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Is Ethical Naturalism More Plausible than Supernaturalism? A Reply to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Part II

April 26th, 2012 by Matt

This is the second part of the paper I presented to the Naturalisms in Ethics Conference at Auckland University last year.

In my previous post, I noted that Robert Adams has argued that if God exists, then divine commands “best fill the role assigned to wrongness by the concept”.[1] He argues that if moral obligations are divine commands this explains the fact, that (i) “wrongness is an objective property of actions,”[2], (ii) it accounts “for the wrongness of a major portion of the types of action that we have believed to be wrong,”[3]   (iii) it “plays a causal role … in their coming to be regarded as wrong”,[4]  (iv) it explains how moral obligations constitute a “supremely weighty reason” for acting or refraining from an action,   and (v) he contends that DCT explains the intuition that moral duties comprise “a law or standard that has a sanctity greater than that of any merely human will or institution”.[5]

Moreover, in my last post, I also argued that, for Armstrong to conclude his arguments call into question any theistic account of ethics, he must argue that his harm account of moral obligation provides a better explanation of all these features. Failing that, if his account doesn’t preserve these features of moral obligation, then he must provide us with a reason to suppose that they are not part of the concept of moral obligation. Or he must provide reasons for revising our concepts.

In his monograph “Morality without God” he attempted to do this. It’s my contention that he has failed in this task.

1. Social Requirements

Let’s begin with (v), In “Morality without God”, Armstrong purports to address this line of argument, he claims that “the best line of argument-because it is the only argument is that moral laws require a lawgiver”[6]. He attributes to popular writer Dinesh D’Souza. He then proceeds to make short work of D’Souza’s argument.

However, this is neither the best, nor the only argument offered in favour of a DCT. In subsequent articles and a monograph, Adam’s has developed (v) in some detail.[7] Adam’s proposes a “social requirement theory” of obligation whereby “being obligated to do something consists in being required (in a certain way under certain situations) by another person or groups of persons not to do it”[8]. Obligations are a kind of social relationship where one person makes a demand on another, failure to comply results ruptures in the relationship expressed in terms of blame, censure, punishment and alienation, which can be expiated by forgiveness. Adam’s offers a sustained argument that the role of guilt, censure, punishment, social inculcation, moral motivation, moral knowledge and forgiveness plays in our concept of obligation, make a social requirement theory plausible.[9] Nowhere in Armstrong “Morality without God” does Armstrong even cite let alone address this argument.

2. Supremely Weighty Reason

Similar problems afflict  (iv) In “Morality without God”. In this regard Armstrong provides two arguments as to why his account provides a better explanation of this feature of moral obligation.

First, he argues that divine commands do not constitute the right sort of reason for action. “If our only motivation to avoid hell or go to heaven, then our motivation is far from ideal”[10]

Second, he argues that the fact that “harming others is sometimes in our best interests”[11] does not entail people have no reason to refrain from harming others. Because, as Armstrong carefully goes on to argue, people can have reasons to not harm others which are independent of self-interest.

Both arguments attack a straw man. The first assumes that the only reasons divine command theorists give for obeying God is “divine punishment”. This, however, is false. While Adam’s social requirement theory does allow censure, blame and social estrangement and punishment to provide some reason for compliance with a person’s commands, he argues this is insufficient to turn a person’s demand into a moral one. The reason to comply with social requirements becomes stronger if the demand is a reasonable one. This reason becomes stronger again if the person who makes the command is a just person who loves us and is committed to our welfare. It becomes stronger still if the person is significantly more informed about the matter in question than we are. The commands of God, a perfectly rational, omniscient just and loving person, then provide supremely weighty reasons for compliance.

It’s hard to see how Armstrong could dispute this given he thinks an act is irrational if “normal people” would never advise someone “they cared about to do it”. If it’s irrational to act in such a way that normal, loving people would advise us against, how is it arbitrary to act in accord with the commands of an omniscient, rational, loving and just person?

The second argument assumes that defenders of DCT claim that if harming someone is in our best interests we have no reason to refrain from harming others. This is also false: Hare[12], Layman,[13] and Craig[14] argue that unless self-interest and morality ultimately coincide, one does not have an overriding or supremely weighty reason for so acting.  One can have reasons for not harming others, but these reasons can be overridden by self interested ones.[15] Or they don’t count as reasons for “virtually everyone”[16]

Armstrong fails to address this criticism. Showing that we have a reason to not harm others does not show we cannot have other stronger reasons to harm others. In fact Armstrong later explicitly states that his account does not “establish a strong reason to be moral”, which he defines as: “a reason strong enough to motivate everyone to be moral or to make it always irrational to be immoral”[17] So far from refuting this claim he appears to concede  the point.

