Objective Morality? Maybe.

Euthyphro's dilemma is this: "Is what is morally good commanded by God because it is morally good, or is it morally good because it is commanded by God?"

This dilemma is typically posed to theists to illustrate a problem. Namely that if God commands what is good then there is something beyond or outside God—and if we call God good, then God is judged by something beyond him. This places something beyond God and even over God. The other horn of the dilemma is that if whatever God commands is good, then 1) good is arbitrary, and 2) to say that God is good is meaningless—there is nothing by which to judge God. All one can say is that God is God.

What theists say of the atheists is that atheists have no objective standard of morality—their morality is subjective. There are several responses to this accusation. The first is “So?” In other words, the theist must explain why this is a problem. The second is “what makes you think you have an objective standard?” Another is “actually atheist morality is objective.”

In my experience most of these discussions take place without anyone defining their terms. We assume that we know what we mean when we say moral, objective, and subjective. Over the last year or so, I've begun to question both what I mean by these terms and what my interlocutors mean by the terms. The atheist responses to the accusation of subjectivity all are good depending on what we mean by our terms. This is the gist of this post.

Whatever morality's source, even if it is God being arbitrary, we see that morality is that which corresponds to the general welfare of humans. Murder both ends an individual's life and interrupts the harmony of the community. Rape disrupts an individual's sense of security and control over one's body while also violating the community's sense of social contract with respect to sexual mores. (Whether society's sexual mores are good or where they come from is a subject for another day.) Similarly, 99% of the population having food and adequate housing is better than if only 1% of the population is fed or has adequate housing. (Parts of this post borrow from Sam Harris' Moral Landscape.)

A significant question then is what do we mean when we say one state of affairs is better than another. In one sense it is true that we all know it when we see it. (Like pornography.) We just know. We evolved as a social species. The goal of all life is to perpetuate itself. So for whatever reason, our species evolved as a social species because it presented solutions to the problem of survival. Those members of the species that mastered cooperation lived to reproduce. Thus cooperation, morality!, is simply part of who we are. It is, of course, true that certain members of our society do not cooperate. And, we call those people psychopaths or sociopaths. This recognition of the non-cooperative is part of the filter that minimizes that portion of the gene pool from mixing with the rest. Of course, some people are attracted to the sociopath. Why? I don't know. Perhaps, this keeps the gene pool stirred and not stagnant. Too much sameness will kill the species. Too much of a bad element will also kill us.

But while I think the above is correct it doesn't feel personal. It makes me feel good, warm, well, even healthy when I take care of my fellow humans. When I don't do good, I don't feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. When people do good to me, I encourage that. When people do bad to me, I discourage that. This is personal. It is how an individual of a social species is successful.

So what does it mean to say that something is subjective. Those that find subjectivity bad seem to equate subjectivity with arbitrariness. I think though that the above suggests that morality is that which works. And while this may be an induction, induction is all we have. (You might reread my posts on epistemology, starting here.) But induction doesn't mean arbitrary. Nor does “what works.” We observe the results of our actions and either consciously or unconsciously catalog that behavior as either successful or unsuccessful. However fuzzy our definition of successful, we are making a rational, non-arbitrary categorization.

So what is subjectivity? It is the interpretation of phenomena by a individual. Think of the subject of a sentence. Joe interpreted the evidence. Joe is the subject. Evidence is the object. Joe's interpretation is subjective. The evidence is objective.

An object, as opposed to the subject, is that which is outside of ourselves. Joe may have feelings about an object that you an I do not. The object is the object regardless of how any of us feel about it. You might say then that objectivity is the supposition that we have correctly perceived an object. That is, we have the truth about that object. Objectivity is what is true regardless of our perception. A pebble may in fact lie 3.5 meters to the north of a crater on the dark side of the moon. This is either true or false regardless of whether we are capable of perceiving it.

