Matt said he loves Domino’s pizza more than Little Caesars’. You ask him why–is it the sauce? The crust? The toppings? The price? If Matt said no to all that and that he just loves Domino’s more for no reason at all, well, that would be downright bizarre. It might not always be easy to come up with the reasons why you love one thing over another, but if someone literally had no reasons whatsoever, it would be perplexingly mysterious why they love that thing. Matt’s love of Domino’s pizza would be arbitrary.
Second, our emotions and feelings are in part judgments that respond to the world around us. If you are angry, you are angry for a reason–you believe that someone insulted you, or cut you off in traffic, or whatever. When emotions do not have this component of judgment, we generally think that something has gone wrong. For example, if someone is depressed because they lost their job and their spouse died, then depression is a reasonable reaction–it is a rational response to real-world events. On the other hand, if someone is depressed but has no good reason to feel blue, then we naturally look for a different kind of explanation of their depression. We may look for a causal explanation involving brain chemistry; perhaps they have serotonin deficiency, say. Irrational depression is a medical problem. Similarly, if someone is angry all the time for no apparent reason, we are liable to say that they have an anger problem, and should seek therapy. In other words, irrational emotions unconnected to facts about the world are a sign of mental stress or illness.
Under Option A God has no reasons at all for loving one thing over another. As soon as he loves something, then it becomes good, pious, and right. So there is no moral reason for God to declare murder wrong instead of right. This means that morality is completely arbitrary; the fact that rape and murder are immoral is random. God could have just as easily made rape and murder your moral duty. What’s to stop him? He’s God after all, and he decides what’s right and wrong. You can’t very well insist that God would not have made murder your positive moral duty, because murder is immoral–that’s to assume that morality is an objective standard apart from God’s decisions, which is Option B. We’re here assuming Option A is true.
Third, God could change his mind at any minute. He might show up and declare that he’s gotten bored with all those old commandments and instructions, and that he’s issuing some new moral laws. Covet thy neighbor’s wife. Do unto others before they do unto you. Eat bacon sandwiches on the Sabbath. Carve graven images of Muhammad. Thou shalt kill. If he were to declare these new rules the moral law, then they would in fact become your moral duties. Perhaps you think that God would never do such a thing. Well, why not? If you think that he is obliged to be consistent in his moral dictates, then you are setting up consistency as an objective external normative standard that God must respect. Yet the whole idea of Option A is that God’s opinions establish the normative universe, not that they abide by it.
To sum up, under Option A morality is random and arbitrary. God chooses some things to be good and others to be bad without any reasons whatsoever for his choice. His preferences are based on nothing at all, and he might as well be rolling dice to decide what to love and what to hate. Indeed, such random emotional judgments, unconstrained by external facts, are more indicative of mental illness or a loss of control than a divinely omniscient mind. Moreover, literally any action could be your moral duty, and will be the minute God declares that he loves it. The cherry on top is that there’s no reason God wouldn’t or couldn’t reverse all his previous opinions and turn morality upside down. Expect the unexpected.
If you think that those results are a bunch of crazy talk–as Plato did–then you should conclude that God’s love does not make things good. Instead, vote for Option B: God loves things because they are good. That is, God’s judgments flawlessly track moral reality; he invariably loves the good and hates the wicked. God may be a perfect judge, but he does not make the moral law. In other words, morality and religion are logically separate, which means that whether God exists has nothing to do with whether there are moral facts or what those facts are.
Now, you might suggest at this point that even if God does not make morality, nevertheless the smart move is to pay attention to his moral advice. God is supposedly morally perfect, so as an ethical role model, there’s no one better. Since morality is a hard thing to figure out, if God’s got it all solved for us, we should listen up–scripture’s just Ethics for Dummies7.
While this is certainly an approach we might try, as a practical matter it is not exactly smooth sailing. Here’s what we’ll need to do. Step one: prove that a perfectly good God exists. Step two: prove that there are no other Gods whose moral opinions we must also consult. That is, not only is your religion right but also everyone else’s is also wrong. Step three: show how we can know what God’s moral views are. If you think that the Qur’an, the Bible, the Torah, the Upanishads, or whatever are the word of the Lord, you’ll need to prove that. Or if you believe you have God’s cell phone number, and he’s letting you know what he thinks, you’ll need to show why you’re not just delusional instead. Step four: offer a clear and unequivocal interpretation of God’s moral views. We might be able to pull off all these things. But each of the steps is mighty heavy lifting. If Plato is right, and morality and religion are logically independent, then we can investigate ethics without debating religion. Perhaps the smart practical move is to do that very thing.
1.3 Egoism (Is Morality Just My Own Personal Code?)
Maybe morality is just a matter of each individual’s personal ethical views, along the lines of the following sentiments:
Morality is just whatever you believe it is.
Everyone has their own morality.
Real morality is just “look out for #1.”
Here’s the real Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.
“What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after8” (Ernest Hemingway).
“Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and a support, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are sweet as the berries of their breasts” (Genghis Khan).
“What is best in life is to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women9” (Conan the Barbarian).
“The achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose10” (Ayn Rand).
There are two distinct ideas expressed by these slogans, and we should pry them apart. One is a purely descriptive thesis about human psychology, namely:
Psychological egoism: everyone always acts in their own self-interest.
The other idea is a normative thesis about morality, namely
Ethical egoism: everyone should always act in their own self-interest.
Both of these theses could be true. Obviously, if psychological egoism is true, then fulfilling one’s moral duties according to ethical egoism is a piece of cake. It’s easy to do what you can’t avoid doing anyway. Or it could be that psychological egoism is true and ethical egoism is false, in which case everyone acts selfishly, but that’s just evidence of flawed human beings who must struggle against their nature to do the right thing. Or perhaps ethical egoism is true but psychological egoism is false, in which case everyone ought to just look out for themselves, but misguided social pressure forces us to sacrifice for others. Or perhaps both psychological and ethical egoism are false.
Let’s
