Properly Basic Moral Belief

The suggestion that we have every right to hold something to be true, even though we might have no evidence or argument that makes it true, will ring familiar with anyone schooled in the philosophy of religion. Certainly this will be familiar to anyone involved in the discussion of the problem of evil.

Properly Basic Religious Belief

The believer is entirely within his intellectual rights in believing as he does even if he doesn’t know of any good theistic argument (deductive or inductive), even if he doesn’t believe that there is any such argument, and even if in fact no such argument exists.

Alvin Plantinga, ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?‘

Any sympathies to Plantinga’s claim that religious belief can be a properly basic belief can be co-opted in support of moral belief. According to Plantinga, religious belief is properly basic because it is involuntary and it arises from a properly functioning natural faculty that, if its origin story is true, grants the belief epistemological warrant. Is there any reason to suppose moral belief, especially at its limits, is any different from a properly basic religious belief?

Perhaps you will say that there is no secular moral equivalent of the ‘sensus divinitatis’ that provides the externalist epistemological justification for properly basic religious belief. God plants this divine sense in believers, but if there is no God, who or what plants a moral sense in moral believers?

I think this question is easy to answer, at least superficially. Moral naturalists answer it all the time, with varying degrees of success. Isn’t it enough to say that we have evolved an innate disposition? Isn’t it enough to say we learn and develop this moral sense by interacting with our fellow creatures? Certainly these are sufficient causal explanations. They do not seem to be very different from the causal explanations considered sufficient to account for other basic beliefs, like seeing a tree or being in pain. Moral beliefs are ‘produced by cognitive faculties whose purpose it is to produce true belief’, in this case true beliefs about how to interact with our fellow creatures. Do we need anything more to account for our properly basic moral beliefs?

Of course there is the possibility of this cognitive faculty misfiring or going wrong, and there are questions to answer about what counts as ‘proper function’ of this faculty and what holds it to account. But the unsettled nature of these questions does not, in itself, give us sufficient reason to dismiss our moral beliefs.

Plantinga would argue the same for religious belief, at least. That we cannot know (de facto) whether or not God exists and has given us the sensus divinitatis does not in itself mean that any believer lacks warrant for their theistic belief. They would not be blameworthy for holding those beliefs, despite their de facto ignorance.

It would be different if those beliefs were shown to be inconsistent or contradictory: that would defeat the warrant, as Plantinga is all-too-aware, and so much of his work on the ‘warrant’ of Christian belief has defended against any accusation of contradiction. But it seems to me that no one is seriously suggesting that all our beliefs about ethics are contradictory or inconsistent; the suggestion is only that they lack conclusive ground.

Properly Basic Moral Belief

In light of this, can we not talk of warranted moral belief? These are the morally basic beliefs that are not shown to be obviously contradictory. They are involuntary, just like religious beliefs, and they arise from a natural faculty whose origin story, if true, grants them warrant. These can be causally accounted for naturalistically, if you like, with evolution and social interaction. Of course, we do not know them to be true (de facto) but we have no good reason to reject them as false (de jure).

Plantinga’s description of a properly basic religious belief seems to me to be very similar to a necessitated moral responsiveness:

I don’t choose between believing this and not believing it: I just find myself believing. In the typical case, what I believe is not under my control; it really isn’t up to me.

Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief

Perhaps you will say that it isn’t just that our natural moral sense can sometimes misfire, it’s that there is nothing in the naturalistic origins of our moral sense that can grant any kind of epistemological warrant to our morally basic beliefs. Unlike the sensus divinitatis which, if true, would grant total epistemological warrant to properly basic religious belief, the naturalistic origins of our moral sense could never, even if true, grant any epistemological warrant to our morally basic beliefs. Moral naturalism is false, and there are no moral facts to form true beliefs about. How, then, can we talk about a natural faculty whose purpose is to produce true beliefs, when there are no true beliefs to be had?

