The Foundation of Morality

In this précis, I will summarize Nagel’s objections against the religious view. I shall then argue that the religious approach can answer these objections, and is more promising than Nagel suggests.

The Religious View

Nagel begins his chapter “Right and Wrong” by discussing the case of someone who doesn’t care about others. If this person can get away with killing, stealing, lying, or hurting others, Nagel asks, “what reason does he have not to?”¹ One answer that Nagel considers is what he calls the religious answer, or “the religious foundation for morality.”² This approach says that even if you can get away with awful crimes on this earth, and are not punished by the law or your fellow man, “such acts are forbidden by God, who will punish you after death.”³ Nagel then reflects on the further implications of this view: “if there is no God to back up moral requirements with the threat of punishment and the promise of reward, morality is an illusion.”⁴ Echoing Dostoevsky’s famous line, Nagel summarizes this view as follows: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”⁵

Some Objections

With the religious view briefly outlined, Nagel then offers three objections to it. The first objection is that, “plenty of people who don’t believe in God still make judgements of right and wrong, and think no one should kill another for his wallet even if he can be sure to get away with it.”⁶ In short, belief in God is not required in order to make moral judgements or deter bad behavior.

Moving on to his second objection, Nagel states, “if God exists, and forbids what’s wrong, that still isn’t what makes it wrong. Murder is wrong in itself, and that’s why God forbids it.”⁷ This objection appears to be inspired by the dilemma offered by the old philosopher Euthyphro: is something good because the gods will it, or do the gods will something because it is good? Nagel seems to prefer the second option, for he states, “God couldn’t just make any old thing wrong — like putting on your left sock before your right — simply by prohibiting it.”⁸ So, Nagel’s second objection is based upon his claim that things are right or wrong in themselves. If things are right or wrong in themselves, then God also saying they are right or wrong is superfluous.

Finally, Nagel’s third objection takes aim at the motivation for morality on the religious view. Concerning the reason for not doing bad things, he states, “you should want to avoid doing such things because they are bad things to do to the victims, not just because you fear the consequences for yourself, or because you don’t want to offend your Creator.”⁹ Indeed, one can sympathize with Nagel here: surely rape is wrong at least in part because it hurts the victim.

Those are, therefore, Nagel’s three objections to the religious view. Let us now take a brief look at what might be said on behalf of the religious view in response.

A Response to Nagel

In his first objection, Nagel is quick to point out that belief in God is not required in order to make moral judgements or deter bad behavior. So there are really two objections here. On the surface, these two points are quite innocuous. However, there are some hidden assumptions here that warrant a closer inspection. Let us take them each in order.

Making Judgements

Consider Nagel’s first point, that people who don’t believe in God still make judgements of right and wrong. I think we can all agree with that. However, as an objection to the religious view, this is pretty feeble. There is a difference between saying that something is right or wrong, and being able to provide an account of how objective right and wrong could exist in the first place. It is the second of these that is contentious.

From a Christian point of view, the fact that everyone can make moral judgements is easily explained: God has written his moral law in everyone’s hearts so that they have an inherent grasp of right and wrong. However, the deeper question is whether, in the absence of God, right and wrong have a foundation in anything independent of human opinion. Upon reflection, it is easy to see that the answer is no. Apart from God, there couldn’t be right and wrong independent of human opinion, because apart from God all we have to go on is human opinion. So, while both those who believe in God and those who don’t can make judgements about right and wrong, the religious view offers a human-independent foundation for those judgements, while the nonreligious view does not.¹⁰

An easy way to illustrate the problem is to consider a scenario like this: if all of humanity was somehow persuaded to think that torturing babies for fun was right, what would make it wrong, absent any human-independent source for morality? Throughout the chapter, Nagel struggles to answer this question. Truly, I think Nagel struggles to find a foundation for objective morality without God because there is none. At the end of the day, if there is no God and someone disagrees with his fellow humans that something is wrong, and can even get away with it, what makes him wrong? And further, if he can get away with it, what compels him to avoid doing it?

Bad Behavior

That brings us to the second point in Nagel’s first objection, that belief in God is not required to deter bad behavior. Nagel says, “plenty of people…think no one should kill another for his wallet even if he can be sure to get away with it.”¹¹ Well, I think we can agree that plenty of people don’t believe in God and yet are good people. But the problem comes from those who don’t believe in God and aren’t good people. And there have been many of them. While Nagel is quite optimistic, this point has not been lost to thinkers who have lived through dark periods of human history. Reflecting on the atrocities performed by atheist regimes in the 20th century alone, the philosopher David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, poignantly points out:

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.¹²

Indeed, in the absence of a final judgement where we will all be held accountable for our actions, and where all unpunished wrongs are finally put right, if you can get away with evil in this life, you have gotten away with it, period. If there is no Ultimate Judge, there is no ultimate justice. On the contrary, the religious view provides a strong deterrent not to do evil, even if you could get away with it in this life. So, contrary to Nagel, the religious view is one that should be taken seriously. And indeed it is taken seriously, by those who have seen what man is capable of when he does not believe that there is judgement after death.

