Constructivism and Moral Arguments for God: Exploring the Foundations of Moral Truth

Dr. Christian Miller, AC Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, delivers an insightful lecture on the intersections of constructivism and moral arguments for the existence of God. Dr. Miller, whose work is extensively supported by Templeton Grant projects, engages deeply with contemporary ethics and the philosophy of religion, examining the nature of moral truths through the lens of constructivism versus moral realism.

In his exploration, Miller presents a sophisticated discussion on whether moral truths are merely human constructs influenced by societal and individual responses, or if they exist independently of our constructions. This critical analysis is framed around a philosophical dilemma akin to the Euthyphro dilemma in religious ethics, challenging the foundational aspects of how moral truths are determined and their implications for philosophical theology.

The lecture is essential viewing for philosophers interested in the latest debates in metaethics and the philosophy of religion. Miller's nuanced approach not only elucidates the complex dynamics between human cognitive processes and moral normativity but also probes the potential impacts of these theories on classical moral arguments for the existence of God. His presentation is a significant contribution to ongoing philosophical discussions and is poised to stimulate further scholarly dialogue and inquiry.

Chapter 5, Part 2b, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, “Constructivism”:

MORALITY AS AN IDEAL SOCIAL CONTRACT

Perhaps one might think the objectionable features of Harman’s view come from his decision to treat moral obligations as the outcome of relativistic social bargains that individuals freely enter into. It’s thus worth investigating whether moral obligations can be understood as the result of a social agreement that is ideal and perhaps for that reason universal.

Ronald Milo has proposed a view that he calls “contractarian constructivism.” It holds that moral truths are most plausibly construed as truths about an ideal social order. On this view, a certain kind of act is wrong just in case a social order prohibiting such acts would be chosen by rational contractors under suitably idealized conditions. This introduces a number of questions. For example, are the decisions based on making possible some good? And if so, isn’t this an abandonment of contractarianism, since it’s the good the guides the contractors’ decisions? Milo tries to avoid this by saying the practical reasoning of the contractors will be shaped by “means—end” reasoning as to how best to satisfy our desires. The aim is to improve the satisfactoriness of our lives. But Evans notes that this stance still involves a theory of the good, namely, a desire-fulfillment theory, and such an account of the good is as realistic as any other, since it seems committed to the claim that it is objectively good for humans to satisfy as many of their desires as possible. It’s also a controversial theory, but there is a more fundamental problem with the whole project.

What authority do the decisions of these hypothetical contractors have over actual individuals? Even if we decided that there are true counterfactuals of this type and that we could know what they are, why should the decisions of these non-actual people be binding on actual people? If I don’t accept their view of the good, then there is no reason to think I would agree with the views about right and wrong that they base on their theory of the good. One might try to avoid this by saying the contractors have no theory of the good at all, but this should only make us more suspicious.

The best attempt Evans knows to resolve this problem of authority is provided by David Gauthier in his Morals by Agreement. He tries to motivate a social contract approach to moral theory by seeing such an agreement as a way of trying to resolve “prisoner’s dilemma” situations. In these scenarios, two accused criminals—call them Ed and Fred—have the chance to confess to a more serious offense. The situation is stipulated such that it appears that whatever Fred does, Ed will be better off confessing. If Ed and Fred, though, could somehow count on each other not to confess, then each would get a small penalty. It looks like the best strategy for both of them would be to reach an agreement not to confess, but there is little reason for them to behave in this way without some assurance the other will keep the agreement.

Gauthier believes that such prisoner’s dilemma situations are not simply unusual possibilities, but capture many features of actual human social interaction. There are many situations in which, if every individual in a group pursues his or her self-interest, the outcome for everyone in the group will be much worse than would be the case if the individuals accept some restraints on their self-interest. Without an agreement regulating our behavior, in the actual world we are doomed to “non-optimal outcomes that, in ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma-type’ situations, may be little better than disastrous.” The solution is an agreement that creates duties that limit our quest for self-interest, though in the long run the agreement actually furthers our self-interest. Duty overrides advantage, but the acceptance of duty is truly advantageous. The authority of the agreement lies in the advantages the agreement makes possible, along with the fact that those who are party to the agreement will withdraw their cooperation towards those who fail to comply.

