Morriston on God and the Ontological Foundation of Morality (Part One)

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Sometime back, somebody — alas! I cannot remember when or who — asked me to write an analysis of the following article by Wes Morriston:

“God and the Ontological Foundation of Morality” (2012) 48 Religious Studies 15-34

At the time I rejected the suggestion. I had read Morriston’s article when it was first published, and while I found it to be pretty good, I didn’t think it contained any revelatory insights into the putative relationship between theism and morality. More recently, however, I have had the occasion to re-read the article, and although my original interpretation hasn’t changed greatly, Morriston’s discussion has become tangentially relevant to something else I’m researching and writing at the moment and so I am much more motivated to engage with its details. Which is precisely what I’m going to do in this and the next blog post.

Morriston’s article is a sustained analysis and critique of William Lane Craig’s views on the relationship between God and morality. According to Morriston, throughout his work on this topic, Craig has defended two clear theses about this relationship:

Thesis 1: If theism is true, we have a sound (ontological) foundation for morality.

Thesis 2: If theism is false, we do not have a sound (ontological) foundation for morality.

The problem, as Morriston sees it, is that both of these theses are false. It is not true that God provides a sound foundation for morality, nor is it true that without God we would lack a sound foundation. I will discuss Morriston’s analysis of each of these claims over the next two blog posts.

In this post, I will cover Morriston’s discussion of the first thesis. I start by outlining, in a fairly quick-fire manner, Craig’s basic views on the ontological grounding of moral values and moral duties. I then look at Morriston’s critique of Craig’s views on moral values, before closing with Morriston’s critique of Craig’s views on moral duties.


1. Craig’s Moral Ontology, in a Nutshell
The universe consists of entities, activities and states of affairs. Every actually existent entity, activity and state of affairs can be called a “fact”. One of the curious features of these facts is that they sometimes have moral statuses attached to them. There are basically two types of moral status that can attach to a fact: (i) a value status, according to which the fact is held to be “good” or “bad”; and (ii) a deontic or duty-oriented status, according to which the fact is held to be obligatory, permissible or forbidden.

The central assumption guiding Craig’s moral theory is that the moral statuses we attach to facts need an ontological grounding. Without this ontological grounding moral facts would fail to be objective in the sense required by Craig (I discussed Craig’s views on objectivity at some length before). Whether this assumption is a good one is a question to which we shall return. For now, let us focus on the ontological grounding that Craig offers.

Let’s look first to Craig’s ontological grounding of moral values. According to Craig, moral values are grounded in the being of God. They aren’t simply inert abstract facts, as the moral Platonists would have us believe and which Craig thinks metaphysically “queer”, they are facts about a concrete God. Specifically, they are facts about God’s essential nature or characteristics. God, according to Craig, is essentially just, kind, generous, loving and so forth. These characteristics ultimately constitute the moral good; and the fact that they are characteristics of God thus provides the good with its ontological grounding.

Craig’s views about the ontological grounding of moral duties builds upon what he says about moral values. As regards moral duties, Craig adopts a fairly typical divine command theory (DCT): the obligatory, the permissible and the forbidden are grounded in God’s commands. Something is obligatory if God commands us to do it; something is forbidden if God commands us not to do it; and something is permissible if God neither commands nor forbids it.

Craig adds to this typical DCT the additional claim that what God commands “flows from” his moral nature. In doing so, he hopes to avoid the typical Euthphro-based objection to DCT that on this account God’s commands could be arbitrary, i.e. that God could command us to do anything, including raping and torturing children, and that if he did we would be obliged to do it. This potential arbitrariness of God’s commands seems to clash with some deep intuitive beliefs we have about moral facts, namely, that they are necessary, i.e. the same in all possible worlds. But if God’s commands flow directly from his moral nature, the arbitrariness objection is, arguably, overcome. God’s commands are no longer arbitrary, they are constrained by his morally perfect nature.

The diagram below tries to summarise Craig’s views about the ontological grounding of moral facts.

2. Morriston on Moral Values
Morriston offers two main critiques of Craig’s attempt to ground moral values in God’s essential characteristics. The critiques essentially amount to the same thing, but they differ in terms of their rhetorical strength, at least they do so in my opinion. The first, and in my opinion rhetorically weaker critique, is effectively a reformulated version of the Euthyphro dilemma. The second, and in my opinion rhetorically stronger critique, probes a bit more deeply into Craig’s conception of the grounding relationship.




