Most of us would agree that there are things human beings should do and there are things human beings shouldn’t do. There are right actions and there are wrong actions. There are good actions and there are bad actions. Functionally, we live life this way and we teach our children these things. We have laws to enforce these things and we have ideologies that support these things. With that said, when we talk about these “things,” we’re talking about morality. But the obvious reality is, that we don’t necessarily agree on what all of those “things” are. In other words, we don’t always agree on all of the moral laws or taboos in our society. This is one of the many reasons that politics and relationships can be so challenging. This tension brings up two main questions that I hope to tackle in this article, “Do objective moral values exist” and “If so, where do they come from?”
But I want to start with another question, “Is there at least one or even two moral standards or rules that we can agree on?” I think there are. I would assume that you agree with me that killing innocent people for fun is always wrong. I would also assume that you would agree that torturing babies for fun is always wrong. You are also likely to agree that rape is always wrong. That being said, even if we don’t agree on all of the moral standards or rights and wrongs, we most likely align on a few. I would also argue, that if someone thinks it’s okay to do any of these things, it still wouldn’t make them okay. It doesn’t matter if someone thinks it’s right to torture babies, it’s still wrong. I would argue that it’s objectively wrong to do so.
OBJECTIVE MORALITY
The fact that there are actions that we would say are always right or wrong no matter what people think about them is evidence that there are objective moral values and duties in the world. I say evidence because we are not looking for proof necessarily. As I mentioned in the Pacifism Series, in the book The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis explains that when speaking about facts and certainty, it’s important to note that in the realm of moral certainty, we’re not looking for the same confidence that we find in mathematics.[1] In fact, William Sorley, a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University until 1933, argued that in one sense, we can’t prove the existence of objective moral values and yet in the same sense, we also can’t prove that the physical world exists either. In other words, an argument for a moral reality and an argument for a physical reality are on equal footing. This is because our awareness of both moral value and physical objects are gained through experience.[2] That being said, we believe in a physical reality without much question and yet, you could argue that there is just as much evidence for a moral reality as well.
For the sake of this conversation, I am going to assume that we are on the same page and that we have enough evidence to believe that there are objective moral truths, even if there is only one we can agree upon. In other words, we agree that there are things we ought to do, even if we don’t want to and there are things we ought not do, even if we want to. But this brings up another important question, “If there are objective moral values in the world, where do they come from?”
WHERE DO OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUES COME FROM?
Who says it’s always wrong to murder, or that racism is always wrong or that rape is always wrong? Where do these moral laws come from? What is the basis of these moral values? It comes down to four options:
Basis of Our Values:
1. Personal preference
2. Social convention
3. Evolution
4. God[3]
I will talk about each of these briefly for a moment starting with, personal preference:
1. Personal Peference: Are the moral values we discover in the world around us just a matter of personal preference? In other words, are they subjective? This would mean that what’s true for you is true for you and what’s true for me is true for me. It’s just a matter of personal opinion. Some have tried to argue from this standpoint, but again, they are arguing for a subjective morality as opposed to an objective morality. If morality is just up to each individual’s opinion and I, for example, think it’s okay to break into your home and steal your stuff, who are you to say that I am wrong? Because again, “What’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me.” With this viewpoint, you have nothing to stand on when it comes to condemning any actions at all. One way I have heard it said is, “If there really is no objective moral truth, then there is no moral difference between putting dinner in the oven for the kids versus putting the kids in the oven for dinner.” We would most likely agree, there’s definitely an emotional difference. There’s also an experiential difference if you’re the kids. But again, if it’s just personal preference, there isn’t a moral difference. That being said, the problem with personal preference as a basis for morality is that the position isn’t possible to live out meaningfully and consistently.
2. Social Convention: This is probably the most popular theory that I see thrown around today. Social Convention is the idea that essentially whatever the majority of society says is right or wrong, good or bad, that’s what we go with. If the majority of society says that stealing is wrong, that makes it wrong. But the obvious issue with this basis for moral values is that it’s still subjective. It can change from one society to another. You only have to look back a few hundred years in U.S. History when the majority of our society thought that slavery was a morally acceptable institution to see how this view breaks down. You can also look at things like Nazi Germany and know that morality can’t just be based on what we as a whole in society think. There has to be something external outside of human opinion.
C.S. Lewis once said,
“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others… The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.”[4]
Lewis is essentially making an argument for objective morality. If you want to say that any action is good or bad or right or wrong, you have to have an objective moral standard to measure against.
