Movement Toward Nonnaturalism
17
Naturalism
So far in our analysis we have largely set to the side competing realist accounts. Earlier we touched on naturalist accounts and briefly discussed the challenges they face to make sense of normativity, moral or otherwise, and applied the metaphysical reading of the open question argument. Much more could be said about naturalistic approaches, and if we were less encumbered by space constraints, we could elaborate on them some more. We will not pursue that discussion here, though, except to make a few important preliminary points about the notion of naturalism. As it happens, naturalism is a notion riddled with potential ambiguity. After discussing it, we will turn our attention to atheistic moral Platonism in the final chapter.
What Is Natural?
To begin with, naturalism can be construed in a narrow or strict way, on the one hand, or in a more expansive and broad fashion, on the other. On a strict view, the physical world is all there is; the only legitimate way to come to grasp reality is by means of the sciences, especially the natural sciences; and the like. When we speak of naturalistic ethics, we usually tend to mean the strict view: an ethical view based on taking naturalism so understood as true. We find this naturalistic construal of reality particularly challenged when it comes to making good enough sense of morality realistically construed, at least without problematically watering it down considerably. This is likely why so many variants of naturalistic ethics end up being antirealist in one way or another.1 That said, there is no shortage of strict naturalists who think that their view is reconcilable with some variant of moral realism.
Naturalism understood less strictly opens up quite a number of fertile possibilities. Aristotle and Aquinas are examples of adherents of this view of naturalism, which some have called “classical naturalism.” This is an appreciably different understanding of the natural order, one rife with rich metaphysical and teleological dimensions, including natural substances possessing real essences, “essences with built-in ends, proper functions, purposes, goals, and objective conditions of flourishing.”2 Here the notion of what is “natural” is contrasted less with supernaturalism than with something more like artificiality. Normativity finds a more congenial home in such an environment rather than being the arguably exotic notion it is in a narrowly naturalistic world bereft of inherent teleology and the like.3
Natural law is a rich ethical tradition that accords primacy to and carves out space for essences, teleology, and normativity; its appeal to what is “natural” goes well beyond simply what is found in naturalism narrowly construed. Historically most natural lawyers were theists, though more recently a number of advocates of natural law have been less open to theism. It makes good sense, though, that there was a strong historical link between natural law, with its rich ontology, and a theistic worldview. There is much about these traditions that dovetails and resonates. Little wonder that Thomists tend to be committed moral realists and Thomistic natural lawyers tend to be committed to theism.
Natural Law
Natural law ethics tends to explore questions of moral ontology by asking what it takes to live a full human life. Goods like meaningful work, strong friendships, certain religious experiences, and the like are often cited as examples of what leads to a rich and fulfilling human life. Our own approach remains quite open to aspects of such an approach, but it’s also of pressing importance to ask this additional question: Is it good to be a human being?4 This question goes beyond what it takes to live a life of flourishing as a human being; it’s a question about the basic value of human life. Recall that this was the topic of the second half of chapter 11, the discussion pertaining to human value and dignity. We have argued that theistic resources are eminently able to account for such human value.
Besides the ambiguity of what is “natural,” some Thomists, perhaps owing to the historical tensions between natural law and voluntarism (discussed in part 1), think there is an intractable tension between moral apologetics and natural law. We disagree. A variety of theistic ethicists—from divine command theorists to natural lawyers and lots in between—can and do apprehend the force of the moral argument without agreeing on all the metaethical details of the sense in which morality is dependent on God.5 Several of those disparate accounts, we suspect, contain important kernels of truth. We gravitate to our own accounts, but moral apologists can approach this subject matter from several possible angles.
