In Defense of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism

Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XXI, 2019, 1, pp. 61-74 , 2019

I shall develop an abductive argument for the claim that the best explanation for moral facts such as One ought not to rape and kill innocent children for sexual pleasure is that moral norms and values are grounded in God's will. I will first explain (1) the Moral Question, i. e., the question of why one should be moral at all. I will provide a brief outline of the possible answers to this question and show why most answers fail; here, I will have a closer look at moral naturalism. I will then, secondly (2), contend that the only answer to the Moral Question is theistic: Only God can provide or rather: can be the foundation of morality. Furthermore, I shall argue that only on the basis of a personal God that has a will who sets ends the very idea of moral normativity makes sense. I will conclude with some brief remarks on moral epistemology.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1986

1 have two purposes for this paper: first, to identify the substantive differences between certain theories of moral realism and my own theory of morality as social creation; and second, to sketch some ways of arriving at a decision between the two kinds of theory on the points where they differ. The theories of moral realism I have in mind are based 1. There are facts that obtain independently of human cognitive capacities and conceptual schemes.

Moral discourses take place with a set of assumptions participants often take as a given. In any discourse, agents expect, as a telos, an addition of knowledge to the other side. How does the addition of knowledge take place? It seems that one has to assume the existence of abstract objects such as universals. For instance, consider justice. We know what is it like for someone to be just. But what is justice? What is the nature of it? Many philosophers think that justice is a universal that is instantiated in a man’s character. A person is just because his character conforms to justice. Some however, think that abstract objects are not real. If this is true, are meaningful communications even possible? Moreover, without the existence of God, can one even find progress in moral discourse? To both questions, I think the answer is no. In this paper therefore, my goal is to show why both are necessary foundations of moral discourse.

International journal of philosophy of religion , 2025

Noah McKay (2023) has proposed a novel argument against naturalism. He argues that while theism can explain our ability to arrive at a body of moral beliefs that are generally accurate and complete', naturalism fails to do so. He argues that naturalism has only social and biological grounds to account for our moral beliefs, which means that naturalism can only claim pragmatic value for our moral beliefs. McKay dedicates his paper to arguing against naturalism. This paper will focus on theism and examine whether theism can explain what naturalism cannot. Theism could rely on guided evolution or the miraculous intervention of God. In contrast to naturalism, theism has revelatory and supernatural grounds for our moral beliefs. This paper will demonstrate some of the challenges that these grounds would encounter. Finally, McKay's argument implies a dichotomy between unguided evolution and theism, which rests on a problematic assumption about evolutionary theory; by abandoning the assumption, the dichotomy also dissolves.

I will try to show that there exists an initiatory theological-philosophical tradition, the acknowledgement of which entails a set of considerations that I believe can shed light on

Philosophical Studies

This paper responds to a recently popular objection to non-naturalist, robust moral realism. The objection is that moral realism is morally objectionable, because realists are committed to taking evidence about the distribution (or non-existence) of non-natural properties to be relevant to their first-order moral commitments. I argue that such objections fail. The moral realist is indeed committed to conditionals such as “If there are no non-natural properties, then no action is wrong.” But the realist is not committed using this conditional in a modus-ponens inference upon coming to believe its antecedent. Placing the discussion in a wider epistemological discussion – here, that of “junk-knowledge”, and of how background knowledge determines the relevance of purported evidence – shows that this objection does not exert a price from the realist.

Philosophical Studies, 2005

The realist belief in robustly attitude-independent evaluative truths – more specifically, moral truths – is challenged by Sharon Street’s essay “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”. We know the content of human normative beliefs and attitudes has been profoundly influenced by a Darwinian natural selection process that favors adaptivity. But if simple adaptivity can explain the content of our evaluative beliefs, any connection they might have with abstract moral truth would seem to be purely coincidental. She continues the skeptical attack in “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Rethink It”, concentrating on the intuitionist realism of Ronald Dworkin. The latter sees the issue fundamentally as a holistic choice between moral objectivity and the genocide-countenancing consequences of abandoning objective standards. Street counters that, because of realism’s skeptical difficulties, Dworkin’s Choice (as I call it) actually works in favor of her Euthyphronic antirealism. I will argue that she misrepresents the realist’s skeptical challenge, and that clarifying the character of that challenge renders the case for normative realism much more appealing. Indeed, I claim that Street fails to exclude the genuine possibility of a rational basis for moral truth.

Moral realism is vulnerable to evolutionary debunking arguments, which undermine the argument that moral facts are actual features of reality by purporting to show that the evolutionarily conditioned nature of our moral judgments precludes us from obtaining significant knowledge of what these moral facts might be, and thus that moral realism is epistemically sterile; even if there were moral facts, they are barred from our understanding. The proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments do not however go far enough in their description of the naturalistic roots of our moral beliefs, which, if they are followed to their conclusion, actually support a bounded form of metaethical realism. This paper will employ a thermodynamic argument to show that there are naturalistic yet irreducible moral facts which apply to all living systems, and thus that naturalistic moral realism is correct if restricted to the domain of living agents. Additionally, evidence will be given for the further claim that these moral facts are actually universal in scope, and apply to all possible worlds allowing the development of self organizing systems.

Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization

In this article, the author examines the dependence of ethics on theistic foundations. The Western conception is that ethics is a result of a natural evolutionary process. The Modern West has never accepted or believed in any ethical system governed by religion, and modernity has tried to establish that the universal moral principles are independent of any metaphysical context. The modernity project and rising secularization have taken charge of the field, and religious significance has gone absent from the mainstream, on account of which many challenges have occurred in moral and ethical matters. We will also examine whether Modern Western Civilization has established an ethical code independent of religion and whether we should follow the Western Model, if any. Moreover, this article examines how ethics is a cause and consequence of the development of personality, and no ethical system is ever there without any religious foundations. Human beings are built on the essence of servit...