Responding to Reasonable Faith Q&A (Part 1)
William Lane Craig often responds in the “Question of the Week” section of the Reasonable Faith website. A fair number of questions center on metaethics. I’ve read through WLC’s responses. First, I should note that it’s commendable for WLC to put the time and effort into replying to inquiries like these. WLC could simply ignore such questions or pass all of them off to others, but instead takes the time to reply to people. And these responses are not curt or dismissive. They genuinely engage with the substance of the messages he receives.
Nevertheless, I am consistently underwhelmed by the way questions about metaethics are handled. I’ll be covering some of these in a series of posts, though I may respond to more if I stumble across any.
(1) A question from a moral skeptic
One writer states that they are an atheist, a Nietzschean, and a deep moral skeptic, and poses a question about the problem of evil. The context of the question isn’t all that important here, though feel free to go read the whole question and response if you’d like. What I find noteworthy in this response is something that I frequently hear in the Christian apologetics community: that moral realism is inconsistent with atheism.
In responding the inquiry, WLC says:
I very much agree with you, Nick, that an atheist like yourself should be a moral sceptic and anti-realist. But you need to put yourself in the shoes of the theist and ask if he confronts the same problem as the Nietzschean. After all, it was the death of God that led Nietzsche to proclaim the advent of nihilism. But the theist has the resources to ground objective moral values and duties. There’s just no good reason to be a moral sceptic unless you’ve got some sort of really powerful argument for atheism, an argument whose premises are attested even more powerfully than the existence of objective moral values and duties. But what could that argument be?
I have yet to fully explore how theistic approaches to metaethics could have the resources to “ground” moral realism (or, as WLC prefers, “objective moral values and duties”). Yet it remains unclear how they are going to escape the sorts of issues I’ve raised against nontheistic approaches to realism. Theistic approaches to realism may still be left with the choice of either naturalism, which struggles to sustain the kind of irreducible normativity, authoritative force, and other features more “robust” forms of moral realism seek to establish, or non-naturalism, which is going to face problems of intelligibility. If there are other alternatives, I don’t yet know what they are, though I’d be interested in finding out.
I’m skeptical that theism is going to be able to rescue the kind of irreducible normativity, normative reasons, and other notions that contemporary (often secular) moral realists appeal to, accounts which take their cues more from Moore than from scripture. They may take an approach that differs in some ways from conventional secular accounts, but they’re going to face a looming conditional problem: if they invoke irreducible normativity, categorical reasons, and so on, the position will be unintelligible; if they don’t, they’re likely going to run up against triviality. But perhaps theistic accounts can escape both of these problems. This highlights an important observation: since moral realism could come up in different forms, there is no single argument that universally refutes all realist positions; such refutations must be piecemeal.
(2) Moral realism is not “the” default position
In one of WLC’s responses, he says:
Similarly, I should say that belief in the objectivity of moral values and duties is the default position, a properly basic belief grounded in our moral experience. We should therefore believe in the objective reality of moral values and duties unless and until we have some reason to think otherwise.
The notion that moral realism is “the” default position is a common refrain among moral realists. Roughly, the idea here is that moral realism is intuitive, or seems to be true, much as it seems that trees exist and that we are having experiences. Since it seems like moral realism is true, we’re entitled to presume it is true unless and until someone can present adequate defeaters. This may involve an appeal to phenomenal conservatism, though it may not necessarily require appealing to it, or appealing to Huemer’s distinctive formulation of it. Regardless, the move here is one in which realism is taken to have some presumption in its favor, against which skeptics must make a case.
There are a few problems with this claim. First, such claims are underspecified. When one says it’s “the” default position, what exactly does that mean? That it’s “the default position” for everyone? Only for those people who have realist intuitions? Why is it the default position? What exactly does it mean for it to be the default position? This is, of course, just one remark from WLC, and it’s likely WLC elaborates on what this sort of claim means elsewhere. Nevertheless, similar presumptions in favor of realism are extremely common, and are rarely accompanied by substantive elaboration and clarification.