How you know you have the truth about an object? Going back to my assertions that all knowledge is gained inductively, we also learn how correct we are about our assessments inductively. One mechanism is intersubjectivity. This is the comparison of our subjective experience with others' subjective experiences. If we all agree that a rock is hard, then we have a term that applies to the rock. If we all agree that some other rock is hard, but not as hard as the first rock, then we have a sense that we are all on the same page on the concept of hardness. When we are alone, we evaluate our correctness about some subject based on how correct we are in general in other circumstances. That is, we induce our probability of correctness based on our other experiences in assessing truth. We might ask ourselves, “how correct would others find my assessment?” (Incidentally, I am not suggesting that this is necessarily a conscious process.)

If all humanity agrees that a certain rock is hard, we are as close to knowing an objective truth about that rock as we might ever come. If I have always been successful in assessing the hardness of rocks in the sense that almost always people agree with me when I say a rock is hard, then even when I am alone I have a certain assurance that this other rock that I've never shown to anyone else is also hard.

So if theists claim to have objective morality because they have a god, are they correct? Yes and no. I think in a sense morality is objective whether there is a god or not. I will get back to this below. But saying God's existence objective is a mistake. Returning to Euthyphro's dilemma that I started this piece with, if goodness is outside God then God's perception of that goodness is subjective. (Too, that goodness is available to us with or without God; so the theist's position is no better than a non-theist's. Both sets of perceptions of this objective morality are subjective by definition.) If God declares what is good arbitrarily (the other horn of the dilemma), is that any less subjective? I don't think so. If the apologist avers that goodness is part of God and thus neither outside God nor arbitrary, is God's perception of itself less subjective? I don't think so. Consider your own perception of yourself. Consider how many studies show that our perceptions of ourselves are wrong. Can we suppose that God's perception of himself is perfect? How would we know? If God asserts its perceptions of itself are perfect, how can we know that it knows that? Surely the assessment that it knows perfectly is subjective. Suppose that we all agree that the morality that God asserts is objective, how does this help. Isn't our perception of its decrees subjective? And if I disagree and take my observations from nature and yet come to the same conclusions as a theist, is the theist justified in his assertion that morality is objective because of God's existence? Again, yes and no. But again, the theist is in no better position than the non-theist. We all must perceive that morality whatever its source.

As a side note, the whole question of God and morality is a little bizarre. A theist asserts that morality cannot exist without God and since morality exists, so must God. His problem is that the premise cannot be substantiated. How could one possibly know that morality cannot exist without God. The atheist, on the other hand, could assert that since God doesn't exist and morality does, then obviously the premise is false. As I've worded it here, the atheist and the theist are both guilty of assuming the consequent (begging the question). That is, they both assume what they are trying to show. To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen a non-theist argue this way. (I have, but it was meant ironically.) The other aspect of this is that for all the claims that theists have objective morality I've seen little to substantiate the idea that they live any better lives than non-theists. For that matter, even if God were to exist, I can't see why the behavior of theists as a whole would be more pleasing to that god than the behavior of non-theists.

And so, the atheist's response “why does the theist think his morality is objective” is sort of justified. As I've hinted at, I think there is a sense in which I think morality is objective. But the appeal to a god as a source doesn't make it so.

Referring back to my list of possible atheist responses to the accusation that we have no objective morality, one response was “so”. If in fact subjectivity doesn't mean arbitrariness, then why would it be a problem for morality to not be objective. We observer that humans, whether we presuppose a God given morality or not, don't change their morality as often as they change their underwear. The fact of the matter is that if gods don't exist, our morality is relatively constant. Regardless of belief, theists don't behave any better than do non-theists, nor are their societies more stable. If we define morality as that which improves the condition of mankind, then the so-called objectivity of theist morality is evidently no more effective than that of the so-called relatively subjective morality of a non-theist.

