Secularism Does Not Imply Moral Subjectivism
We have here today a guest editorial by atheist John C. Wright, writing as I would have written years ago, back when I was blind not a theist, but without the sarcasm and snobbery endemic to the atheist cause, or less of it.
A reader writes:
I have read with interest your discussion of the inability of a secular worldview to underpin an objective view of morality. The discussion prompted me to ask you two questions.
1. I was wondering what arguments you used to advocate an objective view of morality when you were an atheist?
2. Did the argument that you now put forth, (i.e. That an objective morality requires God) play any role in your conversion?
Both excellent questions, and ones which I would be delighted to address, and if I have the power, to answer.
The second question is the easier one, and the answer is negative. The kind of argument that says the secular worldview is insufficient to underpin an objective morality would have had no effect whatever on my mind at the time; even if (as I doubt) I could have been convinced of the proposition, all that would have convinced me was that objective morality was as unobtainable as, say, object rules for aesthetics.
Even had it convinced me that a belief in God had some useful philosophical or political side effect, a philosopher does not judge beliefs by their utility but by their truth. It may be useful to tell the men at the battle that the relief column is on its way, that they might fight the harder, or to tell all the men of the city that they were born like autochthons from the soil, that they might learn an amity which is not naturally in them: but a philosopher disdains such noble lies, preferring to know the truth, and believing himself stern enough in character to fight or to learn despite any opposition of cowardice or selfishness in his own nature, which he, as a philosopher, must tame in any case.
Had it convinced me that the theist world view was more coherent than the secular, again, that would not have been persuasive to me, since I would have preferred to know the truth rather than a theory, no matter how elegant, premised on a falsehood. To me, it would have been the same as arguing that the Santa Clause theory explains objective morality better than the Grinch theory. Even were that so, it would not make Santa real.
The first question asks what I once advocated to say that objective atheist morality were possible.
Before beginning, I needs must make a narrow distinction between those moral imperatives which are uniquely Christian and those which are common to mankind.
I propose as a mere matter of fact which any skeptic is invited to investigate for himself that all men of civilized and literate nations, that is, men who live under a written code of laws, as Chinese, Indians, Persians, Egyptians, the Hellenes and the Romans and any others of whom we have records, agree on the basics of moral propriety: murder, theft, rape, fraud, fornication and sodomy, treason, dishonoring one’s parents, betraying one’s guests, preying on the weak and poor — all these things have everywhere and always been universally condemned.
There are, to be sure, difference of emphasis. The Chinese, for example, emphasize filial piety beyond where other men set the bar. But the skeptic turning the pages of the Analects of Confucius or the Egyptian Book of Going Forth By Day or the dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna will hear repeated the same old saws of common morality as repeated by the Witchdoctors of Patagonia and the Witches of Lapland.
Again, there are, to be sure, particular moral commandments unique to Christendom, as monotheism, or unique to the Abrahamic religion, as the prohibition against suicide. (This prohibition is present in Mohammedanism, by the bye. It is merely by sophistry that suicide bombers make the claim to be martyrs or crusaders. Allah unambiguously condemns self-murder). What the the classical world admired in Cato of Utica and the Japanese in the 47 Ronin, the Christian world condemns.
Finally, there are particular moral anti-commandments unique to the nameless philosophy which we might call Modernism or Leftism or Libertarianism. These have several forms according to the several schools of modern philosophy. Modernists take it as not being a moral command to remain chaste within marriage; indeed, it is a positive moral command, sanctified as a civil right, that criticism of sexual perversion is forbidden, as is any display of a lack of enthusiasm in applause for it. Leftists take it as a moral duty to trample the hedge of private property when needed to relieve the distress of the poor, or to aid a favored group, or to gather political power, or to kill Jews and other undesirables. Libertarianism take it as not being a moral command to defend one’s nation, pay one’s taxes, or embrace self sacrifice for the common good, on the ground that the sovereign individual will is sacrosanct, and has no natural boundaries aside from a prohibition on fraud or violence toward others. These all have the character of special pleading, or, rather, as heresy, by which I mean their argument assumes that the roots of basic morality leading to one branch are inviolate, and in conflict with another branch, and that this second branch has no moral authority and must give way. Even in denying the common morality, therefore, the heretics confirm it.
These unique peculiarities either of Modernism or Christianity will not be addressed in the argument, nor the differences of emphasis between the various iterations of the universal human moral code. We are only discussing the core moral values common to mankind, where there is no disagreement, or few, or little.
Now, to begin, this is merely a question of fact, am empirical question: do or do not all literate civilizations possess a formulation of the Golden Rule? The reader is unfortunately to be thrown on his own resources for this. It is a matter clear enough that scholarly debate is not needed, nor any particularly careful scientific poll.
