My request to Dr. R Scott Smith, a Christian scholar/apologist working at Biola University

On March 7, I read the following written by R Scott Smith, PhD, c/o Biola University, at his blog https://rscottsmithphd.com:

Summary of the Survey
We have surveyed major ethical options for what our core morals are, including:
Are they how we happen to talk?
Are they physical things? Perhaps evolutionary products?
Are they ways of behaving or moving our bodies?
Are they results of a utilitarian calculus?
Are they emotive utterances?
Are they particulars? (nominalism)

But, at least since Hobbes, I’ve argued that none of the views can preserve our core morals of murder and rape being wrong, and love and justice being good.
What Are These Core Morals?

For one, they seem to be objectively real. They seem to exist independently of us as moral principles and values. They also simply seem to be intrinsically valid, and not due to anything else (like, the consequences). That is, they seem to have an essential moral nature. Moreover, they cannot be just physical things or particulars, as we’ve seen. Instead, they seem to be a “one-in-many” – each one is one principle (or value), yet it can have many instances/examples. In sum, they seem to be Platonic-like universals.

That raises many questions, however. Earlier, I remarked that Christine Korsgaard rightly observed that it’s hard to see how such things could have anything to do with us. While she thinks people are physical, it still applies if we are a body-soul unity. Why should these abstract objects have anything to do with us? On Plato’s view, they exist in a heavenly realm of values as brute features of reality.

What makes justice and love character qualities that should be present in us? Why is it inappropriate morally for us to murder or rape? These are normative qualities, not merely descriptive. As we’ve seen, it is hard to see how we can get the moral ought from what is descriptively the case. Yet, that problem could be overcome if humans have an essential nature that makes these moral values appropriate for them, and these acts inappropriate.

Earlier, I argued that the soul as our essential nature provides a sound explanation for how we can be the identical person through change. Body-soul dualists affirm that the soul is our essential nature, and it sets the boundary conditions for what is appropriate for us. For instance, it is inappropriate for us to grow a cat’s tail due to our nature, and it is inappropriate for us to murder due to our nature.

We also saw another reason for the soul’s existence. We do in fact think and form beliefs, yet these have intentionality, which I argued is best understood as something immaterial and having an essence. Now, it is hard to conceive how a physical brain could interact with something immaterial, but that problem does not seem to exist for an immaterial soul/mind.

Moreover, why should we feel guilt and shame when we break these core morals? That doesn’t make sense if these morals are just abstract objects that are immaterial and not located in space and time. Instead, we seem to have such responses in the presence of persons we have wronged morally. Also, retributive justice doesn’t make sense if we repay an abstract principle or value. But it would make sense if a person should be repaid.

There is another explanation we have seen for the grounding of these core morals: they are grounded in God. That helps solve the question of why we feel shame when we break one of these morals. But, that also raises questions, such as: are they good because God commands them, or does God command them because they are good (i.e., the Euthyphro dilemma)? Also, which God would this be?

I will start to tackle these in the next essay. But, first, there is another option for properties besides universals (realism) and nominalism. It is divine conceptualism; properties just are God’s concepts. Justice in us is God’s concept. Yet, concepts have intentionality, but virtues do not. When we think about people being just, we don’t mean they have a concept of justice (though they could), but that they have that virtue present in them. So, offhand, divine conceptualism seems to trade on a confusion.
For Further Reading

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 12

So on the same day I sent him the following message through his blog "contact me" page https://rscottsmithphd.com/contact-us/

Hello,

I would like to ask you a few questions raised in my mind after I read your "Making Sense of Morality: Where Do We Go from Here?", located at https://rscottsmithphd.com, which I read March 7, 2022.

I never seem to get a straight answer from Turek or others who try to argue that the common human repugnance toward murder and rape is more reasonably accounted for by positing "god put his laws into our hearts" than by any naturalistic explanatory mechanism.

I can ask you the questions by email or we can discuss at your blog, or wherever.

