An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar

by Randal Rauser

  A person with good desires simply would not intentionally treat the POW in that way. On this view then, Killum's actions are clearly morally impermissible.

  MORAL PERCEPTION

  Randal: Okay, thanks for that. I'm glad you agree that Killum's actions are unequivocally wrong. However, I still find your explanation for why they are wrong and what it means for them to be wrong to be nebulous and thus deeply unsatisfactory.

  You condemn Killum's actions because they are at odds with the kinds of desires we have many strong reasons to promote. But a person can have many strong reasons to promote desires that are nonetheless evil. It's a truism that every desire has the potential to thwart other desires. An account of morality must explain why some desires are good and thus rightly acted upon, while others are evil, and thus rightly thwarted.

  You see, my take is very different. While I acknowledge cases of moral deliberation, where we must reason to the right course of action, I also believe that we can simply perceive that some particular kinds of actions are good and others are evil. And Killum's actions (torture, murder, and mutilation) are evil.

  Now let me address the epistemological elephant in my ethical room: how can I claim to know these kinds of moral facts in this immediate and unequivocal way? Simple: because I believe human beings have a faculty of moral perception that allows them to perceive moral facts as surely as sense perception allows us to perceive sense perceptible facts.

  Justin: Hmm, interesting. What part or parts of the human brain house this moral-grasping faculty?

  Randal: I don't know. But, then, keep in mind that I also don't know which parts of the human brain “house” the faculty of rational intuition or memory or sense perception. Our knowledge of the brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, is very limited and very much in flux. Fortunately, a person doesn't need to know how rational intuition or memory or sense perception or moral perception functions to know that each of these faculties provides knowledge.

  Justin: Good point.

  Randal: How about I give you a real world example of this immediate moral perception at work?

  Justin: That might help.

  Randal: Sure thing. When the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy visited Paris, he witnessed a public execution by beheading. He later wrote the following reflection on his experience:

  When I saw the head divided from the body and heard the sound with which it fell separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such an act; and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, had found this thing necessary, it was not so; it was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart.2

  Of course, people can disagree with Tolstoy about the wrongness of public executions. So my claim is not that moral perception is infallible. (Nor is that surprising, since none of our cognitive faculties are infallible.)

  Rather, my main point in this example is to bring out the immediacy and bracing moral conviction with which people form basic moral assessments. Just as a person can immediately intuit rationally that 2 + 2 = 4 through their rational faculties, and just as they can immediately sense-perceive that the sun is shining by seeing the sun shining, so they can immediately perceive that a particular action is good or evil, right or wrong, through their moral perception of the action (either by witnessing it or contemplating it). This knowledge isn't produced by weighing various desires in a deliberative fashion. Rather, as with Tolstoy's judgment, these kinds of moral convictions are immediate and acquired prior to deliberation.

  THE PROBLEM OF CHANGING MORAL PERCEPTION

  Justin: Hmm, well I certainly wouldn't want to undermine a kind of immediate intuition as a way of knowing some things. Such a view would be untenable. On the view you’ve forwarded though, how would one go about explaining massive shifts over time in moral sentiment? The dramatic shift in attitudes about homosexuality comes to mind.

  Randal: Go on.

  Justin: With few exceptions, homosexuality was perceived as obviously morally wrong in an immediate way for many of the earth's population. Its wrongness was as obvious to them as the wrongness of beheading was for Tolstoy. Setting aside the question of whether each individual would be rational in trusting their perception, a different but related question naturally pops up. How are we to explain shifts like this on a view like yours?

  Randal: Good question, Justin. Attitudes over time have changed on countless issues. Homosexuality is one issue. One could add many other topics as well, like slavery, cannibalism, polygamy, women's rights, and capital punishment—as in Tolstoy's horror at a public beheading.

  Indeed, the topic of capital punishment brings me to what is literally one particularly painful example: torture. When I was a kid thirty years ago, I visited Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London. For a thirteen year old kid like me, the most memorable exhibit was the Chamber of Horrors. Seeing devices like the horrifying pear of anguish and breaking wheel fascinated and repulsed me. Those wax recreations haunted my imagination for years to come: I couldn't imagine how human beings could inflict such horrors on one another. Today, people widely agree that it is morally wrong to torture people in the manner of these cruel devices. But here's the obvious question: if we have an ability to perceive moral facts with immediacy as I’ve claimed, then how could some folks get things so wrong?

  To start with, let me say that my disagreement with the medievals on this issue doesn't shake my conviction that torture is wrong. On this score, I'm with Tolstoy: By whatever theory others have found the pear of anguish to be morally justified, I insist that it was not so; it was a bad thing, and therefore, like Tolstoy, I too must judge of what is right and necessary, not by what men said or did, not by progress, but by what I feel to be true in my heart. In other words, I believe that those medievals who tortured people were wrong and that what they did was evil. And I am responsible to my conscience.