Is the agreement actual or hypothetical? Evans thinks Gauthier thinks that both can be true. The agreements may be implicit rather than explicit, but they are not a “mere fiction” since they give rise to new modes of interaction. Gauthier thinks that the authority of actual agreements depends on the degree to which they resemble an ideal agreement. He argues that ideal agreement is one that adheres to the “principle of minimax relative concession,” in which the maximum that each party is asked to concede is as small as possible, thus giving everyone reason to commit to the agreement.

Gauthier’s attempt to see morality as a solution to the disasters that stem from unfettered pursuit of self-interest is powerful, and it’s a creative effort to get beyond Harman’s relativism. But Evans thinks many of the same problems beset Gauthier’s solution. For example, it’s still not clear why an agreement that would be made by ideally rational agents under certain conditions (which in fact do not hold) is binding on actual individuals. It seems unlikely that the agreement that it would be reasonable for an individual to keep if other people could be counted on to behave morally is binding on actual individuals, who know that in the real world people frequently lie and cheat.

It’s true that those who are known to violate the agreement can be penalized by others who keep the rules, but this only gives a reason to keep the agreement when breaking it is likely to be detected and the offender is likely to face some serious sanction if it is detected. Gauthier admits he isn’t claiming it’s never rational for one person to take advantage of another, never rational to comply with unfair practices. But Evans points out that this is simply to abandon key elements of the Anscombe intuition, since on such a view moral obligations are not always overriding and do not apply with equal force to everyone.

Perhaps to solve such a problem Gauthier suggests another response to the problem of why individuals should keep their agreement to behave morally. Morality can’t really survive if we are purely self-interested individuals who behave like “economic man.” What must happen is that we must strive to be like the “just man,” whose feelings are engaged by morality and adheres not because of self-interest, but because he simply loves the ideals he is committed to. But this limits the authority of morality to those with the relevant feelings.

The last difficulty Evans raises with Gauthier’s theory concerns the scope of the moral obligations as these are understood. Evans has argued that moral obligations are universal in scope: applying to all humans, and at least some obligations extending to all humans. It’s hard to see how an agreement grounded in self-interest could be the basis for obligations of this type. Gauthier concedes that animals, the unborn, the congenitally handicapped and defectives fall beyond the pale of morality tied to mutuality.

Nor is it easy to see why people in one human society should have obligations towards people in some distant land, particularly if the people in the distant land are too poor and weak to threaten or benefit the people in the first society.

Gauthier imagines such cultural contact between privileged purple people and impoverished green people, and gives three reasons why the purples might decide to treat the greens in a moral way. First, it may in the purples’ self-interest. Second, the purples may have become the kind of people who are so disposed to kind and compassionate treatment that they literally have no choice but to treat the greens well. Evans says this would only be plausible if human nature were completely transformed.

Third, the purples may possess a certain measure of sympathy for all whom they consider human. Evans replies, though, by saying it’s hard to see how such feelings of sympathy by themselves could be the basis of real moral obligations. All of the considerations to which Gauthier appeals manifestly fail to provide a foundation for genuine moral obligations that are overriding, binary in character, motivating, and universal. The contrast between such a view and a divine command account of moral obligations is clear.

Find the other chapter summaries here. 

Image: "Construction Time Again" by Victory is Mine. CC license. 

Chapter 5, Part 2a, C. Stephen Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, “Constructivism”:

Evans takes constructivism to be a metaethical stance that tries to steer a middle course between realist, cognitivist accounts of the moral life and expressivist views. Like realists, constructivists want to argue that moral judgments have an objectivity such that they can be judged true or false, but they want to hold that such judgments gain that status because of our activities. They thus share the expressivist view that the moral world is a human creation. In this section of the chapter, Evans discusses three different versions of this project. Two of them see moral obligations as the result of a social contract or agreement, while the third is inspired by the Kantian-type view that morality is something that is created by the autonomous self. This post covers the first of these three accounts.

