Kagan:
can people act morally w/o god? certainly people who deny god are just as capable as acting morally / immorally as everyone else theists dont have any monopoly on moral behavior
question he’ll be focused on: do we need god for there to be morality for there to be a genuine difference between right and wrong god is ground of morality? can there be a secular nontheistic basis for morality is he as an atheist entitled to talk about right and wrong without god ? right and wrong is a matter of whether or not your behavior hurts people or fails to help them. right actions refrain from hurting people and do provide help. wrong actions hurt people or fail to provide help. why shouldnt you lie? lying hurts people why you shouldnt murder? rape? why must you aid the needy? why is slavery wrong? why must we clothe the naked and feed the hungry? these behaviors are morally wrong or right because of their connection with harm and failure to help hurt: emotional harm assault on autonomy physical harm etc many kinds of hurt to say you cant harm is a simplification, there are times where you have an adequate justification for harming someone else. e.g. self defense. there is work in philosophy on what these adequate justifactions are. he didnt say anything about god in that, and thats the moral theory he believes in, so why would people think otherwise?
counterpoints: are these things REALLY wrong on the atheist view i just sketched, or is it just a matter of opinion? ( it is all in some sense a matter of opinion ), but is there a fact of the matter as to whats right / wrong? He thinks it is factually wrong to rape. He doesn’t think its a matter of opinion. he thinks there can be real wrong in the atheist view what makes it wrong? rape is wrong because it harms the victim. what do we mean in saying that its wrong to rape? controversial matter, not universal agreement, but roughly to believe in morality says that there are reasons to act morally and help others and avoid harming them. these reasons dont depend on the particular desires you have. its not that if you care about truth justice and the american way you must act morally. everyone has these reasons. it is not up to him to make rape wrong, it is just wrong. is there a deeper account that shows where these reasons come from ? what is the foundation / basis of morality ? secular atheist philosophers disagree on this, some are nonfoundationalists, we can state the various moral rules, keep your promises, dont tell lies, etc. we can boil down to a specific set of rules: dont do wrong, do help. but what makes those rules the valid rules? it is an objective fact of reality. there may be nothing at all deeper to make those rules the valid rules. There are these reasons to behave in certain ways vs others. There are also philosophers who believe there is more to say. philosophers differ on what that deeper story is. one example, Contractarianism, the moral rules are the rules that we would give to one another to govern our interactions with one another, if we were to set about trying to settle on a bunch of rules to govern our interactions, if we were perfectly rational. Imagine us, but like perfect at reasoning, what rules would those people agree to to govern their interactions? The rules they agree to are the terms of morality. One version of contractarian thought adds a twist, the reasoning takes place behind a veil of ignorance. In this bargaining system, i wont be able to rig things to skew towards white males, because i wont know im going to be a white male. Does this capture a notion of objectivity for ethics? yes. there is a fact of the matter about what it would be rational for us to agree to given these rules. If you dont think there is a deeper story, you might just say “to say that murder is wrong is to say there is a categorical reason not to murder. it is not a contingent truth, it is a necessary truth. in all possible worlds murder is wrong”. If you are a contractarian, the moral truths are necessary, but their truth itself is explained in the social contract, which in turn is explained in that there are certain truths about reasoning. there are necessary truths which perfect rational beings would reason about what kind of rules they want to give to eachother. This means morality is necessary. another objection: we have the thought that morality involves commandments, we have the thought that morality involves requirements, we talk about moral laws. where there’s a commandment, there must be a commander. where there’s a law, there must be a lawgiver. where there’s a requirement there must be a requirer. who plays the role of commander / lawgiver / requirer? well, it’s gotta be god! if we’re really gonna have the notion not just of moral reason, but moral requirement to behave in one way, then we need to appeal to god afterall, to be the lawgiver. This argument has been embraced by some atheistic philosophers. Yknow, moral requirements do presuppose a lawgiver, now that i have no god, i believe im not required to morally do anything. He believes that moral requirements are appropriate, it would be mistaken to give up talk about moral reqiurements. He wants to ask the question: is it really true that requirements require a requirerer? He is inclined to believe the answer to that is no. Example: it is a requirement of rational reasoning