I agree that this is a true statement. And there is no doubt that many atheists and agnostics are in fact quite moral.
I like to think I am one of them.
But it does not change the fact that the substantial reduction in morality in our country and indeed the entire Western world - most notably and obviously in the former Soviet bloc countries, but by no means only there - has occurred simultaneously with a steep drop in religiousity.
And beyond this, many leftists are openly hostile to religion and many of them are openly hostile to “Judeo-Christian values”. This last is, if not completely equivalent to morality, a near-perfect proxy.
So just because your title is a true statement doesn’t mean that we don't have a massive problem in transmitting moral values now that religion and religiousity are treated with hostility by left elites.
Or that in fact said problem is the *biggest* problem we have regarding the loss of morality.
And not coincidentally, one of the biggest problems we have in maintaining civil society and the neoliberal (a.k.a. capitalist) system that has created and can continue to grow the world’s wealth and prosperity.
I think you might well be hitting on a real issue here. As I point out, beliefs in moralising gods might in part have been successful because they increase social cooperation. The counterpart of this argument is that a secular society may, in comparison, lack this tool to coordinate beliefs and behaviour in a pro-social way. Critics of religion like Dawkins or Harris would retort that religion is the source of intergroup conflicts (or that it has often made such conflicts fiercer). In any case, I am not arguing that secular attitudes necessarily make society more or less functional. The evidence I have seen suggests non-believers might be a bit less (though not by much) pro-social than believers in the US. I would be cautious generalising this across societies, but nothing guarantees a priori that enlightenment always makes society more cohesive.
"I am not arguing that secular attitudes necessarily make society more or less functional."
We are in general agreement.
But I am arguing that it is the ever-increasing fraction of the secular who are "zealously anti-religious" and explicitly hostile to religion (more and more overtly in the last 10 years) that is the single biggest factor making society less cohesive.
Though obviously not the only one.
I say this with conviction in the U.S., with high confidence about Western Europe, and less confidence about the rest of the western world.
Many many of today's oppressor-oppressed ideologues on the left have been taught to hate Judeo-Christian values, and the values they do espouse are deeply immoral, even as the believers think they are being virtuous. Thus all the support and praise for Hamas in the wake of their murder, torture, rape and baby-killing rampage of October 7th.
In other words, religion is not required for morality, but non-antipathy towards religion and the religious and their values is.
I agree completely with how you have framed morality and fairness and that it precedes religion. I also agree with your responses to the various comments and objections. I would add some of my thoughts now, but it seems I should just wait for your next installments.
Being comfortably agnostic, I have no dog in this fight. However, while the general thrust I think is well argued, the use of pareidolia as an evolutionary, then anthropological argument that "explains away" (or has any effect whatsoever on) an ontological question is lightly misplaced. This can itself be explained as a Gricean attribution error of lens neglect and survivorship bias.
More specifically, when we encounter the "moon man face" in discussions of pareidolia, we experience it as a face, but without attributing agency. However, due to context, rather than reflecting on our own lens, we engage in theory of mind about those that both see a face AND attribute agency. Upon reflection on the difference between these two lenses, we falsely infer that we have committed one false positive, and that they have committed two false positives. However, this meta awareness is misleading if we infer, implicitly or explicitly, that the false positive agentic attribution was the result of processing which is absent in our case. We will have failed to rule out that non-agentic attribution may also be a POSITIVE attribution (the face has the property of lacking agency) as a product of agentic processing, not as the successful avoidance of the wrong kind of processing.
The more recursive explanation is that System 2 elements are all downstream of (gricean) agentic processing while facial processing is a System 1 saliency process that sets the table for ongoing System 2 processing. This actually explains the survivorship of scientific explanations themselves being selected FOR their agentic framing. "Nature selecting" or "natural selection shaping." "Selfish genes" or Systems 1 and 2 as agents with preferences. "Laws" of nature that "govern" or are "responsible for" the "behavior" of objects. While we experience these as if "merely vestigial semantics," this is like both "seeing the face" and knowing it not to be a real face. It does not negate the fact that the upstream System 1 saliency processing was affected by the constraints of System 2 framing.
This is consistent with the tendency for evolution to reuse and repurpose, just as abstract thinking still activates sensorimotor manipulation processing (turning an object in mind as if by some virtual, unseen hand), it should not be ruled out that "non-agency" may be just as much of a positivist attribution. It may be the result of the selective inhibition of awareness, which can have the same utility function as the inverse, depending on what is being selected for. A false positive face may hedge well for species in physical peril, while a false negative (refusing agency to what does have it) may hedge well for a species in social peril (of being ostracized for beliefs too "woo" for the collective social barometer).
