William Lane Craig and the conflation between metaethics and normative ethics
In this blog post, I respond to the remarks that appear in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd5O0czxhz0
WLC may be the most prominent and most respected contemporary Christian apologist. Whatever the merits of WLC’s academic work, I am consistently disappointed by the way he handles metaethics in public venues such as speaking events, debates, and in the Q&A on the Reasonable Faith website.
For instance, in this short clip, clocking in at a mere 2:39, WLC mischaracterizes moral relativism in a dazzling variety of ways. Enough preamble. Let’s get into it.
WLC begins with the following:
“I’m persuaded that although people give lip service to relativism, in fact, nobody can live that way. It is impossible to live with other persons regarding them as pure means to an end and not thinking that there are objectively right and wrong ways that you would want to treat them and that you would want them to treat you.”
Right away, WLC commits a serious mistake: relativism has nothing to do with treating other people as “pure means to an end.” Relativism is the view that moral standards are true or false relative to the standards of different individuals or groups. It is a metaethical stance. It has nothing to do with treating other people as a means to an end. That may be a normative moral stance, or even an amoral stance.
That is, it may be that a person considers it morally permissible to treat others as a means to an end. In which case, if doing so is consistent with their standards or the standards of their culture it may be true, relative to those standards, that it is permissible to do so. Yet relativism doesn’t entail that one must hold that it is morally permissible (or required) to treat others as a means to an end. Someone may believe it is morally wrong to do so, or their culture may condemn doing so; if so, it may be inconsistent with their standards or their culture’s standards to treat others this way.
Even if WLC were not exclusively referring to e.g., appraiser relativism, and was instead referring to agent relativism, this would only morally require us to judge others according to their standards or those of their group; it would still have nothing to do with treating them as a means to an end. Likewise, even non-metaethical notions of “relativism” that are often conflated with its metaethical characterization likewise have nothing to do with treating others as a means to an end. Normative relativism may hold that we should tolerate people or groups with different moral standards, while descriptive relativism merely holds that other individuals and groups have different moral standards. Again, these have nothing to do with using others as a means to an end.
There is no conventional characterization of moral relativism according to which relativism commits one to or entails treating others as a means to an end. WLC is simply and unambiguously mischaracterizing moral relativism, implying that moral relativism somehow involves failing to treat other people as ends in themselves. It has nothing to do with this.
His other remarks are also puzzling. WLC maintains that nobody can actually live as a relativist. Is this because this would involve treating others as a means to an end? If so, relativism doesn’t entail this, so that wouldn’t follow. Or is it due to the other reason he brings up, that “thinking that there are no objectively right and wrong ways that you would want to treat them and that you would want them to treat you” - if so, why couldn’t you live without thinking that there are objective ways that you would want to treat others or have them treat you? What work is objectivity doing here? Unfortunately, WLC doesn’t say.
Next, WLC says:
“Very often you can find out what a person really believes, as opposed to what he says, by how he reacts when people treat him in a certain way. For example, I had a friend who was a philosophy professor at a university and a student in his philosophy class turned in a paper to him in which he argued for moral relativism, that there are no moral values, no moral duties, everything is relative, and so forth, and my friend put an F on the paper and sent it back to the student even though it was a good piece of work. And the student came into his office angry and said how can you give me this F! This was a good piece of research; how can you do that! And the professor looked and he said well it was handed in in a blue folder, and I don't like blue folders. The grade is an F. And the student said but that's not fair! You can't do that! And the professor said it's not what? Isn't this the paper that argued that there is no such thing as fairness and moral rightness and wrongness? And all of a sudden the student got the point, and at that point that professor changed the grade to an A.”
I’ve heard similar stories so many times they seem apocryphal. I’m doubtful many (if any) of these stories describe actual events, rather than convenient allegories that purport to illustrate how foolish relativism is.
The problem is, the stories themselves contain everything we need to demonstrate that those employing them seriously misunderstood the metaethical positions they’re criticizing.
