Is God Necessary for Morality? Evaluating the Exchange Between Linville and Antony

Editor’s note: this article was originally published at Convincing Proof.

1. What is the Issue?

Mark D. Linville and Louise Antony recently participated in written debate titled “Is God Necessary for Morality?”1 Linville argued that God is necessary for morality whereas Antony argued that God is not necessary for morality. In this paper I will interact with the arguments made by these two authors. Throughout I will also put forth my case that God is the best explanation for objective morality.

The first thing I want to cover is how this debate was framed. Developing a title for a debate is very important because it frames the debate by setting forth what each side will be arguing for. I believe it was unfortunate to frame the debate with the title “Is God Necessary for Morality?” because it puts the theist in a tough spot in that he has to argue that it’s impossible for morality to exist if there is no God, which, though I believe this is true, is a daunting task to try and argue. It’s very difficult to make the case that something is ‘necessary.’ Even though we believe that many things are necessary, it’s difficult to make the case that something is in fact necessary.

For example, one reason that it’s such a daunting task in this context is that the atheist doesn’t have to argue that her position is the best explanation for morality, but only that it’s ‘possible’ for morality to exist without God. In other words, she doesn’t have to argue that there is no God to defeat the theist in such an argument, but merely that it’s ‘possible’ for morality to exist without God. In order to defeat the ‘God is necessary for morality’ position, she doesn’t have to argue that ‘morality exists without God’ is the actual situation in reality but merely that it’s a possible situation. In other words, framing the debate this way just puts the bar too high for the theist and too low for the atheist.

A better approach would be to title the debate “What Is the Best Explanation for Morality?” because the issue under consideration is how to explain an important part of reality: objective moral truth. Since Linville, a theist, and Antony, an atheist, are both moral realists, they agree that there are real objective moral truths. But they disagree as to what is the best explanation for these real objective moral truths, that is, where they come from, what constitutes them, and how they can even be real and objective in the first place.      

1.1. How do we determine who is correct?

Several advocates on both sides of this disagreement agree with me that this issue should be evaluated as an inference to the best explanation, that is, abductively. David Baggett, a proponent of theistic metaethical explanations, explained,

An inquiry into the ‘best explanation’ invokes the process of abduction, a common form of reasoning that distinguishes itself from deduction in a few ways. Most importantly, whereas a deductive argument makes an effort at forging an airtight evidential connection between premises and conclusion, an abductive approach asks, less ambitiously, what the best explanation of the relevant phenomena is. It typically uses criteria like explanatory scope and power (along with plausibility, conformity with other beliefs, etc.) to narrow down the explanation candidates to the best explanation, and warrants, potentially anyway, to infer that the best explanation is likely the true explanation.2

Similarly, Enoch, a proponent of non-theistic non-natural moral realism, argued that inference to the best explanation is a viable approach for this issue.3 He explicitly noted the importance of plausibility when he wrote that “the game being played is … that of overall plausibility points ….”4 and that “… the plausibility-points game is comparative: the view that we should endorse is the one that has–when all considerations are taken into account–the most plausibility points overall.”5 Which model has more plausibility points, the theist’s or the atheist’s?

Here’s a simple example of how this process works. Let’s say you are a farmer, your crops have produced a harvest 10 times greater than you’ve ever seen, and you don’t know why. Your friend Toni comes to you and presents a possible explanation: the weather conditions this year (sun, rain, wind, etc.) were just so perfect that they caused your crops to produce this tremendous amount. Another friend, Lenny, approaches you with an alternative explanation: a local scientist developed a new super-fertilizer and secretly put it on your crops to test its effectiveness. Now you have two explanations to consider. Which one best fits the evidence? It will take some work on your part to fully explore both explanations and see which one is most plausible and best fits the evidence. This is called abductive reasoning and it’s basically an inference to the best explanation.

There’s a sense in which Linville began his argument by framing it along these lines, that is, as an inference to the best explanation. He explained that he was going to argue that objective morality does not find a good ‘fit’ within the sort of word in which the atheist thinks we find ourselves in (p. 55). He also explained that he was going to argue that objective morality finds a more natural ‘fit’ within a theistic framework (p. 55). However, Antony recognized that, because the debate was framed the way it was, all she had to do was show that atheism doesn’t conflict in any way with morality (p. 67). In other words, she didn’t have to argue that the ‘actual’ situation was that there is no God and morality is objectively real, all she had to do is argue that it’s possible (there’s no conflict between these two things) for morality to be objectively real even if there is no God. However, even she noted how she was going to go one step further and sketch a promising beginning to a naturalistic explanation of morality (p. 66). So there’s a sense in which Antony too is arguing this issue as an inference to the best explanation, even though the debate wasn’t framed this way via the title.

Before I move on, I want to affirm Antony’s explanation of the differences between the definitions of atheism, materialism, and naturalism (p. 67). Sometimes people use those three terms interchangeably to mean the same thing (there is no God) but technically they have different definitions. Atheism is the belief that there is no God. Materialism is the belief that the only thing that exists is the material universe (space, time, and matter). Naturalism is the belief that everything can be explained in terms of natural processes. Now atheism, materialism, and naturalism are obviously related and connected, but they are not all one and the same. For example, as Antony notes, most atheists affirm materialism and naturalism but not all atheists do. For example, I wrote my dissertation against an atheist, Erik Wielenberg, who rejects naturalism and materialism because he believes certain thing exist beyond the material universe, namely, what he describes as platonic abstract objects. Now it seems like Antony herself does affirm naturalism because she wrote that she was going to focus on Linville’s arguments that were directed at naturalism.

This raises another issue. At one level this debate between Linville and Antony has to do with a debate between theism and atheism—which is the better explanation for objective morality? Craig has often framed the theist’s side of this debate as follows: “I. If theism is true, we have a sound foundation for morality. II. If theism is false, we do not have a sound foundation for morality.”6 While we can make some general arguments about how atheism and objective morality don’t seem to fit well together, a comprehensive case for these contentions would involve evaluating and debunking all the atheistic explanations for how objective morality could exist without God. Therefore yes, at one level this debate is between theism and atheism, but at another level, it is specifically between a particular theistic model (Linville’s) and a particular atheistic model (Antony’s naturalistic atheism), both of which are trying to describe reality, how things really are. The point is that even if we can show how Antony’s particular naturalistic atheistic explanation of morality is not a plausible explanation of morality, it only rules out her particular atheistic explanation for objective morality, not necessarily all atheistic explanations for morality, such as Wielenberg’s non-naturalistic atheistic model. The same is true of Linville’s theistic explanation of objective morality; even if Antony can show that Linville’s particular theistic explanation of morality isn’t a plausible explanation, it only rules out his particular theistic explanation, not necessarily all theistic explanations. That’s one of the reasons this topic is so vast and interesting!

1.2. Considering All the Evidence For and Against Theism

Before I start considering the objections Antony raised against theistic explanations of objective morality, there is one more topic to consider, a topic that both Antony and Linville mentioned. Antony was the first one to mention it (p. 69) when she explained she was confident that if we were to consider the total evidence, that there would be more evidence overall for atheism than theism. In other words, she maintained that atheism, as opposed to theism, does a better job explaining the total evidence we have before us – scientific evidence, moral evidence, historical evidence, philosophical evidence, etc. She’s still doing an abductive inference to the best explanation here but she’s talking about what’s the best explanation for all of reality and existence. Thus, instead of asking what the best explanation of morality is, we could ask what’s the best explanation overall for all of reality – morality, the universe, human beings, free will, consciousness, mathematics, etc. Linville responded to her assertion by saying that, based on the total evidence, and especially all the good evidence for the existence of God, he’d place his money on theism (p. 80). In other words, he maintained that theism, as opposed to atheism, is a better explanation for all that we see in reality – morality, the universe, human beings, free will, consciousness, mathematics, etc.

There’s a sense in which it’s important to separate these two conversations:

1. What is the better explanation for morality, theism or atheism?

2. What is the better explanation for all of reality, theism or atheism?

The first question is more narrow and has to do with a specific aspect of reality, i.e. morality, and the question ‘What is the best explanation for this part of reality?’ The second question is more broad and focuses on whether or not God exists. It’s important to separate these two issues conceptually because we could imagine a situation where, hypothetically, we conclude that atheism is a better explanation for morality (a particular aspect of reality), but overall theism is a better explanation for the vast majority of the other aspects of reality (the universe, human beings, free will, consciousness, mathematics, etc.). In such a hypothetical situation we’d conclude that theism is true, even though atheism seems to be a better explanation for objective morality. Thus, this conversation concerning which is the better explanation for morality, theism or atheism, is just a small part of the much longer discussion concerning whether the overall evidence points to the existence or nonexistence of God.    

The moral argument is a common argument for the existence of God. Most moral arguments for God have the following structure:7 

1. Morality is objective, “certain things are morally right and others are morally wrong.”8

2. Objective morality is best explained by theism, “the most adequate answer is provided by a theory that entails the existence of God.”9

3. Therefore, there is good reason to think theism is true, and so “my metaethical views provide me with a reason of some weight for believing in the existence of God.”10

I believe the moral argument for God is a strong argument. However, even if the moral argument for God is somehow shown to be wrong, there are many other arguments for the existence of God. If all that theists had was the moral argument, their overall case for God’s existence would be fairly weak. But that is not the case; the moral argument for God is merely one among many arguments that theists have provided for God’s existence. Theists from various cultures throughout the ages have developed several different lines of evidence and arguments for their belief in God—cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, contingency arguments, and ontological arguments, just to name a few.

2. Objections to Theistic Explanations of Objective Morality

In this section I’ll discuss the two objections that Antony raised against theistic explanations of objective morality – the Euthyphro Dilemma and the Competing Supernatural Explanations objection. I’ll also defend theistic explanations of objective morality by refuting these objections. 

2.1. The Euthyphro Dilemma

The Euthyphro Dilemma is often presented as a rebuttal to the moral argument for God’s existence or theistic explanations of objective morality. In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asked “Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?”11 The dilemma can be restated in monotheistic terms as follows: Either 1. Morality is based on God’s commands; thus He could have arbitrarily commanded any heinous act and it would be morally right, or 2. Morality is based on necessary truths that even God cannot change; thus morality is independent of God and out of His control.12 I trust you can see how theists would want to avoid both horns. But the key question is, are these the only two horns? In other words, is it a false dilemma to say that these are the only two options?

Linville claimed his argument bypassed the Euthyphro Dilemma because it “appeals to God not as the ground of morality but as the agent and architect of a kind of moral teleology that is unavailable on garden-variety atheism” (p. 79). I’m not exactly sure what Linville is getting at here. I’m sure he was constrained by a certain word count limit in his debate with Antony so unfortunately he couldn’t elaborate. However, in order to avoid both horns of the Euthyphfro Dilemma, many theists, possibly even including Plato himself, have proposed that morality is dependent upon God’s nature in such a way that He could not command something that violates His moral nature.13 For example, Robert M. Adams’s version of the Divine Command Theory is an important contemporary example of grounding morality in God’s nature. He explained that “[t]he part played by God in my account of the nature of the good is similar to that of the Form of the Beautiful or the Good in Plato’s Symposium and Republic. God is the supreme Good, and the goodness of other things consists in a sort of resemblance to God.”14 His view is Platonic in the sense that “[t]he role that belongs to the Form of the Good in Plato’s thought is assigned to God, and the goodness of other things is understood in terms of their standing in some relation, usually conceived as a sort of resemblance, to God.”[15] This is not a new idea; in the first chapter of Monologian, Anselm argued that there must be one thing through which all good things are good, and that it alone is supremely good.[16] Also, Thomas Aquinas wrote that “Nothing… will be called good except in so far as it has a certain likeness of the divine goodness.”17

If morality is dependent upon God’s nature in this way, then both horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma are avoided. First, His commands would not be arbitrary because they would have to be consistent with His moral nature. Second, morality would not be independent of God, but dependent upon Him, that is, upon His moral nature. However, this proposed solution agrees with the Euthyphro Dilemma that morality is based on necessary truths that God cannot change or control. However, these necessary truths that God cannot change are truths concerning His moral nature, thus these moral truths which constrain God are not independent of God but are ‘within’ God Himself in a sense. Baggett and Walls noted that “a careful distinction between questions of dependence and control allows an answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma that can serve as an important component of any thoroughly theistic metaphysic with a strong commitment to moral realism… Moral truths can be objective, unalterable, and necessary, and yet still dependent on God.”18 They concluded that “if such dependence or even identity obtains or is even possible, then the Euthyphro Dilemma is effectively defused and the moral argument for God’s existence accordingly gains strength.”19 Many atheists, including Erik Wielenberg, agree that this solution successfully refutes the Euthyphro Dilemma objection against theistic explanations of objective morality and the moral argument for the existence of God. Wielenberg even encourages his fellow atheists to move beyond the Euthyphro Dilemma in their attempt to critique theistic metaethical models.

2.2. Competing Supernatural Explanations

The second objection that Antony raised against theistic explanations of objective morality is an objection that she called “Competing Supernatural Explanations.” She noted that this problem is hardly ever discussed (p. 68). I agree that this problem is hardly ever discussed. The reason it’s hardly ever discussed is that it is a very poor objection. Basically her complaint is that a person can’t, or at least shouldn’t, immediately jump from the evidence under consideration (objective morality) to the conclusion that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent being who created the universe. According to this objection, the reason a person can’t make this jump is because there are many other alternative hypotheses as well. She listed just four of them:

1. There is an all-powerful, all-knowing, malevolent being who created the universe.

2. There is an all-powerful, all-knowing, morally indifferent being who created the universe.

3. There is a very powerful, but not omnipotent, benevolent being who created the universe.

4. There are two competing beings, one a very powerful, but not omnipotent, benevolent being who created the universe, and the other an equally powerful malevolent being who constantly interferes in the affairs of the creatures created by the benevolent being.

Linville addressed this objection well when he explained that it’s similar to when some religious fideists dislike arguments for the existence of God because they don’t get us all the way to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (p. 79). He then went on to rhetorically ask “whoever expected that any one argument should accomplish all that?” (p. 79) In other words, Antony doesn’t understand Linville’s (and most theist’s, including myself) position here. Theists aren’t saying that, starting with objective morality, we can build a case for a specific concept of what God is like (say, the Christian concept of God). Instead, what we’re doing is bringing a particular concept of God (in this case, the Christian concept) to the table and saying that God, as Christians understand Him, is the best explanation for the evidence under consideration (objective morality). This is another reason it’s important to frame this debate as an inference to the best explanation.

Consider again my silly example of a farmer whose harvest is 10 times greater this year then ever before. As a reminder, Toni presented a possible explanation for this—the weather conditions this year (sun, rain, wind, etc.) were just so perfect that they caused your crops to produce this tremendous amount. Lenny, on the other hand, had an alternative explanation—a local scientist developed a new super-fertilizer and secretly put it on your crops to test its effectiveness. Imagine if Toni raised the following objection to Lenny’s explanation: Lenny’s explanation is a bad explanation because there are millions of scientists in the world. Well, what does that have to do with anything? Of course there are millions of scientists in the world, but so what? Now, if you think another scientist is the one who did it, great, present your case for that. But just because there are millions of possible scientists in the world who could of don this, that doesn’t mean that Lenny’s hypothesis that a particular scientist is the one who did it is a bad explanation.

In such a scenario Toni, just like Antony, is confused about Lenny’s position. Lenny isn’t constructing a concept about this scientist ‘merely’ from the direct evidence at hand (increased harvest). No, Lenny has all sorts of information about this particular scientist from other sources. For example, Lenny knows that this scientist lives nearby, that he focuses his research on helping crops produce more, and that this scientist has done this to other farmers nearby in the recent past. He takes all that information from other sources, say newspapers, interviews, television, etc. and then puts his hypothesis forth as the best explanation for this particular situation, that is, this farmer’s crops producing a harvest 10 times greater than ever before.

Similarly, Linville and other theists aren’t building an idea of God ‘merely’ from the direct evidence at hand (objective morality). If they were doing that, then Antony’s objection would be viable. But no, Linville and other theists have a fairly thorough concept of God based on all sorts of other evidence, reasoning, Scripture, etc. and they are bringing that concept to the table and saying that this particular concept of God seems to be the best explanation for objective morality. Surely, if someone else wants to come along and argue for one of the other four possible hypothesis that Antony mentioned, they’re certainly free to do so. But that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever on the strength, or weakness, of the explanation that Linville is putting forth.

Further, imagine the argument in reverse. What if Linville said, well, there’s just so many different atheistic explanations of objective morality that have been put forth by different atheists. Therefore, we must conclude that any one atheistic explanation must be wrong. That would be completely illogical and Antony would rightly dismiss any such argument.

3. Objections to Atheistic Explanations of Objective Morality

In this section I’ll discuss the main objection that Linville raised against atheistic explanations of objective morality – Evolutionary Debunking Arguments. Then I’ll address four attempts that atheists have made to deflect this objection, the first two of which were covered by Antony in her debate with Linville. I will argue that none of these four attempts to deflect this objection are successful.

