Theistic vs. Naturalistic Grounding of Moral Value

Seth Dillon, the CEO of The Babylon Bee, recently tweeted the following:

Sure, atheists have moral values — they just can't ground them in anything. Read Alex Rosenberg's "The Atheist's Guide to Reality." He acknowledges that in God's absence, morality is nothing but a useful fiction. He argues that if atheism is true, the moral feelings we've… https://t.co/HSufKX5ay5

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) August 7, 2023

I refuted Rosenberg's argument for nihilism about a decade ago (see here), so I'm not going to rehash that argument in this post. Instead, I want to respond to Seth's first sentence, which we can represent as follows:

(1) If God does not exist, then there is no grounding for moral values.

In another tweet, Dillon then links to William Lane Craig's 1996 essay, "The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality." 

The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Moralityhttps://t.co/Gr5lo4NZev

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) August 7, 2023

On that basis, I am reasonably confident that Dillon would endorse the following:

(2) If God exists, then there is a grounding for moral values.

From (1) and (2) it follows that:

(3) Theism offers a better grounding for moral values than atheism.

Because the inference is solid, if there is something wrong with this argument, then one or both premises must be false.

Clarifying the Issue 

Before I explain why I reject this argument, I first want to explicitly state what I think Dillon means because many of the words in his tweet are polysemous: they have multiple legitimate meanings. Here is what I think Dillon means.

• values: "things which support practical reasoning from a first-person perspective (“What am I to do?”), a second-person perspective (“What are you to do?”), or a third-person perspective (“What are the reasons for or against what X is doing or has done?”)."[1]
• moral values:  values used to determine whether a person or action is morally good or evil; required, forbidden, or permitted; or virtuous or vicious. Moral values can be divided into two types: “thin” and “thick.” “Thin” moral values are moral values which are not substantially descriptive; examples include (moral) goodness and evil. “Thick” moral values (and disvalues) are values (and disvalues) which combine description and evaluation. For example, to say that “courage” is a thick moral value is to say that the willingness to act despite one’s fear (description) is morally good (prescription). Examples of thick moral values include love, generosity, self-sacrifice, equality, and brotherhood; examples of thick moral disvalues include selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination, and oppression.
• grounding: According to one version of metaphysical grounding theory, “x makes proposition y true iff the fact that x exists grounds the fact that y is true.”[2] For example, if X represents my dog and Y represents the proposition, “My dog exists,” then X makes Y true because X grounds Y. 

Notice that everything I've written so far is compatible with subjectively grounded values. Someone who believes that moral values are dependent upon the attitudes or desires of the individual could affirm that moral values are grounded in those attitudes or desires. To exclude that kind of possibility, I'm going to assume that Dillon has "objective" moral values in mind. But, like the other words we've defined so far, the word "objective" is notoriously polysemous. How should we define it here? I propose the following definition.

• objective-1: To say “objective-1 moral value exists” is to say that what makes an action, state of affairs, or person have that moral value is independent of the subjective states of human beings, such as their beliefs or desires. If objective-1 moral values exist, they are grounded by something which is discovered, not invented, by humans.[3]

There are three conceivable grounds for objective-1 moral values: abstract, physical, and mental. Allow me to explain with a brief survey of the metaphysical landscape. Philosophers distinguish between concrete and abstract objects. Concrete objects include everyday things in the physical world and the mental, including any nonphysical supernatural beings (if they exist). Abstract objects, if they exist, include mathematical objects, sets, propositions, properties, possible worlds, etc. Because concrete objects can stand in causal relations while abstract objects cannot, I like to refer to "causal reality" as that part of reality which contains concrete objects and "acausal reality" to refer to that part of reality which, it exists, contains abstract objects. It follows that, if objective-1 moral values are grounded, their ground is either abstract (such as propositions or properties), physical (such as facts about human biology or human nature), or mental (such as divine ideas). 

So I will slightly revise the argument as follows:

(1') If God does not exist, then there is no grounding for objective-1 moral values.

(2') If God exists, then there is a grounding for objective-1 moral values.

From (1') and (2') it follows that: 

(3) Theism offers a better grounding for objective-1 moral values than atheism.

Assessment

In light of the three possible sources of grounding for moral values, it seems to me that Dillon's tweet is not only false, but obviously false. Let's consider the premises in reverse order. Here is the second premise.

(2') If God exists, then there is a grounding for objective-1 moral values.

By itself, the existence of God doesn't tell us much about God's relationship to moral values or how moral values are grounded. That is why you can find theistic philosophers and philosophical theologians who have affirmed versions of all three options. William Lane Craig, for example, says that God's nature is the standard of moral goodness. By "God's nature," Craig simply means God's essential attributes or properties, e.g., God's omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, aseity, sovereignty, justice, lovingness, kindness, and so forth. If someone were to ask Craig how he grounds his moral values (which include justice, love, kindness, and so forth), Craig's answer would be, "In God's nature." If someone were to then ask, "What grounds God's nature?", his answer would be, "Nothing. God's nature isn't grounded in anything external to God." This leads to an interesting observation. Craig's theory about the ontology of moral value entails that ultimately moral value is grounded on nothing. On Craig's view, some moral values are grounded in other moral values, but at bottom there exists at least one (if not more) moral value which is itself ungrounded.

Now consider the other premise.

(1') If God does not exist, then there is no grounding for objective-1 moral values.

Why should anyone believe (1)? In order to defend it, Dillon would need to rule out both abstract and physical grounds for moral values. Consider abstract objects. If moral values can be grounded in God's properties, then why not just remove the 'middleman' (God) and say that some moral values are grounded in other values, while some moral values are fundamental, abstract properties and not grounded in anything else? This is Erik Wielenberg's position; see his books Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe and Robust Ethics.[4] Sure, you can find materialists (and scientism-ists) like Rosenberg who reject abstract objects out of hand, but atheism isn't materialism.[5] By itself, atheism is compatible with the existence of abstract objects. Or consider Natural Law Theory's (NLT) purely physical grounding of moral values. According to NLT, moral values are grounded in objective facts about human nature.[6]

Therefore, it seems to me that both (1) and (2) are doubtful. It is far from obvious that theism offers a better grounding for moral values than atheism.

Notes

[1] Nicholas Rescher, Introduction to Value Theory (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 11-12.

[2] Fabrice Correia  and Benjamin Schneider, eds., Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 26.

[3] See my earlier post, "My Reply to the 'There is No Such Thing as Evil if God Doesn't Exist' Objection" for the distinction between objective-1 and objective-2.

[4] Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Robust Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[5] For an advanced introduction to atheistic Platonism, see Erik Steinhart, Atheistic Platonism: A Manifesto (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

[6] For a secular version of Natural Law Theory, see Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (SUNY Press, 1998).