2.1 - The New Euthyphro
The reformulated version of the Euthyphro works like this. Craig is claiming that things are morally good to the extent that they resemble God’s essential characteristics. In other words, as the diagram above makes clear, he is claiming that goodness is equivalent to God-likeness. But this raises a dilemma. Either God-likeness is equivalent to goodness because his essential characteristics — like kindness, lovingness, generosity and justice — are independently good, or those characteristics are good solely in virtue of the fact that they are possessed by God.

If Craig takes the first horn of the dilemma — and says that characteristics such as kindness, lovingness and so on are good independently of God — then he effectively concedes that God is not needed to ground objective moral values, they are independent, free-floating properties. This would surely not be welcome to him. But if he takes the second horn of the dilemma — and says that those characteristics are good simply because they are possessed by God — then he faces two problems. First, he appears to make the good contingent upon God’s characteristics which, arguably, could have been different. Making moral values contingent in this manner clashes with some people’s deep intuitions about the nature of the good. And second, he seems to commit himself to the claim that, in a godless universe, someone who was loving and kind would not be good. Morriston thinks this is strongly counterintuitive: we have no real reason to think that those characteristics would not be good in a godless universe.

Craig may respond that these two criticisms of the second horn of the dilemma involve counterfactual claims with impossible antecedents (call these “counterpossibles”) and that counterpossibles of this sort have, on the standard account, merely trivial or vacuous truth values. That is to say, no serious objection to his view can rely on claims like “If God had different characteristics, then those characteristics would be good” or “If God did not exist, then kindness would not be good” since it is impossible for God to have different characteristics or for God to not exist. I’ll discuss this kind of response in more detail below when I consider Morriston’s critique of Craig’s account of moral duties.


2.2 The Moral Metre Stick
The second criticism of Craig’s ontology of moral value looks more closely at the kind of ontological grounding Craig envisages. Morriston looks at a number of quotes from Craig’s debates at this point in order to determine what Craig thinks about this relationship. I will simply summarise the results of this investigation. According to Morriston, Craig’s vision of the grounding here can be understood in terms of “informative identification” and/or “paradigmatic instantiation”.

The best way to understand what an informative identification is is to look at some examples. Two are cited in Morriston’s article. The first is that “water” can be informatively identified with the chemical compound “H20”; the second is that “heat” can be informatively identified with “mean molecular motion”. To me, these are two classic examples of reductive ontological groundings, i.e. cases in which one set of properties is reduced to another. In theory, this could lead to the elimination of the first set of properties. In other words, all talk of water could be eliminated in favour of talk about H2O, or all talk of heat could be eliminated in favour of talk about mean molecular motion.

Does Craig intend to make similar claims about talk of goodness and talk of God-likeness? It’s not clear to me that he does, and the possibility that he does raises issues not addressed by Morriston in his article so I will not pursue them here. All I will say is that there are significant problems associated with reductive accounts of the good of this sort (which, I hasten to add, is not to say that all reductive accounts of the good are problematic, just that some are). Mark Schroeder’s article “Realism and Reduction” is a good place to start if you wish to explore these issues in more detail.

The notion that God provides a paradigmatic instantiation of the good is rather more interesting and, I believe, significant. The analogy Craig uses to make his case is a familiar one: the metre stick analogy. According to popular lore, the length we refer to as “one metre” is determined by reference to a standard metre stick (an iridium bar that is kept in Paris). This is the paradigmatic instantiation of the metre. But this use of this physical paradigm has a curious effect on the ontology of the metre viz. the degree to which an distance is one metre in length just is the degree to which it is similar to the length of the standard metre stick. There is nothing more to the ontology of the metre than this similarity relationship.

Craig argues that this is also true of the ontology of moral goodness. That is to say, God functions as something like a standard moral metre stick: the degree to which any person, object, event or state of affairs in the real world is good just is the degree to which it resembles God.

I have attempted to summarises the main features of the metre stick analogy in the diagram below.

There are several problems with Craig’s use of the metre stick analogy. For starters, the story about the standard metre stick is a good deal more complex than is being let on. The precise definition of a metre, and the physical paradigm that is used to define it, has changed over the years. At the moment, a metre is defined as “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second”. It is not defined by reference to the iridium bar that is kept in Paris. The fact that the paradigm has shifted in this manner over time suggests, perhaps, that the “metre” is not simply reducible to any physical paradigm but is, instead, an abstract property. It may occasionally be helpful to identify it with a physical paradigm, but this should not detract from the fact that it is really an abstract concept, something that is ultimately separate from any physical instantiation. Arguably, this is also true of the good: the good is an abstract property, not reducible to any particular physical paradigm.