3.1. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments are merely a small part of a larger objection to atheistic explanations of objective morality, an objection I call the Lucky Coincidence Objection. Linville also frames his evolutionary debunking argument in terms of a lucky coincidence on p. 63. The Lucky Coincidence Objection can be summarized as follows: Granting, for the sake of argument, that there are such things as objective moral truths, it would be quite a lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs happened to match up with them. Both theists and atheists have raised the Lucky Coincidence Objection against atheistic models of objective morality. Wielenberg himself admitted that “… it is not only theistic philosophers who have found robust normative realism to be problematic. A number of contemporary non-theist philosophers charge that robust normative realism runs into trouble when it comes to accounting for human moral knowledge.”20

Proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments merely point out that this lucky coincidence objection is amplified for a person if she believes our moral beliefs have developed contingently through a haphazard evolutionary process. In other words, if God does not exist and evolution is true, then it is unlikely our moral beliefs reliably correspond with objective moral truth, again, assuming there is such a thing. These proponents claim that our moral beliefs are not true but are merely human constructs that nature selected because they increased our prospects for survival and reproduction. As the television show Survivor has entertainingly illustrated, a group that works together well—which involves moral aspects such as fairness, reciprocity, and self sacrifice—is better able to outwit, outplay, and outlast a group that does not. Similarly, as the story is often told, there was an evolutionary advantage to groups that adopted these made up moral principles; working together well, they could better compete against other groups in the battle for scarce resources.21 

In response to this issue, some have concluded that there’s more than merely an epistemological problem here, that is, a problem with how humans can know moral truth. These folks have gone one step further and concluded that evolutionary debunking arguments show us not only that we should we doubt we have accurate moral knowledge, but that they should also cause us to doubt that there are objective moral truths in the first place. This extension of the objection extends it beyond an epistemological problem (how can we know something) to be an ontological problem (what does and does not exist). For example, noted atheist and evolutionary debunking argument proponent, Michael Ruse, turned this issue into more of an ontological argument when he wrote that “… Darwinian theory shows that in fact morality is a function of (subjective) feelings, but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity.… In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”22 He also wrote,

The position of the modern evolutionist … is that humans have an awareness of morality … because such an awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth.… Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves.… Nevertheless … such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction … and any deeper meaning is illusory….23

Linville explained this distinction between the epistemological and ontological aspects of evolutionary debunking arguments and explained that he was only going to argue the epistemological issue here and not the further ontological issue. For example, Linville wrote that “perhaps Ruse is right, but I’ll argue for a weaker claim that on evolutionary naturalism, even if there are objective moral facts we are never in a position to know them” (p. 56). Linville also wrote that a “Darwinian genealogy of human morality strongly suggests either a non-realist account of morality (Ruse) or at least the skeptical conclusion that we can’t know whether our moral beliefs are true, which is the burden of this essay” (p. 65). Thus Linville acknowledged the potential ontological problem here but chose to only focus on the epistemological problem raised by evolutionary debunking arguments.

I think Ruse’s ontological conclusions, that evolutionary debunking arguments should cause us to doubt that there are objective moral truths in the first place, are appropriate and I affirm them. But it’s much more difficult to make such an ontological argument against the existence of moral truth than it is to merely make an epistemological argument against our ability to know moral truth. That’s why most people, including Linville in this debate, only went after the epistemological aspect and didn’t make any ontological conclusions, even though he did mention Ruse’s ontological conclusions concerning evolutionary debunking arguments.

Even though the basic framework of evolutionary debunking arguments might be as old as the theory of evolution itself (it seems even Darwin made such arguments), most contemporary versions follow Gilbert Harman’s approach in his 1977 work The Nature of Morality.24 For example, Richard Joyce specifically acknowledged his argument’s connection with Harman’s.25 Wielenberg noted that “… Harman was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to outline a case against moral knowledge based on the claim that human moral beliefs can be explained without appealing to any moral truths.… [M]any epistemological evolutionary debunking arguments can be understood as variations on Harman’s basic idea.”26 Since Harman, evolutionary debunking arguments have grown in popularity, due in part to the rise of sociobiology, now commonly called evolutionary psychology, which began with E. O. Wilson’s 1975 work Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.27 Other well-known proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments include Joshua Greene, Peter Singer, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce.28

Sharon Street provided a memorable summary of her evolutionary debunking argument when she wrote:

[A]llowing our evaluative judgments to be shaped by evolutionary influences is analogous to setting out for Bermuda and letting the course of your boat be determined by the wind and tides: just as the push of wind and tides on your boat has nothing to do with where you want to go, so the historical push of natural selection on the content of our evaluative judgments has nothing to do with evaluative truth…. Of course it’s possible that as a matter of sheer chance, some large portion of our evaluative judgments ended up true, due to a happy coincidence between the realist’s independent evaluative truths and the evaluative directions in which natural selection tended to push us, but this would require a fluke of luck that’s not only extremely unlikely, in view of the huge universe of logically possible evaluative judgments and truths, but also astoundingly convenient to the realist.29

Street’s concern is that if there are such things as objective moral truths, then it would be quite the lucky coincidence if our moral beliefs corresponded to them, given that such beliefs developed haphazardly through an evolutionary process which selected for survival and reproduction, not for an ability to know truth. If evolution works as many claim, that it was driven by accidental random mutations, as well as chance changes in the environment (climate changes, meteorites, etc.), then it would be quite a lucky coincidence if it just so happened to shape our moral judgments such that they matched up with what atheistic moral realists claim are independent objective moral truths.

The lucky coincidence objection would lose much of its bite if moral facts and properties somehow played a causal role in forming our moral beliefs. However, most proponents of atheistic moral realism reject the idea that objective moral truth has such causal power. For instance, Wielenberg explained that an “… important feature of my view is that while many of the non-moral properties upon which moral properties D-supervene can produce causal effects, the moral properties themselves are epiphenomenal—they have no causal impact on the rest of reality. That aspect of moral properties makes the question of how we could have knowledge of them particularly pressing.”30 While discussing the difficulty of explaining why we should think objective moral facts and our moral beliefs correspond, Wielenberg reminded his readers that robust normative realists like himself are “hamstrung in this task by the fact that there is no causal connection between moral facts and moral beliefs.”31 He summed up this objection remarkably well when he noted that “if moral facts do not explain the moral beliefs of human beings, then those beliefs being correct would involve a lucky coincidence that is incompatible with genuine knowledge.”32

Atheistic moral realists, including Wielenberg, have tried to refute evolutionary debunking arguments because such arguments aim to show that our moral convictions are the result of an accidental random process, rendering such convictions arbitrary and potentially meaningless. Thus these realists maintain that morality is objectively real, and that we can have true moral knowledge, even if atheism and evolution are true.33

Below I will present an evolutionary debunking argument using Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism as a base. I use Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism as the basis for my evolutionary debunking argument because, first, his argument is about the reliability of our cognitive faculties, which, as Wielenberg points out, is the crux of all evolutionary debunking arguments.34 Second, because Plantinga is a theist like myself, he and I agree that our cognitive faculties, including those that produce our moral beliefs are, for the most part, reliable.35 This position is in contrast to atheists who usually use evolutionary debunking arguments to argue that our moral intuitions really are unreliable. Instead, Plantinga and I only argue that if atheism and evolution were true, then our cognitive faculties would be unreliable. Third, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument is broader in that it applies, not just to moral intuitions, but to all cognitive faculties; for this reason it is a more consistent position. Again, this position is in contrast with atheists who often apply evolutionary debunking arguments only to moral and religious beliefs while maintaining that our cognitive faculties provide us with reliable beliefs in other areas. I’ll have more to say about this below in section 3.2.4 when I discuss the Modal Security Response.

As for constructing an evolutionary debunking argument based on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, the first three premises of his argument can be summarized as follows:36

1. The probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes atheism and evolution, and sees that the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low, then they have a defeater for their belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the reliability of their cognitive faculties, then they have a defeater for any belief produced by their cognitive faculties.

This argument can be applied explicitly to our moral beliefs as follows:

1. Our moral beliefs are produced by our cognitive faculties.

2. Therefore, if someone believes atheism and evolution, then they have a defeater for their belief that their moral beliefs are reliable.

Given atheism and evolution, there is no good reason to think our moral intuitions point to, or are connected with, moral truth that exists beyond our own subjective preferences. If the origination of our moral beliefs can be explained by their evolutionary survival value, then what reason is there to think they also happen to be objectively true? Surely there is no objective evidence for them; all we have to go on is our subjective intuitions and there is no reason to think those are reliable, given atheism and evolution.

3.2. Responses to Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

In this section I will discuss four attempts that atheists have made to deflect evolutionary debunking arguments. The first two attempts were presented by Antony in her debate with Linville but others, including Wielenberg, have presented similar attempts. The third attempt is Wielenberg’s third-factor model and the fourth attempt is the modal security response. I will argue that none of these four attempts are successful in deflecting the force of evolutionary debunking arguments.

3.2.1. Our Moral Beliefs Are Accurate

Antony attempted to deflect evolutionary debunking arguments by claiming that we have ample evidence that our moral beliefs are in fact accurate. She called this attempt of hers an Argument from Arbitrariness (p. 70) but that seemed to me a strange and awkward name for her argument. Regardless, she explained that “if we have direct evidence that an extant capacity [in this case our capacity for accurate moral beliefs] is reliable, then the fact that its origin was chancy [because it was developed via the haphazard evolutionary process] should do nothing to reduce our confidence in it” (p. 72).

Wielenberg made a very similar argument in an article he wrote concerning Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in which he presented two critiques.37 First, he argued that Plantinga’s first premise (the probability of our cognitive faculties, given atheism and evolution, is low) should be rejected in light of the substantial evidence that our cognitive faculties are reliable. He admitted that if all we knew was that some creatures developed by way of an evolutionary process, then it “seems right that it would be unreasonable for us to believe that the cognitive faculties of such creatures are reliable.”38 However, he continued by claiming we know much more than that, for instance, we know these creatures have reliable cognitive faculties. He wrote that, for instance, “… I have all sorts of evidence for the reliability of my faculties. For example, most of my perceptual beliefs about medium-sized physical objects turn out to be true; such beliefs are deliverances of perception, so perception seems to be reliable. I know all sorts of things, and I wouldn’t know these things if I weren’t reliable.”39 I trust that you can see the similarities between Wielenberg’s pushback to Plantinga’s argument and Antony’s pushback to Linville’s argument.

Similar to Antony, Wielenberg argued that, even if Plantinga’s first premise was granted, this still should not lead to premise two (if someone believes atheism and evolution are true, and sees that the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low, then they have a defeater for their belief that our cognitive faculties are in fact reliable). Again, because we have so much evidence that our cognitive faculties are reliable, even if we came to see that the probability of this, given atheism and evolution, is low, we would have to conclude that, though it was unlikely, evolution must have indeed pulled it off and produced for us reliable cognitive faculties. This is almost the exact same strategy Antony took and she used two examples to make her point – arriving at Bermuda and winning the lottery, which I’ll discuss below.

In response to this idea that we have a lot of evidence for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, including our moral faculty that generates our moral beliefs, I must point out that there is a great problem with Wielenberg and Antony’s strategy here. If someone believes atheism and evolution, and then comes to see that the probability of their cognitive faculties being reliable is low in this scenario, it would not be possible for them to use arguments or evidence to try and prove their cognitive faculties are reliable. Any such attempt would fail because, to even begin such a move, they would have to first assume their cognitive faculties were reliable, which is the very issue under consideration.40 As Plantinga pointed out, “any such procedure would therefore be viciously circular.”41 In attempting such a strategy, one would be utilizing the very cognitive faculties under question in order to evaluate their reliability. Thus it does Wielenberg no good in this context to try and argue for, or provide evidence of, the reliability of our cognitive faculties.

Similarly, it does Antony no good in this context to try and argue for, or provide evidence of, the reliability of our capacity to form moral beliefs. And this driven by the fact that the only way we have to “verify” the accuracy of our moral beliefs is to use the very moral-belief-generating capacity that we have doubts about in the first place. It would be similar to if we had doubts that a particular yard stick was really 36 inches long and then we used that exact same yard stick to measure itself and prove that yes, see, it is 36 inches long, because it says it is. Antony is doing the exact same thing because, given atheism and evolution, there is nothing objective for us as humans to ‘check’ our moral beliefs against except our very own moral beliefs, which is the very thing being questioned.

This point was driven home for me when I learned that the argument Wielenberg provided for objective morality, ironically, centers on subjective thought experiments. To try and make his case that some activities are intrinsically good, which he admitted is “notoriously difficult to prove,” he echoed G. E. Moore’s claim that we have a special form of cognition called moral intuition which gives us access to moral properties. Following Moore, Wielenberg appealed to “thought experiments as a source of intuitions about which things might be intrinsically valuable.”42

After encouraging his readers to participate in a thought experiment where they consider a universe consisting of only two people in a loving relationship, he asks “Does it seem to you that something good happens in such a universe?”43 Since it does seem good to us, he concluded that it is, though at the same time acknowledging, “I do not see any way of proving that a given thing is intrinsically good.”44 Yet he goes on to conclude that by “… engaging in intrinsically valuable activities a person can make her life meaningful in one important sense: she can make her life good for her.”45 This line of reasoning seems to be a subjective, possibly relative, foundation for meaning and purpose, a shaky foundation indeed for the model of objective morality Wielenberg attempted to build. He ended this section, titled “Intrinsic Value and the Meaning of Life,” with the comment that his concept of intrinsic value “is central to my approach to ethics.”46 In this section, which is the second section of his book after a brief two-paragraph introduction, he then began building his model on top of this foundation of subjective intuitions.

Thus Wielenberg’s entire model, which claims brute ethical facts are the best explanation for objective morality, is based on subjective intuitions that some situations are morally better than others. Most atheists readily dismiss theists who base their belief in God on subjective intuitions. To be consistent, such atheists should also dismiss Wielenberg’s brute ethical facts, which he claims are part of the best explanation for objective morality, since the only evidence he gives for them are these subjective intuitions. In other words, it seems as though all that atheists have to go on for their belief in objective morality is our moral intuitions. But, given atheism and evolution, why trust that our moral intuition is reliable in the first place? Thus, given atheism and evolution, there seems to be no good reason to believe that our moral beliefs match up with objective moral truth, assuming there is such a thing.

In addition, as I’ve been explaining in this section, it is important to note that atheists have good reason to doubt the reliability of their moral intuition. As I’ve been showing, evolutionary debunking arguments make the case that those who believe in atheism and evolution have good reason not to trust their intuitions as a guide for what is true because, according to evolutionary theory, nature selected beliefs, feelings, and intuitions because they resulted in greater chances of survival or reproduction, not because they were true. Given atheism and evolution, it seems much more likely that our intuitive subjective belief in objective morality was merely something nature selected because it led to greater chances of survival and reproduction, not because it is true.

The major problem here is that, given atheism and evolution, we don’t have anything objective to verify whether our moral beliefs, or our moral intuition which generates our moral beliefs, are correct or not. It seems as though Antony doesn’t quite grasp this point considering the various examples that she used to push back against evolutionary debunking arguments. For example, when she tried to refute Sharon Street’s memorable Bermuda example, she said well, while we’re on the sea on our way to Bermuda we would have no basis for thinking we’ll wind up in Bermuda. However, once we’ve arrived at Bermuda we’d have to assume, by jove, that we got lucky and made it because here we are! (p. 73) Now that we’re at Bermuda, there can be little doubt that we’ve arrived at Bermuda, even if we must marvel at our good fortune (p. 73).

The problem with Antony’s analogy is that it doesn’t fit the scenario that evolutionary debunking arguments are describing. According to evolutionary debunking arguments, there’s no way to verify our moral beliefs are correct because there’s nothing objective we have to compare them with. To fit this scenario better, Antony would have to have her hypothetical people arrive on an island that had no signs, no people, and no way for them to verify that in fact Bermuda is the island they arrived at. Antony claims that we can assess the judgments our moral intuition produce in the normal way, through reason and evidence (p. 73). But she fails to realize that in trying to assess the judgments of our moral intuition we invariably must use our moral intuitions, the very thing we have doubts about in the first place. It’s circular to use our moral reasoning to verify that our moral reasoning is accurate!

Similarly, Antony’s lottery winner analogy also fails. Antony said to consider someone who won the lottery but then realizes her chances of winning were very slim. Should she therefore doubt that she did in fact win? Not at all says Antony (p. 81). Again, Antony is assuming we are in a situation where we can somehow verify our moral intuition is reliable and therefore trust our moral beliefs. But, given atheism and evolution, how could we verify they are correct without using our very moral intuition that is being doubted? The better lottery analogy would be a situation where the person had no way of verifying whether her lottery ticket number was the winner or not. In such a situation, she should very much doubt she has the winning ticket because the chances of that are extremely small.

