Whether Secularism Implies Moral Subjectivism
An ongoing debate:
Dennis Prager writes
The intellectual class and the Left still believe that secularism is an unalloyed blessing. They are wrong. Secularism is good for government. But it is terrible for society (though still preferable to bad religion) and for the individual.
One key reason is what secularism does to moral standards. If moral standards are not rooted in God, they do not objectively exist. Good and evil are no more real than “yummy” and “yucky.” They are simply a matter of personal preference. One of the foremost liberal philosophers, Richard Rorty, an atheist, acknowledged that for the secular liberal, “There is no answer to the question, ‘Why not be cruel?’”
A reader named David Ellis writes
“One key reason is what secularism does to moral standards. If moral standards are not rooted in God, they do not objectively exist.”
I’ve yet to see a good argument for this claim.
I propose the following arguments:
If secularism is true, all thoughts and ideas are manmade. Moral standards are thoughts and ideas. Thus, moral standards are manmade.
Manmade standards are subjective. Subjective means “based on a human authority” which means, the standard is binding only to those who agree to them, and only for the duration of the agreement. Whether Pluto is a planet or not is a question of which manmade standard of the definition “planet” is applied. Defining a second to be one sixtieth of a minute, or a foot to be the length of the king’s foot, et cetera, is something done by the authority of a consensus, a recognized body, or by tradition, and in all cases the authority acts arbitrarily. Nothing objective would change if we defined an hour to be forty minutes or a minute to be forty seconds.
If moral standards are manmade, and manmade standards are subjective, therefore moral standards are subjective, and therefore not objective.
Another augment:
Moral standards come from a moral authority, that is, from a sovereign will which has the ability to make moral choices and the authority to demand acquiescence thereto, whether the power to enforce that command is present or not. Hence, an unarmed policeman has the moral authority to order a fleeing suspect to halt, even if he lacks the present power to carry out that command, because the suspect is morally obligated to obey him, whether he acknowledges that obligation or not: whereas an officer in the Confederate Army has no authority to require a soldier to obey him once the Civil War ends, on the grounds that the Confederate Army has no right to exist once the Confederation is dissolved.
In order for moral standards to be objective, the moral authority issuing them must be objective; in order to be objective, must be universal; and in order to be universal, the issuing authority would have to stand in an authoritative position of leadership or fatherhood or kingship to all rational beings in the universe, that is, all beings in the universe capable or moral reasoning. But if secularism is true, there is and can be no such being.
David Ellis rebuts:
Like I said: no good arguments.
It is to laugh. By “good” here he means that he is unconvinced, not that the argument is not well constructed.
He goes on to explain that he finds no formal fault in the logic, merely that he prefers not to accept the axiom. That is what he means by “good.”
“If secularism is true, all thoughts and ideas are manmade.”
I’ll assume you mean by “manmade” that thoughts and ideas exist only in the mind of conscious entities though it’s a clumsy and ambiguous term to use in what’s supposedly a philosophical argument.
The existence of God isn’t required for thoughts and ideas to exist independently of the human (or nonhuman) mind. Nothing about my nonbelief in God requires that I reject some variety of idealism or dualism or other metaphysical theory which holds that ideas have an independent existence of some sort.
So your argument fails at it’s very first premise. I suppose I could go through the other statements in your argument point by point but since an argument needs only one false premise to utterly fail I see no reason to waste my time as of yet.
Care to revise the argument to a form in which at the very least the first premise is not obviously false?
Now your other argument:
“Moral standards come from a moral authority, that is, from a sovereign will which has the ability to make moral choices and the authority to demand acquiescence thereto, whether the power to enforce that command is present or not.”
Again, a dubious premise. Since the argument is only as good as it’s weakest premise I’ll focus for now on that first questionable premise:
What reason is there to think that moral truth derives from, and only from, the will of a sovereign moral authority?
Why cannot, for example, love be an intrinsic good worth valuing in and of itself?
Why should I replace the central concept in my own views on moral theory (that of intrinsic goods) with your idea of moral authority? Why should one regard it as a more sound starting point for a moral theory (much less the only sound starting point)?
My counter-rebuttal:
“If secularism is true, all thoughts and ideas are manmade.” I’ll assume you mean by “manmade” that thoughts and ideas exist only in the mind of conscious entities though it’s a clumsy and ambiguous term to use in what’s supposedly a philosophical argument.
I was putting my statement in colloquial speech because I do not know whether my readers are familiar with technical philosophical terminology. If there is any ambiguity in the term, I will be happy to clarify. Rather than making an assumption about what I meant, you could always ask. What I meant is that ideas, absent an ideal substrate, are a priori synthetic aidos. Is that a clearer way of saying it?
In that case, my argument is that one cannot assume an ideal substrate without assuming a cause. If the form of justice exists in the human mind, and it is not a perception of an objective and external reality in the ideal substrate, than it is a human invention, therefore arbitrary. If on the other hand it is an objective and external reality in the ideal substrate, then, everything in being needing a sufficient cause, and every cause needing to be of the substance of the effect, a thinker would have to think the thought of this ideal that men perceive. If the thought is universal, the thinker also would needs must be universal. Is that a clearer way of saying it?
“The existence of God isn’t required for thoughts and ideas to exist independently of the human (or nonhuman) mind.”
In logic, a gratuitous assertion can be gratuitously denied. You make an unsupported statement here.
The argument is that thoughts cannot exist without a thinker, because nothing comes from nothing. In proposing an unthought thought, you seem to be proposing a paradox. The existence of some sort of objective and universal mind (call it God or not as you like) is necessary for an assertion of an objective and universal thought, since thoughts only exist in and can only be caused by minds.
