Abstract
Theistic metaethics usually places one key restriction on the explanation of moral facts, namely: every moral fact must ultimately be explained by some fact about God. But the widely held belief that moral truths are necessary truths seems to undermine this claim. If a moral truth is necessary, then it seems like it neither needs nor has an explanation. Or so the objection typically goes. Recently, two proponents of theistic metaethics — William Lane Craig and Mark Murphy — have argued that this objection is flawed. They claim that even if a truth is necessary, it does not follow that it neither needs nor has an explanation. In this article, I challenge Craig and Murphy’s reasoning on three main grounds. First, I argue that the counterexamples they use to undermine the necessary truth objection to theistic metaethics are flawed. While they may provide some support for the notion that necessary truths can be explained, they do not provide support for the notion that necessary moral truths can be explained. Second, I argue that the principles of explanation that Murphy and Craig use to support theistic metaethics are either question-begging (in the case of Murphy) or improperly motivated (in the case of Craig). And third, I provide a general defence of the claim that necessary moral truths neither need nor have an explanation.
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Notes
See Murphy, M. God and Moral Law (Oxford: OUP, 2011), chapter 2. Murphy adds that the explanatory role played by God must be direct, not indirect. See Murphy, 2.4 on this latter point.
I use these two examples throughout the article, partly because they are used by Murphy, but also partly because they cover axiological and deontological moral facts. Some proponents of theistic metaethics, particularly modified Divine Command Theorists, might concede an axiological version of the necessary truth objection, but dig in their heels at the deontological version. The suggestion made throughout this article is that both species of moral fact share the same features and hence any successful version of the necessary truth objection should cover both.
Others have made arguments and developed theories that could be relevant to the necessary-truth objection. See, for example, Plantinga, A. ‘Naturalism, Theism, Obligation and Supervenience’ (2010) 27 Faith and Philosophy 247 - 272, which considers explanatory asymmetry among necessary truths (though the immediate target in that article is naturalism, not moral realism, the latter being the only view I presuppose in this article); and Morris, T. & Menzel, C. ‘Absolute Creation’ (1986) 23 American Philosophical Quarterly 353-362, who try to resolve the tension between theism and Platonism. There are many others too who address the relationship between Platonism and Theism. I focus on Craig and Murphy because they directly engage with the necessary-truth objection to theistic metaethics, and adopt similar argumentative strategies. A complete defence of the necessary-truth objection would require me to engage with other views too, but is beyond the scope of this one article. Here, I merely aim to defuse one set of challenges, and offer a partial defence of the objection.
Cf. Murphy (2011) on moral facts, p 46, where he describes moral facts as any facts that fit the general pattern ‘A is morally required to X’ or ‘A’s X-ing is the morally right thing to do’ and so forth.
The concept of necessity, particularly when applied to discussions of God and morality, begets a surprisingly large number of variants. For a discussion of necessity as applied to God, see Philipse, H. God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason (Oxford: OUP, 2012), Chap. 8. For a discussion of moral necessity, see Murphy (2011) pp. 36-37. There, Murphy argues that moral necessity is a species of practical necessity such that ‘X is morally necessary’ means roughly that ‘there are decisive normative reasons in favour of X’. Murphy is clear later in the text (p. 47) that there is a distinction between this notion of moral necessity and the fact that certain moral necessities are necessarily obtaining states of affairs. The latter has to do with whether there are decisive normative reasons across all possible worlds and it is this feature of certain moral facts that I am concerned with in this article. Thus, nothing I say here is inconsistent with the notion of there being distinct concept of moral necessity.
This is to capture Swinburne’s conceptualisation of necessary moral facts. I don’t wish to pass any judgment on this conceptualisation here, but for a critical discussion, see Rahimi, S. ‘Swinburne on the Euthyphro Dilemma: Can Supervenience Save Him?’ (2008) 13 Forum Philosophicum 17-29.
Essentialist or conventionalist analyses have also been invoked. See Cameron, R. ‘The Grounds of Necessity’ (2010) 5 Philosophy Compass 348-358.
