Mailbag: What about Horrendous Evil?

My question concerns, years ago when Christopher Hitchens told the true story of Elizabeth Fritzl, the woman who was imprisoned for almost 24 years I think it was, and was brutally raped by her own father. Hitchens argues that an all loving, all powerful God does not exist because something atrocious like that happened. He “invites us to imagine how she must have prayed for God to help” and no help came.

I am a follower of Christ but this does pierce my heart. How do you answer that? I know we could say “well we have free will, God allows free will” or “an atheist can’t say it was wrong because they have no standard to appeal to because there is no God.” Those answers seem alright but they still don’t sit well with me. I feel like I need something a little more.

Caleb

Hi Caleb. The story of Elizabeth is awful, to start with. No sugarcoating that. It's truly horrible, not the way the world ought to be.

On its face it seems an instance, perhaps an intractable one at that, of the problem of evil.

But let's think for a moment what it means to say it's not the way the world ought to be. That makes sense in a world that's broken, but it doesn't make much if any sense in a world that just is, a world that we shouldn't expect to be any different.

On a secular view of the world in which, ultimately, reality is made of complex collections of atoms operating according to inviolable causal laws, why expect anything to be any different from how it is? I can't think of any good reason. In that scenario, the likelihood is that everything that happens is causally determined to happen just as it does. So to say, "The world ought to be different" doesn't make a lick of sense. This isn't to say that atheists can't see horrible injustices or don't care about them or don't have the intuition that the world ought to be better. Of course they can and do, but the resources at their disposal as atheists are severely limited to make good sense of such things.

The very category of moral evil is hard to accommodate on their worldview. The world is as it is, and there should be no expectation it's anything different. 

On a Christian understanding of things, we know the world is broken. We know it's not yet the way it ought to be. We know real tragedies take place. We also know that God is in the process of putting the world right. 

I don't claim to know all the reasons why God sometimes intervenes but often doesn't to put a stop to evils sooner. There's quite a bit of mystery there. But nowhere in biblical teaching do I find a promise that God will spare us from even quite horrific things in this world. He promises to be with us, that we can trust him, but that doesn't mean we can expect him to answer every prayer as we'd like in the time frame we desire.

The point about Elizabeth is of course generalizable. Ever so many things in this world fall short of how it ought to be. But here's one line of consideration to bear in mind—though I do not even remotely pretend this is all that needs to be said. Suppose that God were to intervene every time something horrific was about to happen. Consider what seems intuitive enough: children shouldn't be mistreated.

Now imagine what the world would be like if God were to intervene every time a child was about to be mistreated. Bad and abusive parents would be stopped every time they were intent on inflicting harm on a child. Parents irresponsible in feeding their kids and meeting their needs would be stopped from doing that somehow. If a child were dropped from the top of tall building—well, either that wouldn't be allowed, or God himself would somehow break the children's falls. Etc.

My point is that the world would be a very different place. Interventions by God would quickly prove to be ubiquitous. And remember we've identified just a few examples of grievous wrongdoings in this world.

As a Christian I take heart that God is good and can be trusted ultimately to defeat the worst of evils that this broken world doles out.

As I say, there's ever so much more ground to cover. The problem of evil is a big discussion, needless to say. If you haven't read Eleonore Stump's and Marilyn Adams' books on the subject, I'd encourage it. Clay Jones has also done good work on all this stuff, as have others, but those are a few tips for further reading anyway.

Best,

Dave

Mailbag: Are Divine Commands Necessary for Moral Obligations?

Dr. Baggett, do you have any responses to Erik Wielenberg’s 2022 paper in JESP called “Divine Commands Are Unnecessary for Moral Obligation”? 

Nick 

Hey Nick!  

I had a chance to take a quick look at Wielenberg’s article. It’s much in the spirit of his view that moral obligations come about as a result of various moral reasons adding up (an approach of which I'm skeptical). The example he uses—going home from the bar since he’d promised his wife—does indeed seem to me like a real obligation, but it’s not at all clear to me that it’s divorced from divine commands. Even if it, though, I surely don’t see its best explanation divorced from a theistic account of morality more generally.  

Divine command theory is of course just one among other efforts to root deontic stuff in God; it also comes in lots of forms, including a minimal form that doesn't have the implication he insists it does--a version that simply affirms that if God commands us to do X, then we're obligated to do X, which doesn't imply a divine command is a necessary condition for a duty.  

At any rate, the central piece of the scenario depicted strikes me as about promise keeping. Why should be keep our promises, though? What explains that? Perhaps more generally, why is there a moral obligation to be truthful—at least in most cases at least?  

Wielenberg is a moral realist, and I accord him accolades for that; in certain respects this makes him an ally. But this is also why much of what he says initially sounds so plausible when perhaps it shouldn't. Moral realists read it and think, “Yeah, that’s true!” But what makes it true that there are any objective moral obligations at all?  

In his book he offers his own account, of course, but it’s also an account exceedingly subject to criticisms of various sorts—several are starting to make a cottage industry extolling its deficiencies. And the fact remains that error theorists, expressivists, constructivists, and plenty of sensibility theorists would all deny that there are any objective moral duties—most all of them from his secular camp. I think they're wrong, of course, but the point is he helps himself to a generous portion of realism in what almost seems like an effort to preach to the choir. 

He wants to say that theists, by their own commitments, should admit that this duty to go home from the bar is a duty—and divorced from divine commands. I don’t track with that. If we’re going to start seeing things from a theistic perspective, I’m not in the least inclined to explain such a duty in a way that appeals only to the relationship between a man and his wife. Even when David sinned with Bathsheba, afterwards he cried out to God, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.” Morally bad behavior is always first and foremost (even if not exclusively) against God himself. The man who loves God most loves his wife best.  

A man need not realize that God’s at the center of things, and of course an atheist would deny it. But that hardly settles the metaphysics of the matter. If there is indeed a binding duty here, the question is what best explains it? This sort of abductive question is my preferred approach, which leaves open the room for other explanations that can explain things to some degree, but just not as well. This very phenomenon, it seems to me, is what Wielenberg wants to take advantage of to go his pluralist route. But if God does in fact explain the full range of moral phenomena best, then there is good philosophical reason to gravitate to such an explanation; Wielenberg’s characterization of such an approach as “monistic” almost seems to be a subtle argument by derision. 

Wielenberg as something of a naturalist (admittedly something of a Platonist too, which generates a tension with his acceptance of causal closure and such) nevertheless affirms meaningful agency, or at least thinks the arguments against such freedom aren’t decisive. But I’m much more inclined to see his worldview as precluding substantive moral freedom, without which moral duties become notoriously hard to make sense of. So there’s also that.  

So those are a few quick reflections off the cuff anyway. Thanks for asking! Pass along your own thoughts when you get a chance. 

Blessings, 

Dave 

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he's a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He's currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale's John Hare.

Mailbag: "What's a Good Stopping Point?"

Hayyan writes:

Hey Dr. Baggett, hope you're well. 

I'd like to get your thoughts on the objection to the moral Argument which goes something like this... 

It seems at some point on every theory of Morality there's gonna be a point where one hits a brick wall and must say “it just is.” For example, if you're an atheist and believe reducing suffering is good, if asked why you might just have to reply “it just is.” Similarly, if you're a theist and let's assume the theory we hold is that God's nature is the standard of Goodness, well why? And if one says well because God is the greatest possible being, and then one asks, Why is goodness Great? It seems we'd have to say “it just is” again. 

Similarly in any theory one could continue asking ‘why is that Good’ and at some point the reply is going to be ‘it just is.’ 

I'd like to know what you make of that.  

Thank you for your work. 

Hayyan

Hi Hayyan, thanks for the note. I tend to agree there has to be an appropriate starting (or stopping) point. Otherwise we'll have what some might call an "'infinite regress." This is the whole point of something like foundationalism in epistemology, predicated on axiomatic starting points. This is how Euclid did mathematics, building on certain axioms. There are other approaches; we could adopt, say, a coherentist rather than foundationalist model, but the problems with coherentism seem even worse. One might have a wholly coherent set of beliefs, none of which correspond with reality at all, for example. So there seems something right about building your system of knowledge on a foundationalist model of some sort, and this goes for ethics as much as other areas.  

What I think ethics has going for it is that there are really suitable-seeming axiomiatic ethical truths on which nearly everyone agrees. Like: "It's wrong to torture children for fun." As Thomas Reid put it, there are certain nonnegotiable moral facts to which we should pay homage. This is at least a strong prima facie case for something like moral realism. It seems utterly clear to us that certain things are morally the case. This is saying more than simply this is the way it just is. Presumably the idea is that our epistemic faculties are such that we cannot help but apprehend these basic metaphysical (or logical or ethical) truths, and then on their basis we can build our theories, engage in reflective equilibrium, etc.  