Barry

A screenshot of that message is:

Answering R. Scott Smith on murder and rape

 This is my reply to an article by Dr. R. Scott Smith entitled:

Making Sense of Morality: Bentham, Mill, and Utilitarianism 

January 11, 2021/ R. Scott Smith

There definitely is a place for appeals to utility in moral reasoning. E.g., when crafting public policy, we should consider the likely consequences of a proposed action, even when a deontological principle clearly applies.

So when Christian women consider the consequences of their decision to have an abortion (i.e., the child goes immediately to heaven and all chance they might end up in hell is infallibly preempted), then it is clear that the abortion has greater moral good, while allowing the child to grow up, gain freewill, and thus open up the possibility of being tortured in flames forever, is clearly immoral. Especially given that the aborted baby's entry to heaven is necessarily approved by God (how else would he let them in)?  

You couldn't be immoral to murder anybody, because according to Job 14:5, God has set an unchangeable number of days for a person to live.  If you murder somebody, you are necessarily carrying out god's will on what happens to them when their number of days are expired.  Gee, I never knew that obeying the will of God was immoral!

After all, people have to live with such decisions. Moreover, utilitarianism appeals to people, especially in secular societies, as apparently being morally neutral. There is no appeal to God or some other set of values to determine what is moral.

Fair enough. 

However, what gets to count as a “good” or “bad” consequence in the first place? Who gets to decide that?

In America, the "who" are the people who decide whether to vote on proposed legislation.  In certain parts of Africa, it is a witch-doctor.

According to whom is something (or someone) more valuable than another?

See above. 

Biases easily could enter the calculation here.

It would be impossible if they didn't, since morality is ultimately subjective.  There is no such thing as moral neutrality in that group of people who desire to cast a vote about proposed legislation.

To make such judgments seems to presuppose some outside standard, beyond utility.

No, making such judgments presupposes the basic morality of the individual that they have by reason of genetic predisposition and environmental conditioning.  Many people mistake such morals as objective, but they do, in fact, spring from those two sources, no need to posit any moral source that is "above humanity".

Another issue is that utilitarianism seems inadequate in terms of how it treats motives.

Indeed, because morality is relative, there is not going to be any system that will be satisfactory to everybody.  Some people simply prioritize the long-term and others the short-term, and history tells us nothing if it doesn't tell us that we are incapable of creating moral utopia.  There's enough commonality to explain creation of different moral groups (nations, states, towns, clubs, churches) but not enough commonality to justify efforts to unite the whole world in morality.  Exactly what we'd expect on naturalism.

Yet, surely they are morally important. If someone kills another, it makes a major difference if it was done intentionally or accidentally. We rightly recognize that difference in the law.

But only for people who care about the long-term stability of society, not for those of more independent persuasion.  That's a lot of people.  Most people do in fact go faster than the speed limit, cheat on their taxes, and many refrain from calling the police if they have seen a crime, judging the judicial system inadequate to meet their needs.

Relatedly, utilitarianism undermines acts of moral supererogation, ones that are heroic and praiseworthy, yet not required. Suppose someone is jogging but notices another person in danger of being attacked by a third person with a knife. While we should expect that jogger to at least call for help (call the police or cry out, to scare off the attacker), it would be above and beyond the call of duty for that jogger to fight off the attacker and save the would-be victim. Yet, on utilitarianism, that act would be obligatory if it would result overall in net good consequences.

Then have fun refuting utilitarian advocates who think their system covers all possible moral situations.  Count me out.

Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism makes net utility the basis for what is moral.

That's why it cannot be the answer to all moral situations, as most people do not agree that whatever is best in the long term for the majority of people is best.  People will flout the law for their own personal moral reasons often without caring whether this would help or hurt the larger concerns. 

Consider again our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good.

Murder is not always wrong, its a question of whether the law which criminalize certain types of killing might end up operating to create a greater injustice, which discussion is not pointless merely because morals are relative.  We live with each other hear on earth, we don't need to claim we speak for God in order to legitimately seek what we believe is moral justice.

