Is There a Secular Foundation for Morality?

This question introduces the “moral argument” for theism. Like several other common arguments for God’s necessity, the moral argument shows how a concept essential for coherent thinking and living—in this case, the concept of morality—must refer to and rest upon something outside itself.2 To avoid problems of arbitrary circular reasoning or infinite regress,3 that something must be transcendent, eternal, and self-existent: not something, but Someone.

Understandably, the conclusion that morality rests in God does not compute well with naturalistic worldviews, which exclude theism. Demonstrating that naturalism does not supply a foundation for morality would not in itself disprove naturalism or imply that naturalists cannot behave morally. But it would entail that naturalism cannot supply a consistent, authoritative basis for refraining from acting in ways otherwise considered immoral and so fails as a philosophy on which to build functional, thriving societies.

Recognizing the necessity of authoritative moral codes, secular philosophers have tried various ways to justify morality apart from God. Importantly, all these secular frameworks do have something in common with Christianity. They all start from a presupposition—a statement which we cannot necessarily prove is true but must assume (presuppose) is true as a starting point for the rest of our thinking.

Christianity begins with the presupposition that God exists and reveals truth (including moral truth) through Scripture.

Christianity begins with the presupposition that God exists and reveals truth (including moral truth) through Scripture. But secular ethicists build their thinking on various manmade presuppositions. A valid presupposition will lead to claims that do not contradict themselves and that match our knowledge of observable reality. Ideally, a valid moral presupposition will also give rise to a practical framework for motivating moral behavior.

With that in mind, we can look at the presuppositions that major secular ethical frameworks suggest as a foundation for morality—a justified ultimate standard for defining “good” and “bad.” The following analysis will outline how major human-made ethical systems fail to provide a functional, self-sufficient moral foundation but how a biblical worldview supplies a coherent basis for knowing, practicing, and upholding objective morals.

Framework 1: Kantianism

While Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was not an atheist, some secularists have championed Kant’s system to try grounding morals in reason alone.4 Kant’s presupposition was that the highest good is a good will. This good will, according to Kant, is the consistent motivation to behave morally, with the standard measuring stick for morality being a rule which Kant called the “categorical imperative.”5

The most famous formulation of this imperative states, “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”6 In other words, humans should only perform actions which they would be okay with everyone else having a duty to perform under similar circumstances. Kant also proposed a second formulation, which says moral actions are those which treat humans as ends rather than mere means.7

Many find Kant’s system appealing for its objective view of ethics, high regard for humanity, and usefulness for identifying binding (and often, intuitively appealing) moral rules. But can Kantianism offer a stand-alone basis for morality? A closer look reveals otherwise.

Foundationally, Kantianism assumes goodness is discerned through reason, a good will, and universalizability. But by what ultimate standard can we know these concepts are themselves good? Who defines the good which the good will must desire, and how do we know whose good (say, the good of a leaf, versus a deer eating the leaf, versus a hunter sighting the deer) is the best good for the good will to will good toward?

Kant believed the categorical imperative could answer these questions by identifying universalizability as the standard for determining good actions and by identifying humans—rational, autonomous “end-setters”—as the highest object of the good will.8 But the questions remain, why are universalizability, reason, and rational end-setters good—especially to Kantians with a naturalistic worldview in which reason is a byproduct of chemicals reacting in lumps of neural tissue that evolved for no extrinsic purpose and where humans are merely verbose apes? As Oxford philosopher Ralph Wedgewood remarked, “There is no way of developing an adequate ethical theory without clearly acknowledging that many things have intrinsic goodness in a way that is antecedent to their being the object of the good will.”9 The source of that intrinsic goodness is what Kantianism fails to identify.

Nor does Kantianism explain why universalizability is necessarily good—let alone, possible. Zachary Breitenbach noted that not all rational beings reason toward the same moral conclusions.10 What should happen when two reasonably universalizable maxims conflict? What if a rational being willed a universalizable maxim which did not treat humans as means but which many people would nonetheless recognize as problematic—for instance, “Always kick ownerless kittens?” Kant considered such cruelty to animals wrong because it hardens humans’ sensitivities,11 but Russ Shafer-Landau pointed out that such appeals to consequences have no basis in Kantianism.12

