Atheism and Moral Realism

Atheism and Moral Realism

So-called moral realism is the doctrine that morality is mind-independent. In particular, it is independent of judgments, attitudes, legislative acts, or emotions. It is therefore incompatible with divine command theories or human approval theories: the good is not what God commands and not what humans approve of. Moore’s theory of the good is a realist theory: goodness is a simple unanalyzable property, and therefore not the complex property of being commanded by God or approved by humans. Goodness is conceived as objective in the way shape has been thought to be objective—things are good or square irrespective of how they are perceived or evaluated. Things are good (or bad) in themselves, not relative to the minds of observers or legislators. Minds are not necessary for moral properties to be instantiated.[1] A theist who accepts the divine command theory cannot therefore be a moral realist, any more than the most extreme moral relativist can be; indeed, he is a kind of relativist, with God being the thing to which moral truth is relative. Theistic morality is a kind of anti-realism about morality. Moral realism dispenses with God as the foundation of morality, so that theistic morality comes out as anti-realist. Divine command theory doesn’t make morality independent of God’s commands! Moral realism makes morality independent of God’s edicts, nature, and even existence. It is a morality suitable for atheists, but not for traditional theists. The two are not logically incompatible: you could be a theist and a moral realist—you simply reject the divine command theory. But that would not suit the traditional theist, because he places great stock in the idea that God is the metaphysical basis of morality; viewing morality as existing independently of God’s will is anathema (blasphemy). God and morality are supposed inseparable, but moral realism takes morality to be separate from God’s will and nature. In fact, there is a danger that God will be deemed redundant if he isn’t the foundation of right and wrong—for didn’t he create everything, including morality? If the authority of morality is split off from God, then God isn’t needed to get morality going. Not only is moral realism available to atheists; it is arguably not available to theists. Theists really need the divine command theory to be true, on pain of excluding God from a constitutive role in the formation of moral truth. It may be that only atheists can be moral realists in the sense defined.

Of course, atheists need not be moral realists—they could hold a variety of human-centered views of morality. For reasons I won’t go into, I find this position unsatisfactory, because no defensible view of moral truth can be constructed on such a basis. Essentially, a secular version of the Euthyphro argument applies to all such positions: moral propositions are not true because people accept them; they accept them because they are true. Human command theories are as defective as divine command theories—the good isn’t what the gods love, and it isn’t what the people love either. The point I am making here is that moral realism is an unattractive position for theists, given their general theology; and an atheistic morality had better choose moral realism over anti-realism on pain of losing morality altogether. We can’t preserve objectivity by going theist, and the atheist does better to endorse moral realism. Really, atheism and moral realism are the only acceptable positions to adopt if you want a good account of moral truth.  Atheism plus moral anti-realism produces an unacceptable morality (subjectivist, relativist, arbitrary), while theism plus moral realism is inconsistent, unless we deny that God plays a constitutive role in fixing morality. Atheism and moral realism are fully consistent with each other and don’t lead to moral collapse; but every other combination is ruled out–in particular, theism and moral realism. The only way to avoid moral collapse is to accept atheistic moral realism. Theistic moral realism is not an available position, because divine command theory is not a form of moral realism, and rejecting it leaves the theist in a perilous theological position. It is like trying to be a theist while rejecting the claim that God created the universe—that is a requirement on God not a theoretical option. Likewise, if God isn’t needed to explain morality, but just exists idly alongside it, then his rationale is undermined—he becomes a useless cog where morality is concerned. The only stable position is atheistic moral realism—it leads to no intolerable consequences. We get to keep morality in a robust form (by virtue of moral realism) while not courting the intellectual tensions inherent in theistic moral realism; in particular, we don’t have the problem of explaining how God (the God of the Bible) can coexist with a God-independent morality. The anti-realism inherent in divine command theories disqualifies them from forming the basis of morality (by the Euthyphro argument), but combining theism with abandoning that theory of morality is hard to sustain. The divine command theory is not a dispensable feature of theism in any recognizable sense of that term. We must be moral realists in order to preserve morality in a robust form, but only atheism allows for moral realism to be true. In sum: morality disproves theism. Given that morality exists as a set of objective mind-independent truths, God cannot exist (and be the basis of morality). He can’t be the basis because of the Euthyphro argument, but he can’t survive shedding his morally constitutive role—for then he loses his raison d’etre. God is either the basis of morality or he is nothing. Strangely enough, religion implies moral anti-realism. Religion thus refutes itself. For we have an axiological disproof of God’s existence. If morality is real, then God is not. The only way to keep God in the picture is to make him the basis of morality, but that invites the Socratic retort to Euthyphro. Atheism has no such problem; it is not refuted by the existence of objective morality (nor does it refute objective morality). Thus, atheistic moral realism is the indicated position.[2]

[1] We could put it by saying that it is not in the nature of moral properties to be linked necessarily to psychological facts; this is not internal to them. The opposite view is sometimes called moral projectivism (analogous to projectivism about color), and the divine command theory is a form of projectivism in this sense. Right and wrong are imposed on mind-independent facts from outside, not intrinsic to them. There is no difference in this respect between divine command theories and human command theories. (I should note that moral realism comes in a variety of forms, reductive and non-reductive, not just the Moorean form.)

[2] My sense is that atheistic moral realism is a commonly accepted position these days among enlightened thinkers. What I have done here is give an argument showing that it is the only possible position, because theistic moral realism is not an option. I have only sketched the arguments for moral realism, but that is a topic amply covered elsewhere. The novel point is that moral realism refutes theism. The theist cannot regard moral truth as autonomous and self-sustaining, which it must be if the Euthyphro argument is to be avoided.