3. Accounting for the content of obligations 

Armstrong also fails to address (ii). Adam’s contends:

The property that is wrongness should belong to those types of action that are thought to be wrong- or at least it should belong to an important central group of them. It would be unreasonable to expect a theory of the nature of wrongness to yield results that agree perfectly with pre-theoretical opinion. One of the purposes a metaethical theory may serve is to give guidance in revising ones particular ethical opinions. But there is a limit to how far those opinions may be revised without changing the subject.[18]

Our pre theoretical intuitions suggest that there are a number of important cases of wrongful actions which cause no harm. Acts such as recklessness or attempted murder or conspiracy to commit harm, are obvious examples. Here however I will focus on one important example. Suppose a doctor derives sexual gratification fondling a child under general anaesthesia. Providing that the child was not informed of the event, it’s difficult to see how any of the typical, psychological harms associated with child molestation would occur. Nor, from fondling, need there be any physical harm involved in such an instance either. Yet the action is clearly wrong.[19]

In “Morality Without God” Armstrong provides two responses to this kind of counter example.

First, the while the doctor causes “no actual harm”[20] he created a significant risk the patient would find out and suffer harm in the form of “pain and humiliation”[21] This is an implausible response, if wrongness is identical with the property of causing harm, then, if there is no actual harm, the action is not actually wrong.  Moreover, this response entails that a person who knows about such molestations and covers them up is acting in a morally laudable way, while the person who reports the incident engages in serious wrongdoing. The former act decreases the chance that anyone will find out, and hence decreases the risk of harm. By contrast, in virtue of the fact that it elevates the risk of the victim discovering what the doctor had done, the latter significantly increases the risk of harm.

Second, Armstrong contends that actions like this qualify as harm. Discussing a similar case involving the rape of an unconscious woman Armstrong states:

“the doctor causes his victim to lose her ability to control what happens to her body in a very intimate way. He also violates her rights and dignity and such violations can count as harms”[22]

Here Armstrong identifies harm with loss of ability to do what happens in one’s  body, and violation of rights. He elaborates the relationship between these two ideas in an earlier paper [23] where he distinguishes between a neutral loss and a moral loss. The former involves the loss of something valuable; the latter involves the loss of something valuable that the looser has a right to. It’s morally wrong to cause moral losses on others, not neutral ones. This elaboration suggests that Armstrong understands the harm of sexual assault to be violation of the right to control one’s body intimately. This right is grounded in that person’s dignity.

However, this raises an immediate challenge. One important criticism of naturalistic ethics is that it cannot provide a plausible account for human dignity and rights.  Craig himself has argued that “on the atheistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings”. Rather, it’s a human “temptation to species-ism, that is to say an unjustified bias in favor of one’s own species.”[24] Craig’s references to “speciesism” – a term associated with Peter Singer – allude to a serious point made by both Singer and Nicholas Wolterstorff. In Justice: Rights and Wrongs Wolterstorff challenges the secularist who believes in human dignity and rights to identify a non-theological or non-religious property that:

(a) is possessed by all members of the human family;
(b) is not possessed by a terrestrial non-human animal;
(c) can be plausibly said to give humans worth sufficient to account for the standard rights we grant to humans; and,
(d) is not a property that is possessed by different humans to different degrees.[25]

Criteria (a) and (b) are required if rights are going to be granted to all human beings and not to animals like cows or dogs; (c) is required for the property to ground the kinds of human rights we recognise; (d) is necessary if all people have “equal rights”. If the property that grounds rights comes in degrees, and some people have it more than others, then people will not have equal rights. The problem according to Wolterstorff, is that no non-theological property we know of appears to fill this roll. Singer, a non-theist, has made the same point: arguing that our moral codes must be radically revised so that the welfare of human infants is not given more importance than that of pigs.

Armstrong anticipates this objection and responds:

[H]umans are moral agents, because they are free and have freewill….The kind of freedom needed or useful here involves the ability to reflect on and respond to reasons… Because normal adult humans have the ability to tell what is moral and immoral, and because they have the ability to reflect on their choices and conform to what they take to be moral, they are governed as well as protected by morality…they have moral duties in addition to moral rights, in this respect humans are special even according to secular morality[26]

This is far too quick, as Wolterstorff[27] and Singer[28]  have both pointed out, normal adult humans have these properties but infants and small children do not. Infants do not have free will, children are not moral agents in this sense either. David Boonin has noted “by any plausible measure dogs, and cats, cows and pigs, chickens and ducks are more intellectually developed than a new born infant.”[29] So this answer gives us no reason for thinking a child or infant has a rights or dignity, over and above any other animal, and so fails to address the counter example I mentioned.


[1] Robert Adams “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1(1979) 74.

[2] Ibid, 74

[3] Ibid, 74.

[4] Ibid, 75

[5] Ibid, 75.

