[music]
So it's Two Tims Talking Philosophy. I'm
Tim—
no, I'm Timothy! And I'm Tim. Timothy and
Tim.
Two Tims. Here we go: the topic for the
day is God
and morality. Does God have a place in
moral theory? That's a very good question.
I don't know. Here's one answer: there is
a God
and morality comes from God.  What God
commands
is right, anything that God forbids is
wrong,
and that's the whole story. Well I'm not
a big fan of the divine command theory
because there's a very classic
problem with it. Now
I actually like the idea that what God
commands is right
and what he commands us not to do is
wrong. I'm just not sure that could be
the whole story.
And there's this classic problem called
the Euthyphro dilemma.
This dilemma comes from the fact of
questioning, "Well, wait—
when God gives his commands does he
recognize
what's good and bad and then tell us 'Oh
don't do that because it's bad.'
Or is there no such thing as good and
bad apart from his commands?" And so it's
just he sort of makes his commands
arbitrarily.
This is a dilemma because if you say
"Well wait,
God recognizes what's good and bad and
then he bases his commands on that,"
then it doesn't seem like God's commands
are needed, right? If there's already good
and bad out there
his commands might sort of be
informative but they're not doing any
work. They're not
making anything right and wrong. Yeah
they would be informative in the sense
that someone might say "Well, they're
useful—we can now look to the scriptures
to find answers for
right action, wrong action..." But I can see
how it kind of...
it guts the divine command theory of any
real interesting content.
Yeah it's kind of like how, you know, I
might tell my kids "You shouldn't hit
your sister." That's mean—that's bad.
And that might be the way they learn
about morality but it's not as though my
saying is what makes it wrong or what
makes it bad. I'm just sort of
recognizing morality and then
and then telling them. So if God's just
doing that
that's great but that means morality
isn't based on his commands.
It would mean he's just recognizing
what's already wrong and right
and then making those commands. And it
only gets worse from there because
if God is all-powerful and all-good... and maybe we should have cleared that up
in the very beginning: we're using "God"
in a traditional sense of a very
particular conception of God, sometimes
called the classical theistic
conception or maybe just more broadly,
the god that people tend to think of if
they're coming from the Western
tradition— whatever the western tradition
is—all these things are
controversial! But the God that you would
find in Judaism,
Islam, Christianity, for example. That God
is supposed to be all-powerful,
but if morality is something outside of
God—
and I like how you put it,  "God's just
reporting what's right and wrong,"  he's
not creating it with his commands. Well
then
that seems to be a threat to God power
because now even God has to
obey morality or is somehow under the
authority of morality that's outside
of God. Yeah I think you've identified
something that
is attractive about divine command
theory. If you already believe in God
then God is supposed to be in charge of
everything,
right? And if there's a standard outside
of God— if God has to follow the rules—
then it seems like there's something
sort of above God
and so if you believe God exists you
probably
want morality to be under his control.
That seems like a good thing and so
if it's not then it sort of
calls into question his powerfulness, his
omnipotence.
So that's the reason you might be
attracted to divine command theory
but I think what we were just talking
about is... but if you like divine command
theory you still have to settle this
question of
"If morality is not outside of God, if
it's just his commands,
why is he making the commands he does? Is it just for fun?
Does he just wake up one morning—you
know—today I'm going to command
people not to murder—that sounds fun."
It's a nice little trap that Socrates
has laid here—Did we mention? I can't remember... it was Socrates who came up with the Euthyphro...
He's just copying me... Yeah, right! Socrates has laid a nice trap here:
if we say: No, God has reasons for what he
commands, then
those reasons are what make the action
right
or wrong depending on what we're talking
about. If on the other hand you say, "Oh no,
no, God just...