This may not be persuasive to everyone so it’s worth notin a second problem with the metre stick analogy. This is that units of measurement are arbitrary in a way that moral values are not. In order to measure things and engage in physical sciences reliant on measurement, we need some conventional system of measurement. These conventional systems can arise from completely arbitrary starting points, e.g. the length of Henry VIII’s thumb, but this does not matter: as long as the units are matters of conventional agreement, the measurement game can begin. The same is not true of moral values. We cannot just pick an arbitrary paradigm, such as God’s characteristics, and say that being good consists in similarity with those characteristics. The good is a more important, and metaphysically robust concept than that.

This leads me to suggest an alternative analogy that might be more in keeping with what we think about the good: the straightedge analogy. The analogy is inspired by Dan Dennett’s discussion of the history of the straightedge in this talk. A straightedge is a tool that is used, unsurprisingly, to draw straight edges or to check the flatness of machined surface (among other things). Over the years, many physical objects have served as paradigms of the straight edge. But the straight edge itself remains an abstract, indeed, mathematical, entity. Although our physical paradigms might get closer and closer to this abstraction, they are still not ontologically equivalent to it. I argue that something similar is true of the good: approximations of it can be found in physical paradigms, but it is not reducible to those paradigms. So there may be many reasons for thinking that God, if he exists, would serve as an excellent paradigm of the good, but this should not be taken to imply that God is ontologically equivalent to the good.

(Note: the last three paragraphs are really based on my own ideas, not Morriston’s)



2.3 - So what does ground moral values?
If the preceding criticisms succeed, then Craig has failed to show that God provides a sound ontological foundation for moral values. This raises the obvious question: if God doesn’t provide it, then what does? Morriston’s preferred answer, which has been hinted at above, is “nothing”. Moral values are abstract, sui generis facts, just as a moral Platonist would hold. Craig might object that this makes moral values metaphysically “queer” but Morriston avers that Craig’s claim that moral values just are equivalent to God’s essential characteristics is no less metaphysically puzzling.

When it comes to finding ontological groundings for facts it’s always going to be a question of which is the most appropriate stopping point. Since not every fact can have a grounding (lest we risk an infinite regress of groundings) we have to decide where to call a halt. Morriston argues that Craig has done nothing to show that God is a more appropriate stopping point than the moral properties of kindness, generosity and justice themselves.



3. Morriston on Craig’s Account of Moral Duties
After that rather elaborate discussion of moral values, my discussion of duties will seem like somewhat of a damp squib. But that’s for two reasons. First, I think the analysis of values is more fundamental and more interesting. And second, Morriston has relatively less to say about this topic.

Recall that for Craig moral duties are grounded in God’s commands, but that God’s commands are constrained by his essential nature. As a result, Craig thinks he manages to slip between the horns of the classic Euthyphro dilemma: duties really do depend on God’s commands, but God’s commands are not arbitrary.

This means that Craig thinks he need not respond to the classic “What if God commanded something terrible?” objections to DCT. Why not? Because these objections depend on counterpossibles, i.e. commands that God could never issue. This could mean one of two things:

(a) The objection relies on a counterfactual claim with a vacuous truth value according to the usual Stalnaker-Lewis semantics of counterpossibles; or

(b) The objection relies on a nonsensical claim. Asking “what if God commanded something terrrible?” is like asking “what if circles had straight edges?”. Whatever answer we give to these questions would be meaningless.

Morriston rejects both of these suggestions. He thinks that counterpossibles can be both non-vacuously true and meaningful. The example he chooses is an unusual one. He asks us to consider what would follow if an omniscient and perfectly honest being told us — per impossibile — that 2+2=5. In response he suggests that we would have to take the claim seriously since it seems to be the case that whatever an omniscient and perfectly honest being tells us has to be true. In other words, this seems to be a counterpossible claim that is neither vacuously true nor non-sensical. Hence, it is still possible for “what if God commanded X?” objections to have some effect on Craig’s DCT.