Along with these theoretical issues is the practical concern of humans’ inability to meet—and want to meet—Kantianism’s demands. John Hare noted that Kant believed humans by default follow personal inclinations above moral duties and cannot even desire to prioritize duty without experiencing a certain “conversion.”13 But how can that conversion occur if humans by default prioritize inclinations? Moreover, why would a person wish to live enslaved to duty solely for the sake of being “reasonable?” Kant himself recognized that moral living required the existence of an all-knowing God who could help people live morally and who would ultimately reward moral living.14 In summary, as Christian Smith observed, Kantianism offers “handy rules” for people already committed to principles of beneficence and respect for persons but does not supply a stand-alone foundation for secular ethics.15

Framework 2: Consequentialism

Given the shortcomings of Kantianism—especially its blindness to actions’ outcomes—many secularists augment or replace Kantianism with another system: consequentialism. While Kantianism defines actions’ goodness in terms of motivations regardless of outcomes, consequentialism defines actions’ goodness in terms of outcomes regardless of motivations. An action is good, according to consequentialism, if it produces good results. But who defines which results are good? Already, we see consequentialism cannot stand alone as a foundation for morality, because an external standard is required for evaluating consequences’ goodness.16 Consequentialists must presuppose what that standard is and rank actions accordingly.17

For instance, a popular branch of consequentialism called utilitarianism begins with the presupposition that the ultimate good is “the greatest happiness (or least pain) for the most people,” or—in a modified version—“the greatest happiness fairly distributed among the most people.”18 Again, an external evaluative standard is required to call happiness, fairness, or the absence of pain the ultimate goods, and to answer, “What kind(s) of happiness should be maximized (or pains minimized)? How should happiness and pain be measured? Whose happiness should be prioritized when different parties’ happiness conflicts?” Noting that different types of happiness are “to a large degree incommensurable,” Alasdair MacIntyre stated that concepts of pleasure are “useless for utilitarian purposes.”19 Nietzsche, conversely, criticized appeals to minimizing pain, arguing that pain can be necessary for a population’s greatest good.20

Even if the “greatest good” could be consistently identified, numerous practical problems remain.

Even if the “greatest good” could be consistently identified, numerous practical problems remain. For instance, humans are not all-knowing, so exact outcomes (much less, the full range of possible outcomes) are often difficult to predict for ethical calculation purposes.21 And even if humans could identify consequentialism’s demands for each situation, could people truly live out those demands—even when consequentialism required those people themselves to sacrifice their earthly comforts, possessions, or lives for the “greater good”?

Hare noted that some utilitarians believe we could meet utilitarianism’s demands if we simply understood others’ (reasonable) desires better and tried hard enough to maximize happiness accordingly.22 But Hare responded that in practice, understanding others’ desires does not necessarily engender acting on that knowledge; we cannot truly try to accomplish feats we know are impossible; and prioritizing “reasonable” desires does not guarantee moral outcomes.23 Utilitarianism attempts to show the right thing to do but does not answer why people would be able or motivated to do it.24

Worse, utilitarianism easily justifies—and may even demand—actions otherwise considered atrocities. For instance, John Harris has argued on utilitarian grounds that governments should implement a “survival lottery” by which randomly selected healthy people are killed for organ harvesting.25 If one such slaughter could save five patients, and if healthcare systems must minimize deaths while maximizing saved lives, is it not the greater good that one die rather than five?

To try sidestepping these grave problems, a modified system arose called rule consequentialism, which states that certain moral rules must be factored into calculations about the greatest good.26 These rules not only save time during moral decision-making, but also preclude atrocities for the “greater good.” But (besides the issue that following rules may not always produce the “greatest good,” violating consequentialism’s core doctrine27) this admission of the need for objective morals beyond consideration of actions’ consequences alone reinstates the original problems of answering what the rules should be, what standard of good they derive from, where that standard comes from, and why it should be considered authoritative.28 In other words, we still have no moral foundation.

Framework 3: Contractarianism

Recognizing that functional societies need some form of binding moral obligations but that other secular frameworks cannot justify these morals’ foundation, philosophers known as contractarians suggest that society itself gives rise to morality. Contractarianism assumes that people primarily seek their own interests but realize that if everyone sought only their own interests, the result would be anarchy, warfare, and the constant threat of victimization by anyone more powerful.29 So, people with “enlightened self-interest” agree to a social contract—a covenant which allows members to coexist peaceably, provided they follow the community’s guidelines. Members must relinquish their “right” to pursue their own interests at others’ expenses but can continue living in a largely self-serving way, all while resting assured that they will not fall prey to self-interested others. Ensuring that members follow the contract’s rules is typically the task of the State, which becomes the authority for moral truth.