Why do we characterize our own approach as nonnaturalist, despite sharing in common with theistic natural lawyers such commitments as normativity and teleology that find a natural home in a theistic world? Mainly because God is not part of the natural world. By “nonnaturalism” we don’t mean “unnatural,” of course, since it’s consistent with everything found in the natural world, and indeed there are aspects of the natural world that arguably point to God (human consciousness, design, etc.). The natural world alone, though, does not contain all that there is. Neither is God himself, the creator of the natural world, part of the world, nor, we submit, are moral truths explained by the natural world alone.
Movement Toward Nonnaturalism
Interestingly enough, some of the leading secular metaethicists today are in wholehearted agreement on this score. They agree with us, and we with them, that the moral evidence points to a nonnatural source. They and we are in agreement about error theory, expressivism, constructivism, moral realism, and even nonnaturalism. We are thinking of Platonists in particular here. As George Mavrodes once said of Plato, “The idea of the Good seems to play a metaphysical role in his thought. It is somehow fundamental to what is as well as to what ought to be, much more fundamental to reality than are the atoms. A Platonic man, therefore, who sets himself to live in accordance with the Good aligns himself with what is deepest and most basic in existence. Or to put it another way, we might say that whatever values a Platonic world imposes on a man are values to which the Platonic world itself is committed, through and through.”6
Mavrodes contrasted a Platonic world with a strictly naturalistic world of the sort believed in by Bertrand Russell. But not every secularist believes in such strict naturalism; some among them are a sort of Platonist. And such secular, or atheistic, Platonists can claim to believe in moral realism in a quite strong sense. This sort of realist doesn’t embrace moral skepticism or moral nihilism or moral expressivism or even a merely instrumental sense of moral oughtness such as we might find among the constructivists. Rather, they can claim to believe in nonnatural moral facts and categorical imperatives, the sort of objectivity combined with prescriptivity that Mackie thought irremediably odd. They can, in other words, affirm something much like the sort of moral realism we argued for in part 2 and yet deny that such moral facts, if they exist, serve as evidence for God’s existence.
With respect to such secular nonnatural moral realists, therefore, it isn’t until the final fork in the road, as it were—the distinction between something like (atheistic) Platonism and something like theism—that our paths at last diverge. This is a point worth emphasizing, because on, say, the matter of whether there are authoritative moral duties, we are in complete agreement. They are our allies on such a score, and on every score, right up until the final showdown between Platonism and theism.7 What we intend to do in the following chapter is primarily to examine one example of atheistic moral Platonism (AMP), that of Erik Wielenberg. Our view shares much in common with his, as noted—in numerous respects he’s a kindred spirit on ethics and metaethics—but this is an appropriate juncture to highlight one significant difference, for we have indeed arrived at that aforementioned final fork in the road.
As a methodological matter, in this volume we have intentionally put off this aspect of the discussion until now in order to focus on what we consider the particular strengths of a theistic account in explaining various moral phenomena. That discussion culminated in the cumulative case we constructed in the final chapter of part 3. Such a cumulative case can be couched in several different ways—from deductive to abductive accounts, from inductive to “natural sign” approaches. When we move in the abductive direction, we speak in terms of what the “best explanation” is of various moral phenomena in question. Making the case for a best explanation requires arguing that one explanation is better than all the alternatives. This is a huge task, beyond what we can do in short compass. Usually, in conversations on this topic, though, the salient alternatives to a theistic hypothesis get narrowed down to one or two, making the dialogue manageable.
So, what we intend to do in the next chapter is to consider mainly one important nonnatural alternative to the theistic explanation. It is a view that’s rightly received quite a bit of attention in recent years, and it is well worth careful consideration: Wielenberg’s theory of nontheistic Platonism that he calls godless normative realism (GNR). Obviously, we cannot survey all of that literature here, but we’ll do our best to briefly encapsulate several of our primary concerns. We could have incorporated discussion of Wielenberg within the body of part 3, but we chose to put it off until now, thinking this was a tidy division of labor that could bring focus to our respective discussions. Of course, we realize the limitations in this analysis; even if we are right that theism provides a better explanation than does Wielenberg’s view, more argument would be needed to take on other secular accounts. Once again, our argument at this point is necessarily partial, but taking on such a worthy interlocutor as Wielenberg can provide a model of how to carry on such conversations.