that you not contradict yourself should we conclude that because there is a law of noncontradiction that there is a lawgiver? there is some cosmic logician who commands us to not contradict ourselves? doesn’t seem to be so. It is fundamentally irrational to contradict yourself, but it does not reuqire a cosmic logician laying down that law. the word requirement does not entail the existance of a requirer. reason itself requires you dont contradict yourself. it’s talking about reason in a personified fashion, but no harm done as long as we understand there doesn’t need a person to lay down that law of noncontradiction. we dont need a lawgiver for moral requirements to be genuine requirements. It seems perfectly legitimate to say reason requires we act in accordance with various categorical reasons ( not to hurt people, to aid them ) we can personify reason in that way, but all we mean is that there are these compelling decisive objective categorical reasons to behave in certain ways and to not behave in other ways. He is skeptical of the claim that commandments require a commander. it’s not as though all nontheistic philosophers think about this in the same way. If you got 4 of us you would get 4 different stories about how to ground morality in a secular fashion. some of his colleagues more sympathetic to the thought that talk of moral requirement entails there is somebody who is commanding us to behave accordingly. if that’s so then who could it be besides god? the answer should be all of us. We, the members of the moral community, are the ones that lay down the requirements. that idea is especially fitting with contractarianism. when we freely enter into an agreement we see how it could be rational to agree to certain rules like forbidding lying. if somebody breaks those rules, they are not upholding their part of the social contract, and as such, the rest of us who are indeed limiting our behavior in keeping with the agreement, we can appropriately and with due authority, tell that person they arent keeping their end of the bargain and they shouldnt behave that way. If you think there needs to be a lawgiver, then that lawgiver is your peers. 1 rules of morality are not a matter of opinion, they are objective fact. he is inclined to think that moral philosophers of an atheistic inclination are completely entitled to think that we can have a moral reality without god
Craig: Question: is god necessary for morality notice what it is not asking: whether belief in god is necessary for morality no one in tonight’s discussion is arguing you must believe in god for morality question is whether or not god is necessary for morality. answer to that question depends on what you need by morality if by morality you mean a certain pattern of social behavior prevalent among social behavior among human beings then obviously this sort of behavior could still go on even if god doesn’t exist god isnt necessary for human beings to exhibit certain patterns of social behavior which they call acting morally. if by morality you mean that certain things are REALLY good or REALLY evil, that certain actions are unconditionally obligatory or impermissible, then many atheists and theists alike agree that god is indeed necessary for morality. in the absence of god morality turns out to be just a human convention or illusion. The same patterns of social behavior might go on without god, but it would be a delusion to think that such behavior has any objective moral significance. three distinct ways god is necessary for morality: without god objective moral values, duties, and accountability would not exist moral values: whether something is good or evil objective moral values: whether something is good or evil independently of whether somebody believes it to be so holocaust is objectively evil is to say that it is evil even though the nazis thought it was good. it would still have been evil even if the nazis had won ww2 and brainwashed / exterminated everyone who disagreed with them, so that everyone believed the holocaust was good. if there is no god, then moral values are not objective in that sense. traditionally, objective moral values have been based in god. God is the highest good, he is the paradigm of moral value. his holy and loving nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions are measured. he is by nature loving, generous, just, kind and so forth. if god exists, objective moral values exist. But if god does not exist, what basis remains for objective moral values? In particular, why think that human beings would have moral worth? On the atheistic view human beings are just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on a speck of dust called earth in a huge universe, all individuals are doomed to perish relatively soon. on atheism, cant see any reason human well being is objectively good, any more than insect well being, or dog well being, or monkey well being. on a naturalistic view moral values are just the byproduct of biological evolution and social conditioning. just as a troop of babboons exhibit cooperative and even altruistic behavior, because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins homo sapiens have similarly evolved behavior for the same reason. as a result of socio biological pressures there has evolved a herd morality which functions well in the perpetuation