We are going to come back to this thought in a bit, but let’s look at the third option for a moral basis, which is evolution.
3. Evolution: Are the moral values we discover in the world around us just a byproduct of evolution? From the perspective of a naturalist, the only things that exist are the things described in the physical world by our best scientific theories. William Lane Craig makes a great point in his book Reasonable Faith that,
“…on the naturalist view, there’s nothing special about human beings. They’re just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called planet Earth, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe, and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time.”[5]
Science can’t really take a stance on morality. From a naturalist perspective, moral values are just illusions that we as human beings have come up with in order to survive. Some naturalists might say that due to social-biological pressures, human beings developed some sort of “herd morality” over time in order to survive as a species, but this still isn’t a basis for objective morality. Some will try to argue that human flourishing is the standard, but then the issue becomes who says that human flourishing is good? Now, I agree that human flourishing is good, but why is it good and who gets to define what human flourishing is? Also, why isn’t rat flourishing more important than human flourishing, if we are just a byproduct of evolution? Then, we run into some other issues when we look to the animal kingdom. Such as, why are human lives more valuable than any other animals or insects? Again, why am I more valuable than a mouse? Not only that, why don’t the moral values we live by as humans apply to animals? For example, when a male dolphin forcibly copulates with a female dolphin, we don’t call that rape. We recognize that they don’t have a moral standard to live by. When a cheetah runs down and kills a gazelle, we don’t call that murder. So, for objective moral values to exist, I would argue that it has to come from more than just survival of the fittest.
This brings us to the last option for a moral basis which is God.
4. God: Lastly, do the moral values we discover in the world around us find their basis in God? At the end of the day, we can actually separate these four bases we’ve looked at into two main options:
OPTION 1: No God
On one side, you have the no God option, and that would include the first three we have talked about so far. As we’ve said, with this option, you can make up your own moral standards as a personal preference and you can pretend that your moral preferences are more than opinion or that it is just survival of the fittest.
OPTION 2: God
The God option brings us to the Moral Argument for the existence of God. The argument goes like this:
Moral Argument:
- If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
- Objective moral values and duties do exist.
- Therefore, God exists.[6]
I want to go through and break down this argument piece by piece and also look at both sides of the argument, along with some challenges that are often brought up. The logic behind the moral argument actually goes all the way back to Plato himself. When you study philosophy and look back to the ideas of Plato and his theories connected to the “Doctrine of Forms,” Plato taught that there is something out there called, “the Good,” which exists in itself. And things in this world have goodness only to the degree that they reflect or embody, “the Good.”[7] In other words, this thing called, “the Good” (if you want to call it a thing) is the standard. Later on, Christian theologians would go on to take this idea even further and say that, “the Good” is actually God Himself. And so, in some ways, the moral argument has its bases not only in Christian theology, but early philosophy as well.[8]
When we look at the first premise of the moral argument, “If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist,” It’s based on the fact that as we have talked about, in order for something to be objectively right or wrong, you have to have an objective moral standard that’s separate from human opinion. You need an objective reference point in order to measure things against. If objective moral values do exist, we need something to ground them in and God’s nature is what provides that objective reference point for those moral values. In other words, God’s Nature seems to be the only valid option for an objective basis for our moral values and duties.
Another way of looking at it is, in order to have an objective moral law, you must have a moral lawgiver. As a Christian theist, I would argue that God is the standard by which good comes from and can be measured. Without God, there is no standard.
Challenge #1:
With that, here’s a challenge that I sometimes get when I bring up the moral argument as evidence for God’s existence. Some people will say, “You don’t need to believe in God to determine right and wrong.”
To this I agree, that is absolutely correct. You don’t need to believe in God in order to determine right and wrong. I have multiple agnostic friends and atheist friends who can often determine which things are right and which things are wrong. In fact, as a Christian, I believe that there are people who don’t believe in God who can be more moral than I am. So, you don’t have to be religious to know moral truths.
C.S. Lewis in’ “The Abolition of Man” says it this way, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentle man does not cheat,’ than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.”[9]
In other words, just because you don’t have a great ontology for objective moral values, doesn’t mean that you can’t develop some sort of epistemology and live out or discover the moral values that are out there in the world. It’s also interesting to note that if you look at all of the cultures in the world, many agree on basic morality. There might be some extreme outliers, but for the most part, it seems that there are some basic moral principles found within different societies. The Bible actually says in Romans Ch. 2:14-15, that even Gentiles, or those who don’t know God, have His law written on their hearts.