If you think rape is always immoral, then you are saying God is morally wrong.  See the Good News Translation of Deuteronomy 21:14.  Christian translators would hardly render the Hebrew as "forced her to have intercourse with you" if they could have grammatically justified any less rape-sounding translation. 

If the good consequences of a murder outweigh the bad, then that act would be justified and even obligatory.

But whether the good consequences DO outweigh the bad, is a moral judgment call that not even Christians can agree on.

The same goes for rape, whether under act or rule utilitarianism.

No, you only establish this "core" value by arbitrarily preempting the opinion held by remorseless rapists.  That's not very objective or clinical, that's nothing more than "those people are yucky so their opinion doesn't count."  And there are plenty of women who have a "rape fetish", and there is counseling available for rape victims who orgasmed during the rape.  But the victim having an orgasm during the rape probably isn't something you hear about in the mass media.  But an atheist could pounce on that as a proof that either your god doesn't exist, or the god who exists is a barbarian.  But that's not difficult anyway:  girls become capable of bearing children when they reach 12 years of age.  The male's sex drive is strongest during their teen years.  Why?  Might it be that your god seriously thought that having a family and working the farm was far more important than literacy, college and capitalism?

But these results clearly are deeply mistaken, to say the least. If this justification held, it could be moral to rape another person,

You don't have an argument indicating that rape is objectively immoral.  You just blindly presuppose that is the case because you know most people will agree with it.  But popularity doesn't equal truth.  You have to ask WHY most people think rape is wrong.  That's easy, the way they were raised:  most of us were not raised to take advantage of other people., and we were raised to believe that we shouldn't be subjecting somebody else to misery unless only a greater evil would occur without it, so since the satisfaction of the rapists sexual drive is not viewed by most people as a high priority, while their being born and raised in a democratic nation tells them the girl doesn't deserve to be raped, most people naturally eschew rape.

or murder a racial minority person who is protesting peacefully for civil rights.

There is no doubt that such a statement as this will garner an awful lot of support for you because America as a whole is steaming over the white cops killing black men.  But again, you have nothing but popularity on your side.  Once again, you cannot prove the objective immorality of a racist cop killing a black man in a way contrary to the applicable state and federal laws.   

But, we deeply know such acts are wrong; otherwise, why would there be such uproars against these acts?

But WHY do we "deeply know" such acts are wrong?  Gee, is it sheer coincidence that our viewpoint on such things is in harmony with the way most of us were raised, and in harmony with the kind of mammalian genetic predisposition most of us are born with (i.e., don't do something which threatens the survival of the group)?

Furthermore, your implied belief that murder is objectively immoral is disproven from the bible, in which God takes personal responsibility for all murders (Deuteronomy 32:39, Job 14:5, see Deut. 28:15-63).  You don't have to be a hyper-Calvinist to argue as a Christian that god is responsible for evil and works it to his own good.  That logically requires that when some white cop guns down a black man, God was more responsible for why the atoms in the cops brain did what they did, than the cop himself.  Biblical statements about God's omnipresence contradict biblical statements supporting libertarian freewill.  There is no place God is absent from, and that includes brain synapses.  Unless you wish to argue that ancient Semitic peoples tended to include exaggeration in their religious texts?  Gee, that wouldn't create a serious problem for inerrancy, would it? A Bible whose statements about God often exaggerate him?  How about a Court of law declaring the Affidavit of some witness "inerrant" despite its containing exaggerations?

Likewise, justice would be reduced to whatever is the result of the calculation. A rape or murder would be just in a society that is predominately one race if that act would maximize the overall benefits for the majority. Yet, if these acts can be just on this moral system, we have lost justice.

No, we'd have lost our current sense of justice.  Once again, your arguments blindly and wrongly presuppose that you DO have unchallengable "core" moral elements.  You don't.  You just have a lot of mammals in the world whose genetic predispositions are similar enough to explain their grouping together, but not similar enough to create moral utopia...exactly what we'd expect in a godless mammalian world where trying to stay alive and thrive is the ultimate purpose.

Indeed, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, seem to be intrinsically so.