I’m not entirely sure I follow Morriston’s reasoning here. Those who are better versed in the semantics and logic of counterfactuals will be better-positioned to evaluate his argument. I’m rather more persuaded by Morriston’s second observation about counterpossibles, which is that Craig himself seems to have an inconsistent attitude toward them. In particular, it seems that Craig thinks that there is at least one counterpossible that is neither vacuously true nor nonsensical:

Thesis 2: If theism is false, we do not have a sound (ontological) foundation for morality.

This is a counterpossible because Craig seems to adopt the view that God is a necessary being, i.e. a being that could not fail to exist. But despite this Craig expends a great deal of energy defending the truth of this counterpossible. We’ll consider what he to say in part two.

If Morriston is successful in his refutation of Craig’s ontology of moral duties, the obvious question arises: what does ground moral duties? Morriston argues that there are two possibilities.

The first is that duties, like values, need no ontological grounding. After all, there are a variety of normative laws — e.g. one ought not to believe any argument that commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent — that seem to create something akin to duties but have no grounding outside of themselves.

The second is that duties could be grounded in the commands or desires of a strictly hypothetical agent, as is done in Ideal Observer-style theories of ethics. In this case, the actual existence of the ideal observer is not needed since all that matters is what the observer would command/desire if he/she existed.


4. Conclusion
To sum up, Craig thinks that if theism is true, then we have a sound ontological foundation for moral facts. Specifically, he thinks that moral values are grounded in the essential characteristics of God and that moral duties are grounded in the commands of an essentially good God.

In response, Morriston has argued that Craig’s attempt to ground moral facts in God is flawed. His grounding of moral values relies on a questionable account of the grounding relationship and is open to a revised version of the Euthyphro dilemma. Likewise, his grounding of moral duties relies on an inconsistent attitude toward the truth of counterpossibles. In addition to this, Morriston has argued that moral facts either do not need any ontological grounding or, if they do, that non-theistic groundings are available.

It should be noted that Morriston does not think that there is anything atheistic about his view. Indeed, he self-identifies as a Christian and thinks that his view, which is shared by other Christians (e.g. Swinburne) should be preferred by theists over that of Craig.

Craig on Objective Morality (Part Two)

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(Part One)

You should probably read part one before attempting this, but if that seems like too much to ask, then be reassured that I’ll try my best to summarise the important parts of that discussion when it seems important to do so.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to work out exactly what Craig means when he says that God makes objective moral values and duties possible. As noted in part one, this is an important exercise since imprecision in what is meant by objectivity can be a way to both confuse and be confused.

Craig dedicates two paragraphs in his book Reasonable Faith to clarifying what he means by objectivity. Last time out, I subjected the first of these paragraphs to a close analysis and concluded that Craig seems to mean at least two things when he claims that an entity or property is "objective": (i) that it is mind-independent; and (ii) that it is non-relative. It is important to keep these two concepts distinct since they need not always go together.

In this entry, I’ll first look at paragraph two in more detail and then consider moral platitudes and metaethical theories in general.


1. Paragraph Two: Cognitivism
Again, for ease of reference, I’ll quote the paragraph in full:

“To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or bad independently of whether any human believes it to be so. Similarly to say that we have objective moral duties is to say that certain actions are right or wrong for us independently of whether any human being believes them to be so. For example, to say that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them so that it was universally believed that the Holocaust was right. The of premise (1) [of Craig’s moral argument] is that if there is no God, then moral values and duties are not objective in this sense.”

In many ways, this paragraph just further elaborates on the distinctions and clarifications we discussed in part one. For instance, the concept of mind-independency is once again clearly to the fore, as is the idea that moral truths are not relative to particular sets of cultural beliefs and practices (e.g. those of the Nazis).

What is interesting about this paragraph is what it has to say about the truth value of moral propositions. It is clear that Craig thinks, in addition to being mind-independent and non-relative, moral propositions such as “the Nazis were wrong to carry out the Holocaust” have a truth value and, indeed, that that truth value is positive in this instance.

In some ways this observation probably ties in better with a discussion of premise (2) of Craig’s argument (in which he affirms the existence of objective moral values and duties), but I think it is worth making here for a couple of reasons.

First, not all metaethical theories accept that moral statements like “X is good” or “I have a duty to do A” have truth value. Such theories are non-cognitivist in nature. Examples include, universal prescriptivism, expressivism, and emotivism. These theories usually argue that a non-cognitivist approach is more plausible on semantic and ontological grounds, and that it can actually give us a good deal of what we want from morality in return for sacrificing the possibility of truth value.