Coming back to the big picture, we can never really formulate a null hypothesis on ontological commitments without begging the question. Those that think that a lone agent is likely to feel loneliness, perhaps boredom, and to design other agents, or "fine tune" a system that produces agents, have a coherent theory for what they observe. So too will the abstractionist who explains the risk of survivorship bias inherent to a complex creature reflecting on their origins as a product of chance or design. That the world has not collapsed to theism or atheism is evidence of collective Gricean hedging, which could be used as an argument for the local or global primacy of agency. Our epistemic quagmire can have no effect on the ontological status of the question, but we have good reason to maintain the productive tension, regardless of some unobtainable, ultimate truth value.
Thanks, this is a very thoughtful comment. I agree that an anthropological or cognitive explanation of religious belief does not by itself disprove God. That would require a different set of arguments and, frankly, a different post.
Where I would push back a bit is on the idea that such explanations have “no effect” on the ontological question. The God hypothesis is not something we are forced to posit by the data; it is introduced as an extra explanatory layer. If we can explain why humans are strongly disposed to see agency everywhere, to construct stories about invisible persons, and to attach moral significance to them, then the fact that people have religious intuitions becomes much less powerful as evidence that these agents really exist. Anthropological and cognitive accounts do not refute God, but they do undercut one of the main arguments for taking theism seriously.
That said, the target of this particular post is narrower. I am not trying to show that God does not exist. I am arguing against the claim that morality only makes sense if there is a God. My point is that we have a perfectly coherent story about where our moral sense comes from, in terms of cooperation, bargaining, evolved psychology, and cultural evolution, that does not require a divine foundation.
I think you are very much correct that any argument from moral intuitions to a moral intuition designer (formerly moral law implying moral law giver) is adequately neutralized by the arguments presented here. I thought about addressing this directly to your reply to another comment in which you mention "explaining away."
My (friendly) challenge is to point out the possible gap between BOTH explaining away the source of the agentic attribution AND implicitly presuming a lack of agency to be a kind of prescribable null hypothesis (even though it is mine, I just have found no reason to prescribe it). Here's a quick litmus test for the kind of subtle maneuver we can accidentally make-- one I think you will appreciate given your writing on confirmation bias.
I call it "The Susan B Linda Problem:"
Susan wants to believe a thing.
Susan does believe that thing.
Which is more likely:
A) Susan is suffering from confirmation bias
B) Susan is suffering from confirmation bias AND (logical conjunction) is wrong about that thing.
The point is to have those familiar with the classic Linda problem to feel the inner waffling based on the rhetorical effect of "confirmation bias." It is meant to highlight how subtley we are influenced by social positioning. For example, naivety and ideology are out of style at the moment, so we subconsciously hedge against them with negative reactions to people believing pleasant things and grant affordance to those who believe unpleasant things.
In the same way that there should be some discounting of agentic attributions in general, given that we have very strong evolutionary reasons to expect false positives (as you have argued here), I think there is also good reason to at least lightly discount our default null hypotheses based on observing others that may have an opposing default. The productive tension may be the source of underlying utility (consistent with what you have written elsewhere), and both defaults may be category errors at base.
To clarify, the argument presented I think to be sufficient in terms of god(s) not being necessary for morality, while also resisting the intuition that it would go further to be evidence of self-sufficiency that would Occam's away those same god(s).
Thanks for tackling a contentious topic with clarity and honesty. This straightforward argument, which you’ve well articulated, has surprisingly lost ground in the last decade. The fact that moral necessity precedes religious doctrines (which differ and often conflict) doesn’t necessarily preclude a moral god or gods, but it does demonstrate how moral intuitions that facilitate a cooperative equilibrium can arise independent of scripture.
Well, first you reject a spiritual dimension, then the rest of your argument follows. Apparently you think this is convincing to those of us who do believe in a spiritual dimension.
Hi Isha, that this is not an essay to argue against religion being true (even though many, like me, would see the anthropological evidence as contributing to explaining it away).
It is an essay addressing the idea (often anxiety inducing) that morality doesn’t make sense without religion.
This is a nonsense argument that starts from a false premise and then begs the question. Pretty much every version of religion that has a God presupposes that he predates us humans, therefore that the religion comes before the moral sense and the moral sense exists precisely because we are made by God to have it. The fork is an oxymoron, essentially asking "What if a perfect God did an imperfect thing?", it's a contradiction in terms hidden behind fallacy of equivocation. Yes, religion is the only explanation for "morality" because when we speak of morality we speaking of there being an objective "right", not merely a functional strategy for personal gain via cooperation with others over time. Your attempted test of the moral sense that people would disagree with a God who tells them to steal applies likewise to your own attempted basis, they would also reject Game Theory that tells them the same as violating that same moral sense, and they would make exceptions to it the same. You're still just pushing a consequentialism under a double standard.
There's either an objective morality or there isn't. Game Theory doesn't provide an objective anything, it's inherently conditional. Without it being objective, it's not "morality", it's just self-interest hypocritically masquerading as virtue.
