Instigator / Con
1500
rating
3
debates
66.67%
won
Topic
#5613
If God exists, then morality is objective
Status
Debating
Waiting for the next argument from the contender.
Round will be automatically forfeited in:
00
DD
:
00
HH
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MM
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Parameters
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 4
- Time for argument
- Two weeks
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- One month
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
Contender / Pro
1500
rating
1
debates
50.0%
won
Description
Resolution: If God exists, then morality is objective.
Definitions:
God - the omniscient, omnipotent, sentient creator of the universe who gives moral commandments to his followers and/or humankind in general
Morality - a system that prescribes what is right, wrong, good, and evil
Objective - derived from facts and valid logical deductions; provable. | Antonym of subjective
Pro will have the primary burden of proof in this debate. As such, I, as Con, will waive the first round. In turn, Pro must waive the last round. Violation of this rule ought to result in a conduct point penalty. Forfeiting a round also ought to result in a conduct penalty.
Thank you, and may the better debater win!
Round 1
Per the format of this debate, I waive this round.
Introduction:
When we look out at the world we needn't look far to discover that people take the objectivity of morality for granted, and if they didn’t, the basic fabric of society would quickly splinter apart. That is to say, the colloquial understanding of morality is that it exists as an independent standard about human affairs, it can be appealed to, and it is efficient in settling disagreements about issues of justice. To demonstrate this, consider this passage from C.S. Lewis:
“Everyone has heard people quarreling. Sometimes it soundsfunny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but how-ever it sounds, I believe we can learn something very impor-tant from listening to the kind of things they say. They saythings like this: ‘How’d you like it if anyone did the same toyou?’—‘That’s my seat, I was there first’—‘Leave him alone,he isn’t doing you any harm’—‘Why should you shove infirst?’—‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit ofmine’—‘Come on, you promised.’ People say things like thatevery day, educated people as well as uneducated, and childrenas well as grown-ups.Now what interests me about all these remarks is that theman who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’sbehaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing tosome kind of standard of behavior which he expects theother man to know about. And the other man very seldomreplies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries tomake out that what he has been doing does not really goagainst the standard, or that if it does there is some specialexcuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this partic-ular case why the person who took the seat first should notkeep it, or that things were quite different when he was giventhe bit of orange, or that something has turned up which letshim off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as ifboth parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair playor decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.”What we see here is that people behave as if there is some sort of agreement about what Right and Wrong really are, and when there are disagreements they appeal to something like a Law of Human Nature, and they use their moral intuitions, the common law and the Church (when relevant) to decide who is more congruent with the Law of Human Nature.
This passage leads right into my first point, which is that morality must exist independently of any individual’s reason, otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to stand apart as a standard capable of settling disagreements. If morality were subjective all the way through, one person’s claim of justice would be just as true as another person’s, and if those two people got into a quarrel there would be no way of telling who was in the right and who was in the wrong. To draw upon a metaphor, imagine if we had no agreements about the basic axioms of mathematics, such as the law of addition, Euclid’s geometric axioms, Axiom of Induction, etc., if different mathaticians used different axioms they would never be able to agree upon anything, build rockets, cars, etc., it wouldn’t matter how consistent they were with their own set of rules if they all didn’t take the same set of assumptions for granted about the rules of the universe. The only real difference between the Law of Human Nature, and the laws of nature, is that a planet could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it. In summary, the measuring stick of morality needs to be independent of the thing measured.
In addition to the commonsensical use of morality, we can also deploy the logical argument of Reductio ad Absurdum to show the logical contradictions we would be led to accept if we considered morality to be subjective. Imagine who absurd it would be if someone said, “In my opinion, I just don’t like the Nazi party.” If we accepted subjective morality, then we would have no way of condemning the Nazis beyond our own opinion. Instead, we want to be able to say that the Nazis were really wrong and that they transgressed a law of the universe, which says that there is something wrong about putting Jews in ovens. Otherwise, we can accuse the Nazis of no more than being overly zealous patriots of Nazi Germany. And the Neroberg trials (where we tried Nazi doctors like Dr. Josef Mengele for conducting inhuman experiments on the Jews) should have never taken place, and no Nazi should have been held accountable for putting Jews in ovens. Because after all, Nazi German made laws that it was acceptable to imprison and torture Jews, so if subjective morality was true then Germans were actually doing the moral thing by following the law at the time!
