Responding to Reasonable Faith Q&A (Part 2)

This is part two of an ongoing series responding to William Lane Craig’s responses in the Q&A for Reasonable Faith. For over a decade, people have written in questions, and WLC publishes his responses to them.

My interest is, of course, to any responses involving metaethics. This time, I want to address this question and answer.

The person writing in provides some context, the most relevant of which is:

As you've [WLC] mentioned at several occasions about the premise "objective moral values and duties do exist", that deep down we all know that objectively good and objectively evil actions do exist and you prove their existence by appealing to moral experiences.

…then ends with the following question:

Why moral ontology cannot be derived from moral experiences of good and evil instead of God?

Here’s where things get weird. In his response, WLC says:

Notice, however, that your question, “Why moral ontology cannot be derived from moral experiences of good and evil instead of God?” confuses moral ontology with moral epistemology. Moral knowledge can, indeed, be derived from moral experience, but moral experience presupposes that there is an objective something to be experienced (lest you lapse back into subjectivism!). Your question is actually inconsistent with moral objectivism.

WLC seems fond of saying that people are confusing ontology with epistemology. I despise this accusation. In almost every instance in which I’ve seen someone use it, it’s either not true, or it’s at least questionable whether it’s true. This situation is no different.

Nothing about this person’s question involves any clear conflation between ontology and epistemology. The question seems to be asking a rather straightforward question: couldn’t we appeal to our experiences to infer that there are stance-independent moral facts? That is, can’t we obtain epistemic access to the stance-independent moral facts by appealing to distinctive features of our phenomenology?

If this is what is being asked, then there is no confusion between epistemology and ontology. Inferences based on our experiences would be the putative epistemic process by which we obtain knowledge of the stance-independent moral facts. Nothing about such a proposal involves mixing up epistemology with ontology; it merely involves the claim that a particular epistemic procedure provides knowledge of certain ontological facts.

Why do I interpret the question this way? Well, it’s a more charitable interpretation, so it’s got that going for it (if you think that counts).

But I can also point to features of the question that suggest my interpretation is correct. First, note that they stated earlier, “[...] and you prove their existence by appealing to moral experiences.” This strikes me as decisive all on its own: they seem to be clearly distinguishing the ontological matter in question here (the existence of stance-independent moral facts) from the epistemic procedures by which we may gain access to them (in this case, moral experiences).

I also think my interpretation makes the most sense of their use, in the main question itself, of “derived,” which is sometimes used to mean “infer” or “deduce.” On this reading, we can replace certain elements of their question:

Why moral ontology cannot be derived from moral experiences of good and evil instead of God?

…with something approximating my interpretation

“Why can’t [the existence of stance-independent moral facts] be [inferred] from moral experiences of good and evil instead of God?”

Making inferences about ontological facts via our experiences doesn’t suggest conflating ontology with epistemology; quite the contrary, if we’re going with a conventional correspondence theory of truth, one’s epistemic practices involve attempts to refer to the world that are successful insofar as they accurately captures, or corresponds to the world. Their question seems to presume a completely conventional presumption about the relation between epistemology and ontology.

We could even convert this question from one about moral facts and moral experiences to one about facts about trees and tree perceptions, to illustrate how there really is no mistake being made here. Suppose someone were to instead ask:

“Why can’t the existence of trees be inferred from perceptual experiences of trees instead of God?

Does this question involve a conflation between ontology and epistemology? No. It exhibits a perfectly conventional understanding of the relation between epistemology and ontology. And yet it is structurally analogous to the question WLC described as confusing the two.

If anything, it would appear WLC is confused about the question. However, I don’t think WLC is conflating epistemology and ontology. I think he just didn’t read the question carefully or charitably.

Unfortunately, WLC’s remarks only exacerbate his apparent confusion. Notice this remark:

[...] but moral experience presupposes that there is an objective something to be experienced (lest you lapse back into subjectivism!). Your question is actually inconsistent with moral objectivism.

If moral experience presupposes realism, and they’re appealing to moral experience to infer moral realism, then why would their question be inconsistent with realism? That makes no sense. In other words, suppose we insisted that a “moral experience” was, by definition, an experience of an objective moral property. We then appealed to such experiences to infer that there are objective moral properties. One might object that this is question-begging: one can’t simply insist their experiences just are experiences of objective moral facts as a reason for concluding that there are moral facts; that one’s experiences are best explained by the existence of moral facts is precisely the inference one is presumably trying to make; one can’t establish the truth by effectively stipulating it.

I’m not sure what, exactly, WLC is saying when he says that moral experiences presuppose an “objective something,” however. There are a few issues. One way of trying to grapple with this is to pose a dilemma as to the possible meaning of “objective something.”

First, it could be objective in a respect irrelevant to moral realism. Even if moral experiences were experiences of an “objective something,” it would not necessarily follow that moral realism were true. This would only follow if our experiences were experiences of stance-independent moral facts. Otherwise, the fact that experiences were an “objective” something would involve equivocation about the meaning of “objective.” Objective, in the sense relevant to moral realism, refers to stance-independent normative facts, not anything that exists at all. For instance, suppose our moral experiences presuppose moral qualia, and it is these qualia that exist (that is, they are the “objectively something). Does this entail moral realism? No. It depends on the content of the qualia. Or suppose the objective something associated with our moral experiences are certain emotional states. Do these entail moral realism? Again, no. Simply because our experiences presuppose that something exists, and that it exists stance-independently, doesn’t entail that the thing that exists stance-independently is itself a moral fact of the kind relevant to moral realism.

Second, it could be objective in a respect that is relevant to moral realism. If so, then I think we can simply respond that WLC’s claim is false. The claim that we have moral experiences does not entail that there are stance-independent moral facts. And perhaps WLC is open to this possibility: perhaps the parenthetical is suggesting that either those moral experiences presuppose moral realism or moral subjectivism. This is also false, since there are a few other options for the content of moral experiences other than subjectivism (e.g., noncognitivism; perhaps our moral experiences are of emotions or other nonpropositional states and don’t involve any propositional content or prompt the inference that there are any moral propositions). So proposing a dichotomy between the two options WLC alludes leave WLC with a false dichotomy. In short, moral experiences don’t presuppose realism/objectivism or subjectivism; they are consistent with either, and consistent with positions that don’t presuppose either.

It’s hard to know what exactly WLC is claiming, though, so I don’t know if I’m interpreting WLC accurately. I suspect WLC’s remarks may actually be too muddled to assess as false or mistaken, and might instead be too muddled to adequately assess.

Either way, I see no indication the question conflated epistemology and ontology. There’s a tendency for people who acquire certain tools or talking points to overuse them, and apply them even in circumstances where they aren’t appropriate. Overreliance on recycling certain canned rhetorical replies is an unfortunate consequence of people not thinking as carefully as they could about the topic in question. I believe that that is exactly what’s going on here, and that WLC’s mistakes point to a more general tendency for his engagement with metaethics to be somewhat disappointing.