First, moral relativism does not entail that “there are no moral values” or “no moral duties.” Yet look at how WLC characterizes the position: “there are no moral values, no moral duties, everything is relative, and so forth…” the view that morality is relative is not the same thing as the view that there are no moral values or duties. Moral relativism doesn’t hold that there are no moral values or duties, it holds that there are moral values and duties, and that their truth is relative…that there are still moral values and duties is the whole point! It’s what distinguishes relativism from noncognitivism and error theory! WLC appears to be unaware of or to conflate basic distinctions in metaethics. Here’s a quick recap:
Relativism: Moral claims are true or false relative to the standards of different individuals or groups
Error theory: All first-order moral claims are false
Noncognitivism: There are no moral facts because moral claims do not express propositions and are thus incapable of being true or false. Moral claims are better understood as expressions of e.g., emotional states, imperatives, or some other expression of nonpropositional content.
Note how relativism is both a form of cognitivism (it treats moral claims as truth-apt, i.e., capable of being true or false) and holds that some moral claims are true. In practice, most relativist positions relativize moral standards to the stances of individuals or groups. However, relativism is even technically compatible with realism, since one could (in principle) relativize moral claims to standards other than stances.
As a result, it’s technically possible for a relativist to be a realist. What makes most relativist positions antirealist positions in practice is not that they relativize moral standards, but that they relative them to people’s stances, thereby rendering moral facts stance-dependent. This point, and the points made in the next paragraph, are put most succinctly by Joyce ,here.
This is why stance-dependent positions remain antirealist even if they aren’t relative. For instance, relation-designating accounts may treat all moral claims as true or false according to one standard, such as the standards of a hypothetical ideally rational and fully-informed agent, or the standards of an intergalactic space dragon, or whatever. The point is, if there’s only one standard, moral claims no longer contain an indexical element that allows their truth function to vary relative to which standard they are relativized to: there’s only one standard! It just happens to be a stance. This is a bit pedantic, but if we were talking theology or scripture, I’d be willing to bet WLC would be just as particular.
Setting aside this arguably nitpicky concern, WLC seems to uncritically endorse a far less pedantic concern: conflating (yet again) metaethics and normative ethics. Nothing about moral relativism, or moral antirealism more generally, prohibits a person from objecting to an unfair grade. There’s nothing illegitimate or mistaken, nor is it in any way an expression of confusion or self-contradiction to object to other people’s actions if you don’t think their actions are objectively morally wrong.
A moral antirealist can both deny that there are stance-independent moral facts and simultaneously deny that such facts are a necessary condition for the legitimacy of expressing a normative stance or having preferences about how other people act. Realists consistently make the same mistake: they seem to think that (a) there are stance-independent moral facts and (b) such facts are necessary for us to be justified in acting certain ways. They then mistakenly think that if you endorse antirealism, you deny (a), which leaves you without (b), and therefore without any justification for or ability to legitimately object to other people’s actions, have normative standards, expect others to act certain ways, and so on.
This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the antirealist position. The problem is that the antirealist can reject (b), too. As such, the antirealist position permits a wholesale rejection, not merely of the existence of stance-independent moral facts, but also of the necessity or even relevance of such facts to justifying one’s actions; indeed, an antirealist isn’t even required to think any given action requires justification in the first place. I don’t require a justification to say “yay!” or “shut the door!,” for instance, and if moral claims are expressions of my moral preferences, e.g., “murder is wrong,” means something like “murder is inconsistent with my moral standards,” it’s not clear why I’d be required to think such preferences require justification.
For comparison, take subjectivism about food preference claims, e.g, “pizza is tasty.” If this is used to express the claim, “I consider pizza tasty,” does one require gastronomic justification for why they find pizza tasty? No. This would be absurd. That they find pizza tasty is just a psychological fact about themselves. It no more requires justification than someone needs to justify why they were born in May (To clarify: I am not saying you couldn’t be asked to provide justification for such claims being true; perhaps others have never seen you eat pizza and suspect you may be lying. Rather, the point is that you don’t have to present an argument or defense that would permit you to consider finding pizza tasty, such preferences may be outside one’s voluntary control, and wouldn’t disappear if one lacked reasons or arguments that would “permit” them to like pizza.).