Hi Steven, thanks for the comment (in spite of its combative tone). In this post I’m explicitly working in a naturalistic framework, where morality is understood as evolved social rules for fair cooperation. I argue that our intuitions and preferences about morality come from these. I understand you disagree, but it (I’d argue) offers an economical theory of human morality which doesn’t require a leap of faith.
In the next posts, I’ll turn directly to the issue you raise: first moral realism and “objective right”, then Binmore’s alternative account in more detail. I am not sure these will convince you, but I will address some of the points you raise.
As always, I appreciate your courtesy and willingness to engage with readers. "Combative" was not my intended tone, it was simply written quickly and meant to get my initial thoughts down while I had a spare minute on break. No personal disrespect meant, just strong disagreement.
Presuming an atheistic materialist naturalist framework itself requires a leap of faith, arguably a much greater one than any other religious belief. You haven't avoided using a skyhook, you've merely picked the one you like.
Using multiple definitions of "morality", especially a non common usage one, and conflating them without clearly specifying the operative meaning in each context is a fallacy of equivocation. Please use greater clarity in your writing for a general audience.
Since you'll be going into greater detail on some of these points later, I'll wait on those articles to see what else you have to say. Have a Nice Day!
How is this a skyhook or a leap of faith? He argued in some detail about what is and isn't required for morality and backed it up with loads of empirical evidence for a substack article.i don't see begged questions, either, the goal of the article is right there in the title.
Presuming an atheistic mechanistic naturalism as your a priori premise is a massive leap of faith far beyond that required of most religions. Bluntly, it takes more faith to insist that God does NOT exist than to assume that he does.
He argued that moral sense predates religion, but that's a claim that necessarily presumes that every such religion is false because each such religion claims that their God(s) predates the creation of humanity, which firmly places religion prior to an evolved moral sense.
The title of the article is both a begged question and fallacy of equivocation regarding what the average reader understands "morality" to mean. He's using a nonstandard definition of "morality" which amounts to nothing more than precisely the same claim he's using as his evidence: that a general "moral sense" intuition mostly aligns with optimal game theory strategies. He then makes his own Santa Claus fallacy appeal to evolution as the supposed mechanism of this emerging naturally with no actual evidence of such a thing. His reasoning is completely backward, that moral sense exists and is broadly beneficial at a certain level of analysis, therefore evolution must have produced it because any origin other than evolution has been preemptively dismissed. That's not proceeding from proven true premises to a necessarily true conclusion, that's starting with a conclusion and then insisting the premise he prefers must be true and therefore the conclusion is true. At no point does he actually prove the warrant or disprove the competing alternative explanations.
It's circular reasoning to declare that evolution explains morality if you must first redefine "morality" to explicitly be a product of evolution and then use that definition as your proof that evolution produced your morality. Seriously, read that entire article, the entire series even, and can you tell me where you find he's genuinely overcome the Naturalist Fallacy? "Morality" as people normally understand it, answers "what should be?" in an objective way, not merely restates "What is?". He repeats several logically invalid attempts to disprove that God overcomes the Naturalist Fallacy and can provide a valid basis for morality, but he does not subject game theory or evolution to the same tests he applies incorrectly to God. That's a double standard that's being used to conceal weaknesses in his arguments (or, more charitably, that he's left a more detailed discussion of to a later article).
"Matter came from non-matter" is a skyhook based on an unsupported faith.
"Life came from non-life" is a skyhook based on an unsupported faith.
"Reality is purely mechanistic, even though we intuit and behave as though it isn't" is a skyhook based on an unsupported faith.
Presuming that moral sense "evolved" in an actual "evolutionary biology" sense necessarily posits a distant past where we had no moral sense and then a progression over time in its development. That's not what I see anywhere credibly supported in studies of human cultures across time. Are you seriously convinced that at some point we were genuinely a bunch of amoral beings who had to kill each other into breeding a moral sense out of random variations in genetics?
Frankly, Atheistic mechanistic models of reality have to jump through far more improbable to impossible hoops than any version of Intelligent Design. That's multiple skyhooks instead of just one, so they fail Occam's Razor.
Maybe at some point in a future article he'll actually close the gap between "an objective standard of 'Right' and 'Wrong'" that people usually mean when they talk about "Morality" versus the 'biologically based intuitions that lead to relatively more successful cooperation among people under contingent circumstances and time frames emerging naturally over time' (I'm paraphrasing) that he means here, but he certainly hasn't cleared that hurdle with this article.
Is religion required for morality? That claim is so absurdly strong that yes even explaining one possible alternative suffices to refute it. It's a separate question which theory is overall better but you should be familiar with the basic reasons for preferring a natural one, e.g. simplicity.
Otherwise that's a whole lot claims that you're not substantiating. What are you basing the claim on what counts as morality? And in your opinion naturalism requires more faith? You're out of touch with what the professionals think, but that's fine I guess.