What I find to be suitable candidates in the arena of ethics for such properly basic truths are things like "Gratuitous torture is morally bad," and other judgments in that sort of vicinity. Really clear-cut things like that, which we deny on pain of what seems patent irrationality or perversity. What possible reasons could I adduce for rejecting such axioms that I could be more sure of than the axioms themselves? I think we are hard pressed to say.  

I don't put a claim like "God functions at the foundation of morality," however, into the same category. God might be the first and final cause of all things, and something of the ultimate brute fact, but epistemologically anyway, we need reasons and evidence and arguments to take seriously the efficacy of theistic ethics. That's not an appropriate time simply to say it's a properly basic truth requiring no evidence.

Indeed, I take the direct experiential evidence we have of moral realism to raise questions about what it is about reality that would provide a robust, and ultimately best explanation of such nonnegotiable moral truths. This is where attentiveness to a wide range of moral evidence is needed, and careful argumentation to show that God can provide a compelling explanation of moral data otherwise hard to make sense of—the rationality of morality, the convergence of our moral judgments with objective moral truth, the ultimate airtight connection between happiness and holiness, the grounds for authoritative moral obligations, the solution to Sidgwick's dualism of practical reason, etc.  

This is what gives me confidence in the theoretical advantages of a theistic ethic. We can then ask, if we're convinced this is so, how much evidence such a case provides for the truth of theism. Maybe it adds a little, maybe a lot. Maybe a cumulative moral case in itself makes theism more likely than not. That's a complicated question. But the evidence from morality certainly, to my thinking, adds to the evidential case for theism.  

Having worked that through, we can then ask, "But what made God exist?" Or something like that. But God is the one reality for which we have the most principled reasons to think is without any external cause. Necessary existence is part and parcel of who he is. This is the import of something like the modal ontological argument. To ask what caused God is to ask a malformed question predicated on a fundamental understanding, as if God were merely one more item in the furniture of reality rather than the very ground of being itself.  

So, regarding God, the point goes well beyond simply "It just is." At least as I see things, the "brick wall" to which you refer is actually the theoretically adequate appropriate stopping point in our explanations that gives us reason to think it's a proper foundation on which to construct our account of reality and avoid the otherwise intractable infinite regress of explanations.  

More generally, though, we can't help but do moral theory on the foundation of what seems to us the case. Suppose someone were to say, "But that's not enough." On what basis would they say it? Presumably because it seems to them not to be enough! So rather than providing a counterexample to the method, they are following it impeccably. It just seems to be an inescapable feature of our epistemic situation. Sadly, Cartesian certainty requires more, but is just beyond our ken. Fortunately, knowledge doesn't require such certainty, so hankering after it is misguided. Hope some of that helps! 

Blessings, Dave 

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he's a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He's currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale's John Hare.

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Mailbag: Arguing for the Premises of the Moral Argument

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I had a few questions regarding the following argument:  

1. If there is moral obligation / knowledge / transformation, then God exists. (Theistic Metaethical Theory) 

2. There is moral obligation / knowledge / transformation. (Moral Realism) 

3. Therefore, God exists.  

Is there a way to argue for this in a succinct way or are 1 and 2 separate arguments in and of themselves?   

Evans in "God and Moral Obligation” argues roughly for 1 (he limits it to moral obligation). And arguments in response to people like Joyce are needed to establish 2.  

Is your adductive argument as you lay out for 1 and your forthcoming book is aimed at 2? 

Kevin 

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               Hi Kevin, thanks for this. Yes, I think you’re quite right. So yeah, this modus ponens version of the argument is a popular way of putting the argument(s). As you note, I prefer an abductive approach for several reasons, one being that the contrapositive of the first premise above involves what I consider to be a counteressential: a situation in which God doesn’t exist. If God exists necessarily, as I think he does, then we’re literally envisioning an impossible world, indeed a null world. So to ask of such a world what its features are strikes me as problematic. 

               Both deductive and abductive versions, though, begin with moral phenomena realistically construed. So the second premise requires a defense of moral realism. This is the book in the tetralogy that Jerry and I haven’t written yet, yes, but we just got a contract with OUP to write it, which is exciting. We will argue against error theory, expressivism, constructivism, etc., and try to answer debunking objections (this is where Joyce comes in, exactly right, along with folks like Kahane, Ruse, Street, etc.). Of course we’ll also attempt to provide several positive reasons to believe in moral realism. 

               The first premise requires that the theistic explanation be shown explanatorily superior to the secular alternatives. So it involves two tasks: defending theistic ethics against objections (and giving positive reasons for it), and critiquing secular ethics that attempt to make sense of moral realism. Good God was on the first topic, and God and Cosmos was on the second. 

               I think quite separate arguments are needed, then, for the two premises in question. Defending moral realism logically comes first (though we’re getting around to it last), and then the case for the comparative superiority of theistic ethics. 

               Evans makes the case for both premises (delimited, as you say, to moral duties)—why theism makes such good sense of them, why we have reason to believe duties are real in the first place, and the limitations naturalistic accounts encounter making sense of them. 

               Our abductive argument, too, makes the case for both premises (though the second premise would be couched in terms of best explanation). There really are three tasks, again: defending moral realism (current book), defending theistic ethics and arguing in favor of it positively (Good God), and critiquing secular ethics (God and Cosmos). A yet fuller case would expand that last point to include a critique of nonChristian religious ethics, which I haven’t done, but some students are working on (taking on Islam, Mormonism, etc.). It’s something I hope to do more later, especially Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.  

               Does that help? 

               Merry Christmas, friend! 

Blessings, 

Dave 

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Mailbag: Does the Moral Argument Have a Fatal Flaw?

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

In December, we shared a post on Facebook about The Morals of the Story, a book written by two of our editors, David and Marybeth Baggett. Along with the post, we included this snippet from a review of the book:

"If humanity’s deep and unshakable moral intuitions are correct, then The Morals of the Story demonstrates that the rational observer should embrace Christian theism in response."

In response to this idea, Heath writes,

 The point being that "objective morality points to the existence of god.” Which god, might I ask? Well, of course the Christian god. Who else? Why not Allah, or Shiva, or Quetzacoatyl? These are all gods too. And if objective morality points to god, objectively it points to ALL gods equally. Objective morality. Can there even be such a thing? I think all morality is subjective, not objective. It would be nice if moralities were indeed objective, but since we've decided to tie morality to religion we must necessarily reject objectivity. Example: A large group of profoundly fervent jungle tribesmen find it moral to hack the hearts out of living men, women and children to appease their gods. That is moral to them. Another group believes that 2000 years ago a god sacrificed himself to himself so that the believers can be forgiven for all time. That is moral, to them. A different group of people use reason to construct morals. Morals based on enlightened self-interest. Obviously they would reject the morals of both previously mentioned groups. These are atheists, and only without religious bias can morals begin to be objective.

Reply,

Hi Heath,

Thank you for your comment and you raise a couple of important objections to a moral argument for the truth of Christianity. Of course, your post is brief and one would not expect arguments to be fully developed in the context of social media, so I will try to spell out how I think you intend the argument to go. I take it that you have two concerns about the claim that if human moral intuitions are correct, then this suggests that Christian theism is correct.

First, even if humans generally and accurately apprehend moral truths, and even if this is best explained by theism, it is not at all clear how this would be best explained by Christian theism. If morality requires some form of supernaturalism, then many supernatural explanations of morality are available and it is not immediately obvious why the Christian explanation should fare any better than, say, the Hindu explanation. If there are moral truths that need supernatural explanation, then that is evidence that applies equally well to all supernatural accounts.

Second, you suggest that morality is not objective and, therefore, there are no moral truths with which Christians can build their moral case for Christian theism. The hypothetical story about the origin of moral beliefs is meant to motivate this conclusion that moral realism is not correct. Later, in another comment, you add this: “Different cultures have different morals. Hence the subjective nature of it all. I don't get why you presume a standard morality to be everywhere. That is a pipe dream. Not a reality.” In that case, the whole project of The Morals of the Story rests on the mistake of thinking moral realism (the view that there are objective moral realities) obtains. Since the project assumes something true that is false, it must be fatally flawed.

Let me take the second objection first. There are two kinds of reply I want to make here. First, I want to say something about why we should think moral realism is a justified belief. Second, I want to consider whether we have any good reason to think it is not.

Geoff Sayre-McCord, a philosopher teaching at the University of North Carolina, claims that “moral realism can fairly claim to have common sense and initial appearances on its side.”[1] The reason that Sayre-McCord might say that moral realism has this advantage is that we simply find ourselves believing in moral realism and we find ourselves having a high degree of confidence in these beliefs.[2] It seems obvious to most people that there are at least some moral facts.