Moral Naturalism

Whilst it is easy to dismiss strongly naturalistic accounts of ethics (and I do), the idea that our evolved natures might play a role in determining our moral natures is not so easy to dismiss. Or at least it’s harder for a non-believer to dismiss this than it would be for a non-believer to dismiss the sensus divinitatis.

There are some things that we, as human beings, cannot do. If you dispute these limits then I encourage you to follow Diogenes and try to eat raw meat (like a dog) and you will quickly discover your human limitations, as he did. Just as our evolved natures shape our physical limits (we cannot breathe underwater, photosynthesise, lay eggs, etc.), it’s possible that our evolved nature shapes our moral limits, at least in part. And if this is the case then, whilst you would be free to transgress these limits, you would not be free to do so without consequences. (Just as Diogenes is free to eat raw meat but cannot do so without consequences.)

These limits would be as ‘true’ as anything can be for you. A human being cannot eat raw meat without risking the digestive consequences, and a human being cannot do the morally impossible without risking the consequences of guilt and shame.

Can you, as a human being, love a fellow human being, form a bond of trust with them, make oaths and promises with them, have a family with them, become part of a community with them, entwine your lives and identities over time (activating all the evolved dispositions along the way) to such an extent that your life feels empty when they are not around, and then turn around and shamelessly betray them brutally? You can do the deed, of course, but can you do it shamelessly? Can you do this without facing any judgement, and can you be sincerely indifferent to that judgement when it comes?

I think you would discover that doing this guilt-free would be no more possible for you than eating raw meat indigestion-free. Diogenes would say it is wise to align your will with nature, your nature.

We can call these empirical facts, if you like, though I would hesitate to say so because that description would always fall short and suggests it to be less than it is. You can call them ‘natural’ if you like. I would prefer to call them an essential part of what it means to be a human being. I would say they are ‘true’, even if not a ‘fact’, and that it’s obvious that part of what makes them true is my evolved human nature. It would be different if I were a lizard.

Should we try to transcend these natural limits? Are these limits limitations to our potential? Should we use technology to overcome this human moral frailty, just as we learn to cook our food, or use scuba gear to breathe underwater?

A wholly naturalistic account that sees ethics as only a helpful tool that has evolved to serve our purposes would seem to recommend ditching that tool when it is no longer useful. That kind of thinking reveals a misunderstanding, I think. For this reason, I would say that these kinds of naturalistic accounts can be only partially and never wholly true for ethics. They can show us our limits, but they cannot of themselves determine those limits.

Ancient philosophers seemed to understand this; we seem to have forgotten. You can begin by being motivated by a natural tendency to ‘self-interest’, but as soon as you reflect and philosophise on it you realise that ethics is self-supporting or sui generis: it stands alone. The good is good for goodness’ sake and virtue is its own reward. It is in your self-interest, but it is not done for the sake of self-interest.

Once you understand what virtue is, you understand that nothing is more important, not even your own ‘wellbeing’, because understanding virtue changes your understanding of what it is to be well. A healthy soul is a virtuous soul. That is why those old philosophers can say, straight-faced and with absolute seriousness, that ‘virtue is sufficient for happiness’.

These virtues are not mere instructions about how to achieve a particular purpose, they are recognitions of what our purposes ought to be. They are a recognition that ethics does not serve our purposes but judges them; a recognition that there is goodness beyond wellbeing. That is why they can say with sincerity that ‘a good man cannot be harmed in life or after death’, and this would remain true even in a virtual or post-human life where all harm is artificially removed. It would be shameful to take a pill that allowed you to be a glutton without consequence, rather than exert some self-restraint, even though it seems to go against motivations of self-interest. With philosophical and moral understanding, you learn that those self-interested reasons are the wrong kind of reasons to be motivated by.

