But that flicks us onto the second horn of the dilemma. Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command some things because they are moral? If the former is true, and God had no reason for his commandments, why should we take his whims seriously? If God commanded you to torture and kill a child, would that make it right? “He would never do that!” you might object.
But Plato made short work of this argument 2,400 years ago in Euthyphro. That’s what religion is for, they say-even many scientists. When we say “The Holocaust is bad,” do our powers of reason leave us no way to differentiate that conviction from “I don’t like the Holocaust” or “My culture disapproves of the Holocaust”?įaced with this intolerable implication, some people hope to vest morality in a higher power. Some concluded that “X is evil” means little more than “X is against the rules” or “I dislike X” or even “X, boo!”īut many people are not ready to reduce morality to convention or taste. Philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century took Hume’s argument seriously and struggled with what moral statements could possibly mean if they are not about logic or empirical fact. Moral statements indeed must be distinguished from logical and empirical ones. “’Tis not contrary to reason,” he famously wrote, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” ” The conclusion is sometimes attributed to the philosopher David Hume. Many people believe that “you can’t get an ought from an is.
Can we ever deduce what’s right or wrong? Can we confirm it with data? It’s not obvious how you could. One realm that is sometimes excluded from the rational is the moral.
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