Second, it is possible to believe that moral propositions are intended to refer to mind-independent phenomena, to be non-relative in their scope, and to have truth value, and still deny that they have positive truth value. In other words, it is possible to be a moral nihilist or error theorist and still accept Craig’s other claims about what is needed to have an objective morality. This would really be a rejection of premise (2) of Craig’s arugment. We call theories that accept the positive truth value of moral propositions “realist”.

Third, and most importantly, although it might be correct to say that cognitivism follows straightforwardly from mind-independence and non-relativity -- and so, one who accepts those claims automatically accepts cognitivism -- it is not necessarily true to say that one who rejects these properties rejects cognitivism. In other words, it could be argued that moral propositions are mind-dependent but still capable of having a positive truth value.

This is a significant observation since it seems to me that Craig’s argument as whole is intended to appeal to the fact that people really want to be able to affirm that certain things are good and bad ( or right and wrong). Like Craig, I think we all really want to be able to say that what the Nazis did was just wrong and that no amount of cultural brainwashing will make it otherwise. But if that’s what we want to be able to say, then it seems like all we really care about is positive truth value - mind-independency and non-relativity might be purely incidental.


2. What are the key moral platitudes?
So far I’ve been analysing what Craig has to say about objectivity. I now want to step back from this analysis and offer some more general comments on metaethics and successful metaethical theories.

Let's ask the question: What is so important about moral objectivity? Why does Craig latch onto objectivity in his moral argument? I hinted at this above, but to be more explicit now, I think Craig’s discussion is only interesting to the extent that it tells us something about the kinds of things we demand from a successful moral theory. These are sometimes referred to as the "platitudes" of moral discourse.

Craig clearly demands objectivity, but as we have seen his use of this term is imprecise. He could be referring to mind-independence, non-relativity, or cognitivism, or some combination of the three. It could also be that he has other demands that are more implied than explicit.

So let's not be too wedded to what Craig wants, let's focus instead on the kinds of things we all might want from a successful moral theory. I don’t know if I can do justice to all the demands we might place on a successful moral theory, but the following list seems to me to be fairly typical. I’ll define the terms as I go along (there’s going to be some overlap with what I’ve already said):

(a) Mind-Independence: We hope that moral properties exist independently of the desires and beliefs of human beings. If we wish, we can be even more discriminating in how we define mind-independency. We could, for example, distinguish between desire-independent and belief-independent theories. I won’t do that here, but it’s worth noting anyway. We could also distinguish between theories that make moral properties independent of our own personal minds and theories that make moral properties independent of all minds. 

(b) Absolutivity: We want moral propositions and claims to hold true for all people, at all times and all places. How absolute is “absolute”? That depends. We may include a number of contextual factors in our moral theories (e.g. “X is morally obliged not to kill another human being (Y) provided that Y is not trying to kill X), but we could hold that anyone who find themselves in a similar context is bound to affirm the truth of such a proposition. This would be a kind of absolute morality. To distinguish it from an even more absolute morality, we might like to refer to "strong" and "weak" forms of absolutivity.

(c) Practicality: We want moral properties to actually affect how people behave. In other words, if someone recognises that they have a moral obligation not to kill another human being (unless certain contextual factors apply), then we would expect them to acknowledge that they must act in a way that is compliant with this obligation. We could add an “overridingness” condition to this if we wish. This condition would stipulate that we expect the recognition of a particular moral status to supply a reason for action that overrides any other reasons for action that a particular agent may think he has. 

(d) Positive Truth Value: We want it to be the case that at least some moral propositions are true and at least some are false. We don’t want to be moral nihilists. 

(e) Non-trivial truth value: This might be a slightly unusual condition and so requires some explication. I’m adding it in here to exclude a certain type of moral theory. The theory I have in mind is one which satisfies our demand for positive truth value, but does so in a manner that is trivial or vacuous. As it turns out, this might be one ground upon which to object to a theistic metaethics, but it is not prejudicial against this position. It can apply equally well to non-theistic theories. Here’s an example: 

• In Plato's Republic, Cleitophon proposes at one point (340b) that “justice” is whatever the strongest believes to be to his advantage. Suppose we drop the “whatever the strongest believes...” clause and apply this to all individuals? This would mean that a proposition like “X is just” has a positive truth value. But that truth value is surely trivial in nature: the individual could never be mistaken about what is just since it is relativised to their occurrent beliefs about what is to their advantage.