This idea of ‘goodness beyond wellbeing’ would make no sense on a purely naturalistic account that sees ethics as an evolved disposition that serves our adaptive purposes, that ethics just is the way to achieve our purposes. Such an account suggests that if we can rid ourselves of the need for ethics then we can and should do so. At the point when we can achieve our purposes without ethics, ethics will become something that used to be useful at some point in our distant evolutionary past; like an appendix. We can cut it away and suffer no loss. Keeping it on beyond its purpose only offers us an ever-present risk of infection. But I suppose the post-human world of the future will have an easy cure for that too, just as soldiers can be (first) trained to kill reflexively, and then (later, once we have realised our ‘mistake’) trained to do away with the guilt that follows.

In any case, the lesson of Socrates is that ethics is sui generis; it stands on its own two feet. Even if it might have its origins and some of its limits accounted for by our evolutionary past, its meaning is not entirely determined by that naturalistic account.

That we can offer some naturalistic account for our moral beliefs helps to support the notion that those beliefs can be considered properly basic, but it is not necessary for it. Properly basic moral beliefs can stand alone. It can be its own warrant, just as belief in God can be its own warrant. It can me made true by the fact that it is true, even if we cannot know with certainty whether it is (in fact) true.

A Community of Believers

Properly basic moral belief stands alone, but it does not stand on a lone individual’s judgement. As with Plantinga’s argument about properly basic religious belief, it’s relevant that there is a ‘community of believers’.

This community of moral belief extends far wider than Christianity. Whilst we might disagree wildly about where or what the moral limits are, that there are limits to what we are permitted to do to one another would seem to be a common ground. So common, in fact, that it acts as a condition for the possibility of moral reasoning as such. There are denominational differences, but moral limits would seem to be an ecumenical matter. There is no meaningful morality without moral limits.

Other Minds

In God and Other Minds (1967), Alvin Plantinga argues that theistic belief is in no worse position, in terms of epistemic justification, than our belief that other people have minds.

How do you know that you aren’t living in a world of appropriately-behaving-but-nonetheless-mindless zombies or robots? All you can see is their behaviour: you cannot see their minds. How can you know there’s anything going on behind their eyes?

Of course, it’s silly to seriously doubt the existence of other people’s minds. Even though we can have no proof for these things, it doesn’t matter: we still have every right to believe as we do. Plantinga will ask: if we don’t object to the lack of proof in the existence of other people’s minds, why should we object to the lack of proof in the existence of God?

We could ask the same on behalf of moral belief. Plantinga’s analogy with our belief in other minds is all the more relevant in this case because our belief in other minds is more intimately connected with moral belief than religious belief. We would seem to have no more (or less) reason to believe in the existence of other people’s minds as we do to believe in our moral responsiveness to those people, in part because in recognising them as people with minds, we ordinarily recognise them as being something of moral importance. It would be difficult to separate those two things. Could you recognise someone as a person who has a mind but not see anything morally important in that? But perhaps we shouldn’t beg these questions.

My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

There is more that should be said in defence of this idea, but if you are not already on board with Wittgenstein’s approach to this issue then it is unlikely that any discussion of mine will bring you aboard. It is sufficient to say that we do believe in the existence of other people’s minds and we are morally responsive to those people.

We happily believe in the existence of other people’s minds even though we have no conclusive reason to believe in the existence of other people’s minds. We don’t ordinarily think there is anything wrong with this. In fact, we would question the sound mind of anyone seriously committed to solipsism.

By analogy, why shouldn’t we be just as happy to believe in our necessary moral responsiveness to those people, even though we lack conclusive reason to believe in that responsiveness?

Moral Limits

I recognise moral limits; I suspect you do too. There is no reason to reject that recognition, and there is reason not to reject it, because a recognition of moral limits is a condition for the possibility of sound moral judgement. But if I recognise moral limits, then I recognise that there are certain things I cannot do, things like dismissing my moral limits when they are not convenient. That is the nature of ethics: it is the judge of our purposes and not their servant.

These limits define the shape of my moral world: they form the edges and boundaries and spaces where I can only say ‘here there be dragons’. This shape forms the foundation of my moral reasoning, and in that it stands on its own.

As Wittgenstein would say, the walls of this house are its foundations.

Read more: The Problem of Evil as an Ethical Problem

Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy