Controversial Philosopher Makes a Moral Change

Dr. Craig: Hello, this is William Lane Craig. Credible sociological surveys have revealed an unexpected resurgence of openness and interest among students in the existence of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. More than any other Christian ministry, I believe that Reasonable Faith is strategically positioned to supply the evangelistic and discipleship tools to help further this young generation.

During the last year, we’ve continued to produce our animated videos. We have a wonderful series of videos on the existence of God and the evidence for Jesus. And now we’re producing an ongoing series on the attributes of God—just releasing the video on divine omniscience, and the next one to come out will be on divine omnipotence.

We’ve also got a new Equip course on the atonement and have developed an app so that you can download these courses and access them easily using your mobile device. We have now over 255 local Reasonable Faith chapters all around the world—from Europe to Nepal to Australia to Muslim countries. And these chapter directors who lead these studies are vetted, qualified people—extraordinarily talented, committed to the task of worldwide evangelism and discipleship.

All of this is undergirded by my years of scholarly research which is bearing fruit now in my five-volume Systematic Philosophical Theology. I am currently working on the final volume. It is this sort of depth that undergirds our popular-level material for student and lay audiences that helps to make Reasonable Faith so effective and so strategic in reaching this younger generation.

This fall, we’re having our annual matching grant campaign. A group of donors is donating $250,000 to match your donation to Reasonable Faith given between now and the end of the year. Dollar for dollar, every gift will be matched up to $250,000, and this will put us in a good position for beginning the new year.

So, I hope you’ll give prayerful consideration to including Reasonable Faith among the Christian ministries and charities that you support. Thank you so much for your interest and for your support in this strategic ministry.

Kevin Harris: Let's check out an interview with Peter Singer on morality. I've noticed that when some Christian philosophers and ethicists give examples of thinkers and influencers we should oppose, the name Peter Singer often comes up. That could be because he has said some things that seem to support infanticide, among other things. Is he the philosophical boogeyman that he's often made out to be, you think?

Dr. Craig: Well, he does have some radical views, but that doesn't mean that he's a moral nihilist or relativist. He just thinks, for example, that a whale is objectively more valuable than, say, a human embryo, and therefore it would be permissible to abort that human embryo for certain reasons. I heard Peter Singer debate Dinesh D'Souza at Biola University years ago, prior to my debate there with Christopher Hitchens, and Singer really performed admirably in that debate. The debate was on the existence of God, and D'Souza, instead of debating the existence of God, went after Singer for his moral theory. Singer got up and pointed out that this was off-topic and that the topic was the existence of God. And D'Souza had said nothing to defend God's existence or to refute Singer's argument. So it was really a rout. It was quite embarrassing, and the Biola students were really eager for another debate by the time my contest with Christopher Hitchens came along.

Kevin Harris: Here's the first clip that we're going to take a look at. He's asked by the interviewer what he thinks philosophers have most gotten wrong and wasted their time on. Here's clip number one.

Interviewer: Over your long philosophical career spanning many decades, what do you think philosophers have got wrong the most?

Peter Singer: Well, mostly I think it's the problems that they choose to work on. Philosophers understandably have a tendency to work on those problems that their colleagues are interested in and particularly that will get published in the best peer-reviewed journals. Although there are some good peer-reviewed journals that do publish on applied ethics or practical ethics, that's generally not seen as the most prestigious part of the field to publish in. So there's a lot of work that goes into things that I think are less important problems, less urgent problems than problems in ethics. I'd like to see more philosophers focusing on those problems that make a difference to how we live, that make a difference to the state of the world as it is, rather than things that are more narrowly of interest to a small number of their philosophical colleagues.

Kevin Harris: You can comment on what he said, Bill, but I'd like to ask you the same question. How would you answer that?