[6] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 97

[7] See Robert Adams Finite and Infinite Goods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999and “Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987) 262-275.

[8] Robert Adams Finite and Infinite Goods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999242.

[9]Ibid chapters 10 and 11, see also  “Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987) 262-275.

[10] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 119

[11] Ibid, 114

[12] John Hare The Moral Gap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; Paperback 1997); Why Bother Being Good? (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, April 2002); “Moral Faith and Providence” a paper presented at the 1996 Annual Wheaton Philosophy Conference, accessed 27 December 2010; “Is Moral Goodness without Belief in God Morally Stable” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008).

[13] C. Stephen Layman “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy 19 (2002) 304-16; “God and the moral order: replies to objections” Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006) 209-12; “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 49-66.  Layman is not himself a divine command theorist, he simply argues theism accounts for the overriding nature of moral obligations better than atheism does.

[14]  William Lane Craig “This Most Gruesome of Guests” in in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics Eds. Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 182.

[16] Robert Adams “Moral “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief” The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York :Oxford University Press 1987) 158

[17] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 118

[18] Robert Adams “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979) 74

[19] See Matthew Flannagan, Is Historic Christian Opposition to Feticide Defensible in the 21st Century? 274

[20] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 58

[21] Ibid

[22] Ibid, 57.

[23] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “You Can’t Lose What You Aint ever had: A Reply to Marquis” Philosophical Studies 96, 1997: 59-72

[24] William Lane Craig “Opening statement” in Are the Foundations of Morality Natural or Supernatural? A Debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris. University of Notre Dame, 7 April 2011, transcript available at http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/05/transcript-sam-harris-v-william-lane-craig-debate-%E2%80%9Cis-good-from-god%E2%80%9D.html

[25] Nicholas Wolterstorff Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) see chapter 15.

[26] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 70-71

[27] Nicholas Wolterstorff Justice Rights and Wrongs 325-341

[28] Peter Singer Practical Ethics

[29] David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121, the neurological data is summarized in Michael Tooley’s  Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) Ch. 11.5.


Tags:   · · · · · 7 Comments

7 responses so far ↓

  • Matt – you nearly had me… til “The commands of God, a perfectly rational, omniscient just and loving person, then provide supremely weighty reasons for compliance.”

    Your arguments, in my opinion, read well, but are not enhanced by adding a “God” to the equation.

    I suppose this is (in my opinion) the one thing that annoys atheists the most. And that is, that the the apologist argues themselves into a position AND then nails it to a statement about a God.

    You set yourself up as a knowledgeable person in this apologist field, and in publishing your writings you tacitly acknowledge the rights of “us” as readers to provide critical thinking (yes you might disagree with the quality of my thinking).

    These comments, by necessity are usually brief (and cannot allow for lengthy narratives, and notes from referenced writings – and I’m writing this while I eat lunch…) Consequently, I’m going to say much more.

    BUT…So why not a challenge to you. Look at what you have written and imagine your reasoned arguments without any reference to your imaginary friend. I bet that it will read just as well.

    Why? Well the evidence for your God being rational, omniscient, just and loving is a bit thin. The God of the bible is the God of the Jewish, Christian, and the Islamic faiths (and please correct me if I’m wrong if this isn’t the God you worship).

    I finish with a couple of neat quotes….
    “Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position” Mohandras Gandhi

    “It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” Aristotle

  • edit…>
    ) Consequently, I’m going to say much more.

    should have been a negative …I’m NOT going to say much more..

    Sorry, my bad…

  • Not sure what your objection here is Pete, the part you cite is where I talk about Adams suggestion that moral obligations have features which suggest they are social requirements, that is demands people make on other people which are reinforced by certain social sanctions such as punishment, censure, guilt and so on. He goes on to suggest that for a social requirement to be a valid moral obligation the person who issues the requirement must have certain features, be rational, care about our welfare impartially, and so on. You seem to agree with this.

    But then you state you disagree when I mention God, but presumably if God exists he is a person with the features I mentioned, nor does there appear to be any existing human person who has these features, so whats the problem with pointing out that God, as defined by Craig and others, seems to plausibly fit the role. Is it that whenever an argument has a conclusion that mentions God you suddenly reject it because your commited to denying this?

  • Matt, My point is that your critique of Adams work does not require you to include God as justification (In my opinion)

    So far as objection is concerned, I believe that you just need to stop a littler earlier in your justification.

    Argh – the features that don’t exist in any known human – Well there I do disagree. These values/morals that you, Craig, etc contend don’t exist in any known human, In my opinion exist in all “normal” human beings. Our morals come from within – evolved to allow us to build communities, societies etc…

    Committed to denying the existence of a God. Actually, that’s not correct. I haven’t seen any evidence to support the existence of a God(s) – A very important distinction, and a view held by many atheists.

