Objective Morality

I was confronted with the moral argument for the existence of God today.  The argument is that we are confronted with what seem to be moral and ethical facts.  Moral and ethical values are not mere matters of opinion.  The people making this argument assert that if evolution, naturalism and atheism are correct this perception can only be an illusion.  Therefore atheists don't get to use moral language to criticize the Christian religion.

I want to respond to this Christian evasion of moral responsibility, I am naturally inclined to outrage upon hearing these views.  First I believe that objective morality is compatible with atheism.  I don't think that I am being intellectually dishonest here.  Perhaps I am mistaken, but that is a different matter.  Second even if there were no objective morality, this wouldn't mean that morality was simply a matter of personal preference.  The immoral aspects of Christianity would still be wrong in the way that humans generally see wrong.

I'll start with a few notes about objectivity in the world that we see.  I would argue that the shape of objects that we see is a feature of objective morality, but the colors that we see are not.  Our color vision depends on the way that light of various frequencies effects certain cells in our eyes.  Most of us can see three different colors, but I understand that a minority are capable of seeing four.  Some are blind to some colors, which doesn't mean that they see the world in black and white.  It is only that they fail to make distinctions between colors that most of us would see as obviously different.

If we were to encounter aliens from a different planet, I doubt that they would see squares as circles or vice versa.  It would be much more likely that they would see different colors.

Now how does this relate to morality?  Some features of morality cross cultural lines.  Others do not.  In no culture is morality considered simply a matter of opinion.   It is frequently, if not universally seen as a feature of the external universe.  I argue that sometimes it is and at others it is not.  As a believer in evolution, I expect that if we were to encounter aliens from another planet we should expect them to have a moral code with several similarities precisely because they were presumably formed by the same process of evolution that brought us into existence.  Those similarities are an objective part of the universe.  The fact that evolution shaped our moral perceptions doesn't contradict the objectivity of a moral claim any more than the fact that our eyes were formed by evolution means that the things that we see aren't part of objective reality.

When I say that something is wrong I am not merely saying that I don't like it.  I am asserting that the act in question is worthy of blame.  But is blameworthiness part of objective morality?  I argue that sometimes it is.  If we have a hammer made out of silly putty and one made of steel, we would say that the one made of steel was better.  That superiority would be a feature of objective morality.  We would not expect our alien to see things differently.  The reason is that the hammer, by definition, has a specific purpose: to drive a nail into something.  One hammer will do that better than the other.

Similarly one system of moral and ethical values will be better than others.  How so?  Blame works in a specific way to threaten an individual's reputation in response to harm to another individual.  People have an interest in assessing how beneficial or harmful association with another individual is likely to be.  Certain acts will universally signal that one is a bad associate, or so I believe.

Now perhaps I'm mistaken.  Perhaps morality is more like color vision in that all common features of morality are the result of humans being related to each other.  Suppose they are inherited and would not likely be shared by aliens if there are any.  I argue that this would make no difference.  These traits cross cultural lines

Let's go back to the example of color vision.  Suppose you have an orange car.  Is it possible for me to acknowledge that your car is orange even though I would prefer that it was blue?  I see color vision as being subjective and not objective.  I don't think that aliens are likely to see the same colors.  And yet when I say that the car is orange, people know what I am talking about.  No one suggests that it is just my preference or opinion that the car is orange.

Likewise even if morality were completely subjective it wouldn't change the fact that people know what I am talking about when I say that the genocides described in the Old Testament are evil and that Christians should be ashamed of themselves for having this as part of their religion.  I believe that I am talking about a universal understanding of morality, but it might be that it is only a human one.  Even if this is so I will still be understood since I am talking to humans.

But we could go further than this.  Suppose that the values I am talking about are not even common to all humans but are simply a product of our culture.  If this were so I think that it would undercut the entire moral argument for the existence of God.  The assertion is that each of us, as a human, is confronted by certain moral realities.  If we are only confronted with what we think of as being moral reality as a result of growing up in a certain culture, this would tend to undercut the claim that we have a God given sense of right and wrong.

But still I would hold the same opinion about the injustice of mass murder.  If I chose to move to a different society, I would want to move to one that recognized genocide as being immoral.  Wouldn't you?