Moral Naturalism Part 2: Non-naturalism demystified

I described Thursday my frustration with what seemed to be a common moral view among atheists—roughly, that moral naturalism is true because facts influence our moral decisions, or because morality is intimately connected to the natural world. This doesn’t follow, though. Aerodynamics and weather conditions can tell an archer how best to aim, but it’s a mistake to suppose it tells an archer equally well where he ought to aim. The former are descriptive and natural concerns, the latter are normative or prescriptive concerns.

Atheist proponents of moral naturalism seem to spend a time talking about how science can help inform our moral decisions, 1 but seem to skip over entirely the interesting (and relevant) issue of how science tells us what we should aim for.

With that out of the way, I’d like to turn today to address a more plausible philosophical framework for atheists to discuss morality—moral non-naturalism. This isn’t the most intuitive concept, but it’s not as strange as it might seem. It doesn’t mean that facts or nature are morally irrelevant, and it doesn’t mean that supernatural things must exist. 2 I think it’s best understood by analogy.

Non-natural normative truths without God.

Any natural property we can point to—say, maximizing pleasure—can’t overlap with something like the good, because “good” is a normative property. The would-be naturalist must show how nature can account for the normative property of morality, but this seems implausible—you can’t seem to point at any collection of atoms and say “there, those are ‘oughts.’”

This lends many people to believe that atheism must entail nihilism—the famous paraphrase from Dostoevsky applies, “without God, all is permitted.” 3

But this argument won’t work if normative truths can exist independent of God and nature. If we can show how something like this might exist, we can have a model for how morality might look. Consider the law of excluded middle in logic. 4 This is a law which holds that something is either true or it isn’t—there’s no in-between.

The law of excluded middle tells us that, if we know that it’s not the case that a preposition “p” is false, then we ought to believe that p is true. It seems trivial enough to say, but it’s an important facet of first-order logic. Notice, though, that it’s normative—it tells us about something we ought to believe or do. Notice, also, that it’s not really in any coherent sense natural—you can’t seem to point to any atoms in the world and say “there, there is the law of excluded middle.” And notice, too, that no theist to my knowledge has ever said that “without God, no middles are excluded.” It seems that it’s plausible, if not possible, for non-natural normative truths to exist with no grounding at all in God.

Logic and morality are disanalogous in many important and relevant ways, but this example simply shows first, that it’s plausible that these types of normative truths can or do exist; and second, that something like the law of excluded middle might be a good candidate for how moral normativity might look.

So what does a non-natural morality look like?

It’s a tricky philosophical problem to tackle whether or not something like this actually exists. 5 It’s surprisingly hard to pin down what this actually means, but moral non-naturalism doesn’t require believing in anything spooky. So long as it’s true that 2+2 = 4, it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to me whether numbers like “2″ or things like “+’s” really exist. I only care about whether the statement is true, what I should believe, and how I should act given that knowledge. Similarly, I’m not concerned whether the law of excluded middle exists, nor am I too worried whether moral truths are things that are floating around in nature. What I do care about is whether those moral statements are true, and that’s the question I think is most relevant and important for moral realists to address.

As for what non-natural moral truths actually are, here I can’t provide much more than a suggestion to survey contemporary moral philosophy and see what you find compelling or plausible. I personally find Neo-Kantian systems to be fairly persuasive, 6  but you might not. You might prefer John Rawls’s or Stephen Darwall‘s brands of contractualism, Derek Parfit’s chimeric moral theory, or something else entirely. I’m not too interested in presenting and defending any particular moral theory, 7 but instead simply make the point that this is a more promising framework for our moral discussions which avoids the obvious pitfalls of moral naturalism that so many atheists seem to simply (and embarrassingly) ignore.

What if I’m not convinced?

Since I’m talking frameworks and not specifics, it’s important to point out that it might very well be the case that the moral skepticism is right—maybe moral truths don’t actually exist. Or maybe they do exist, but relativism is actually true. 8 I’ll also happily admit that it’s possible for moral naturalism to be true—there are some more-or-less plausible and sophisticated arguments that I glossed over which I think provide a more promising framework for natural accounts of normativity. I’ll turn to all of these issues in the next few posts.

In Part 3, I’ll address the possibility of moral nihilism, and explain how I’m okay with the idea on my more skeptical and cynical days. Part 4 will address alternate moral theories and more plausible versions of naturalism for any readers who might not be satisfied by non-natural accounts but still want to avoid the obvious failures of more unsophisticated theories popularized by positivist-minded atheists. I’ll wrap everything up with Part 5, while giving what I think is some more practical and less abstract advice for an atheist who wants to treat morality with some seriousness.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

It’s worth noting that I don’t know of any moral philosopher who has argued that facts are irrelevant to moral decisions. ↩I remember talking with my intro ethics professor after The Moral Landscape came out, and he tried to explain to me what moral non-naturalism was and I got really hung up on this point. ↩It’s also worth noting that this is fairly incoherent. “Permission” is a moral concept, so if the point is meant to be that morality doesn’t exist without God, then nothing in fact is permitted—just as nothing is forbidden. Things just are. ↩For readers with a more sophisticated understanding of logic: Yes, it gets much more complicated. Yes, I know this isn’t true in many logical systems. Yes, it still works as a good example. If you feel the need to rant about how it doesn’t hold in other logical systems, replace it with a more sophisticated law of your choice. ↩In no small part  because it’s philosophically tricky to even understand what “existence,” or an “object,” or any-other-thing-that-seems-really-basic actually is. ↩I’d recommend some Christine Korsgaard for Neo-Kantianism with a nice Aristotelian twist. ↩Though I’m happy to make suggestions to any interested readers in the comments. ↩For all I’ve been knocking on The Moral Landscape, I will admit the best part of his book was a polemic against relativism. I just wish Harris didn’t manufacture the blatantly false-choice between moral relativism, morality from ancient texts, or his ill-supported pet moral theory. ↩