God just commands it."  Well now we have
God making stuff up on the fly, which is
kind of what you
laid out just now. Yeah my favorite
example is—
you know— what if God woke up one day and said—not that he sleeps!— but if he woke
up one day and said
"You know what? Morally speaking it's
wrong to quack like a duck on Tuesdays." Well, if
that's what he chose to command then all
of a sudden that's part of morality. And
that just seems kind of
ridiculous. Like, "Well, he wouldn't command
that!" Well why not?
Right? If if morality is just his
commands,
what is he basing his commands on? Let's
go back to the main question here. Let's
see if we can clear things up a bit.
The question is God and morality— and
maybe we should rewind all the way back
to the beginning of this podcast and
start over and say—
Why would two philosophers teaching
philosophy at a college campus, for
example...
Why bring God into it at all? In other
words, I can imagine a student sitting in
the back of the class
kind of rolling their eyes and saying, "Oh
geez, I didn't know we were going to have
a lot of God-talk today."
Well one reason we might talk about God
and morality in the first place is
because
historically God has played a big role
in this discussion.
So it's a commonplace belief whether
or not you think it's the right belief—
it's one that I think should be
addressed... And not just historically but
worldwide, right now—
yeah, ask anyone off the street globally,
"Where does morality come from?" They're
probably going to say something about
God.
Yeah, and I think there's a really common
idea where
if you start to doubt whether God
exists, you start to wonder whether
there's
any real objective value in the world
because
this idea of God is a kind of grounding
idea for a lot of people. So
I think it does make sense to talk about
it and I don't even necessarily think
it's wrong.
I actually think God does play some role
in morality but it's worth reflecting
and thinking about, well, what exactly is
that role.
Are we assuming there is a God? I mean
we're asking, "What's the relationship
between God and morality?"
Or are we saying hypothetically, "If
there's a God, this might be the
relationship to morality,"
or is the question only of interest to
people who believe in God in the first
place?
Well I think it should be of interest to
everyone who... people who believe in God
or not, because part of the question
is
"Must god exist in order for there to be
morality?"
So if you think he doesn't exist but you
also think
God is needed for there to be morality,
then you've got a conclusion there.
There is no morality! So it's still going
to be important to you
what role God plays in morality whether
or not you believe God exists.
Now I am approaching it from the
position that I,
think God exists but I also don't like
divine command theory
and so I'm in a sort of weird situation
where there's a really popular
view about morality for people who
believe in God and I happen to not like
that view.
I see this all the time in the classroom:
students who believe in God
who are convinced God must have
something to do with morality—
some sort of central connection that's
important—and yet they see the power of
the Euthyphro dilemma and they...
Yeah, I can almost see them sweating in
the back ,you know, "What do I do now?" So
I guess the move would be to go to
natural law theory or something else...
I tell all my students whether we're
talking about arguments for God's
existence
or the divine command theory, "Just
because you think a particular theory
doesn't work—or a particular argument
doesn't work—
you don't have to sort of throw the
whole view out—
it doesn't mean God doesn't exist, it
doesn't mean God has nothing to do with
morality,
it just means this particular view that
someone has come up with
doesn't look like it's going to work."  So
there are other options
and natural law theory is one that I
think is,
I think is more attractive for a person
coming from a theistic
point of view, a person who believes in
God. Yeah iIm working, I'm still working
out for myself
what the answers are to this question of
God and morality:  I'm not quite sure what
to say whenever someone turns it back
around on me
and asks me what I think. I'm tempted to
say,  "Why not
just be a Kantian? Or why not just be a
virtue theorist? Or a utilitarian? Or
many of these other theories that don't
explicitly work God into the theory—we
might just call these
secular theories— theories of morality
that don't bring God at all.
But couldn't someone believe in God—even
be committed to God in some serious way,
maybe a devoted
Christian or a devoted Muslim, for
example— couldn't they just be a Kantian? Is there anything wrong with that?
I don't think there's anything wrong
with that. I mean there's going to be
pros and cons
to any sort of philosophical view you
you take up,
but I suspect anyone who's coming from a
religious tradition—
let's say Protestant Christian or
even Muslim or... Judaism—any of those
traditions...