The title of this debate is “If God Exists, then Morality is Objective,” which implies that there might be other kinds of possible worlds where morality is subjective. Since we are not debating the modal possibility of other words, we must give reasons for the ways in which morality is objectively grounded in the world we find ourselves in. The thesis of this argument is that morality is grounded in the laws of nature of the created order, platonic ideals, and God. Let’s start with the laws of nature:
- There are vast symmetries between the neurological states of humans. Our wiring as homo sapiens is such that the release of certain neurotransmitters in the brain creates the phenomenological experience of joy or suffering, and this does not change from human to human. The rise of Serotonin levels roughly corresponds with emotions like joy, and the rise of hormones like cortisol corresponds with emotions like stress. Due to these symmetries of brain chemistry, the US constitutional right for “the pursuit of happiness” also depends on symmetrical circumstances that give rise to the neurotransmitters of happiness. For one, consistent serotonin levels require that Maslow's needs are met, like food, water, and shelter, and the basic physical hierarchy there also other psychological needs, like purpose, community, meaning that need to be met to obtain a happy life over the course of one’s life. Because these needs do not vary to a high degree from person to person, so metaethical values need to be held to protect the rights, liberties, and autonomy of humans. For example, if property rights were deprived of people, this would thwart their ability to garner resources and would lead to a loss of food, water, and shelter, which would end in human suffering. In summary, since humans are largely built the same, they require largely symmetrical treatment, and to say that metaethical values are subjective is to say that there are no universal guiding principles we can use to predict human behavior or to maximize human happiness. Morality is consistent from culture to culture and from person to person because the laws of nature that dictate the structure of the human psyche are universal. To say that morality is subjective is to deny the objectivity of the laws of nature.
- If you know anything about mathematics, you know that the majority of mathematicians at the research level are something akin to Neo-platonists. Whether or not the Platonic realm is true in actuality, the way that the theory of Platonism explains the ways that math is discovered, appears to be independent of human minds, and yet is unreasonable effective at solving real problems makes Platonism a highly attractive philosophical explanation of mathematics. For instance, the statement "2+2=4" seems true regardless of cultural background, time period, or individual belief. However, no one has ever seen the number “4,” or can prove that any numbers exist objectively. Numbers are instrumentally highly useful at solving problems, but they are not discovered empirically. I say all this to suggest that morals as treated with the same kind of ontological status as Platonic ideas prove to be highly explanative as a philosophical theory. The kind of moral world that humans find themselves in tends to be one where we have real claims to moral rights and can suggest when moral wrongs have transgressed. So for example, children at the early ages of three and four years old have been shown in studies to act as “intuitive lawyers.” These children are capable of judging the intent of the actors and are even able to draw a distinction between what is referenced in the law and the difference between a mistake of fact vs. a mistake of law (Levine, Leslie, & Mikhail, 2018). This is a highly developed sense of moral judgment that has been built into nearly every legal system. If morality was simply a social construct that was conditioned by society or by parents, then it would be nearly impossible for children at these ages to be able to make such intuitive moral judgments. This implies that there is something of a universal moral grammar, which is the basic idea that there might be an innate basis for our moral judgments. Chomsky thought that we all had an innate linguistic grammar and that all languages had the same deep grammatical structure. If morals are innate, but we are able to contest about which morals are more or less preferable, then the moral world turns out to be discovered by the human mind, but is recapitulated through language, and ultimately by the laws we adopt as a society. In conclusion, the pervasive and objective nature of morality is best described as mathematics and like that of the platonic forms.
- In many religious traditions, God is seen as the ultimate standard of goodness. For instance, in Christianity, God's nature and will define what is morally right and wrong. This concept aligns with the idea of the "summum bonum," where God embodies the highest form of good that all other values and actions are measured against.
Round 2
I would like to thank my opponent for accepting this debate. May it prove to be an intelligent and thought-provoking discussion!
The Argument From Consequences
Imagine, for a moment, that a friend came up to you distraught, saying, "I just found out that some people believe that tastes in books, music, television, and film are subjective, not factual! How could this be?"
You respond, "Well, of course they are. Why wouldn't they be?"
