Main authors discussed: William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, William J. Wainwright

The moral argument for theism tries to show the existence of God is necessary to explain or ground certain features of morality.  Wielenberg focuses on the version of this argument that holds moral realism is unsustainable without God. He suggests, on the contrary, that moral realism is no less plausible for an atheist.  His strategy is to show certain arguments theists raise against atheistic moral realism apply with equal force to their own position.

Wielenberg begins with a very brief overview of the account he wishes to defend.  He understands moral realism as the view that objective moral facts exist, in the sense that their truth does not depend upon human mental states.   Moral facts are non-natural because they cannot be reduced to natural, or supernatural, facts and properties.   Further, certain moral facts are necessarily true as well as “brute,” meaning “their obtaining is not explained by the obtaining of other states of affairs.” (25)  He calls these facts basic ethical facts, explaining “They come from nowhere, and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence; rather, they are fundamental features of the universe that ground other truths.” (26)  He gives little argument for most of this, claiming it as common ground with his theistic interlocutors.  The exception, of course, is the non-theistic part.  Accordingly, he turns his attention to the claim that objective moral truths require some sort of theistic grounding.

He examines the claim first in relation to supervenience, the thesis that any two states of affairs identical in their non-moral properties must be identical in their moral ones as well.  As Wielenberg notes, this sort of necessary connection can be mysterious: what is it that establishes the supervenience relationship?  William Wainwright claims supervenience looks implausible on the assumption of atheism, for their is nothing to explain the fact of this connection.  On his view, such necessary facts require an explanation, which theism is able to provide.

Wielenberg raises two objections to Wainwright.  First, theism traditionally holds God’s existence is a necessary fact, but can provide no explanation for it.  Thus it would appear Wainwright thinks his principle that necessary facts require explanation applies only to ethical facts, but Wielenberg can find no plausible argument for this seemingly ad hoc restriction.  Second, Wainwright does not successfully show theism is able to provide an explanation for the existence of all necessary ethical facts.  He attempts to do so by holding up Robert Adams’ account from Finite and Infinite Goods, but Wielenberg shows that it, like his own, posits the existence of brute, necessary ethical facts.  Since Adams argues that God is the good, and God is necessarily existent, then certain facts about the good will be necessarily true. (32)  In short, whereas Wainwright claims theism is better able to account for supervenience than atheism, Wielenberg claims the two views are on a par: both hold that the connection between at least some states of affairs and certain moral properties are brute facts not explicable in terms of anything else.

Wielenberg next turns his attention to William Craig and J.P. Moreland’s suggestion that atheistic moral realism is incoherent since it posits foundationless moral values whose manner of existence is hard to conceive.  What can it mean, they ask, for justice to “just exist”? Wielenberg’s answer is that it means certain states of affairs are the case.  (34) He continues, “The state of affairs that it is just to give people what they deserve obtains whether or not any people actually exist, just as various states of affairs about dinosaurs obtain even though there are no longer any dinosaurs.  In this way, my approach cashes out the idea of justice ‘just existing’ in terms of facts about justice.” (34)

Finally, Wielenberg consider’s Craig’s Karamazov-style assertion that without God nothing can really be right or wrong, and concludes it has at its root the conviction that moral facts must have foundations external to themselves.  He first replies that Craig does not argue for this claim about foundations but simply asserts it, effectively begging the question against views like Wielenberg’s. Moreover, he tries to show Craig’s own position fails to satisfy it.  Craig endorses a Divine Command view, which is supposed to provide an external source for claims about right and wrong in the commands of God.  Wielenberg argues, however, that God’s commands can create obligations only if certain other ethical facts not grounded in God’s commands–for example, facts about what constitutes legitimate authority–obtain.  These ethical facts not grounded in God’s commands lack the external foundation that Craig claims is necessary.

I would like to close by noting a potential problem with Wielenberg’s argument.  He claims both he and theists are committed to the existence of “substantive, metaphysically necessary, brute facts” about whose foundations it is “misguided” to ask. (26) The theist asserts the brute fact of God’s existence, whereas he asserts as brute facts certain ethical propositions, like “it is just to give people what they deserve.” (34) Now if we are wondering about the foundations of the first fact, we are probably interested in a causal story: who made God?  On the other hand, if we want to know about the foundations of facts about justice, we are not interested in a causal story but a conceptual one.  The absence of an appropriate story has very different implications in the two cases.  Even if there is no answer to the question of where God came from, it is still perfectly intelligible to talk about God’s attributes, actions, etc.   However, without a conceptual story about a claim like “it is just to give people what they deserve,” it is difficult to see how we are saying anything at all when we utter it.  A conceptual story would need to explicate in natural (or supernatural) terms what justice means and why giving people what they deserve counts as an instance of it.  This claim is controversial, of course, and there is no room to argue for it here. What I do think has been shown, however, is that Wielenberg has more work to do to show the brute ethical facts he advocates are on the same footing as the brute fact of God’s existence claimed by his theistic opponents.

Reviewed by John Milliken
Social Philosophy and Policy Center

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