Of course another way to look at this is to start out assuming our moral intuitions are reliable and thus our moral beliefs are correct. In other words, we could start out assuming we in fact did make it to Bermuda. But then if we use the inference to the best explanation, we could ask: which is the more plausible explanation for the fact that we in fact did arrive in Bermuda? Is it more plausible that we got here accidently through the random process of wind and waves? Or is it more plausible that someone guided us somehow here, either a human person or a supernatural person? Linville makes a similar move when he talked about finding a working watch – the present argument wouldn’t be whether or not the watch works, but assuming it does, would it be more plausible to think a monkey created it or that a human watchmaker did? (p. 80)

Antony seems to anticipate this response to her argument. In other words, she wrote that a theist might object that she is question begging to appeal to the evidence and reasoning that we ordinarily take to support our moral judgments (p. 73). But she went on to claim that doing this would undercut the theist’s own argument (p. 73). She explained that the argument which Linville seemed to present began by assuming in the first premise that our cognitive faculties, including the ones that generate our moral beliefs, are reliable but then goes on to show that if evolution and atheism is true then they aren’t reliable. But, according to premise one our cognitive faculties are reliable, thus we do have true moral knowledge and therefore there is a contradiction with believing we have accurate moral beliefs and believing that atheism and evolution are true. Antony said that this was the argument that Linville was making and she pointed out that whatever theists use to support that first premise, that we do in fact have true moral knowledge, the atheist can co-opt and use as well. Antony is correct that this specific argument that Linville presented does rest on such a premise, that we do in fact have reliable cognitive abilities that generate moral knowledge.

Of course Linville, and other theists, could, and sometimes do, make their evolutionary debunking argument in a different way such that they would avoid relying on such an initial premise that affirms our moral knowledge is accurate. However, the following question could be asked here: In this endeavor, is it appropriate to start out assuming that our cognitive faculties are reliable, and specifically our cognitive ability that generates our moral beliefs (which some call our moral intuition)? I believe the answer is yes, it is appropriate to begin with the initial assumption that our moral intuition is, for the most part, reliable. We seem to all do this; we believe that we are correct when we conclude that rape is wrong, that strangling babies for fun is wrong, that loving others is right, etc. Both sides in this debate, the atheists such as Antony and the theists such as Linville, do begin from the position that our moral intuitions are reliable. But the question becomes, which side’s theory best explains why these moral intuitions are reliable? In other words, even though both sides begin by assuming our moral intuitions are reliable, which side’s explanation better confirms that yes, in fact, we can and should trust our initial moral intuitions?

It seems to me that the atheistic position raises serious doubts about the reliability of our moral intuition. This is especially true if atheism is paired with a belief in evolution. Then I think there is a great amount of justified concern that our moral intuitions are really reliable. Linville drove this point home when he talked about C. S. Lewis’ remark about naturalists who followed their naturalism all the way to its likely implications (p. 80-81). It’d be similar if we found ourselves believing that looticoffliers (a term I just made up that represents entities that don’t exist but that we believe do exist) are real, but then we came to understand that atheism and evolution are true, and that a haphazard evolutionary process is what produced our beliefs in looticoffliers. Certainly in such a scenario we’d have a strong reason to doubt the reliability of our belief in looticoffliers. The same applies to our belief in objective morality. 

Lastly, it’s important to note that Plantinga’s evolutionary debunking argument is not arguing about how things actually are, but how things would be if evolution and atheism were true. As noted above, because Plantinga does not believe atheism is true, he does not face the implications of his argument and so can safely maintain our cognitive faculties are reliable; he wrote, “Of course we all commonsensically assume that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable, at least over a large area of their functioning.… I don’t mean to argue that this natural assumption is false; like everyone else, I believe that our cognitive faculties are, in fact, mostly reliable.”47 He even pointed out that this belief in the reliability of our cognitive faculties is properly basic.48 However, the scenario under question is how things would be if atheism and evolution were true. Plantinga noted that “… in this context we can’t just assume, of course, that if N&E [atheism and evolution], N [atheism] including materialism, were true, then things would still be the way they are.”49 In other words, if someone is convinced their cognitive faculties are reliable, and comes to see the probability of having reliable cognitive faculties is low given atheism and evolution, then this would be a good reason to doubt evolution and/or atheism. As we’ll see in the next section, raising doubts about the evolutionary process is the strategy Antony and Wielenberg took, but maybe what they should doubt instead is their atheism. 

3.2.2. Our Moral Beliefs Did Not Come from Evolution

Antony also attempted to deflect evolutionary debunking arguments by claiming that we don’t even have substantial evidence that our moral beliefs really came from evolutionary processes (p. 83). She called this attempt of hers an Argument from Screening Off (p. 70) but that seems to me a strange and awkward name for her argument. Regardless, she explained that “morality is just one of several capacities specific to human beings – language and mathematics being others – for which no adequate evolutionary account exists … I must protest again that we do not have any reason to suppose that we know the evolutionary history of our moral attitudes. The hypothesis that a trait is the product of natural selections is an empirical hypothesis that must be constructed with biological detail and supported by evidence. A superficially plausible story is simply not enough” (p. 83).

Antony went further and even speculated that, possibly, our moral reasoning and intuition that generates our moral beliefs is a spandrel of evolution (p. 74). This doesn’t help her position at all. If I understand the concept of evolutionary spandrels correctly, they are just accidental byproducts of the haphazard random evolutionary process. If we have concerns about the reliability of our moral reasoning if it came about via the haphazard random evolutionary process, then we should have, not less, but more concerns if our moral reasoning was merely an accidental byproduct of this haphazard process. It doesn’t seem to me that it would help her case at all to suppose our moral reasoning is a spandrel of evolution instead of a direct result of evolution.

In his second critique of Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, Wielenberg similarly argued that we do not know enough about how evolution worked to confidently assert Plantinga’s first premise (the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given atheism and evolution, is low). He admitted there are cases where, despite having lots of good evidence for the reliability of their cognitive faculties, a person could become convinced concerning certain claims about his origin that would require him to doubt the reliability of his cognitive faculties. However, the theory of evolution does not meet this threshold because it is missing too much crucial information. He explained that “… while a typical reflective naturalist [atheist] believes that he has an understanding of some of the basic principles of evolution, he also believes that there are important causal factors of the actual process of evolution that led to the development of human cognitive faculties here on earth of which he is unaware.”50 In sum, the less we know about how the actual evolutionary process took place, the less confidence we should place in Plantinga’s first premise.

Wielenberg argued that, because our knowledge about how the evolutionary process formed our cognitive faculties is so incomplete, it should not undercut the vast amount of positive evidence we have for the reliability of our cognitive faculties. Therefore, we should place less confidence in Plantinga’s first premise and more confidence in the evaluation of our own cognitive faculties. He concluded that “… it would take a lot of information about one’s origin–it takes a developed, detailed, fleshed-out scenario that is not missing any crucial information, before the grounds for doubt are serious enough to annihilate or undercut all one’s evidence for the reliability of one’s faculties.”51 In other words, the evidence that our cognitive faculties are reliable is much greater than the evidence for Plantinga’s first premise (the probability of our cognitive faculties, given atheism and evolution, is low).      

In response to Antonty and Wielenberg’s critique that we do not know enough about how evolution worked, it should be noted that most evolutionary debunking arguments, including Plantinga’s, are based on what contemporary scientists have reported about the process of evolution. Plantinga makes it clear that his argument only applies to someone who believes that atheism and evolution are true. Therefore, the hypothetical person in Plantinga’s argument does believe what contemporary scientists currently say about the evolutionary process that developed our cognitive faculties. If someone does not believe evolution is true, or believes there are a lot of holes in the theory, like the skeptic Wielenberg described, then this argument does not apply to that person. As I mentioned above though, evolutionary debunking arguments are merely a subset of a larger objection for atheistic explanations of objective morality, that is, the lucky coincidence objection. Thus, even if an atheist rejected evolutionary debunking arguments because they reject evolution, they’d still have to deal with the lucky coincidence objection.

Certainly there are various aspects about the theory of evolution that many do not find very credible; Plantinga himself has concerns with it.52 Regardless, the force of evolutionary debunking arguments depend, not on whether the contemporary theory of evolution is true, but on how much credibility a particular atheist attributes to it. The more an atheist believes in evolution, the more force that evolutionary debunking arguments have against them. The fact is that evolutionary scientists do claim to understand how evolution worked, and many atheists are confident that they are correct. In fact, the theory of evolution is, for many atheists, a key part of their belief system. It is to this type of atheist that evolutionary debunking arguments most strongly apply.

In his article against Plantinga’s argument, Wielenberg presents several hypothetical scenarios about someone finding out how he originated and then claims these scenarios more accurately reflect the position an atheist finds himself in when considering evolution. In the first scenario, the hypothetical person discovers that he came about “… by some process or other and have no idea at all what the process may be.”53 Each consecutive scenario increases the amount of information the person knows about how he originated. The fifth and final scenario, the one Wielenberg claims most resembles the situation of a reflective atheist concerning evolution, is as follows:

I believe I was created by a certain machine. I believe that the machine operates according to certain principles, and I understand all or most of these principles. I cannot make a very good estimate of the probability of such a machine producing cognitively reliable creatures, but I suspect the probability is relatively low. I cannot make a very good estimate of the probability in question because I believe that whether or not a given being is cognitively reliable depends on the initial condition of the machine at the start of the creation process and I have no idea what the initial conditions of the machine were at the start of the process that created me. Now I realize that all the creatures around me were created in this machine as well. I further notice that the vast majority of them are cognitively reliable.54

The problem with this scenario is that it does not represent the typical atheist. It may represent how Wielenberg understands evolution, but most atheists believe they understand fairly well how evolution played out. It seems the more scientific or educated an atheist is, the louder he claims he can explain how evolution produced us and our beliefs.55 It is the very cornerstone of their explanation—that nature selects for the ability to survive and reproduce, not the ability to know truth—which has led many, including Thomas Nagel, Barry Stroud, Patricia Churchland, and even Charles Darwin himself, to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties.56

With respect to our moral beliefs in particular, naturalist Joshua Greene, whom Wielenberg described as one of the central figures in contemporary moral psychology,57 and whose work Wielenberg highly praised,58 wrote, 

I view science as offering a “behind the scenes” look at human morality. Just as a well-researched biography can, depending on what it reveals, boost or deflate one’s esteem for its subject, the scientific investigation of human morality can help us to understand human moral nature, and in so doing change our opinion of it…. Understanding where our moral instincts come from and how they work can … lead us to doubt that our moral convictions stem from perceptions of moral truth rather than projections of moral attitudes.59

The contention here is that Greene, Darwin, Dawkins, Nagel, Stroud, and Churchland more closely represent the typical atheist than Wielenberg’s hypothetical so-called reflective atheist.

In order to drive home how arbitrary our moral beliefs would be if they were developed by a haphazard evolutionary process, proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments often point out that if our evolutionary path would have taken a different direction, then our moral beliefs would be radically different. Linville made such an argument using wolves and Antony noted how Ruse made such an argument with termites – “instead of evolving from ‘savannah-dwelling primates,’ we, like termites, could have evolved needing to “dwell in darkness, eat each other’s feces, and cannibalize the dead.’ If the latter were the case, we would ‘extol such as beautiful and moral’ and ‘find it morally disgusting to live in the open air, dispose of body waste and bury the dead.’” (p. 76). Antony’s response to these examples of termites and wolves was to exclaim that “I think that Linville’s wolves would surprise him …. If they developed the cognitive tools to notice and reflect upon their social practice, it might occur to a few of them that the benefits of their rigid hierarchical social system could be realized without granting absolute power to any one wolf” (p. 76).

Antony’s strategy here is very close to one that Wielenberg took. Wielenberg, in an attempt to remove all contingency (and therefore luck) from his model, spent the last few pages of his book Robust Ethics asking readers to entertain the idea that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. By ‘necessary’ he meant that something must be the case in all possible worlds, whereas something is ‘contingent’ if it is possible for it not to be the case.60 If the laws of nature were necessary in this sense, he argued, then any being with cognitive faculties like ours would necessarily have moral beliefs similar to ours.61 I trust you see how similar this move is to the move Antony made. Wielenberg made this move because he understands that eliminating all contingency is the only way to ultimately rebut the lucky coincidence objection.

It is interesting to note that Wielenberg seems to agree with theists that there must be a necessary foundation of some sort for objective morality. Both sides then, theists and atheists, recognize that contingent things are not enough, there must be something necessary that provides the stability needed for morality to be objective as opposed to just a subjective, accidental human belief. Theists argue that God provides such a necessary foundation whereas Wielenberg asked his readers here to consider that the laws of nature may be necessary.

In his attempt to deflect the lucky coincidence objection made by theists who argue that the existence of God is the best explanation for why our moral beliefs correspond to moral truth, Wielenberg wrote that “… the question of whether God’s existence would decrease how lucky we would have to be to possess moral knowledge depends on the modal status of the laws of nature.”62 He continued by considering two possible scenarios. First, if the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then it would not matter if God does not exist. He wrote that “[i]f there is no God but the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then the fact that there is no God to put in place just the right laws for moral knowledge to arise doesn’t make us any luckier to have moral knowledge than we would be if God did exist because the laws of nature couldn’t have been any different from what they are.”63 He argued that, “[c]onsequently, to make the case that the truth of theism would make our possession of moral knowledge less lucky than atheism, one would need to make the case that the laws of nature are not metaphysically necessary.”64

Wielenberg seems to ignore the fact that the inverse is also true: To make the case that the truth of atheism would make our possession of moral knowledge no more lucky than if theism were true, which is what Wielenberg is trying to do, one would need to make the case that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. But Wielenberg makes no such attempt. Certainly one can speculate that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, but such an assertion is notoriously difficult to prove, as Wielenberg himself admits.65

Also, even if some of the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, this would not mean that the evolutionary path that led to human beings was necessary. Therefore, Wielenberg had to go even further and speculate that the evolutionary process that led to the development of human beings may itself have been necessary in some sense. He summarized this possibility as follows:

These considerations are hardly decisive, but I think they do indicate that it is a mistake simply to assume that it is nomologically possible for us (or other beings) to have evolved to m-possess radically different moral principles than the ones we actually possess. For all we know, m-possessing the DDE [a particular moral principle] is an inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process that made us capable of forming moral judgments in the first place.66

Wielenberg is forced into this remarkable speculation because he realizes that if the evolutionary process which supposedly produced human beings was contingent, if it could have occurred differently, then our cognitive faculties could be different, which in turn may have resulted in vastly different moral beliefs. Similar to the termites and wolves already discussed, Charles Darwin himself recognized this and used bees as an example:

If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case … some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience. For each individual would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger or enduring instincts, and others less strong or enduring.… In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed, and the other ought not; the one would have been right and the other wrong.…67

Fellow moral robust realist David Enoch agreed that “[i]t is indeed true that had the causal forces shaping our intellectual and other normative faculties been very different, had they ‘aimed’ at things that are of no value at all or that are of disvalue, we would have been systematically mistaken in our normative beliefs. And we are indeed epistemically lucky that this (presumably) isn’t the case…. So yes, some brute luck may remain.”68 He went on to call the fact that our moral beliefs do line up with objective moral truth a miracle, albeit, in his estimation, a small miracle. After presenting a third-factor model similar to Wielenberg’s, he concluded his discussion as follows: “Let me not give the impression that this suggested way of coping with the epistemological challenge is ideal. Indeed, because of the (perhaps) remaining small miracle perhaps Robust Realism [his non-naturalist atheistic explanation of objective morality] does lose some plausibility points here.”69

As for Wielenberg’s speculative solution that our evolutionary path might have been necessary, he wrote that the amount of lucky coincidence involved in having moral beliefs that are correlated with objective moral truth depends on the answer to this question: “[T]o what extent do the actual laws of nature permit the emergence of species of beings that m-possess moral principles radically different from the moral principles we m-possess?”70 He began his answer to this question with the following hypothetical claim, which he called Extreme Specificity (ES): “The actual laws of nature entail that any being capable of forming moral beliefs at all m-possess all and only the principles included in Moral Truth.”71 He argued that if the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary in this regard then “… there is no luck at all involved in the fact that Bart [a hypothetical person he used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”72 This is the same strategy Antony used when surmised that Linville’s wolves would surprise him.

Wielenberg is clear that he does not believe Extreme Specificity is true; he admitted that “we simply lack the knowledge required to warrant a clear and confident answer” concerning Extreme Specificity, but he did suggest that “… we may be relatively close to ES [Extreme Specificity]—or at least, closer to ES than some philosophers have suggested.”73 He even postulated that “[f]or all we know, m-possessing the DDE [a particular moral principle] is an inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process that made us capable of forming moral judgments in the first place.”74 He understands that the closer we are to Extreme Specificity in the actual world, the smaller amount of luck is entailed by our having moral beliefs that correspond to objective moral truth. He concluded his book by stating that “[a]s far as I can tell, a certain degree of agnosticism is called for with respect to just how lucky we are to have moral knowledge on a view like mine.”75

Anticipating how some would respond to this speculation, Wielenberg preemptively argued that just because one can think of other ways evolution could have played out (possibly more like the evolutionary paths of wolves, termites, or bees) does not mean that those ways are actually possible. He explained his point as follows:

One might be tempted to argue that the fact that it is easy to imagine the laws of nature being different than they are is an indication of their metaphysical contingency. However, theists typically maintain that God’s existence is metaphysically necessary; yet it is easy to imagine the non-existence of God. Therefore, theists cannot consistently appeal to the conceivability of different laws of nature to support the metaphysical contingency of the actual laws of nature.76

In response, it should be noted that the supposed evolutionary tree would seem to say that evolution not only could have, but in fact did sprout off in many different directions, leading to wildly different organisms. In addition, since he is the one suggesting that the laws of nature and the evolutionary path which led to human beings may be necessary, the onus would be on him to provide evidence for this claim. 

