Goodness and Rationality in Light of the Moral Argument

I recently wrote a post where I talked about how I'd much rather align myself with irrational people who care about empathy and compassion than with rational people who don't. I wrote another post after that about why I am drawn to perfect being theology even though I don't accept the claims of revealed religions. Since then, I have been taking a lot of notes and doing a lot of work at trying to write out the versions of each argument from natural theology that I find convincing. I haven't posted them yet because I'm going through them a bit slowly.

This past week I've been doing a ton of thinking about moral arguments for the existence of God, and that has recently triggered some further thoughts on the relationship between goodness and rationality. What I've discovered, I think, is that people who care about empathy and compassion and who strive to treat other people with dignity, even at great personal cost, are acting very rationally, even if they don't realize it, and even if they hold beliefs about the world that don't make much sense. In other words, there is a sense in which good people are far more rational than people who embrace violence and hatred.

Two Moral Arguments

First, let me briefly mention two of the arguments that I've been thinking about. These are both moral arguments for the existence of a supreme moral authority. One is based on objective moral obligations. An objective moral obligation is something that would be wrong for us not to do, even if we didn't want to, and even if most people didn't recognize it as a real obligation. For instance, regardless of what anyone thinks or says, we should treat other people with dignity, and we should refrain from causing severe pain to other people for no good reason.

The argument is that, if objective moral obligations exist, then a supreme moral authority must exist. This is part of a longer thing I'm writing but basically the idea is that obligations are binding on us, which entails that there is something external to us that imposes those obligations on us. It's kind of like how, if we agree to a game of basketball, we are socially obligated to follow the rules of the game. Moral obligations are imposed on us from an external source, because they do not always match up to our personal desires, and they don't seem to care if they get in the way of our personal fulfillment or (sometimes) survival. Yet, I find it impossible to deny that we really do have objective moral obligations.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons I am convinced that the best way to explain objective moral obligations is by appealing to a supreme moral authority. It would have to be a perfectly just, necessarily existing, immaterial mind that is somehow creatively involved in the world: perfectly just, because otherwise there would be a conceivably higher authority than it; necessarily existing (meaning that its nonexistence is impossible), because it is a ground for necessary moral truths; immaterial, because of its necessity and plausibly because of its moral perfection; a mind, because being just is a personal property and only a personal agent could have a will that is expressed in our moral obligations; and creatively involved in the world, because it seems highly implausible that impersonal physical forces would just so happen to produce creatures that were somehow able to perceive the will of a transcendent moral authority purely by coincidence.

The argument would look like this:

1. If objective moral obligations exist, then they represent the will of a supreme moral authority.
2. Objective moral obligations exist.
3. Therefore, they represent the will of a supreme moral authority.

The second argument, which ties this to the subject of rationality, is an argument from practical reason. It goes like this:

1. We ought to be committed to morality if and only if morality is ultimately rational.
2. Morality is ultimately rational if and only if there is no fundamental disconnect between morality and our ultimate self-interest.
3. If there is no supreme moral authority, then there is a fundamental disconnect between morality and our ultimate self-interest.
4. Therefore, if there is no supreme moral authority, then morality is ultimately irrational.
5. Therefore, if there is no supreme moral authority, then we ought not to be committed to morality.
6. We ought to be committed to morality.
7. Therefore, there is a supreme moral authority.

If we have real moral obligations, then I think premise (6) is undeniable. Otherwise, it would be like saying that yes, I have a real obligation not to torture children, but I don't need to be committed to upholding that obligation. That attitude seems morally incoherent.

The first two premises are the ones that are more likely to be disputed, but they make sense to me. Take premise (2). It seems very obvious that I could have a moral obligation to do something that goes against my self-interest. For instance, by refusing to cheat on a test, I might not be able to pass a class and graduate. By helping someone in need, I might be endangering my own safety (something I am thinking about a lot these days in light of ICE's ongoing, state-sponsored acts of terror in Minnesota). So there is a disconnect at some level between morality and my self-interest, yet that doesn't seem to negate my moral obligation. But the word "ultimate" plays a very important role here.