Dr. Craig: I think while this may be true of Peter Singer's colleagues, I can only speak for myself and say that my method has been to work on what I am interested in, what I am passionate about, regardless of its importance or publishability. The irony of his comments was that he thinks philosophers should be working more on the issues that he thinks are important. I couldn't care less about what he thinks is important. I'm going to work on the issues that light up my board and make me excited about what I'm studying. That's my modus operandi.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, I think he wants greener philosophers, for sure. Singer has recently moved to a belief in objective morality after years of thinking that it was all subjective. Here's clip number two.

Peter Singer: For many years, I considered myself an anti-realist or a non-cognitivist—whatever you want to call it—somebody who did not think that there were objective truths in ethics. But I was always interested in the role that reason can play in ethics, and how it is that reason gets that influence on our ethical judgments, although we feel it should. For a while I tried finding ways in which it could, without actually moving over to a more objectivist position. But I struggled with that. Then I was writing a book about Henry Sidgwick, the great 19th-century utilitarian philosopher, together with a Polish colleague, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. In working on Sidgwick, who was an objectivist in ethics and thought that there are some self-evident truths or axioms of ethics, I became persuaded—and Katarzyna helped to persuade me—that that is a defensible view, and that it can solve the problem of providing an objective foundation for ethics, one based on reason. It seemed to me that that was, in the end, more defensible than I had previously imagined it to be.

Kevin Harris: Interesting. I haven't seen the data but I've noticed what seems to be an increasing move to moral realism in recent years. Do you see any indications of that, especially among prominent philosophers like we just heard from Singer?

Dr. Craig: I'm not in a position to answer that question in general. I can only speak anecdotally, and I have to say that in my debates on university campuses, the response to the moral argument for God's existence by agnostics and atheists has typically not been to deny the objectivity of moral values and duties. They usually agree with me that objective moral values and duties exist. When I think of people like Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Louise Antony, Erik Wielenberg—all of these folks are moral realists. I think that Singer has been an objectivist about ethics for a long time. This is something that our secular friends on the Internet who want to adopt an anti-realist view of moral values and duties really need to think seriously about. I think many of them have the misimpression that it's only theists who believe in the objectivity of moral values and duties because we have such a plausible way of grounding them. But in fact, moral realism is widespread.

Kevin Harris: Up next, Singer discusses morality, rationality, and the evolutionary advantages of developing ethics. Clip number three.

Peter Singer: Ethics is concerned about both humans and other sentient creatures. They're the subjects of our ethical concern. But you've raised the question of where ethics comes from, and you say it's a human enterprise. I'm not so sure about that, in that if there is a rational basis for thinking, for instance, that agony is a bad thing and that it's good to reduce agony, I would hope that any rational being—human or nonhuman—who understood what agony is would agree with that judgment. It may be true that on this planet only humans have a developed moral system and argue about morality. That surely is true. But because we have developed reason—and of course, we developed reason for evolutionary advantages that it gave us—we have somehow cottoned onto something which there could be other beings in the universe who also understand, who don't have human origins. I think that we are understanding something about the objective nature of ethics when we understand the rational foundation for it, which I claim, and some other philosophers claim, is something that any rational being would be able to appreciate.

Kevin Harris: Plenty to address there, including the rational and evolutionary basis for morality. I noticed that secular moral philosophers talk a lot about not causing harm. That's usually the term. Singer’s term for that is preventing agony. I agree—I don't like agony. Maybe a little discomfort, but agony? No.

Dr. Craig: He doesn’t define here what it means, but I take it that he is willing to say that pain is not necessarily bad—that pain can be a good thing. And I think that’s true. But agony, which would be some sort of really intense, horrible pain, is a bad thing. I think that harm, though, is probably the better term because it is more objective. Agony is a subjective state of mind, and harm is an objective state. What's interesting here is that Singer recognizes that even though our apprehension of moral values and duties evolves over time, that does nothing to rob them of their objectivity, any more than our gradual apprehension of the physical world over time robs it of its objectivity.

