catholicism and so gives you no way of choosing among Christian sects or between Christianity and alternative religions, short of somehow estimating the probability that each is true and the associated payoff and choosing the one with the highest expected return."
In other words unlike what pascal argued for one has no reason at all to do anything just because an incredible payoff is offered when doing x and an incredible punishment when not doing x if a person has no evidence that any of this is true. Because an infinite amount of such arguments could be made filling x with whatever demand one wishes for. One could become the victim of an infinite amount of blackmails with no logical reason to not give in to the demands of all of them if one gives in to the demands of one of them. One should not simply compare promised benefits, and instead should compare expected benefits given the evidence one has about the world. Letting oneself be manipulated by an infinitely large and imaginary carrot that someone is dangling in front of one is not the right move.
While I just showed that it is not in one's rational self interest to bet on the existence of god for the reasons given by Pascal, his argument is just that: if we cannot choose between two options choose the one that “promises” the most benefits.
Your improved Pascal then intends to achieve something similar:
"If morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things. If morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs but since morality correlates tolerably, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large. It follows that if you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct you ought to act as if the first is."
The conclusion given your premises is false and your premises are also false. Let's start with your conclusion.
While you admit that there is a cost involved if morality is an illusion, you mention nothing about costs or benefits if morality is real. All you offer is "you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things", to which the skeptic rightfully replies 'so what?'. There are no additional benefits and no reasons to always act in accordance with moral rules excluding the problem of the disagreement around what those even are.
Pascal in his argument at least offered heaven or infinite torture in hell as incentives to choose to believe in god. In your argument you only have negative consequences sometimes when one acts against one's own self interests based on an illusion on the one hand and nothing to show for if one believes morality is real besides being right if morality in fact was true and even that without the pleasure of feeling justified in one's belief because one could simply not know if it was true or not(according to you). Therefore, given your assumption that one has no conclusive evidence to decide which of the two options is true and one only has the costs and benefits you mentioned, to make a decision one should choose to believe that morality is an illusion and act accordingly. I want to add that the option of choosing morality will always lose when comparing costs and benefits like that because it puts a constraint on the set of possible actions to choose from.
I also believe that this is the reason why Dennis Prager says: "If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions. They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities." He is mixing up the problem of being able to decide what is morally right and wrong with the problem of having an incentive to act accordingly. Because even if we (magically) had a way to decide what is and what is not morally right, which the existence of god does not provide as you correctly pointed out, someone could still simply claim “i don’t care, that is just your opinion” and do as they like. This becomes a lot more difficult if there are powerful incentives like an actual god with heaven and hell forcing everyone to live in accordance with those moral facts or suffer the consequences.
What Prager and many others seem to have a problem with is 1) understanding that humans alone are enough to create incentives for humans to act in a way that creates the world they want to live in and 2) that no “objective” justification of what kind of world we desire is needed. We do not need to somehow prove that it is the right thing to do when we punish a thief, a bulgar, a rapist or a murderer. The murder can talk all he wants about how in his opinion he had the right to commit some murders. We can and should just punish him not for moral reasons(which cannot exist) but because it serves our interests. Maybe this desire to give an objective justification of the punishment is rooted in the fear of what would happen if the “bad” ones had all the power. While it would have horrible consequences if tomorrow every human with a strong desire to murder and steal would wake up with the powers of superman the existence of objective moral facts would not change anything about that because they would not create any incentives for the super villains not to do what villains do.
The other problem of your “improved pascal” is its premises. I believe one can make a strong argument that there are unintended consequences that create way more costs than “miss[ing] the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs”.
Integral to human flourishing is the presence of an effective method of distinguishing truth. It is plausible to assume that damaging that method, the understanding of it or the trust in it would create costs. Different methods exist of course but I am going to assume that we more or less agree that using something one might call the “scientific method” that is based on empirical evidence to determine what is and isn’t true creates the most value. If we now allow a belief to be accepted into the web of beliefs that we agree can justifiably be called true which is not based on such evidence we damage the coherence and effectiveness of our truth finding method with all the unforeseeable consequences that might bring.
Getting an Ought from an Is:
The nature of moral facts is such that their existence tells a person what they should do. They by definition are the type of “Is” that creates an “Ought”. To clarify they are not facts of prudence though which tell a person what to do given a certain goal instead they are supposed to give reasons to act in a certain way independent of one's own goals or consequences for oneself. Such reasons to act despite not having reasons to act seem rather impossible leading me to the conclusion that moral facts do not exist(given our most basic assumptions which seem to be possible to think about anything at all like the law of noncontradiction).