I don't think there's anything in those
sacred texts that say,
"Thou shalt be a divine command theorist."
Alright, yeah, that's right—
So, so there's gonna be— it's gonna be
an open question whether
these views are compatible with a
particular religion,
but I suspect a lot of these moral views
that don't specifically mention God will
be able to fit
with different religious traditions. It
just might turn out
that the role you think God plays in
morality maybe isn't precisely what you
thought it was.
Right, yeah— but for example you mentioned virtue theory...
I happen to really like virtue theory
and I think
a virtuous person is someone who's just
excellent
in every respect of living and I think, "Wow, as someone who believes in God I've
got the paradigm example
of virtue in God." Does that mean God
created morality? I don't know what that
would
mean but I think it's still relevant to
talk about God,
but you can still keep that discussion
separate from virtue theory on its own.
Is it unfair to say that maybe some
theories are
not so compatible with belief in God? I
don't want to
start a bar fight here—some utilitarians
might aim a chair at me—but I sometimes
wonder if utilitarianism might be off
the table for some religious traditions
just because... Well I guess we'll have to
save it for another podcast...
But would it be fair to say— and by
the way I don't know why I keep grilling
you with questions:
you can turn it around on me! But what
would you think of something like
utilitarianism? Might that...
might that stretch the commitments of
some
religious believers, just because for
instance it is hard to balance
justice in utilitarianism? Or am I just
showing my anti-utilitarian colors?
It's just your anti-utilitarian colors! I
think that's right—
No, I mean I hear the point and I
think...
I think there are some counter-intuitive
consequences
of utilitarianism that we can talk about
another time that,
that are difficult to swallow as a
religious person.
But I also think there is a lot of room
to explore what may or may not be
compatible with your religious faith
because I've come across
philosophers who have tried to make the
case
that God is a utilitarian, even from a
specific—you know—Christian
religious tradition. So that doesn't mean
they're right
but it means there's at least room to
discuss whether or not that
philosophical view fits with the
religious
view. I've had students suggest that in
class without any prompting on my part
at all. In fact, very often when I have this
conversation in class, we'll do it for
one week and then we'll move on and God
doesn't really get mentioned again. But
sometimes a student will mention weeks
and weeks later when we're learning
utilitarianism,
"You know, I wonder... maybe God's a
utilitarian and God's
commanding us to all maximize happiness
all the time."
Yeah, I mean in fact— and this is going to
take us a little too far aside so I'll
just make a short comment—
the problem of evil is a big problem for
religious believers, which is: Why does
God allow suffering?
And you might think, well if God's a
utilitarian,
he allows suffering because it brings
about in the long run— he has this
grander plan where he's going to do
greater good in the long run. That sounds
very utilitarian, right? He's allowing
some bad stuff to happen
to bring about greater good. Now whether
or not that works is another question
but
it's not totally unrealistic to think
something like that might fit with a religious trade. Yeah,
we're really getting in the weeds here
but it might even be—
you know, to take it a step further— that
if we deny God's being a utilitarian,
now we just made the problem of evil
worse because we don't have that easy
reply of, "God allows evil for the greater good."
Anyway time to move on I suppose... Earlier in a
previous discussion we talked about the
motivational question:
"Why be good ?" Or "Why care about the right thing?" We talked about the
epistemological question: "How do we ever
know what's right and what's wrong?"
and then the metaphysical
question, which is just a straightforward
question of, 
"What makes something good or bad? What
makes something right or wrong?"
I want to talk for a moment about the
motivational question: Do you think
religion overall is a force for
motivational good? In other words,
religions—right or wrong—motivate people
to work hard, care for their families,
look out for their neighbor, and so on. Or
are the New Atheists correct that really,
religion contaminates everything it
touches and we would all be better off
in an atheistic world where people rid
themselves of this illusion.