(f) Non-Scepticism: We want it to be possible to find out which moral propositions are true and which are false; we don’t want to be moral sceptics. This is an epistemic constraint and Craig seems to think such constraints are irrelevant in metaethical debates (at least in the ones he has had). I disagree (see here for more). It seems to me that a moral theory which satisfies the other conditions but which forces us to be moral sceptics would be unwelcome.

(g) Fit with Background Knowledge: We want the theory to be consistent with other parts of our worldview. Obviously this might be difficult to apply in some cases: theists are likely to think that morality must be consistent with God’s existence, and naturalists are likely to think that it would be nice if moral properties were somehow reducible to natural properties. Despite its difficulty, it still seems like a reasonable condition since it applies to all theories, not just moral ones.

These are the platitudes or conditions of success I’ll work with for the remainder of this entry. I could probably add more, and refine them a little bit, but I don’t want this to become too tedious. If you have any complaints about what I’ve said, or think certain refinements are necessary, feel free to comment below.

I doubt very much that any metaethical theory can satisfy all of these demands. The history of moral philosophy would seem to support this observation. Still, I think it is possible for some metaethical theories to satisfy a good number of these demands and so get us a good deal of what we want from morality. Indeed, I think the way to assess competing theories is on the basis of which ones get us the most of what we want.

This suggests that when deciding which is to be our preferred metaethical theory, we may be forced to compromise. We may have to give up one of the things we want in order to have more of the others.

All of which begs the question: which of these platitudes would we be willing to give up?

I’ll lay my own cards on the table at this point. I’d be willing to give up mind-independence. If I could formulate a metaethical theory which allowed for some degree of absolutivity, practicality, non-triviality, positive truth value, non-scepticism, and is consistent with my background knowledge, I’d be delighted. It would be like all my Christmases come at once. It would be bordering on petulance if I were to hold out for mind-independence after getting all of these things. Wouldn’t it?


3. The Scorecard Exercise
Now that we have some idea of what we want from morality, we can put it to use in the analysis of Craig’s theory. As was the case in part one, I am going to propose an exercise here. Its completion is left to the reader.

First, I suggest that we construct a scorecard with which we can evaluate different metaethical theories. On the "row" side of the scorecard we will have the moral platitudes outlined above. On the "column" side of the scorecard we will align all the different metaethical theories. Obviously, the goal is to see how well the different theories do with respect to the platitudes.

To perform this evaluation properly, we will have to have some idea of the available competitor theories. This is one area in which Craig’s discussion in Reasonable Faith is sorely lacking. He only seriously considers non-natural realism (or Platonic realism, as he calls it) as an alternative to theistic metaethics. I think we need to be far more expansive in our search of the available theoretic space.

Here is an abbreviated list of the available moral theories to get the ball rolling (I’m going to exclude non-cognitive theories):

• (1) Non-natural realism: Moral properties are real, but they exist in some abstract, non-natural realm.

• (2) Theological voluntarism: Moral properties are real, but they depend for their existence on one or more of God’s voluntary acts (willings, desirings, or commands).

• (3) Paradigmatic Exemplarism: Moral properties are real, but only in virtue of the fact that there exists a being that is a paradigmatic exemplar of those properties (I confess, you probably won’t find this theory mentioned in the available textbooks. As far as I know, the name is of my own invention. Nevertheless, it comes close to Craig’s own views with respect to how God grounds the existence of certain moral properties; and it is distinct from theological voluntarism).

• (4) Naturalistic Realism: Moral properties are real, but they are *reducible* to natural properties. I use *reducible* somewhat reluctantly since there are different theories and some of them object to the label of reductionism (Luke Muehlhauser has been doing a series on these recently, which is well worth reading).

• (5) Extreme Moral Subjectivism: Moral properties are real but their content is directly determined by the beliefs and desires of each individual.

• (6) External Moral Subjectivism: Moral properties are real but they depend for their existence on the subjective attitudes of one or more individuals external to oneself.

• (7) Constructivism: Moral properties are real, but they depend for their existence on some appropriately construed constructive procedure (e.g. a social contract). This comes in a variety of forms (Kantian, Humean and Decision-theoretic) and has been discussed on this blog before.

• (8) Nihilism: Moral properties are not real. We might think they are, but they’re really not.

Here then is the proposed scorecard (click to embiggen).