“Nothing about my nonbelief in God requires that I reject some variety of idealism or dualism or other metaphysical theory which holds that ideas have an independent existence of some sort. So your argument fails at it’s very first premise. “
Except that my first premise is “if secularism were true, all thoughts are manmade.” It is from this premise that I deduce the conclusion that idealism and dualism are unsupported in secularist thought. You do not in fact disagree with the premise, you disagree with the conclusion, having not properly identified the premise. You made the unsupported statement that idealism or dualism, that is, the belief in an independent or objective mental substrate, can exist as a conclusion of a philosophy that holds only human beings (or presumably this includes other natural rational animals, such as extraterrestrials) exists as rational and moral entities. Idealism and dualism hold that ideas exist logically prior, or even prior in time, to the human perception or elucidation of them.
So, in effect, you are making the claim that even if human beings are the only rational and moral beings, rationality and morality and the forms and ideals thereof exist prior to those human beings? Thoughts existed in the universe before rational beings arose to think them?
If so, then you seem to be positing thoughts without a thinker to think them, imperatives without an imperator, legislation without a lawgiver, a mental realm without a mind, a Platonic realm of Ideas without an idea-maker.
While I admit it may be possible to make the argument for unthought thoughts, you have not yet made this argument: and the concept is not intuitively so clear that it can stand on its own without some support.
Is this logically possible? I can see how one could be agnostic on where it came from, but not secularist. One could say, “the Platonic Form of the Good, or of Justice, exists as objective reality in the mental realm, but where or from what higher form this form arose or is logically supported by, that no man can know” — I think that would be a defensible, if awkward argument. But I do not see how one can say, “No thoughts exist in the universe aside from what man thinks,” and then say, “Justice is an objective and eternal form to which all honest thinkers must eventually agree.”
“What reason is there to think that moral truth derives from, and only from, the will of a sovereign moral authority?”
This is not a good question: I did not say “moral truth” — that was your terminology. I said “moral standard.” A standard is a measure set by an arbiter. Hence, by definition, a standard logically implies an arbiter.
Now, in order to be an arbiter, that arbiter must have authority to make a ruling.
If I, John Wright, Nebula-award-losing science fiction writer, philosopher-at-large and savant, tomorrow told my neighbors that a dollar was henceforth equal to 60 cents, and that a minute was equal to 100 seconds, I would have no authority for setting these standards.
On the other hand, if an international body of scientists wants to define what the scientific meaning of the word “planet” is, such that Pluto is no longer officially a planet, like it or not, they have the authority to do that. It is an informal authority, based on consensus, but it is authority.
Is that answer clear? The reason for saying moral standards come from a moral authority is the definition of the thing, the nature of reality.
The reason why I speak of “authority” is that a moral standard implies an imperative. The imperative exists even when the power to deter disobedience does not exist. An unarmed policeman has the right to order a suspect to stop fleeing; if the suspect continues to flee, he commits a moral wrong of disobedience to the sovereign, no matter what the suspects personal opinion as to the legitimacy of the sovereign might be. Secularism, in effect, proposes imperatives without an authority to issue them.
The ambiguity you embrace centers on that concept: You say that it is possible that moral truth (you mean “moral standards”) can be “derived” from the fact that love is an intrinsic good worth “valuing” in and of itself. To which I asking in return: suppose I decide not to value love: have I violated a moral standard? Am I under a moral obligation to value love if I do not have a natural sentiment which so inclines me? If so, absent a moral authority whom I ought to respect, whence comes that obligation to value love? For nothing happens without a cause.
“Why should I replace the central concept in my own views on moral theory (that of intrinsic goods) with your idea of moral authority?”
If your only theory of moral authority is that there are intrinsic goods in certain manmade concepts, I suggest that this theory is of limited application: it only applies to those who just so happen to agree with you.
In effect, you can argue “anyone who agrees, as I do, that love is intrinsically good must agree not to harm the innocent” but you cannot argue, “even those who think it right to harm the innocent are bound by the moral standard that condemns harming the innocent. What they do is immoral, no matter their opinions.”
In short, your argument is subjective, not objective. You cannot deduce a universal from a particular; you cannot deduce an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ You cannot deduce a universal moral law from a particular valuation of love as a good thing.
You see, even if I grant that love has a particular value in and of itself, an objective value, that merely means I should like or admire or crave it. It does not necessarily impose upon me a certain set of behaviors I should act to support or should act to avoid.
You cannot deduce concepts like “right” and “wrong” from the concept “valuable” or “valueless.” From the statement of fact, “love is valuable” you cannot deduce the imperative of action “therefore you ought to act the way a man who values love acts.”
Why not be an ascetic, or a monk, or a hermit, or a misanthropist, or like the dark elf Albrecht, forswear love in all its forms?
Unless you are ready to say that there is a moral law obligating me against my will to act reverently toward love and its many splendid manifestations, merely saying love has innate value says nothing.
If you are ready to say that there is a moral law obligating me against my will to revere love and to act lovingly, then this moral law must come from a different source than from the raw fact that love is valuable. You need to add the minor premise that love is an moral authority that has a right to demand my obedience, in order to reach the conclusion that valuing love implies a moral obligation to act lovingly.
“Why should one regard it as a more sound starting point for a moral theory (much less the only sound starting point)?”
Because it has the properties all alleged moral codes tactically or openly support: (1) an imperative nature (2) universal application (3) objective law.
It is the only sound starting point. If man is the measure of all things, then all measures are merely human opinion or human consensus: and any man who forswears human authority over himself has the right to throw aside human moral authority to obey human laws.
At that point, there is no moral law acknowledged, only power and the will to power, which is, in effect, the Modern Age and all its perversions and genocides, triumphant and self-righteous vice and evil, meek and defeated virtue and goodness.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
