Oh and by the way new atheists are evil yeah?
Michael Ruse did a piece on God and morality for Comment is Free Belief and talked sense for nine paragraphs, then in the tenth and last went completely random and gratuitous and childish.
God is dead. The new atheists think that that is a significant finding. In this, as in just about everything else, they are completely mistaken. God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality. Thank goodness!
Stupid, isn’t it. Frightful man – always spoiling for a fight. Everyone says he’s like that in real life, too.
This is also spectacularly arrogant. Most analytic philosophers are some form of utilitarian, and many of them are preference utilitarians. That is, they believe there really is such a thing as morality.
It’s trendy to scoff at what philosophers think, but people like Shelly Kagan, or Richard Carrier or Alonzo Fyfe or many others, who actually think critically about the nature of morality, don’t see why it’s so problematic. Or at least there is enough merit to them that Ruse can’t just confidently dismiss the entire field for the purpose of making a cheap shot to arrive at the middle ground.
1. It’s literally true that you really can harm people or help them.
2. People really do exist. So do their brains, and their emotions.
3. It really is true that we can organize our affairs such that they positively or negatively affect the well being of people.
But hey! It’s so complicated, so we shouldn’t even bother thinking about it right? We should just start claiming things don’t exist because we personally haven’t bothered to understand them.
It’s telling that the people who claim to be all about bridge-building will not hesitate to take cheap shots at New Atheists.
“God is dead. Morality has no foundation.”
What is the name for this fallacy?: I believe a comes from b, therefore without b there can be no a, therefore for people who don’t believe b exists there can be no a.
If it was used against the people who usually use it they would shiver on a summer day. They don’t believe in the sun god, you see…
Eh, most analytic philosophers are utilitarian moral realists? I’m not sure about that.
Morality has no foundation? So, morality can’t exist without an enforcer? Nothing is wrong unless you can be punished for doing it?
I think that fallacy would be denying the antecedent, dirigible.
Patrick, as Thrasymichan as it might sound, I think that an argument can be made that the duty component of morality can’t *arise* without an enforcer. Of course, this doesn’t help religion, except as a means of disseminating arbitrary authority, which it appears to be quite good at.
Benjamin, I’m not sure that’s where Thrasymachus comes in. He believed that morality was the interest of the stronger.
That aside, certainly, morality would not arise at all if no one stood to benefit, and if the failure to act accordingly was not found blameworthy and sanctioned, or if favoured behaviour was not commended.
However, this does not mean that morality has no ground, as Ruse suggests. It has no transcendent ground, indeed, but it does have a ground in the way that human societies function, and how that functioning has, over time, impressed certain types of feelings and expectations on people (possibly on cerebral structures), so that they act (roughly) in accordance with fairly well-known and established “rules”. The suggestion is that these are the product of evolutionary processes, but I think in order to get to them, quite a lot of work has to be done with the evolutionary product.
But why he should have introduced the “New Atheists” into his wrongheaded piece of philosophising about morality (I’m not at all as confident as you, Ophelia, that he was talking sense for nine paragraphs) is hard to fathom. It is stupid, really stupid. If he did it in a moderately charming or clever way, that would be one thing, but it’s so ploddingly …, well, stupid!
Actually, Ruse’s argument can be expressed as a strictly logical deduction. It’s a simple case of modus ponens.
If God does not exist, then morality has no foundation.
God does not exist.
Therefore:
Morality has no foundation.
Of course, the premises may not be true. Indeed, I think the first is false and the second true.
My piece, written before I saw Ruse’s, is now up on the site:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/18/evolution-morality-psychology
I think it’s true that morality has no ground all the way down below rational reflection on our desires, values, and so on. If Ruse means no ground “all the way down” in this sense, I think he’s correct. I also think that it follows from this and some other plausible premises that morality is non-arbitrary but is neither strictly “objective” nor fully determinate.
However, pace Ruse, it’s difficult to see how an “all-the-way-down” ground for morality would exist even if God existed (i.e., see the Euthyphro problem).
Thanks Russell. Great, short essay, which is, I think, almost certainly right. I especially like the point you make that probably neither conservative nor liberal expectations for moral behaviour are likely to be fulfilled, and that this is related to our status as evolved animals with the ability to reason with what ‘nature’ has given us to work with.
I was going to mention Eythyphro, but thought I could make the point without it. Of course, there can be no ground for morality in this ‘all the way down’ sense, or what religious people tend to speak of in terms of transcendence. But this does not mean that there is no ground in our evolved capacities and in our reasoning about them for the moral judgements that we make.
Eric, I made the “Thrasymachan” reference to acknowledge that morality is in some sense authority-dependent. However, as I said, it’s only a matter of appearances.
Keep in mind, I was answering the question: “So, morality can’t exist without an enforcer?” I say, no it can’t. But your comments are consistent with my answer.
Thanks, Ebonmuse.