A constraint on metaethics

Suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that there was a loving God and he issued commands. If in that world we used the phrase “morally wrong”, that phrase would refer to the property of being forbidden by God.

Or suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that we had Aristotelian forms and they specified what the will should will, the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what our form says the will should will.

But suppose now we lived in a world where there was nothing like moral duties, no God, no forms, but buried underground and unseen by humans there was a stone tablet that arose from a random volcanic process millions of years ago. On these tablets by chance there were markings that looked just like French sentences, and when interpreted as French sentences, they stated imperatives, like the Golden Rule, that that fit very well with our intuitions about what are the core moral duties. I doubt that the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what the stone tablet would enjoin if it were interpreted as French. (I am careful in my wording, because strictly speaking the stone tablet, being the product of random processes, does not contain any sentences—it only contains markings that look like sentences of French.)

Suppose my intuition is right. What is the difference between the third case and the first two? Here is a hypothesis. In the divine command world, presumably our beliefs about what we call “morally wrong” have some sort of a connection to the commands of that God. In the Aristotelian world, our beliefs about the “morally wrong” presumably come in some way from the Aristotelian forms. But in the stone tablet world, the “morally wrong” beliefs have no connection to the stone tablets, except that the stone tablets happen to fit them.

This suggests an important constraint on metaethics: our beliefs about the morally wrong had better have a real connection—perhaps even a real causal connection—with their grounds. If this constraint is right, then evolutionary debunking arguments against morality cut more deeply than is recognized: if the arguments correctly show that our “moral concepts” lack a relevant connection with any grounds, then our “moral beliefs” not are not knowledge, but they are in fact just nonsense.

Of course, I want to turn this around: given that our moral beliefs are not mere nonsense, it follows that they have a real connection with grounds, and this undercuts the idea that we are mere products of completely unguided evolution.

Divine hiddenness as a problem for atheists

One might think that divine hiddenness is a problem for the theist but not at all for the atheist. That is not so clear to me. Consider the plausible evolutionary psychology stories about theistic belief, such as that social animals as smart as us will be sufficiently able to outwit the social enforcement of cooperative behavior and the best evolutionary solution is to have us believe in a being who misses nothing and whose judgment cannot be escaped. But given such good evolutionary stories about theistic belief, why are there so many who do not believe?

I am not saying the problem has no good answer, just that there is still a problem there, even if theism is false.

A third kind of moral argument

The most common kind of moral argument for theism is that theism better fits with there being moral truths (either moral truths in general, or some specific kind of moral truths, like that there are obligations) than alternative theories do. Often, though not always, this argument is coupled with a divine commmand theory.

A somewhat less common kind of argument is that theism better explains how we know moral truths. This argument is likely to be coupled with an evolutionary debunking argument to argue that if naturalism and evolution were true, our moral beliefs might be true, and might even be reliable, but wouldn’t be knowledge.

But there is a third kind of moral argument that one doesn’t meet much at all in philosophical circles—though I suspect it is not uncommon popularly—and it is that theism better explains why we have moral beliefs. The reason we don’t meet this argument much in philosophical circles is probably that there seems to be very plausible evolutionary explanations of moral beliefs in terms of kin selection and/or cultural selection. Social animals as clever as we are benefit as a group from moral beliefs to discourage secret anti-cooperative selfishness.

I want to try to rescue the third kind of moral argument in this post in two ways. First, note that moral beliefs are only one of several solutions to the problem of discouraging secret selfishness. Here are three others:

• belief in karmic laws of nature on which uncooperative individuals get very undesirable reincarnatory outcomes

• belief in an afterlife judgment by a deity on which uncooperative individuals get very unpleasant outcomes

• a credence around 1/2 to an afterlife judgment by a deity on which uncooperative individuals get an infinitely bad outcome (cf. Pascal’s Wager).

These three options make one think that cooperativeness is prudent, but not that it is morally required. Moreover, they are arguably more robust drivers of cooperative behavior than beliefs about moral requirement. Admittedly, though, the first two of the above might lead to moral beliefs as part of a theory about the operation of the karmic laws or the afterlife judgment.

Let’s assume that there are important moral truths. Still, P(moral beliefs | naturalism) is not going to exceed 1/2. On the other hand, P(moral beliefs | God) is going to be high, because moral truths are exactly the sort of thing we would expect God to ensure our belief in (through evolutionary means, perhaps). So, the fact of moral belief will be evidence for theism over naturalism.

The second approach to rescuing the moral argument is deeper and I think more interesting. Moreover, it generalizes beyond the moral case. This approach says that a necessary condition for moral beliefs is being able to have moral concepts. But to have moral concepts requires semantic access to moral properties. And it is difficult to explain on contemporary naturalistic grounds how we have semantic access to moral properties. Our best naturalistic theories of reference are causal, but moral properties on contemporary naturalism (as opposed to, say, the views of a Plato or an Aristotle) are causally inert. Theism, however, can nicely accommodate our semantic access to moral properties. The two main theistic approaches to morality ground morality in God or in an Aristotelian teleology. Aristotelian teleology allows us to have a causal connection to moral properties—but then Aristotelian teleology itself calls for an explanation of our teleological properties that theism is best suited to give. And approaches that ground morality in God give God direct semantic access to moral properties, which semantic access God can extend to us.

This generalizes to other kinds of normativity, such as epistemic and aesthetic: theism is better suited to providing an explanation of how we have semantic access to the properties in question.

Various challenges for evolutionary psychology

I took my kids to an event tonight with Eric Wielenberg, and my 11-year-old daughter found herself puzzling about how our emotions could evolve. I tried to convince her that some aspects of our emotional lives that have plausible evolutionary explanations. But she came up with a number of challenges for evolutionary explanations that withstood my critical scrutiny. They are an interesting bunch:

1. The desire to do what is wrong
2. Happiness, in the sense of contentment—think of a cat lying down while being stroked (my example)
3. The drive to achieve things the hard way even when one can get them without effort—wanting the achievement of getting a meal by hunting even if one can get an equally delicious meal without much effort (her example)
4. Mercy towards weaker animals, even ones that we could eat or that could eventually harm us.

Note that while occasional pleasure can definitely contribute to fitness by rewarding behavior, the kind of contentment in (2) might actually be deleterious, by making us less active. One might think of (3) as a form of practicing, but that seems a stretch in a lot of cases. And (4) is particularly puzzling—it's not so hard to come with stories about a lot cases of mercy towards members of our own species, but mercy to other species seems a lot harder. One might try a malfunction story for (1), but my daughter thinks (1) is too widespread to be anything like a disease, and we surely don't want to say that (2)-(4) are faults. I suppose one could try to find a spandrel story about some of these, but I am not sure how convincing these will be and whether they will fit well with the fact that (2)-(4) seem to be components of our flourishing.

Of course (1) is puzzling on a theistic view (whether evolutionary or not), though perhaps the theist can give a view on which it's a distortion of a desire to imitate God, by desiring to be ultimately in charge. On the other hand, (2) and (4) have very nice theistic explanations.