Yesterday we talked about why there can be no objective morality without God. The only logical position for an atheist to hold is moral relativism. Now today I want to discuss why moral relativism -- which is a position many atheists and secular people do openly hold -- is nonsensical and false. We do not get to invent our own moral systems. There is only one true moral system, and it is a system that everyone, everywhere, knows and recognizes.
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Now, yesterday I made the argument that there is no basis for objective morality without God.
As an atheist, you cannot logically assert any kind of objective moral code because you have denied God.
And I argued that the only thing left for an atheist is moral relativism.
That's really the only I'm not going to rehash that argument.
You can go and listen to it or watch it if you like.
My main objective was just to knock down the idea that it's possible for objective morality to exist in a godless universe.
I spent 30 minutes trying to do that, so you can go and look at that or listen to that.
Quite a lot of feedback to that discussion, much of it ranging from negative to extremely negative.
And now what I'd like to do is I'd like to engage what appeared to be the two most frequent criticisms Of the position that I expressed yesterday.
Now, the first one, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on.
I did want to mention it, though. There were a lot of people who insisted quite breathlessly that it is possible for an atheist to do good things and be a good person.
In fact, as I was told, just because atheists believe that there is no God doesn't mean that they're going to go off killing and raping, etc.
You don't need God to be a good person, I was told.
And to that argument, I say, yes.
Also, what are you responding to and who are you responding to?
Of course atheists can be moral.
Of course atheists can do good things.
I never argued to the contrary.
I've never heard any Christian argue to the contrary, honestly.
That's not an argument that really exists.
That certainly wasn't my argument.
I didn't argue that atheists can't be good people.
I said that atheism provides no rational basis for asserting goodness and badness as objective realities.
That was my argument.
I'm not sure why so many atheists struggle to understand this distinction.
And it's kind of funny to me that atheists like to impugn the intelligence of believers, while at the same time with the whole invisible sky daddy and all that kind of nonsense, while at the same time, which again, there is no Christian above the age of five who actually believes that God is in the sky or that he's magical.
So it's another...
Another, you know, it's a kind of really stupid straw man that I see really that intelligent atheists will use.
And it's beneath them to get into that kind of stuff.
But they do it. And even here, there is, even among intelligent atheists, there appears to be this inability to understand a really basic distinction and nuance.
So, again, I'm not saying that atheists aren't good.
I'm saying that atheism itself, the belief system, provides no basis, no rational basis for asserting the objective nature of morality.
That's my point.
In fact, my argument is actually the opposite.
Of what these critics seem to understand.
My whole point, and what I said many times in that episode, is that atheists do act morally, and they do recognize moral goodness, and they do condemn moral evil, which proves that they do recognize the objective nature of morality, even if it contradicts their worldview.
That was my point. It's the point I made.
Yes, there are plenty of good atheists who understand.
In fact, all of them recognize moral goodness.
That was my point that I was trying to make.
Now, you notice that...
Atheists will tend to have this confusion, actually, on the other side, too, because many arguments with atheists, in my experience, will devolve into the atheist listing all of the alleged crimes and atrocities committed by religious people.
I cannot tell you how many times I've had a debate or an argument with an atheist about the existence of God or something along those lines, and eventually they start talking about the Crusades and the Inquisition.
Now, the fact that they... The real point is that the Crusades, the Inquisition, none of that has anything to do with anything.
The sins of religious people are completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists.
I was watching a debate with Christopher Hitchens recently, and he went on this This whole tangent about the alleged wickedness of Mother Teresa.
Now, Hitchens was a brilliant guy, but this was an amazingly erroneous and pointless rant, as it obviously has no bearing at all on the question of whether God exists or not.
Makes no difference.
You can say whatever you want about Mother Teresa.
It has nothing to do with anything.
So it seems that some atheists tend to think that arguments about God are really a contest over who, between atheists and religious people, are the best people.
But that is not the argument.
And that is just not an argument that I've ever heard a Christian make.
Honestly, I've never, ever heard a Christian say that, well, Christians are the best people in the world, and if you are a Christian, then it prevents you from doing bad things.
And if you're an atheist, then all you do is bad things, and you're out raping and killing.
I've never heard that argument.
Honestly, I've not once ever heard it expressed from a Christian.
So we can put that to the side.
Second, this is where I want to spend the most time I heard from quite a few people who openly said that, well, morality is not objective.
You're right. Atheism provides no basis for objective morality, and that's because there is no objective morality.
There's only what we think is good or bad, which is a preference that depends on culture, evolution, personality, and so on.
So this is moral relativism.
What I was doing yesterday is I was trying to demonstrate that as an atheist, the only thing really open to you, logically, is moral relativism, although I didn't really get into trying to disprove moral relativism, so that's what I'm going to try to do now.
I'd like to explain why I think that moral relativism is false, why I believe that morality is certainly objective, And I guess before we do that, I guess we have to define our terms.