Now all we have to do is determine how each of the available theories does in relation to each of the proposed platitudes. We could place a tick or an “x” in each box for comparative purposes, and whichever theory satisfies the most of these demands “wins” (gets the most ticks), in the sense that it is the best we can hope for. I've kick-started the process by marking the score for nihilism.

I suggest that if we perform this exercise, Craig’s theory might not do nearly as well as some of its competitors. Furthermore, even if it does equally as well as some of its competitors, Craig’s moral argument is undercut. Why? Because he claims that God’s existence is essential for getting what we want from morality, but if there are other theories that get the same amount (or more) then this is wrong.

We must careful when doing the necessary comparison. This is for two reasons. First, it is probably best to construct a separate scorecard for each of the moral properties under consideration, i.e. one for moral values and another for moral obligations. Second, we should only reach a determination on a particular criterion after having evaluated the associated argument.

I’m not going to go ahead and actually fill in the remainder scorecard here since it requires a good deal more careful analysis to do this properly. Still, I think this is a good methodology to adopt when addressing Craig’s (and others’) arguments about metaethics.



4. Conclusion
The discussion in this post has taken us away somewhat from the original concerns with Craig’s definition of objectivity. I’ll try to tie it all back together.

As we have seen, Craig thinks the existence of God is the only way in which to secure the objectivity of morality. The problem is that it is not entirely clear what he means by objectivity. He might mean mind-independence, or non-relativity or positive truth value, or some combination of all three.

In light of his lack of clarity, I suggest we are better off interpreting Craig’s claims about objectivity as being akin to those of someone placing demands or constraints on successful moral theories. I further suggest that there are many such demands and that those employed by Craig may not even be that important.

In order to properly evaluate proposed metaethical theories, I think we should construct a kind of scorecard on which we determine how many of our moral demands are satisfied by the different theories and compare them with one another.

That’s it for now.

Craig on Objective Morality (Part One)

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[Note: I’m hoping that this might end up being part of longer a series, but I don’t want to get too ambitious at this stage. I would appreciate any comments and suggestions on improving my analysis, but do bear in mind that I have two more entries on the objectivity issue planned]

“So many debates in philosophy revolve around the issue of objectivity versus subjectivity that one may be forgiven for assuming that someone somewhere understands this distinction.” 

(Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-realism”, SEP)

I like Richard Joyce. He has written some lucid and highly engaging stuff on moral philosophy over the years. Now I don’t ultimately agree with him, but I like the above quote because it captures one of the key difficulties in all philosophical arguments: the imprecision of terminology.

Many concepts that we use in everyday speech, like “objectivity” or “subjectivity”, have been subjected to highly intricate and elaborate philosophical theorisations. So to say that something is objective, or to affirm the existence of objective entities, can be both uninformative and misleading.

I mention all this because, of course, the centrepiece of Craig’s moral argument is the claim that “objective moral values and duties exist”, and that they can only do so if God exists as well. What does Craig mean by this? In the text of Reasonable Faith (p. 173, to be precise), Craig dedicates two paragraphs to directly answering this question (further indications of what he means by “objective” are peppered throughout his discussion). Let’s see if things become clearer if we subject these paragraphs to close scrutiny.


1. Paragraph One: Objectivity and Relativity
For ease of reference, I’ll quote the first paragraph in its entirety here (emphasis added):

“Let me say something to clarify the distinction between something’s being objective and something’s being subjective. To say that something is objective is to say that it is independent of what people think or perceive. By contrast, to say that something is subjective is just to say that it is not objective; that is to say, it is dependent on what human persons think or perceive. So, for example, the distinction between being on Mars and not being on Mars is an objective distinction; a particular rock’s being on Mars is in no way dependent on our beliefs. By contrast the distinction between “here” and “there” is not objective: whether a particular event, at a certain spatial location occurs here or there depends upon a person’s point of view.”

Noting the highlighted phrases, it becomes pretty clear that I think Craig makes two interesting clarifications here about the nature of objectivity. I want to discuss these in some detail.

The first clarification is the idea that in order for something to be objective, it must be mind-independent. In other words, like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, an objective entity continues to exist even in the absence of a mind which perceives its existence.

I like to think of this as the core, or privileged, sense of “objectivity”. In other words, as the sense that is closest to that implied in the paradigmatic applications of the term. But because I think objectivity is a confusing term, I will use the more precise term “mind-independence” to refer to this sense of objectivity. Similarly, I’ll use the term “mind-dependent” to refer to that which is typically considered under the term “subjective”.