I would like to thank Dr. Felipe Leon for bringing the distinction and the labels to my attention.
I will drop this qualification from now on and refer simply to ‘necessary’ facts once more, until I reintroduce the notion of factual necessity in a later section.
An anonymous reviewer worried that the arguments throughout did not adequately address the possibility that truths of this sort were merely conceptually true not metaphysically true – i.e. they were just part of a language game that doesn’t reflect or track reality. The worry being that in failing to address this I was assuming the substantive truth of what needed to be the case for my arguments to succeed (namely: that there are metaphysically necessary moral truths). Three responses occur to me here. First, as I say in the text, I am indeed assuming that there are metaphysically necessary truths of this sort, for the sake of argument. I am willing to accept that this could be wrong, but since it looks to be a view shared by the critics with whom I am engaging, it seems like a justifiable assumption. Second, I think the examples used throughout this article have a serious whiff of metaphysicality about them since they directly target or pick out entities and states of affairs in the real world, certainly more so than, say, Aquinas’s classic injunction to ‘do good, avoid evil’, which I think is a wholly conceptual truth. And third, I am not sure that conceptual truths of this sort raise analogous problems for theistic or non-theistic metaethics.
‘What Good is an Explanation?’ in Cornwall, J. Understanding Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
By his count there are five: to find reasons for X; to render X more familiar; to unify X with other aspects of our knowledge; to say what caused X to be; and to say why X was necessary. Lipton ibid.
Note: to necessitate a fact is not the same thing as to render that fact a necessary truth.
Murphy, (2011) pp. 45-46, argues that the epistemic function is parasitic upon the ontological function.
Maitzen, S. ‘Stop Asking Why There’s Anything’ (2011) Erkenntis, DOI 10.1007/s10670-011-9312-0.
The term comes from Grunbaum, A. ‘The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology’ (2004) 55 British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 561-614.
Murphy and Craig both seem to support this view.
Murphy (2011), Chap. 1, makes this point when discussing explanans-centred criteria for explanation, as opposed to explananda-centred criteria.
Craig’s output is vast but some examples of specific discussions of morality that I have relied on in this article include Craig ‘The Indispensability of Theological Metaethical Foundations for Morality’ (1997) 5 Foundations 9-12 available at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/meta-eth.html (accessed 4/09/12); Reasonable Faith (3rd Edn, Crossway, 2008) pp. 172-183; Wallace, S. (ed) Does God Exist? The Craig-Flew Debate (Ashgate, 2003), pp. 168-172; and Garcia & King (eds) Is Goodness without God Good Enough? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), pp. 168-173.
(3rd Edn, Crossway, 2008).
Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty (trans. E. Anscombe) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979) makes a similar point about Moore’s claim to know that he has two hands.
This isn’t to say that the quest for such a grounding is always fundamentally misguided. This is something that can only be fully determined after the explanation has been proposed. But as I say below it is doubtful that, given the nature of necessary moral facts, theistic explanations are up to the task.
Pleasants, relying on Wittgenstein, makes this point directly in relation to the ethical injunction against killing and the badness of death. See Pleasants, N. ‘Wittgenstein, Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty’ (2008) 51 Inquiry 241-267.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to make this clarification.
Wielenberg, E. Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p 51.
The ‘informative identification’ phrase comes from Murphy, M. ‘Theism, Atheism and the Explanation of Moral Value’ in Garcia and King (eds) Is Goodness without God good Enough? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) and is explicitly accepted by Craig later in the same book at p. 168.
Of course, the metaphysically queer nature of moral properties is also cited as a reason for accepting moral nihilism. This may be the correct attitude to take, but if we are accepting that certain moral facts exist, as we are for the purposes of this article, then metaphysical queerness would seem to be a reason for thinking that those moral facts could not be grounded in anything else.
