Absolute/objective morality and God
Issues:
Position: I don’t believe so
Why: you could postulate “forms” like Plato – with no sentience, no intention behind them. You may say this must be divine, but it is not God as I understand the concept: there is no intention, no identification with a creator, first cause or any other role generally associated with a Christian-style God.
Possible counter argument: You could argue that the absolute form of morality would be an incoherent concept without God. This could be done in several ways
Summary:
I cannot see that an absolute morality requires a God figure.
Possible reasons why it might, however, include identity of God with morality, or God providing the authority for morality.
I see three scenarios for this: a) God’s directives determine what is moral or b) God is a sentient personification of the form of good. C) Right is independent of God, but God’s authority turns it into morality.
Problem: If what God decides is moral becomes moral, could he change his mind? If he could, would that mean that, for example, killing could become moral?
Possible scenarios: He could and might, He could but would not or He could not
Scenario (i) He could and might: can I really accept that killing could become moral?
Position: I would say that I could not accept this.
Why: More or less intuition: I cannot see how even God changing his mind could ever make killing moral.
Possible counter argument: Being human my intellectual capacity may just not be able to accept how this could occur, or at the moment I lack the correct framework to understand how it could happen. This is not to say that this could not exist, merely that I have not found one that works for me. However, that is not a useful approach as it effectively forces me to abandon the argument at this point. Therefore, for the sake of argument, while I cannot rule it out, I prefer to assume that God either could or would not change his mind. This does stand as a qualification, however.
Scenario (ii) If he could but would not:
Position: I do not believe that this is an acceptable position
Why not? : In order to make the decision not to, or have a reason not to, there would have to be reference to something (or nothing, see second point) to generate this reason. What would this be?
Possible sources:
External thing: if it is an appeal to an external “what is right” then that implies God is subject to a greater concept of goodness. An external source would seem to imply that God’s decision did not determine what was moral, and hence undermine this branch of the argument (that God was the source of morality).
Nothing: This would seem (to me) to make the decision arbitrary, which would imply that morality was arbitrary, which I find quite difficult to accept (but see above disclaimer on limits of human mind)
Internal thing: God would not because of something about himself that means that he would not: Either something fundamental about God, or simply how it seemed to him. The former sort of implies he could not (see below) the latter implies that that objective morality is effectively God’s subjective morality. For example you could say it was because God did not want humans to suffer unnecessarily, but then I would repeat: “why not?” –On what basis would he base his desire not to see humans not suffer? How it seemed to God? Again, this is a subjective position.
Counter Argument:
Note this is not necessarily a problem, if you can accept the following: We might say we are effectively deferring to the superior judgement of a deity on moral issues. It does sort of imply that there is no absolute objective good – but the subjective judgement of a divine being is a close approximation of this.
Problem: a common position on a Christian style God is that god is perfect. In this case, then his judgement cannot be wrong and how it seemed to him would effectively be an objective good. But this would imply he could not change his mind – and put us into scenario iii) below.
Scenario (iii) God could not change his mind:
Position: possibly, with qualifications:
Why: This would imply to me that either:
Scenarios: If God was limited by something it would imply once more that he was subject to something external – which would imply that he was not the source of morality.
The only reason I can see that it would be incoherent to talk of God changing his mind would be that in some way it is limited by the very nature of God. For example, it may be argued that a perfect being could not change his mind, as he would have got it correct the first time. However this implies that:
There is something intrinsic about God which means that there was only one morality that could arise. This would mean that morality was as fundamental to God as his own existence – it is not so much that God created morality as morality is a fundamental part of his being. This would seem to me to imply:
Position: Of all the answers to the relationship between God and Morality, I like this best. Basically, it saying that the Platonic-style “Form of Good” is merely an aspect of God. God could not change his mind as the good is intrinsic to him and is eternal/absolute.
Why: This has the advantage that is answer the above issues: there is nothing external to/greater than God to which he defers or refers. Killing could not be made right by a decision of God, as there is no decision to be made.