The apparent need for an objective morality is similar to the preference for deductive logic over inductive logic. Deductive logic provides assurance of a correct conclusion given that the premises are correct. Most of us humans make the assumption that our premises are correct. Thus we go through life assuming our conclusion don't just follow but in fact correlate to reality. As I may have mentioned in a previous post, the most dramatic growth occurs when one questions one's premises. This happens both in science (consider quantum mechanics with respect to Newtonian physics) as well as in our individual lives. Deductive logic is invaluable so long as we keep in mind what our fundamental premises are and hold them suspect when necessary.

This need for assurance also can be seen in our persistence in our implicit assumption of platonic ideals. If you have engaged in debates and you are of an atheistic persuasion, you've perhaps encountered someone who thinks you are inconsistent for not believing in gods but yet you believe in love. Our western type dialogs persist in referring to love as it were a concrete substance. And yet that substance does not exist. Love is the name of a certain group of behaviors. Of course behavior exist in a sense. We see actions. That set of actions over there, we call that running. Those over there, that's justice. Those? Hatred. Etc. But none of those things have a substance. They exist only in that they are concepts that help us process our life experiences.

So I wonder sometimes if theists suppose that morality is objective because “thou shalt not murder” is engraved on a rock 3.5 meters to the north of a crater on the dark side of the moon. It is interesting that there is certain contingent of atheists that suggest that this is what is meant by objective. It is then taken as a given that of course morality is subjective.

Sam Harris argued that this is false and I think he may have convinced me. He didn't really undertake to explain his use of the words objective and subjective. (And this is in part is what prompted me to write this post.) But the gist of it is, I think, what I have written above. We all know what morality is. By and large we agree. Sometimes it takes a while to come to new moral sensibility such as women and other ethnicities are people too. We know that a woman running from a rape gang after having watched them force her younger brother to execute the rest of his family only to be slaughter in his turn – this is bad. We know that if every one in the world had adequate food and shelter (which is certainly not true at this writing) this would be better than the condition of the world is now. We know that individual freedom so long as it doesn't impinge on others' freedom is good. We know that the requirement to stifle one's thoughts impedes scientific and moral development.

Intersubjectively, which the best of approximation of objectivity we can hope to have, we know which way is best. Inasmuch as there are cultures that think of women as chattel, we can compare results and know that they are wrong. We can look at Japan and what, to me, is a very weird idea of what qualifies as entertainment and observe that they have less crime by any measure than does the United States. Perhaps the Greeks were right and catharsis is a useful concept. (Look up Hentai sometime—but consider yourself warned.)

Some claim that we need a deity to ensure that we will behave properly. My visceral response to this is that it obviously hasn't worked very well. Slightly more objectively, theist behavior has been no better than a non-theist behavior. Given that this assertion seems baseless, should we consider it more or less moral for one to think that they only can avoid evil if there is a threat of punishment? Is the so-called selfless act morally good if one knows that one's deity will reward them? Surely one who avoid evil because it is evil and does good with no celestial reward in store is more moral. I may be happy if I can come up with a threat that gets my children to clean their rooms. I may be happier if the promise of ice cream will get them to do it. But, I am happier still if they learn and appreciate the value of cleanliness for its own sake.

One more term needs to be mentioned. That is relativity. You might hear those decrying the evil of relative morality. This is meant, I think, to be equivalent to subjective morality. In any case, the fear is that evaluating situations according to context would lead to people doing whatever they want and disregarding society. For one, I don't think the non-sociopath is capable of disregarding society—at least most of the time. For another, the critics don't seem to object to evaluating even murder in its context. We have first degree, second degree, third degree murder as well as manslaughter. (In the U.S., these laws are defined on a state-by-state basis. Most have variations of this list.)

Humans know that one state of affairs is better than another. We know that there is such a thing as too much eating. We know there is such a thing as starvation. We also know that those aren't the only choices—there is a better way. Similarly, we know that treating people as you would be treated (as C.S. Lewis charmingly put it, do as you would be done by) is better than treating people as you would not be treated. One message board I belong to used to claim to have only one rule; don't be a jerk. Morality is not a complicated thing. Humans don't need a deity to get “do as you would be done by.”

God's existence has nothing to do with morality.