“Suppose one could show that some widely held moral beliefs did not contribute to either reproductive or societal success. If such evidence existed, and if we observed consistency across humans of moral judgment, that would be evidence for the existence of moral facts that humans can perceive. Hence it would be evidence for those moral facts that humans do perceive.” → Somehow you jump here from “our current explanations of why we hold these “moral” beliefs are not good enough” to “therefore we have evidence for moral facts”. You are right that it IS evidence for the existence of moral facts. But it is also evidence for an infinite amount of other explanations, many of which do not make the existence of weird things like moral facts necessary. We should not jump back to god as the creator of the universe if we discover facts that speak against the big bang theory right? The reason for that has nothing to do with logic though. The creation of the universe by god can be very logical. It just is not the explanation we come to if we use the method of discovering truth that has been the most valuable. We should talk about god and moral facts as possible explanations for observations when we have exhausted all other options.
I only read the beginning. He is rejecting the idea of moral luck, that the moral status of a person can depend on accidents, that murder is a more serious offense than attempted murder even though being a bad shot is not a moral virtue.
This one was addressed long, long ago by Plato, in the Euthyphro, where Socrates asks, "Do the gods love holy things because they are holy, or are holy things holy because the gods love them?" I've seen it said (I think by Anthony Flew) that an appreciation of the point of this question is one of the marks of a philosopher.
If the good is good because the gods like it, or command it, then the statement that the gods are good is merely a tautology, empty of content; we would still have to say that the gods were good if they commanded that we kill our fathers, marry our mothers, or torture our guests. But if the word "good" has actual content, so that saying that the gods are good means something definite, beyond "you had better praise the gods because they are more powerful than you are," then we must have the capacity to judge for ourselves that something is good, and then we don't need the gods to tell us what is good.
Ironically, this distinction is important to Ayn Rand's philosophy, though she doesn't credit it to Plato. She rejects the idea that ethical egoism means "I want this, and therefore it's good," which she calls "whim-worship"; her version is "this is good, and therefore I want it." This is something that a lot of her critics seem not to get, perhaps because the assumption that ethical judgment cannot be rational is so deeply ingrained that they see only a choice between the arbitrary commands of God and the arbitrary commands of one's own desires. That might have been true of Stirnerite egoism but it was not true of Randian egoism.
I agree with your description of her position. The problem is that her argument for why certain choices are objectively good has holes in it, sufficiently serious ones that I do not think they can be fixed. As you may know, I spend a chapter on that in the third edition of _The Machinery of Freedom_. http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Problems%20with%20Ayn%20Rand.htm
I didn't actually know that, because I have been content with the second edition. So I can't comment on your criticisms. However, even if she is wrong about which choices are in my self-interest, I think her view that my self-interest must be defined by what is objectively good for me, not simply by what I want, is sound; indeed almost obviously so, given such obvious cases as addiction to heroin, or alcohol---or tobacco!
The third edition has about another hundred pages of material, so you might find it worth reading. The free pdf is webbed on my page:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
That's useful to know. I'm hesitant to acquire any more printed books because wall space for more bookshelves has become a scarce resource for us. Thanks!
'If we applied the same standards to testing moral reality — rough consistency at the most basic level of perception — the case for it does not look that much worse.'
I've seen this argument before. Michael Huemer likes to say similar things, as you point out.
I think it's totally wrong. I'm actually a moral anti-realist myself, and as you might expect, I don't find this to be at all confusing or in conflict with my intuitions, whereas a non-belief in the existence of the physical world definitely would be.
Of course I have lots of thoughts and (sometimes strong) emotions about moral behavior, but this doesn't conflict with my intuitions, because I correctly recognize that as a fact about my own psychological makeup, not about 'moral reality'.
>The solution that strikes me as least unsatisfactory is to posit the existence of moral truths analogous to physical truths,
The human brain appears to have evolved to incline us to some degree of belief or disbelief whenever it can (presumably, because otherwise we would never have a clue how to behave). To believe any theories of either morality or the physical world is to assume that those theories are in some sense “correct” or at least “better” than any alternatives of which one is aware. And that is quite sufficient to be able to cite arguments and evidence that defends them or criticises alternative views.
>perceived by a moral sense analogous to physical sight or hearing.
There is no direct perception of reality (moral or physical). All observations are theory-laden (although some theories appear to be built into us as a result of evolution).
>That describes the world as almost everyone actually perceives it;
On many things, yes. But disagreement is also common and desirable: that is competition among theories.