Kevin Harris: Abortion comes up in this next clip—you knew it would. Clip number four.

Peter Singer: People could disagree with me on abortion in a variety of different ways. They could, for example, think that the fetus has a fundamental right to life. They might be misled by the fact that the fetus is biologically a human being and their belief that all humans have rights, including a right to life, to think that therefore the fetus has a right to life. Now firstly, I don't think that ethics really is grounded on rights. I think that rights have a role in ethics, but it's not the foundation of ethics. So they might be making that mistake—thinking that rights are the foundation of ethics. Or they might be making the mistake of thinking that because we accord human rights, which is a kind of ethical convention that we talk about—we accord rights to all humans—therefore, the fetus must have those rights. I think that would be a mistake in transferring something that may be true of typical humans to humans at a very early stage of life where they don't have the characteristics that we might regard as grounds for giving other humans a right to life.

Kevin Harris: “Ethics is not grounded on rights.” My ears kind of perked up when he said that, Bill. Can you expound on that and some of the other things he said?

Dr. Craig: I'm inclined to agree with that—that though there are moral rights, they are not truly fundamental to ethics. I would rather speak of intrinsic value or moral duties than rights. For example, I think that we have moral duties toward animals and toward the environment, but I would never say that oceans and forests and beasts have moral rights. It's cast better in terms of duties. But the abortion question can simply be rephrased: we have a moral duty to protect unborn human beings because of their intrinsic value. Now, Singer is certainly correct that fetuses don't have characteristics like self-consciousness, freedom of the will, rationality, and so forth. But they do have these characteristics potentially if their lives are not artificially interrupted. They will grow to have those capacities. So they have them latently and simply need to be actualized. I think that gives them a certain right to life that should not be taken away without some sort of overriding moral justification—or, to rephrase it differently, in virtue of their intrinsic moral value, we have a moral obligation to protect them unless and until there is some overriding moral obligation that would supersede it.

Kevin Harris: Up next, Singer is asked about God. Here's the interviewer—clip number five.

Interviewer: Some people criticize the position of people who don't believe in God and say that when they claim that morality is objective, they're making almost a religious move in nature. How would you respond to that criticism?

Peter Singer: I don't think it's true that you need belief in God to think that morality is objective, just as you don't need belief in God to think that mathematics is objective, for example, or the laws of logic. I think that they're quite independent. I do consider myself an atheist, and I am a believer in the objective truth of morality. Some people make the mistake of thinking that without God, ethics must be relative, but that's just a mistake. They've perhaps been brought up thinking that ethical truth comes from God, comes from the Scriptures or the Ten Commandments or whatever else it might be, but they haven't considered other possible grounds for the objectivity of ethics without belief in God.

Kevin Harris: You've pointed out multiple times, Bill, that people can recognize and act upon moral values and duties apart from belief in God. The big question is, can there be an objective foundation for morality apart from the existence of God?

Dr. Craig: Singer simply asserts that there can. But you notice he didn't provide any argument, nor give any hint of an account of the grounding of objective moral values and duties apart from God. I think he's simply inaccurate when he says that theistic ethicists haven't considered the alternatives to theism. For goodness’ sake, look at my debate with Erik Wielenberg on the foundations of moral values or the work of David Baggett, a premier Christian moral philosopher. Certainly these folks consider and weigh the non-theistic alternatives to theistic-based ethics. I fear that Singer probably just doesn't read Christian ethicists and so he's not familiar with the literature on this.

Kevin Harris: In this next clip, Singer comments on Sam Harris' view—clip number six.

Interviewer: The way that Sam Harris expresses his belief in objective morality, or one way that he puts it, is that this belief we have in the distinction between facts and values—i.e., what David Hume put forward, the distinction between “ought” and “is”—is actually a fabrication or a mistake in the language that we use. Would you agree with him in that assessment?

