Download Phil/RS 335

PHIL/RS 335
THE MORAL ARGUMENT
WHY BE GOOD?
• Like the design argument, the moral argument
for God's existence seems more directly rooted
in our everyday experience than the more
abstract considerations which generate the
ontological and cosmological arguments.
• In the case of the moral argument, the
everyday experience in question is our
concern for the moral dimensions of our lives.
• A common claim of theists is that only God
can properly justify moral beliefs and
judgments.
C. S. LEWIS, "THE MORAL ARGUMENT"
•
•
Famed Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis makes
this sort of claim with a philosophical rigor
rarely matched in advocates of this
argument.
The question that animates Lewis's analysis is,
“How can we understand the force of moral
judgments?”
• As our experience suggests, such judgments are not
just expressions of taste or sentiment. If I assert that
murder is wrong, I am not saying, and no one
understands me to be saying, something like “I don't
like pecan pie.”
AN APPEAL TO STANDARDS
• According to Lewis, the difference is to be
explained by the fact that moral judgments
make an appeal, implicit or explicit, to a
standard independent of taste or personal
preference.
• This standard is objective, or at least
fundamentally intersubjective.
• Thus, despite the protestations of skeptics or
relativists, Lewis insists that human beings
are in fact committed to moral standards
of behavior, standards which they regularly
ignore and/or fall short of (137c2).
IMPLICATIONS?
• For Lewis, this description of our moral lives has some
important implications for our understanding of the
world we live in.
• Lewis sees humanity as suspended between two
competing views of the universe.
• On the one hand, the power and capacities of technology
and science incline us toward materialist explanations of
the world around us.
• On the other hand, we seem naturally inclined towards a
religious or mystical account of the whole.
• Though this may seem like a peculiarly modern
viewpoint, Lewis insists that we’ve always been
suspended between these alternatives, and that
there is no non-question-begging way out.
NO RECOURSE?
• One possible implication of this fact is that we are to
forever remained suspended, caught in a
fundamental and inescapable ambiguity.
• Rejecting this possibility, Lewis seeks to identify a
way out.
• We have a resource that we have failed to
consider: our own experience, to which we have a
privileged, ‘insider,’ access.
• In a move that has old roots but into which Lewis
tries to breathe new life, Lewis insists that our inner
experience reveals to us the mark of the author of
our existence.
WHAT MARK?
•
•
The telltale mark revealed in our inner
experience is just this apparently universal fact
of our experience of the ground of morality
and moral judgment in a moral law.
Though Lewis is very brief and vague here, the
idea seems to be that the moral law is a kind
of trace or sign of the divine in us, a sign
which, he suggests, "…we have to assume is
more like a mind than it is like any thing else
we know…" (139c2).
• On the assumption that the only other kind of thing is
matter.
MACKIE, “CRITIQUE OF THE MORAL
ARGUMENT”
• Mackie's article does not directly respond to
Lewis's.
• Instead he summarizes the standard form of
the argument, and then considers and
rejects three different expressions of this
form: the versions offered by Newman and
Kant and then a more general form (in
which Lewis's version could be appropriately
located).
THE STANDARD FORM
•
According to Mackie, the moral argument has two parts, which can
be summarized as follows:
1. Morality is a series of imperatives or commands which require an
authoritative ground.
2. Morality requires grounding which exceeds any possible human authority,
individual or social.
__________________________
Conclusion: Morality is grounded in a supernatural authority.
1. The stringency of the requirement of morality requires a source of moral
motivation sufficient to it.
2. Such motivation cannot be accounted for by reference to merely human
incentives.
___________________________
Conclusion: The supernatural authority of morality must be a divine capable of
wielding positive and negative incentives profound enough to motivate
humans to satisfy morality's stringent requirements.
CARDINAL NEWMAN ON THE CONSCIENCE
• John Henry Newman, a catholic cardinal and moral
theologian, argues that our experience of a
conscience which serves as a resource for making
moral judgments and a spur to act in accordance with
them, serves as the source and appropriate basis for
belief in God, “…a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy,
just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive…” (141c2).
• As Mackie summarizes his argument, if follows the basic
form of the moral argument summarized above. It
moves from a claim about the authority of conscience
(1) to the ground of that authority in the divine (2)
which must have the personal qualities summarized (3).
DOES IT WORK?
• As Mackie goes on to argue, the argument, though formally
valid, is open to criticism.
• In particular, the second move, the insistence that the
authority of the conscience must be grounded in the higher
authority of the divine, does not seem self-evident or
necessary.
• If the conscience really is authoritative, than what it authorizes
would seem to have moral force independently of any reference
to the divine. Thus, if the first premise of the argument is true, than
the second and third would seem to be false.
• If, however, the conscience is not authoritative, and thus requires
grounding, the resources for motivating the moral argument from
conscience would seem to be lost.
• Ultimately, in as much as we don't need God to account for
the experience Newman refers to, it doesn’t seem to justify the
metaphysical complexity it assumes.
KANT AND THE MORAL ARGUMENT
• Though Kant criticizes both the ontological
and cosmological arguments for the existence
of God, he seems to offer a version of the
moral argument in the second of his great
works, The Critique of Practical Reason.
• Kant's version is importantly different from
Newman's in that Kant did not insist that the
authority of morality requires God.
• The force of the moral law is a rational, not divine,
force and is thus accessible through reason alone.
THE SUMMUM BONUM
• What reason reveals, according to Kant, is that the
proper end of morality is the highest good, the
unity of virtue and happiness.
• This is a unity which must be possible (if something
is required of us, it must be possible for us), but
which neither reason nor experience suggests
should be expected.
• Moral reason thus requires us to recognize the
possibility of the summum bonum in God, “…as this
is possible only on condition of the existence of
God…it is morally necessary to assume the
existence of God” (143c2).
WHAT DID KANT MEAN?
• As Mackie points out, it's not clear how Kant intended for
us to understand it.
• Kant is clear that the conclusion that God exists is not
warranted by theoretical reason, and that this
conclusion is only required from the “practical point of
view.”
• One possibility is that Kant was saying that we should act
“as if” there is a God, but it's not clear why this is required
and it is clear that this is no argument for God's existence.
• More fundamentally, Kant seems to beg the question
when he insists that we assume the possibility of the
summum bonum. Another option is that it is a moral ideal
that is in principle unrealizable, though one that we
should strive to achieve.
GOD AND MORAL OBJECTIVITY
• The last version of the moral argument that Mackie
considers focuses on the putative need for objectivity.
• As we saw with Lewis, many theists have argued that
the only way in which moral claims could be objective
is if they were grounded in the divine.
• Mackie's own take on these matters is a skeptical one.
That is, he denies that moral claims are objective.
• Here, he's less concerned to argue this than to argue
that even if moral claims were objective, it would not
be necessary to refer to God to explain that.
• We recognize all sorts of reasons of objective inquiry that do not
make any necessary reference to God. There's no reason to
suppose that the situation is any different with morality.