Moral Values, Moral Duties, and The Moral Argument For God’s Existence
I must apologize for slacking off on this blog lately…I have to work on not letting myself get caught up in my business and ignoring more important things! Before we get started, my favorite apologist is Dr. William Lane Craig. His new book, On Guard: Defending Your Faith With Reason and Precision, is excellent and covers many of the topics I discuss on this blog. If you want a great overview of Christian apologetics without over-the-top philosophy or scientific detail, this book is the way to go.
If you recall, the moral argument for God’s existence goes like this:
- If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
- Objective moral values and duties do exist.
- Therefore, God exists.
In order for the conclusion (3) to be false, one or both of the premises (1 and 2) must be false.
The biggest contention is with the first premise in the moral argument for God’s existence. There is little contention about the existence of objective moral values and duties, at least in practice, but some atheists do argue against the existence of objective morals as well. Before we talk about the first premise, there are a couple of important distinctions I’d like to mention.
Moral Values and Moral Duties
Moral values and duties are not the same thing. Moral values have to do with whether or not something is good or bad. Moral duties have to do with whether or not something is right or wrong. This sounds pretty much the same, but when you think about it, ‘good‘ and ‘right‘ or ‘bad‘ and ‘wrong‘ do not mean exactly the same thing.
Right and wrong goes beyond whether something is good or bad. Right and wrong are associated with duty…and duty is associated with whether or not you ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ to do something. Good and bad has to do with something’s worth.
It is good, for example, to sing a beautiful melody, or paint a stunning landscape, but you’re not obligated to do it. It’s not necessarily the ‘right’ thing to do…and it’s not necessarily ‘wrong’ not to do it either, even if you have those abilities. It’s good to become a doctor or nurse and help people who are sick. It’s also good to become a farmer and grow food for hungry families…but you’re not obligated, or it’s not your ‘duty’ to do either.
There are also situations where you may have to choose between two bad choices…and if there are no other alternatives, it’s not ‘wrong’ to choose something that’s bad.
In the novel and movie Sophie’s Choice, Sophie is taken to a Nazi concentration camp with her two children. An officer asks her to choose which child will be taken to the gas chambers and which will be allowed to live. When she doesn’t answer, they start to take them both away to be killed, until she makes the choice to let her son live…and they kill her daughter.
Both choices are bad, but one or the other had to be made in order to save the life of one of her children. Sophie did nothing wrong by making a choice, though both choices were bad. I pray that neither you or I ever have to make a choice remotely close to this one.
Moral values are about whether something is good or bad. Moral duties are about whether something is right or wrong and imply a duty, or ‘oughtness’.
Objective Moral Values & Moral Duties vs. Subjective Moral Values & Moral Duties
Subjective moral values and duties are dependent on people’s opinions.
Values and duties I consider good and right (or bad and wrong) may not mean the same to someone else. I think what the Nazi’s did to Sophie and millions of others was bad and wrong, but the Nazi’s didn’t think they were doing anything wrong…and if moral values and duties are subjective, they weren’t doing anything ‘wrong’!
Objective moral values and duties are independent of what anyone thinks.
I believe the Nazi’s that made Sophie choose between the life of her son and daughter and the men and women who murdered and tortured millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically challenged…etc, etc. were wrong and were objectively doing bad things. Even if they thought they were right and what they were doing was good for humanity…and even if they had won the war, wiped out everyone who disagreed with them, and everyone alive agreed that the holocaust was a good thing…it would still be wrong. This would be the case if the moral values and moral duties they were violating were objective moral values and moral duties.
The question in premise 1 of the moral argument for God’s existence is whether objective values and duties require a God figure to even exist at all…and that’s what we’ll discuss next time.
Hope to see you then!
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