Moral Naturalism Part 1: An untenable framework

This is part one of a series where I lay out some of my thoughts about and frustrations with contemporary ethical debates in the atheist movement. I’ll be occasionally editing and refining and clarifying as appropriate. Part 1 will explain my problems with moral naturalism. Part 2 explains why I think non-naturalism is a more plausible framework, while sketching out a rough picture of what non-natural normative truths independent of God might look like. Part 3 will address moral skepticism, as well as why arguments against moral naturalism can also undermine arguments for religion grounded in God. Part 4 will address more plausible forms of moral naturalism for the unconvinced, and Part 5 will provide a summary as well as my general reflections and advice for discussing ethics as philosophically-minded atheists. 

I’m not a moral naturalist, and I think just about every attempt I’ve seen from the atheist community to put forward a coherent version of moral naturalism is a confused and bizarre failure, at best.

With these next few posts, I hope to provide an alternate perspective for any readers who might have found Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape compelling, or discuss evolution, common survival, or neuroscience when pressed on metaethics from an insistent believer. These are somewhat understandable mistakes, but based on flawed ideas in both philosophy and science.

I won’t pretend that ethics isn’t hard, 1 but that just gives more reason to avoid the tempting yet shallow answers to moral questions. With any luck, this won’t be an intensely abstract and hard-to-follow post, but the trade-off will be that nuanced issues might not be treated as delicately as they might otherwise warrant—I encourage interested readers to explore more formal philosophical resources. 2

What is moral naturalism?

Roughly, moral naturalism is the idea that what’s moral or what’s good is a thing discoverable out there in the natural world, something like a collections of atoms 3 that you can just point to and say “that right there is Morality” or “those atoms are what’s good.”

This seems easy to do with something like chairs, but much harder to do with moral concepts. In fact, we’ve more or less known for a few hundred years that it won’t work. Arguments from Hume to G.E. Moore have more or less made moral naturalism a nonstarter in moral philosophy until a few modern proponents of virtue ethics started arguing (in my opinion, unconvincingly) for the idea.

But contemporary atheists seem enamored with moral naturalism, and this seems to compliment a characteristic overconfidence in what knowledge science can provide. It’s not much of a surprise that an atheist like Lawrence Krauss, who argues that science has more or less made philosophy irrelevant, would square Morality in the natural, and thus scientifically accessible, world.

Why won’t moral naturalism work?

Imagine you’re a typical Utilitarian, and you want to say that what’s good is to maximize pleasure. It doesn’t seem too hard to treat this a natural thing—you can probably point to a few collections of neurons firing just-so in all sentient life and say “There, that’s pleasure. That’s what’s good.” But does that work?

There’s an important difference between what is and what ought to be. This should be a familiar point, and you can call this the is/ought gap, the fact/value distinction, or whatever else you’d like—what matters is that facts tend to be about what exists in the natural world, whereas morality is about what ought to exist in the natural world. But it’s not clear where in the natural world, or where in pleasure, this “ought” is coming from. The fact is that we often do seek pleasure, but should we?

Put another way, if we have all the natural facts about pleasure, we can still respond to someone saying “what’s good is pleasure” by coherently asking “but is pleasure really good? Should we really seek out pleasure?” Notice that this doesn’t work with other kinds of natural definitions. You can’t coherently ask “but is water really H2O?” when you know all the natural facts about water—that’s just what water is, end of discussion. This is G.E. Moore’s famous open question argument. 4

If there’s normativity 5 built into any facts, I’ve yet to see a compelling case. 6  To continue to pick on Lawrence Krauss, in a recent debate he said the following about morality and facts which clearly demonstrates the problem here:

I think science does tell us right and wrong in a real way. For example, the scientific facts that certain animals can suffer, for example, affects our decision of how we should treat those animals—whether we should eat them or not eat them. Or the scientific evidence that certain people of certain colors don’t have different intellects, different capabilities, has changed the way we deal with other humans. Science has determined how we behave in the modern world.

Notice that Krauss gives no scientific justification for “treat equal intellects equally” or “don’t cause suffering.” Of course facts influence moral decisions, since moral decisions necessarily operate over a world of facts. But what’s not clear is that morality itself is based on facts accessible to science. We have no rational reason to suppose it does.

I’ll turn next to why moral non-naturalism is a viable option 7 for a moral realist, and also where scientific accounts of morality, like evolution or neuroscience, can properly fit into our moral understanding.

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:

Like, really really hard. ↩The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is always a great place to start. ↩Or fermions and bosons for our particularly reductive readers. ↩Sam Harris briefly treats it in The Moral Landscape by calling it a word game, and suggesting that you can’t coherently respond by questioning whether flourishing of conscious creatures really is good. I hope that strikes you as patently false as it did me. ↩For those less versed in philosophical jargon, normativity is the basically the “ought” property of something. ↩Fun note: The is/ought gap and open question argument apply equally well to any theist who wants to hold that what’s moral is some fact about God. We can just as well ask “Are God’s commands good?” as we can “Is pleasure good?” ↩In fact, I’d argue only option ↩