For example, for most it seems obviously true that the Holocaust was factually, objectively, morally wrong. It seems equally as obvious that torturing children for fun would be wrong in all the same ways. This, of course, is not anything like a decisive argument that moral realism is correct, but it should provide some reason to think we are justified in believing that moral realism is correct.

After all, we take all kinds of seemings as good justification for belief. It seems to me that there are other minds and that I am not a brain in a vat. It seems to me there is a table over there and that I am drinking coffee. These seemings are adequate grounds for having a justified belief that these things are so. If my three-year-old son looks out the window and sees a tree, it seems to him that there is a tree out there, and he forms the belief “There is a tree out there.” Few would say that this belief is not justified until he has more evidence; the seeming itself is sufficient.

 Of course, for all we know, we could be brains in vats or everyone around us could be mindless zombies that act exactly as if they had minds, but epistemologists generally agree that the mere possibility that these states of affairs could be actual should not worry us very much. Justification doesn’t require certainty.

However, justified beliefs can have their justification defeated. One might have good reasons to think that we are brains in vats, for example. Perhaps, like Neo from The Matrix, one could somehow become aware that reality as they experience it is a mere simulation. In that case, the belief that I am not a brain in a vat would no longer be justified.

My suggestion is that our moral intuitions are kinds of seemings analogous to the other kinds I have mentioned and that there are prima facie grounds for counting our moral intuitions as justified beliefs. Just as our experience of empirical realities can justify our belief in the external world or other minds, likewise our moral experience can offer us initial justification for at least certain of our less negotiable moral convictions. If one does not experience these moral intuitions, then, clearly, he could not be justified in believing in moral realism on this basis. Or, if he has sufficiently strong defeaters, he could no longer consider his belief justified, unless he defeats the defeaters. My view is that moral intuitions provide a prima facie reason for thinking that moral realism obtains.

If that is claim, then the next thing we will want to consider is whether there are any defeaters for moral intuitions. You offer one such possible defeater: the reality of moral disagreement. But it is not true that disagreement entails or even implies that a belief is false or that there is no truth to the matter. The history of science provides ample evidence of this. People disagreed with the heliocentric model of the solar system, but this did not imply that the proposition “The earth revolves around the sun” is neither objectively true nor false. Today, the flat earth movement is growing alarmingly and unfortunately fast. As a result, there is disagreement about whether the earth there is a flat disc or a globe. But this does not imply that, therefore, the truth of the proposition “The earth is not a disc” is merely a matter of subjective preference or opinion. If some proposition is objectively true then, by definition, whether people agree that it is true or not is not relevant to its status as a true proposition. So, I do not consider the argument from moral disagreement to be a defeater for the justification of our beliefs about moral realism. And so, if I am correct, then I continue to be justified in thinking that moral intuitions generate true moral beliefs.

If our belief in moral realism is justified, then we still have the remaining question of how the truth of these beliefs is best explained by Christian theism. You argue that the evidence is explained equally well by any religious perspective. But this simply is not the case. Some religions may not make any attempt to explain moral facts; they may say that ethics are ultimately illusory, as is the case in various forms of Buddhism and Hinduism. One central doctrine of some forms of Buddhism is annata or “no self” doctrine. This is the view that the perception of ourselves and others as moral agents is an error. We simply do not exist as persons. Perhaps we could preserve some form of moral realism on this view, but it would not accommodate what most take to be the obvious moral facts, even by most people living in contexts where the no-self doctrine is promoted. There is a reason why the Buddha needed to achieve enlightenment in order to discover the truth; his doctrines are directly at odds with our most basic beliefs about ourselves and the only way to overcome them is through rigorous practice.  Further, at least some religions are intrinsically bad explanations for anything. Scientology seems obviously and inherently less likely to be a good explanation for any phenomena it might be summoned to explain.

The Christian worldview, on the other hand, readily and naturally explains how many of our most deeply held moral beliefs are true. Suppose we think that human beings have dignity and value. The Christian worldview claims that ultimate reality is constituted by a being who is tri-personal. This being is the locus and ground of all value. It is natural to think that when we find the infinite good of the personal God mirrored in finite things, there we would find dignity and value. Many religions simply do not make the same claim about the nature of reality and the good. Polytheistic religions cannot claim the same thing without contradiction. The Christian worldview further confirms the value of human beings by telling us that we were created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26) and, most dramatically, in the incarnation, where the Second Person of the Trinity became a human being himself. God thought it worthwhile to condescend to becoming a human being in order that he might redeem humankind.

So, in Christian theology and revelation, we find our moral intuitions about the value of human beings easily and logically explained. That is just one example, but there are many others.[3] I think this is enough to show that it is just not the case that all religions are equally equipped explain how our moral beliefs can be true. What objective morality can help do is adjudicate between conflicting accounts and help us decide the best explanation. Not every theology is equally well equipped to provide a good explanation of the full range of moral phenomena in need of explanation—from moral duties to moral freedom, from moral values to the dignity of people, from moral knowledge to an account of evil, from moral regret to moral transformation to moral rationality. This is much of what The Morals of the Story tries to explore and explicate, while respecting the mental freedom of those who remain unconvinced by the argument. Of course here in this short post I can’t make the full case; not even a whole book can. Philosophy is difficult, and takes a serious investment of time.

Heath, you have given us some important objections to consider and I hope that I have at least provided you with some idea of how a Christian might answer them, though I am also sure I have not convinced you to change your mind. We don’t even have the tip of the iceberg here! Maybe we have the tip of the tip and that is all. Still, I think you can at least see how one might argue that belief in moral realism is justified and how, at least possibly and perhaps somewhat plausibly, Christian theism may well be the best explanation of the truth of those moral beliefs.

If you are interested in exploring how Christians think about morality and how it might be evidence for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism, The Morals of the Story is a good place to start. If you are interested in something a bit more rigorous and technical, you might try Good God or God and Cosmos. Baggett and Walls are wrapping up a new book on the history of the moral argument, which you might find of interest as well when it gets published eventually.

Thanks again for your comment,

Jonathan Pruitt

Managing Editor

[1] Geoff Sayre-McCord, “Moral Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy),” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d., accessed December 20, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/.

[2] According to a survey of professional philosophers, most believe in moral realism.

[3]For another, fuller perspective, you might see Baggett’s Seven Reasons Moral Apologetics Points to Christianity. If you are interested in how Christianity better explains our moral intuitions about love, you might be interested in this discussion I had with Brian Scalise.

I offer an explanation of how Christianity in particular best explains how we have moral knowledge elsewhere.

Mailbag: Concerns about the Nature of Moral Obligations

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

Original context

Jason writes:

Jonathan,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful response. I am very tempted to follow the inquiry into the nature of rationality. I would suggest, for example, that the rational constraint that we should act in our self-interest must be understood as a pro tanto constraint. That is, pro tanto I ought to act in accordance with my self-interest. There are circumstances in which it would not be irrational to act in violation of my self-interest (e.g., when sacrificing my life to save the lives of others). I am also very interested in pursuing the distinction between a minimal conception of rationality and a more robust conception of reason-responsiveness. However, let me set such worries aside for now and focus on the substance of my criticism of DCT and your response to that criticism.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that in the absence of divine commands there are moral reasons to engage in actions, but there are no moral obligations. I take your point that on the commonly defended modern versions of DCT (including that defended by Baggett and Walls), DCT is a theory of rightness and wrongness (or, more generally, deontic moral value). The substance of my criticism is that I am offering a counterexample; that is, I am claiming that I can describe a situation in which (a) there are no divine commands, (b) a person faces a choice between two options, (A) and (C), and (c) the person is morally obligated to choose (A) over (C) [or, more carefully, actions (A) and (C) have deontic value, (A) has positive deontic value, (C) has negative deontic value, that we morally ought to perform (A) and that it is morally wrong to perform (C)].

In my original comment, I did not robustly describe options (A) and (C), I merely stipulated some of their properties. Let me put more flesh on the bones of my argument: Suppose the following: I am hiking in a desert region and I come across a young child who is languishing in the heat in obvious distress. She is dehydrated and delirious and does not respond to questions. In such an example, I face two options: (A) Give the child water and food, escort her to safety, and make sure that she receives the medical attention she needs; (C) Ignore the child and complete my hike.

On DCT, (A) (which we can call RENDER AID) has moral value and there are moral reasons to choose it, which reasons are independent of God's commands. Presumably also, on DCT, (C) (IGNORE) has moral value (negative value, i.e., badness) and there are reasons to refrain from choosing it. In my original comment, I asked whether, on DCT, the strength of a reason is also independent of God's commands. If it is, then, I think we can conclude the following:

(1) There are strong reasons to choose (A) RENDER AID and these reasons and the strength of these reasons is independent of God's commands.