In addition, Wielenberg himself inconsistently affirmed that human beings were produced by an evolutionary process that was accidental and thus contingent. He wrote that “… evolutionary processes have endowed us with certain unalienable rights and duties. Evolution has given us these moral properties by giving us the non-moral properties that make such moral properties be instantiated. And if, as I believe, there is no God, then it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do.”77 He also wrote that “contemporary atheists typically maintain that human beings are accidental, evolved, mortal, and relatively short-lived….”78

Realizing the implications of these statements, Wielenberg explained in a footnote that, in the context of evolution, ‘accidental’ should not be understood as a result of entirely random processes because “[a]ccording to contemporary evolutionary theory, evolutionary processes are not, contrary to popular mischaracterizations, entirely chance-driven. Rather, they are driven by a combination of chance and necessity; see Mayr 2001, 119-20.”79 It is important to note that Mayr actually stated that chance rules at the first step of evolution, with the production of variation through random mutation, and that determinism only comes in during the second step through non-random aspects of survival and reproduction based on a particular species’ fixed, or determined, environment.80 Thus, if evolution worked as many claim, that it was driven by accidental random mutations, which Wielenberg agrees to,81 as well as chance changes in the environment, such as the success of other organisms, climate changes, meteorites, etc., then it is very difficult to think that evolution had to necessarily produce human beings just the way they are and to have the moral beliefs they do.

Lastly, the suggestion that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary comes dangerously close, for an atheist such as Wielenberg that is, to another line of reasoning—fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God.82 Wielenberg recognized this when he explained that if it is metaphysically necessary that any being capable of forming moral beliefs at all possesses only true moral beliefs, then “… there is no luck at all involved in the fact that Bart [a hypothetical person he used as an example] m-possesses moral principles that correspond with moral reality rather than m-possessing radically different (and false) moral principles.”83 Recognizing that this may be seen as a hint of fine-tuning, he followed this up in a footnote by noting that “[p]erhaps Bart is lucky to exist at all, but that is a separate issue—one that connects with so-called ‘fine-tuning’ arguments, a topic I cannot engage in here.”84

The important point is that the fine-tuning debate has sparked a lot of discussion over the last couple of decades, instigating a whole host of arguments for and against it. The fine-tuning argument itself, as well as the most common argument against it, the argument for a proposed multiverse, are both based on the strong intuition that the laws of nature are not necessary but contingent. Wielenberg’s suggestion that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary would thus effectively rebut the prominent positions on both sides of the fine-tuning debate. At the very least, this should give one pause in accepting Wielenberg’s speculative proposal that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. Whether one believes that God exists or not, it seems much more plausible that, if He does exist, then He exists necessarily, that is, more plausible than the idea that the laws of nature are necessary.

3.2.3. Erik Wielenberg’s Third Factor Model

One of the ways that Erik Wielenberg attempted to address Evolutionary Debunking Arguments was by proposing that a third factor, namely, our cognitive faculties, explains why there is a correspondence between objective moral truth and our moral beliefs. He used this third factor model to try and show why it is not a lucky coincidence that moral truth and moral beliefs correspond; they correspond because they both stem from our cognitive faculties. He summarized this idea as follows:

[T]here is a necessary connection between the cognitive faculties and moral rights [those who have such cognitive faculties necessarily have moral rights]. Those very cognitive faculties also generate moral beliefs, including the relevant beliefs about rights. The connection between the cognitive faculties and beliefs about moral rights is causal. In this way, the relevant cognitive faculties are responsible for both moral rights and beliefs about those rights, and so the cognitive faculties explain the correlation between moral rights and beliefs about those rights.85

In other words, he posited that our cognitive faculties do more than generate our moral knowledge, they also instantiate ontologically our moral rights and obligations in the first place. Thus, our cognitive faculties explain why there is a match between our moral beliefs and objective moral truth. He wrote that

… the presence of the very cognitive faculties that cause (or at least causally contribute to) my belief that I have certain rights also entails that I have those very rights.… [C]ertain non-moral features of the world [our cognitive faculties] both entail certain moral facts and causally contribute to the presence of moral beliefs that correspond to those moral facts.86

Thus he argued that there is a correlation between our beliefs about moral rights and the fact that we do indeed have these rights in that both stem from a third factor–our cognitive faculties.87 He noted that “[i]f these claims are correct, then we have explained the ‘remarkable fact’ [that moral properties and moral beliefs correspond].… [I]t seems to me that if we can explain why (i) x causes y and (ii) x entails z, then we have explained why y and z tend to go together.”88

To summarize, Wielenberg claimed that this third factor (human cognitive faculties) do two things: they make objective moral properties be instantiated and they also generate our moral beliefs. Because moral properties and moral beliefs both stem from the same thing, our cognitive faculties, this secures a correlation between them, while also allowing for the fact that moral properties themselves are causally inert. He explained that cognitive faculties “… both entail certain moral facts and causally contribute to the presence of moral beliefs that correspond to those moral facts. On that model, it is not at all unlikely that moral beliefs and moral facts will correspond.”89 He used his third-factor model to try to deflect criticism from several prominent evolutionary debunking arguments from Gilbert Harman, Michael Ruse, Sharon Street, and Richard Joyce.90  

Let me take some time and more fully explain the part of this third factor model that Wielenberg refers to as hi proposed making relationship in which natural non-moral properties are responsible for making moral properties to be instantiated. The importance of this proposal to his model is made clear by his explanation that “the making relation is the cement of the foundation of normative reality.”91 He construed this relationship as a type of causation when he wrote that “… whatever moral properties are instantiated are conserved or sustained by various underlying non-moral properties via a robust causal relation that holds between the relevant non-moral and moral properties.”92 Wielenberg summarized this making relationship well when he responded to the question: What is the source of human moral rights and obligations?

I propose the following answer: any being that can reason, suffer, experience happiness, tell the difference between right and wrong, choose between right and wrong, and set goals for itself has certain rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and certain obligations, including the duty to refrain from rape (in typical circumstances). Having such cognitive capacities makes one have such rights and duties. Evolutionary processes have produced human beings that can reason, suffer, experience happiness, tell the difference between right and wrong, choose between right and wrong, and set goals for themselves. In this way, evolutionary processes have endowed us with certain unalienable rights and duties. Evolution has given us these moral properties by giving us the non-moral properties that make such moral properties be instantiated. And if, as I believe, there is no God, then it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do. But that they are accidental in origin does not make these moral properties unreal or unimportant.93

Wielenberg claimed this making relationship is brute in that it has no ontological explanation and no foundation external to itself.94 Though this making relationship has always necessarily existed timelessly as a brute fact, moral goodness itself was not exemplified until the correct non-moral properties arose. He explained that

… if a given entity is good, it is good in virtue of or because of certain non-moral properties of that entity. Pleasure, for instance, is good because of the qualitative feel that pleasure has. Persons are valuable, and possess certain rights, because of certain capacities they have—for instance, the capacity to experience pain, and to reason. When an entity possessing the right sort of non-moral properties comes into existence, that entity will also possess the property of being good. When such entities are produced by entities or processes that do not possess moral properties, then value arises from valuelessness. More precisely, in such cases, entities that have the property of being good arise from entities or processes that do not have this property. For example, for many years the universe was devoid of sentient life. Eventually, valueless processes produced beings that could experience pleasure, and, at some point, the first episode of pleasure occurred. At that moment, the property of goodness was exemplified for the first time.95

In this section I will argue that Wielenberg’s third-factor model fails to rebut the lucky coincidence objection. First I will argue against the first part of his third-factor model, his idea that cognitive faculties make moral properties to be instantiated. Second, I will point out that the second part of his third-factor model, his idea that our cognitive faculties generate our moral beliefs, is contingent and thus is still vulnerable to the lucky coincidence objection.

First I will argue against Wielenberg’s suggestion that cognitive faculties make moral properties to be instantiated. Given atheism, why think that cognitive faculties are anything more than instrumental accidents of evolution that nature selected for because they led to greater chances of survival or reproduction? Mark Linville has argued that human cognitive faculties are not a viable source of moral properties such as moral value, rights, or duties if they are merely instrumental abilities developed from a haphazard evolutionary process, much like opposable thumbs. He wrote that “… it is better for a human to have a pair of thumbs than not. But that is because having them allows people to open beer bottles and play the tuba. It does not follow (obviously), that thumbed creatures enjoy some special value not shared by their thumbless companions. To get anything like a real rights view up and running would seem to require more than appeal to such instrumentally valuable human characteristics.”96 Linville makes a similar point in his debate with Antony (p. 61). Peter Singer famously claimed that our insistence of human moral rights is an unwarranted species-ist type of chauvinism on our part.97 Given atheism, it is hard to see why he is wrong. If our cognitive faculties arose accidentally as helpful adaptions to our environment then, as James Rachels pointed out, we “… are not entitled … to regard our own adaptive behavior as ‘better’ or ‘higher’ than that of a cockroach, who, after all, is adapted equally well to life in its own environmental niche.”98

Another problem with Wielenberg’s idea that our cognitive faculties instantiate moral properties is that different human beings have different levels of cognitive abilities. Wielenberg’s model would seem to indicate then that we should attribute less moral rights and duties to those who have lesser cognitive faculties such as infants or those with mental handicaps. This is a very precarious path that could be used to justify all sorts of horrendous practices such as eugenics, forced sterilizations, and involuntary euthanasia. Angus Menuge summarized his concern with this part of Wielenberg’s model as follows: “[I]t is obvious that even amongst those who have the relevant cognitive faculties, there is wide variation in cognitive powers and capacities. Human rights are supposed to be equal, but it is implausible … to claim that all of these human beings would have the same human rights: if cognitive powers and capacities come in degrees, so would human rights.”99

John Hare contrasted a notion like Wielenberg’s to a common belief among theists concerning the moral value of all human beings; he wrote,

It is unclear why we should give status to members of a species who do not themselves have the relevant capacities … for example, infants born with severe mental retardation, if it is the existence of just those capacities in some of its members that is supposed to make the species valuable in the particular way that moral status implies. I myself do not see how to overcome this difficulty [however] [w]ithin the Abrahamic faiths we do have a way to do this, starting from the premise that humans are created in the image of God.100

While considering a similar notion, that we should ascribe value to human beings because they have the capacity for rational reflection, Evans made the point that “many people believe that young infants and people suffering from dementia still have … intrinsic dignity, but in both cases there is no capacity for rational reflection.”101 In other words, Wielenberg’s model seems to imply that if a particular human being does not have sufficient cognitive faculties, then they have less moral rights, or none at all. Surely Wielenberg himself does not believe that infants and people suffering from dementia have less moral rights, but the fact that his model seems to minimize, if not eradicate, such rights is an indication that his model is dangerously wrong.

Also, Wielenberg’s proposed making relationship between moral and natural properties is suspect because it is an extravagant ontological claim. Wielenberg has conceded “… that the appeal to the making relation makes robust normative realism less attractive in some respects than at least some of its competitors…. [I]t is plausible that, everything else being equal, a theory that posits more kinds of properties and relations is less attractive than a theory that posits fewer kinds of theories and relations.”102 Platonists have historically struggled to explain how their proposed abstract objects are able to connect with concrete objects in the physical world. Sometimes known as the problem of exemplification, this issue dates all the way back to Plato and his critics. It is fairly well agreed upon that abstract objects, if they exist, are non-causal entities; so much so that being non-causal is usually part of the definition of abstract objects. Therefore, the abstract objects themselves are unable to cause their connection with concrete objects. Many Platonists, including Plato himself, have even suggested a theistic being as the agent that causes abstract objects to be exemplified in concrete objects.103

At least when it comes to understanding how moral properties can be connected to non-moral properties, the idea that the former supervenes on the latter is currently the most popular explanation. However, some have criticized the idea of supervenience by claiming it is not an explanation at all but merely a filler word used to signify something for which we have no explanation.104 In addition, as Wielenberg noted, some have “suggested that such supervenience is more at home in a theistic universe than in a non-theistic one.”105 He went on to quote William Wainwright’s comment that “… the connection between the base property and the supervenient property can seem mysterious. For, in the absence of further explanation, the (necessary) connection between these radically different sorts of properties … is just an inexplicable brute fact.”106 

Wielenberg rejects the three explanations discussed above for how moral properties connect with the physical world—that the moral properties themselves cause the connection, that a theistic being causes the connection, or that moral properties simply supervene upon natural properties. Instead, he has proposed that it is the concrete objects which cause this connection. Craig summarized his position as follows: “Wielenberg recognizes that it would be implausible to say that this just happens, as if by magic. Rather he claims that the physical objects cause the abstract objects to supervene on physical situations.”107

While Wielenberg sometimes uses the term supervenience to explain this phenomenon, his explanation of the process makes it clear he is proposing something much more elaborate than simple supervenience. He explained that his proposed making relationship is a form of robust causal D-supervenience where the concrete natural properties (our cognitive faculties) actually cause the abstract moral properties to be instantiated. He coined the term D-supervenience as a way to refer to Michael DePaul’s version of supervenience.108 He explained that “… given DePaul’s understanding of dependency, if M depends on some base properties B, then M is not identical with, reducible to, or entirely constituted by B, but the instantiation of B explains the instantiation of M; it is B’s instantiation that makes M be instantiated…. This making relation (as I shall henceforth refer to it) is distinct from supervenience.”109 His proposed D-supervenience, or making relationship, is distinct because supervenience, as it is normally understood, is merely a relationship of correlation whereas making is actually explanatory and causal. Thus he construes the making relationship involved in D-supervenience as a sort of robust causation, thus describing making as type of causation.110

William Lane Craig has been one of the most vocal critics of Wielenberg’s proposed making relationship between natural properties and moral properties. First, since natural properties are not agents, how do they know which moral properties to instantiate? Craig rhetorically asked “What if instead of picking out moral goodness, some physical situation might pick out moral badness? Indeed, what if it picks out some other abstract object like √2 to instantiate, so that two people’s loving each other has the property of being √2 instead of being good?”111 In addition, Craig pointed out that Wielenberg “imputes to physical objects causal powers that are mysterious and completely unknown to contemporary physics.”112   

In response, Wielenberg pointed out that in his model this

… relation is a causal relation of a robust sort: the act’s being a case of causing pain just for fun necessarily causes the act’s wrongness. This causal relation holds between instances of properties—property-tokens—and so does not involve causation between concrete and abstract entities. This point is important because it means that Craig’s objections to causation between concrete and abstract entities are directed against a doctrine that is not part of my view.113

This seems to be a distinction without a difference that does not help Wielenberg’s case at all. He admits as much in a footnote to the above quote where he wrote,

I should note, however, that some of Craig’s concerns about my theory of robust causation are relevant to causation between property tokens. E.g., I offer no account of how such causation works nor do I offer an explanation of why certain nonmoral property tokens cause one moral property token rather than another. While I don’t see these as serious weaknesses in my view, I want to make clear that I am not suggesting that Craig’s misunderstanding of my account of robust causation renders all of his objections to such causation irrelevant.114

In several places he claimed that this causal relationship is brute, unexplained, and necessary, and that he does not see this as a serious weakness of his model. He argued that “[e]xplanation, as they say, must come to an end somewhere. Why does being an instance of torturing someone just for fun entail moral wrongness? Because being an instance of torturing someone just for fun makes an act wrong.… Eventually we hit bottom; no further explanation is available. But I don’t see why possessing this sort of explanatory bottom is a problematic feature for a view to have.”115 Later he added that this causal relationship is necessary: “There is a necessary connection between the cognitive faculties and moral rights.”116

Wielenberg’s insistence on these unexplained necessary connections between non-moral properties and moral properties has caused some to accuse his model of being conveniently ad hoc. First, consider the following quote by Shelly Kagan:

An adequate justification for a set of principles requires an explanation of those principles—an explanation of why exactly these goals, restrictions, and so on, should be given weight, and not others. Short of this, the principles will not be free of the taint of arbitrariness which led us to move beyond our … ad hoc shopping lists.… Unless we can offer a coherent explanation of our principles (or show that they need no further justification), we cannot consider them justified, and we may have reason to reject them.… This need for explanation in moral theory cannot be overemphasized.117

For instance, concerning models like Wielenberg’s, Craig, reflecting Kagan’s concern above, wrote that “[i]f our approach to metaethical theory is to be serious metaphysics rather than just a ‘shopping list’ approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to the supervenient moral properties or principles needed to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states or why such principles are true.”118

Second, now that I’ve critiqued the first part of Wielenberg’s third-factor model, his idea that cognitive faculties make moral properties to be instantiated, I will now point out that the second part of his third-factor model, his idea that our cognitive faculties generate our moral beliefs, is contingent and thus remains vulnerable to the overall lucky coincidence objection. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Wielenberg is correct in that cognitive faculties do necessarily make moral properties to be instantiated (see my concerns about this claim above), the correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because, while his proposed relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties is necessary, his proposed relationship between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent. There is no good reason to think that beings with cognitive faculties like ours would come to have the same moral beliefs we do. We can easily imagine beings with similar cognitive faculties as our own but with radically different types of moral beliefs.