  Justin: Okay, I can understand that. However, I think I am more interested in how these facts are explained on your view. Presumably, you want to say both that we’ve been given a faculty of moral perception and that this faculty is generally reliable.

  For example, our perception of temperature may fail under certain circumstances, but we have good reasons to think it generally reliable. It's not as though the temperature perceptions of people living hundreds of years ago had them believing that fire was actually cold and ice hot! Shouldn't we think that moral perception, if it operates similarly in all persons, would not differ so dramatically from culture to culture and from ancient to present times?

  Randal: Hah! I like that illustration.

  For starters, as I said, while moral perception may be immediate, it isn't infallible. Sometimes intuitions can be mistaken. For example, our moral perception can malfunction based on cultural conditioning or the distorting influence of personal prejudice. The sober lesson here is that moral perception can misfire, so to speak.

  Second, even when moral perception is working fine, we might deny the moral knowledge we have. For example, when Hutus hunted down and butchered their Tutsi neighbors during the Rwandan genocide, I think at some level they knew what they were doing was wrong and evil. But they were rationalizing their behavior by dehumanizing their Tutsi neighbors and calling them cockroaches. Countless genocides have been carried out on these terms, with the genocidaires suppressing their own knowledge of the evil of their actions.

  So I am okay with saying that moral perception is fallible and that we can choose to disregard the deliverances of our moral perception. Neither of these facts undermines my general conviction that moral perception can provide knowledge. Nor do they undermine my conviction that torture is wrong based simply on moral reflection on the act of torture.

  Justin: We agree that, if there is a faculty th
at works in this way, it would be fallible, just as we agree that other faculties, like vision or temperature perception, are fallible. But to bring back my other point, other faculties don't seem to differ in their outputs nearly as dramatically over time or across cultural borders as our moral values do. People in the first century didn't mistake an elephant for a tree more often than do modern persons.

  Randal: You got me there! I never heard of anybody mistaking a pachyderm for a ponderosa pine.

  Justin: Given this difference, would you say we should be less confident in our ability to perceive moral truths than we are in our ability to perceive the world around us visually?

  Randal: No, I don't agree. Tell me, Justin, are you more persuaded that the sky is blue than that it is wrong to torture infants and rape women for fun?

  Justin: Good point. At least some moral truths are as obvious as the sky is blue. But, then again, those moral truths are as obvious to me as the fact that human slavery is wrong, and yet your view of moral perception doesn't seem very well equipped to explain the gradual correction here.

  THE FACULTY OF MORAL PERCEPTION AND DESIRES

  Randal: On the contrary, my view of moral perception fully allows for a diversity of opinion to emerge, for the reasons I’ve already noted. At the same time, we have a situation where we seem to perceive particular moral facts with the same unavoidable immediacy that we perceive rational axioms or sense perceptual facts. I can just see that 2 + 2 = 4 and that the sky is blue, and I can just see that particular actions are morally good and praiseworthy and others are morally evil and condemnable.

  This amazing faculty of moral perception is no surprise to me. After all, I believe God is morally perfect and wants his creatures to gain moral knowledge about the world and to act on it accordingly. So I would expect human beings to be furnished with a cognitive faculty to provide moral knowledge.

  But where does this faculty of moral perception come from, in your view? It seems to be a fundamentally mysterious ability on atheism, no?

  Justin: In my view, what we’re perceiving isn't some kind of intrinsic essence of goodness or badness in certain behaviors. Rather, we’re perceiving the motivations behind those actions as being desires that are clearly the kinds of desires that tend to thwart other desires.

  Randal: As I already observed, every desire thwarts some other desires, so that is not a helpful criterion for identifying moral properties. What makes an action moral or immoral is not whether the action thwarts desires but rather whether it is good or evil. These are primal concepts. They are part of the furniture of the universe, so to speak. Good and evil are as surely a part of the world as the shape and texture of material objects. Just as our sense perception can perceive the shape and texture of material objects, so our moral perception perceives the good and evil of particular actions.

  If I walk into an alley and see a woman being raped, I don't know what the rapist's desires are. He could have many different desires that lead him to rape. (And as I pointed out, the same is true of Private Killum's murderous actions.) But I don't need to have access to the rapist's mental states to know that he is engaged in an action that is morally evil. So, unlike you, I do believe that actions like rape are intrinsically evil.

  Justin: It's of course true that every desire potentially thwarts some other desire. But that is no objection to a view that states that desires are to be evaluated as to the tendency with which they relate to other desires. We can still say the desire to rape is a bad desire—a desire that a good person would not have—because it tends to thwart other desires.

  Alonzo Fyfe, the primary defender of this view, writes,

  We can see the problem with the desire to rape by imagining that we have control over a knob that will generally increase or decrease the intensity and spread of a desire to rape throughout a community. To the degree that we increase this desire to rape, to that degree we increase the desires that will be thwarted. Either the desires of the rapist will have to be thwarted, or the desires of the victims will have to be thwarted. The more and stronger the desire to rape, the more and stronger the desires that will be thwarted.3

  Randal: Okay, and…?

