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.