As noted earlier, this point is amplified if one believes, as most atheists do, that our cognitive faculties and moral beliefs came about haphazardly through a random evolutionary process. Wielenberg himself does not take a position on whether all our moral beliefs can be explained in evolutionary terms but he is “sympathetic to the view that at least some of our moral beliefs can be given evolutionary explanations.”119 In particular, he sketched an evolutionary explanation of how we came to have our beliefs about moral rights.120 

The reason that beings with cognitive faculties like ours may not have the belief that they have moral properties such as rights is that the causal connection between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent, not necessary. Thus his model still includes contingency, that is, the contingency in the relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. This contingency still leaves his third factor model open to the lucky coincidence objection because, as Wielenberg himself admitted, where there is contingency, there is luck.121 Thus he does not eliminate the lucky coincidence objection with his third-factor model, but only moves it somewhere else as he attempts to sweep contingency under the rug.

It is important to note that Wielenberg describes this making relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties, the first part of his third-factor model, as a necessary relationship, that it obtains in all possible worlds.122 This is the key difference to note between the first and second part of his third-factor model. While he proposed that the first part, the making relationship between cognitive faculties and moral properties, is necessary, he proposed that the second part of his third-factor model, the relationship between cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs, is contingent. Wielenberg admitted that “… because the basic ethical facts are necessary truths, if there is any luck in the correspondence between our psychological dispositions and moral reality, it must lie entirely on the psychological side of the equation.”123 His proposed correspondence between moral properties and moral beliefs breaks down because of this difference in causal necessity between the first and second part of his third-factor model.

Consider the following refutation by analogy. If Wielenberg’s model works in the realm of moral knowledge, then it should also work in other realms of knowledge generated by our cognitive faculties, realms such as science and mathematics. Let us consider his third factor in the context of Fermat’s Last Theorem.124 For the purpose of this analogy, it is sufficient to note that Fermat’s Last Theorem is a mathematical theorem proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637. He claimed he had developed a proof of this theorem but such a proof was never found in any of his writings. Despite numerous attempts by mathematicians, there were no published successful proofs of this theorem until 1994. If we insert Fermat’s Last Theorem in Wielenberg’s third-factor model, the two parts of the model would be as follows:

1. Our cognitive faculties make the property of ‘being able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem’ be instantiated.

2. Our cognitive faculties cause us to believe we can prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.

It is easy to imagine beings like us who have the cognitive faculties which make them able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, but who do not have the belief that they can. Similarly, it is easy to imagine beings like us who have cognitive faculties which make them have moral properties such as rights and obligations (assuming the first part of Wielenberg’s third factor model is correct), but who do not have the belief that they have such properties. Our imagination is not even necessary, for there are in fact such people, that is, humans who do not think they, or others, have moral rights and obligations. The reason that beings with cognitive faculties like ours may not believe that they have moral properties is that the causal connection between cognitive faculties and moral beliefs is contingent, not necessary.      

To summarize, it has been argued in this section that Wielenberg does not avoid the lucky coincidence objection with his third-factor model. First, there are serious problems with the first part of his third factor model, his proposed making relationship between moral and nonmoral properties. Second, there is still contingency in the second part of this third factor model, that is, the idea that our cognitive faculties generate our moral beliefs. For this second issue, I showed that Wielenberg did not eliminate contingency, he only moved it to a different location in an attempt to sweep it under the rug. Therefore there is still contingency in his third-factor model, namely, in the second part, his proposed relationship between our cognitive faculties and our moral beliefs. And where there is contingency, there is luck.

3.2.4. The Modal Security Response

Justin Clarke-Doane wrote a paper titled “Debunking Arguments: Mathematics, Logic, and Modal Security” that will be published in Robert Richards and Michael Ruse (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Evolutionary Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In this paper Clarke-Doane presented a response to evolutionary debunking arguments concerning objective morality. It seems to me that his argument can be summarized as follows:

1. If evolutionary debunking arguments undermine our moral beliefs, then they also undermine all our other beliefs, such as our mathematical beliefs.

2. We are confident that our cognitive faculties that produce our beliefs, specifically our mathematical beliefs, are reliable for the most part.

3. Since we don’t allow evolutionary debunking arguments to undermine many of our beliefs, such as our mathematical beliefs, then we shouldn’t allow them to undermine our moral beliefs either.

In a nutshell, he is arguing that if we allow evolutionary debunking arguments to undermine our moral beliefs, then, to be consistent, we have to allow them to undermine all our beliefs, including our mathematical beliefs. But we are so very confident that many of our beliefs, and especially our mathematical beliefs, are accurate. Therefore, we should reject any evolutionary debunking arguments that attempt to undermine our beliefs, including our moral beliefs.

Clarke-Doane gives several examples of proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments that selectively apply their argument to only certain beliefs, namely, our moral beliefs, but inconsistently don’t apply them to our other beliefs (p. 4). In this I agree with Clarke-Doane; it is inconsistent to apply evolutionary debunking arguments to only some of our beliefs. That is why I affirmed Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary debunking argument above, because he consistently applied it to all of our beliefs. As I explained above, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument is broader in that it applies, not just to our moral intuitions, but to all of our cognitive faculties; for this reason it is a more consistent position. This position is in contrast with atheists who often apply evolutionary debunking arguments only to moral and religious beliefs while maintaining that our cognitive faculties provide us with reliable beliefs in other areas.

Telling such an evolutionary story is a common tactic employed by atheists, including Wielenberg, to try and explain away religious beliefs as false. In an effort to brush off C. S. Lewis’s argument for God’s existence from human desire for, and belief in, ultimate joy, Wielenberg wrote of such desires that “evolutionary psychology … predicts that human beings will tend to hold a number of false beliefs.… ”125 Wielenberg has spent a considerable amount of time trying to defend his assertion that we have true moral beliefs from evolutionary debunking arguments. Clearly Wielenberg did not realize his inconsistency in affirming evolutionary debunking arguments to dismiss the reliability of our religious beliefs while rejecting such arguments when it comes to the reliability of our moral beliefs. Shafer-Landau rightly pointed out the inconsistency of applying evolutionary debunking arguments to only some of our beliefs when he wrote,

If we are required to suspend judgment about all perceptual beliefs—as we must, if required to do so in the moral case—then we will most likely not be in a position to confirm the reliability of our perceptual faculties. We must presuppose the truth of at least some central, widely uncontroversial perceptual beliefs in order to get the confirmation of our perceptual faculties off the ground. But if we are allowed such liberties in the perceptual realm, then we should be given similar license for morality. And then the debunking game is up.126

Thus I wholeheartedly affirm the first premise of Clarke-Doane’s argument as I summarized it above. Given atheism and evolution, there is no good reason to assume any of our cognitive faculties are reliable and thus we have reason to question all of our beliefs. Thus, given atheism and evolution, there results a certain global skepticism about all our beliefs. This is famously known as “Darwin’s Doubt” because Darwin himself seems to be the first to recognize this predicament. For instance, he began to doubt the reliability of his own cognitive faculties when he became convinced humans had come about through an evolutionary process. In 1881 he wrote to W. Graham, in response to his Creed of Science, that “… you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”127

Where I disagree with Clarke-Doane’s argument is in his premise 2 and 3 as I summarized it above. I would maintain that, given evolution and atheism, we should rightfully doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties and thus doubt that all of our beliefs are accurate, including our mathematical beliefs. Someone might claim that we could simply check the accuracy of our mathematical beliefs by comparing it to objective mathematical truths. However, such a strategy would be viciously circular because, as discussed above, we’d be using our own mathematical abilities to verify our own mathematical abilities, which is the very thing being doubted. If we have doubts about the length of a yard stick, we don’t want to use that yard stick to measure itself to see if it really is indeed 36 inches.

Footnotes

[1] Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. VanArragon, eds., Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 55–84. When quoting Linville and Antony from this book, I’ll simply put the page number in parenthesis within my text.

[2] David Baggett, “Psychopathy and Supererogation,” in God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? (New York: Routledge, 2020), forthcoming.

[3] David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57–58.

[4] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 14–15.

[5] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 267.

[6] William Lane Craig, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics, ed. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 30.

[7] Robert M. Adams, “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in Rationality and Religious Belief, ed. C.F. Delaney (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 116–140.   

[8] Adams, Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief, 116.

[9] Adams, Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief, 117.

[10] Adams, Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief, 117.

[11] Plato, Euthyphro, 9e.

[12] For a brief summary see C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89–91. For a fuller treatment see John Milliken, “Euthyphro, the Good, and the Right,” Philosophia Christi 11.1 (2009): 145–55.

[13] William Lane Craig, “The Most Gruesome of Guests,” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics (eds. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 171–73.

[14] Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002), 7.

[15] Ibid., 14.

[16] Anselm, “Monologion,” in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works (eds. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans; Oxford World’s Classics, New York: Oxford University Press), 5–82.

[17] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, Chapter 40.

[18] David Baggett and Jerry Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91.

[19] Baggett and Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality, 93.

[20] Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85.

[21] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 189–220. See also Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1998), 282.

[22] Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 253.

[23] Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on Its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications (New York: Routledge, 1989), 261–69.

[24] Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

[25] Joyce, The Evolution of Morality, 184.

[26] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 147.

[27] Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).

[28] Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). Peter Singer, “Ethics and Sociobiology,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11:1 (1982): 40–64. Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109–166. Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 184.     

[29] Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” 121–22.

[30] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 13–14.

[31] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 155.

[32] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 153.

[33] See Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality, and Meaning (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003); Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality without God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Russ Shafer-Landau, “Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge, ” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7:1 (2012): 1–37.

[34] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 163.

[35] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 313, 326, 335.

[36] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 314. Though Plantinga’s argument uses naturalism in place of atheism, atheism is being used here because, as explained previously, Wielenberg is not a naturalist.

[37] Erik Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” Synthese 131:1 (2002): 81–98.

[38] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 85.

[39] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 90.

[40] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 346.

[41] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 341.

[42] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 3.

[43] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 4.

[44] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 4.

[45] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 5.

[46] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 6.

[47] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 326.

[48] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 341.

[49] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 336.

[50] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 91.

[51] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 93.

[52] Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 225–64.

[53] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 87.

[54] Wielenberg, “How to Be an Alethically Rational Naturalist,” 95.

[55] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[56] See quotes by these contemporary thinkers pointing out their doubts about our cognitive faculties in Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 315.

[57] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 110.

[58] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 123.

[59] Joshua Greene, “From Neural ‘Is’ to Moral ‘Ought’: What Are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 848–849.

[60] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 36, explained that he adopted these from Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 44–45.

[61] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 166–75.

[62] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[63] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[64] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174.

[65] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 69.

[66] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 172.

[67] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1909), 100–101.

[68] David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 173.

[69] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 175.

[70] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 167.

[71] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168. Moral Truth is the set of all necessarily true general moral principles, which, as has been noted, are what he claims are brute ethical facts.

[72] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[73] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 169.

[74] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 172.

[75] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 175.

[76] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 174. Emphasis added.

[77] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 56. Emphasis added.

[78] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 51. Emphasis added.

[79] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 51.

[80] Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 120–21.

[81] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 51, 56.

[82] Robin Collins, “The teleological argument: an exploration of the fine-tuning of the universe,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, eds. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 202–82.

[83] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[84] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 168.

[85] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 145.

[86] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 153–54.

[87] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 56.

[88] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 156.

[89] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 154.

[90] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 146–64.

[91] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 38.

[92] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 20.

[93] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 56.

[94] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 37.

[95] Erik J. Wielenberg, “Objective Morality and the Nature of Morality,” American Theological Inquiry 3.2 (2010): 80.

[96] Mark Linville, God and Morality: What Is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, ed. Adam Lloyd Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2020), forthcoming.

[97] Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976).

[98] James Rachels, Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 70.

[99] Angus Menuge, “Vindicating the Dilemma for Evolutionary Ethics: A Response to Erik Wielenberg” (presented at the Evangelical Philosophical Society Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, November 2018), 11.

[100] John Hare, God’s Command, Oxford Studies in Theological Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27.

[101] C. Stephen Evans, “Moral Arguments for the Existence of God,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1.

[102] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 35.

[103] F. C. Copleston, Greece and Rome, vol. 1 of A History of Philosophy (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1946), Part 1, 214-217; Part 2, 33, 38.

[104] J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), 41.

[105] Erik J. Wielenberg, “In Defense of Non-Natural, Non-Theistic Moral Realism,” Faith and Philosophy 26.1 (2009): 27.

[106] William J. Wainwright, Religion and Morality (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 66.

[107] Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals,” 336.

[108] Michael R. DePaul, “Supervenience and Moral Dependence,” Philosophical Studies 51 (1987): 425–39. 

[109] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 10–11.

[110] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 19.

[111] Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals,” 337.

[112] Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals,” 337.

[113] Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson,” 366.

[114] Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson,” 366.

[115] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 24.

[116] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 145.

[117] Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 13.

[118] Craig, Is Goodness without God Good Enough?, 180.

[119] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 148.

[120] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 135–44.

[121] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 167.

[122] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 36, 145, 156.

[123] Wielenberg, Robust Ethics, 167.

[124] This particular refutation by analogy was suggested by Dr. Greg Welty.

[125] Erik Wielenberg, God and the Reach of Reason: C.S. Lewis, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118–19.

[126] Russ Shafer-Landau, “Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism and Moral Knowledge,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7:1 (2012): 23.

[127] Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (London: J. Murray, 1902), 64.

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Adam Lloyd Johnson serves as a university campus missionary with Ratio Christi. He also teaches classes for Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and spends one month each year living and teaching at Rhineland Theological Seminary in Wölmersen, Germany. Adam received his PhD in Theological Studies with an emphasis in Philosophy of Religion from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2020.

Adam grew up in Nebraska and became a Christian as a teenager in 1994. He graduated from the University of Nebraska and then worked in the field of actuarial science for ten years in Lincoln, Nebraska. While in his twenties, he went through a crisis of faith: are there good reasons and evidence to believe God exists and that the Bible is really from Him? His search for answers led him to apologetics and propelled him into ministry with a passion to serve others by equipping Christians and encouraging non-Christians to trust in Christ. Adam served as a Southern Baptist pastor for eight years (2009-2017) but stepped down from the pastorate to serve others full-time in the area of apologetics. He’s been married to his wife Kristin since 1996, and they have four children – Caroline, Will, Xander, and Ray.

Adam has presented his work at the National Apologetics Conference, the Society of Christian Philosophers, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the International Society of Christian Apologetics, the Canadian Centre for Scholarship and the Christian Faith, the American Academy of Religion, and the Evangelical Theological Society. His work has been published in the Journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics, Philosophia Christi, the Westminster Theological Journal, and the Canadian Journal for Scholarship and the Christian Faith. Adam has spoken at numerous churches and conferences in America and around the world – Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, Boston, Orlando, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. He is also the editor and co-author of the book A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? published by Routledge and co-authored with William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Erik Wielenberg, and others.

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The Case That Our Moral Knowledge Points Toward God: Part 1

INTRODUCTION 

This is the first article in a series on how one might offer several different moral arguments that all (1) focus on our knowledge of moral truth and (2) reinforce each other so that their joint force is even stronger than the force of each individual argument.[1] There are different kinds of moral arguments for the existence of God. Some aim to show that God is needed for objective moral truth to exist; others focus on the advantage that God offers for justifying other aspects of morality, such as: moral knowledge, moral transformation, or moral rationality. This series of articles focuses specifically on three well-known arguments for God’s existence that have to do with our moral knowledge. I will make the case that these arguments, while different, are complementary. After examining each argument, the series concludes by offering a strategy for how they can be used in conjunction so that they reinforce each other. In this first article of the series, I examine Mark Linville’s “Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism” (AEN), which is similar to an argument given by Alvin Plantinga.

THE ARGUMENTS OF MARK LINVILLE AND ALVIN PLANTINGA 

Mark Linville’s AEN is a deductive argument which aims to show that naturalism is false because evolutionary naturalism (EN) undermines any basis for humans having moral knowledge, yet we seem to have moral knowledge.[2] Since Darwinian evolution is the “only game in town” for naturalists in terms of accounting for the diversity of biological life, Linville justifiably lumps evolution and naturalism together.[3] Linville is hardly the first to make the claim that EN cannot justify moral knowledge; many secular ethicists recognize this,[4] and a number of theists, like Linville, have also reached this conclusion—perhaps none more notable than Alvin Plantinga. Let us first examine Linville’s argument and then compare it with Plantinga’s. Linville argues:

(1) If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.

(2) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.

(3) There is moral knowledge.

(4) Therefore, EN is false.[5]

Premise (1) contends that through the process of natural selection we have evolved with a sort of programming to hold moral beliefs that are conducive to survival. Morality is crucial to our “survival and reproductive success,” so we cannot think it is independent of natural selection. All rational moral deliberation must be within the boundaries of that programming.[6] Linville points out that Darwin himself held that our moral programming would have been much different had we evolved under different conditions; if humans had evolved under the sort of conditions in which hive-bees evolved, then “there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”[7] If EN were true, we surely could not escape the bounds of our evolutionary moral programming. So we should accept (1).