> there are not many people who do not see torturing small children for fun as wicked. And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests.
Consistency is one type of test. There are also thought experiments, apparently relevant physical evidence (including for moral issues), etc. But such tests never “confirm” any theory (conjecture) of “moral reality” or “physical reality”. Because the next test might be the one that we consider to refute the theory (although possibly only after giving the test itself a lot of testing and criticism).
>If a moral universe exists there ought to be a reasonably good correlation across people in their fundamental moral perceptions.
There is a universe of moral discourse, at least. And there is a lot of agreement about it. However, we never know when someone might come up with a refutation of what we had previously assumed to be “obviously right”. And we should welcome such challenges to our current views.
We get our views of physical reality from sense perceptions. It's true that we have to interpret those perceptions. But the sense perceptions themselves are mostly consistent across people — if you and I look at the same object we will usually see the same thing.
I am not sure I said that consistency confirms a theory, physical or moral. If I did I shouldn't have. My view is that if a perception passes all the tests we are able to put it to that is as much reason for belief as we can get, but not for certainty.
> … the sense perceptions themselves are mostly consistent across people — if you and I look at the same object we will usually see the same thing.
I share that as a critically-preferred conjecture—but it remains a conjecture.
>I am not sure I said that consistency confirms a theory, physical or moral.
You said it and I even quoted your saying it, which I now do again: “And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests”.
>My view is that if a perception passes all the tests we are able to put it to that is as much reason for belief as we can get, but not for certainty.
There is no supporting “reason for” any theory (an apparent perception is a type of theory). No matter how many tests a theory passes, there are an infinite number of other possible theories that fit the same evidence. So, logically, we could not be seeing anything that could count as support. However, a single failed test could, logically, be a refutation. (Put another way: you can’t, in principle, support the theory “all swans are white”; but you could, in principle, refute the theory by seeing one black swan.)
It is hardly relevant to the truth or falsity of any theory what people believe or disbelieve about it (except in some self-referential cases).
People can be, and often are, psychologically “certain”. But see previous sentence.
you are interpreting him wrong. “And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests”
The important part is "the same way". He expects you to understand that he is not saying anything about certainty when he uses the word confirm. Instead he is giving an argument for why we can believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts without wasting time on the details of how we can believe in physical facts. So you are, probably by mistake, attacking a straw man.
His argument is still weak but that is a different issue.
>you are interpreting him wrong. “And that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality, by subjecting it to consistency tests”
>The important part is "the same way".
He and you might think that is the important part, but I think that the claim that things can be “confirmed” is important, because erroneous.
>He expects you to understand that he is not saying anything about certainty when he uses the word confirm.
I presume only that when he says “confirm” he at least means confirm. But theories cannot be confirmed.
>Instead he is giving an argument for why we can believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts without wasting time on the details of how we can believe in physical facts.
I agree that we do “believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts”. But, as I have explained, not in the way Friedman appears to argue.
>"erroneous"
Simply erroneous or does it maybe depend on certain assumptions and maybe simply on what definition of "confirm" one uses?
Can you confirm an appointment you have with someone? Can you confirm if it is raining or not by looking out of the window? It is impossible to simply answer these questions. Because it depends on wich ground assumptions you allow and therefore what you mean by confirm. To me it was clear how he used the word. To me it is also clear that the use of the word "confirm" creates value and therefore we should not get rid of it.
He also never said anything about confirming theories. That was also your interpretation.
>But theories cannot be confirmed.
Can you confirm that or is that also simply a conjecture that you believe I have to agree with?
>No matter how many tests a theory passes, there are an infinite number of other possible theories that fit the same evidence.
Given the evidence is your confidence in those infinite number of theories the same or different?
>I agree that we do “believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts”. But, as I have explained, not in the way Friedman appears to argue.
It is actually not about what we "do" believe but about what we "can" believe given a set of rules. I believe that a set of rules that makes belief in moral facts possible opens a can of worms and therefore is not a good set of rules to use.
From my understanding moral facts are the kind of facts that are supposed to give you reason to do something that you have no reason to do. We cannot say what these reasons are supposed to be or observe them in any way. Whatever set of rules allows us to say that such tings exist also allows us to claim the existence of a bunch of other weird things.
>>"erroneous"
>Simply erroneous or does it maybe depend on certain assumptions and maybe simply on what definition of "confirm" one uses?