Peter Singer: No, I don't agree with Sam about that. I do think that there is a distinction between facts and values, or “is” and “ought.” In that sense, I'm not a naturalist, as Sam is. I'm a non-natural objectivist. Sidgwick was a non-natural objectivist. I believe Derek Parfit was a non-natural objectivist. So this is a distinct position, and it's like the truths of mathematics or logic. They're not empirical truths; they're not something that we can observe in the world. They are truths of reason. In that sense, I think they are non-natural truths, and I think morality belongs with them—or at least some basic axioms of morality. Not all moral judgments are in that same category.

Kevin Harris: A lot of that came up with your debate with Sam Harris, Bill. He says he's a non-natural objectivist. Maybe talk about what all that entails.

Dr. Craig: If you watch my debate with Sam Harris, you'll see that he equates goodness with the flourishing of sentient life. That is a natural objectivism—he equates moral goodness with natural states of affairs. But I think Singer quite rightly sees that objective moral values and duties cannot be plausibly identified with any natural state or property in the world. He compares them rather to truths of mathematics and logic. While we may be able to apprehend these moral truths through reason alone, and while these moral truths may be necessary truths, that says nothing about the question of their grounding of the explanation of these moral truths. So there's still a lacuna here, a gap in his moral philosophy, as a non-natural objectivist who is also a non-theist.

Kevin Harris: One more clip today. Singer is asked about the role of intuition in moral judgments. Clip number seven.

Interviewer: I want to ask you a little bit about what you think the place of intuition should be in our moral judgments. In a paper titled Ethics and Intuitions in 2005, you wrote that “the moral intuitions are the biological residue of our evolutionary history, and it's not clear why we should regard them as having any normative force.” What primarily do you think should have normative force in the calculation or making of ethical judgments?

Peter Singer: I think that what should have normative force is beliefs about the foundations of ethics, including the idea that, for example, the interests of strangers should count equally – when we're thinking from a purely ethical stance – with my own interests unless I have some reason to believe that my own interests are significantly greater than their interests. But if they’re similar interests, they should count equally. That does upset many of our intuitions, which are that we have special obligations to family and close friends rather than to strangers—which again, a utilitarian can give some explanation of why we think that but ultimately that’s not the foundation of ethics. I think we should be prepared to challenge a lot of widely held intuitions when, working up from that rational foundation, we apply it to particular situations. We can see that the right thing to do is sometimes contrary to the intuitions that we have evolved to have when we were living in small-scale societies and when they helped us to survive and reproduce and helped our offspring to survive.

Kevin Harris: Bill, if you could comment on Singer’s view on moral intuition in that clip—and as well, how would you answer that question on intuition and morality?

Dr. Craig: I think it's impossible to escape altogether the need for moral intuitions. Even Singer’s claim that strangers have the same claims as do family members or friends is ultimately based upon a moral intuition about the value of human beings. He just thinks that sometimes our moral intuitions can be incorrect. For example, he thinks that it is incorrect that you should save your own children’s lives before saving the lives of some stranger’s children. He thinks that these lives are equally valuable and therefore your intuition that you should save your own children first is a mistaken intuition. I don’t agree with that, but nevertheless, I think we all agree that moral intuitions are defeasible and need to be examined and questioned. But you’ll never be able to escape the need for them altogether.

Kevin Harris: As we're wrapping it up today, I just wonder about the significance of his move toward moral realism or moral objectivism. It seems like that’d be a step in the right direction, and especially for an atheist to consider that – what is the best explanation or grounding for those objective moral values that you’ve moved toward?

Dr. Craig: Absolutely. I think that Singer has a strong moral intuition, for example, that agony is intrinsically bad. I think that illustrates my point that moral intuitions are really inescapable. But what we can rejoice in is that here is a man who recognizes the objectivity of moral values and duties. That should raise in all of our minds the acute question of the grounding or explanation of these objective moral values and duties. Theism, I think, does a far better job of explaining these than does atheism.^[1]