Here are some thoughts that occurred to me when reading a book on moral autonomy. Granted, I haven’t given this too much thought so my mind may change but for right now it makes sense to me.
Many theists like to claim that God is our source of “objective” morality. They see God as a moral authority from which all that is good and moral stems from. Now, I don’t believe there is such a thing as “objective” morality but I am open to the idea that morality could be objective, I am just not convinced that it is.
Appealing to God as a higher moral authority has some problems of its own. To me it seems that this type of argument is circular. Here’s why:
- If God exists, he is perfectly good since no being who is not perfectly good can bear the title “God”.
- We cannot determine if a being is God without first confirming that he is good.
- We cannot confirm whether he is good without first assessing whether his commands to us are good.
- Assessing whether his commands are good or not requires that our judgments be logically prior to our recognition of him as God.
- Given (4) it follows that there is a standard of good separate from God to which we are appealing when determining that “God is good”, since, saying “I can confirm this action is good because God is good because I can confirm this action is good…” is circular reasoning.
Now, I am not claiming to know what this standard is or where it comes from, but, I do think that we can make sense of morality, whether it is objective or not, from a purely naturalistic framework. In fact, the widespread moral diversity that we see across human cultures makes more sense on naturalism than it does on theism or appealing to deities as moral standards.