of our species. On an atheistic view there doesn’t seem to be anything that makes this morality objectively view. humans have an awareness of morality beacuse of it’s biological worth. ethics is illusory. Love thy neighbor as thy self, they think they are referring beyond themself, but nevertheless that is beyond foundation. morality is an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory. if we were to rewind human evolution to the beginning and start anew, people with a very different set of moral values might well have evolved. darwin said ” if men were raised under the same conditions as hive bees there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females, would, like the worker bees, think it was a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering. for us to think humans special and our morality objectively true is to succumb to the temptation of specieism - the bias toward your own species. the worthlessness of human beings in a naturalistic world view are underscored by 2 implications of that world view: materialism, and determinism. naturalists are typically materialists, that regard man as a purely material organism, everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic makeup, there is no personal agent who freely decides to do something. Without freedom, none of our choices are morally significant though. They are like the jerks of a puppet’s limbs, controlled by the strings of sensory input and physical constitution. what moral value does a puppet or it’s movements have? If there is no god all you are left with is an ape like creature on a tiny speck of dust which is deluded of its own moral grandeur. if god does not exist objective moral duties do not exist. duties have to do w/ right or wrong. right vs wrong is not same as good vs evil. duty has to do with what i ought or ought not to do. you are not morally obligated to do something because it would be good for you to do it. it would be good for you to be come a doctor, but you are not morally obligated to become a doctor, because it would also be good for you to become a firefighter, or a doctor, or a homemaker, etc. if god does not exist, we have no objective moral duties. To say we have objective moral duties is to say that we have certain moral obligations regardless of whether we think that we do. 10 commandments flow from god’s moral nature, and on that foundation we confirm objective rightness of certain acts, and condemn the objectively wrongness of certain acts. if we have no god, what basis remains for objective moral duties. on the atheistic view, humans are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. if a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it does not murder a zebra. No morals in animals, neither a prohbited nor obligatory action. if god does not exist, what moral obligations do we have to do anything? It is very hard to see why morals would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained into us by societal impressioning. on atheistic view, incest and rape may not be biologically and socially advantageous, and so socially have become taboo, but that does nothing to show that rape and incest is really wrong. such behavior goes on all the time in the animal kingdom. on the atheistic view, the rapist is doing nothing more wrong than acting unfashionably. if there is no moral lawgiver then there is no objective moral law which we must obey ( great prediction by kagan ). Thirdly, without god, no moral accountability. traditionally, god holds all persons morally accountable for actions moral choices in life have eternal significance if god does not exist, what basis remains for moral accountability, even if there were objective duties and values under atheism, they are irrelevant because there is no moral accountability. if life ends at grave it makes no difference if you live as stalin vs mother theresa. given the finality of death it does not matter how you live. This means you can live as you please in your own self interest. Not always best to live morally, it is often that self interest runs against morality. There is no reason man should be moral unless morality pays off there is no objective reason man should do anything other than pleasure if god does not exist, there is no moral accountability, which would be demoralizing. moral choices are insignifcant because our fate will be the same regardless of what we do. its hard to do the right thing when that means sacrificing your self interests. challenge to atheists: what is the basis for objective moral value in atheism what is the source of objective moral duties in atheism? what makes certain acts obligatory if there is no lawgiver to command / prohibit them explain how on atheism ultimate moral accountability exists
why is harm bad in naturalism: humans can appreciate reasons for respecting others that animals cant. which makes humans different from animals. humans evaluate behaviors to see if there are legitimate reasons for behaviors. Lions cant reflect upon their behavior, so when they do it, it’s not wrong. once we achieve a certain level of rationality, the reason its objectively wrong for me to commit murder is because there is a reason for me not to do it, a reason im capable of recognizing. If other creatures could also do this rationality, then the other creatures would need to be moral.