The vast majority of people, including scientists, throughout history have been religious. The vast majority of "professionals" in the specific topic area of "Morality" are theologians, VERY religious. Bluntly, you have to commit a rather extreme "No True Scotsman" Fallacy to get to a claim that belief in God as the source of morality is not the default AND simplest supposition common to man, professional or otherwise. Claiming otherwise is the extreme (and much more complicated) claim that requires exceptional proof, which is not provided here. William of Ockham himself was a theologian who considered God the simplest explanation over multiple contingent unproven theories. You're not going to get anywhere insisting that the theologian's own principle doesn't favor God as the explanation over Mechanistic Naturalism here.
Yes, presuming matter can arise from non matter, then life can arise from non life, that that life can then somehow develop consciousness, and that that consciousness will effectively desire, perceive, and behave as if God is real and has provided objective morality, in a reality where doing so is actually optimal rather than insane, all without God actually existing or there being any objective morality, is a proposed series of events that are not merely impossibly improbable, but as close to flat out impossible period as anything can be according to current science.
Mechanistic Naturalism is self-refuting as an explanation for our nature and existence, taking it as a premise requires genuinely believing in multiple things that are impossible on its own terms and assuming on faith that at some point in the future we will inevitably find ways to resolve those contradictions despite literally spending centuries and fortunes already trying fruitlessly. Religious faith is already a complete and internally consistent theory, Mechanistic Naturalism is not, therefore the latter requires much more faith than the former to believe in.
This post doesn't even reach the standard of proposing a plausible alternative for morality, it merely dodged the issue almost entirely by dismissing all other premises a priori, moving the goal posts to let his theory clear a much lower hurdle, applied a different standard of evidence hidden by equivocation to a straw man of the commonly accepted understanding, and then declared victory without a logically valid argument in there anywhere. No, this didn't rebuttal anything, it didn't even manage enough internal consistency to meet the minimum standard for consideration as an alternative theory. This only passes muster if you're starting from the position that you cannot accept the existence of God as the Creator of everything and source of Morality and then desperately clinging to anything that promises to avoid that admission regardless how poor a substitute it may be. The author's Santa Clause Fallacy of "this must be true simply because the alternative is unacceptable to me" perfectly describes the atheists buying into this muddle of fallacies.
The difficulty for secular moral theories is not merely explaining why humans tend to make similar moral judgments, but why those judgments present themselves with an intrinsic and binding authority, why we experience moral claims as prescriptive truths rather than adaptive preferences. Evolutionary accounts may highlight the origins of cooperative behavior, yet they cannot bridge the categorical gap between descriptive facts and normative obligations. The universality of moral intuitions, coupled with the human conviction that certain actions remain wrong even when socially approved, suggests that morality operates as an objective feature of reality rather than a contingent byproduct of natural selection. If moral truths possess this transpersonal, irreducible normativity, they require an ontological ground beyond the flux of human cognition. In this sense, theism yields a more coherent metaethical framework: a transcendent moral mind can serve as the source of both the objectivity and obligating force of moral norms. By contrast, purely naturalistic models risk reducing morality to socio-biological heuristics, thereby undermining the very authority they seek to describe. For this reason, many philosophers argue that the existence of robust moral realism is more intelligible within a theistic point of view than within any strictly material account of the human condition. This was fun thanks for making me think.
Thanks for your comment. I get where you are coming from. I see two questions you see as unresolved by this approach:
Why do we perceive morality as objective (“moral judgements present themselves…”)
Why should we care about morality in that perspective (“undermining the very authority…”)
I’ll address each of these questions in later posts. The first one has a simple answer. The second one requires to go at the heart of what morality is in that perspective. It is something real but definitely different from our intuitions about objective moral laws.
Thank you for taking the time to clarification. I appreciate that you’re separating the phenomenology of moral experience from the normative grounding of moral obligation. Still, even granting your distinction, the challenge remains: if morality is “real” yet not objective in the traditional sense, the burden is to explain what kind of reality it possesses and how that reality exerts normative force on moral agents. I still feel that evolutionary accounts may perceive morality as objective, but perception alone does not generate normativity; it only describes psychological mechanisms. My concern is that without an ontologically independent source, something more than a projection of evolved intuitions, moral prescriptions risk collapsing into adaptive strategies or socially stabilized preferences. In that case, the sense of “oughtness” becomes epiphenomenal rather than authoritative. So while I’m eager to see how you develop these questions, especially the second one, the central issue persists: can a non-theistic framework yield a moral ontology robust enough to preserve the obligatory dimension of ethics without smuggling in the very objectivity it seeks to dispense with. Look forward to further discussions.
“No, religion isn’t required for morality”
I agree that this is a true statement. And there is no doubt that many atheists and agnostics are in fact quite moral.