So on one hand, you have moral relativism, which is the belief that there is no underlying moral truth.
There's no moral truth at all.
Morality is both subjective and relative in this view.
So what is right and good depends on my own perspective.
So that's subjective.
And it depends on circumstance.
So it's relative. On the other hand, Objective morality is the belief that moral standards, moral truths, and moral responsibilities exist independent of my own preferences or opinions.
In other words, some actions are really good and some are really bad, and they remain good or bad even if I think otherwise.
Even if everyone in the world thinks otherwise, the moral truth remains.
So maybe instead of objective morality, we could call it actual morality.
I don't know. Maybe that's a better term.
But the point is that this belief holds that immoral actions are actually immoral.
That is, per se, immoral.
And moral actions are actually moral.
That is, per se, moral.
And just as we have actual moral obligations to do certain things and not do others.
And those obligations exist in Whether or not we recognize them, or whether or not we choose to follow them, or whether or not we like them.
So, how do I prove this?
Well, I'm not going to make an exhaustive argument here, but I will mention two points for consideration.
One, I think we have to start with, you know, my first piece of evidence for objective morality that I would present is Your own moral intuition.
I mean, your own understanding and my understanding, which is the same.
And this is a weird argument, I realize, because on one hand, it's very weak in that I can't provide tangible proof of it because I'm telling you what's going on in your own head, which I can't prove and, of course, comes off extremely presumptuous.
But on the other hand, it's a strong argument because as you listen to it, you know that what I'm saying is true.
So here's the point.
Each person who says that morality is not objective, in fact, I'll personalize this.
You, who are listening to this right now, if you as an individual, if you believe that morality is relative, if that's what you claim to believe anyway, then I'll talk to you.
So you say that morality, maybe you laugh at the idea of objective morality.
We all have our own morality.
My morality is not your morality, so on and so forth.
Yet, you say that, yet I know that you know that rape is wrong.
You know that murder is wrong.
You know that it's wrong to tell a lie.
Now, maybe you've told lies in the past, but you knew it was wrong when you did it.
And so you felt guilty for it afterwards.
And there are plenty of people out there, unfortunately, who have murdered and raped.
But unless they were insane, they knew it was wrong when they did it.
Which is why we can justify putting them in prison.
Because they knew it was wrong and they did it.
If they didn't know it was wrong and they did it, then they go to an insane asylum.
So you know it. And when I say you know it, I mean you know it.
Not that you've decided it or that it's your preference, but that it's a thing, it's a reality that you know and that you recognize.
Right? Okay, so how do I know that you know it?
Well, because if I murdered someone, or if I stole from someone, you would not say, well, that's your opinion, that's your morality, I mean, that's what you thought was right, and so I'm not going to judge you.
No, you wouldn't do that, would you?
You would condemn my actions and you would condemn them with force and intensity because I broke a code that you think I ought to have followed, which means that you innately recognize the code and you believe that I recognize it, which means that you believe it to be objective.
That is not subject to opinion.
Another example. You condemn the Nazi, even though you're a moral relativist, you still condemn the Nazi Holocaust.
And if I launched a serious argument where I said that the Nazis, well, you know, the Nazis, they thought that what they were doing was okay, and I mean, they had their reasons for it, and hey, let's not foist our morality on them.
If I made that argument, you would react rightly with disgust and derision.
You would mock me. You would spit at me for making that argument.
Because again, you recognize that the Nazis broke a universal code and that I, in justifying their behavior, am denying that code, which in this context you see correctly as a plainly absurd thing to do.
So even though you claim to be a moral relativist, if I made a consistent morally relativistic argument in relation to the Nazi Holocaust or rape, you would laugh at me.
You would laugh at your own position.
If it was made to you in reference to one of these things.
So that is my first argument.
I know that morality is objective because I can see that it is, and you can see that it is, and everyone can see that it is.
And if something was truly subjective, then there is simply no way that we would all have exactly the same sense of it.
That's the funny thing, you know, that all of these moral relativists out there, yet none of them speak up to offer their morally relativistic defenses of rape, holocaust, pedophilia.
Well, very few of them do.
Anyway, as I said yesterday, Richard Dawkins did offer a bit of a defense of pedophilia.
But even then, it was a half-hearted defense, and he's certainly in the minority among relativists.
And that's interesting, isn't it?
Number two, I think it's a valid point.
If I'm trying to disprove moral relativism, the fact that even moral relativists don't believe in it, I think that's a relevant point.
Number two, I think the objective nature of morality can be seen and proven historically and anthropologically.
If morality were subjective, if it were decided by individuals and societies, and if it did not have a source outside of ourselves, then the moral systems of every separate society should be like their clothing choices or their fashion.
That is, it should be wildly different from place to place and from era to era.
But that is not what you find.
