Randal: Unfortunately you keep trying to hammer a point that I’ve already responded to. But let me restate my reply a bit differently.
First, as I said, I believe there are a range of actions that are categorically immoral, and, as such, they could never be morally permissible to perform, including rape, torture, cannibalism, devotional child killing, and so on. Since these are categorically immoral, no divine being would ever command them.
Ahh, you say, but what if God did command them? What then? Huh? Huh?
And this brings me back to the second point I’ve already made. While you seem to think that these per impossibile scenarios that you keep raising present a unique problem for theism, the reality is that the exact same scenarios can be presented to the atheist ethicist like yourself.
For example, at present you agree with me that the desires to perform actions like rape, torture, cannibalism, and devotional child killing are categorically immoral. But what if you come to believe that the morally right desire is to rape, torture, cannibalize, and kill? Then you’ll need to rape, torture, cannibalize, and kill!
Justin: My confusion here was flowing from the fact that you were entertaining my hypothetical in a way that seemed you merely thought it less likely that God would command such a thing rather than flat-out impossible.
That said, you raise a good point. If I were to fall under the radical delusion of thinking that the desire to rape or torture are the kinds of desires that, when introduced or increased, tend to fulfill desires rather than thwart them, and that therefore rape or torture could, in certain circumstances, become obligatory, I'd also seek help from a mental health professional.
Randal: Well, we can certainly high five on that point!
MORAL KNOWLEDGE AND SKEPTICISM
Randal: But since you’ve returned us to the topic of moral epistemology, I think this is an important question for you to address. I'm interested to hear more about your defense of moral knowledge on atheism.
Perhaps the most well-known atheist of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, famously described the position of the atheist as follows: “A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.”7
I agree with Russell: that is a strange mystery indeed. As nature cycles along, she produces creatures that are adapted for survival, not truth. But once we adopt the atheistic view that we were formed to acquire adaptive beliefs rather than true beliefs, we face a daunting skeptical problem: how do we know our adaptive beliefs are true? Richard Rorty (himself an atheist) put it like this: “The idea that one species of organism is unlike all the others, oriented not just toward its own increated prosperity but toward Truth, is as un-Darwinian as the idea that every human being has a built-in moral compass—a conscience that swings free of both social history and individual luck.”8
Rorty is right. Blind nature produces creatures oriented toward their increased prosperity, not toward truth. And that brings me to my question: what is your basis for thinking that your desires track moral facts successfully, that they yield genuine moral knowledge?
Justin: It is not my position that mere desires track moral truth. There is a big difference between, say, holding that whatever I desire is what is good and what I’ve advocated above. Recall that desires, because they are the only reasons for action that exist, are properly the primary objects of evaluation.
We can evaluate desires by their tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires. Some tend to fulfill and some tend to thwart. Good actions are those actions that persons with good desires relevant to that situation would do. So, the primary question in morality involves the tendency of certain desires to fulfill or thwart other desires. That is an empirical issue. There is nothing in principle preventing us from evaluating them as to their relation to other desires. Admittedly, some of those questions will be much easier to answer than others.
Now, if your question is about blind nature and its implications on our beliefs in general, which is what you seem to be hinting at, that seems to me like a much broader question beyond the scope of this particular chapter.
Randal: As I have explained, as a theist I believe that God equipped human beings with a faculty of moral perception that enables us to attain moral knowledge about the world. Like sense perception and rational intuition, moral perception is not infallible, but it is directed at truth because God wants us to attain moral knowledge about the world as surely as he wants us to gain sense perceptual and rational knowledge.
In short, if we were created by a God who desires us to gain moral knowledge, then it is highly likely that our moral faculties would produce moral knowledge. As a result, just as I am prima facie justified in accepting the deliverances of sense perception and rational intuition, so I am prima facie justified in accepting the deliverances of moral perception.
By contrast, as an atheist you believe our cognitive faculties (moral faculties included) evolved gradually, spurred on by selective pressures that were directed not to truth, but to adaptive value. Given that your cognitive faculties are oriented toward adaptation rather than truth, what basis do you have for believing they do produce truth?
Justin: Well, because the kinds of cognitive faculties that selective pressures directed at adaptive value would likely bring about would also be the kinds of cognitive faculties that are generally reliable at tracking truth.
Randal: That sounds circular to me. Justin, what reason do you have to believe selective pressures are largely truth conducive? After all, I can provide plenty of counterexamples.
Consider the example of clinical psychopaths. These are people who appear to lack the moral perceptual abilities that I’ve said are the possession of properly functioning human beings. And yet, as Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out in their book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, psychopaths flourish in certain social environments.9 They are disproportionately represented among successful Wall Street stock traders and corporate CEOs, for example.
But if psychopaths can flourish despite having a dysfunctional moral perception, how do you know that all of us are not likewise radically deficient when it comes to grasping moral facts? As I said, what justifies the claim?