Indeed, one might rest on the observation of what happens the next time, in any walk of life, one overhears a debate involving any moral concept, such as fairness: if a man takes your seat on the bus, or snatches the last two slices of orange given the group so that one member of the group gets none while he gets twice, one will inevitably hear the argument set on the unspoken assumption of a universal moral standard. If the man brings up an exception, such as, “I deserve the seat or orange slice because I am X or because I have suffered X or paid X” no matter what X is, X must be something that, were the man honest, he would admit excused another under the same excuse as excuses him: no other way of arguing is logically possible.
One only very rarely sees in fiction, and even more rarely in real life, a man do an injustice to another citing no more justification than that of the Melian Debate: the strong dispose and the weak suffer. This argument is a claim of radical antinomianism or an appeal to the law of the jungle.
On those rare occasions it is made, oddly enough, it is made in objective terms, that is, the National Socialist says, “For the eugenic good of the human race, we supermen must extermination the under-men, and do this in order to horde and increase the general strength of man and his fitness to survive: so, to the ovens with the Jew!” but when the Martian tripod or the deadly Archangel of Death ready to carry off the firstborn of all Egypt, or some other superior being stronger than the National Socialist rears over the horizon, the logic of his position requires him to accept the Darwinian sentence of execution with stoic fatalism.
If the National Socialist superman argues that he has the right to commit injustice on the grounds of the weakness of his victim, when confronted by a strength of beings superior to him, such as U.S. Marines, while he can silently, with gritted teeth, stand up and fight against the greater strength; but he clearly cannot argue against it.
One is tempted to believe that to argue about morality at all, one must assume an objective basis of morality. Indeed, perhaps morality is itself nothing more than objectivity, that is, logic, applied to the cases where the rightness and wrongness, guilt and innocence, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness of human action is discussed.
There is nothing to debate if there is no standard, if guilt is in the eye of the beholder: there is neither grounds for praise nor blame, nor grounds for defense, nor need of defense.
Is there a logical proof to confirm this theory? I say that there is.
Consider that any axiom necessary to discuss any philosophical point is, for all practical purposes, universal and objective. That is, whether it would be objective from a cosmic and nonhuman point of view or not, the categories the human mind cannot help but employ in discussing and reasoning about the matter, cannot help but affirm the axiom. As human beings, we cannot step outside human experience, and deduce what axioms would apply to the thought processes of creatures who do not use human reason, or do not experience linear time, or occupy space, or made decisions, or have language, and so on and on.
Let us draw a distinction between those things that are objective from a cosmic point of view, that is, things that would be true even if no human observer observed them, and those things that are objective from a human point of view, that is, those things which any human being, no matter what his viewpoint or coign of vantage, must observe.
This distinction becomes of interest when discussing, for example, whether a being incapable of abstract reasoning or of counting can hold it to be true that twice two is four? The question is a paradox, because the statement twice two is four is an utterly abstract statement, one that applies equally to four aardvarks as four zymologists, four gnats and four giants. It does not apply to fluids, since four vessels of unequal sizes holding different chemicals at different temperatures do not, when poured into one larger vessel, equal four other vessels of other sizes, or even four volumes of the same size, if the chemicals interact — in other words, “twice two equals four” is a true statement in the abstract, and true when and only when applied to concrete situations where the unspoken assumption (i.e. that the subject of the statement is a quantity essentially preserved through any accidental changes) is an assumption that applies in that case. So to ask whether twice two is four in the eyes of a nonhuman creature incapable of abstract reasoning, or whose abstract categories do not include concepts like quantity or equality, essence and accident, is an unanswerable question, or, rather, it is a question of ontology: it asks whether abstractions “really” exist or whether they are manmade.
While the theist may be tempted to speak with confidence concerning the cosmic point of view, if, for example, the Divine Being has vouchsafed or revealed to him what the cosmos or its Maker thinks on a certain issue or sees from the coign of vantage of the eternity beyond human comprehension, the secularist, either through humility or skepticism, cannot share that confidence. He must confine himself to those things that are subjective, or to those things which are objective only the second and more limited sense of the word: true from any possible human viewpoint.
The test for whether something is true from the human viewpoint is simply to see whether it can be imagined otherwise in any logically coherent way. If an alternative to some axiom embracing all human beings has not yet been imagined, it has not yet been proved subjective.
Now, this may seem a weak reed on which to build a philosophy, but consider how much nonsense can be dismissed summarily once nothing but what is noncontravenable is admitted.
A statement that there is no truth, if true, is false.
While it may be true (whatever that means) in a cosmic sense that some nonhuman minds whose abstract categories are not the same as ours may realize that all reality is unreal, and all statements untrue, as far as humans are concerned, this is unthinkable. Human thought cannot express it. An argument which assumes or concludes that truth is subjective impeaches itself.
