Download Phil/RS 335

Phil/RS 335
God’s Existence Pt. 2: 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
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, 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.