    I’ll dig up some stuff I was listening to today about the qualities you attribute to God, that shows we are not the only species that can have the types of moral obligations of rationality and impartial welfare. I need to research these first as I only became aware of these studies today….

  • Pete,

    Matt, My point is that your critique of Adams work does not require you to include God as justification (In my opinion)

    I was criticising Armstrong not Adams.
    And again I am not sure what you mean by “not including God” in my justification. The relevant context was one where Armstrong has suggested that identifying moral obligations with Gods commands does not account for the fact that moral obligations provide reasons for actions. The only way one could critique this claim is to argue that if God exists his commands do constitute reasons for action of the right sort. So I don’t see how critiquing Armstrong does not require menttioning God. The relevant question being asked is: If God exists would it be plausible to identitfy moral obligations with his commands. You can’t answer that question unless you mention God.

    Argh – the features that don’t exist in any known human – Well there I do disagree. These values/morals that you, Craig, etc contend don’t exist in any known human

    This again misconstrues the argument, the claim was not that values don’t exist in people. It was that no human persons demands or commands can be identified with moral obligations unless that person had certain features, and then I argued no human person had the features I mentioned. They were features such as being perfectly just, being fully informed, completely rational, impartially concerned about the welfare of all and so on. Now your welcome to show me a human person who is fully informed , perfectly rational, impartially cares about the welfare of others and so on.
    You’ll also note I go on to point out that unless this person has ordered the universe so that happiness and virtue coincide. There will be cases where self interested reasons and moral reasons diverge and its difficult in such circumstances to see why moral reasons trump self interested ones. So if you think the person also has the power to order the universe this way I would genuinely like to meet him.

    In my opinion exist in all “normal” human beings. Our morals come from within – evolved to allow us to build communities, societies etc…

    This mantra is inadequate, its true that our awareness of certain moral principles has evolved in this way so that normal humans grasp them. Its also true that moral codes ( mores or morals in the sociological sense) have come about through social evolution. But none of that shows that moral obligations are identical with those values or codes. If this were true then societal mores or normal human beings could never be mistaken in what they value. Human beings and human societies could never command something wrong or have values that are oppressive and unjust or wrong. If the commands of A is identical to wrongness then A can never command wrongdoing. Clearly human societies do err in this way, ergo moral obligations are not identical to the mores of human soceities.
    I don’t know why this needs explaining, most serious meta-ethics would acknowledge this, which is why typically they identify moral requirements with the commands of ideal societies rather than actual ones.

    Committed to denying the existence of a God. Actually, that’s not correct. I haven’t seen any evidence to support the existence of a God(s) – A very important distinction, and a view held by many atheists.

    This seems to over state your position. The claim you have never seen any evidence that supports Gods existence could only be true if you had never read any of numerous arguments putting forward such evidence. You might claim these arguments are all inconclusive or don’t provide enough support but to say you have never seen any support provided at all is indefensible. Even leading atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy don’t accept this latter claim.
    In any respect there is a circularity here, as there often is in comments like this. You dismissed an argument on the grounds it appealed to God, and you do this because you claim no arguments that appeal to God are unsuccessful. That sounds more like an aprori position has been adopted from the outset.
    I’ll dig up some stuff I was listening to today about the qualities you attribute to God, that shows we are not the only species that can have the types of moral obligations of rationality and impartial welfare. I need to research these first as I only became aware of these studies today….

    No there is some evidence that higher primates display rudimentary feelings of reciprocal altruism. But that is not the same as perfect rationality and impartial concern for the welfare of all, no human in fact has these traits, we might in certain contexts approximate to them to some extent but limited approximation is not possession

  • […] who have followed my recent discussions of Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s writings on God and Morality. Might be interested in this […]

  • Matt – clearly I will need to spend more time writing my responses than the space between bites of my apple.

    “This mantra is inadequate…” My apologies for presenting an inadequate argument.

    I’m trying to “poke” you enough so that you start looking at stating some facts (remember: facts available to everybody) and ask yourself..(well this quote says it best)

    “When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” John Maynard Keynes, also attributed to Winston Churchill.

    I work in a different industry to you, so I don’t have all the time you have to read/research the same stuff you do. But, please, I’m an educated (Otago Uni) reader of your blog trying to understand why you keep believing in the face of evidence to the contrary.

    I’m still plugging my way through the “True Reason: etc” book…And I’m enjoying my journey towards being a more knowledgeable atheist. I’m astounded by this fact: That the evidence for a Jesus character is so weak that I wouldn’t want to be your defence lawyer if your life depended on it!! Wow!

    Now if all this makes me look like one of those internet trolls – my apologies. My intention is only to get you to think a little harder

    And I will try to be more considered about my responses

    Ciao