BfDiDDy -
I haven't studied Kant, no. I hear some people are quite smitten with his ideas. I myself am thorougly unimpressed with modern philosophy as a whole--or at least what little bits I've read--so I haven't studied it much. Perhaps I have read all the wrong books, but I find philosophy full of naive logic where sophisticated intuition is called for, and fuzzy intuition where logical subtlety is required. Altogether, I find it stuffy, lifeless, and frustratingly error-prone. Suffice it to say, I have little patience with the subject. It's a gap in my background, I know, but one I simply haven't had the intestinal fortitude to close. (Is that not the most arrogant paragraph you've ever read? Ah well, I'm a DarnedArrogantMathematician, what can I say?
)
Anyway, it seems to me that what you said was entirely beside the point of what I said, so I think you may have misunderstood me (or else I misunderstood you). It's hardly your fault, I compressed some complicated ideas into a tiny post that I made before breakfast; in this post, I shall take more time and attempt to make my ideas unmistakable. After that, if after all I was the one who misunderstood you, you can do the same.
There are two logically subtle differences between what I said and what you seemed to perceive me saying.
First, I am not saying that there are no morals without scripture; rather, I am saying there are no morals without God. That is, I am not saying we cannot have morals without an authoritative set of laws, I am saying we cannot have them without an authoritative entity. I am not saying morals have to be told to us rather than reasoned to or discovered; I am saying we need God as a firm foundation for that reasoning.
More importantly, though, I am not saying that moral systems cannot be made without reference to God--certainly they can. I am saying that without reference to God, nobody can claim a moral system is
right.
That is, you seem to be arguing with the idea that one cannot create a personal ethical system without reference to the Bible. This is obviously false--many people construct ethics without reference to scripture or God. What I was saying is that there cannot exist an absolute ethical system without a God.
I did not always believe this. The fact that I do now stems from my ruminations on what morals *are* and where they come from, so let me bore you with a bit of background. (These observations are so simple that I am sure the ideas are well known, though as far as I know they are original to me.)
Many people--and apparently Kant, too, from the quotes--seem to view moral laws as atomic. A principle like, "Thou shalt not murder" is supposed to be a self-evident law that stands for all time. Building a moral system for people who believe this is all about what laws you do and don't include. The quote you gave from Kant suggests that he is reasoning to universal laws and moral principles. He reasons to a law like "you shouldn't steal." How and why he gets there isn't important for the moment--my main observation is that the final product, and evidently for him the atomic moral element, is a universal law.
In my view, this is a naive view of morals. There are few--if any--moral laws that hold across time and culture. Virtually every moral law has context. Within internet culture, there's a moral law that you shouldn't spam newsgroups and boards; that law isn't necessarily relevant at, say, an AOL chatroom or the bulliten board at the local grocery store. On the DBB five years ago, we were morally expected to avoid inflammatory subjects; on the DBB today, explosive debate is encouraged. One could hardly expect that all of the moral laws that make sense in modern urban society would make sense in an ancient nomadic desert-dwelling culture. And vice versa. This hints that laws are not the basic substance of morals.
A second hint comes from the fact that interesting ethical dilemmas never come down to simple application of laws. Dilemmas are always things like, "If you could save a life by telling a vile lie and ruining a reputation, would you do it?" Obviously we have laws like, "you shouldn't lie" and "you shouldn't allow people to be murdered." The moral dilemma is interesting because it illuminates the laws with conflict--you realize that you don't
actually believe "you shouldn't like", you rather believe that "you shouldn't tell self-serving lies." And you furthermore realize that certain laws are more important to you than others in certain situations. There exist interesting moral dilemmas precisely because you can manufacture situtations in which moral laws will conflict. The fact that you modify or abandon laws in response to such dilemmas--and feel morally compelled to do so!--hints that moral laws have a deeper foundation.
My own answer--and I believe it to be a good and valid observation--is that moral reasoning is not about laws at all. It's about values. Laws come from values.
We have a moral law about "no spam," not because of some arbitrary moral property of spam--not because floating somewhere out in cosmic space is an arbitrary yet absolute inscription that reads authoritatively "spam is evil"--but because we value a society in which there is productive discussion, and spam threatens that. The law exists to promote and protect the thing we value.
Kant seems to have an inkling of this when he says that an act is moral if, if everyone were to do it... the world would be a place he would like. He seems to be saying, I would like to lie, but I would not like a world in which everyone lied, so lying is immoral for me as well. This is a good ethical principle--in fact a biblical one, it is equivalent to the golden rule.
Nonetheless, Kant seems to be saying that he can not only demand honesty from himself, but from strangers as well, simply because he would not like a world in which everyone lied. (The law--no lying--comes from the value--an honest world.)
Well, who is Kant to say that an honest world is a good thing? Isn't that just an opinion, a personal preference on his part? If he met an Extremist Darwinist Philosopher, who believed that lying was a good thing, as it gave social advantage to those with the mental wit to see through lies, and would prefer a world in which lying was allowed and encouraged... what could Kant say to this man?
Nothing. The differing laws come from differing values--differing preferences about the way the world should be, and they are both merely personal values. Neither Kant nor the EDP can make any fair claim that the other should prefer the world his way.