GILBERT HARMAN’S RELATIVISTIC SOCIAL CONTRACT ACCOUNT

One of the simplest and most natural ways of thinking of morality as a human construction is to see it as the result of a social agreement, for such an agreement would obviously be the result of human activity, yet if morality were grounded in such an agreement, it would appear to have a degree of objectivity. A key question that must be faced by social contract theories of morality concerns the nature of the agreement: Is the agreement supposed to be an actual agreement or is it merely a hypothetical ideal, an agreement that people would make if certain conditions were fulfilled, even if those conditions never in fact hold? The difficulty with a hypothetical agreement is understanding how it could be actually binding.

Both the strengths and weaknesses of the actual agreement model can be seen in the metaethical thought of Gilbert Harman, who’s a metaphysical naturalist. He’s skeptical that moral terms can be defined in terms of non-moral facts, so he instead envisions morality as the result of a human agreement, which can salvage a sort of objectivity. Harman wants to distinguish his own view, which he calls ethical relativism, from the view he terms ethical nihilism, which simply denies that ethical propositions have any truth at all. Moral nihilism would thus logically lead to the view that morality should be rejected altogether, and Harman does not wish to go that far.

Why does Harman commit to ethical relativism? Because actual human social agreements differ significantly. One might of course propose that there would be no relativity if the agreement is an ideal one, an agreement that all humans would agree to if they were fully rational and had the opportunity to make such an agreement. But Harman is skeptical this could be achieved and, even if it could, that it would be binding. Any moral obligations we have must then be grounded in actual agreements made by concrete social groups. Since many such groups exist, there could be many different moral frameworks.

This means, Harman says, that moral claims will be analogous to claims about motion that are made in the context of Einstein’s theory that space and time are relative. There are alternative spatio-temporal frameworks and any claim about whether an object is in motion (as well as how fast it is moving) are always  made relative to some particular spatio-temporal framework. When understood as relative to a particular framework, claims about motion can be true or false, but it makes no sense to see such claims as “absolute.” Similarly, no one moral framework can be correct in the sense of holding for everyone, even though such claims can be made relative to a particular framework. But Evans wants to raise questions about whether Harman’s relativism really differs significantly from nihilism.

Ultimately the problem with Harman’s view is similar to the problem that emerged with expressivism: the authority of morality is undermined. Remember such key features of moral obligation as objectivity and universality. Harman admits his view can’t accommodate universal moral obligations. But consider a Mafiaoso obligated to murder—Harman says it’s a misuse of language to say of the assassin that he ought not to kill, or that it would be wrong of him to do so.

But Evans replies that it’s hardly a misuse of ordinary moral language to say that this employee of Murder, Inc. ought not to kill. Morality has been emptied of its authority otherwise. In particular, our conviction that moral obligations are universal and apply to everyone has been undermined. To say that morality has authority is in part to say that such claims about what people ought to do can be true regardless of what people believe.

Consider too why people adhere to their agreements. If the motivation for the agreement is self-interest, as Harman says it is, it is not clear they it is not sometimes reasonable for a person to fail to keep their moral agreements. Why should a person agree to live by a set of moral rules and yet selectively disregard those rules when it is in the person’s interest? Why should the rules of morality be seen as possessing genuine authority? This is particularly a problem for Harman’s view that says what creates moral obligations is the individual’s decision to accept a particular moral agreement as binding. This means people can walk away when they choose.

Harman anticipates this objection about “free riders” by saying the agreement implies an intention to carry out one’s part of the agreement on the condition others do the same. But this will not do, Evans says, for if we admit that a moral agreement can be tacit and grounded in actions and intentions rather than an explicit promise, it still must involve an element of commitment over time. Harman sees moral obligations as grounded in relative agreements we can always opt out of, but it is easy to see that a moral skeptic might claim that the view that there are such obligations does not differ significantly from the moral nihilist claim that genuine moral obligations do not exist at all.

Harman’s account fails in another way. Since the individual can opt out of morality altogether, there is no reason to believe that all are subject to moral obligations, nor is there any reason to think that any of us has moral obligations that extend to all human persons. Nor does it seem we have any obligations to people in our own neighborhood we may come in contact with, if these are people who can’t benefit us or harm us. But it seems arguable, quite to the contrary, that some of our deepest and most serious moral obligations are precisely obligations towards people who may be in such categories; for example, those who may be senile or handicapped or unable to act towards us in ways that our self-interest should take into account.

Image: "Construction" by A Levers. CC License.