Saturday, April 13, 2019

The Personal and Transcendent ground of true morality

This was a response I made in a conversation on social media to a person who disclosed that  she did not believe in any god but protested that she was a good person. 


Allegory with a portrait of a Venetian senator (Allegory of the morality of earthly things), attributed to Tintoretto, 1585


This seemed to me to be a good time to show why this is incoherent and why God is a necessary condition for the existence of morality.

 I am curious about how you define good and evil given your atheistic perspective?

I believe morality requires a ground that is both personal and transcendent:

If it is personal but not transcendent, then it is merely a matter of individual or collective preferences. What is perceived to be good for you might be bad for me. What 1930's Germany thought was good for Germany was very bad for Jews. Without transcendence there is no ground to views morals as binding on anyone who does not consent to the principle (moral subjectivism, moral relativism).

If morality is transcendent but not personal, then morality is a inanimate thing that sits alongside other things. Murder and the law against murder are equally real. Labeling one good and the other evil is arbitrary since both have an equal claim to existence. Without a personal ground, there is no basis to adequately differentiate an 'ought' from an 'is' (moral platonism).

If morality is neither transcendent nor personal, then morals do not exist. (moral nihilism).

If morals require both a personal and transcendent ground, then morals can only exist in a reality that allows such grounding. I would conclude that morals are only possible in a reality where some version of theism is true. (moral argument for God's existence).





I will conclude with a few thoughts on why denial of both a personal and transcendent ground for morality amounts to  a denial that morals exist. If morals are not grounded by personal perspective of at least one transcendent self and are not grounded by anything that transcends all finite selves, then it is grounded nowhere as these exhaust all of the logical possibilities.