Let me approach it from a different angle. There is something intrinsically absurd about a life that ends in death (by which I mean personal annihilation) for every one of us, in which I am nevertheless supposed to act in a way that prioritizes the well-being of others over my own. Obviously, I do think that it is important to do the right thing even if it hurts, so I am not denying that we have real moral obligations. Rather, I am just recognizing what seems to be an absurd state of affairs: my life will eventually come to nothing, and so will yours, yet I am obligated to treat you with justice and compassion even if it hurts me. There is a fundamental disconnect between morality and my own ultimate self-interest. And I claim that this reveals a deep absurdity in this kind of moral vision. This is what I mean when I say it's not rational.

Furthermore, if morality is fundamentally irrational or absurd, then it is hard to understand how we could possibly be obligated to commit ourselves to it. Of course, I recognize that we should be committed to morality (that is the sixth premise in the argument!). But I can't make sense out of saying that we should commit ourselves to morality if morality is fundamentally absurd, because then if we ask the perfectly sensible question, "Why should we care about morality?" there won't be any reasonable answer that can be given. The only answer, it seems, would be, "You just should!" This is not a rational answer, and it is deeply unsatisfying both morally and intellectually.

If we ought to be committed to morality, then, there must be a sense in which morality is not at odds with our ultimate self-interest. And although this isn't spelled out in the argument (perhaps it should be?), it seems to me that the problem could be resolved if this life is not all there is, and if death does not result in our personal annihilation. If those who choose to fulfill their moral obligations will ultimately find personal fulfillment in doing so, then morality ceases to be irrational. Sometimes this idea is caricatured as only doing the right thing for personal reward, but that seems like a very misguided way of looking at it. Again, it is totally reasonable to ask, "Why should anyone care about morality?" It's the same sort of question as, "Why does anything exist at all?" The person who asks these sorts of questions is being perfectly sensible. And it only seems more sensible to ask, "Why should I do something that causes me personal harm?" The answer to that cannot be that you just should. That is, after all, the same sort of logic used by authoritarians and dictators.

The point, then, is that there is something good and sensible about taking an interest in one's own ultimate personal fulfillment. To be apathetic about one's personal fulfillment would be very strange indeed. So it seems to me that the first two premises of the argument are true. And that leads us to premise (3). The only way that there could be a guaranteed harmony between morality and our ultimate self-fulfillment is if there is a supreme moral authority that can see to it that those who fulfill their moral obligations will find personal fulfillment, whatever that entails. After all, such a being would be perfectly just, and it would be creatively involved with the world, so it would have the resources to ensure that those who strive to treat other people with dignity and live good lives will not ultimately end up as tragic figures, otherwise (again) morality would be absurd.

There's a lot more that could be said, but all of this makes good sense to me, and if it's right, then it follows that there must be a supreme moral authority (just as there must be if we have objective moral obligations). In that case, we have even stronger grounds for committing ourselves to morality than we might have thought.

The Rationality of Good People

So that brings me back to what I was talking about at the beginning. I think that people who listen to their conscience and who strive to act justly and treat other people with dignity are operating out of a deep inner sense that morality is fundamentally a sane and reasonable thing to commit oneself to, even if they don't know how to explain why. And it also seems to me that the supreme moral authority is far more interested in our becoming good people than in our having a perfectly coherent set of beliefs about reality. Even if different communities hold sharply divergent views about the nature of ultimate reality, there is such a strong continuity between them in what people of good character act like.

This is not to say that well-meaning people can't have important moral disagreements. But one of the reasons I find myself much more comfortable around people who care about doing the right thing is that people like that are thoughtful, sane, safe—and thus eminently reasonable! They are people who treat wisdom as a virtue. If they see the world differently from me, and even if they see the foundations of morality differently from me, I still think they are far more reasonable than people whose ideas might align at some level with mine but who have no qualms about treating people in marginalized communities as animals or about supporting authoritarian policies. I think particularly of the way that ICE is taking pleasure in cruelty to children. Surely those who do such things have fully lost touch with their humanity, and theirs is a path to true insanity. Those who support them are not reasonable no matter how well-versed in logic they might be. Alternatively, I am encouraged to see that so many people refuse to accept such cruelty and are willing to act from a sense of deep moral instinct.