Erroneous given the philosophical arguments associated with critical rationalist epistemology. https://jclester.substack.com/p/critical-rationalism
>Can you confirm an appointment you have with someone? Can you confirm if it is raining or not by looking out of the window? It is impossible to simply answer these questions. Because it depends on wich ground assumptions you allow and therefore what you mean by confirm. To me it was clear how he used the word. To me it is also clear that the use of the word "confirm" creates value and therefore we should not get rid of it.
In everyday conversation it would usually be irrelevant and confusing to quibble about “confirm” (or “sunrise”, for instance). But a philosophical exchange is usually more scrupulous.
>He also never said anything about confirming theories. That was also your interpretation.
Friedman says, “that view of moral reality can be confirmed in the same way we confirm our view of physical reality”. I take “view” to mean “theory” here.
>>But theories cannot be confirmed.
>Can you confirm that or is that also simply a conjecture that you believe I have to agree with?
No, it can’t be confirmed. But it can become a critically preferred conjecture. You only have to agree with it if it seems true to you.
>>No matter how many tests a theory passes, there are an infinite number of other possible theories that fit the same evidence.
>Given the evidence is your confidence in those infinite number of theories the same or different?
It is not possible to consider more than an infinitely small sample of those theories. One’s confidence is irrelevant to the truth of a theory (except in certain self-referential cases).
>>I agree that we do “believe in moral facts the same way we believe in physical facts”. But, as I have explained, not in the way Friedman appears to argue.
>It is actually not about what we "do" believe but about what we "can" believe given a set of rules. I believe that a set of rules that makes belief in moral facts possible opens a can of worms and therefore is not a good set of rules to use.
Belief does not appear to be a choice constrained by known or chosen rules (https://jclester.substack.com/p/belief-and-libertarianism). But perhaps you mean what “a set of rules” logically implies or allows. Some cans of worms are better opened.
>From my understanding moral facts are the kind of facts that are supposed to give you reason to do something that you have no reason to do.
To believe (i.e., genuinely feel) that certain things are moral (or immoral) is to have a reason to do (or not to do) them. And if that is a categorical belief, then it seems it must override other preferences.
>We cannot say what these reasons are supposed to be or observe them in any way.
When I say that murder is immoral, I at least observe my feeling that it is so. (When I say that the North Pole is cold, I seem to have an analogous feeling that this is so.)
>Whatever set of rules allows us to say that such tings exist also allows us to claim the existence of a bunch of other weird things.
Sufficient unto the day is the weirdness thereof.
> The solution that strikes me as least unsatisfactory is to posit the existence of moral truths analogous to physical truths, perceived by a moral sense analogous to physical sight or hearing.
Of course, I could argue just as convincingly for the existence of spiritual truths perceived by a spiritual sense.
I'm not sure what you mean by "spiritual truths." So far as religious truths, I don't think you get agreement on religious facts to nearly the degree you get it on moral facts, so the argument is less convincing.
> I don't think you get agreement on religious facts to nearly the degree you get it on moral facts,
Some cultures didn't even consider randomly killing people immoral as long as you announced your actions openly and payed off the family of the victim. You even devoted a chapter of your book to the subject.
> I don't think you get agreement on religious facts to nearly the degree you get it on moral facts
See my other comment:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/faith-vs-reason/comment/45221140
Earlier stories in the Torah support this as well.
1. God punishes Cain for killing Abel. At that time, there was one divine command -- don't eat from a specific tree -- which was no longer operational since people had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. But God acts as if Cain should have known better.
2. God punishes the generation of Noah because they were wicked and violent. (Ironically, the word for violent is "hamas," although the current Hamas got its name from an acronym in Arabic, not from a Hebrew word). Again, there was no divine command to the contrary.
The story about Abramham's comment on God is interesting when compared to the story where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son.
The discovery of the scientific method -- which goes beyond making passive observations and checking for inconsistencies -- enabled enormous theoretical progress in determining what the physical facts are. I can see no analogous theoretical progress in the field of moral facts. We don't even have an academic field analogous to the natural sciences. On the contrary, we appear quite stumped by simple moral dilemmas, far from being able to derive answers from first principles. Do you disagree with this assessment? If not, how do you explain these difference based on your analogy between physical and moral facts? Are we missing something like the scientific method in the field of morality? How would it work?
I'm not sure I believe in "the discovery of the scientific method." At least, I have two historical anecdotes, one from an Icelandic saga and one from a 14th c. Muslim world traveler, that look like scientific experiments.
But your real point is that we have made more progress in understanding physical facts than in understanding moral facts. That's true, but there is no obvious reason why the two projects should be equally easy.