I like to think I am one of them.
But it does not change the fact that the substantial reduction in morality in our country and indeed the entire Western world - most notably and obviously in the former Soviet bloc countries, but by no means only there - has occurred simultaneously with a steep drop in religiousity.
And beyond this, many leftists are openly hostile to religion and many of them are openly hostile to “Judeo-Christian values”. This last is, if not completely equivalent to morality, a near-perfect proxy.
So just because your title is a true statement doesn’t mean that we don't have a massive problem in transmitting moral values now that religion and religiousity are treated with hostility by left elites.
Or that in fact said problem is the *biggest* problem we have regarding the loss of morality.
And not coincidentally, one of the biggest problems we have in maintaining civil society and the neoliberal (a.k.a. capitalist) system that has created and can continue to grow the world’s wealth and prosperity.
I think you might well be hitting on a real issue here. As I point out, beliefs in moralising gods might in part have been successful because they increase social cooperation. The counterpart of this argument is that a secular society may, in comparison, lack this tool to coordinate beliefs and behaviour in a pro-social way. Critics of religion like Dawkins or Harris would retort that religion is the source of intergroup conflicts (or that it has often made such conflicts fiercer). In any case, I am not arguing that secular attitudes necessarily make society more or less functional. The evidence I have seen suggests non-believers might be a bit less (though not by much) pro-social than believers in the US. I would be cautious generalising this across societies, but nothing guarantees a priori that enlightenment always makes society more cohesive.
"I am not arguing that secular attitudes necessarily make society more or less functional."
We are in general agreement.
But I am arguing that it is the ever-increasing fraction of the secular who are "zealously anti-religious" and explicitly hostile to religion (more and more overtly in the last 10 years) that is the single biggest factor making society less cohesive.
Though obviously not the only one.
I say this with conviction in the U.S., with high confidence about Western Europe, and less confidence about the rest of the western world.
Many many of today's oppressor-oppressed ideologues on the left have been taught to hate Judeo-Christian values, and the values they do espouse are deeply immoral, even as the believers think they are being virtuous. Thus all the support and praise for Hamas in the wake of their murder, torture, rape and baby-killing rampage of October 7th.
In other words, religion is not required for morality, but non-antipathy towards religion and the religious and their values is.
At least at the societal level.
I agree completely with how you have framed morality and fairness and that it precedes religion. I also agree with your responses to the various comments and objections. I would add some of my thoughts now, but it seems I should just wait for your next installments.
Being comfortably agnostic, I have no dog in this fight. However, while the general thrust I think is well argued, the use of pareidolia as an evolutionary, then anthropological argument that "explains away" (or has any effect whatsoever on) an ontological question is lightly misplaced. This can itself be explained as a Gricean attribution error of lens neglect and survivorship bias.
More specifically, when we encounter the "moon man face" in discussions of pareidolia, we experience it as a face, but without attributing agency. However, due to context, rather than reflecting on our own lens, we engage in theory of mind about those that both see a face AND attribute agency. Upon reflection on the difference between these two lenses, we falsely infer that we have committed one false positive, and that they have committed two false positives. However, this meta awareness is misleading if we infer, implicitly or explicitly, that the false positive agentic attribution was the result of processing which is absent in our case. We will have failed to rule out that non-agentic attribution may also be a POSITIVE attribution (the face has the property of lacking agency) as a product of agentic processing, not as the successful avoidance of the wrong kind of processing.
The more recursive explanation is that System 2 elements are all downstream of (gricean) agentic processing while facial processing is a System 1 saliency process that sets the table for ongoing System 2 processing. This actually explains the survivorship of scientific explanations themselves being selected FOR their agentic framing. "Nature selecting" or "natural selection shaping." "Selfish genes" or Systems 1 and 2 as agents with preferences. "Laws" of nature that "govern" or are "responsible for" the "behavior" of objects. While we experience these as if "merely vestigial semantics," this is like both "seeing the face" and knowing it not to be a real face. It does not negate the fact that the upstream System 1 saliency processing was affected by the constraints of System 2 framing.
This is consistent with the tendency for evolution to reuse and repurpose, just as abstract thinking still activates sensorimotor manipulation processing (turning an object in mind as if by some virtual, unseen hand), it should not be ruled out that "non-agency" may be just as much of a positivist attribution. It may be the result of the selective inhibition of awareness, which can have the same utility function as the inverse, depending on what is being selected for. A false positive face may hedge well for species in physical peril, while a false negative (refusing agency to what does have it) may hedge well for a species in social peril (of being ostracized for beliefs too "woo" for the collective social barometer).