(2) These reasons are so strong as to be overriding. That is, they tend to override other reasons that might be present. So, if I have self-interested reasons to complete my hike, these reasons are overridden by the strength of the reasons to render aid.

(3) Option (C) IGNORE is extremely bad. It is much worse than, for example, failing to notify a cashier that he has undercharged you for your groceries.

(4) The reasons that I have to render aid concern the welfare of a conscious person.

(5) The child, in virtue of being a person, has a special moral status, which status endows her with the capacity to make legitimate demands of other persons.

Given (1) - (5), it would be wrong to suggest that RENDER AID is merely supererogatory. The reasons are overriding and concern the welfare of a conscious person. RENDER AID has deontic status, it is the thing that, all things considered, I ought to do. Thus, I am morally obligated to choose to RENDER AID and that if I choose IGNORE, then I have done something wrong.

So, I am saying that RENDER AID is not merely (minimally) rational. (And it is probably not in my self-interest to help the child.) The reasons in support of RENDER AID are not mere rationality constraints. Now compare the (divine command independent) reasons to choose RENDER AID with the reasons to tell a cashier that he has slightly undercharged you (say by 25 cents). The reasons to choose RENDER AID are much more significant than the reasons to inform the cashier of his small error. We should be able to capture this difference in language; our language should be responsive to this difference. And, when we search for a way of describing the difference, what we come up with is that RENDER AID is morally obligatory. Informing the cashier of his error might be a good thing to do, but it is not morally obligatory. If I fail to help the child in the desert, I have done something seriously wrong, I have failed to discharge a moral obligation. But, on the view you are defending, I am not morally obligated to render aid to the girl unless I am commanded to by God.

So, the upshot is that if we grant, as you appeared prepared to do, that (i) there are moral reasons, independent of God's commands, to engage in actions, (ii) that such reasons have differing strengths, where the strength of a reason is also independent of God's commands, and (iii) some such reasons concern the welfare of persons, then there are moral obligations independent of God's commands. The claim that I am only obligated to act when I am so commanded is not tenable.

I apologize for the lengthy response. I hope that you find it interesting and worth your time. Like you, I think this topic is deeply important and very interesting, so I am strongly inclined to take advantage of opportunities to fruitfully discuss these issues. Thanks again.

Hi Jason,

Thank you for another substantive reply.

I take it that your central claim is this: we can have morally overriding reasons to act without appeal to God’s commands. When we have overriding moral reasons to act, then we have a moral obligation to act. We can see a likely case of this when we imagine that we encounter a little girl stranded on a hiking trail. It seems that, given just natural facts about the situation, we would be morally obligated to act.

A further, but not central, point is that rendering aid to the girl would likely not be in my self-interest, so there are reasons to act distinct from self-interested reasons. Specifically, the right sort of moral reasons in the right amount can generate a reason to act.

Let’s first say something about self-interest and the connection to morality before moving on to address the heart of your reply. It seems to me that there is a real problem if self-interest and morality come apart so that there can be cases where what is right to do is not in my interest to do. This is a worry shared by thinkers like Kant and Sidgwick (perhaps Aristotle as well). If it is not in my interest to be moral, then we cannot hope to make full rational sense of morality (Baggett and Walls, Good God, 13). This is Sidgwick’s problem of “dualism of practical reason.” And in order to solve this problem, Kant thought that we needed to believe that God exists as a “postulate of practical reason.” Hare explains that Kant thought of God as having three roles: the legislative, executive, and judicial (Hare, God and Morality, Kindle location 1740). In his judicial role, God ensures that happiness and holiness ultimately cohere. In this way, it is always in my interest, ultimately, to be moral, and the rational stability of morality is preserved.

Perhaps one could say that morality can be fully rational and yet not always be in our self-interest, which is the view I think you take here. I am not sure that is so. We can always ask, “Why be moral?” Why should I care about moral reasons to act if, in the end, acting is not in my interest? Of course, we find ourselves caring about moral reasons but if we suppose, counterfactually, that we do not care about moral reasons, then it is difficult to show why we should act without some circularity without appeal to self-interest.

I should care because it is right to care; that is one likely answer. And that answer could be translated as “I should be moral because I should be moral,” which is circular. The best answer, as far as I can tell, to the question, “Why be moral?” is that being moral is in our interest. Such an answer avoids the circularity problem and preserves the rationality of morality.

I think this point about practical reason helps illustrate some of my concern with the account of moral obligations you have offered. We, of course, share the perspective that rendering aid is morally obligatory, but we disagree about the explanatory account of that fact.

If I am understanding your view correctly, if we have enough good reasons to act, then those good reasons constitute a moral obligation in at least some cases. But I am not sure why that would be. Certainly, there is an intuitive appeal to the scenario you have laid out. When we encounter the girl on the trail, all morally healthy people would recognize their duty to act. Further, I think it is correct that we recognize this duty without asking ourselves whether God has commanded us to render aid in such cases (though he has with great clarity in the parable of the Good Samaritan). But, and not that this is contrary to your claim, I think it is equally true that we do not asses the state of affairs and add up the moral reasons and then decide we are morally obligated. In such cases, morally healthy people just see that they are so obligated. In fact most of the reasons to act that we are likely to adduce come from our sense of its being a duty already.

So I think we can ask two questions. (1) Why do we have the experience of feeling obligated in such cases, and (2) assuming we are really obligated, what is the explanation of the obligation?

If we assume some conjunction of naturalism and evolution, then in response to 1, we could say that our feelings of obligation are explained by their evolutionary advantage. A species is more likely to thrive when we perform acts of altruism, so our biology has programmed us to have such feelings. And the Christian could say that such intuitions are explained by sharing, to some degree, God’s moral vision. We care about the girl because God cares about the girl and he made us in his image.

The response to (2) has a wide array of options on both naturalism and Christianity. I think your reply gives a good illustration of a possible naturalist reply, but of course, there are many others. Christians may give natural law, virtue ethical, divine command theory, or yet other replies. But the DCT view is this: we are obliged to help if and only if (and because) God has so commanded. (Why we should think of obligations as divine commands is important and perhaps that would be worth exploring in another post. But I will set that aside for now and point readers to Robert Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods).

This view does not entail that moral reasons and moral obligations are alien to one another. God will often command some act because it’s a good thing to do. God’s commands, contra the radical theological voluntarists, are not capricious. Since we are made in God’s image, we naturally find ourselves thinking that we are obligated to render aid when morally good reasons abound, even if we do not psychologically appeal to God’s command in the moment.

Your challenge is powerful precisely because we find ourselves believing so easily and naturally that we are obligated to render aid. Certainly, if we already think that moral reasons are good reasons for acting, then it will be natural to think that whenever we find sufficient moral reasons, then we will find ourselves believing we are obligated. One might even define “ought” in a colloquial sort of way to mean “having good moral reasons to do something,” but how do we solve the ontological problem of moral obligations? What’s easily lost here is the fact that there are subtle ways to domesticate the notion of moral obligations, losing in the process what Evans calls the “Anscombe intuition” about moral obligations.

Let us suppose, again counterfactually, the God has not commanded us to render aid in a scenario like you have described. In this case, we would have morally good reasons to help the girl and it would be bad if we chose not to help. It’s good to save the life of the girl, to provide relief of the family, safeguard future contributions she will make to society, and so on. The bad would be the negation of all these things, and the cost of her death, emotionally and otherwise. In this context, perhaps it is fair to characterize your view this way: When we have the right kind and quality of morally good reasons to act, and refraining from acting would result in tremendous badness, then we are obliged to act.

Put this way, it seems to be a kind of consequentialism. When the good outweighs the bad, then we have a moral obligation. Of course, there are serious problems with consequentialist theories, like the in-principle denial of human rights and the limited power of our moral calculus, of which I am sure you are aware. We could imagine, if we are in the time traveling mood, that we have encountered Hitler’s mother when she was a little girl. If we balance the scales now, it turns out leaving her to die will result in more good than bad.

That said, I do not think you intend to offer a consequentialist theory, and please correct me if I am wrong. But if it is not consequentialist, and it is deontological, then it would seem to follow on a theory like Kant’s that we should eschew the sort of counting up of good and bad and perform our duty, come what may. Even if the result was very bad, I would still be obligated to perform my duty on a deontic system. Thus, Option (C) IGNORE, would not be prohibited because it has bad results. If you mean that the act itself is bad, and I would agree, then I am still not sure how that would be relevant for an account of moral obligations. Some acts which are bad in themselves can be morally obligatory. For example, sometimes disciplining a child requires us to do something bad, like deprive the child of something he enjoys. Depriving a child does seem like, in isolation, a bad thing. But parents are so obligated. Or, perhaps, killing enemy combatants in a just war is a bad, but morally obligatory thing. This tension between moral goodness/badness and moral rightness/wrongness serves to motivate this problem of how we move from one category to the other.

