My argument that there is no basis for objective morality in a godless universe received a lot of criticism. In this episode, I try to counter the two most common criticisms of my argument, and try to explain why atheists struggle to understand this distinction.
00:00:00.000Now, yesterday I made the argument that there is no basis for objective morality without God.
00:00:07.400As an atheist, you cannot logically assert any kind of objective moral code because you have denied God.
00:00:14.420And I argued that the only thing left for an atheist is moral relativism.
00:00:19.780That's really the only option that is logically open to them.
00:00:25.100I'm not going to rehash that argument. You can go and listen to it or watch it if you like.
00:00:27.900My main objective was just to knock down the idea that it's possible for objective morality to exist in a godless universe.
00:00:34.940I spent 30 minutes trying to do that so you can go and look at that or listen to that.
00:00:39.580Quite a lot of feedback to that discussion, much of it ranging from negative to extremely negative.
00:00:45.600And now what I'd like to do is I'd like to engage what appeared to be the two most frequent criticisms of the position that I expressed yesterday.
00:00:55.800Now, the first one I'm not going to spend a lot of time on. I did want to mention it, though.
00:01:00.040There were a lot of people who insisted quite breathlessly that it is possible for an atheist to do good things and be a good person.
00:01:08.800In fact, as I was told, just because atheists believe that there is no God doesn't mean that they're going to go off killing and raping, etc.
00:01:16.400You don't need God to be a good person, I was told.
00:02:00.160I'm not sure why so many atheists struggle to understand this distinction.
00:02:03.480And it's kind of funny to me that atheists like to impugn the intelligence of believers,
00:02:08.640while at the same time, with the whole invisible sky daddy and all that kind of nonsense,
00:02:12.540while at the same time, which again, there is no Christian above the age of five who actually believes that God is in the sky or that he's magical.
00:02:23.940So, you know, it's another, you know, it's a kind of really stupid straw man that I see really that intelligent atheists will use.
00:02:34.160And it's beneath them to get into that kind of stuff, but they do it.
00:02:40.220And even here, there is, even among intelligent atheists, there appears to be this inability to understand a really basic distinction and nuance.
00:02:48.920So, again, I'm not saying that atheists aren't good.
00:02:54.580I'm saying that atheism itself, the belief system, provides no basis, no rational basis for asserting the objective nature of morality.
00:03:11.580In fact, my argument is actually the opposite of what these critics seem to understand.
00:03:19.640My whole point, and what I said many times in that episode, is that atheists do act morally, and they do recognize moral goodness,
00:03:28.020and they do condemn moral evil, which proves that they do recognize the objective nature of morality, even if it contradicts their worldview.
00:03:36.000That was my point, the point I made, is that, yes, there are plenty of good atheists who understand, in fact, all of them recognize moral goodness.
00:03:46.240That was my point that I was trying to make.
00:03:50.760Now, you notice that atheists will tend to have this confusion, actually, on the other side, too,
00:03:59.000because many arguments with atheists, in my experience, will devolve into the atheists listing all of the alleged crimes and atrocities committed by religious people.
00:04:09.820I cannot tell you how many times I've had a debate or an argument with an atheist about the existence of God or something along those lines,
00:04:17.420and eventually they start talking about the Crusades and the Inquisition.
00:04:21.180Now, the fact that they reveal themselves to have very little understanding of those historical episodes is beside the point.
00:04:27.120The real point is that the Crusades, the Inquisition, none of that has anything to do with anything.
00:04:33.780The sins of religious people are completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists.
00:04:41.980I was watching a debate with Christopher Hitchens recently, and he went on this whole tangent about the alleged wickedness of Mother Teresa.
00:04:51.320Now, Hitchens was a brilliant guy, but this was an amazingly erroneous and pointless rant,
00:05:00.320as it obviously has no bearing at all on the question of whether God exists or not.
00:07:09.080Morality is both subjective and relative in this view.
00:07:11.920So, what is right and good depends on my own perspective, so that's subjective, and it depends on circumstance, so it's relative, and that's it.
00:07:20.860On the other hand, objective morality is the belief that moral standards, moral truths, and moral responsibilities exist independent of my own preferences or opinions.
00:07:31.560In other words, some actions are really good, and some are really bad, and they remain good or bad, even if I think otherwise.
00:07:38.120Even if everyone in the world thinks otherwise, the moral truth remains.
00:07:41.920So, maybe instead of objective morality, we could call it actual morality.
00:07:59.060And just as we have actual moral obligations to do certain things and not do others.
00:08:04.440And those obligations exist, whether or not we recognize them, or whether or not we choose to follow them, or whether or not we like them, right?
00:08:18.540Well, I'm not going to make an exhaustive argument here, but I will mention two points for consideration.
00:08:25.540One, I think we have to start with, you know, my first piece of evidence for objective morality that I would present is your own moral intuition.
00:08:39.380I mean, your own understanding and my understanding, which is the same.
00:08:43.500And this is a weird argument, I realize, because on one hand, it's very weak, in that I can't provide tangible proof of it, because I'm telling you what's going on in your own head, which I can't prove, and of course, comes off extremely presumptuous.
00:09:00.900Well, on the other hand, it's a strong argument, because as you listen to it, you know that what I'm saying is true.
00:09:08.620So, each person who says that morality is not objective, in fact, I'll personalize this.
00:09:16.420You, who are listening to this right now, if you as an individual, if you believe that morality is relative, if that's what you claim to believe anyway, then I'll talk to you.