Mark Schroeder ‘Realism and Reduction: The Quest for Robustness’ (2005) 5(1) Philosophers’ Imprint, available at http://philosophersimprint.org/005001/, accessed 18/04/12. Of course, Schroeder thinks it may be possible to reduce some moral facts to facts about individual reasons for action. I take it that this may well be true—and indeed would be inclined to support it myself—but do not discuss it here since it does not support the contrary view being explored in the main body of the article. This is because the normativity of reasons for action is still left as a basic, sui generis feature of reasons for action.
This suggests an important link between the criticisms I mount in this article and more general critiques of the actual metaethical explanation offered by Craig (modified divine command theory). For critiques of this sort, see Morriston, W. (2012); Wielenberg, E. (2005 and 2009) and Koons, J. ‘Can God’s Goodness Save the Divine Command Theory from Euthyphro?’ (2012) 4 European Journal of Philosophy 177-195. All these critiques make similar claims: that the stopping point offered by Craig is implausible because moral facts require no grounding beyond themselves or because any purported theistic explanation tends to run into some revised version of the Euthyphro (i.e. grounding moral truths in theistic facts tends to undermine their necessity). The arguments I make here connect up with those critiques: I am saying that necessary moral truths do not have explanations because those truths have properties that make any purported grounding implausible.
Wielenberg (2009).
Craig (2008) p. 178: ‘It is difficult, however, to even comprehend this view’.
On each of these claims, see Craig (2008), p. 178.
For example, even in the Platonic view, obligations would still typically be owed to persons and values would still be properties of persons so it’s not clear what the problem is, unless one thinks that all abstract properties are metaphysically problematic. Furthermore, the theistic view supported by Craig doesn’t seem to solve these problems any better than the non-natural view. See Wielenberg (2009) and Koons (2012) on this point.
Murphy (2011) pp. 45-49.
Murphy (2011) p. 48.
Indeed, the fact that there are necessary/absolute wrongs, which can be known independently of God, is an essential component of Craig’s moral argument for the existence of God. See Morriston (2012) for more on this point.
A reviewer objects: what if one received divine revelation of the necessity of the first fact, then later linked that to the necessity of God? My response is twofold. First, if the revelation simply consists in a strong unshakeable belief in the necessity of P without any link to God (without any revelation of, say, the fact that God caused P to come into being) then I suggest the subsequent connection to God will seem implausible for reasons stated elsewhere in this article: where P seems to be immanently necessary, to have necessity as part and parcel of its nature, it is highly unlikely that P has an explanation. Second, if the revelation includes the link to God (e.g. if it is of the sort ‘I made P necessary’) or if the subsequent link to God is causal in nature, I would argue it is addressed by the factual necessity vs. metaphysical necessity argument that I make below.
Murphy (2011), p. 48.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
Craig certainly adopts this view; see Is Goodness without God Good Enough?, p. 170, but as Craig himself notes, Murphy may not adopt this view.
Of course, people have argued that God couldn’t possibly be free, but this is a hotly contested point.
Murphy, p. 48.
Murphy (2011), p 48, italics original.
Murphy (2011), p. 49, italics original.
Murphy (2011), p. 49.
Murphy, p. 49.
My colleague Felipe Leon (personal correspondence) points out to me that ‘One might also appeal to the principle of credulity or phenomenal conservatism here as well, arguing that such propositions just seem to one to be necessary, in which case one has prima facie evidence that they are necessary’.
Blackburn, Simon ‘Morals and Modals’ in Blackburn, S. Essays in Quasi-Realism (Oxford: OUP, 1993).
Hanks, P ‘A Dilemma about Necessity’ (2008) Erkenntis 68: 129-148.
Which states: ‘it is necessary that P implies that it is necessarily necessary that P’.
Hale, R ‘The Source of Necessity’ (2002) in Tomberlin, J. (ed) Philosophical Perspectives 16: 299-320.
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The author would like to thank Felipe Leon, Justin Schieber and four anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous draft.
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Danaher, J. Necessary Moral Truths and Theistic Metaethics. SOPHIA 53, 309–330 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0390-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0390-0