Your friend says, "Why, if opinions on film were truly subjective, then all standards of quality would disintegrate! The Shawshank Redemption would have just as much claim to being the best movie ever made as The Room! Clearly, that can't be true, so whether a movie is good or bad must be universal and objective."
I think it's clear what the problem with this argument is, and yet many, including my opponent, use essentially the same line of attack to try and prove moral realism. Really, this is just a logical fallacy known as an Appeal to Consequences -- the idea that some fact must be wrong because if true, it would lead to an undesirable outcome. My opponent uses this sort of argument several times, saying, for instance:
Imagine who absurd it would be if someone said, “In my opinion, I just don’t like the Nazi party.” If we accepted subjective morality, then we would have no way of condemning the Nazis beyond our own opinion. Instead, we want to be able to say that the Nazis were really wrong and that they transgressed a law of the universe, which says that there is something wrong about putting Jews in ovens.
The problem with this line of attack is, even if I take the argument presented completely at face value, it doesn't actually prove that morality is objective -- i.e. that there are moral facts. All it does is say that the statement "The Nazis were evil" would not be factual if morality is subjective, which is undesirable in my opponent's view. Perhaps it would be more desirable for such a statement to be factual and universally true, but that doesn't make it so. At best, Pro argues that morality must be objective because we should want it to be so, for it would lead to desirable results. At worst, he assumes that "The Nazis were evil" is already factual to begin with, which is just Begging the Question, another logical fallacy.
Other quotes from my opponent that use this same sort of unsound reasoning:
[M]orality must exist independently of any individual’s reason, otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to stand apart as a standard capable of settling disagreements. If morality were subjective all the way through, one person’s claim of justice would be just as true as another person’s, and if those two people got into a quarrel there would be no way of telling who was in the right and who was in the wrong.
This assumes that some objective way of telling who is right must exist, but this is unsupported.
[T]o say that metaethical values are subjective is to say that there are no universal guiding principles we can use to predict human behavior or to maximize human happiness.
This is akin to saying, "If Islam is not the true religion, then there would be no way of explaining how Muslims could refrain from eating delicious bacon." Clearly, Muslims don't eat pork because they believe God commands them to not do so. The actual existence of Allah is not necessary to explain this. Most humans believe in some form of morality, so it only makes sense that they would act according to some moral principles. We can still predict human behavior and measure human happiness even if there are no moral facts.
Axiomatically Incorrect
My opponent makes reference to mathematical axioms and says that morality works in a similar way. However, this argument only weakens his case, rather than strengthening it. Axioms are statements which are taken to be true because they serve as a basis for reasoning but cannot be proven. It is a foundational truth of both mathematics and logical reasoning in general that some things must simply be taken for granted, or else we would never be able to prove anything at all. For instance, the reflexive property, which in mathematics states that a number is always equal to itself, is not itself provable, but is merely assumed to be true.
Moral objectivism cannot be proven by simply taking it as axiomatic, for again, that would merely be begging the question. To argue that we ought to come to an agreement on moral axioms for the betterment of society is to say that morality would not objectively exist if we did not first start with the assumption that it does.
Hume's Guillotine
The strongest points my opponent makes involve similarities among the moral systems of human cultures and the apparent innateness of human morality. There are a few points I could make in this regard. For one thing, I believe that there are cultural differences in moral systems which shed serious doubt on the validity of this argument. For instance, virtually everyone everywhere would agree that rape is morally wrong, and a grievous wrong as well. However, what exactly is rape? It sounds like a simple question, but various cultures across the world and across time have viewed things very differently. Until relatively recently, marital rape was not a crime punishable by law throughout most of the world, and in some parts of the world, it is still perfectly legal, mainly because the people living in those legal jurisdictions where it is legal do not consider it to be a wrong. Rather, they believe that a man has a fundamental right to sex with his lawfully wedded wife which is more important than and outweighs her own right to bodily autonomy. This provides evidence that morality is shaped just as much as, if not more so, by culture rather than anything innate.
However, I think there is still a more fundamental point being missed here. I think my opponent's arguments are sufficient to demonstrate that morality exists in general, but that is not the topic of this debate. It is up to Pro to prove, not just that morality exists, but that it is objective -- that there are moral facts that are true and independent of human beliefs, feelings, or perceptions. In other words, if rape is objectively wrong, it must be wrong not merely because humans believe it to be wrong, but because it is actually so. In deferring to human beliefs and intuitions, Pro fails to prove that these beliefs are factual, and falls victim to the classic fallacy of assuming an 'ought' from an 'is'. One cannot validly derive a moral statement merely from descriptive statements.
This is the real crux of my argument, so let me deliver it as plainly but as completely as I can.
- Any moral statement either is, or has an equivalent, ought statement. For instance, to say that 'Theft is wrong' is equivalent to saying that 'One ought not commit theft.'
- No ought statement can be validly derived merely from descriptive statements ('is statements'). This is widely accepted to be true among philosophers.
When we put these two statements together, however, we arrive at a stunning conclusion. If it is possible to prove a moral statement, then we can prove an ought statement (1). However, to prove that ought statement, we must first have an ought statement in the premises (2). But, in order to prove that statement in our premises, it must be derived from a logical argument that also has an ought statement in the premises. And then, we would need to prove that ought statement as well. Either we end up in an infinite loop of circular logic, or an infinitely long chain of justifications that has no end point. Either way, it is an inherently invalid argument. However, to derive an ought statement merely from 'is statements' is also logically invalid. Therefore, we find that it is impossible to prove any ought statement, which means that it must be impossible to prove any moral statement at all. Moral objectivism is quite literally impossible unless we take at least one moral statement to be axiomatic. However, as already discussed, to do so would merely be begging the question, itself a logical fallacy. Therefore, morality cannot be objective.
Conclusion
My opponent's case is fundamentally backwards -- it relies on first assuming that objective morality exists, and works backwards from there. However, it fails to actually prove its existence or clearly describe its origins, and relies on classic logical fallacies, rendering the whole argument unsound. He has not been able to meet his burden of proof.
Thank you for reading! I now yield the floor.
Forfeited
Round 3
Unfortunately, my opponent has been unable to respond in time. I shall await his arguments.
Not published yet
Round 4
Not published yet
Not published yet
I understand. I've let things slip away from me before as well.
Sorry for the forfeiture. I meant to respond on time, but things have been crazy at work so I let time slip away. I still want to give a reply and finish the debate though because it's a good one :)
Sorry to keep you waiting! I did intend to have my arguments up earlier, but to be honest with you, I have a really bad habit of procrastinating until the last minute. Looking forward to your responses!
Recidivism? More like, Reci-eve deez nutz.
Great, looking forward to your contribution! :)
I've read your opening arguments and it looks like this is going to be a good debate! I'll try to have my arguments up by the end of the week.
"moral sense theory is more obscure, perhaps I will get into it more when your debate is done, but I think it goes a long way to prove objective morality exists."
Sure, I'd like to hear more about it after this debate is over. Ethical theory is very interesting to me, personally, and I like learning more about it.
"Your opponent doesn't need to prove God exists. He could claim that in fact God is not real, but that if God were real hypothetically speaking than objective morality would have to be real."
Yup, he could do that. I was well aware of that when I created this debate. I'm interested to see what arguments he will use.
moral sense theory is more obscure, perhaps I will get into it more when your debate is done, but I think it goes a long way to prove objective morality exists. Your opponent doesn't need to prove God exists. He could claim that in fact God is not real, but that if God were real hypothetically speaking than objective morality would have to be real.
Sure, technically I don't have to disprove moral realism to win, but if I can successfully do so, then there is no way for my opponent to win. Conversely, my opponent could win by simply proving that morality is objective without bringing God into the equation at all. Given that he believes that objective morality can't exist without God, however, I doubt he'll take that route.
As far as moral theories go, I'll admit I'm not the most well-educated person. I know a bit about philosophy, but I'm no expert. But when it comes to theories like utilitarianism, Kantianism, etc., I find that they all seem to have been formed by starting with the conclusion that moral realism is true and working backwards from there. I don't think that any of them actually manage to prove that morality is objective.
That's not what the debate is about though.
Do you know moral sense theory well enough to disprove it?
It isn't tho, and I intend to prove it in this debate.
You do know that morality is objective right?
Let me know if there's anything you need me to adjust about the debate setup. Please do not reject the challenge; that will delete the entire debate. Just let me know if you need me to change anything and I can do so.