00:09:28.600So, you say that morality, maybe you laugh at the idea of objective morality.
00:09:32.060You know, we all have our own morality.
00:09:35.060My morality is not your morality, so on and so forth.
00:09:36.980Yet, you say that, yet I know that you know that rape is wrong.
00:13:50.900In fact, if morality is subjective, then I think I should be able to find two things.
00:13:56.840When I'm, if I'm looking around the world, I'm looking through history of different civilizations.
00:14:00.220I should be able to find civilizations that have no moral code whatsoever.
00:14:04.800I should be able to find civilizations where nothing is considered right or wrong.
00:14:08.480Um, and number two, I should be able to find civilizations that have something close to the opposite of our own moral code.
00:14:16.160So, civilizations where it's considered absolutely right to lie, murder, steal.
00:14:22.680I should find civilizations where cowardice is celebrated, integrity is derided.
00:14:27.560Um, given the number of civilizations that have existed, given how separate they have often been, especially in the past,
00:14:33.660I think it's reasonable that an entirely subjective thing should manifest itself in extremely different ways, opposite ways.
00:14:41.360That's what I, uh, uh, that is what we find with truly subjective things like fashion.
00:14:47.380Okay, so you can find societies where men wear pants, societies where they wear skirts,
00:14:52.160societies where people wear almost nothing, societies where women wear burkas, societies where they wear bikinis.
00:14:57.120If morality is subjective, then I should find a situation as diverse and contradictory as this, but I don't.
00:15:04.780What I find as I look at civilizations across the world in history is that there is a unanimous agreement in principle on a number of moral points.
00:15:15.700Like it's wrong to lie, it's wrong to steal, to murder, it's good to be honest, to be humble, to be courageous.
00:15:22.240I find basically the same sort of person admired and the same sort of person despised everywhere.
00:15:30.720Now, it's true that you find civilizations where terrible evils are accepted in commonplace, obviously Nazi Germany,
00:15:39.260uh, every slave holding society is another example.
00:15:41.900But you notice that even in cases where terrible, monstrous evils were accepted,
00:15:49.780they were still rationalized and justified according to the same moral code.
00:15:55.760So, murder was illegal under the Nazis, but they just claimed that exterminating the Jews was not murder.
00:16:01.900Now, that claim was ridiculous, obviously, but the fact remains that even they felt the need to pay homage to this moral code
00:16:10.800and to pretend that they were following it.
00:16:19.260And it's because, in fact, we expected them to follow it, to have followed it.
00:16:24.380It's because we rejected the idea that societies and individuals invent their own morality that we could justify putting the Nazi war criminals on trial and then hanging them.
00:16:33.560If morality were really subjective, we would have no basis for condemning them because that was their morality.
00:16:39.120But we rejected that and said there's only one, you broke it, you know you broke it, and now you face the consequences.
00:16:46.000In slave-holding countries, like our own prior to the 1860s, slavery was justified on the basis that slaves weren't fully people.
00:17:47.360Let's look at an example that should absolutely prove moral relativism, if moral relativism is true.
00:17:56.800Let's look at the meeting of Indian civilizations and Europeans.
00:18:01.940So here we have people that are entirely separated, living in isolation from one another, who had never come in contact, never been exposed to each other, never exercised the slightest influence on one another prior to their meeting.
00:18:17.860So here we have a chance for relativistic morality to really show itself.
00:18:24.420If morality is really relative, and you've got these two sides of the world, not come in contact with each other, and you have this completely relative thing called morality, I mean, it should manifest itself in wildly different ways.
00:18:44.900Incredibly, although the Indians and the Europeans were extremely different in many ways, they still had the same fundamental ideas about morality.
00:18:56.660So to prove my point, I'll take the most challenging example for my position.
00:19:02.240We can look at the Aztecs and the Spanish.
00:19:04.840Now, here we have two very, very different sets of people, and the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale, yet even they had basically the same kinds of rules and laws and moral ideas as the Spanish.
00:19:20.260Homicide, rape, perjury, theft, robbery, sedition, incest, public drunkenness, etc., they were all condemned both as legal and moral infractions.
00:19:29.420Now, yeah, they ripped the hearts out of their human sacrifices, but they didn't consider that murder.
00:19:34.840So, again, which doesn't make it okay, obviously.
00:19:39.200Now, if you're a moral relativist, that does make it okay.
00:19:43.200That's the whole point of moral relativism.
00:19:44.740They didn't consider it to be bad, which means it wasn't.
00:19:47.960As someone who believes in objective morality, I say that that's not an excuse.
00:19:52.020But the point is, again, you see this thing, this invisible moral code, which appears to be the same everywhere, and which even the most evil civilizations felt the need to work around.
00:20:09.100So, that's why I think moral relativism is false, because I see no evidence for it at all.
00:20:21.760All I see, when I look inside myself, and when I look outwardly to human societies, our own, other societies, civilization, when I look through history, all I see is evidence that morality is objective.
00:20:38.680It is a thing that you, it's not something you invent or come up with, it's a thing that you recognize, which is why all of these civilizations came to the same recognition.
00:20:51.940Although they all failed to follow it in various different ways, and some to worse degrees than others, but they all saw basically the same thing.
00:21:06.960A really relative thing, a really subjective thing, should be various, it should be contradictory, especially when you see that it's, especially in cases where it's developed, where you have two systems that have developed.
00:21:21.940Isolated from one another, isolated from one another, but that's not the case with morality, which tells me that it is not, in fact, relative.