And there you go again appealing to the emotions of the reader, but surely an apologist can do better to prove objective morality, than by remarking that certain morals "seem" intrinsic.

But "intrinsic" doesn't have to imply transcendance.  Morals become lodged in our minds as we are raised by our caregivers.  I'm not seeing why that naturalistic explanation is leaving anything unexplained. 

Answering R. Scott Smith on subjective morality

 This is my reply to an article by R. Scott Smith entitled

Making Sense of Morality: An Introduction to Naturalism 

January 25, 2021/ R. Scott Smith

What should we make of these noncognitivist views? First, by reducing away any cognitive content from moral sentences, they end up being merely descriptive. But, morality deeply seems to be about what is normative, or prescriptive.

"Seems"?  Surely you have something to ground objective morality more than this?  

It also "seems" that Leviticus 21:9 is mere barbarism from an Iron Age culture.  Is "seems" sufficient for argument, yes or no? 

If people protest against a miscarriage of justice (e.g., an unarmed African-American man who was walking down a street, but was murdered by white men), they are not merely emoting. Instead, they deeply believe there was an injustice done, which is why they are upset.

But "deeply believe" doesn't an objective moral make.  The Nazi's "deeply believed" that the Jews deserved to be exterminated.  Christian Reconstructionists "deeply believe" that replacing all American law with the moral commands of the Pentateuch would be morally good.  But surely Christian moral scholars could not possibly agree on whether it was good.   Thus leaving skeptics no reason to think that God's absolute viewpoint is in there somewhere.

Second, moral judgments are not identical with feelings or commands, for the former can occur without the latter.

The show me a moral judgment that isn't identical with a feeling or a command.  Good luck.

We do not need to have any feelings when we state, “Murder is wrong.”

False, feelings reduce to 'thoughts', so you are saying we don't need to have thoughts when we state "murrder is wrong".

But even assuming your logic is correct, then we also don't need to have any feelings when we say "some moral situations would justify disobeying the law and committing vigilante justice."

But again, the wrongness of murder is inherently tied to the moral goodness of the law that is making such killing illegal.  If state law criminalized use of deadly force in self-defense, the fact that it thus became "murder" would not convince most Christians to conform, most would still use lethal force if they thought doing so was necessary to save them from an immediate threat of death or great bodily harm.

So then you can know that murder is sometimes morally good if you can spot moral flaws in the law which criminalizes certain types of killing.  What constitutes a moral 'flaw' is, of course, relative.  But that hardly means it is pointless.  Your liking the taste of some food that others hate is equally subjective, yet that doesn't require that it is flawed.

That's a big problem with you moral objectivists: you always act like the subjectivity of a moral opinion means that opinion is somehow defective.  Not at all. One parent in the neighborhood has her own dogmatic belief that the kids shouldn't be playing outside after 7 p.m., the parent down the street has the same attitude but her limit is 8 p.m.  These moral stances are subjective, but that hardly means that either of them are "flawed".

So stop telling yourself that "subjective" equals "flaw/defective".  It doesn't.  Even if it would make things difficult for inerrantists.

And, we can have feelings without moral judgments.

Sure, but not when it comes to morality.  If the store owner feels like he should call the police about the teen who stole a soda, I'm not seeing how that could possibly be distinguished from his moral judgment that such theft be prosecuted. 

Third, there is no room for any moral education or training on these views, since there is no cognitive content to learn and therefore no real moral disagreement.

No, moral disagreements don't require that at least one party hold to a moral that is objectively real or transcendent.  see above example about parents disagreeing about the latest time in the day to allow their kids to play outside.  Each parent can profitably teach their subjective moral to their kids, even if there is no god who has an absolute time for kids to stop playing outside.

But, this result undermines any training in moral virtue, such as in why we should address examples of injustices in society.

No, there is nothing about subjective morality that "undermines" requiring kids to obey their parents' subjective morals.  The only question is where we draw the line, and this, again, is subjective.  You continually presume that if the moral in question is not objective, then it is either wrong or pointless to deal with it.  This is absurd.