Premise (2) recognizes that just because our moral beliefs help us to survive, that does not require that the beliefs track any moral truth. The evolutionary processes involved in the development of our moral beliefs are independent of these beliefs being true, and if EN were true then a plausible account of our moral beliefs can be given by appealing to the survival value of us holding them.[8] This means that “our moral beliefs are without warrant” and “do not amount to knowledge.”[9] By contrast, a theist can appeal to God’s design of our minds to recognize moral truth, providing a basis to justify our moral knowledge. Premise (3) holds that we do seem to have genuine moral knowledge, thus (4) concludes that EN is false.

Alvin Plantinga’s argument is slightly different. While Linville argues that, if EN were true, our moral knowledge would be aimed at adaptiveness for survival, Plantinga emphasizes the adaptiveness of our behavior and argues that all of our beliefs are unimportant apart from their being consistent with adaptive behavior. In a world where EN is true, our beliefs essentially go along for the ride, and their truth or falsity makes no difference so long as they do not get in the way of adaptive behaviors. Plantinga’s argument is that we have reason to doubt the reliability of our “cognitive faculties” (e.g., memory, perception, sympathy, introspection, induction, moral sense).[10] What EN ensures is that we behave in ways that lead to survival and reproduction; thus, the role of our cognitive faculties is not producing true beliefs, but instead “contributing to survival by getting the body parts in the right place.” Natural selection guarantees adaptive behavior, but why think our cognitive faculties produce true beliefs?[11]

Plantinga’s argument goes as follows. Premise (P1) holds that “the conditional probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given [EN], is low.”[12] Premise (P2) is that “anyone who accepts (believes)” EN and also realizes that (P1) is true “has a defeater for” thinking that her cognitive faculties are reliable.[13] Premise (P3) then states that “anyone who has a defeater for [the reliability of her cognitive faculties] has a defeater for any other belief she thinks she has, including [EN] itself.”[14] (If one’s cognitive faculties are unreliable, then all beliefs produced by them—which are all of one’s beliefs—are unreliable.) Finally, Premise (P4) concludes that: “If one who accepts [EN] thereby acquires a defeater for [EN], [EN] is self-defeating and can’t be rationally accepted.”[15]

Clearly (P1) is the crucial premise. Linville notes that many intuitively find Plantinga’s first premise implausible because “the link between true belief and adaptive behavior” seems credible when it comes to nonmoral behaviors, such as hunting for food. Linville prefers the more modest claim that EN only calls into question our moral beliefs because the adaptive success of many nonmoral behaviors seem to be tied to the truth of our beliefs.[16]

Despite Linville’s concern, Plantinga makes a solid case for P1. Plantinga recognizes that most of us assume our cognitive faculties are mostly reliable. But “the naturalist has a powerful reason against this assumption, and should give it up” if he also accepts evolution. When a frog eats an insect, it does not matter what the frog believes or whether those beliefs are true so long as the frog engages in the right behavior to eat the insect and thus survive.[17] In response to the sort of concern raised by Linville that “true beliefs will facilitate adaptive action” better than false beliefs, Plantinga agrees but contends that it is “irrelevant” because “we are not asking about how things are, but about what things would be like if both evolution and naturalism (construed as including materialism) were true.”[18] Plantinga is not arguing that our cognitive faculties are unreliable in the actual world; he is only arguing that they would be unreliable if EN were true. Moreover, no test could demonstrate the reliability of one’s cognitive faculties because such a test would require the use of one’s cognitive faculties. Plantinga rightly concludes that “this defeater, therefore, can’t be defeated.”[19]

If Plantinga’s argument succeeds, then it expands the scope of the knowledge problem faced by EN beyond Linville’s argument: All of our beliefs are dubious. Next time, we will look at a second kind of moral knowledge argument.

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1. These articles are adapted for a popular audience from an article that I published in the Journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics (Volume 12, 2019, pp. 49-64) that is titled “Toward a Cumulative Epistemic Moral Argument for God’s Existence.”

2. Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all that exists (i.e., there is no God or supernatural realm). Evolutionary naturalism is the view that both naturalism and Darwinian evolution are true.

3. Mark Linville, “The Moral Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, eds. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009), 392-395.

4. Ibid., 393. Secular ethicists such as E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have similarly concluded that EN reduces ethics to an illusion and requires that any belief we have that we are apprehending some real and objective moral truth is merely a “useful fiction” that has survival benefits.

5. Ibid., 394-398. On pages 397-398, Linville frames the argument he laid out on page 394 in epistemic terms by modifying Premises (2) and (3) to refer to “moral knowledge” rather than “moral facts.”

6. Ibid., 400-403.

7. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1882), 99.

8. Linville, “The Moral Argument,” 394-398.

9. Ibid., 397.

10. Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 311-312.

11. Ibid., 315-316.

12. Ibid., 317.

13. Ibid., 340.

14. Ibid., 343.

15. Ibid., 344.

16. Linville, “The Moral Argument,” 408.

17. Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 328.

18. Ibid., 335.

19. Ibid., 346.

Summary of Chapter 4 of God and Morality: Four Views, edited by R. Keith Loftin

 God and Morality

In the final chapter of God and Morality, Mark Linville argues for a view in which morality is objective and depends on God. He does not argue that moral realism is true, but assumes as much and then offers a model for understanding how objective moral truths depend on God, which he calls “moral particularism”.

Linville begins the chapter by offering a critique of a view he rejects, in which morality is made true by divine fiat. On this view, the claim that adultery is wrong is true only in a relational and contingent manner. Adultery is immoral because God has prohibited it. There is nothing inherently wrong with the act itself. One problem for this view, however, is that things really could go either way, i.e. God could have commanded adultery, and it would have been good. Or consider the following options: (i) God creates Adam, grants eternal friendship to him, and provides him with what he needs to flourish; or (ii) God creates Adam and allows him to experience nothing but eternal pain, grief, and torment. If morality is true merely by divine fiat, then God is good regardless of the option he actualizes. Both (i) and (ii) are consistent with God’s goodness. But as Linville points out, the term “good” appears to no longer have any real meaning here, because it fails to pick out any feature or property in a distinctive manner.

Fortunately, there are other options available for those who think that morality in some sense depends on God. Aquinas, for example, holds that God is himself the good. The good is not identical to God’s commands, but rather God is the criterion of goodness. As William Alston states it, God is himself the ultimate criterion of value. Alston calls this view value particularism, because “the criterion of value is a particular being rather than a principle or abstract idea” (p. 143). Linville agrees with this. However, Alston goes on to argue that moral obligation depends on God’s commands. Linville disagrees with this latter claim.

The view favored by Linville is moral particularism. This is the view that God’s nature is the standard for both the right and the good. On this view, the ultimate explanation of the significance and value of love is the loving nature of God. That is, loving others is commanded because it is obligatory. It is not obligatory because it is commanded. God is the ultimate ground of the requirement that we love others, because God is himself love (1 John 4:8). The command, “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16) reflects this reasoning as well. God’s nature yields the obligation, ultimately.

When we reflect upon the obligation of loving others, it is also important to point out, as Linville does, the Christian doctrine of imago Dei. It is crucial that human persons are made in the image and likeness of God. This is the ground of our value. This fits nicely with the above. It is quite plausible to think that personhood has value because God is a person, just as love has value because God is love. We owe others love, justice, and mercy because they are persons, made in God’s image. God, a Person, “is both metaphysically and axiologically ultimate” (p. 158).

For those engaging in moral apologetics, there are many other issues in this chapter worth considering. One is a response that is often given to the claim that morality depends on God, namely, that there are plenty of atheists who still know particular moral facts and seek to apply them to their lives. I will focus here on the former claim concerning knowledge of moral facts. Consider the following moral fact, offered by Linville:

“Recreational baby-stomping is wrong.”

If we understand this claim, and our moral faculties are functioning properly, we should just see that it is true. One can know that recreational baby stomping is wrong, without any knowledge of theology or God. God can set up our world so that we can form such value judgments that do not depend on understanding their grounding in Him. This belief can have warrant, whether or not one believes in God. This is important because the claim that is relevant to moral apologetics here is not that one must believe in God to have properly functioning faculties. Rather, the claim that is relevant is that the theist can offer a better explanation for why human beings have faculties that reliably track moral truth—those faculties were specifically designed for the task.

I would add that theists have another and in my view stronger claim to make. On theism, there is an explanation for the very existence of such moral truths. There is a personal and morally perfect being whose nature grounds them. It is difficult to see how such truths are metaphysically grounded, on naturalism. In his reply, Evan Fales argues that there is no need to bring God into the explanation. Instead, we can simply say that the moral law is ultimate. The problem here, however, is explaining the existence of the moral law, with its self-evident moral truths, in a purely natural world. Did the moral law arise from the Big Bang? How would that work? Moral truths don’t seem natural. They don’t have weight, spatial location, and so on. The theist has a ready explanation for the existence of such truths, as we’ve seen, whereas the naturalist does not. A moral law fits well within a theistic framework, but not a naturalistic one. This is a key piece of evidence in favor of theism.

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part IV

Darwinian counterfactuals, ethical nonnaturalism, and theism

The nonnaturalist has a ready reply to the argument from Darwinian counterfactuals. For he might wish to maintain that certain natural properties bear a necessary relation to the moral properties that they exemplify, regardless of any evolutionary possibilities. But nonnaturalists who are also metaphysical naturalists seem to have problems of their own in the face of such Darwinian counterfactuals. How is it that unguided human evolution on earth has resulted in just those moral beliefs that accord with moral verities? As Gould has argued, everything about us, even our very existence, is radically contingent. If we were to rewind the reel, it’s highly unlikely evolution would again attempt the experiment called Homo sapiens. The Dependence Thesis in the hands of the nonnaturalist seems highly improbable. A sort of moral fine tuning argument is suggested. The theist may have an advantage just here. For, on theism, as Santayana put it, the Good is also nature’s Creator.

The theist, like the nonnaturalist, is in a position to say why there is a necessary connection between certain natural properties and their supervenient moral properties. Adams, for example, suggests theistic Platonism, so can account for why nobody could exhibit Hitler’s qualities without being depraved and an affront to God’s nature. But the theist also has an account of the development of human moral faculties—a theistic genealogy of morals—that allows for something akin to Street’s “tracking relation”: we have the basic moral beliefs we do because they are true, and this is because the mechanisms responsible for those moral beliefs are truth-aimed. The theist is thus in a position to explain the general reliability of those considered judgments from which reflective equilibrium takes its cue. Certain of our moral beliefs—in particular, those that are presupposed in all moral reflection—are truth-aimed because human moral faculties are designed to guide human conduct in light of moral truth.

Humean skepticism or Reidean externalism?

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Linville reads Hume as a skeptic across the board, not just in ethics. His ethical views were part of a seamless whole that includes his discussion of the beliefs of common life. In each discussion—causality, substance, personal identity—he aims to show both that the belief in question is without any epistemic credentials and that relevant human propensities explain the belief without making any assumptions about the truth of the belief. From a Humean perspective, we lack positive reasons to accept either the dependence or independence thesis. His is a variety of epistemological moral skepticism, so it resembles AEN.

Reid countered Hume by common sense. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher but casting out a devil, as Chesterton put it. There is no set of premises more certainly known from which such beliefs follow. Hume is right: the beliefs of common life are not endorsed by reason, but, instead, are the inevitable by-products of our constitution. But Hume is mistaken in inferring from this that such beliefs are, therefore, without warrant. Why, after all, trust the rational faculties to which Hume appeals, but not trust the faculties responsible for our commonsense beliefs? Both come from the same shop, and Reid thought the shop was God’s creation.

Reid thought the commonsense beliefs that arise spontaneously and noninferentially given our constitution are warranted even though they fail to measure up to the exacting standards of epistemic justification assumed by foundationalists after the Cartesian fashion. These days we say such beliefs are properly basic. A belief is properly basic just in case the faculty through which it is acquired is functioning as it ought. Plantinga puts it this way: a belief is warranted just in case it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is truth-aimed and functioning properly in the environment for which it was designed. This account accommodates those perceptual, memorial, testimonial, and even metaphysical beliefs that are the guides of common life and, closer to our purposes, are among the fund of native beliefs with which we begin in theory assessment. Even closer to our purposes, such an account accommodates those moral beliefs employed in reflective equilibrium.

Reid appealed to a set of “first, or ‘self-evident’ principles” of morality discerned through faculties that he thought were wrought in the same shop as reason and perception. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man who fails to recognize self-evident principles of morality.

There are moral principles to which we should “pay homage,” as Norman Daniels puts it. We pay such homage when we utilize them as data for the construction of moral theories or as a kind of court of appeal in assessing them. But our confidence in these constitutional beliefs is wisely invested only in the event that we have reason to believe the faculties responsible for them to be truth-aimed. Reid’s theism provided him with such a reason; the moral faculties were forged in the same shop as our other cognitive faculties. They are designed by God for the purpose of discerning moral truth. “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned.”

Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part III

Epistemological arguments and the Dependence Thesis

Linville has been arguing that AEN provides an epistemological argument for moral skepticism, to show that our moral beliefs lack warrant because the mechanisms responsible for our moral beliefs appear to be fitness-aimed, rather than truth-aimed. If our best theory of why people believe P doesn’t require that P is true, then we lack good grounds to believe P is true. This much resembles an argument by Gilbert Harman.

Harman’s so-called “problem with ethics” is that moral facts, if such there are, appear to be explanatorily irrelevant in a way that natural facts are not. According to Harman, we need not suppose that over and above such natural facts about Hitler as his monomania and anti-Semitism there is a moral fact of Hitler’s depravity. Nor must we appeal to his actual depravity in order to explain our belief that he was depraved. Harman may thus be viewed as arguing in his own manner that we have no reason to believe that the best explanation for our moral beliefs involves their truth. We have no good reason to think that the causes of those beliefs are dependent on whatever would make them true.

Sturgeon has replied first by noting that moral facts are commonly and plausibly thought to have explanatory relevance. Both Hitler’s behavior and our belief that he was depraved are handily explained by his actual depravity, and this is in fact the default explanation. Sturgeon follows the method of reflective equilibrium, a method employed in both science and ethics, which begins with certain considered judgments, and with the assumption that our theories, scientific and otherwise, are roughly correct, then moves dialectically in this way between plausible general theses and plausible views about cases, seeking a reflective equilibrium. Sturgeon notes that, whereas he allows for the inclusion of moral beliefs among the initial set, Harman does not. But he argues there’s no non-question-begging justification for singling out moral beliefs as unwelcome in the initial set while allowing those of a scientific or commonsense nature.

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Sturgeon’s approach invokes the supervenience of moral properties on natural properties. On standard accounts, if some moral property M supervenes on some natural property (or, more likely, some set of natural properties) N, then it is impossible for N to be instantiated unless M is also instantiated. In all worlds in which Hitler believes and acts as he did, his depravity would supervene on such properties and be instantiated; he couldn’t have had those properties without being depraved. Harman, by denying this, tacitly assumes there are no moral facts or properties, which is of course the point at issue.

Sturgeon’s appeal to reflective equilibrium is crucial in his reply to Harman. Brink goes to some length to argue that Harman fails to demonstrate any explanatory disanalogy between the scientific and moral cases. Linville finds Sturgeon’s reply successful. Sorley once said the true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics. He thought that holding off on ethics until the task of worldview construction was complete would result in an artificially truncated worldview, and that moral ideas would be given short shrift. The exclusion of moral experience seemed arbitrary. Harman seems to be following in the tradition Sorley criticized. Harman’s results are achieved only by begging the question against the moral realist.

But even Sorley would in principle admit that the initial “ethical data” must prove to be compatible with everything else that is included in our final interpretation of reality. In fact, the same year Sorley delivered the Gifford Lectures, George Santayana published Winds of Doctrine, in which he complained that Bertrand Russell’s then-held moral realism was the result of Russell’s “monocular” vision. Santayana said Russell didn’t look and see that our moral bias is conditioned and has its basis in the physical order of things. Eventually Russell abandoned his moral realism, crediting these very arguments. AEN suggests following Santayana’s advice, and bearing in mind Sharon Street’s worry: “If the fund of exhaustive judgments with which human reflection was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence…then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter is always just a subset of the former.” What we require is some assurance that our original fund is not contaminated. So, what reason have we for supposing that the mechanisms responsible for those judgments are truth-aimed, that the Dependence Thesis is true?

Santayana suggested that if God exists and has fashioned the human constitution with the purpose of discerning moral truth, then we have reason to embrace the Dependence Thesis. But neither Russell nor Santayana was a theist. Moral realists need to give an account of moral beliefs that would lead us to suppose that they are reliable indicators of truth. Quine offers such a story with a Darwinian spin to inspire confidence in our ability to acquire knowledge of the world around us. Natural selection is unkind to those whose behaviors stem from either false beliefs or profound stupidity. We should expect our cognitive faculties to be truth-aimed and generally reliable given such selection pressures.

Plantinga has challenged such stories with what he calls “Darwin’s Doubt.” The connection between fitness-conferring behavior and true belief might not be so certain as Quine suggests. If Plantinga is correct, then evolutionary naturalism is saddled with a far-ranging skepticism that takes in much more than our moral beliefs. Despite Plantinga’s many ingenious examples in which adaptive behavior results from false beliefs, many people just find the link between true belief and adaptive behavior plausible. And in any event the moral and nonmoral cases appear to be significantly different.