My point was not only that we made more progress, but that we made more progress for a specific reason, which may reveal an important difference between "physical reality" and "moral reality" (if it exists), namely, that we can do carefully controlled experiments on physical systems (that's what I meant by "scientific method"). This, I think, is very important to the discovery of physical facts, or more precisely to the development of *theories* about what those facts are. I also think this method works the same in any culture and there is no alternative that works equally well in producing "physical truths". That is why I believe it may say something about the nature of physical reality. (It's also the reason I say it was "discovered", not "invented". It doesn't matter to me who discovered it, though -- a 14th century Muslim or Galileo.) On the other hand, it is not obvious to me how a "carefully controlled experiment" to reveal a moral truth would even look like. It seems that everything we can find out about moral truth, we could find out by thinking and introspection only.
If my argument really shows a difference between moral and physical truths, I think it shows the same difference between physical and mathematical truths. So maybe a better analogy for you would be between moral truths and mathematical truths? (Of course you could also try to turn this around: the fact that we make progress in mathematics comaparable to physics, shows that experiments are not that important to progress in any field. But that seems wrong.)
P.S.
> there is no obvious reason why the two projects should be equally easy.
No, but there is another obvious reason why it would be more difficult to discover moral facts, than physical or mathematical facts, namely that in reality there is nothing to discover (beyond, say, evolutionary psychology). Don't you think your argument needs some explanation why of all academic fields "moral law" seems to be one of the most difficult? Apparently much more difficult than mathematics, physics, biology chemistry, economics etc.?
Separately, I am not getting your posts for some reason. I had to navigate here to see this one. They no longer show up in my email.
No idea why. I'm also putting them on FaceBook and X.
> For a defense of that position see my earlier post Moral Realism
To use an example, from that essay, how would you convince an Eskimo that he shouldn't put his aged father on an ice flow and shove him out to sea?
Observe in particular that it didn't take very long for modern Canadians to go from abandoning God to convincing themselves that it's perfectly OK to pressure your aged father to sign up for the MAiD assisted suicide program.
I believe the sleight of hand is in the definition of "god". If you define "god" such that whatever it wants is defined as "good", then *if* there is such a being then it doesn't mater how evil its desires appear to every non-indoctrinated human being. It's right; we're wrong. QED.
Some Christian theologians make this pretty much explicit, for whatever that's worth. Humans just don't get to define "good".
Others want nothing to do with worshipping the kind of being that implies.
That doesn't work at all, since you still have the problem of demonstrating that what you have defined exists, which requires you to show that whatever it wants is good.
Yeah. I called it "sleight of hand" for a reason.
Not really because "God" for the faithful exists as a matter of fact based on faith. You are running into the Western churches problem of a legalistic God; Jews have the same problem in my view though a much better claim on that position given OT God seems that way.
The Eastern and Oriental churches take the better approach, God is simply unfathomable and to anthropomorphize God is hubris and a fool's errand. He simply seems to reveal preferences on arbitrary things and those things become "Good" (if he wants you to emulate it) or "Evil" (if he wants you to avoid it) with no rhyme or reason or rational as to the "why". If you want to sin, that's your business, eternity is a long time.
Everything else is simply amoral hence up to human ethics, not morals, to decide. God hasn't revealed a preference on eating broccoli, that's up to society. He has revealed a preference though on golden calves and turning the other cheek.
My favorite atheist philosopher put it this way: "...we do not endeavor, will, seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after and desire it." -Spinoza
I think this is exactly right. This endeavoring, willing, seeking, desiring is what we each are, not something to be confused with "opinion" - something less elemental to our being. Our evolution has built us so "what we are" is shared across large numbers of people, though I have serious doubts as to many shared values being universal. Too many counter examples. Reason promted by common drives to survive and flourish can aim for universality, but should expect incremental progress.
It seems to me that the "high probability = certainty" epistemology is (also) common sense. How else is any man certain that his wife loves him?
No man knows that with certainty, although many think they do. Some may know it with a very high probability.
Welcome to my substack. One of my earlier posts was in part about your work. Let me know if I got anything wrong.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/race-gender-and-iq
Thanks, David. Yes, that's a pretty accurate summary of my arguments. I'll soon do an article commenting on the many errors of another article that critiqued your post!
Best.
BTW, Plato discussed this issue and it is known as the Euthyphro dilemma. The issue is whether divine commands good solely because a god commanded them, or whether there exists a prior reason for their goodness and the god is simply reflecting that in the command.
It would be hard to view gods as the source of good in the standard Greek system, since different gods disagree with each other and oppose each other. But I am not sure those are the sort of gods Plato is thinking of.