It also wouldn't matter if you were correct.  I too hear about racism in America's police department, and guess what:  I don't "address" those "examples of injustice in society", in the serious way that you obviously intended the word "address".  I might mention some such examples here or there, but I don't "address" them seriously. My life has enough of its own issues without needing to "address" such issues.  What are you going to say now?  All atheists who don't participate in political protest rallies aren't living consistently with atheist morality?

It also does not do justice to the fact that many of us do disagree morally. This is plain to see when we look at the many social and moral issues we deliberate and debate.

Once again, the moral disagreement between two persons doesn't have to implicate objective morals before their disagreements on it can be profitable.  Such as the child who doesn't want to wear the particular shoes the parent wants them to wear.  I can't see any divine oversight about such a trifle, and yet even most Christians would say the parent should discuss this with the child, since maybe one of them will discover some truth (i.e., the shoes give the child blisters, or the child is lying about the blisters, etc).

My question to Christian philosopher R. Scott Smith

 At the Christian apologetics site  https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/msm13

  R. Scott Smith's article is linked.  So I went to his contact page and sent him the following questions:

Hello, 

I am an atheist, and I was wondering what you think of the following argument:  When most people really think about it, they do not seriously believe that unreasonableness is an essential component of faulty argument.  For example, jurors are "wrong" to convict an innocent person, but if trial consisted of the right combination of clever prosecutor and incompetent defense attorney, you could hardly blame the jury for thinking it reasonable to view the suspect as guilty.

If then it be true that unreasonableness doesn't necessarily inhere in all faulty arguments/beliefs, aren't you admitting there is at least a possibility, even if not a probability, that one's denial of God might remain "reasonable" despite being "false"?

I ask because it is my experience that Christians are constantly equating a skeptical belief or skeptical denial with "unreasonableness", as if they thought "inaccurate" and "unreasonable" were necessarily synonymous, which not even a thesaurus will confirm.

---------------------

I now answer the relevant portion of his argument at 

moralapologetics.com/wordpress/msm13

Now, we will see when we explore ethical relativism that while there is a fact of moral diversity amongst people and cultures, nonetheless those differences may not be as wide or deep as we have been taught.

So I guess apologists are wrong when they get from the bible the notion that hundreds of thousands of Canaanites lived a morality that was diametrically opposed to the morality of the Hebrews.

Instead, we can identify common morals that may be applied differently (e.g., how people in one culture show respect for their elders, versus how people in another culture do so).

I'm not seeing the point, the fact that we are all mammals and desire to live together means were are going to discover that the best way to facilitate this is to agree on some common morality.  Frank Turek's statement that atheists cannot sufficiently or reasonably account for why most humans in history have eschewed rape, is absurd.  If you desire to live in groups, outlawing rape is one definite way to enhance group survival.  On the other hand, God's requirement to burn pre-adolescent girls to death (if she is having illicit sex in her father's house, she is likely not married and still living there, thus she is likely 12 years old or younger since marriage took place at early age back then) is so despised by Christians that we could use Turek's logic "we all know that rape is wrong" and say "we all know that burning teen and preteen prostitutes to death is wrong", and we'd have set a basis for beliving that God wanted us to believe that Leviticus 21:9 wasn't from Him.

Further, just because there is a descriptive fact of diversity, that alone does not give us ethical relativism, which is a normative thesis.

Correction, doesn't "necessarily" give us ethical relativism.  But I myself do not argue that my conclusions abuot such matters follow "necessarily", especially in the area of which morals are "right".  

Which means I don't need to argue necessity to win the debate, all I have to show is that my position on the matter is reasonable.  Reasonableness can exist even if the opinion in question doesn't follow "necessarily".  Just like we can be reasonable to call the police only to find out later that we misinterpreted the scene.

Granted, too, irreducibly moral properties would be rather “queer” given naturalism. But, perhaps there are independent reasons why we should question that assumption. In later essays, I will suggest a few such reasons.