To bring this back to the student’s situation: nothing about antirealism would somehow make it the case that a student would be making any mistake, or would be engaged in some kind of performative contradiction, if they were to object to receiving a bad grade. They wouldn’t even be making a mistake if they said that what the professor was doing was immoral and wrong and to insist that the professor “shouldn’t do it” because it’s “unfair.” Such claims are normative, not metaethical, and all such claims can be easily expressed in ways consistent with antirealism. Antirealist positions simply deny that there are stance-independent moral facts, they do not entail that you’d be making a mistake (by e.g., contradicting yourself) if you were to object to other people’s actions, nor do they prohibit one from holding normative stances about fairness or how teachers should grade.
We’re told that the professor said:
And the student said but that's not fair! You can't do that! And the professor said it's not what? Isn't this the paper that argued that there is no such thing as fairness and moral rightness and wrongness?
Is it? We were told the paper argued that morality was relative and that there were no moral values or duties. Perhaps if the student argued specifically for the latter this could cause them some problems. But if that were the case, then the problem with the student’s remarks wouldn’t be relativism, in which case it’s unclear how the story is supposed to show that relativism is unlivable. If relativism is somehow relevant, it’s unclear how, since relativism doesn’t hold that there are no moral values or duties. That sounds closer to, perhaps, error theory.
There are two issues, however. First, someone can deny that there are stance-independent moral facts without requiring them to abandon having any normative moral standards. Second, even if they did endorse a classical form of error theory in which they accepted that there were no moral facts this would (aside from not being relativism) still not indicate that objections to a bad grade are somehow illegitimate.
Compare a situation in which you are bargaining with someone about the price of a product. You would prefer to pay as little as possible, they’d prefer to charge you as much as possible. Suppose they propose an unrealistic offer. You may scoff, and object that the offer is unfair, or absurd, or objectionable. Now imagine this person responding, “Hold up. You don’t think there are any objective facts about what the correct price of the product is. You’re not a price realist, after all. As such, you can’t object to me charging you whatever I feel like.”
This is absurd. Your objection doesn’t require realism about the price of the product. You can object simply on the grounds that their offer is inconsistent with your preferences. Objections to how others treat us don’t require that their treatment be factually mistaken. That is, if you don’t want to accept someone’s unreasonable offer, you aren’t only “permitted” or “justified” in objecting to their offer if you think the offer is factually incorrect about the “correct” price of the product. There may be no correct price of that product, or indeed any product. The whole notion of a “correct” price that is true independent of what you or anyone else values the product at or is willing to pay for it, may seem absurd, even incomprehensible. Does this mean that none of us are permitted to or justified to bargain? Should we accept any offer anyone makes, no matter how unreasonable? Of course not. Objections don’t have to be objections to claims about what’s true or false. They can be objections to what other people are doing, or want to do, and one can object simply on the grounds that doing so is inconsistent with your preferences. A student may object to an unfair grade because they don’t want to be graded unfairly. Such desires don’t require justification.
And if the realist wants to insist that they do require justification, well (a) that’s the very thing a realist is denying and (b) they would have to present compelling arguments for such claims. They’re not entitled to simply help themselves to such claims, at least not without begging the question against the antirealist. Indeed, it’s fair to say that many objections to moral antirealist positions involve subtle and implicit forms of question-begging of this kind, where the realist helps themselves to one or more presumptions that go unstated but that, when made explicit, reveal that the realist is continuing to treat their exchanges with antirealists as though the antirealist is committed to one or more realist presuppositions. We aren’t, and realists often don’t seem to appreciate the conceptual resources available to antirealists.
Next, Craig says at 1:37:
See it's how we react when others treat us in ways that we think are wrong that our real moral sensitivities come out.
What is WLC talking about? Does he think moral relativism or moral antirealism involves denying or claiming not to have “moral sensitivities”? Of course we can (and do) have moral sensitivities. That is, we have moral preferences, values, standards, and so on. We just don’t think those standards involve stance-independent normative moral facts.
WLC seems to conflate moral relativism/antirealism with normative and psychological claims, e.g., that we can’t have normative moral standards, or don’t have moral “sensitivities.”
Reacting to how others treat us with moral outrage, or opposition, along with praising, blaming, do not, in any way, require or hint at a commitment to moral realism. Normative moral judgments, and acting in accordance with one’s values, is completely consistent with moral antirealism.