Again, I take it that you think that having a certain quality and quantity of moral reasons creates a moral obligation. The concern I have here comes from the distinction between moral rightness and moral goodness. These are different kinds of entities and having some of one does not generate the other. How would such a transmutation occur? On the other hand, if we say that God is the good, commands what is good, and these commands are moral obligations, then we preserve the distinction and have a plausible explanatory account, without the risk of watering down what’s meant by moral obligations.

Mailbag: Can God Have Moral Reasons for Divine Commands?

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Jason writes:

"He may have had plenty of reasons to provide the additional moral reasons to perform a particular action that we already had moral reasons to perform. The goodness of the action is one reason for God to command it"

A point of clarification: You seem to be saying that there are actions such that, prior to God's commands, there are moral reasons to perform them and that (at least for such an action) God's commanding that we perform the action gives us additional moral reasons to perform it. Is this a correct interpretation of your view? If this is correct, then an immediate consequence is that God's commands do not generate or constitute the moral reasons that exist prior to God's commands. Presumably, this also entails that God's commands do not generate or constitute the strength of these prior reasons.

Assuming that I understand your view correctly, I have additional questions: Suppose A is an action such that, prior to God's command, there are moral reasons to perform it. What is the nature of A's deontic status at this point (that is, prior to God's command)? Since, on your view, DCT is a theory of deontic value, presumably the answer is that A has no deontic status. So, on your view A is neither obligatory nor wrong prior to God's command. Is this right?

Suppose now that there are two actions, A and B, such that, prior to God's command, there are moral reasons to perform each of them. Suppose that the reasons to perform A are much stronger than the reasons to perform B. Don't we want to say that A has a different moral status than B? Suppose we are faced with a decision between A and B. Don't we want to say that A is the action that we should perform? Given that it is the action that (at least in the context of a choice between A and B) we should perform, don't we want to say that A has a different deontic status than B?

Suppose now that I face a choice between A and C. A is such that, prior to God's commands, there are strong reasons to perform it; and C is such that, prior to God's commands, there are strong reasons to refrain from performing it. What we want to say about such a situation is that I ought to perform A and I ought to refrain from performing C. Indeed, we want to say that, if I perform C rather than A, I will have done something wrong. But, if this is correct, C has deontic value; it is morally wrong and its moral wrongness is dependent only on the existence and strength of reasons that count against performing C (and in favor of A), which reasons exist prior to God's commands. So, how can it be that God's commands make an action have its deontic value?

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your comment and question!

I’m not Dr. Baggett, but I think I can suggest some ways one might respond to the criticisms you raise.

One thing to keep in mind is the good/right distinction. Divine command theory (DCT) is usually presented by its advocates as a theory of moral rightness (moral obligations, in particular) and not a theory of moral goodness. DCT says that moral rightness is constituted (or caused or, in Hare’s case, prescribed) by divine commands. On each account, if God commands that P, then we have a moral obligation to P. Of course this is one among other theistic ethical accounts of moral obligations.

If something like DCT holds, then we can have moral reasons to act that are not themselves morally obligatory reasons. In other words, an action could be good to do, but not morally obligatory. For example, perhaps it is good for me to spend all my money building wells in drought-stricken areas. But that is not morally obligatory, at least because there are equally good other causes that I could support, like, say, bringing an end to human trafficking. In God’s case, we can say that he has moral reasons to give a command; it is consistent with moral goodness. But that does not presume a theory of moral rightness.

One issue in the discussion of moral obligations, I think, is that we use the term “ought” in different ways. There’s a rational use of “ought” and a moral use of “ought.” Rationally speaking, I ought to do what is in my self-interest. I ought to pursue my self-interest on pain of irrationality. Arguably, it is always irrational to do some act that is not in my interest. And this is precisely the sort of insight that undergirds many ethical theories, like utilitarianism and social contract theory. I ought to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number because, if everyone follows that rule, then it will ultimately result in the most good for everyone, including myself, or so the story goes.

However, it seems that there is another sense of “ought” that is not captured by appeal to rationality in general or self-interest in particular. Phenomenologically, we can spot a difference in ourselves in the case of adding 2 and 2 to make 5 and when we have morally wronged another person. And, it seems to me, that many of our moral choices, psychologically, do not make any reference at all to rationality. When I think about the wrongness of murder, I do not remind myself (at least not at first) of how such an act would not be in my interests. Rather, I have the sense that such an act would be wrong no matter how my interests factor into the equation. There’s a certain gravity, weight, and transcendence with such prohibitions that, at least by my lights, resist the reduction to the merely rational ought.

So, I could have moral reasons for performing some act A over act B, without God’s command in place. Any supererogatory act will, de facto, come with good moral reasons to do that act, but it will not be morally obligatory. But the divine command theorist will say that I am only obligated to act when I am so commanded. Doing some act because it is good is a moral reason to act; however, it is not sufficient to ground moral obligations.

Mailbag: The Science of Morality?

Question Hello professor, I hope you are doing well. I have been looking at some of your work and I think you could answer a question I have in regards to ethics. If you have time that is. If you don't have the time you can just ignore my email. My question has to do with an article I have been reading recently that is titled the science of morality. In the article the author states that morally good is identical with flourishing well being and the morally bad is identical with misery. I read some reviews of the articles and other scholars state that the author was just redefining moral goodness with well being and argument was circular. But why believe that objective goodness cannot be identical with flourishing of human well being? What makes the argument invalid?

Thank you for your time,

Bill

Answer

Hi Bill,

This is a deceptively hard question! The topic of goodness is quite complicated. Usually when we say that someone is morally good, we're talking about traits of character and various virtues the person shows. Somehow the goodness inheres in the person. We speak secondarily of various states of affairs being good, but it's almost a misnomer to call a state of affairs morally good. This is why Kant was of the view that the only truly good thing is a good will--an attribute of a person.

We might come across an awful state of affairs, but what's morally bad is, most likely, the person or persons (if there is such a person or are such persons) culpably responsible for bringing it about. To say a hurricane is bad is not to say it's morally bad. It just is what it is. Calling it morally bad is anthropomorphism. Of course it's nonmorally bad, in that it produces, potentially, a range of undesirable consequences, but you asked about moral goodness in particular. Often when goodness gets contrasted with bad, the focus is on nonmoral considerations that pertain to things like pleasure and pain; but when good gets contrasted with evil, the distinctively moral features come into view.

So flourishing is a perfect example of something that's nonmorally good. But it doesn't get us to the heart of moral goodness. The effort to define moral goodness by appeal to human flourishing is a rookie mistake. It's a deflationary attempt by folks who want to domesticate the concept to reduce moral goodness to something other than itself. It's thus an attempt to define moral goodness in terms that aren't moral at all. But moral goodness can't be reduced or explained away in such a manner. The effort falls prey to the naturalistic fallacy, for one thing. For another, it just leaves too much out.

Suppose you are asked a question and risk being shot to tell the right answer. The morally good thing to do, you're convinced, is to tell the truth. But still, you tell the truth and immediately get shot. How on earth can an appeal to human flourishing be adequate to account for the moral goodness of your choice in such a situation? Rather than conducing to survival and flourishing, it ensured your immediate death.

Now, just because there's not an analytic reduction of "moral goodness" into "human flourishing" doesn't mean there's no connection between them. To the contrary, I think there's an airtight (synthetic) connection between the two, but that's quite different from saying moral goodness just is human flourishing. Ultimately, on a Christian worldview, moral goodness comes about by way of right relation with and transformation by God entirely into the image of Christ--a righteous and holy life--and with such a life will come complete fulfillment and satisfaction. But that doesn't mean morality and happiness are the same thing; they're not. But a good God can and will ensure their ultimate correspondence.

Best,

djb

Mailbag: A Moral Argument from Evil?

Question: Hi, MA team:

I've been working through an argument for God's existence which takes as its starting point a conception of evil as wrongdoing or injustice. In other words, when we think about great evils, whether moral or natural, we tend to think of certain states of affairs that *ought not* obtain, or which depart from the way things should be, or which are simply not owed to us. All of these different conceptions, it seems to me, essentially boil down to two elements: 1) we treat the existence of evil as being 'out of step' with the character of the world, that is, as having a certain normative pull; and 2) such normative character points to an understanding of evil as in relation to some end or perfection, some maximum.