Coming back to the big picture, we can never really formulate a null hypothesis on ontological commitments without begging the question. Those that think that a lone agent is likely to feel loneliness, perhaps boredom, and to design other agents, or "fine tune" a system that produces agents, have a coherent theory for what they observe. So too will the abstractionist who explains the risk of survivorship bias inherent to a complex creature reflecting on their origins as a product of chance or design. That the world has not collapsed to theism or atheism is evidence of collective Gricean hedging, which could be used as an argument for the local or global primacy of agency. Our epistemic quagmire can have no effect on the ontological status of the question, but we have good reason to maintain the productive tension, regardless of some unobtainable, ultimate truth value.
Thanks, this is a very thoughtful comment. I agree that an anthropological or cognitive explanation of religious belief does not by itself disprove God. That would require a different set of arguments and, frankly, a different post.
Where I would push back a bit is on the idea that such explanations have “no effect” on the ontological question. The God hypothesis is not something we are forced to posit by the data; it is introduced as an extra explanatory layer. If we can explain why humans are strongly disposed to see agency everywhere, to construct stories about invisible persons, and to attach moral significance to them, then the fact that people have religious intuitions becomes much less powerful as evidence that these agents really exist. Anthropological and cognitive accounts do not refute God, but they do undercut one of the main arguments for taking theism seriously.
That said, the target of this particular post is narrower. I am not trying to show that God does not exist. I am arguing against the claim that morality only makes sense if there is a God. My point is that we have a perfectly coherent story about where our moral sense comes from, in terms of cooperation, bargaining, evolved psychology, and cultural evolution, that does not require a divine foundation.
Thank you for your thoughtful response in return.
I think you are very much correct that any argument from moral intuitions to a moral intuition designer (formerly moral law implying moral law giver) is adequately neutralized by the arguments presented here. I thought about addressing this directly to your reply to another comment in which you mention "explaining away."
My (friendly) challenge is to point out the possible gap between BOTH explaining away the source of the agentic attribution AND implicitly presuming a lack of agency to be a kind of prescribable null hypothesis (even though it is mine, I just have found no reason to prescribe it). Here's a quick litmus test for the kind of subtle maneuver we can accidentally make-- one I think you will appreciate given your writing on confirmation bias.
I call it "The Susan B Linda Problem:"
Susan wants to believe a thing.
Susan does believe that thing.
Which is more likely:
A) Susan is suffering from confirmation bias
B) Susan is suffering from confirmation bias AND (logical conjunction) is wrong about that thing.
The point is to have those familiar with the classic Linda problem to feel the inner waffling based on the rhetorical effect of "confirmation bias." It is meant to highlight how subtley we are influenced by social positioning. For example, naivety and ideology are out of style at the moment, so we subconsciously hedge against them with negative reactions to people believing pleasant things and grant affordance to those who believe unpleasant things.
In the same way that there should be some discounting of agentic attributions in general, given that we have very strong evolutionary reasons to expect false positives (as you have argued here), I think there is also good reason to at least lightly discount our default null hypotheses based on observing others that may have an opposing default. The productive tension may be the source of underlying utility (consistent with what you have written elsewhere), and both defaults may be category errors at base.
I look forward to the next installment. Cheers!
To clarify, the argument presented I think to be sufficient in terms of god(s) not being necessary for morality, while also resisting the intuition that it would go further to be evidence of self-sufficiency that would Occam's away those same god(s).
We are roughly in agreement. I am not claiming "sufficiency" of the anthropological account, though I see it as clearly having evidential weight.
Pretty Pascal Boyerian !
Thanks for tackling a contentious topic with clarity and honesty. This straightforward argument, which you’ve well articulated, has surprisingly lost ground in the last decade. The fact that moral necessity precedes religious doctrines (which differ and often conflict) doesn’t necessarily preclude a moral god or gods, but it does demonstrate how moral intuitions that facilitate a cooperative equilibrium can arise independent of scripture.
Well, first you reject a spiritual dimension, then the rest of your argument follows. Apparently you think this is convincing to those of us who do believe in a spiritual dimension.
Hi Isha, that this is not an essay to argue against religion being true (even though many, like me, would see the anthropological evidence as contributing to explaining it away).
It is an essay addressing the idea (often anxiety inducing) that morality doesn’t make sense without religion.
This is a nonsense argument that starts from a false premise and then begs the question. Pretty much every version of religion that has a God presupposes that he predates us humans, therefore that the religion comes before the moral sense and the moral sense exists precisely because we are made by God to have it. The fork is an oxymoron, essentially asking "What if a perfect God did an imperfect thing?", it's a contradiction in terms hidden behind fallacy of equivocation. Yes, religion is the only explanation for "morality" because when we speak of morality we speaking of there being an objective "right", not merely a functional strategy for personal gain via cooperation with others over time. Your attempted test of the moral sense that people would disagree with a God who tells them to steal applies likewise to your own attempted basis, they would also reject Game Theory that tells them the same as violating that same moral sense, and they would make exceptions to it the same. You're still just pushing a consequentialism under a double standard.