Justin: Sorry, it's just not clear to me how this is supposed to be an objection to what I’ve said here. You seem to want to attribute to me the claim that an improperly functioning cognitive faculty in a person could never be compatible with that person flourishing in some specific role in modern life. I have not made any such claim.
If it were not the case that the belief-forming mechanisms we’ve evolved were generally reliable, then we are without a remotely plausible explanation of important bits of background knowledge, such as our long-term survival in a wide variety of changing environments. The claim that our belief-forming cognitive faculties are generally reliable is a much better explanation for this fact than the claim that they are generally unreliable.
Randal: I plead innocent of the charge! I didn't attribute that claim to you. My point is this: your view that our moral perception was formed for adaptive value rather than to gain truth undermines your justification for accepting the deliverances of our moral perception as true. The case of psychopaths—that is, individuals who can flourish while having moral perception radically different from that of the general population—merely illustrates my point.
You and I agree that our cognitive faculties, including our moral perception, are generally reliable. But reliable for what? I believe they are reliable for gaining true beliefs. The most you can say is that they are reliable for attaining adaptive beliefs. That's a big difference.
In short, your account of moral perception provides an undercutting defeater to the deliverances of moral perception. An atheistic view of the origin of moral percepti
on undermines the deliverances of moral perception.
Justin: Randal, thanks for spelling that out more. Your distinction between cognitive faculties being reliably adaptive and reliably delivering true beliefs is a good one.
Randal: Awesome! So I'm right! Why don't we call it a day and celebrate? The drinks are on me!
Justin: Unfortunately, this argument is a complete non-sequitur.
Randal: Waiter, cancel my drink order!
Justin: Oh, by all means, I’ll still have the drink.
Randal: Okay, waiter, I’ll have a pint of your finest strong barley wine in a crystal goblet. And you can give my friend something colorful in a fancy glass with a cocktail umbrella.
So now, where were we?
Justin: My concern here is that your conclusion that my justification for accepting the deliverances of any belief-forming cognitive process (moral perception or any other) as true is in any way undermined does not logically follow from the claim that these processes were evolved primarily for their adaptive value.
Perhaps you’ve oversimplified the issue and forgotten an important premise regarding the relationship between a belief-forming mechanism being adaptive and its deliverances being reliably true.
Randal: Sorry Justin, but I must disagree with you here. And I need to exonerate myself of your charge. My memory's not perfect, but I didn't forget any premises. The fact is that you need to defend the premise that adaptive moral beliefs are likely to be true, for that's the very claim I'm challenging. Until you defend that premise, you are only justified in believing your moral perception is adaptive, not that it is truth conducive. And thus it follows that you rationally ought to withhold assent to the deliverances of your moral perception because you have no basis to believe they are likely to be true.
Justin: While this specific argument is taking place at the tail end of a discussion of morality, I do not think it necessary that we continue to limit ourselves to talking merely about moral perception and moral beliefs. The argument you’re attempting to run here is clearly much broader in scope. It's an argument about belief-forming cognitive faculties in general.
Randal: While you could apply this kind of argument to reason generally, I’ve intentionally focused here on morality.
Justin: Before I defend my statement above, I think it might be useful for the both of us to back up and get clear on what's being said. Maybe I’ve completely missed the boat here.
Randal: Okay, I’ll return to the dock. I wouldn't want you to miss the boat and be left to quaff your fancy cocktail all alone.
Justin: Now, on a common atheistic view, beliefs are neurological structures that have at least neurophysiological properties and semantic properties/content (There is a cliff up ahead; the sky is blue; there is water to my left).
Randal: Proceed with caution, Justin. The claim that beliefs just are neurological structures is a highly controversial view in the philosophy of mind. Regardless, it isn't an atheistic view, since atheism and theism completely underdetermine theories of mind. In other words, a theist could accept your identity claim and an atheist could reject it.
Justin: Ah, yes. You are correct about that.
Randal: Fortunately, my argument does not at all depend on any particular theory of mind.
Justin: If I understand you correctly, your worry, in part, is that what matters from an unguided evolutionary perspective is simply the behavior of an organism. Unguided evolution doesn't care whether the beliefs causally associated with any particular action have content (semantic) that is actually true about the world. It is assumed in the argument that, unlike the potentially causal physiological properties of a belief, the content of a belief is causally irrelevant and so hidden—in a functional sense at least—from the selective pressures of unguided evolution. Am I being fair to your argument so far?
Randal: I wouldn't say it is necessarily hidden, but it is in inadequate to ground more than merely adaptive belief. In other words, unguided evolution can secure beliefs that are adaptive, but that doesn't cash out to beliefs that are true. At the risk of repeating myself, let me go ahead and repeat myself.
Justin: If you insist. I'm just trying to get clear on the argument.
Randal: As I already said, you need to defend the premise that adaptive moral beliefs are likely to be true. Until you defend that premise, you are only justified in believing that your moral beliefs are adaptive, not that they are true. Until you defend that premise, your only reasonable response is moral skepticism.
Justin: Okay, okay, okay. Hold onto your britches.
Randal: Is that what you call these? Britches? And all this time I thought they were lederhosen! Barley wine tastes better when you’re wearing lederhosen.
Justin: Let me now explain why atheists are within their epistemic rights to accept that their cognitive belief-forming faculties, which have evolved for adaptive reasons, will also reliably track true beliefs.
Randal: Awesome! Do tell. The suspense is killing me!
Justin: Suppose that I took a walk in an unfamiliar wooded area that happens to be filled with hungry tigers. There are certainly possible scenarios in which I survive these walks by having false beliefs. For example, it's possible that beliefs like “This forest is filled with beautiful women dressed in convincing tiger cosplay” and “Beautiful women engaged in tiger cosplay take their roles seriously and will attack and kill me if I'm noticed” may get me through unscathed.
But, when we consider the total number of possible false beliefs that I could have had about the situation, it seems clear that only a small minority of false beliefs will just happen to be of the sort that manage to put me through the forest populated with hungry tigers alive. The subset of false beliefs that specifically and systematically recommend the kind of necessary avoidance behavior are a relatively small subset of the total number of false beliefs that it was possible for me to have. So, while it is certainly possible to identify false beliefs with which I could survive a forest of hungry tigers, I am far more likely to survive that forest if the majority of my beliefs about my surroundings are true rather than false.10
Randal: To summarize the essence of your response, shorn of the fanciful, feminine, feline fluff, it seems that you’re simply stating that it “seems clear” to you “that only a small minority of false beliefs” will be adaptive and false. But, as I pointed out with the case of cognitively deficient but flourishing psychopaths, that isn't clear, not at all.
Justin: But, Randal, that it seems clear to me wasn't the only thing I’ve said on the matter. As a conceptual exercise, consider the total number of logically possible false beliefs. Now, take that total and compare it to the subset that is the total number of logically possible false beliefs that reliably encourage behavior that is generally adaptive in a broad number of circumstances. Given that this is a very specific condition, only a minority of false beliefs will actually meet it.
Randal: To switch from tigers back to morality, as I said I pointed to real cases of individuals like psychopaths, who flourish despite having a moral perception radically different from ours. The fact is that you simply haven't shown that atheism is likely to secure moral perception that reliably tracks objective moral facts. Consequently, as I said, the consistent atheist position regarding moral perception is skepticism. And giving up moral knowledge is a high cost for atheism.
Of course, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. If you believe you have reliable moral knowledge, then you should be a theist!
But, once again, I suspect we are not going to agree on this! So it's probably time to move onto another topic. Any ideas?
Justin: I’ve argued that, although our belief-forming cognitive faculties evolved to be adaptive, this shouldn't worry us about the reliability of those faculties for producing true beliefs. This is because, as I’ve argued above, true beliefs, moral or mundane, are more likely to be adaptive than false beliefs. As a result, the consequence of skepticism, moral or otherwise, that you’ve attem
pted to burden atheists with doesn't stick. To be clear, there may be reasons that could be offered in support of moral skepticism, but this isn't one of them.
Randal: I feel sick that my slick shtick doesn't stick.
Justin: I also worry that your defense of theism's ability to provide moral knowledge is problematic, but I think that discussion will be a better fit for a later chapter we’ve got planned, on arguments that appeal to facts about suffering in our world.
Randal: Okey-dokey. Thanks for the heads up!
So time to move on then?
Justin: Yeah, that's enough of that I suppose. If you’re looking for other topic ideas, I’ve got a different argument I'd like to bounce off of you. I think it's a decent argument, but I must admit that I haven't had many critical eyes on it just yet. Maybe you’ll convince me otherwise.
Randal: I’ll do my best!
Justin: I suppose the best way for me to begin unpacking this argument would be to provide an illustration of sorts.
Randal: Sounds good. Vivid illustrations are a great way to, er, illustrate things. What sort were you thinking of?
A MOST UNUSUAL BIRTHDAY GIFT
Justin: How about this? Imagine an extraordinarily wealthy businessman who, for transparently aptronymic purposes, shall be named Rich. For all intents and purposes, Rich has limitless financial resources. Let's also imagine that our wealthy mogul is a father and has designed and overseen the building of an immense skyscraper for his son, Adam. That building, while serving perhaps unknown secondary purposes, exists primarily to be a residence for Adam.
Randal: Okay, so rich Mr. Rich built a tower primarily for his son, Adam. Adam's Tower. Got it.
Justin: Prior to being handed the keys to the massive entryway on his eighteenth birthday, Adam had never seen the inside of the massive and ornate construction.
Randal: Wow, that definitely beats my eighteenth birthday! I know what Adam's probably thinking: house party!
An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar Page 14