Before giving his GNR our careful attention, we should mention that there are, of course, additional secular and nonnaturalistic accounts of morality that try to salvage a strong sense of moral realism. We are simply unable to take them all on here, though we can point readers to other sources where criticisms are launched against them.8 What we aim to do here is delimit the discussion simply to certain aspects of Wielenberg’s account and offer a model of how such a view, while to be applauded for its innovations, can be subjected to criticism. Once more our treatment is meant as more of a discussion starter than a definitive treatment of Wielenberg, much less of any and all secular realist theories of ethics or metaethics.
1 It is also possible to lay out a naturalistic ethic without presupposing naturalism strictly understood. Suppose a theist found satisfactory some version of naturalistic ethics. He finds, say, something like Cornell realism to suffice to account for the relevant moral phenomena. His ethical theory would be naturalistic, even though he himself is not a strict naturalist.
2 As David A. Horner and J. P. Moreland put it in Metaphysics: A Short Companion (B&H Academic, 2024), 111–12.
3 Although he is no natural lawyer, recall Olson’s inclusion of supernaturalism among “naturalist” accounts in his effort not to beg questions against theistic ethics. Among projects that one of us (Baggett) hopes to undertake at a later date is to chronicle an array of ways in which “natural” is variously construed.
4 Peter Geach famously distinguished between attributive and predicative goodness. Attributive goodness ascriptions look like this: “This is a good car.” This is the notion of goodness of its kind. Predicative goodness ascriptions appeal to a broader conception of goodness, something more like Platonic conceptions; an example: “This person is good.” Geach was skeptical that attributive ascriptions are distinct from predicative ones. We demur and, indeed, push the distinction even further by citing a case like this: “Is it good to be a human being?” This question not only appeals to a wider conception of goodness but also encompasses the yet broader issue of human value. See Peter Geach, “Good and Evil,” Analysis 17, no. 2 (1956): 33–42.
5 Frank Beckwith, in the forthcoming Oxford University Press collection edited by David Baggett and John Hare, has written a chapter arguing for the consistency of natural law with a moral argument for God’s existence, contra those natural lawyers who are skeptical of it. Part of the appeal of moral arguments for God’s existence is that they need not all agree on the fine-grained details of metaethics.
6 George Mavrodes, “Religion and the Queerness of Morality,” in Ethical Theory: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed., ed. Louis P. Pojman (Wadsworth, 1995), 587.
7 Michael Huemer offers a unique taxonomy of metaethics that has the practical result of vitiating this point, but we think that he mistakenly underestimates the radical difference between human mind- and divine mind-dependence.
8 Dale Kratt’s book A Secular Critique of Secular Moral Nonnaturalism (Springer, forthcoming) is worth reading for a critique not just of Wielenberg but of a whole range of secular metaethicists, as is Steve Parrish’s yet-to-be-published The Nature of Moral Necessity. In Philosophia Christi 20, no. 2 (2018), Adam Lloyd Johnson, William Lane Craig, Tyler Dalton McNab, and Mark C. Murphy all criticize Wielenberg’s book Robust Ethics, with Wielenberg giving a response to each of his critics. See Johnson, “Introduction to the American Academy of Religion Form on Erik Wielenberg’s Robust Ethics”; Craig, “Erik Wielenberg’s Metaphysics of Morals”; McNabb, “Wile E. Coyote and the Craggy Rocks Below: The Perils of Godless Ethics”; Murphy, “No Creaturely Intrinsic Value”; Johnson, “Fortifying the Petard: A Response to One of Erik Wielenberg’s Criticisms of the Divine Command Theory”; and Wielenberg, “Reply to Craig, Murphy, McNabb, and Johnson.”