The argument I have in mind, then, proceeds thus:

1. To the extent that we understand evil as a wrongdoing or injustice -- that is, as a departure from the way things should be, or as something not owed -- we understand evil in relation to some end or perfection, some maximum. 2. But, given atheism, no such perfection or maximum exists. 3. Therefore, plausibly, theism is true.

I would be very interested in your thoughts, please. One possible objection that has been marshalled against my argument is the following (and I wonder how you would address it, provided that you think the argument works):

"I think most moral philosophers think premise 2 is false. Aristotle argued there is a highest human end (without God), so injustices are departures from that. Similarly, Kant argued that his "categorical imperative" is objectively true, not dependent upon God. Finally, I argue...that (1) is false: that evil is not a departure from some objective "maximum," but rather deviations from a conception of fairness that is rational for human beings to adopt given human psychology."

Thank you very much for your time, Paulo Juarez

Reply: This is all very interesting stuff! Thanks for the query, and sorry for the delay getting back to you. This approach, to my thinking, has tremendous potential. The notion that the world is, in some very strong sense, not as it ought to be seems profoundly right, but also rather difficult to reconcile with naturalism. After all, in something like a fully determined world, why should anything be different from what it is? Evil in any robust sense makes more sense in a theistic world inhabited with creatures with meaningful agency who have used their agency wrongly. In God and Cosmos, Walls and I make the case that what’s worse even than the problem of evil is the inability of naturalism to account for the category of evil at all. When the problem of evil ceases being a problem for one’s worldview, so much the worse for one’s worldview.

You’re characterizing as an essential feature of evil a relation to some end or perfection or maximum. First a word on that. Personally I might disambiguate between these three notions. The second and third of them—perfection and maximum—seem to go well together in Anselmian theology. If the God of classical theism is construed along the lines of the greatest possible being, then his perfection is constituted by instantiating all the great-making properties to the maximally compossible degree. So, regarding goodness, God has as much goodness as is possible in light of his maximal power, knowledge, etc. Tom Morris and I did an article on this in the recent issue of the Christian Research Journal. I think that makes great sense.

When we speak of an “end” of something, however, I’m not as confident that we need speak of a perfection or maximum. Regarding human artifacts, for example, like a pencil, its end is to write well, or something like that. Or a car’s purpose or function is likely to transport us around. Aristotle thought teleology was shot through everything, but if it is, in lots of cases the telos in question has little to do with perfection or a maximum.

Now, if human beings in particular have a telos, and if Christianity is true, then you could more effectively argue that the goal, the purpose, the telos of human beings does involve perfection—at the culmination of the sanctification process when we’re entirely conformed to the image of Christ. That classical theism and orthodox Christianity feature the realistic hope of total moral transformation in this way enables the “performative” variant of moral apologetics that’s one of the four variants of the moral argument this website often discusses.

But you wish to characterize even natural evils as falling short of a perfection, which likely seems predicated on the idea that worlds admit of intrinsic maxima, and I rather doubt they do. Unlike the case of God, who does admit of intrinsic maxima, worlds likely don’t, which is related to why one of Guanilo’s criticisms of the ontological argument fails, since the criticism assumed that, say, islands admitted of intrinsic maxima when, in fact, they just don’t. How many palm trees are on the perfect island, for example? There’s no principled, nonarbitrary way to say.

So I’m of two minds about your argument. On the one hand, I think there’s something profoundly right about theism providing the best explanation of the category of evil—along with hope for its ultimate defeat (by relation with God, the ultimate Good, a good so incommensurably good that relation to him can make the sufferings of this world, however horrific, pale by comparison). On the other hand, characterization of evil as intrinsically connected to a maximum or perfection strains credulity a bit.

More plausible, I think, is the claim that evil, as an instance of the way the world shouldn’t be, reflects a missing of the mark (even if the mark isn’t best cast as a perfection). Not every imperfection is an instance of evil, but every evil does seem to be a radical missing of some normative state of affairs. So I’d likely be inclined to recast your argument more like this:

1. To the extent that we understand evil as a wrongdoing or injustice -- that is, as a departure from the way things should be, or as something not owed -- we understand evil in relation to some end or standard.

2. Theism provides the best explanation for such normatively binding ends.

3. Therefore, plausibly, theism is true.

This still remains too brief and needs more fleshing out, but it’s the direction I’d encourage. And maybe I’m wrong! Perhaps you can still convince me of the need and plausibility of those categories I excised. But for now, my suggestion, for whatever it’s worth, is this: Leave behind the ontologically heavy notions of perfections and maxima and just refer to the intuitively strong idea that evil reflects something that is not the way the world ought to be. Then make the case that classical theism and orthodox Christianity can provide the better explanation of such normatively binding ends that make sense of how the world, people, etc. “ought to be.” On naturalism, assuming determinism at the macro level, it’s awfully difficult to distinguish between the way the world is and how it ought to be. That’s a very high price to pay for the committed naturalist, involving an eschewal of deep moral intuitions.

As for the Kantian and Thomistic concerns, I don’t think you have as much to worry with there as some might say you do. In various places in Kant’s works, he gives a variant of a moral argument for God’s existence. It tends to be a version of either the performative or rational argument (as discussed on this site and in God and Cosmos), but it’s undoubtedly there. Just recently I’ve been reading his Lectures on Ethics (which students of his put together based on his lectures). Here’s a telling passage (one among many!): “The ideal of the Gospels is complete in every respect. Here we have the greatest purity and the greatest happiness. It sets out the principles of morality in all their holiness. It commands man to be holy, but as he is imperfect it gives him a prop, namely, divine aid.” Even the categorical imperative is, to Kant’s thinking, connected in various and powerful ways to God, not least in Kant’s insistence we should think of all moral duties as duties to God for the sake of grounding their rational stability.

Regarding Aristotle, you might wish to read John Hare’s chapter on him in God and Morality. Our highest telos, for Aristotle, is contemplating the divine. So it’s actually not the case that the highest human good, for Aristotle, was independent of God. Naturalists who try to adopt him to their cause are misguided, for a number of reasons. Here’s one: Aristotle’s focus on what’s natural was by way of contrast with the artificial, not the supernatural. At any rate, much more could be said there (and has been said elsewhere), but take a look at Hare if you get a chance.

Thanks so much for the chance to reflect on this, and feel free to stick to your guns and defend your approach. Keep up the great work! Blessings!

Dave Baggett

Mailbag: What Can God Do?

Editor's Note: Thanks to Dr. Michael Jones for answering this mailbag question. If you have a question that you would like answered, contact us on Facebook or at moralapologetics@gmail.com. 

Hello! I'm desperately searching for an answer to a question that my Mormon friend posed to me earlier this week. He asked me if God has freedom given that He cannot choose evil. I replied by telling him that God could choose any number of good things, not just evil. The inability to choose A, B, & C doesn't mean God can't choose D, E, and F, but he stopped me there. "God can't just choose all that is good, He must choose the most perfect choice since He is perfectly good Himself. Thus, God can only do one thing. He does not have free will." I really have no idea how to answer this, do you? If not, could you direct me towards someone who would? Thanks!

Patrick

Greetings. This is an interesting question. It’s also a familiar one, to me: one or another of my students raises this question almost every year. Perhaps it comes up so regularly because there’s some truth behind it. And that’s actually a good thing: if your goal is to win the confidence of your friend (I get the impression that it is) then I think it would be helpful for you to begin by acknowledging those points about which you agree.

For example, you’d probably grant that there are some things that God cannot choose to do, wouldn’t you? We’re often tempted to think that if God is omnipotent (all powerful) then he can do anything that we can imagine – and perhaps even things that are beyond our imagination. But that’s neither biblical nor very logical. The Bible indicates several things that God cannot do. For example, he cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and he cannot be tempted (James 1:13). God can’t do these things because they go against his own nature. Similarly he can’t cease being God, he can’t become finite in his knowledge, power, or goodness, and he cannot cease to exist, any more than you or I could do things that go against our nature, like sprout wings and fly or be in all places at once.

Likewise there are things that God cannot do because they are truly impossible, and therefore no one could do them. It’s impossible to make a square triangle, to make two plus two equal five, and things like that. Not being able to do these things is not a shortcoming on God’s part: no god, no matter how powerful, could do these things, for they are truly impossible.

There are choices that God cannot make because making them would go against his nature, and there are choices that God cannot make because they involve something that is simply impossible. These closely parallel what was said above. This is not a shortcoming on God’s part: it’s just the nature of things. Your friend may simply be pointing this out, and if that’s all he’s trying to say, then you may want to thank him and be done with it.

From what you wrote, however, it seems like your friend is saying that God isn’t free at all. I would disagree with that. Your friend seems to be making the argument that God’s perfect knowledge of all the options and their results combines with his perfect goodness to prevent him from choosing anything but one option in every situation. There’s a lot that could be discussed here, including Molinism, Open Theism, metaphysical views of time, history, God’s relationship to time, etc. Since I can’t address all of these, I’ll focus on just one: the presupposition that in any given situation there is always one option that is superior to all of the others.