Does Plato, or anyone in that literature, apply the argument in the way I do here, to show that either atheists can have good reason for their moral judgements or else theists can't?
Well, if a standard of moral goodness exists independently of God, then God is not necessary for there to be moral goodness.
I had a metaethics class in college (at UCLA) taught by Robert M. Adams. It covered many of the issues in divine command theory. So yes, philosophers are certainly discussing this.
I just skimmed the Wikipedia article on the Euthyphro Dilemma, and it looks pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma
> Well, if a standard of moral goodness exists independently of God
God *is* that standard of moral goodness.
This is one of the more compelling arguments for that position, I agree. It is improved I think by Plato pointing out that the gods often disagree a bit on the particulars of what is good, much like modern religions, making the question even more awkward. With reference to modern religions, if the god is what determines right or wrong, isn't your choice of religion essentially equivalent to saying "I like this, and I don't like that"? How does one decide which is the true religion?
Admittedly, it is entirely possible that one religion is in fact "true" in the sense that it's god is actually the font of all good, and that you just can't know ahead of time which is which because humans can't identify good from evil, and thus can't know that the religion they happen to follow is the good one, until after death if at all. I have never discussed the matter with any religious person who found that to be a solution they were willing to accept, however. Usually the possibility that their chosen religion is one of the less correct ones is unacceptable, and thus they are left arguing that all other religions are just misguided, or good enough... somehow.
I don't think divine disagreement is a philosophical problem for monotheists, although it does, as you say, make it harder for them to be sure their version of morality is correct. In principle they can have, many believe they do have, non-moral evidence that their god is the real one — miracles and such.
One counter-argument is that God revealed Himself through miracles -- the 10 plagues, the Exodus from Egypt, the 10 commandments, etc. These then establish God as God, and the divine commands are thus good.
One problem with this argument is that a modern person 3000+ years later can be skeptical of these claims. (There are responses to this, most notably the "Kuzari argument" but I have not found these ultimately persuasive.) But a second problem is that even if we personally were present for these miracles, they establish God's power but not necessarily God's goodness. (A very powerful demon could have done the same thing.)
That does not mean that people who believe these claims are wrong. It is just that the arguments are not absolutely convincing and that there is at least some faith involved to bridge the gap.
I agree with your second problem.
I think the best case along those lines was for Islam at the end of the first century AH. Hard to deny the wildly implausible success — a very minor power defeating and annexing one of the local great powers and half of the other. About as visible as miracles get. Obviously they had God on their side.
The case doesn't look so strong now. Possibly Muawiya's usurpation lost them the divine support.
There's also the problem that other religions' gods also have their own miracles, and thus their own claims on being the correct God to follow. So even if, possibly especially if, we accept that miracles are miracles and thus establish the god, we are kind of stuck again with how to choose the right God, or how to separate the good god from the questionable other entities that can perform miracle like things.
It is notable that much of the discussion in the West about the truth of religion focuses on Christianity vs Atheism, but for me at least the more useful angle is the cage match between every mutually exclusive religion, of which atheism is merely one. The person who argues that God = Good must further explain why it is God and not Allah or Anansi, or why Christianity and not Zoroastrianism or what have you. To me that seems like a much steeper climb without just shrugging and saying "faith".
One not unreasonable response is to argue that there is one God but our knowledge of him is imperfect, so at least some of the competing claimants are really the same being differently perceived. I think that works for at least the Abrahamic religions.
And, of course, it is how some polytheists in classical antiquity solved the problem. Zeus=Jupiter.
I think that is a reasonable response, but the problem is it still drops the problem back down to "So... how do we recognize which religion is more or less correct if we can't evaluate morality external to what we think god says?" That gets back to the Plato issue, where the classical gods disagree somewhat on what the good is, and so you can't just take the gods' words for it because they disagree. At some people people have to just pick, which implies a choice of what is the good without relying solely on the word of the gods.
I think one can make a pretty good argument that you could triangulate on the good based on the various estimates. That is, there is one God, our knowledge is imperfect, but most religions tend to agree on general moral rules, so if we stick to those basics that are generally agreed upon we can get a lot of the way there. So long as we don't start killing each other over the less well agreed upon bits we will be ok. I think that is a very good idea, but then it also doesn't get you terribly far... there's a lot of moral ground between "don't murder or steal" and questions like "is it ok to trick someone to your benefit if they are being greedy or stupid in an unseemly manner?" for instance.
Evangelicals have a third option.
