#900 A Moral Argument from a Continental Thinker
August 11, 2024Dr. Craig,
I'm studying Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, but the idea that our moral and empirical knowledge rests ultimately on unprovable assumptions, or intuitions, has long fascinated me. Despite being trained in the continental tradition, I've attempted to formalize my thoughts. Might we begin to formulate an argument for God's existence along these lines?
1. All our putative knowledge, moral and empirical, rests ultimately upon assumptions about our capacity to reliably interrogate the world.
2. Those assumptions “bottom out,” to some non-trivial degree, in axiomatic convictions born of forceful intuitions which themselves are not susceptible to empirical confirmation.
3. The degree of credence we grant these axioms is proportional to the instinctual conviction they arouse (e.g., the instinctual conviction that other minds exist).
4. There are at least some moral propositions that arouse forceful convictions equaling the convictions aroused by propositions pertaining to the physical world (e.g., the conviction aroused by the proposition that it is wrong to torture an infant equals the force of our conviction born of our senses when they report that we stand before a wooden table).
5. To deny the reliability of our moral intuitions necessarily casts doubt on our empirical intuitions, as they are both derived from forceful convictions.
6. We must, therefore, in both instances, moral and empirical, grant the authority of some extra-intuitive sanction for the veracity of our knowledge or admit the possibility of error.
Aaron
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
Having just read the manuscript for David Baggett and Jerry Walls’ forthcoming book The Good, the Right, and the Real: Is Value a Fact? (Oxford: Oxford University Press), I was struck by how similar your thinking is to theirs, Aaron, even though you come at the issue from a Continental perspective whereas they approach it from an analytic philosophical perspective. Almost all your premises have correlates in the analytic tradition.
For example, (1) and (2) express the idea of properly basic beliefs which lie at the foundations of knowledge and which we are rational and warranted in accepting. Such properly basic beliefs, as you note, include belief in the existence of other minds, the reality of the external world, and the reality of the past. Without such properly basic beliefs, we should be reduced to utter scepticism.
The idea expressed in (3) is called Phenomenal Conservatism, the view that if it seems to someone S that p is true, then S is prima facie justified in believing that p. More precisely,
PC. If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters,[1] S is thereby justified in believing that p.
Phenomenal conservatives talk about S’s “seemings,” which refers to experienced mental states with propositional content and a forceful phenomenal character, a sort of felt veridicality that inclines us to believe their propositional content.
Your (4) is the burden of Baggett and Walls’ book. They seek to justify moral realism over against various anti-realist views like error theory, expressivism, and constructivism. They use the same example of torturing an infant as a moral seeming so strong that it warrants moral realism. They maintain that anti-realism is at root
a veto of morality, and the price is prohibitive. It is a denial that torturing children or exterminating whole people groups is wrong, or that racism is perverse, or that integrity is any morally better than duplicity and corruption. What it assumes is that our moral experience—the visceral aversion we have thinking about the Holocaust, our phenomenological antipathy to cruelty, our abhorrence of mindless barbarism or rapacious greed, the deep satisfactions of morality we are capable of feeling, our ravenous hunger to see justice done—is systematically misleading.
In a nutshell, our response to this approach is to ask which intuition is the more compelling: that there are no stance-independent moral truths (like detractors of moral realism insist), or (say) that setting fire to babies for fun is wrong? We do not think it a remotely close call, in truth
If we assume that there are no defeaters of our moral experience, your (5) seems to follow. If we can reject our undefeated moral seemings, then why not reject other seemings that are of comparable or less phenomenal force?
It is only when you get to (6) that your argument, I think, goes astray. There need not be any non-basic epistemic warrant for our properly basic moral and empirical beliefs. Rather you should conclude:
6. Therefore, we are warranted in holding to our moral and empirical properly basic beliefs.
As you note, this conclusion will have important implications for the existence of God once we ask about the best explanation for our objectively true moral beliefs.
[1] A defeater is in this case a belief that is incompatible with p and at least equal to p in warrant.
- William Lane Craig