The core of Street’s paper is her “Darwinian Dilemma” she poses to value realists like Sturgeon. Our moral beliefs are fitness-aimed. Are they also truth-aimed? Either there is a fitness-truth relation or there is not. If not, and evolution has shaped our basic evaluative attitudes, moral skepticism is in order. If there is a relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fitness because they are true (the “tracking” relation), or we have the moral beliefs that we have simply because of the fitness that they have conferred (the “adaptive” link account). Adaptive link leads to constructivism. The moral realist needs a tracking account, but Street thinks fitness following mind-independent moral truths is implausible. A tracking account of paternal instincts would have to say more than that the behavior tends toward DNA preservation—something like the instincts were favored because it’s independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring. Nonnaturalists have the worst deal in light of the causal inertness of moral properties on their view. Ethical naturalists have a better time at it, but why not just eschew realism and go with an adaptive account?

A dilemma similar to that urged by Street comes from another consideration of Darwinian counterfactuals. Sturgeon thinks moral terms rigidly designate natural properties. If justice picks out some natural property or properties, we might expect an ethical naturalist to conclude that moral judgments if true are true in all possible worlds. But Linville writes that to insist that our moral terms rigidly designate specific earthly natural properties to which human sentiments have come to be attached appears to be an instance of what Judith Thomason has called metaphysical imperialism.

Sturgeon dialogued with Gibbard, who argued for expressivism. Sturgeon’s reply is that perhaps our ancestors called bargaining outcomes just because they really were. But is this so? The bargaining situation Gibbard had envisioned involved a cast of characters who were self-interested individualists. In such a situation, there was pressure in the direction of equitable arrangements. But imagine a different set of initial conditions—like lupine bargainers. If justice supervenes on certain natural facts, these will essentially include facts about the psychological constitution of the respective bargainers. It seems to Linville that the most plausible explanation is that such counterfactual moral beliefs are formed as the result of selection pressures that are themselves in place due to the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape—contingencies that are morally indifferent. While ethical naturalists in those worlds no doubt argue for the supervenience of the moral on the natural, the efficacy of moral explanations, and the existence of corresponding moral facts, we should, Linville thinks, regard them as mistaken. If the moral beliefs of the actual world have also taken their cue from predispositions that were fitness-conferring, then it is hard to see why our own ethical naturalists are in any better position so to argue.

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Mark Linville’s Argument from Evolutionary Naturalism, Part I

Nietzsche had the insight that those, like George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), who think they can have morality and moral duty without a religious foundation are deluded. “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” Nietzsche thought there are no moral facts, precisely because there are no theological ones. The moral argument takes Nietzsche’s assertion as one of its premises: if there is no God, then there are altogether no moral facts. But contra Nietzsche it also urges that we have, in our moral experience, good reason to suppose that there are indeed moral facts.

Such arguments come in numerous forms—without a lawgiver there’s no moral law, prudential considerations, requirements of moral knowledge—but Kant’s is one of the more sophisticated: If there’s no God, then the moral law makes objective demands that are not possibly met, namely, that the moral good of virtue and the natural good of happiness embrace and become perfect in a “highest good.” But then the demands appear to be empty, and in the face of such an antinomy, we might come to think of moral requirements as null and void. For Kant, though God is not the author of the moral law, he is required as a sort of Director of the screenplay. If death is the end, he also argued morality wouldn’t seem to matter as much as it should.

Linville’s argument will instead focus on this: theists can, where naturalists can’t, offer a framework on which our moral beliefs may be presumed to be warranted. In particular, the naturalist’s commitment to a Darwinian explanation of certain salient features of human psychology presents an undercutting defeater for our moral beliefs taken as a whole. This argument is thus chiefly epistemological in nature, and seldom strays from the discipline of metaethics.

Wilson and Ruse have suggested ethics to be an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate. The pressures of natural selection, on their view, have had an enormous influence on human psychology, including the hardwiring of epigenetic rules, widely distributed propensities to believe and behave in certain ways, which have developed through the interaction of human genetics and human culture. Such rules give us a sense of obligation because of their adaptive value, not because they detect any actual moral obligations. Objectivity in morality is illusory, a useful fiction. Ruse thinks Darwin’s theory complements Hume’s subjectivism.

On Hume’s view, belief in objective moral properties is at best unwarranted, and talk of them is in fact meaningless. The only fact of the matter we find in moral judgments is an object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in ourselves. The mind, as Hume put it, has “a great propensity to spread itself on external objects,” so that the subjective feelings that, given our constitution, result from such contemplation of some act, are mistaken for perceptions of objective properties of the act itself.

Let’s call the combination of naturalism and an overall Darwinian account of the origin of the species evolutionary naturalism (EN); according, then, to one like C. S. Lewis, on EN, the dictates of conscience are little more than an aggregate of subjective impulses which, although distributed widely throughout the species, are no more capable of being true or false than a vomit or a yawn.

An argument—call it the argument from evolutionary naturalism (AEN)—thus emerges from such considerations:

1. If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection.
2. If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there are no objective moral facts.
3. There are objective moral facts.
4. So, EN is false.

This isn’t an argument for God, but for the falsity of EN. Also, naturalism doesn’t entail Darwinism, but Darwinism seems to be the only game in town. Linville’s primary focus will be to consider objections to the first two premises. He realizes there are plenty of anti-realists out there, but wishes to focus on realists who try to ground their realism in EN. One might object to the first premise by denying that natural selection is solely or even partly responsible for the emergence of human morality. And the second premise might be accused of a common fallacy by moving so quickly from an account of the origins of human morality to the assertion that its claims to objectivity are false. What might the evolutionary naturalist say about the possible connections between the workings of natural selection and the truth of our moral beliefs?

AEN and the genetic fallacy

The second premise initially appears to be guilty of the genetic fallacy; identifying the source of a belief is generally not evidence of its falsity. But sometimes identifying the origins of a belief is relevant to a consideration of its truth, as in cases where it can be shown that the explanation of someone’s belief is epistemically independent of whatever would make the belief true. (Like forming a belief about the number of people in a room by a random drawing.)

Might we offer a similar evolutionary argument for moral skepticism? Sober suggests it’s a tall order because we’d have to identify the processes of moral belief formation and the would-be truth-makers for moral beliefs, and then show such processes and truth-makers to be independent. Call this the Independence Thesis.

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Of course the Independence Thesis doesn’t entail that morality is an illusion, but merely that our moral beliefs are probably false. But we need not argue for the falseness or probable falseness of our moral beliefs. Nor is it necessary to argue for the truth of the Independence Thesis. It is one thing to suggest that there are positive reasons for asserting epistemic independence, and quite another to say we lack any reason for thinking that a relevant dependence relation obtains. We would have a reason for thinking there is such a relation just in case the best explanation for a person’s having a given belief essentially involves the truth of that belief. It seems that a plausible Darwinian yarn may be spun in such a way as to offer a complete and exhaustive explanation of our various moral beliefs without ever supposing that any of them are true.

It was no background assumption of the evolutionary explanation of our moral beliefs that any actual moral rightness or wrongness existed in the ancestral environment. When we look at the animals, we explain their behavior and the impulse toward their behavior by appeal to adaptiveness. Moral properties are not included in the cast of characters. On a Darwinian story, conscience is what arises in a social creature once the social instincts are overlain with a sufficient degree of rationality.

Arguably, given an evolutionary account of human moral beliefs, there is no reason for thinking that a relation of epistemic dependence obtains, and so, given an evolutionary account, belief in moral facts is unwarranted. If our moral beliefs are without warrant, then they do not amount to moral knowledge. Linville thus modifies (2) in AEN to

(2*): If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there is no moral knowledge.

An evolutionary account serves to undercut whatever warrant we might have had for our moral beliefs, and if they lack warrant, they are not items of knowledge.

Wilson and Ruse think Darwinism poses a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs, as well as for moral realism itself. Linville instead thinks the proponent of AEN might back off from the stronger claim that Darwinism entails that there are no moral facts, speaking instead of whether we are warranted in our ordinary moral beliefs. In this way AEN becomes an epistemological argument for moral skepticism. As Richard Joyce observes, the conclusion that our moral beliefs are “unjustified” is “almost as disturbing a result” as an argument for the actual falseness of those beliefs.

On the suggestion that Darwinism presents us with an undercutting defeater for moral beliefs, (3) becomes

(3*): There is moral knowledge,

and this takes us to the conclusion that

(4) EN is false.

What we lack is some reason for thinking that the adaptiveness of a moral belief depends in any way on its being true. Linville turns the tables on Sober. Instead of Sober’s suggestion that the AEN defender must show that moral beliefs are independent of any truth-makers, perhaps the onus is on those who assert dependence. Why, given EN, should we suppose the world to include anything more than natural facts and properties and our subjective reactions to those properties?

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Mark Linville’s Argument from Personal Dignity, Part III: Personal Dignity and the Imago Dei

Part I

Part II

Reason has a role to play in arriving at a maxim not to violate the dignity of humanity. But the admission of a role for reason to play does not nullify the main point of Darwin’s discussion: the initial social impulse is very much the product of natural selection. Dennett is likely right in his observation that, given the Darwinian account, the belief in rights, and, here, dignity, is actually a “conversation stopper.” Such “rule worship” is adaptive in that it permits us to get on with the business of social intercourse.

Stephen Gould found a basis for something such as dignity in the radical contingency of the existence of Homo sapiens. [David Bentley Hart uses the radical contingency of things, including the universe, as evidence for the need for something noncontingent to account for it all; see his Experience of God.] There’s something astonishing and utterly unlikely that we find ourselves here. But improbability alone is not sufficient for singling out persons as having any special significance. The naturalist’s obstacles in accounting for the dignity of persons are at least threefold, and they are interlocked: how to derive the personal from the impersonal, how to derive values from a previously valueless universe, and how to unite the person and the valuable with the result of a coherent and plausible notion of personal dignity.

Suppose now instead that the personal and valuable aren’t emergent features of reality at all, but rather are basic. Indeed, suppose that personhood is the most basic feature of reality and that, in fact, the impersonal ultimately derives from the personal. Suppose that the one thing that is both metaphysically and axiologically ultimate is a person, so that personhood and value are necessarily united in that Being. Theists, of course, maintain precisely this and believe that Being to be God.

Dennett and others insist that any explanation of consciousness that is not in terms of the nonconcious is question-begging. But one might suggest that this very assertion begs the question. Dennett assumes that all ultimate explanations must be mechanistic, so that the teleological, where it occurs, must be explained in mechanistic terms. But this is just to take naturalism as a kind of axiom, and it is far from clear that such an assumption is warranted. On theism, teleological explanations are irreducible and more basic than mechanistic explanations. And the justification for taking them as irreducible in this way is found precisely in the resulting implausibility and possible incoherence of attempting such reductions. We simply can’t explain all that calls for explanation unless there is a place for irreducible teleology in the scheme of things. For the theist, teleology factors in principally at the level of divine purpose and activity, but theism also offers an account of human persons that permits the irreducibility of human consciousness and purposes.

According to theism, God is person and is the source of all value so that the value of personhood is found in the fact that the metaphysically, axiologically, and explanatorily ultimate Being is personal. As Linville sees it, the rationale for Christ’s command to love persons unconditionally is found in the unconditional value of such persons. Because each person enjoys a worth that is categorical in nature—independent of any extrinsic considerations—the morally appropriate attitude to take toward them is one of a categorical regard for that worth.

The biblical command to love God and neighbor is no coincidence. The rationale for loving neighbor is grounded in the very reasons for loving God with the entirety of one’s being. And this is because the value of persons is, in turn, grounded in the personhood of God. Persons qua persons are created in the image of God in that God himself is a person. On a Judeo-Christian worldview, human personal dignity, though intrinsic, is derivative. Linville writes that the value of human persons is found in the fact that, as bearers of the imago dei, they bear a significant resemblance to God in their very personhood. God and human persons share an overlap of kind membership in personhood itself, and human dignity is found precisely in membership in that kind. [Incidentally, Erik Wielenberg, in his recently published Robust Ethics, offers an “explanandum-centered” challenge to Linville (along with Zagzebski, Adams, and Murphy) for his merely derivative, and thus not intrinsic (in the sense relevant to Wielenberg’s analysis, unlike his own theory of non-theistic robust normative realism, so he argues), account of personal dignity—an issue we will consider in a later post.]

Linville argues that, on theism, human persons have been fashioned, in one morally relevant respect, after the most ultimate and sacred feature of reality and thus participate in that sacredness. Where Camus found only an unreasonable silence in the universe, theist and Christian G. K. Chesterton discovered, and rejoiced over, an “eternal gaiety in the nature of things.”

Mark Linville’s Argument from Personal Dignity, Part II

Part I Part III

In Part I we looked at Linville’s arguments against two consequentialist theories—egoism and utilitarianism—by seeing their inability to accord moral standing to individuals. Now we resume his discussion by looking at some additional attempts by various ethical theories, starting with virtue theory. [Note: of course there are theistic ethicists who are also virtue ethicists, like C. Stephen Evans, Robert Adams, and others—and historically, of course, Aquinas.] Virtue ethics places a premium on the goodness of agents. Aristotle maintained that excellence or right action should be understood in terms of how a good person, one of practical wisdom, would choose to act. This has led some to claim that the view leads into a circularity problem (for if rightness is what a good person would do, one can’t say good people are those who perform right actions). But Linville doesn’t pursue that issue, instead assuming, for discussion purposes, that the Aristotelian is able to answer such questions. Again, Linville is concerned to ask this question: Does the moral standing of persons factor in to the virtue ethicist’s account?

Consider how a Virtue Ethic (VE) account might look in explaining the wrongness of an action in a context where we do not suppose that any direct duties are being violated. Routley’s “Last Man” counterexample: Imagine you are literally the last person on earth and, for whatever reason, you’re considering some action that will have disastrous environmental effects. The action still seems wrong; does this mean we’re embracing an ethic of direct environmental duties—the according of moral standing to nature itself? Linville says he’d also blame Last Man for defacing great art, even though it’s not plausible to extend moral standing to paintings or statues.

Thomas Hill suggests there’s a natural way to account for environmental wrongs independently of our positing direct duties to the environment itself. Ask, “What kind of person would do a thing like that?” His is an application of a virtue ethic to the question of environmental responsibility. With this emphasis, there is a shift characteristic of VE away from the question of the rightness or wrongness of the actions in question and to the issue of excellence of character, or lack thereof, of the person in question. Hill writes that sometimes we may not regard an action as wrong at all though we see it as reflecting something objectionable about the person who does it. Hill reasons that, while environmentally destructive behavior does not necessarily reflect the absence of virtues, it often signals the absence of certain traits which we want to encourage because they are, in most cases, a natural basis for the development of certain virtues.

Linville finds Hill’s application of this account of human excellences to environmental concerns plausible, but a parallel application to explain our “moral discomfort” in cases of rape or genocide would be highly implausible. In the face of some gruesome killing, it would be a massive understatement to observe the killer “lacks excellence of character.” Nor is Hurthouse’s account of why we should help a person in need adequate: helping the person would be charitable or benevolent. We ought not to explain why one should refrain from rape by pointing to the fact that raping a person would be uncharitable and malevolent. It is, of course, but it’s more. Moral standing is clearly implicated in the case of rape, but appears to have no place in formulations such as VE. The reason rape is wrong, and, indeed, the reason that it is committed only by bad people, is that persons ought never to be treated in that way.

Linville sees no reason to think the Virtue Ethicist egoistic. He writes he sees no more reason to suppose that the egotism objection sticks here than he saw earlier for supposing that consistent utilitarians must always have “social utility” consciously before their minds and not the welfare of individuals. Surely, he writes, we can see our way to the view that generosity may be consciously altruistic regardless of what we learn about the metaethics involved in VE. But the devil is in the metaethical details, he says.

On Confucianism love for humanity gets wrapped into an account of human flourishing. Humans are moral creatures, and flourish insofar as one cultivates the virtue of love of humanity. Respect-for-persons gets folded into his account of flourishing. “What makes a good person good?” is answered by reference to the person’s regard for humanity and the role that such regard plays in the overall cultivation of character. The “external foundation” that appears in Confucianism is a principle of respect-for-persons, and it compares favorably with the celebrated Kantian formulation of such a principle. (Hursthouse notes that virtue ethicists largely have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation.) Hackett’s explanation of the role of personal worth in the thought of Confucius would work equally well were he discussing Kant’s Principle of Humanity: “Personal being is intrinsically valuable, and the locus of ultimate, intrinsic worth; while love, as recognizing and implementing the actualization of the worth, is the essential principle of ultimate moral requirement.” But this is at odds with classical views in the Aristotelian tradition. Linville’s conclusion is that standard accounts of VE have no conceptual room for the moral standing of individuals, and that this counts against such theories. We should be able to say simply that rape and genocide are wrong because people ought neither to be raped nor exterminated.