God made his commands for human relations with each other and with Himself.
They cannot exist outside Himself, that's impossible.
But, they also argue that anything God commands is by virtue of his nature, good.
So, if we want to go war and genocide a people, it's wrong, but if God does it, it's all good.
Ahh, we were writing simultaneously!
I would argue that the Evangelicals don't have that third option either, because that option still presupposes that their choice of religion is the objectively correct choice, while other religions, with different preferences of gods, are thus objectively false. How do they know their religion's god is the true one, and not one of those demons pretending to be gods telling people what is good?
Quite true. But, of course, they'd answer they know because they know and the Bible confirms it.
Exactly, you either already agree with them or you can't. *shrug* Religious moral debates often end up being so boring for exactly that reason. We need more CS Lewis types :)
But in practice we can do any evil we wish, if we first convince ourselves that it's God's Will. (*This* genocide was commanded by God....)
Literal genocide is historically pretty uncommon — what examples were you thinking of?
The interesting question is whether religion makes doing bad things, such as killing a lot of people, more or less likely. The evidence for "less" is that several of the most murderous societies we know of were explicitly atheist.
Off hand, I can't think of any comparable cases inspired by religion. Nazi Germany was not officially atheist but I don't think the argument for the holocaust was religious. Lots of smaller scale killing that was arguably inspired by religion, but lots that wasn't.
The only comparative cases I can think of were committed by pre-Axial age societies.
Come to think of it, Nazi ideology was an attempt to return to pre-Axial age ethics.
I once saw someone come up with a list of wars throughout all history and tried to grade them based on how religious or not religious they were. So the Crusades would be maximum religion and the Punic Wars no religion (or something like that, and of course all of these things have some of both, example: Catholic France supporting the protestants in the 30 years war for geopolitical reasons).
The conclusion he came to is that there is no correlation between religion and war or religion and genocide. In fact outright genocides seem more common amongst pagans, even things like the 30 years war were more about a breakdown of societal functioning and mercenary looting then a literal desire to kill every X to the last woman and child, such as was done in the Third Punic War.
The example I had in mind as I typed it was the conquest of Canaan.
Sadly, the evidence for this in history is undeniable.
Men have used God as their justification for all sorts of wickedness.
Classical Christian thought, which I feel poorly equipped to do a good job defending, was certainly well aware of these issues, and typically -- via "Divine Simplicity" -- sought to avoid both horns of the dilemma by saying that God is literally identical with goodness (and providing arguments for same). This necessarily means that goodness has quite a bit more ontological heft than might be obvious, but this (it seems to me) in practice ended up being a virtue.
The retort could then be: goodness does not exist in the atheist worldview, so there is nothing to be morally right *about*. But it does in ours (and in the real world, which is the one we believe in), so indeed, moral judgments, whether by theists or non-theists, can be correct, and are (sometimes unwittingly) a sub-species of theological judgments.
This "comment" is mostly about your other post about moral realism.
Pascal argument & Improved Pascal:
"Blaise Pascal famously argued that one ought to believe in the Catholic faith because the enormous payoff if it was true, heaven instead of hell, made it in your interest to believe even if you thought the probability that it was true was low. [...] The third is that the argument applies to many doctrines other than Catholicism and so gives you no way of choosing among Christian sects or between Christianity and alternative religions, short of somehow estimating the probability that each is true and the associated payoff and choosing the one with the highest expected return."
In other words unlike what pascal argued for one has no reason at all to do anything just because an incredible payoff is offered when doing x and an incredible punishment when not doing x if a person has no evidence that any of this is true. Because an infinite amount of such arguments could be made filling x with whatever demand one wishes for. One could become the victim of an infinite amount of blackmails with no logical reason to not give in to the demands of all of them if one gives in to the demands of one of them. One should not simply compare promised benefits, and instead should compare expected benefits given the evidence one has about the world. Letting oneself be manipulated by an infinitely large and imaginary carrot that someone is dangling in front of one is not the right move.
While I just showed that it is not in one's rational self interest to bet on the existence of god for the reasons given by Pascal, his argument is just that: if we cannot choose between two options choose the one that “promises” the most benefits.
Your improved Pascal then intends to achieve something similar:
"If morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things. If morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs but since morality correlates tolerably, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large. It follows that if you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct you ought to act as if the first is."
The conclusion given your premises is false and your premises are also false. Let's start with your conclusion.