The second interesting clarification comes from Craig’s use of the indexical terms “here” and “there”. When I see this it immediately sets certain alarm bells off in my head. Indexicals are probably the distinguishing mark of relativistic claims (moral or otherwise). So I take it that Craig’s use of the terms here is intended to exclude the relative from the domain of the objective.

But this raises the question: what does it mean for something to be relative? Roughly, a proposition or state of affairs is relative when its truth/falsity (or existence/non-existence) cannot be determined on its own terms, but only relative to some other proposition or phenomenon.

To modify Craig’s example, the claim “there is a desk ten feet in front of me” can only be assessed for its truth value relative to my current spatial location. It cannot be assessed in the absolute. It is perfectly possible for this claim to be true for me and not for you; no contradiction is entailed by this possibility (but note: it can still be true or false).


2. Do we need to distinguish the objective from the relative?
If Craig is conflating relativism and mind-independence in the course of clarifying the nature of the “objective” in paragraph one, then there might be a problem. While it might generally be true that mind-dependency and relativity are present at the same time, it is not necessarily true.

Richard Joyce actually makes this point in the course of his article on Moral Anti-realism. He argues that there can be mind-independent relativisms and mind-dependent absolutisms. As follows:

Mind-Independent Relativism: Michael Jordan might be tall relative to most other men, but he might be average in height relative to other basketball players. Thus the truth of any claim about his tallness is going to be relatively determined, but at the same time there is nothing particularly mind-dependent about it.

Mind-Dependent Absolutivity: We might decide that “X is good” means “My grandmother approves of X”. This would make goodness a mind-dependent property, but would it make the claim “X is good” a relativistic one? No; the truth conditions of that statement would hold true for all individuals at all spatial and temporal locations (it might be epistemically difficult for some of those individuals to gain access to those truth conditions, but that’s another matter).

This suggests that we can construct the following two-by-two matrix.

In future entries, I’m going to suggest that this two-by-two matrix is inadequate because there are even more dimensions to be considered when assessing metaethical theories. But for the time being we can use it to perform two interesting exercises.

First, considering the two dimensions we have identified, ask yourself: what is it that we would like from a metaethical theory? Is mind-independency really that important? Or is absolutivity the most important thing? I’m not going to propose any answers here. But it’s worth thinking about since one of the most common ways to do metaethics is to first specify what we demand from our moral terms and then look around to see if any of the available theories satisfy these demands. It could well be that no single theory satisfies all the demands and so when it comes to actually figuring out which theory is the most acceptable we have to compromise.

The second exercise we can perform is to try to position some moral theories on the grid. I have provided an illustration below. I put “extreme moral subjectivism” in the top left. This is the theory that makes moral truth entirely dependent on your subjective whims, which can vary from time to time and place to place. I put “external moral subjectivism” in the top right. This is theory that makes moral truth dependent on the subjective whims of another. This would be akin to the grandmother subjectivism discussed above. I put nothing in the bottom left because I am unsure what belongs there. And I tentatively place Craig’s preferred metaethics in the bottom right.

The placement is tentative for a couple of reasons. Although it is true that -- based on what he has said in paragraph one -- Craig wants his theistic metaethics to belong in the bottom right quadrant, his desires are obviously not going to determine the issue. We need to see whether his actual theory merits this placement. It may not.

For instance, Luke Muehlhauser has been arguing for some time that Craig’s theory really belongs in the upper right quadrant since he makes moral truth dependent on God’s mind (much like I did with my grandmother earlier in this post).

We need to be somewhat careful about this claim since it raises issues relating to the Euthyphro dilemma and Craig has some responses to this (or, rather, he adopts the responses of others) which I’ll have to comment on later (even though I have discussed them before).

But I should note that I have similar concerns with Craig’s theory myself. Elsewhere in his discussion, Craig seems to endorse the idea that moral obligations are relativistic. To be precise, he endorses the claim that moral obligations arise from relations between human beings and God. This would seem to make obligations (if not values) relativistic. Now maybe he could argue in response that the obligations we have towards God never change and are hence (contingently) absolute. The problem with this is that it is not obviously or necessarily true. For instance, I am sure a Christian (who believes in Hell) would have to believe that our obligations changed in the post-Jesus era. If this is right, then our obligations are not absolute.

Anyway, that’s enough for this post. I’ll look into paragraph two next time round.