There's either an objective morality or there isn't. Game Theory doesn't provide an objective anything, it's inherently conditional. Without it being objective, it's not "morality", it's just self-interest hypocritically masquerading as virtue.
Hi Steven, thanks for the comment (in spite of its combative tone). In this post I’m explicitly working in a naturalistic framework, where morality is understood as evolved social rules for fair cooperation. I argue that our intuitions and preferences about morality come from these. I understand you disagree, but it (I’d argue) offers an economical theory of human morality which doesn’t require a leap of faith.
In the next posts, I’ll turn directly to the issue you raise: first moral realism and “objective right”, then Binmore’s alternative account in more detail. I am not sure these will convince you, but I will address some of the points you raise.
As always, I appreciate your courtesy and willingness to engage with readers. "Combative" was not my intended tone, it was simply written quickly and meant to get my initial thoughts down while I had a spare minute on break. No personal disrespect meant, just strong disagreement.
Presuming an atheistic materialist naturalist framework itself requires a leap of faith, arguably a much greater one than any other religious belief. You haven't avoided using a skyhook, you've merely picked the one you like.
Using multiple definitions of "morality", especially a non common usage one, and conflating them without clearly specifying the operative meaning in each context is a fallacy of equivocation. Please use greater clarity in your writing for a general audience.
Since you'll be going into greater detail on some of these points later, I'll wait on those articles to see what else you have to say. Have a Nice Day!
How is this a skyhook or a leap of faith? He argued in some detail about what is and isn't required for morality and backed it up with loads of empirical evidence for a substack article.i don't see begged questions, either, the goal of the article is right there in the title.
Presuming an atheistic mechanistic naturalism as your a priori premise is a massive leap of faith far beyond that required of most religions. Bluntly, it takes more faith to insist that God does NOT exist than to assume that he does.
He argued that moral sense predates religion, but that's a claim that necessarily presumes that every such religion is false because each such religion claims that their God(s) predates the creation of humanity, which firmly places religion prior to an evolved moral sense.
The title of the article is both a begged question and fallacy of equivocation regarding what the average reader understands "morality" to mean. He's using a nonstandard definition of "morality" which amounts to nothing more than precisely the same claim he's using as his evidence: that a general "moral sense" intuition mostly aligns with optimal game theory strategies. He then makes his own Santa Claus fallacy appeal to evolution as the supposed mechanism of this emerging naturally with no actual evidence of such a thing. His reasoning is completely backward, that moral sense exists and is broadly beneficial at a certain level of analysis, therefore evolution must have produced it because any origin other than evolution has been preemptively dismissed. That's not proceeding from proven true premises to a necessarily true conclusion, that's starting with a conclusion and then insisting the premise he prefers must be true and therefore the conclusion is true. At no point does he actually prove the warrant or disprove the competing alternative explanations.
It's circular reasoning to declare that evolution explains morality if you must first redefine "morality" to explicitly be a product of evolution and then use that definition as your proof that evolution produced your morality. Seriously, read that entire article, the entire series even, and can you tell me where you find he's genuinely overcome the Naturalist Fallacy? "Morality" as people normally understand it, answers "what should be?" in an objective way, not merely restates "What is?". He repeats several logically invalid attempts to disprove that God overcomes the Naturalist Fallacy and can provide a valid basis for morality, but he does not subject game theory or evolution to the same tests he applies incorrectly to God. That's a double standard that's being used to conceal weaknesses in his arguments (or, more charitably, that he's left a more detailed discussion of to a later article).
"Matter came from non-matter" is a skyhook based on an unsupported faith.
"Life came from non-life" is a skyhook based on an unsupported faith.
"Reality is purely mechanistic, even though we intuit and behave as though it isn't" is a skyhook based on an unsupported faith.
Presuming that moral sense "evolved" in an actual "evolutionary biology" sense necessarily posits a distant past where we had no moral sense and then a progression over time in its development. That's not what I see anywhere credibly supported in studies of human cultures across time. Are you seriously convinced that at some point we were genuinely a bunch of amoral beings who had to kill each other into breeding a moral sense out of random variations in genetics?
Frankly, Atheistic mechanistic models of reality have to jump through far more improbable to impossible hoops than any version of Intelligent Design. That's multiple skyhooks instead of just one, so they fail Occam's Razor.
Maybe at some point in a future article he'll actually close the gap between "an objective standard of 'Right' and 'Wrong'" that people usually mean when they talk about "Morality" versus the 'biologically based intuitions that lead to relatively more successful cooperation among people under contingent circumstances and time frames emerging naturally over time' (I'm paraphrasing) that he means here, but he certainly hasn't cleared that hurdle with this article.
Is religion required for morality? That claim is so absurdly strong that yes even explaining one possible alternative suffices to refute it. It's a separate question which theory is overall better but you should be familiar with the basic reasons for preferring a natural one, e.g. simplicity.