The second problem is that, to the extent that we can make sense of such a claim, it appears to involve an empirical claim: that all or most people, or at least all or most people in the relevant epistemic position (perhaps this requires adequate reflection, or philosophical training, or meeting other criteria), find moral realism intuitive, or think moral realism is true, or whatever it is that’s suppose entail that realism is “the” default position. The problem is that there’s almost no empirical evidence that all or most people are moral realists. Plenty of professional philosophers are moral antirealists, and the best available empirical research on nonphilosophers found, at least among the participants that were sampled, that a substantial majority (~75%) consistently favored antirealism (see Pölzler & Wright, 2020). Granted, these participants likely came from populations disproportionately likely to favor antirealism (college students and people who may have been less religious on average than the general population of the US), but we don’t have any comparable measures of many other populations, and, in any case, most other studies find very high rates of antirealism as well. There simply isn’t any good evidence that all or most people are moral realists. Note that most is setting too low a bar, anyway. It’s not like we could say moral realism is “the default position” if 51% of people favor realism and 49% favor antirealism. I wouldn’t insist we must meet some arbitrarily high threshold (e.g., 95%, or 99%, or 100%) to say realism is “the” default position. Yet what evidence we do have suggests high levels of variation in responses to questions about metaethics among nonphilosophers, variation that remains among professional philosophers. There is little evidence to support the claim that there is any single “default” position in metaethics.
But, as Louise Anthony put it so well in our debate on the existence of God, the existence of objective moral values and duties will always be more obvious than the premises in any argument for moral skepticism. One will always have less warrant for believing at least one of those premises than for believing in the objectivity of moral values and duties. Therefore it can never be reasonable to embrace moral skepticism.
It’s not more obvious to me. This is also precisely the kind of claim one would make if you were insensitive to the force of arguments, or were sensitive to them but were so convinced of your position that you’ve set the bar out of reach. It’s like setting a prior so high that even if there were thousands of devastating arguments against realism, all the realist would have to do is say “that’s still not enough to overcome how obvious moral realism is to me.” Claims like this one may nominally nod to fallibilism in principle, but hint at the possibility of incorrigibility. This is the kind of dubious misuse of phenomenal conservatism I criticize in my blog post on epistemic blank checks. This isn’t merely epistemic caution, it’s epistemic dogmatism.
WLC continues to make remarks that invoke vague appeals to “we” without specification:
So one thing you might say to your father-in-law is that if he denies the objectivity of moral values and duties, then he should by the same token be skeptical about the world of perceptible objects around him. For his moral skepticism to be justified, he needs to have some reason to doubt the veridicality of our moral perceptions that does not equally apply to our sense perceptions. But the minute he attempts to provide some such reason, then you have moved beyond mere skepticism and into a substantive discussion of whether or not he really does have a good reason for doubting his moral perceptions.
Note the reference to “our moral perceptions.” Who is “our”? It doesn’t include me. I don’t have “moral perceptions,” and I don’t think anyone else does, either. I think some philosophers mistakenly think they have “moral perceptions,” but I don’t think anyone actually has such perceptions, and I don’t think most people take themselves to have moral perceptions of a sort that would commit them to moral realism. Note that WLC seems to presume that this person’s father-in-law has moral perceptions (presumably of the sort that would commit them to realism). Why make such a presumption? How does WLC know that this person has the relevant kinds of moral perceptions?
If WLC thinks they do, that involves (in addition to whatever philosophical claims are involved in explaining what “moral perceptions” are) an empirical claim about the philosophical beliefs or commitments, along with the phenomenology, of some (again, unspecified) population of people. There isn’t much evidence on the metaethical phenomenology of nonphilosophers, but at least one study found little support for the notion that all or most people have realist phenomenology (Zijlstra, 2021).
