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