Likewise for the rules of logic. A statement that says a statement can be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense, if it were true, would at the same time be false. And not. Whatever nonhuman beings might think, while a man can tell illogical jokes, he cannot form an illogical syllogism to support his reasoning, no, not even a chain of reasoning questioning whether syllogisms are necessary for reasoning.
Likewise again for the rules of morality. A statement that says men need not be honest, if uttered honestly by an honest man, or thought honestly by an honest thinker, would be dishonest. You could not trust the conclusion that says it is OK to deceive yourself, for then how do you know whether you are being deceived?
This does not prove that all moral rules, or customs said to have the force of morality, are objective, but if it proves that only one moral rule is objective, that is, a duty to be intellectually honest in thought and reasoning, then the general statement that no moral rules are objective is exploded.
This argument does not make any assumption about whether God exists or not, and such an assumption is not necessary to reach this conclusion.
But does this line of reasoning point to the existence of a God, or, at least, of a universal and objective substance of mind, or a Platonic Realm of Ideas, wherein ideas as objective entities rest?
I would say the chain of reasoning disproves the crass and wooden materialism of materialist fundamentalists like Marx or Lucretius, for even if nothing exists except the atoms of the brain moving by Newtonian mechanics, it is a raw fact inexplicable in the materialist theory, that all brain atoms no matter where situation fall in this case into the same configuration, and this configuration always and everywhere represents the perception that twice two is four, that truth is true, that logic is valid, that honesty is good.
Now, the only way a cat’s eye in the dark and a cat’s eye in the light have the same material or mechanical configuration is when the cat is dead: for living cats, the light dilates the pupil. If we find all cats everywhere have dilate pupils, we either conclude that they are all dead, that is, the eye sees nothing, or that the light is everywhere. The fact that some cats are blind, and their pupils do not dilate confirms that non-blindness is the norm.
Likewise, if the fundamentalist materialist claims that the human conscience is a node of tissue in the Broca Area of the cortex, I reply that if all nodes have the same mechanical configuration, either they are all perceiving the same light, in this case, the light of conscience, or they are all dead. The fact that some sociopaths are blind when it comes to moral questions, and their nodes do not react to the light of conscience, confirms that non-sociopathy is the norm. But if something like the ‘light of conscience’ really exists, or any non-physical or non-material reality, then materialist fundamentalism is false.
Again, if truth and honesty and goodness are not physical objects with mass or energies with voltage, then there is nothing to impress a shape onto the plastic of the brain atoms, and nothing to which the thought ‘goodness is good’ corresponds in the perceivable world. The perception or mechanical reaction of the alleged sense mechanism in the Broca Area of the brain cannot be said to be an accurate perception, for it reflects no physical thing.
From disproving fundamentalist materialism, can we prove God? As a skeptic, I would say the argument fails merely due to lack of evidence.
While it may be that the mind of God is what produces and sustains the fact that A is A and goodness is good and shows these things to the minds of any rational being who contemplates or perceives these abstract truths, it could also be the case that these mental abstractions are self-existent, eternal and timeless, true because they cannot be untrue.
The skeptic must agree that, if the Hubble Expansion is as measured, and if as presumed matter-energy cannot be created nor destroyed, then the whole of the sidereal cosmos, timespace itself, and all matter and energy within it, emerged explosively from a single submicroscopic pinpoint some 15 billion years ago. He can be asked whether this means, since time cannot exist before timespace, and cause and effect and before and after cannot take place absent the concept the time, that therefore a supernatural or eternal cause, a cause that is not the type of cause and effect that operates within nature, created the cosmos?
We may ask the skeptic: Does not the fact that the nature arose seemingly from nothing, and the axiom that nothing comes from nothing, require the conclusion that the nature arose from an author of nature? And if the author of nature, he must be supernatural? The will of a supernatural lawmaker might enact the mechanical law of cause and effect, but the operation of a machine cannot. Therefore do not the stars, if the stars are merely mortal inhabitants of a universal less than infinitely old, imply a star-maker?
But he cannot answer. If we restrict our answer (the skeptic answers) only to those matters open to direct and indirect observation, then the question must remain a mystery. It is simply beyond the human power to know the facts in that case. Whatever unimaginable conditions of non-being existed (if that word has any meaning in this context) before (if that word has any meaning in this context) the Big Bang, human science cannot reach and human imagination cannot imagine. It is a singularity, where our abstract categories break down.
Likewise here. When asked whether these universal and self evidence moral truths discovered in the soul of mortal men indicate a soul-maker even as mortal stars imply a star-maker, the skeptic must reply that the question is beyond human power to answer. To pretend to know what no human being ever can know is presumption.
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.