In fact, if morality is subjective, then I think I should be able to find two things.
If I'm looking around the world, I'm looking through a history of different civilizations.
I should be able to find civilizations that have no moral code whatsoever.
I should be able to find civilizations where nothing is considered right or wrong.
And number two, I should be able to find civilizations that have something close to the opposite of our own moral code.
So civilizations where it's considered absolutely right to lie, murder, steal.
I should find civilizations where cowardice is celebrated, integrity is derided.
Given the number of civilizations that have existed, given how separate they have often been, especially in the past, I think it's reasonable that an entirely subjective thing should manifest itself in extremely different ways, opposite ways.
That is what we find with truly subjective things like fashion.
Okay, so you can find societies where men wear pants, societies where they wear skirts, societies where people wear almost nothing, societies where women wear burqas, societies where they wear bikinis.
If morality is subjective, then I should find a situation as diverse and contradictory as this, but I don't.
What I find as I look at civilizations across the world in history is that there is unanimous agreement in principle on a number of moral points, like it's wrong to lie, it's wrong to steal, to murder, it's good to be honest, to be humble, to be courageous.
I find basically the same sort of person admired and the same sort of person despised everywhere.
Now, It's true that you find civilizations where terrible evils are accepted in commonplace, obviously Nazi Germany, every slave-holding society is another example, but You notice that even in cases where terrible, monstrous evils were accepted, they were still rationalized and justified according to the same moral code.
So, murder was illegal under the Nazis, but they just claimed that exterminating the Jews was not murder.
Now, that claim was ridiculous, obviously, but the fact remains that even they felt the need to pay homage to this moral code and to pretend that they were following it.
Why? What was the point of that?
And It's because, in fact, we expected them to follow it, to have followed it.
It's because we rejected the idea that societies and individuals invent their own morality, that we could justify putting the Nazi war criminals on trial and then hanging them.
If morality were really subjective, we would have no basis for condemning them, because that was their morality.
But we rejected that and said there's only one, you broke it, you know you broke it, and now you face the consequences.
In slaveholding countries, like...
Like our own, prior to the 1860s, slavery was justified on the basis that slaves weren't fully people.
What does that mean?
It means that even slaveholders recognized that you shouldn't treat people like that.
But they rationalized that, well, these aren't people.
A bad rationalization, but the fact that they made it at all is kind of instructive, isn't it?
Okay. But you might say that, well, all of these societies I've talked about so far, they all interacted with each other.
They came from the same human pool, as it were.
So their agreement on moral points is not very surprising because of this interaction.
So fair enough.
Okay. Let's look at an example.
That should absolutely prove moral relativism if moral relativism is true.
Let's look at the meeting of Indian civilizations and Europeans.
So here we have people that are entirely separated, living in isolation from one another, who had never come in contact, never been exposed to each other, never exercised the slightest influence on one another prior to their meeting.
Here we have a chance for relativistic morality to really show itself.
If morality is really relative, and you've got these two sides of the world, not come in contact with each other, and you have this completely relative thing called morality, I mean, it should manifest itself in wildly different ways.
But that's not what you find.
Incredibly, Although the Indians and the Europeans were extremely different in many ways, they still had the same fundamental ideas about morality.
So to prove my point, I'll take the most challenging example for my position.
We can look at the Aztecs and the Spanish.
Now here we have two very, very different sets of people, and the Aztecs practice human sacrifice on a massive scale.
Yet even they had basically the same kinds of rules and laws and moral ideas as the Spanish.
Homicide, rape, perjury, theft, robbery, sedition, incest, public drunkenness, etc.
They were all condemned both as legal and moral infractions.
Now, yeah, they ripped the hearts out of their human sacrifices, but they didn't consider that murder.
So again, which doesn't make it okay, obviously.
Now, if you're a moral relativist, that does make it okay.
That's the whole point of moral relativism.
They didn't consider it to be bad, which means it wasn't.
As someone who believes in objective morality, I say that that's not an excuse.
It was still bad.
But the point is, again you see this thing, this invisible moral code, which appears to be the same everywhere, and which even the most evil civilizations felt the need to work around.
So, That's why I think moral relativism is false.
Because I see no evidence for it at all.
All I see when I look inside myself and when I look outwardly to human societies, our own, other societies, civilization, when I look through history, all I see is evidence that morality is objective.
It is a thing that you, it's not something you invent or come up with, it's a thing that you recognize.
Which is why all of these civilizations came to the same recognition.
Although they all failed to follow it in various different ways, and some to worse degrees than others, but they all saw basically the same thing.
A really relative thing, a really subjective thing, should be various, it should be contradictory, especially when you see that it's, especially in cases where it's developed, where you have two systems that have developed isolated from one another.
But that's not the case with morality, which tells me that it is not, in fact, relative.
It is objective and It is simply a truth that we all see and we choose to follow or not.