Kant’s Principle of Humanity says to treat others as ends in themselves, simply as a means. What informs this principle is the idea that people are of ultimate and unconditional worth, and to treat them as “ends” is just to respect their autonomy as persons who have wills and ends of their own, and thus to act toward them in a way that is consistent with that worth. Kant distinguished two ways something can have value: either it has a dignity or it has a price. It has a price if it has a market value; this is mind-dependent—how much is one willing to pay for it? Something has dignity just in case it resists such valuation in terms of some market value so that its worth is intrinsic. Any property is intrinsic to a thing just in case that property involves no essential reference to any other thing, which is to say that it is nonrelational. Each and every individual human possesses the property being human intrinsically. Kantian dignity is a moral value or worth that individual persons possess intrinsically as persons. Since it is a nonrelational property, its value is mind-independent, and thus not reducible to or derivative of the valuings of some agent or other. If persons have dignity, then they ought to be valued for their own sake even if, in fact, they are not. And for being nonrelational, dignity is not reducible to instrumental value.

So dignity constitutes the unconditional worth of its possessor. Kant’s principle prohibits treating persons simply as means to ends precisely because this amounts to treating a person as though his or her value is merely instrumental, or determined by their relation to something else. This is to treat a person as a thing. Slavery is an example in which a person is regarded quite literally as having a market value. Kant’s notion of dignity is a natural basis for according those natural, inherent, and imprescriptible rights denied by Bentham. What is it to have unconditional regard if it is not to value the person intrinsically? And to be told that one ought to value persons intrinsically would seem to imply that persons just are of intrinsic moral worth.

Personal dignity seems implicated indeed by the sorts of pre-theoretical moral beliefs to which we typically appeal in reflective equilibrium. Should we suppose whether the question of dignity depends on metaphysics? Are we entitled to believe that persons enjoy intrinsic value regardless of what worldview we take to be true? It would be surprising. For example, the belief that persons have dignity would seem to involve the belief that there are persons, so this is not a part of a worldview that would deny persons. Advaita Vedanta appears to deny the real existence of persons. On Theravada Buddhism, the question of whether there are such things as persons is at least problematic—there is only a bundle of nonpersonal constituents, not the sort of thing ascribed dignity.

The naturalist may face a similar problem. Can the existence of persons be accounted for on naturalism? Goetz and Taliaferro call it the “Astonishing Hypothesis” that naturalism could produce the likes of human beings. On “strict naturalism” nature is all that exists and nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the ideal natural sciences, especially physics. But persons as substantive selves that essentially possess a first-person point of view appear to lie, in principle, beyond the scope of third-person scientific explanation. For naturalists, explanations must explain consciousness by appeal to the unconscious, the personal by way of the nonpersonal, or the first person in third-person terms. Dennett thinks the first person needs to be left out of any final theory. Susan Blackmore has followed his advice, concluding there is no substantial or persistent self to be found in experience. Consciousness has been absent even in 20th century works bearing such promising titles as Consciousness Explained. [I seem to recall Plantinga suggesting the book’s title should have been “Consciousness Explained Away.”] Hume famously failed to find himself despite careful search, only an aggregate of perceptions. But the very practice of science is unintelligible unless persons exist and have observations and thoughts, and presumably observing and thinking are experiences. [Scott Smith hits this theme in his book In Search of Moral Knowledge.]

Owen Flanagan has said recently that we must “demythologize persons,” and by this he means that the Cartesian beliefs of the soul and of libertarian free will must be abandoned. C. S. Lewis once said if he was mistaken about his late wife, she was but a cloud of atoms he mistook for a person. Death would only reveal the vacuity that was already there. Dennett speaks of evolution having wired us to assume an “intentional stance,” which amounts to a predisposition to view certain other things in the world as intentional systems—agents with beliefs and desires. But this is of course misleading, on Dennett’s view, as would be a revised Kantian ethic. In light of the eliminability of teleological purposes on strict naturalism, it’s false to say that intentional systems are autonomous and thus have ends of their own. Neither is it clear that moral agency or autonomy may be preserved on a more relaxed version of naturalism. “Broad naturalism” or “minimal physicalism” describe varieties of physicalism that appeal to some form of supervenience of the mental on the physical. The aim is to allow room for the irreducibly mental within an extensively physical world—property dualism. Kim suggests this is wishful thinking.

Kim’s argument is “the supervenience/exclusion argument” for thinking that the irreducibility of the mental is at odds with the causal efficacy of the mental. Physicalists are committed to causal closure, where if any event has a sufficient cause c, then no event distinct from c can be a cause of the event (barring overdetermination). The result is epiphenomenalism. But this eliminates Kantian grounds and means of treating persons as ends-in-themselves. The latter suffers because the attitude of respect for a person or the law itself presupposes the sort of mental causation precluded on naturalism; the former is eclipsed by the mechanism of intentional systems. Autonomy presupposes teleology, and the latter has no purchase in the world described by naturalism, strict or broad.

We appear to have two irreducibly different kinds of things with different sets of properties. Conscious states, for example, defy description in terms of the spatial and compositional properties that are essential to accounts of physical states and processes. Kim even suggests qualia resist functional reduction.

Ultimately, consciousness is either eliminated altogether, reduced to the physical, or held to be emergent and irreducible. Eliminativism is implausible; reductionist accounts seem bound to fail; and emergentism introduces a pluralist ontology and thus a departure from naturalism.

The insistence that conscious and autonomous persons could be engineered from Big Bang debris is easy to see as a function of an entrenched antisupernaturalism combined with the commonsense recognition that there is consciousness and that it sometimes plays a causal role. We know the world contains persons; what we don’t know is how this could be the case if naturalism were true.

But how does the personal come from the nonpersonal and the intrinsically valuable from the valueless? On naturalism, it’s hard to see why any special and intrinsic value should be assigned to the species as a whole, much less to each and every individual specimen.

Kant claimed to find the ground of personal dignity within himself. Contemplation of the starry heavens above made him feel insignificant, but reflection on the moral law within has the opposite effect, infinitely elevating his worth. That infinite worth is thus secured by our autonomy as moral agents capable of understanding and acting on moral principle. Moral agency is what we might call a dignity-conferring property. But this requires that morality itself must be of intrinsic rather than instrumental value. Kant said both human persons and the moral law itself have dignity. Genuine respect for persons requires respect for the law. My respecting you calls for my acting for the sake of certain direct duties to you. Has the naturalist sufficient reason for supposing that morality itself enjoys the sort of dignity that Kant ascribes to it? Elsewhere Linville has already argued no; on evolutionary naturalism, human morality has emerged as an evolutionary device; a strategy aimed at reproductive fitness. One might as well argue for human dignity by appeal to the opposable thumb or to featherless bipedalism.

Michael Martin has recently suggested ideal observer theory as the foundation for personal dignity. It’s how an ideal observer would react that determines the morality of an act. Copan has questioned the ontology of such a view held by a naturalist. Recall that a property is intrinsic only if, among other things, it is nonrelational and mind-independent. On the face of it, it’s hard to see why Martin supposes that sense can be made of Kim has the property of intrinsic value by analyzing it in terms of the feelings of anyone nonidentical to, or, for that matter, identical to Kim. If the property is intrinsic, then it is identical to or supervenient on something true of Kim’s intrinsic nature. And about what does the ideal observer have feelings of approval in the case of intrinsic value? The ideal observer theory faces a Euthyphro problem. Does the ideal observer value Kim intrinsically because Kim is intrinsically valuable, or is she intrinsically valuable because the ideal observer values her intrinsically? First option is to abandon ideal observer theory. In terms of the other option, why assume the ideal observer would value Kim intrinsically unless she actually is intrinsically valuable? Shafer-Landau has critiqued ideal observer theory along similar lines. So no, if there’s to be an account of dignity, it must be rooted in the metaphysics of personhood.

Kai Nielsen thinks that no special account of persons is required in order to make sense of the requirements of justice. He insists that the religious apologist needs to show, but has not shown, that respect-for-persons can only be supported on religious grounds. [Note: this isn’t true if the argument is abductive; it only need be shown that respect-for-persons is best explained by theism.] Nielsen proposes that Kantian respect may be drawn out of Hobbesian egoism. But what of the powerfully placed egoist who needn’t fear repercussions for treating people poorly? Nielsen acknowledges there may be no egoist rationale for respecting others in such a case. But this makes the values a façade, if it’s just a matter of subscription—in that case, it’s just conditional, hypothetical, not categorical. So Nielsen’s earlier claim that certain moral beliefs are “bedrock” is misleading, and in a later book he suggests that moral realism is a myth. So Nielsen’s project assures us we can have ethics without God but then it doesn’t deliver. And again, Hobbesian egoism makes sense of direct duties only to oneself.

Photo: "Christ Healing the Blind Man" by  Eustache Le Sueur. Public Domain. 

Mark Linville’s Argument from Personal Dignity, Part I

In his well-regarded essay “The Moral Argument” Mark Linville offers two variants of the moral argument. The second is called “an argument from personal dignity,” and it’s this argument that I wish to lay out here in broad outline in order to give a wider range of readers exposure to it. I will do so in three parts; this is the first.

Just as people can be devoted to certain moral ends for a variety of different reasons, different people can offer different rationales for the wrongness of an action, or even an account for why such a thing isn’t wrong at all, even something so bad as torturing children. Take Mary Anne Warren, for example. She argues that all and only persons have rights, and since fetuses aren’t persons, they have no rights. So abortion only involves rights of the mother. What, then, of infants? They too don’t display the faculties or capacities Warren thinks are constitutive of personhood, so now we have an argument for infanticide too. She acknowledges this, but doesn’t infer infanticide is morally okay, since the practice could impoverish the lives of others who would benefit from the infants. But nonetheless, she thinks, we have no direct duties toward the infants themselves. If infants do not have rights at all, then not only do they not have a right not to be killed, but neither do they have a right not to be tortured. It may not be allowed on occasion owing to the effects on actual persons, but there’s no direct duty owed the infant. They are afforded no moral standing, in and of themselves.

But surely this is unsatisfactory. If bayonetting babies for fun is morally wrong, the wrongness must be explained chiefly in terms of what is done to the baby. Similarly, Mary Midgley’s objection to G. R. Grice’s contract theory critiqued Grice’s implication that animals, young children, and the mentally impaired have no natural right due to their nonparticipation in the contract out of which rights arise.

A moral theory needs to do justice to our deep-seated moral convictions, but it must also offer a satisfactory account of those implications. We should consider carefully judgments about what qualifies as an acceptable explanation. Another lesson to be gathered is that the considered judgments in question appear to call for our according moral standing to individuals. Linville understands S has moral standing to mean S is the appropriate object of direct moral duties. Generally, in the case of harms brought to persons, we have, Linville thinks, an implausible explanation if it is reducible to the form: A’s harming B is wrong solely because A’s harming B affects C.

Take egoism. If the egoist concludes that rape is wrong, then he can only conclude this because he has determined that it wrongs the rapist. Rape is wrong, if wrong at all, because it violates a direct duty owed the victim. Egoism satisfies the criterion that a theory must countenance the moral standing of individuals; the trouble is that the only individual who enjoys such standing is the agent. So we have but to add the clause, in addition to the agent.

Next, take utilitarianism. First, allow me to sum up 8 points against (secular) utilitarianism made by Paul Copan, as it nicely sets the stage for Linville’s analysis: 1) Utilitarians make a correct ethical point, namely, that consequences matter in our ethical analysis, but he also points out that they are not all that matter. 2) How can we measure the well-being of society without considering the well-being of individuals? This shows the failure of utilitarians to accord proper emphasis on intrinsic value. 3) Humans have intrinsic value—in favor of the utilitarian view of humans that’s counterintuitive and false. 4) Because of their essence or nature as God-bearers, humans have dignity and worth. Utilitarians emphasize function over essence or nature. 5) Utilitarians ignore motives and focus only on consequences. 6) Voluntary heroic acts (that aren’t duties) become duties or obligations, on utilitarianism. In other words, there’s no room for supererogation (acts praiseworthy to perform but not blameworthy for not performing). 7) Utilitarianism tends to eliminate the natural importance of family loyalties and deep friendships in favor of a level playing field for all humanity. (See I Timothy 5:8.) 8) Utilitarianism is obviously discriminatory against the helpless.

Now for Linville’s analysis of utilitarianism, especially on the question of moral standing: Utilitarianism certainly looks beyond a concern for the good of the agent. The principle of utility tells us that right actions are those that have good consequences for the community. But how are “good” and “community” to be understood? Classical utilitarians are hedonists, so pleasure is viewed as of intrinsic value, the only thing (along with freedom from pain) desirable as an end (in itself). Other, nonhedonistic theories of value could be plugged in here—like human flourishing or the meeting of interests.

What is meant by “community”? Usually “humanity.” But Peter Singer has suggested all and only sentient creatures. So utilitarians can differ regarding the scope of the moral community. Linville then points out a natural mistake: assuming the utilitarians identify the scope of the moral community with those who have moral standing. For utilitarians do not accord moral standing to individual members of the moral community.

Jeremy Bentham, a famous proponent of utilitarianism, famously said that the notion of natural rights is “nonsense on stilts.” His subject was the Declaration of Rights published by the French National Assembly in 1791, which affirmed “natural and imprescriptible rights.” In particular, Bentham challenges the notion of natural and imprescriptible rights, thought to exist “anterior” to the establishment of government. There are no such things as natural rights. “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense on stilts.”

Bentham’s argument is with the notion of rights that are inherent and imprescriptible. Parsimony requires the rejection of both features. Whatever rights that exist do so because of circumstances of society—what is advantageous to society, that is, owing to the notion of utility.

Now, there may be moral grounds for granting civil rights. But whether rights are extended or abrogated will be determined by the circumstances of utility, and this is always with a view to the advantage of society. There can’t be “imprescriptible” rights precisely because a concern for social utility may call for their abrogation.

John Stuart Mill doesn’t really disagree with Bentham. Chapter five of Utilitarianism is Mill’s attempt to show that utility and justice embrace, despite the criticisms of the theory’s detractors. Mill identifies duties of justice with those “perfect duties” discussed by philosophers. These (unlike “imperfect duties”) involve the rights of individuals. So notions of justice and individual rights are inextricably bound. But why ought society protect such rights? Mill says he can give no other reason than general utility. Mill, like Bentham, maintains that the sole basis for according rights to individuals is the effect that doing so has upon the advantage to society.

Are Mill’s rights “imprescriptible”? By the end of the second chapter of this book of Mill’s, it’s clear that Mill is advancing a variety of rule utilitarianism. For example, he argues against lying even when it’s expedient because truth-telling more than anything honors that on which large-scale societal happiness most depends. For Mill, moral rules designed to safeguard our fundamental security or well-being derive their supreme importance and impose paramount obligations due to the weight of the goods that they protect as weighed on the scale of social utility. Inidividual “rights” are thus claims that people have to those goods, and, as we have seen, the claims themselves are sustained by that same concern for utility. So the notion of inherent or natural rights is just as fantastic by Mill’s reckoning as by Bentham’s.

A Kantian respect-for-persons ethic could prove to be a useful fiction on a utilitarian reckoning. But if Mill is to be believed, it is a fiction, useful or not, and it must be so precisely because of that utilitarian reckoning. Mill’s trying to answer the “problem of justice” objection. The worry is that there appears to be no necessary connection between an action’s maximizing utility and its being fair or just. It appears the consistent utilitarian would be in a position of justifying, say, slavery, rape, or torture of innocents.

Now, Linville is willing to grant that, perhaps, the Principle of Utility, rightly understood, has none of these “iniquitous consequences.” Nevertheless, Linville maintains that any and all versions of utilitarianism worthy of the name must fail to account for that portion of commonsense morality that we individuals have moral standing. Consider rape. Even if, on Mill’s view, it involves the violation of the victim’s rights and the individual is wronged or done an injustice, this is not sufficient for allowing that his view accords moral standing to individuals within the moral community. Why? The explanation for the wrongness of rape appeals to the “generally injurious” consequences for the community rather than the simple fact that the person who is the victim simply ought not to be treated in that manner. Mill, no more than Bentham, offers an account that permits the existence of inherent rights. If there’s a right not to be raped, it’s derivative and contingent on the circumstances of social utility.

While Mill employs language suggestive of direct duties to the holders of rights, we must not lose sight of the logic of the utilitarian analysis. To the question of why society ought to defend the rights of individuals, Mill’s answer was “social utility.” But this invites a further question: why should we concern ourselves over social utility? It is because of something beyond itself, or not? If not, the present argument succeeds: the utilitarian doesn’t act ultimately out of a regard for the moral standing of individuals. But if so, then utilitarian has something beyond utility in mind (something potentially quite laudable, like natural rights).

The John Adams whose name is affixed to a document asserting inalienable human rights might well be thought to have been motivated by a direct concern for innocent soldiers, Quakers, and witches, as their natural and imprescriptible rights were at stake. Contra utilitarianism. Bernard Williams notes that consequentialism attaches value ultimately to states of affairs. The point coincides with the “receptable problem” that Tom Regan has urged against utilitarianism. According to Regan, it’s not individuals that are valued by the utilitarian, but their mental states. Whether it’s pleasure, satisfaction of interests of individuals, where do persons fit into such a scheme? According to Regan, on utilitarianism persons are important because they are the vessels that are laden with this treasure.

The principal concern of utilitarianism is to maintain the greatest possible net pleasure or satisfaction. And this net pleasure is not for the sake of any individual persons. Rather, the reverse is true; any regard for the individual is ultimately out of a concern for increasing net utility. Utilitarianism fails to accord moral standing to individuals.

Photo: "Christ Healing the Blind Man" by  Eustache Le Sueur. Public Domain.