Category Archives: Morality

Morality

What Are the Flaws of Moral Relativism? – Part 1

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Post Author:  Darrell

Re-post from Aug 2, 2010

Moral Relativists hold to the position that morals, i.e., that which is right versus that which is wrong, are not absolute or objective in nature.  Instead, they are dependent upon what an individual believes and/or a community deems appropriate. As a result, an action can be morally wrong for person “x” and morally right for person “y” at one and the same time and in the same sense simply due to the fact that they hold different beliefs or their community deems different things to be appropriate.  To the relativist, moral principles are not transcendent in nature, and as a result, they do not apply universally to all people at all times.

In Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air , Francis Beckwith and Gregory Koukl cite seven fatal flaws of Moral Relativism.  In the next few posts, I will list and explain these flaws in an effort to demonstrate the challenges inherent in the philosophy of Moral Relativism.

Flaw Number One: Moral Relativists are logically incapable of accusing others of doing wrong. Many moral relativists take the position that morals are a matter of personal definition, i.e., something is only wrong if it is deemed to be so by that particular individual.  This places relativists in quite an untenable position, for then an individual who believes murder to be morally acceptable would be morally appropriate in murdering.  The moral relativist may personally believe that murder is wrong, but this is of no effect when defining what is morally wrong for the murderer.  The murderer’s actions are only wrong if the murderer himself believes them to be wrong.

Some moral relativists believe that morals are not defined by an individual, but are instead defined by one’s community.  However, this position is equally untenable, for if morals are defined by ones community, Hitler and Germany were acting in a morally appropriate manner when they slaughtered millions of Jews.  After all, their community deemed these actions morally acceptable.  In fact, one might even say that the Allied forces were morally wrong in forcing Germany to stop, for they were forcing their community’s moral beliefs upon Germany.

Obviously, next to no one is willing to say that murder is acceptable or that the holocaust was morally appropriate, yet both of these positions are a logical consequence of moral relativism.  Consequently, moral relativists are in the position of affirming the moral acceptability of these horrific actions or are forced to maintain the belief that at least some actions (murder and genocide) are morally wrong despite what an individual or community believes.

In the next post we will look at a few more flaws inherent in Moral Relativism.  Stick around.

Morality

Are There Any True Moral Relativists?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This post is a bit of a rant, but I hope it provides some light on top of the heat.  In 2011 I asked a simple question on the blog and then allowed readers to vote on the answer.  Here is the question: Is the statement, “It is wrong to rape little children for fun,” objectively or subjectively true?

I explained that objectively true means that a statement is “true for all people at all times in all places,” and that subjectively true means that a statement is “a matter of taste, of my personal preference,” like saying that “French roast is the worst tasting coffee.”

299 votes have been cast since I posted the poll question, and disappointingly, only 68% voted that the statement is objectively true.  Think about this: more than 30% of the people who responded to this poll are so morally confused that they fail to recognize that raping a little child for fun is morally wrong for all people at all times in all places.

By casting their votes for the subjective truth of this statement, they are saying that it is possible that for some person, living at some place, in some time, raping a little child for fun is morally acceptable.  But you can’t really feel the total impact of these votes until you read some of the comments left by people who voted for subjective truth.  Here is a sampling:

“Of course I voted for ‘Subjectively’ since there is no objective morality.”

“Morals are subjective, so yes: raping little children is a matter of taste.”

“In my opinion, it is subjective. Everyone has their own sets of morals and values, therefore, their own sets of morality.”

“I voted for subjective because the statement gives an opinion. . . . Many people regard ‘wrong’ in many different ways and the way one regards what is wrong is based on his or her personal opinion.”

“I think it is subjective because to some it is wrong, but to some people, like the rapists themselves, it is good.”

“It’s a matter of fact that it is subjective.  Good or bad is subjective, justice is subjective and many more things that most people assume they aren’t subjective are actually subjective.”

Please keep in mind that I asked about a moral action that is so extreme that there should be no problem arriving at a judgment of its rightness or wrongness.  I didn’t ask about abortion or gay marriage or any other issue where there is moral controversy.  No, I wanted to make it simple.

For a person to say that the moral rightness or wrongness of raping a child for fun is a matter of taste is insanity, not to put too strong a point on it.  The wrongness of raping a child for fun is a fact as much as the fact that 5+4=9.  Only a twisted society could affirm the latter and deny the former.