Otherwise that's a whole lot claims that you're not substantiating. What are you basing the claim on what counts as morality? And in your opinion naturalism requires more faith? You're out of touch with what the professionals think, but that's fine I guess.
The vast majority of people, including scientists, throughout history have been religious. The vast majority of "professionals" in the specific topic area of "Morality" are theologians, VERY religious. Bluntly, you have to commit a rather extreme "No True Scotsman" Fallacy to get to a claim that belief in God as the source of morality is not the default AND simplest supposition common to man, professional or otherwise. Claiming otherwise is the extreme (and much more complicated) claim that requires exceptional proof, which is not provided here. William of Ockham himself was a theologian who considered God the simplest explanation over multiple contingent unproven theories. You're not going to get anywhere insisting that the theologian's own principle doesn't favor God as the explanation over Mechanistic Naturalism here.
Yes, presuming matter can arise from non matter, then life can arise from non life, that that life can then somehow develop consciousness, and that that consciousness will effectively desire, perceive, and behave as if God is real and has provided objective morality, in a reality where doing so is actually optimal rather than insane, all without God actually existing or there being any objective morality, is a proposed series of events that are not merely impossibly improbable, but as close to flat out impossible period as anything can be according to current science.
Mechanistic Naturalism is self-refuting as an explanation for our nature and existence, taking it as a premise requires genuinely believing in multiple things that are impossible on its own terms and assuming on faith that at some point in the future we will inevitably find ways to resolve those contradictions despite literally spending centuries and fortunes already trying fruitlessly. Religious faith is already a complete and internally consistent theory, Mechanistic Naturalism is not, therefore the latter requires much more faith than the former to believe in.
This post doesn't even reach the standard of proposing a plausible alternative for morality, it merely dodged the issue almost entirely by dismissing all other premises a priori, moving the goal posts to let his theory clear a much lower hurdle, applied a different standard of evidence hidden by equivocation to a straw man of the commonly accepted understanding, and then declared victory without a logically valid argument in there anywhere. No, this didn't rebuttal anything, it didn't even manage enough internal consistency to meet the minimum standard for consideration as an alternative theory. This only passes muster if you're starting from the position that you cannot accept the existence of God as the Creator of everything and source of Morality and then desperately clinging to anything that promises to avoid that admission regardless how poor a substitute it may be. The author's Santa Clause Fallacy of "this must be true simply because the alternative is unacceptable to me" perfectly describes the atheists buying into this muddle of fallacies.
The difficulty for secular moral theories is not merely explaining why humans tend to make similar moral judgments, but why those judgments present themselves with an intrinsic and binding authority, why we experience moral claims as prescriptive truths rather than adaptive preferences. Evolutionary accounts may highlight the origins of cooperative behavior, yet they cannot bridge the categorical gap between descriptive facts and normative obligations. The universality of moral intuitions, coupled with the human conviction that certain actions remain wrong even when socially approved, suggests that morality operates as an objective feature of reality rather than a contingent byproduct of natural selection. If moral truths possess this transpersonal, irreducible normativity, they require an ontological ground beyond the flux of human cognition. In this sense, theism yields a more coherent metaethical framework: a transcendent moral mind can serve as the source of both the objectivity and obligating force of moral norms. By contrast, purely naturalistic models risk reducing morality to socio-biological heuristics, thereby undermining the very authority they seek to describe. For this reason, many philosophers argue that the existence of robust moral realism is more intelligible within a theistic point of view than within any strictly material account of the human condition. This was fun thanks for making me think.
Thanks for your comment. I get where you are coming from. I see two questions you see as unresolved by this approach:
Why do we perceive morality as objective (“moral judgements present themselves…”)
Why should we care about morality in that perspective (“undermining the very authority…”)
I’ll address each of these questions in later posts. The first one has a simple answer. The second one requires to go at the heart of what morality is in that perspective. It is something real but definitely different from our intuitions about objective moral laws.
Thank you for taking the time to clarification. I appreciate that you’re separating the phenomenology of moral experience from the normative grounding of moral obligation. Still, even granting your distinction, the challenge remains: if morality is “real” yet not objective in the traditional sense, the burden is to explain what kind of reality it possesses and how that reality exerts normative force on moral agents. I still feel that evolutionary accounts may perceive morality as objective, but perception alone does not generate normativity; it only describes psychological mechanisms. My concern is that without an ontologically independent source, something more than a projection of evolved intuitions, moral prescriptions risk collapsing into adaptive strategies or socially stabilized preferences. In that case, the sense of “oughtness” becomes epiphenomenal rather than authoritative. So while I’m eager to see how you develop these questions, especially the second one, the central issue persists: can a non-theistic framework yield a moral ontology robust enough to preserve the obligatory dimension of ethics without smuggling in the very objectivity it seeks to dispense with. Look forward to further discussions.