It may be true that in some or perhaps in many situations there is one option that is decisively better than all of the others. I think that your friend is right that in those situations God’s nature constrains him to choose that option that is best. (I must add, though, that here we’re talking as if God experiences time and choosing just like we mortals do, which may be too anthropomorphic. We’ll leave that issue aside, though.) But that should not be viewed as a shortcoming, any more than God’s inability to sin, lie, or create square circles is a shortcoming (which it’s not, in my opinion). Furthermore, some theologians believe that there’s a sense in which this is still a form of free choice on God’s part, for in such a situation God’s choice is not constrained by anything outside of himself. God chooses in harmony with what God is and what he knows about reality. He can’t choose otherwise because doing so would contradict his nature and the nature of reality. Perhaps that’s not a problem at all, though. The alternative would seem to be to say that God can make choices that are not consistent with who he is, as an omniscient and omnibenevolent being. I’m not sure that you should want to affirm that.

All of that is predicated on the assumption that in any given situation there is always a single best option. However, that’s a pretty big assumption. In fact, there may be many situations wherein there are many very good options none of which is clearly better than the others. The other day my wife asked me what I wanted for breakfast and then proceeded to list a number of very tasty options. Each had its advantages, to be sure, but to me any of them would have been great. Something similar may happen to God quite often: he may know that choosing option A will have 10 beneficial consequences and 3 detrimental ones, that B would have 12 benefits but one hugely detrimental consequence, that option C would have 9 beneficial results but also 9 fairly minor negative results, etc. Knowing exactly how each option balances good and bad, he would know if and when there are options that, all things considered, are equally preferable. In those situations there is no one best option. That being the case, it makes sense that God would be free to choose between those options, don’t you think?

It’s great to think deeply about the nature of God. It can be inspiring! But let’s keep in mind that there are many ways in which the nature of the infinite, perfect God transcends finite human understanding. We should marvel at his greatness but not be discouraged if he’s hard for us to wrap our minds around.

May God bless you as you seek to follow him,

MSJ

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Mailbag: The Devil Made Us Smarter?

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A reader of the site asked for help responding to this:

"The devil gave humans critical thinking which God didn’t want us to have. God wanted us to not eat from the tree of knowledge so we could be thought-slaves for eternity, but the devil did us a favor and turned the tables there with a single conversation. The devil killed a grand total of 10 people in the Bible, while God killed somewhere around 2.3 million. He understands human nature but doesn’t judge you for being human. He accepts god’s unwanted children unconditionally."

It appears these lines come from Martin Ristov, although I’m unfamiliar with the person. It appears to be motivated by a fair bit of anger at the biblical God, similar in invective and spirit to the New Atheists. The idea seems to be that, in a moral comparison between God and Satan, the devil wins. Satan is responsible for giving us critical thinking, liberates us from being thought-slaves, has done comparatively little damage (killing just ten folks in the Bible), doesn’t judge people for being human, and accepts those God rejects. God, in contrast, wanted us to be thought-slaves, killed millions, judges us for being human, and is conditional in his acceptance.

The comparison with the New Atheists is ironic in a sense, since the New Atheists claim not to believe in God, whereas this person doesn’t seem to deny God’s existence, but rather his love and character. Still, certain adamant secularists seem mad at God at the same time as denying His existence. C. S. Lewis is well known for admitting, post-conversion, that as an atheist he both denied God’s existence and was very angry with God.

I think much of what’s going on here is attributable to looking at theology from the outside. Christians are inclined to believe God is loving; in fact, love isn’t just what God expresses, it’s who He is. God has expressed His love most clearly through Christ, and the whole of salvation history culminates in Him. Jesus went to the cross while we were sinners in order to save us. God’s love is His most important attribute, and every part of biblical revelation should be understood through this guiding hermeneutic. If, instead, one reads the Bible through a different lens, a very different conclusion can be drawn; but to read it in such a way is to wrongly divide the word of truth. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil isn’t denied the first people, on this skewed and exegetically deficient reading, because of the importance of avoiding defining good and evil for oneself in whatever subjective way one wanst, but rather because God wants to keep us from knowledge. Rather than Jesus being the Logos and the foundation for all clear thinking, critical thinking gets cast as a gift from the benevolent hand of Satan. We are thus furnished with a stark example of what incommensurable paradigms look like, and how far afield eisegetical, prooftexting mishandlings of the biblical text get us.

A comparison and contrast between God and Satan also sounds much more dualistic than Christianity actually is. Unlike, say, Zoroastrianism and certain other theologies, Christianity doesn’t put God and Satan into equal and opposite positions. Satan is a creation of God. There’s only one God, one locus of value, one Creator of the world, one Sustainer of all that exists, one Being who exists a se. Much of what often gets rejected is not classical theism, but some diminished demi-god, like the finite and morally impoverished gods of the Greek pantheon. The idea that Satan is really the good guy after all shows that the person speaking has some rather big misunderstandings, either inadvertent or intentional. The force behind systemic evils and gross injustices and all manner of cruelty and corruption is actually the good and benevolent force? The one animating the actions of Roman soldiers nailing Jesus to the cross was the good guy? This strains credulity to the breaking point, and raises a serious question about conversational cooperation.

The one who willingly suffered for the salvation of the world, who took our sin upon himself, who was willing to endure the shame and punishment that we rightly deserved—and to do so out of His great love for us—drinking death and shame to its dregs that He might effect ultimate victory over evil and set the world to rights—He’s the bad guy? The one who offers to each of us the experience of ultimate goodness that can make all the temporal sufferings of this fleeting life pale into insignificance in light of the eternal glory to come—He’s the real devil? I suspect this is a paradigmatic instance of what was prophesied: that the day would come when good would be called evil, and evil good.

Mailbag: A Question on Prior Obligations to Divine Command Theory

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By David Baggett A reader of the site sent this question:

In reading a review on NDPR of C. Stephen Evans' book God and Moral Obligations (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/41665-god-and-moral-obligation/), I found the author’s (Terrence Cuneo) argument to be strong ones against Evans’ proposed solutions to the "prior obligations" objection to DCT. It seems that even on a DCT, moral obligations still seem to have some unconditional "oughtness" about it.

I always thought that the strength of a DCT versus a non theistic robust ethic view (perhaps like Wielenberg's) was that a DCT was able to explain the unconditional "ought" of moral obligations. For if moral obligations were brute facts, then the question "why should I love my neighbor" is answered by "because it's simply the right thing to do," and then if someone were to ask, "why is it the right thing to do?", the final answer would be: "because it just is." I thought the advantage a theist has is that he can say that an action is right because God commands that it is right, which on the surface sounds like it provides a wider explanatory scope compared to the "it just is" answer. However, the prior obligation objection seems to ask the question "Why should I obey God's commands" and it would seem like we have a separate obligation (apart from the Will of God), to obey his commands (as the reviewer points out). Thus, it would seem like a theistic component to explain moral obligations might not be better off than the robust ethicist’s view.

What are your thoughts on this? I understand that you've been reviewing Evan's book on the website. I've found the site to be encouraging BTW, thank you so much for contributing to the body of Christ!

Great question, thanks for sending it along! You are not the first to point to this part of Cuneo’s review and to express concern about this aspect of divine command theory. Evans’ book is fantastic, and the prior obligations objection to DCT is indeed interesting, although it doesn’t, to my thinking, pose an intractable objection. I’ll try to explain why.

On the surface there’s certainly an issue to deal with. If DCT provides an exhaustive theory of moral obligations, and we have an obligation to obey God, then our obligation to obey God to obey God comes from our obligation to obey God. This is circular, so something has gone wrong. What should we say about this?

Two of this site’s contributors, friends Matt Flannagan and Paul Copan—who collaborated on a terrific book entitled Did God Really Command Genocide?—deal with this objection (pp. 165-67). They note the objection goes back to Mackie and, before him, Cudworth. They note a few problems with the argument. First, they note, it generalizes, and as such would apply “to every account of moral obligations within any given ethical theory, secular or theological.” One example they adduce is social contract theory. “According to a social contract view, moral obligations are those requirements that rational, impartial persons in a society would agree to. But Cudworth (and Mackie) could argue that one is morally obligated to such a contract only if there is already an obligation to follow such hypothetical agreements. So the hypothetical agreement can’t itself be the source of moral obligations.” See their point? I think this is an excellent insight. In this way we could say the objection, if it were to hold, would show too much.