Simply put: some people may claim to have “moral perceptions” that would suggest moral realism is true. WLC, at least, presumably claims to have such perceptions, as do other philosophers who have made similar claims, and perhaps some of the respondents in empirical studies. What we don’t have, however, is anything like substantive empirical evidence that there is anything like moral perception of a kind that would lend itself to a universal, shared tendency to “perceive moral facts,” at anything even approaching the scale of visual perception of e.g., physical objects. WLC and others are simply presuming that how morality seems to them is how it seems to others, without specifying what proportion of people they are referring to, nor offering any empirical evidence their claims or true, nor, as far as I can tell, it even seeming to occur to them that their ostensible moral perceptions may be a parochial and idiosyncratic feature of the way they are disposed to think, and not something shared by most other people.
Things only get worse from here. WLC shifts towards being even more explicit in the presumption that most people are moral realists:
In fact, the vast majority of people [... ] believe that objective moral values do exist.
WLC provides no arguments or evidence for this claim. It is merely asserted.
WLC, consistent with many other moral realists, appears to simply be helping himself to a contestable empirical claim about human psychology which isn’t supported by available empirical evidence. That WLC and others help themselves to such a claim is important, because they appeal to this claim to maintain a presumption in favor of moral realism. Essentially, WLC and others suppose that, because it seems obvious that moral realism is true, moral realism wins unless antirealists can present compelling arguments against it. This obviates the need for moral realists to do any of the heavy philosophical lifting one would need to do to offer a substantive and intelligible account of moral realism, or to present compelling arguments for it. One can instead claim to already be sitting on the dialectical throne of provisional victory until, and unless, antirealists can dethrone them.
Antirealists should reject this outright. Moral realists have not actually done the work to show there’s any meaningful presumption in favor of realism. See, for instance, Sinclair’s (2012) excellent critique of the notion that there is any defensible presumption in favor of realism.
WLC ends with a final set of remarks, all intended to assist in convincing a Christian who apparently rejects moral realism that moral realism is true:
The other thing you might do with your father-in-law would be to show him that objective moral values follow logically from things that he already believes. For example, you say that he believes in the Christian God. Well, then, ask him if he thinks that God is good? If not, then how is God worthy of worship? If God is not worthy of worship, then how can He be God? Does he think that Jesus of Nazareth was a good man? If not, then how can he worship Jesus? I’d encourage you to read him various Bible passages about the goodness of God. Not only would that show him that the Christian God is good, but reading the Word of God to him might penetrate his callous heart.
These are not compelling arguments. WLC is fond of insisting that people conflate epistemology with ontology. One might suppose that WLC has himself conflated metaethics with normative ethics: it does not necessarily follow from the fact that someone thinks God is “good,” that moral realism is true, since there are nonrealist conceptions of goodness. Likewise, one can believe God is “worthy of worship,” that Jesus was a “good man,” and so on without endorsing realism. Normative and evaluative judgments like “worthy” and “good” do not require or logically entail normative realism. Passaging declaring the goodness of God doesn’t require that such goodness be stance-independent.
When I initially proposed normative entanglement, I brought it up to refer to tricky cases where metaethical and normative claims were entangled in questions and statements in ways that led those who attempt to exclusively affirm or deny the metaethical portion of a claim look bad via pragmatic implicature: by saying that “baby torture is not objectively wrong,” one pragmatically implies (a) the absence of or at least less normative opposition to baby torture and (b) undesirable psychological traits, e.g., poor moral character, inadequate commitment to the badness of baby torture, reduced opposition to baby torture, and so on.
However, such instances of entanglement are one symptom of a broader tendency for realists to entangle normative and metaethical considerations. We see this in WLC’s remarks. In some cases, it seems like realists are presupposing that normative and evaluative judgments presuppose or imply their distinctive conception of normativity. I think that may be what’s going on here.
References
Pölzler, T., & Wright, J. C. (2020). Anti-realist pluralism: A new approach to folk metaethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11, 53-82.
Sinclair, Neil (2012). Moral realism, face-values and presumptions. Analytic Philosophy 53 (2):158-179.
Zijlstra, L. (2021). Are people implicitly moral objectivists?. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1-19.