  Justin: Well, let's apply Fyfe's knob-themed thought experiment to the desire for charity. What if we were to turn up a fictional knob associated with the desire to do charity such that it increases the intensity and spread of a desire to do charity throughout a community? My point is that not all desires are created equal.

  Randal: But once again I come to the point that the thwarting of desires is, in itself, neither here nor there. Everything depends on the moral status of the desires being thwarted. Let's say you become convinced that it is wrong to eat sentient animals. By becoming an active defender of vegetarianism, you turn the dial way up so that it will thwart all sorts of desires people have for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza and chicken wings. But, if it is morally wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures simply because we enjoy the taste, then this moral fact trumps and thwarts an entire buffet of culinary desires.

  Justin: If you turn up the dial associated with the desire for a vegetarian diet though, you are simultaneously eliminating or lessening the desire for diets that include meat. Notice that the desire for a vegetarian diet isn't a desire that tends to thwart other desires. It makes more sense then, to turn up that dial than to turn up the dial that will tend to thwart other desires.

  Randal: I beg to differ. One can desire a vegetarian diet for moral reasons while desiring meat for taste.

  Justin: Well, okay, but I hope you see my point. Anyway, it's clear that we conceive of morality in entirely different ways, but it's not at all clear that theism somehow constitutes a superior view in regard to the specific question of how we come to know moral facts. On your view, moral facts are basic and are perceived directly. On my view, moral facts are just facts about desires and their relationships to each other.

  Randal: That's not quite my view. I certainly do believe that we all directly perceive basic moral facts, but that doesn't mean that all the moral facts we perceive are basic. Some are the result of careful deliberation. And that's part of the reason that we need ethical theories: they help us organize and justify our respective moral deliberations.

  Nonetheless, a significant amount of our moral knowledge is indeed basic and thus immediate. If a properly functioning person sees a rape in progress, they don't need to reason to the conclusion that the act is wrong by undertaking a calculation based on the projected thwarting of various desires. They know absolutely and unequivocally that it is wrong. We can leave the moral philosophers to develop theories of the nature of morality. But the starting point of moral knowledge itself is immediate and pretheoretical. That's the nature of our moral condemnation of Private Killum's torture, murder, and mutilation of his hapless POW as well. And I don't see that your desirist theory can explain this type of knowledge.

  Justin: I’ve claimed the initial evaluation of desires is deliberative, but that is a separate issue from the fact that, once a person is driven by good desires, deliberation won't be necessary for acts. They will do the right thing naturally. That kind of automatic goodness of action is what we want from those around us.

  Randal: I can see we’re not going to agree here. Before we move on to a completely new topic, I'd like to say something about another aspect of morality that I believe favors theism. Are you okay with that?

  Justin: But yes, we’re unlikely to resolve this difference in our views here. What other aspect of morality were you interested in discussing?

  MORAL OBLIGATION AND MORAL CALLING

  Randal: I want to come back to moral obligation—the sense that we are obliged to do particular actions and obliged to refrain from doing other actions.

  To give a sense of what I'm thinking, perhaps I can begin with the case of John Rabe, a German businessman working in Nanjing, China, in 1937. By September, it was becoming clear that the advancing Japanese army was about to take over the city. Giv
en the notorious reputation of the Japanese for brutality, the obvious course of action beckoned: flee the war-torn country by retreating to the safety of the West. But against every impulse of his nature, Rabe resolved to stay. In his journal, as presented in the 2007 documentary Nanking, he offered the following reason why:

  Under such circumstances can I, may I, cut and run? I don't think so. Anyone who has ever sat in the dugout and held a trembling Chinese child in each hand through the long hours of an air raid can understand what I feel. The rich are fleeing, the poor remain behind. They don't know where to go. They don't have the means to flee. Aren't they in danger of being slaughtered in great numbers? Shouldn't one make an attempt to help them? There's a question of morality here. And so far, I haven't been able to sidestep it.4

  Rabe is right: there is a question of morality here. More specifically, there is a question of moral obligation and, perhaps even more provocatively, of moral calling. It's the experience of recognizing in particular moments a deep moral claim upon our lives, an obligation and perhaps a specific calling to act in a particular way, even when doing so frustrates our personal interest and desires.

  Justin: Interesting. I don't experience moral obligation as some kind of external calling. I experience it as a collection of particular kinds of reasons I have for acting. Obviously, I have reasons for doing all sorts of things—jogging, going to sleep, or engaging in conversation. The question is, what is the difference between generic reasons and moral reasons. In my view, the difference is that generic reasons are not the kinds of reasons that people generally have strong reasons to promote or condemn in any significant way. Moral reasons, on the other hand, are.

  Randal: It seems like you view moral obligation as nothing more than the end result of a moral calculation weighing reasons for and against a particular action. But that's not the way it is.