What do they think has gone wrong with the argument? They think it equivocates between these two claims:

1 If God commands X, then we have an obligation to do X, and

2 There is an obligation to do what God commands.

Only the second proposition affirms an obligation to obey God. 1 makes the conditional claim: IF God commands X, THEN we have an obligation to do X. 1 is consistent with there being no obligations at all. But if God issues a command, what God commands is rendered obligatory. DCT only requires 1, whereas the prior obligations objection requires 2. As Matt and Paul put it, “[T]he divine command theorist need not hold that there is a prior obligation to obey God. All he needs is that God jointly possesses various characteristics or traits such that his act of commanding is sufficient to constitute moral obligations,” which is just the sort of thing that one like Robert Adams does in Finite and Infinite Goods and elsewhere. Jerry Walls and I similarly argued in Good God that, among God’s qualities that give him moral authority to issue binding commands, are his perfect knowledge, love, and power. (See pp. 122-23.)

Even if we don’t have a prior obligation to obey God’s commands, that wouldn’t mean we don’t have moral reasons to obey God. Not all moral reasons are duty-related. Something being morally good, for example, gives us moral reason, perhaps even compelling moral reason, to do it, even if we don’t have a moral obligation to do it. This is one among several other sorts of replies one can give. Among others Evans mentions include that God does actually command us to obey his commands, after he’s established his moral trustworthiness; or, even if the objection were to work, divine commands could still be sufficient to general moral obligations without being necessary; or that the prior obligation to obey God’s commands is a nonmoral ought.

It seems to me that the robust realists generally water the whole concept of moral obligations down, so in a face-to-face battle between theistic ethics and secular robust realism, what’s often getting discussed are two different conceptions of moral obligations. Wielenberg, for example, talks about moral obligations arising from enough compelling normative reasons to perform a particular action. To my thinking such a conception of moral duties is a watered-down, domesticated view of what a moral duty is, and insufficient to do justice to what Evans calls the Anscombe intuition—the notion that a moral obligation carries with it a binding prescriptive power and authority that can’t be reduced merely to compelling reasons to perform an action. Cuneo, the same fellow who pressed the prior reasons objection to Evans, also raises an objection against Wielenberg similar to what I’m suggesting here. He writes this:

Consider Wielenberg's own view concerning moral reasons. According to this view, when an agent has decisive moral reason to act in some way, then that agent is morally obligated to act in that way (7; cf. 52). In one place, Wielenberg claims that "to have an obligation just is to have decisive reasons to perform a certain action" (57).

There are two ways to understand this position. According to the first -- call it the unqualified view -- a limited range of normative facts, such as moral and prudential facts, favor or justify responses of certain kinds. If this view is correct, when a moral fact favors or justifies the performance of an action, then there is a moral reason to perform that action. However, under this view, the term "moral reason" does not designate a special type of favoring relation, namely, the moral favoring relation that a moral fact bears to a response of a certain type. Rather, it designates a state of affairs in which there is a moral fact that bears the favoring relation to a given type of response (or, alternatively, it designates a moral fact that bears the favoring relation to a given type of response).

Now distinguish two variants of the unqualified view. According to the first variant, moral obligations determine moral reasons. This variant, however, cannot be the view that Wielenberg accepts, since his position is not that moral obligations determine moral reasons but that moral reasons either determine or are identical with moral obligations. According to the second variant, moral obligations just are decisive moral reasons. This variant of the view avoids the problem just stated. … But it is not easy to understand. This view implies that the state of affairs that consists in some moral fact M decisively favoring a response is a moral obligation. But M cannot itself be a moral obligation, for no complex state of affairs could have M as a constituent and be identical with M. It is not apparent, however, what other sort of moral fact M could be.

Now consider the second understanding of Wielenberg's position. Under this position -- call it the qualified view -- the term "moral reason" designates a special type of favoring relation, namely, the moral favoring relation that something could bear to a response of a certain kind. This relation is just one of many such relations. In fact, according to this view, every system of norms generates and entails a correlative set of reasons: norms of etiquette generate etiquette reasons; norms of chess generate chess reasons; norms of the Mafia generate Mafioso reasons; norms of morality generate moral reasons, and so on.

If this view were correct, it trivially implies that if we are morally obligated to refrain from acting in a given way, then there is a moral reason for us to refrain from acting in that way. Unfortunately, this position also trivially implies that if we are "Mafioso required" to refrain from a given action, then there is a Mafioso reason to refrain from performing it. While this position might be able to explain how moral obligations are grounded in (or are identical with) moral reasons, it implies nothing regarding the normative weight of these reasons and the obligations they determine (or are identical with). Instead, it invites us to ask the higher-level question whether we have reason to act on the qualified reasons we have.

In brief, I see no compelling reason to think the prior obligations objection should be construed as evidence that (secular) robust realism provides as good an explanation of objective moral obligations as does classical theism and divine command theory.

Mailbag: On the Morality of God's Judgments in Ezekiel

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From the Mailbag: Dr. Baggett, I've read your co-[written] book with Dr. Walls on the moral argument and have found it to be very helpful for solidifying my belief in God. I understand that by definition, we should trust our moral intuitions and due to that, we can rule out portraits of God that violate those baseline intuitions (e.g. God commanding rape). I see possible and probable interpretations of the genocide texts via Paul Copan that leave my moral intuitions intact, but I'm not sure how this would work for other texts. Consider Ezekiel 5:10 and 26:8. It seems there that God's direct punishment leads to cannibalism of children and the killing of young daughters (ESV). As the parent of three young girls I can't square this with my basic moral intuitions. How would you recommend proceeding?

By the way, thanks so much for your work. I understand if you're not able to answer this due to time restrictions. If you don't have time, do you mind pointing me in a fruitful direction?

Keith Brooks

Thanks for the question, Keith! For illumination on these matters I turned to my colleague, Old Testament professor Dr. Gary Yates. Here’s his reply:

These are direct punishments from God, but the OT prophets do distinguish between God using these enemy armies to carry out his judgments and the culpability these nations have for the moral atrocities they commit when carrying out these judgments. We can see this in Isaiah 10:5-15, where Assyria is the “rod of Yahweh’s anger,” but the intent of the Assyrians is not to carry out God’s intentions or to act in the kinds of humane ways that God demands. The intent of the Assyrians is to “destroy” (10:7) and to usurp God’s sovereignty (10:15). We see the same thing in Jeremiah’s oracle against Babylon in Jeremiah 50-51. The Lord uses Babylon as his “hammer” to strike the earth, but the Babylonians were actually only carrying out the evil intentions of their own hearts (Jer 50:11, 29, 33). The Lord uses the evil actions of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies to accomplish his purposes, but he does not compel them to perform their evil actions. They do them of their own accord and out of their own sinful and corrupt motivations. The prophets always make the case that the Lord will temporarily use these nations to judge Israel but then he would then hold them accountable for their crimes (see also Jer 25)—could he really do this if he had simply compelled them to kill, rape, and pillage? The atrocities of siege, starvation, cannibalism, and military defeat are highlighted in the prophets for two reasons—1) the Lord was motivating repentance by showing the people how terrible the judgment would be if they refused to repent; and 2) these were the specific covenant curses that the Lord had warned would come against Israel if they were not faithful to the covenant he had made with them as his chosen people (cf. Lev 26; Deut 28).

Two other points to consider that might help here. In Genesis 9, God establishes the Noahic covenant with all humanity which calls for severe punishment on those who shed blood (Gen 9:5-6). Isaiah 24:1-5 teaches that God will judge the world for violating the “everlasting covenant” (24:5). Since this covenant is with all nations, and since there is reference to bloodshed in Isaiah 26:21, the covenant in view here is the Noahic covenant. God will judge all nations for their violence and bloodshed in the final judgment. Passages like Amos 1-2; Habakkuk 2; and Nahum 3 also indicate that God’s judgment of nations (like Babylon and Assyria) is based on the fact that they have committed crimes that involved bloodshed against other nations and peoples. If God is directly responsible for the bloodshed and other acts of violence, then he is directly violating his own covenant.

The other point is that OT law expressly forbade Israel from practicing the kinds of atrocities against non-combatants that we are talking about here. When waging war outside of the land, they were not to kill non-combatants (Deut 20). They were given explicit instructions as to what to do with female prisoners of war that they wished to take as wives, and observance of these guidelines would have protected against wanton rape and abuse of females (Deut 21:10-13). God’s concern for widows and orphans reflects his concern for the oppressed. When we see Israel taking female captives for sexual purposes at the end of Judges (from their own people), the point there is that the Israelites are acting more like Canaanites than the kind of people that God designed them to be. In sum, we have to look at passages like these from Ezekiel 5 and 10 that you have pointed out in light of the whole canon and in light of the explicit moral commands and structures that God has put in place. I hope this helps.

Dr. Gary Yates

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