Ye Olde Ethyphro

What about Nagel’s second objection against the religious view, that things are right or wrong in themselves, and therefore the fact that God also says so is superfluous? I think this is a cop-out. While it is easy enough to say that murder is wrong “in itself,” it is much harder to say whymurder is wrong in itself, and what that even means. That is the thing the philosophers have been trying to answer since the beginning.

In answer to Euthyphro’s two-horned dilemma, the Christian in fact has a third option. God does not say something is good because it is good, nor is something good simply because he says it is, as though this could be arbitrary. Rather, God says something is good because he is good. In short, the religious answer is that right and wrong are grounded in God’s commands. As the creator of everything there is, and the source of goodness itself, God is the only being with the moral authority to justly issue these commands. Furthermore, since God is a necessary being, these moral commands cannot be arbitrary, but rather flow necessarily from his good and perfect nature.

However, apart from God, it is hard to see what would make things like murder truly wrong. If we are just physiochemical systems conditioned by survival to dislike certain things, it is hard to say why they are really wrong independent of human opinion. Do most homo sapiens dislike murder? Yes. Does murder usually cause suffering? Yes. But, to make the point that therefore murder is wrong takes a further premise. The religious view has provided an answer. The nonreligious answer has not been forthcoming.

Right Motivations

Finally, what about Nagel’s final objection, that you should want to avoid doing bad things because they are bad things to do to the victims, not just because you don’t want to offend your Creator? Nagel is taking issue with the idea that the only reason someone does not want to commit murder, for example, is because it would offend the Creator. However, putting it like this overlooks the fact that the reason it would offend the Creator is because he has imbued human beings, who are made in his image, with inherent value and worth, and that he loves us all infinitely. In fact, on the religious view, the reason it is wrong to murder someone is preciselybecause they have inherent worth as a human being. That is why it would be evil to hurt them, but not to hurt, say, a rock.

But on the nonreligious view, it is a lot harder to see why human beings should be considered to have any more inherent worth than other physiochemical systems. Indeed, on the nonreligious view, valuing human beings above animals or other physical objects seems arbitrary. If one answers that human beings are more valuable than other physiochemical systems because we are more complicated, then the further question is simply raised: why should being a more complicated physiochemical system give you moral worth? Ultimately, if there is no ultimate source of goodness in the world that imbues human beings with intrinsic moral worth, to value human beings above animals or other bundles of chemicals is to commit speciesism, or bias towards one’s own species.

Conclusion

We have seen that Nagel’s objections to the religious foundation of morality, when seen in the light of cold morning, are rather feeble. Nagel’s first objection, that people who don’t believe in God can still make moral judgements, takes for granted that there is a right and wrong to begin with, even though he offers no foundation for this apart from God. Similarly, his second objection, that God’s commands are unnecessary because things are wrong in themselves, is unpersuasive since Nagel offers no account of why some things are wrong in themselves, but not others. Nagel also fails to consider that, according to the religious view, since God is a necessary being, his moral commands cannot be arbitrary, but rather flow necessarily from his good and perfect nature as the source of goodness itself. Finally, his third objection, that the religious view has no concern for the victim when avoiding harmful acts, misses the fact that on the religious view, it is precisely because God has imbued human beings with inherent value and worth that we should be concerned for the victim in the first place.

Notes

¹ Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 61.

² Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 62.

³ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 62.

⁴ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 62.

⁵ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 62.

⁶ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 62.

⁷ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 63.

⁸ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 63.

⁹ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 63.

¹⁰ While Platonists believe that moral values such as Goodness or Compassion exist in the abstract as Platonic Forms, Platonism cannot account for moral duties, which concern what is right or wrong. Even if we were to grant that Compassion exists as an abstract entity, there is still nothing that would compel us to be compassionate, rather than greedy, on the nonreligious view. We must remember that on the Platonist view, moral vices such as Greed also exist in the abstract, yet there is no human-independent moral authority, apart from God, which could justly require us to be compassionate rather than greedy. Furthermore, it would surely be dubious to refer to Platonists, who believe in a quasi-supernatural realm of nonphysical abstract entities, as nonreligious. In short, Platonism does not exactly sit well with atheism. (See World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism by philosopher Michael Rea for a further exploration of this argument.)

¹¹ Nagel, What Does It All Mean?, 62.

¹²David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 26.