The only reason I don’t truly panic when I see poll results like this is because 99% of the people who voted for subjectivity are just running their mouths, so to speak.  They don’t really believe what they’re saying.  It’s all about the shock value.  It’s hip to deny objective morality.  Only backward religious folks still believe in that silliness.  We have so moved beyond old-fashioned values.  Can I get a secular humanist “Amen”?

Almost every one of the “subjective” voters really believes in objective morality, and they demonstrate it every day.  They complain when other people talk behind their back, they accuse politicians they don’t like of evil intent, they protest against corporations who profit from child labor, and they demand justice in the courts.  They act, every day, as if there is a common, objective set of moral laws, that everyone should follow.

There have been precious few consistent moral relativists in the history of the world, thank you God.  And the ones who are truly consistent, who truly believe that there is no objective morality and who live that belief out every day in practice, are diagnosed by the psychiatric community.  The diagnosis?  Sociopath.

Atheism, Morality

Can Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The arch-atheist Friedrich Nietzsche certainly believed so, but atheists nowadays have largely disavowed their atheist fathers.  Atheists want to shake their reputation as depressing nihilists and instead tell the world how happy they are.  Freedom from religion is your ticket to joy and fulfillment.

In the UK, atheists paid for a bus campaign that featured the following message: “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  What a cheerful campaign!

Some in the atheist community, however, disagree with this dressing up of the atheist message.  Julian Baggini, writing for the Guardian, said recently, “Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that.”  Baggini, to his credit, thinks that atheists who tell people to forget God and just enjoy their lives are completely missing the point of atheism.

Baggini writes:

Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. Can you really tell the parents who lost their child to a suicide after years of depression that they should stop worrying and enjoy life?

He continues:

Stressing the jolly side of atheism not only glosses over its harsher truths, it also disguises its unique selling point. The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. The more brutal facts of life are harsher for us than they are for those who have a story to tell in which it all works out right in the end and even the most horrible suffering is part of a mystifying divine plan. If we don’t freely admit this, then we’ve betrayed the commitment to the naked truth that atheism has traditionally embraced.

Baggini finishes his essay by reminding atheists of the ever-present threat of nihilism that Nietzsche warned of.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the threat of moral nihilism. Atheists are quite rightly keen to counter the accusation that life without God cannot be moral. The British Humanist Association, for instance, claims that “Right and wrong can be explained by human nature alone and do not require religious teaching”. But, just as with happiness, there is a need to distinguish the possibility of atheist morality from its inevitable actuality. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to ground ethics either hasn’t done much moral philosophy or wasn’t concentrating when they did. Although morality is arguably just as murky for the religious, at least there is some bedrock belief that gives a reason to believe that morality is real and will prevail. In an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that’s exactly what will sometimes happen.

Read that last section carefully, because Baggini is arguing, as we have argued here many times, that atheists have a hard time grounding morality, much harder than the religious do.  Speaking to his atheists friends, he says, “Anyone who thinks it’s easy to ground ethics either hasn’t done much moral philosophy or wasn’t concentrating when they did.”

Baggini also admits that “in an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that’s exactly what will sometimes happen.”  In other words, on atheism, the ability to rationally reject morality is built into the system.  There is nothing that ultimately guarantees that morality can be grounded, and so an atheist who decides that morality is simply optional is within their rational rights to do so.  And, according to Baggini, that is exactly what sometimes happens.

Morality, Philosophy, Polls, Top Ten Posts of 2011, Truth

Is Raping Little Children Just a Matter of Taste? – #2 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Some statements about the world are objectively true, meaning they are true for all people, places, and times, regardless of whether anyone actually believes the statements.  Other statements about the world are subjective, meaning they merely refer to a person’s preferences or tastes.

An objective statement would be: “The sum of three plus five equals eight.”  This statement is not a matter of taste, but is an objective fact about the world.  It is true for all people at all times in all places that “the sum of three plus five equals eight.”

A subjective statement would be: “French roast is the worst tasting coffee.”  This statement is clearly a matter of taste, of my personal preference.  It gives information about me, not French roast coffee; you don’t learn anything objective about French Roast coffee from the statement.  It should also be clear that for all people at all times in all places, it is not true that French roast is the worst tasting coffee.

That brings me to my question.  Consider the following statement: “It is wrong to rape little children for fun.”  Is this statement objectively true or subjectively true?  Is the statement referring to a matter of fact about the moral wrongness of raping little children for fun, or is it expressing a personal taste or preference that I have against raping little children for fun, similar to the statement about French roast coffee?

Please answer this question in the poll below and be sure to leave comments explaining why you have answered the way you answered.

Atheism, Morality, Top Ten Posts of 2011

How Did Jeffrey Dahmer Define Morality? – #4 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If morality is not grounded by a transcendent standard, a standard that is above all humanity, then it collapses to relativism.  This concept is not at all difficult to understand, but relativism retains a negative enough connotation these days that atheists, who deny a transcendent, objective standard of morality, are still squeamish about the word.

Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who gained notoriety for eating his victims, understood the connection between God and morality all too well.  Dahmer’s father recounted his son’s moral reasoning in a documentary produced in 1996: “If it all happens naturalistically, what’s the need for a God?  Can’t I set my own rules?  Who owns me?  I own myself.”

Exactly.  If there is no God, you have no accountability to anyone else at all.  You own yourself and you can do with yourself whatever you please.

In an interview in 1994, Dahmer himself explained his thinking.  He wondered that if there were no God and we all came “from the slime,” then “what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges?”

The fact that we all instinctively cry out at Dahmer’s behavior does nothing to take away from the fact that his reasoning is right on target.  He embodied the atheist worldview taken to its logical extremes.  You may not like what Dahmer did, but unless you believe in an objective, transcendent moral standard, he didn’t do anything but act unfashionably.

Morality, Philosophy

Will Science and Technology Lead Us to Utopia?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many people in our western civilization are optimistic that things are always getting better.  If we continue to invest in education, if we produce more advanced technology, and if we push scientific understanding as far as it can go, then we will eventually reach a paradise on earth.  This paradise is inevitable, they believe.

This optimism can be traced back to the eighteenth century, to the period known as the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment thinkers sincerely believed that man’s reasoning powers were unlimited and that science and technology would eventually prevail.  According to Professor William F. Lawhead, one of the central beliefs of the Enlightenment was that “all problems, theoretical or social, can be solved through science and concerted, rational effort.”  Sound familiar?

Those who continue to hold to the ideals of the Enlightenment, however, have at least one major counter-example to answer to, that of the Holocaust.  I was reminded of this counter-example by Professor J. T. Bridges, whose research yielded the following chilling quotation from author Michael Berenbaum:

The Holocaust, by its scope, nature, and magnitude transforms our understanding of human culture and human existence.  An unspoken premise of the advocates of culture and education is that the refinements of culture and learning somehow make us into better people and intensify our moral worth.  Yet the Holocaust was perpetrated not by the least cultured and least sophisticated of nations but by the most cultured and most advanced of societies.  Furthermore, the elements within that society that proved capable of perpetrating the evils were not the least cultured, but came from all spectrums of society including philosophers and scientists, musicians and engineers, lawyers and ministers, artists and intellectuals.  No segment of German society proved immune. . . . We see that people could love good music and kill young children.

A people with some of the most advanced science and technology, sophisticated culture, turned into Nazi Germany.  You will excuse me if I harbor some doubts about the utopian hopes of our modern day Enlightened.  Clearly science and technology, education and culture did nothing but make the Nazis into more scientifically advanced, more educated, and more culturally sophisticated killers.

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 3

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the first 2 posts of this series, I presented Richard Dawkins’ “answer” to the question “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”  At the end of part 2, I said that Dawkins did not actually answer the question, even though that’s what he led the reader to believe he was going to do.  In order to understand why, let’s look back at his arguments.

Recall that Dawkins first argued against the alleged Christian claim that nobody would be good if there were no God to believe in.  Fear of divine wrath is the only thing that keeps mankind in check.

What’s wrong with this argument?  Well, first and foremost, I am unaware of any Christian scholar that has ever made this argument.  Dawkins is tilting at windmills.

I am perfectly willing to admit that atheists are capable of moral actions and I am perfectly willing to admit that Christians are capable of immoral actions.  There is no dispute on either point.  What Christians do claim is that a person who is dedicated to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior will improve morally, but Dawkins doesn’t even mention this claim.

Dawkins’ second argument was against the imaginary Christian apologist who says, in essence, that a person can only decide what is right or wrong by reading the Bible, a holy book which issues absolute moral commands.  Without a book like the Bible, there would be no way to decide between right and wrong.

Has Dawkins stopped tilting at windmills yet?  I’m afraid not.  Again, I am not aware of any apologist or Christian scholar who makes this argument.  Why?  Because the Bible itself clearly says in Romans 2:14-16 that every person is aware of the moral law, whether they have a holy book or not:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.

Christians believe that God has written the basic moral law on every person’s conscience.  The Bible certainly contains what I would call advanced moral instruction, but the basics are known by everyone whether they read the Bible or not.  In fact, the Bible as we know it today wasn’t even available to Christians for hundreds of years after Jesus was resurrected, so a Christian claim that a person cannot make moral decisions without the Bible would be incredibly strange indeed.

Dawkins’ final argument, as explained in part 2 of the series, is that the Bible’s morality is outdated and “obnoxious.”  So, argues Dawkins, if the source of Christian morality is the Bible, and the Bible fails to give reasonable moral instruction, then the Bible cannot be needed for moral decision making.  Dawkins concludes that there is a human moral consensus, and that we as humans can make our moral decisions based on that consensus.

What was the question Dawkins set out to answer?  “If there is no God, why be good?”  I hope you can see that his conclusion completely fails to answer that question.  Why be good?  Dawkins answers that there is a moral consensus that we can use to make moral decisions.  Well, that’s nice, but that’s not the question.  We want to know why, rationally, should a person be good if there is no God.  It’s great that there is a moral consensus, but why should we follow it if there is no God?

On atheism, Professor Dawkins, give us a rational reason to follow the moral consensus without first just assuming that we should be moral (that’s called begging the question).  No such reason was ever offered in The God Delusion.  I wonder if Dawkins forgot that he even asked the question.

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Dawkins’s next chapter, “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist” he “exposes” the Bible’s moral commands to be largely immoral and hopelessly outdated.  What the reader will find in this chapter is Dawkins riffing on how morally backward the Bible is.  In fact, Dawkins concludes that “those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.”  Scriptural moral teachings, “if followed through religiously . . . , encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find—I can put it no more gently—obnoxious.”

What are these “obnoxious” biblical passages that Dawkins highlights?  If you’ve ever conversed with a skeptic before, the list is fairly standard.  He starts with the Noahic Flood, then moves to the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of the Levite concubine in Judges 19, the stories of Abraham lying about Sarah being his wife, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac, and so forth and so on.

Dawkins also makes sure that his readers understand that the unpleasantness of the Bible carries over to the New Testament as well.  Dawkins accuses Jesus of teaching poor family values and God of sado-masochism.  Why?  Because “God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed in atonement for the hereditary sin of Adam.”

Dawkins chronicles several other flaws of biblical moral teaching with the overall purpose of proving the Bible to be a complete disaster for moral instruction.  Again, none of these accusations are new to Dawkins.  I had personally seen almost all of them before ever reading The God Delusion.

If you’ll recall, we started out with a question that we hoped Dawkins would answer (hint: the title of the blog post).  Now we finally get to the payoff.  At the end of his biblical shop of horrors, Dawkins finally concludes his analysis of the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”  Here is his summary:

This chapter began by showing that we do not—even the religious among us—ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried alongside much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.

There you have it.  Dawkins’ answer to the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?” is to say that there just is a wide consensus on morality.  Based on that consensus, we can come up with our own morality and, even more importantly to Dawkins, we do not need a holy book to tell us what to do.  That’s pretty much it.

Do you feel cheated?  Do you feel like he didn’t answer the question at all?  Join the club.  In the third post of this series, I will analyze Dawkins’ arguments to see where he went wrong.

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, there is a section entitled “If there is no God, why be good?”  I eagerly devoured this section as I sincerely wanted to see what answer Dawkins would give.  After all, he is the most prominent intellectual atheist in the world today, right?  What did he say?

First, he addressed the alleged Christian claim that the only reason anyone acts morally is for fear of divine retribution.  If you take God’s punishments away, everyone goes bad.  Dawkins points out to Christians: “If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.”

By Dawkins’s understanding of the Christian view of morality, we need God to scare us into behaving, and if belief in God were to disappear, every person would immediately cease doing good.  Dawkins thinks this view is obviously wrong.  He explains:

It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness.

According to Dawkins, Christians assert that without a person actively believing in God, they would do nothing good.  He then provides some brief statistical evidence to illustrate that religious people don’t always act very morally (it’s only a couple paragraphs that are meant to get this simple point across).

After “proving” God isn’t needed to motivate moral behavior, Dawkins quickly moves to another alleged Christian argument.  He imagines a Christian apologist saying the following:

Wherever the motive to be good comes from, without God there would be no standard for deciding what is good. We could each make up our own definition of good, and behave accordingly. Moral principles that are based only upon religion (as opposed to, say, the ‘golden rule’, which is often associated with religions but can be derived from elsewhere) may be called absolutist. Good is good and bad is bad, and we don’t mess around deciding particular cases by whether, for example, somebody suffers. My religious apologist would claim that only religion can provide a basis for deciding what is good.

Dawkins is claiming that Christians believe that a person can only decide what is right or wrong by reading the Bible, a holy book which issues absolute moral commands.  Without a book like the Bible, there would be no way to decide between right and wrong.  Dawkins then wonders whether it is necessary for moral laws to be absolute.

To examine that question, Dawkins briefly introduces Immanuel Kant, a philosopher who tried to explain absolute moral duties without God.  Dawkins isn’t overly impressed with Kant’s attempt and admits that “it is tempting to agree with my hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion.”  Dawkins quickly adds, however, that “morals do not have to be absolute” and so ends the section of his book entitled “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”

Here is where Dawkins has taken the argument so far.  He has demonstrated that religious people are often immoral, which defeats the Christian claim that believing in God motivates morality.  He then stated that Christians believe that the only way a person can decide between right and wrong is by following the absolute moral commands of the Bible.  Dawkins leaves the argument at this point and invites the reader to continue to the next book chapter where he will address the subject of whether the Bible can be successfully used as a source of absolute moral commands.

In part 2 of this post, we will examine the next chapter, entitled “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” to see how Dawkins answers the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”

Morality

Should We Legislate Christian Moral Values if Christianity Is False?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I recently heard another excellent podcast of Unbelievable? where apologist Os Guinness debated “atheist” Mary Warnock.  I put “atheist” in quotation marks because of Warnock’s beliefs, which you will see are central to her positions on morality and public policy.

Warnock insisted that she is a Christian because she regularly attends her Anglican church and participates in Christian fellowship and ritual.  But, when she was asked if she actually believed in the historical truth of the biblical accounts, she replied that she did not.  She believes that the stories are man-made.

The issue of their historical truthfulness, however, did not seem to bother her at all.  She repeatedly stated that the biblical stories are some of the greatest imaginative literature ever produced by man, that the morality taught in the Bible is right on target and exactly what the British people should base their laws upon.  In fact, she agreed with Guinness several times that the modern democratic west is built on the teachings of Christianity.

Having pointed to the impact of Christianity on the UK, and having agreed that she wishes for that impact to continue, she then went on to say that the historical truthfulness of Christianity has nothing to do with public policy, and should, in fact, be strictly kept out of any public policy discussion.  Why?  Because the basis for Christian moral beliefs (the historical truthfulness of the events in the Bible) is completely irrelevant to the issue of which moral code is legislated.  The UK should largely adopt the moral teachings of Christianity and leave aside the question of Christianity’s truthfulness – just like Warnock does in her personal life.

Guinness, as you would expect, raised several issues with this approach.  First, why should the Muslim or Hindu go along with this approach?  Why shouldn’t their imaginative literature, their holy writings, be made the basis of British law?  Why should the secularist who finds Christian morality to be too restrictive go along with Warnock?  Surely the secularist also has his imaginative literature.  How can the Christian or anyone else argue over morality without eventually bringing in the basis for their moral beliefs?  If Christianity is false, shouldn’t that have some bearing on whether we adhere to its moral teachings?

Warnock seems to be saying something like the following.  Christianity has the best set of stories of any worldview, the best set of stories to promote the values that Warnock prefers.  Other worldviews have inferior stories that do not promote the kind of values that Warnock prefers.  Having the best stories is enough to establish Christian morality as the basis for public policy.

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood Mary Warnock, but this is what I heard during the discussion.  It seems to me that the truthfulness of Christianity has everything to do with whether we should adopt its teachings.  Eventually, the topic of worldview must come into the public policy discussion.  After all, Christians base many of their moral standards on the idea that every human is made in the image and likeness of God.  If there is no God, then the Christian foundation for human dignity completely crumbles.  Warnock does not seem to see this point.

I don’t understand how we can avoid these worldview discussions in the realm of public policy.  Rather than pretending our worldviews don’t matter, let’s follow Guinness’ lead and cultivate a climate of civility where we can learn to how to interact with each other without coming to violence.