Here’s why this is important for understanding the moral argument; notice how it’s NOT saying that, “You have to believe in God to BE good.” You can do good things and at the same time not believe that God exists. We see that all of the time. You don’t actually need to believe in God or be religious to recognize moral truth. But the question we are after is, where do these objective moral truths that we discover in the world around us come from? We want to get to the ontological question. This is important. Why should I live a moral life? Who says? Why not just lie, cheat, and steal? And this actually leads to another point to support that first premise.
An obligation only makes sense in the context of a relationship. Think about it, I don’t have an obligation to my car, but I do have an obligation to my wife. Obligations only make sense when you have persons involved. This is important because when it comes to moral claims, we are essentially saying that there are things we ought to do and there are things we ought not do. But the next question becomes, who says I ought to do it or ought not do it? It has to come from some sort of authority. The relationship between the morality question and who’s your authority is an important one. Who is it that gets to decide what it means to be good? I am only accountable to people, not things. The greater the authority, the more accountable I am.
If there are moral obligations, we have to ask, to whom are we accountable?
Challenge #2:
There is another important challenge that is often brought up against the moral argument and this is a classic dilemma in philosophy known as:
The Euthyphro dilemma: Something is good because God wills it, Or, God wills something because it is good.
The reason this is a dilemma is that if the first theory is true, that something is good just because God wills it, it makes the idea of good arbitrary because God could have willed that murder is good or that lying is good. If the second is true, that God wills something because it is good, then whatever is good or bad is independent of God himself and therefore it causes the moral argument to fall apart because you would no longer need God as the basis for morality.
But there is a third option, that many theists have pointed to throughout the years which is that
Answer to the dilemma: God wills something because HE is good. In other words, God himself is loving, just, and kind, and His commands are grounded in His just and loving nature.
Now, want to take a step back and ask, what do we do with all of this? Why does any of this matter? How do we use this information? Part of this actually goes back to the last episode on civil discourse. It matters because it’s important for us to be able to think well and to communicate well. It’s important for us to understand why we believe what we believe and to be able to articulate that in a helpful way.
A few months back I was having an interesting conversation with a few good friends at our local pancake house. One of these friends would find himself in the agnostic camp at this point in his life. He’s not quite sure where he lands when it comes to God and the Bible and we got into this conversation on some of the big moral issues in our culture today like sexual ethics and racism. At first, it felt like the conversation was going all over the place because we didn’t really have any common ground. Maybe you have been in a similar situation where you have had a conversation like this, where you are talking about some controversial moral topics, but it’s hard to find any common ground. In light of what we have been talking about today, there are two questions that I often like to ask in the midst of these conversations to help frame them and to try and find some common ground. These two questions are as follows,
What does it mean to be human?
Where do sexual ethics come from?
These are two questions that I’ve heard asked before, I didn’t come up with these, but I find them to be super helpful, especially when trying to find common ground on challenging topics such as these. I think these are important questions because in order for us to agree upon controversial topics like sexual ethics, or racism, we have to be able to answer these two questions.
What does it mean to be human? In other words, why do humans have value? Where does that value come from? What makes us different than animals? And then, if we are going to talk about sexual ethics; where do we get those from? Who says? The next time you find yourself in one of these conversations, these are two great questions that can help us to engage in civil discourse around these challenging issues and help us better frame those conversations in a beneficial way.
CONCLUSION:
I want to end by looking at this thought by C.S. Lewis from his book, The Abolition of Man, he wrote, “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”[10] In other words, the true danger of subjective morality and trying to get rid of an objective moral standard is that we will eventually live in a world where selfishness and the pursuit of self are all that remains.
[1] Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963., The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. Harper San Francisco, 2001.
[2] Craig, William Lane Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (p.104) (Crossway Books, 2008).
[3] (Craig, William Lane. On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. David C. Cook. Kindle Edition.)
[4] Lewis, C.S. (Clive Staples), Mere Christianity (Harper One, 2009).
[5] Craig, William Lane Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (p.173) (Crossway Books, 2008).
[6] Craig, William Lane Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (p.172) (Crossway Books, 2008).
[7] Copleston, Frederick A History of Philosophy. (Complete and Unabridged) (pp.167-176) (Garden City, NY: Image Books. A division of Doubleday, 1962).
[8] Craig, William Lane Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (p.104) (Crossway Books, 2008).
[9] Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality. (p. 34) Macmillan Publishing, 1955.
[10] Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), The Abolition of Man: How Education Develops Man’s Sense of Morality. (p.78) Macmillan Publishing, 1955.
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