Problems:as mentioned under 1) it does not seem to be necessary that the form of good and God are identical. I could postulate the form of good with out necessarily invoking God. However this in no way says that God could not be identical with the form of good, merely that it is not necessary.
Observation: God’s intellect is now effectively a mechanism for interpreting situations and comparing them to the internal good, and not for decision making of right and wrong.
Effectively this is saying that there is a right and wrong which is absolute, but there is no reason why we ought to do right rather than wrong. God’s authority provides the reason. Effectively he provides the link from “it is right” to “you ought to do it”. Chapter 3 will address this point – the Is/Ought problem.
Summary:
The positions I have left open or partially open are:
Of which the latter is my favourite. The “Is/Ought” issue is still to be addressed.
I should say first off that I have never been very impressed with the “is-ought” argument.
Issue: The argument is about the fact that from the premise: “X is right” You cannot logically derive: “You ought to do X”
Basically to say that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is”, which, logically, I have to accept is strictly true.
Position: This has never impressed me for a number of reasons: 1) It is linguistic only 2) Intuitive movement from is to ought 3) Extra premises or intrinsic meaning of “right” 4) Possible insolubility if accepted.
Reason 1) It is linguistic – I am always wary of linguistic arguments as my philosophy tends to be based on ideas and not words. This is a personal feeling, but I have always thought that if an idea has a problem with it when you say it one way, then say it another. To attack the language is to fail to understand the idea behind it. I know that many philosophers do not accept this and believe that the language is important, but I cannot quite bring myself to believe it.
Reason 2) Intuitively I, and I suspect the majority of people have not problem going from “X is right” to “I ought to do X”. It just seems obvious, above and beyond logic, and with no reference to anything outside its own self-apparancy. This will be explored some more in the subjective morality chapter.
Both of the above can be dismissed as merely how it seems to me, and I cannot dispute this. However, they have a powerful effect on my view of this issue.
Reason 3) You could simply add a premise “you ought to do what is good” and you would have a logically sound argument. This could be either added explicitly as a second premise, or is intrinsic in the meaning of “right”.
Second premise: If we are proposing an absolute form of right, which tells us that “X is right”, is it any more unrealistic to say that there exists an absolute fact which is that “You ought to do what is right”? I cannot see any difference intrinsically between the two items that would allow one but disqualify the other.
Possible counter arguments: This could be attacked as an ad-hoc multiplication of entities, I have simply added something to solve the problem with no excuse other than I needed to solve the issue raised. This might hold some water, but does not convince me that it could not be so.
Intrinsic to “right”: What does it mean to say that something is right? Does it not mean (or at least imply) that you ought to do it? What else does “right” mean? Strictly logically speaking one does not imply the other, but within the language game which is played by humans it seems to me that to say “x is right” carries the sub text that “you ought to do it”.
Possible counter arguments: This can be disputed as simply not true, but I do believe that it is. I am not sure what arguments either side could use to try to convince the other that they were right in this case. I would appear to be arguing about semantics (which brings me back to the point above about missing the underlying idea)
Reason 4) I suspect it gets you into a circular argument in any attempt to get out of it. To give an example of this problem, I will try to outline another version of morality and God’s relationship to it:
Scenario: An option raised explored in chapter 2 is that morality is outside God, but on its own tells us only that X is right, not that we ought to do it, as in the logic above.
God’s role is to transform this is into an imperative: you ought to do what is right. This is by God’s command. I believe I have heard this put forward by some moral philosophers, although the exact source escapes me.
So: X is right and God tells us we ought to do it, thus bridging the is-ought gap.
Counter argument: why should we obey/believe God when he tells us that we ought to do right? Well, it could be on his authority as a divine being, or indeed any other property, Y, about God.
In other words: We ought to obey God, because God is Y.
But this just gets us back to the “is-ought” situation we had before. We have derived an “ought” from an “is”, which is just what we were trying to avoid.
