I mean, right?
I’ve been listening to various youtubers, as mentioned forgetfully in at least two posts, and some of them spend considerable time responding to various Theist, and mostly Christian, Apologists and so on.
This is getting pretty old, to be honest, but one of the arguments that goes by now and then from the apologists is that atheists have no objective basis for moral statements; without God, the argument goes, atheists can’t say that torturing puppies or whatever is objectively bad. Implicit, and generally unexamined, is a corresponding claim that theists have a source of objective moral statements, that source being God.
But this latter claim is wrong.
What is an objective truth? That is a question that tomes can be, and have been, written about, but for now: in general an objective truth is a true statement that, once we’re clear on the meanings of the words, is true or false. A statement on which there is a fact of the matter. If Ben and I can agree on what an apple is, which bowl we’re talking about, what it means to be in the bowl, and so on, sufficient to the situation, then “there are three apples in the bowl” is objectively true, if it is. If Ben insists that there are six apples in the bowl, and we can discover that for some odd reason Ben uses “an apple” to refer to what we would think of as half an apple, we have no objective disagreement.
What is a moral truth? Again, tomes, but for now: a moral truth is (inter alia) one that provides a moral reason for action. A typical moral truth is “You should do X” for some value of X. In fact we can say that that (along with, say, “You should not do X“) is the only moral truth. No other fact or statement has moral bearing, unless it leads to a conclusion about what one should do.
(We will take as read the distinction between conditional and categorical imperatives, at least for now; we’re talking about the categorical imperative, or probably equally well about the “If you want to be a good person, you should X” conditional one.)
What would an objective moral truth look like, and where would it come from? We would have to be able to get to a fact of the matter about “You should do X” from things about which there are facts of the matter, modulo word meanings. The theist is almost certainly thinking that the argument is simple and looks like:
- You should do what God wants,
- God wants you to do X,
- You should do X.
Since we’re talking about whether the theist’s argument works, we stipulate that God exists and wants you (me, us, etc.) to do X for some X. And if we should do what God wants, we should therefore do X.
But is it objectively true that we should do what God wants?
If I disagree, and say that I don’t think we should do what God wants, the theist can claim that we differ on the meanings of words, and that what they mean by “should do” is just “God wants you to do”. But that’s not very interesting; under those definitions it’s just a tautology, and “you should do X” turns out not to be a moral truth, since “should do X” may no longer be motivating.
To get further, the theist will have to claim that “God wants you to do X” implies “You should do X” in the moral sense of “should”; that it’s objectively motivating. And it’s not clear how that would work, how that claim is any stronger than any other. A utilitarian can equally say “X leads to the greatest good for the greatest number” is objectively motivating, a rule-utilitarian can say that “X follows the utility-maximizing feasible rules” is objectively motivating, and so on.
(“You should do X because God will punish you if you don’t” can be seen as objectively motivating, but not for moral reasons; that’s just wanting to avoid punishment, so not relevant here.)
Why would someone think that “You should do what God wants you to do” is any more objectively true than “You should do what maximizes utility” or “You should do what protects your family’s honor”? I don’t find myself with anything useful to say about that; because they grew up hearing it, or they’ve heard it in Church every Sunday or whatever, I suppose?
So that’s that. See title. :) Really we probably could have stopped at the first sentence.
ceoln 