That is the problem with moral reasoning without God. You can construct systems all day long, but when it comes to the basis of those systems, you can make no claim that yours is correct. Your moral reasoning may be careful and correct, but you have no guarantee of the soundness of your axioms. Perhaps you can build a beautiful moral system by correctly applying "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But on what authority do you get that statement? How do you know it shouldn't be "Do unto others what they have done to you?" or "Demand from others what they demand from you" or even "Do whatever the heck you want so long as you don't badly hurt anyone"? Who says one is right and the other is not?
We here in the United States cherish our principle of equality before the law; any person, no matter what their economic, racial, or cultural background, is considered equal before the law. To us, this is self-evidently morally correct. But there are cultures in which it wasn't that way--there were cultures in which the rich or important got off easy for a crime that a slave would be killed for. Obviously the equality we highly prize was of no consequence to them. Who are we to say we are right--isn't a value like that just a taste, like a taste for mint ice cream? Isn't it just an expression of, "I would like the world to be a certain way?" Who says others can't prefer the world other ways?
You can't derive a moral system from logic alone. Logic is a support, connecting foundation to pinnicle; it is not the foundation itself, but rather it builds on a foundation of your choosing. And those foundations have a tendency to move! As long as moral laws are derived from personal values, and those personal values are mere preferences, there can be no such thing as an absolute moral. Ultimately they are derived from tastes and opinions, so they are no more than opinions; nobody is right.
We can
agree on values and moral laws--typically we do, on the important ones. We all
agree human life is valuable, so we
agree murder is wrong. But if someone came along who disagreed, and who honestly would prefer a world in which murder was allowed... what could we say to him? We could tell him the majority of us disagreed with him, but that is all. We could not tell him he is wrong. When it comes to personal taste, there is no such thing as wrong.
Kant's law that you should not lie is derived, through logic, from his
preference for a world in which everyone is honest to each other, and his
assumption that you are morally obliged to do what you would like everyone else to do. But who is he to say that those two things ought to be universally accepted?
When you realize that moral laws come from values--values about the way the world should be, and things in it that ought to be cherished and protected--it is patently obvious that there can be no true "right" in an atheistic universe. A group of people might commonly value something, but there is no guarantee that another group wouldn't value it. And the universe doesn't value anything--it doesn't think or care, it's just a universe. Morals can be, at best, due to commonly held values, but those values--however prevalent--remain local preferences and tastes, not absolutes and truths. In an atheistic universe, morals are, however popular, ultimately
arbitrary.
The advantage a theist has is that he has a higher entity than even the universe, and a personal one with the authority to decree that certain things are valuable. Even if it is only God's opinion, as the creator of the world, he has the right to say what it should be like. God provides a foundation for morals, and allows a universal moral standard to exist. Whether or not you think the world would be a cool place if you killed somebody, God doesn't think so, and ultimately it's him you'll be accountable to. Ultimately he is the one that makes the rules for the universe--it's his universe.
Usually this argument stops here, and the theist looks over at the atheist with a superior expression and says, "there, I can believe in absolute morals, and you can't," and that is all the farther it goes.
I have actually heard an odd twist on this, turning it into an argument for the existence of God. It is due to Christian philsopher and apologist William Lane Craig (as far as I know, anyway) and goes like this: If you believe in absolute morals, you have to believe in God, since absolute morals are impossible without God. In essence, if you believe that morals have some force beyond simply the dictates of society--if you can say "I am right" and "you are wrong" and think you're talking sense, there has to be a higher source of morality than you and your friend to which you appeal, and it furthermore has to be universally authoritative (it has to have the authority to make universal laws) and personal (it has to be able to care about the values those laws come from). That sounds dangerously like a God. If it isn't necessarily the Christian God, it's certainly an entity big enough that it ought to make -any- atheist nervous!
Overall, then, what I am saying is this: If morals were ultimately derived from laws, perhaps they could exist in an impersonal universe, and perhaps they couldn't--I don't know. But since they are derived from values, in order to claim that there is a universal moral law--in order to claim that something is *right* in an absolute sense (as opposed to right in a popular sense)--you need to assume an authoritative source of values. And values only make sense if someone is valuing them--it has to be an entity capable of
caring and
valuing. For the atheist, no such entity can exist; the highest possible source of values is humanity as a whole. For the theist, God provides the values and laws by which we all have to abide. Therein lies the difference--for the theist, there is such a thing as right and wrong in the universe; God provides it. For the atheist, morals -- however popular -- must ultimately be a matter of opinion. However rationally moral laws are supported, for the atheist, they must ultimately derive from values that are mere human opinion.
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I don't know how logically correct that all is, but I believe it is good. In my study of this argument about God and ethics, I have flip flopped several times--for the longest time, I thought the argument didn't work, but these days I tend to think it does. (For what it's worth, I don't buy all Christian apologetic arguements, even the serious and popular ones. For example, I think First Cause is junk, and always have--and I love to harass fellow Christians apologists about it.) It has taken several years of thought, but in the end, I do think this argument about God and absolute morals has some merit--even though it takes the form of a dilemma (God or no absolute morals) where many find "no absolute morals" to not be all that painful of a conclusion, especially when they realize what I mean by it.
Anyway, I doubt the theists you ran into had quite *that* sophisticated of a version of the argument in mind, but I know it is a popular apologetic argument to say that without God there are no absolute morals--and to mean by it more or less the same thing as I just did. It is unfortunate that most popular atheistic responses I have heard to the argument assume the same thing BfDiDDy seems to have--that the writer means that a personal ethical system cannot be developed without God. That is a misunderstanding of even the popular argument as I understand it.
-Drak