Any thoughts on that?  I have lots of
thoughts on that. One thing I'll say is: it's easy to
paint in broad strokes when we're
talking about what religion does and
doesn't do,
and as philosophers like to point out
it's a little more complicated and
nuanced than that.
So do I think there are
problems in religious traditions
especially with regard to what it
motivates people to do?
Absolutely. I think there are, for example,
there are people who seem to be quite
selfish
and use their religious traditions
for their own gain—whether it's they're
only religious because they want to
go to heaven and have eternal reward or
they use it to manipulate people or
whatever—but I think
in general when we're talking about why
should I be good, why should I care about doing what's right...
I think a lot of religious traditions
offer good answers to those questions,
very reasonable answers to those
questions.
For example, a commandment in the
Christian bible is,
"Love thy neighbor," and the motivation
for
doing something loving and doing
something caring doesn't
appear to just be avoiding hell
and getting eternal reward. It appears to
be
intrinsically motivating: that the
loving act itself
is worth doing because it's good. That
seems like a good
source of motivation, so I'm not sure
that
motivation is totally laid out in
any of these religious traditions but I
think there can be a lot of good
motivation coming from these religious
traditions.
And I think you could give a parallel
answer—and I don't mind saying I *would*
give
a parallel answer for the
epistemological question. "Overall,
do religions make it more difficult to
know what is right or wrong because
they're mixing in all kinds of false
teachings?" someone might say. "Or do they shed some light?" And I think the answer
is real similar to what you just gave for
the motivational question: there's some
good and there's some bad—every religion
is a mixed bag of some true teaching
and some false teaching and we have to
sort through it, just like everything in
life, right?— We have to,
we have to sort through the news, you
have to sort through the books, you have
to sort through people telling you this and telling you that...
I think we're looking for a formula
that will give us all the correct answers—
but it doesn't matter what source you
look to—
you're *always* gonna have to make a
judgment of whether you can trust the
source, and what parts are correct and
what parts are
incorrect. Isn't that?... I think it's
something like that...
I think that's exactly right, and as much
as philosophers like to take a step back
and critically reflect
on what we've been handed—and I think
that's the right approach—
that doesn't mean what we come up with
is automatically better than what others
have come up with.
And mainstream religious traditions for
a very long time have had a lot to say
about morality,
and it would be pretty arrogant to just
dismiss it
outright without taking it into
consideration and thinking,
"Okay, what are they saying, why are they
saying it? And, yeah, I think it's it's foolish to
disregard thousands of years of human
history
who have taken religious teachings to be
a source of moral information
and think that's somehow not relevant to
this discussion. I think it's absolutely
relevant and a way of knowing about
morality.
While also acknowledging that we can
make improvements here or make
improvements there as we
learn new things or make corrections
along the way.
Yeah, absolutely— it doesn't mean
they're infallible... they can't make mistakes ...although if you're...
if you're religious and you believe in
God you probably think
God isn't— Yeah, I just heard the
fundamentalists rising up there! Right—
so the bible is infallible but maybe our
*interpretation* isn't— but now we're
really getting off the...
off the track. Yeah, this is... this is
complicated stuff, isn't it?
It is. It is. Alright, here's something...
If I understand Richard Swinburne's
position, he says something like this,
"God creates the conditions or the
context for what is right and wrong, so we just
happen to be carbon-based creatures
and fire burns our skin and it hurts—
didn't have to be that way—
if you believe in God, God created us and
he made decisions about what we'll be
made of and
what will hurt and what won't—and so on.
So there's a lot of facts about the
world that depend on God
and how God created the world. He could
have made fire soothing—
so you can imagine a science fiction
world where the kid says,
"Mom, come on over, bring some fire! I hurt
my finger!" This is getting a little silly
but the idea is just that, you know, the
world could have been a different place,
so,  "Don't set people on fire!" sounds like
a pretty good moral principle for *this*
world
but only because God set the world up in
that way
where we don't interact very well with
fire. If God would have
set the world up in a *different* way, so
that fire was soothing or provided a
nice calming feeling,
then the claim, "It's wrong to set people
on fire,"
would in fact be false. So I think I've
kind of mixed myself up talking about this but
to get it out and to reach the
conclusion: the idea is..