I've been analyzing Christian moral apologetics for several years now.  Matthew Flannagan did little more than run away when I debated him at his blog and asked what moral yardstick he uses to decide whether some human act is morally good or bad.  I documented many such failures on his part.  Here's two:

https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2017/11/matthew-flannagan-fails-to-show-child.html

 https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-latest-challenge-to-matthew-flannagan.html

Moreover, it is true that we may speak in ways that do not necessarily commit us to the reality of things we are talking about.

That's right.  The atheist who views his own morality as "absolute" is a fucking fool.

Generally, mere word uses do not have power to cause things to come into existence (except, for instance, stories). A scientific example was talk of phlogiston to explain combustion. Later, however, scientists discovered it was not real; instead, oxygen was what was involved.

Further, error theory does not explain why we find morality to be such a ubiquitous aspect of life.

Maybe so, but other atheist theories DO explain it.  Morality is found everywhere in human life because we are mammals and hard wired to be societal, and thus to prioritize that which contributes to group survival above that which inhibits it.  Little wonder then why most people eschew rape, child molestation, murder and theft, and have only good things to say about getting a job, raising kids, going to college, disinfecting the bathroom, etc, etc. 

After all, why talk morally if there are no morals?

Straw man, morals obviously exist, the problem is that they appear to be nothing more than opinions.  Atheists have just as much justification to talk about adultery as they have to talk about politics.  Nothing about those conversations express or imply that we are speaking about things that originate in something transcendent to humanity.

While error theory explains why we can talk morally, given naturalism, it still does not give us an adequate explanation of what morals are.

Easy:  when you say "you shouldn't steal" and "you shouldn't use the tv remote", these ultimately reduce to thoughts.   

If they are just the way we use words, then we can change morals by changing how we talk. In that case, murder could become right, and justice could become bad. But surely that is false.

What do you mean "surely"?  So at the end of the day, your argument for objective transcendent morals is nothing more than the fallacy or argument from outrage?

Murder is not intrinsically wrong merely because it is the "unlawful" killing of another human being, because this begs the question of whether such prohibitive law is itself always a good thing.  If the state law criminalized use of deadly force in self-defense, then killing in self-defense would be "murder", but that would hardly justify pretending that the law making it so was completely beyond criticism.

Probably wouldn't take me long to find many normal typical every day mature adult fathers who would make effort to murder the babysitter for molesting their child, even if the molestation did not put the child's life in danger (i.e., inappropriate touching, a crime that wouldn't justify use of lethal force).  Again, most of us are shocked by the news that a dead body with a bullet hole in its head was found in some ditch outside of town...but most of us stop crying if the news continues and says it is the body of a convicted pedophile who was recently paroled.  Our inability to cry equally giant tears when we hear of the death of a pedophile as when he hear about the death of a pedophile commits us to the premise that while the state law against murder is generally good for society, we are not foolish enough to think that it is an absolutely exceptionless standard.

Once again, most of us don't like gang warefare.  But if we heard on the news that two rival gangs met in a parking lot outside town and killed each other in a gun battle, most of us would be happy that additional human scum are not longer a threat.  It was murder, but the moral goodness of the result is no less apparent than the moral goodness of eating nutritious food.  And like it or not, yes, most people do believe the ends justify the means, even if they are willing to take the personal risks that would materialize if they lived in total consistency to that viewpoint.

As far as relative morality committing itself to the premise that in some situations, it would be morally good for justice to become bad, this seems to be a bit convoluted.  But even so, it isn't hard to imagine scenarios where a person believes that the way the law operates results in "bad justice", but where that person decides to just conform to it anyway.  The innocent suspect might be looking at only 2 years on a plea deal, but risks 20 years if he goes to trial.  He views his guilty plea as resulting in "bad justice", and yet it was morally good to him because he was forced to choose this evil over the greater evil of losing trial and getting 20 years.  Can it possibly be good for justice to be bad?  Yes.  In the civilized world we live in, any justice system is eventually going to put an individual in the situation of being required to either choose a lesser evil or a greater evil, so that their choosing the lesser evil ends up proving to be the "good" choice.