Conclusion: Try as I might I cannot see a logical way out of this (or any similar way of bridging it) which does not boil down to either something within the meaning of “right” or propose “you ought to do what is right” as some sort of absolute fact.
Summary: The “Is/Ought” issue does not appear to me to be a serious issue. It does not hold up as an argument for God providing the authority to turn an “is” into an “ought”, as that just pushes the problem one layer down. I tend towards the intrinsic second premise option, or “ought” being intrinsic” in the use of the word “right” with in our language game.
Problem: If morality were not objective, how it is that it is (moderately) consistent between different people? If it were not consistent at all, then morality would not operate as it requires some sort of consensus to ensure that two different people agree about a given situation. If everyone had a different opinion it would be useless. Note that this does not remove conflict – if the morality was “everyone for him/herself” then it would be consistent, but there would be conflict in that people might vie for the same item (e.g. a piece of food). However, if everyone accepted this morality, then it would not be see as unfair that one person got the food and not you – simply that they were better at getting the food, and you will try to bee them next time. However, if one person believes in everyone for themselves and another believes in sharing, then if the former stole and ate the food, there would be disagreement – the latter would believe that they had not been treated fairly.
One way in which consistency could be achieved is if they had the same source
Background: There has been considerable effort given into how morality might have evolved. These have tended to involve game theory and population modelling, not just in the area of morality, but in the evolution of traits generally, and also some psychological experiments testing the general population’s reaction in artificial game theory situations.
Position: I would say that I believe morality could evolve as a behaviour.
Why: Behaviour can evolve in extremely complex manners, and morality could easily be a side effect of this, either as an evolutionary advantage or a random mutation which did not provide a sufficient dis-advantage to be de-selected.
Problem: morality often seems counter-evolutionary, as it is difficult to see how it would give an evolutionary advantage. Indeed some of the actions which morality leads to (e.g. self sacrifice) seem to be an evolutionary disadvantage.
Possible solution: Game theory has given rise to an idea that morality could evolve, as a sophisticated calculation of optimal strategy for propagating genetic code does appear to give rise to an evolutionary successful rudimentary “moral” strategy.
Problem: it tends to be limited as certain behaviours, even within a sophisticated game theory do not seem evolvable. That is, the strategy which seems to be successful at ensuring genetic continuity seems to show a much lower level of commitment to others than morality often shows.
Possible solution: However, I have read some theory recently about the strategy of over-commitment. Were a population to definitely commit to support each other, even in situations where there is no future gain to offset the current sacrifice you end up with a curious effect:
This mutual unconditional support enables the population to achieve much more than it normally could. For example, the confidence of its members in the support of others means that the population can out-compete a population which only commits to the traditional optimal support strategy provided by standard game theory.
Problem: “Free loaders” – those who follow the traditional optimum strategy within the overcommitted group would tend to have a better chance of propagating their genes and hence the overcommitted group would evolve back to the traditional strategy over time.
Possible solution: A sense of “justice” (crude word) evolves to protect against freeloaders, even if it is of no benefit to those applying the justice.
An experiment was set up so you could gain an advantage by exploiting others, although the good of the whole was better served by co-operating. If someone did exploit you, you could punish them, costing them points, but only at the expense of a penalty yourself. It was set up so that you never played with the same people twice, so punishing the would not benefit you directly (indeed would harm you – the penalty) as you would never again play against the person you punished, so they would not be put off cheating you the next time you played them.
Despite this, people still punished freeloaders and those inclined to exploit others gradually stopped, and ended up with fewer points than those that did not.
Conclusion: Of course this theory cannot (yet) provide a detailed account of how morality could evolve, but it gives me confidence that it is possible, and so functionally at least you could get evolved morality.
Social evolution – faster, successful societies, subjective to society, maybe just adds detailed ethics to above evolved morality
Decision making process
Even if there was an objective morality would I use it?