There are moral principles, those moral
principles
are not *created* by God— they're outside
of God, like we were discussing at the
beginning—
but how those principles interact with
the world and what specific things are
right or wrong
depends on God's creation. So there is a
sense in which God is closely related to
morality. So, for instance, it is wrong to set people on fire because
God made us that way—
that it's very painful to be burned. I'm
not sure what Swinburne's
actual position is but it sounds like
you're describing
something in the natural law ballpark.
Because you're talking about,
well, it's not that morality is just what
God commands,
but look— we are made in a certain way
and there are just some things that are
good for us and some things that are bad
for us
and morality depends on what's good for
us and bad for us
and God created us with certain things
that are good for us and bad for us.
And so he didn't make these arbitrary
commands, he makes these commands
based on how he made us and what he
knows is good for us.
Is that sort of like the picture you're
painting? Yeah, I don't know what picture
I'm trying to paint here! But
it's something like this: maybe the laws
of morality
are like mathematics. They're just built
into the world
*necessarily* so, so that morality is
necessary.
So to get technical, right, these are...
these are necessary truths—they could
not have been otherwise, there's no possible world
where murdering is morally okay because
it's a necessary truth, like two plus two
equals
four, and so if these necessary moral
truths come built into the world,
a lot like mathematics, then God didn't
really have a lot to do with it, as far
as *creating* them or choosing them.
It's wrong to set someone on fire. Why?
Because
it's necessarily true that it's wrong to
unjustifiably
cause pain in somebody. And fire—
just by the way that God built the world—
is something that causes pain.
I see. I do think that would be a picture
where
if you have a... if you have a God who
is all-knowing,
all good, all-powerful, then
he would be able to recognize—he would
know what those moral laws are
whether or not he created them. And would
reasonably make commands that correspond
with those.
It's not clear whether it would be
doing sort of
metaphysical work, as it were—
it would wouldn't be changing what's
right and what's wrong
or determining what's right and
what's wrong but
it seems like God would still play a
role in that picture.
But not much of a role. Kind of a side
player. So if you're looking for a
God-centered moral theory, if you're a
believer who just has this deep
intuition that
morality has got to do something with
God and God has to be at the center of
it somehow,
then that very light sketch that I just
gave
might not be the way that person wants
to go because it doesn't seem like God
is really at the center
of that kind of theory. I think that's
right. It doesn't...
it in a way lowers God
beneath morality and whether or not that
is an okay picture is going to depend on your religious tradition and your
view of God and what you think is...
Look, I think people are too worried
about this!  I'll put my cards on the
table: there's lots of things that God—
if he exists—can't do! So you've probably
heard these kinds of examples. God can't
give
an authentic signature of yours. He could
perfectly imitate it,
but it would be a forgery— he cannot give
a genuine
Tim signature—just can't do it! Cannot
create
out of thin air a genuine American
dollar bill. Why? Because part of the
definition
of a genuine dollar bill is that it be
minted in a U.S. mint. And so on— there's
lots of
these little cute, kind of tricky
examples. But some things
God can't do—and I think most believers
in God would be fine with saying that
God can't lie,
God can't deceive, God can't do lots of
horrible things. And so I think
most people who believe in God already
accept
various limitations on God, I put
"limitations" in quote marks here.
So why not say also that—you know—
there are some other limitations but
they're not *really* limitations.
I'm not too worried about these
"limitations" on God so I'm
probably closer to your view
that thinking morality if it's quote-unquote
"outside of God" isn't necessarily a
threat to God's
goodness, to his power ,to his—you know—
supremacy as the ultimate being of the
universe.
