Atheists Don't Need to Explain Morality in Order to Believe in It
On the independence of ethics from metaethics
Readers, in this essay, I explain why both Christians and atheists are wrong to think that atheists can’t have moral beliefs without believing in God. Alex O’Connor’s story about the time he “tried nihilism” provides the point of departure.
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Christians frequently claim that, without belief in God, atheists have no right to believe in morality.
Sometimes, atheists even agree.
But they’re both wrong.
I was reminded of this when listening to a clip from one of
’s interviews with , titled, “Why I Tried Nihilism…”.(Chris Williamson is the host of the phenomenal Modern Wisdom podcast and O’Connor, sometimes known on social media as “Cosmic Skeptic,” is the most prominent young atheist voice in Podcastlandia.)
In the first part of the nine-minute clip, O’Connor makes an important argument against his Christian critics, including Jordan Peterson. These critics allege that, by living a moral life or believing in moral claims, O’Connor acts inconsistently with his official atheistic nihilism.
But O’Connor wonders how his Christian critics know what it would be like to act as if nihilism is true:
[Jordan Peterson] essentially said that… “People claim that they are nihilists, but they don’t live like that.” I thought, “Well, what would it mean to really live like a nihilist?”
…
And I think the reason why people think that nihilism is unlivable is because they have this image of somebody just immediately becoming a Raskolnikov-type figure and just committing a murder or something.
But they forget that these people still have their memory, and they’re going to be embedded in a culture and an upbringing…. Their preferences are essentially still going to be aligned.
O’Connor argues that a nihilist could continue to act morally, and he would not be guilty of inconsistency in doing so.
To give an example of my own, if I believed that morality had the same status as flavor preferences, would I begin to compulsively order ice cream flavors I detest?
Given other motives for and habituation into moral behavior, the nihilist is unlikely to change his behavior based solely on his philosophical views. Nor is it obvious he should.
But then, in the second part of the clip, Chris Williamson expresses a more nihilistic or eliminativist view of the implications of evolutionary psychology for human life.
In this latter discussion, more metaphysical than moral, O’Connor does not resist the idea that evolutionary psychology does away with the meaning and morality of life. In fact, he frames the discussion by saying:
Once you have fully explained why something would be considered immoral just on evolutionary grounds, you’ve essentially taken out the moral factor altogether, and you’re explaining it in terms of genetic preference.
There is a tension here between the idea that our metaphysical beliefs can justify or undermine morality—and the contrary intuition that our moral intuitions and instincts cannot be dislodged, whatever our metaphysics.
Almost all Christian apologists want atheists to gravitate in the direction of the second half of the interview clip. If you’re an atheist, all morality is eliminated from life.
But contrary to almost all Christian apologists, I gravitate to the first half of the clip.
My argument, in consonance with O’Connor’s first, is that atheists don’t need to explain morality in order to believe in it.
Why?
Because ethics does not depend on metaethics.
1. What Is Metaethics?
In analytic philosophy, there is a disciplinary division between ethics and metaethics.
Ethicists debate ethical theory, like the relative merits of Kantianism, Utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and modern natural law theory.
Metaethicists debate something different. They discuss different attitudes toward the ethical as such, its metaphysical or epistemological status, its justification. They debate moral realism, anti-realism, fictionalism, relativism, etc. Metaethicists debate whether evolution can justify ethics or if it debunks ethics. And questions of the epistemology of morality—intuitionism, empiricism, and rationalism—also fall under the heading of “metaethics.”
Now some might think these latter questions are not separable from the former. After all, if you believe in the absolutes of the Kantian categorical imperative, how could you be an anti-realist?
Well, that’s a metaethical argument. Maybe a Kantian should be a moral realist. But, it is also plausible to think that the point of Kant’s moral theory is that the categorical imperative comes from within us, that it’s not something objective, discoverable by theoretical reason.
But as you can see, these are internecine debates among people already committed to Kantianism. Metaethics asked a question different than ethics, and plausibly posterior to it.
(Perhaps metaethics comes after ethics, just as for Aristotle metaphysics comes after physics.)
There may indeed be some correlations between classic ethical theories and metaethics. For example, utilitarianism is commonly associated with ethical naturalism. Ethical naturalism is a kind of moral realism.
But, these correlations can fail to obtain among contemporary philosophers (and frequently do). After all, a utilitarian may argue that utilitarianism is the correct ethical theory, but that all it means to be the “correct ethical theory” is to be what works for human society. This would be a kind of anti-realist pragmatism about ethics.
Likewise, a Kantian could think that we should act as if the categorical imperative applied to us. This would be anti-realist Kantianism.
As you can see, a philosopher’s ethics fails to determine his or her metaethics.
1.1 Does Ethics Depend on Theism?
Now let’s come to the question of God. If you notice, he hasn’t yet been mentioned.
Do you have to believe in God in order to be justified in doing ethics or believing moral claims?
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Some highlights from the remaining 3/4 of the essay:
“But if we want to justify moral knowledge in a theistic metaphysics, we encounter a problem: It is debated whether God is necessary or even helpful to explain morality.”
“[Once] you have a psychological explanation of human behavior, none of our first-person reasoning about what to do retains its cogency. It is all debunked.”
“We should drop the argumentum ad nihilismus.”
“It is false that without God there is no morality. Because—there is morality.”
“So, I do think theism plays a role in the explanation of the truth of moral realism. But…”