While you admit that there is a cost involved if morality is an illusion, you mention nothing about costs or benefits if morality is real. All you offer is "you will do bad things — and if morality is real you ought not to do bad things", to which the skeptic rightfully replies 'so what?'. There are no additional benefits and no reasons to always act in accordance with moral rules excluding the problem of the disagreement around what those even are.
Pascal in his argument at least offered heaven or infinite torture in hell as incentives to choose to believe in god. In your argument you only have negative consequences sometimes when one acts against one's own self interests based on an illusion on the one hand and nothing to show for if one believes morality is real besides being right if morality in fact was true and even that without the pleasure of feeling justified in one's belief because one could simply not know if it was true or not(according to you). Therefore, given your assumption that one has no conclusive evidence to decide which of the two options is true and one only has the costs and benefits you mentioned, to make a decision one should choose to believe that morality is an illusion and act accordingly. I want to add that the option of choosing morality will always lose when comparing costs and benefits like that because it puts a constraint on the set of possible actions to choose from.
I also believe that this is the reason why Dennis Prager says: "If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions. They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities." He is mixing up the problem of being able to decide what is morally right and wrong with the problem of having an incentive to act accordingly. Because even if we (magically) had a way to decide what is and what is not morally right, which the existence of god does not provide as you correctly pointed out, someone could still simply claim “i don’t care, that is just your opinion” and do as they like. This becomes a lot more difficult if there are powerful incentives like an actual god with heaven and hell forcing everyone to live in accordance with those moral facts or suffer the consequences.
What Prager and many others seem to have a problem with is 1) understanding that humans alone are enough to create incentives for humans to act in a way that creates the world they want to live in and 2) that no “objective” justification of what kind of world we desire is needed. We do not need to somehow prove that it is the right thing to do when we punish a thief, a bulgar, a rapist or a murderer. The murder can talk all he wants about how in his opinion he had the right to commit some murders. We can and should just punish him not for moral reasons(which cannot exist) but because it serves our interests. Maybe this desire to give an objective justification of the punishment is rooted in the fear of what would happen if the “bad” ones had all the power. While it would have horrible consequences if tomorrow every human with a strong desire to murder and steal would wake up with the powers of superman the existence of objective moral facts would not change anything about that because they would not create any incentives for the super villains not to do what villains do.
The other problem of your “improved pascal” is its premises. I believe one can make a strong argument that there are unintended consequences that create way more costs than “miss[ing] the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs”.
Integral to human flourishing is the presence of an effective method of distinguishing truth. It is plausible to assume that damaging that method, the understanding of it or the trust in it would create costs. Different methods exist of course but I am going to assume that we more or less agree that using something one might call the “scientific method” that is based on empirical evidence to determine what is and isn’t true creates the most value. If we now allow a belief to be accepted into the web of beliefs that we agree can justifiably be called true which is not based on such evidence we damage the coherence and effectiveness of our truth finding method with all the unforeseeable consequences that might bring.
Getting an Ought from an Is:
The nature of moral facts is such that their existence tells a person what they should do. They by definition are the type of “Is” that creates an “Ought”. To clarify they are not facts of prudence though which tell a person what to do given a certain goal instead they are supposed to give reasons to act in a certain way independent of one's own goals or consequences for oneself. Such reasons to act despite not having reasons to act seem rather impossible leading me to the conclusion that moral facts do not exist(given our most basic assumptions which seem to be possible to think about anything at all like the law of noncontradiction).
“Suppose one could show that some widely held moral beliefs did not contribute to either reproductive or societal success. If such evidence existed, and if we observed consistency across humans of moral judgment, that would be evidence for the existence of moral facts that humans can perceive. Hence it would be evidence for those moral facts that humans do perceive.” → Somehow you jump here from “our current explanations of why we hold these “moral” beliefs are not good enough” to “therefore we have evidence for moral facts”. You are right that it IS evidence for the existence of moral facts. But it is also evidence for an infinite amount of other explanations, many of which do not make the existence of weird things like moral facts necessary. We should not jump back to god as the creator of the universe if we discover facts that speak against the big bang theory right? The reason for that has nothing to do with logic though. The creation of the universe by god can be very logical. It just is not the explanation we come to if we use the method of discovering truth that has been the most valuable. We should talk about god and moral facts as possible explanations for observations when we have exhausted all other options.
The British mathematician Clifford had an interesting talk on this in 1877, The Ethics of Belief
https://www.people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf
I only read the beginning. He is rejecting the idea of moral luck, that the moral status of a person can depend on accidents, that murder is a more serious offense than attempted murder even though being a bad shot is not a moral virtue.
I discuss the issue in part VI of an old article:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Payne/Payne.html