So I think you're right, there are... if you
already accept that there are some
things God can't do—
even just basic logical things he can't
do like make a square circle
or make two plus two not equal four—
married bachelor!—
Yeah, I mean... so I'm not too worried about
the fact that
math is somehow above God, right? He can't
break the laws of math—that doesn't seem
troubling—
so why... why should I worry too much that
God can't break the moral law?
That it's somehow above him? So I
think there is something to that, that
maybe people who are worried about
morality being
outside of God, if they... if they worry
that's a problem,
maybe thinking about these other "limits"
on God that aren't problems
helps us realize that maybe it's okay to
have certain quote-unquote "limits".
Yeah. Well said. You won't find any
disagreement from me.
Maybe one thing we haven't touched on
yet is this question of self-interest.
On our previous discussion you asked me,
What do you say when someone says, "Why
should I care about doing the right
thing? Why should I care about being a
good person?"
And I said that I kind of liked
Aristotle's answer:
that developing virtues and being a good
person
is beneficial—it's the way to go. Your
life will flourish
in that way, at least the chances of it
flourishing are higher,
than if you go down the the path of evil
and the path of selfishness and the path
of
competition and ambition and everything
else. So here's a question:
If Aristotle gives the answer that you
should be good
and you should care about doing the
right thing because it's in your
self-interest,
is there anything wrong with religions
saying the same thing? Because very often
religions will say, "Be a good person
because you don't want to go to hell!
Or karma:
because what comes around goes around.
Very often religions
take criticism on this: "Oh, you're just
turning morality into self-interest,"
but in the back of my mind, I'm often
thinking, "Well, Aristotle thought that
morality was about self-interest, too,
and we don't need to get into the
details but social contract theory
says something very similar. I probably
worry more about the self-interest
problem than you do, based on what
you were just describing because
I'm very much drawn to this picture that
Aristotle paints of
morality being good for us.
Not just as a society but at the
individual level. That somehow I'm living
a healthier, fuller life if I'm
doing the right thing, if I'm living a
life of virtue and excellence.
And so I like that picture. But I do
worry that
that picture— that fact that doing the
right thing
is good for us— I don't think that should
be part of the motivation to do the right
thing, right? I mean... Here's Kant coming up again! He's saying,
"You got to do the right thing *because*
it's the right thing,
period." Yeah, I mean, I think about, you
know, any... in my ethics class i assign this clip from
Friends— from the TV show "Friends"— where Joey and Phoebe are arguing
about whether there's such a thing as an
unselfish good deed.
And I think it's a really interesting
philosophical discussion
and one thing that gets brought up is,
"Have you ever noticed that when you do
something good you feel good about it?"
Yeah.
And Joey's point was: that makes it
selfish.
And my thought is, well if I do the good
deed
for the good feeling, then it seems like
it was selfish.
But if I do the good deed for some other
reason—
because I want to help someone and I
recognize they need my help
and it would be good to do that— I might
go,
"It's going to feel good, I'm going to
feel good about this,"
but that's not *why* I'm doing it. I think
there's a difference between those two
scenarios:
doing it to get the good feeling and
then just doing it knowing I'm gonna
feel good but that's not *why* i did it.
Yeah, we are complex creatures with
complex motivations. I think
very often we can do something with
many, many
different motivations, and I don't even
think we're that good at
unraveling what those motivations are! If
you ask someone, "Why did you do that?" I'm
not sure that
we have the insight to really, to say why
we do something.
I think that's true and it is a
little overly simplistic to say,
"Oh, I did this not for the good feeling
but for
these altruistic reasons." Motivation
is a is a complex thing and
if anything psychology has taught us...
recently that
we tend to come up with justification
for why we do things... Post hoc reasoning.
Post hoc reasoning.
Yeah, Jonathan Haidt calls this "the
Inner Lawyer". So we already have
our position in mind and then only
afterwards do we scramble to find
explanations or rationalizations of why
we've taken that position. Yeah, so
beware that inner lawyer! Okay,
thanks Tim. It was a good discussion. Thank you.
[music]