With its aura of practicality and its confident assertions about what “reasonable people” would agree to, contractarianism might seem to finally solve the problem of morality’s foundations. Correspondingly, philosophers across the centuries have forwarded different contractarian theories, from Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Rawls and T. M. Scanlon.30 Tristram Englehart too has argued that a system based on social agreement might (at least partially) rescue morality from the nihilism glimpsed by Nietzsche’s madman.31

But as Englehart noted, the moral rules society agrees upon would lack content.32 They would not refer to external, authoritative, overarching moral realities that exist independently of the State; they would merely be conventions of the State itself. Without an external standard for defining “good,” contractarians cannot even show that following a social contract would be inherently good or that the anarchy it seeks to prevent is bad.33 Sheldon Wein, himself a contractarian, recognized such issues, noting a common objection to contractarianism is that it requires people to presuppose at least one moral value—the value that keeping promises (even for self-serving reasons) is good.34 Given these problems, contractarianism serves not as a self-existent foundation for objective morals, but as a proposed rescue device for secular societies which understand that secularism supplies no such foundation. Does this rescue device work?

Numerous factors suggest otherwise. For starters, as MacIntyre observed, centuries of philosophical debate—even within contractarianism itself—demonstrate that rational, intelligent people do not agree about which moral rules rational, intelligent people would agree to follow.35 This irony casts serious doubt on the very core of contractarianism. Moreover, MacIntyre noted that the differences between these philosophers cannot be resolved, because their thinking begins with different assumptions about fundamental concepts, including justice and rights.36 So, even though these philosophers’ different conclusions follow logically from their premises (and therefore are reasonable), the incompatible starting assumptions explain why reasonable people do not necessarily agree. Yet contractarianism stands or falls on agreement.

Even if people could consistently reach satisfactory agreements—perhaps in line with Engelhardt’s suggestion that “ethical” procedures are those decided upon through consent achieved without force37—the results may fall far short of what most people would consider moral.38 For instance, leaving aside the problem of how secular viewpoints can foundationally deem consent good or force bad, we may imagine a contract following Engelhardt’s consent-based system. The signatories of this contract could agree that every year, to offset global hunger, poverty, climate change, and economic burdens, the community should encourage 20,000 senior volunteers to consent to peaceful euthanasia, “giving back” their bodies for organ harvesting, research, and sustainable food production. A case could be made that from a secular worldview perspective, there is nothing inherently unreasonable about this agreement. But would consent and agreement make killing and cannibalizing 20,000 seniors per year moral? Many people will (hopefully) realize the answer is no, even if contractarianism cannot explain why.

But the problems continue. Responding to David Gauthier’s belief that a social contract could work for “constrained maximizers” who agree to “comply with fair bargains,” John Hare wrote, “There is the difficulty, then, of seeing how constrained maximization could ever get off the ground. For the costs of exclusion from bargaining with constrained maximizers depend on how many constrained maximizers there already are.”39 In other words, it may not be reasonable to join a social contract if you cannot be certain how many community members will follow it.

Even with strong impetus for following the contract—perhaps on pains of capital punishment as Rousseau suggested40—there would remain (besides the letdown of life in a potentially dystopian society) the problem of David Hume’s “sensible knave.”41 This knave lives by the thinking which Christian Smith aptly summarized, “Why not be good when it serves [my] enlightened self-interest but strategically choose to break a moral norm at opportune moments, when violation has a nice payoff and there is little chance of being caught?”42 Acknowledging the knave has a point, atheistic philosopher David O. Brink observed, “The imperfect coincidence of morality and self-interest implies that immorality need not always be irrational.”43

Some secularists downplay this problem by suggesting the torment of guilt can sufficiently deter knavery.44 But Christian Smith responded that many people in today’s world “actually do live by a sensible-knave strategy and do not seem driven by their psychological misery back into a consistent upholding of moral norms.”45 Comparing social contracts to computer security systems that offer protection against honest users but not malevolent hackers—thus missing their purpose entirely—Smith concluded,

[Secular moral systems] are vulnerable to delegitimation and possibly breakdown when a critical mass of sensible knaves behave in exploitive ways that the proponents of the moral system cannot prevent with convincing reasons. And those I take to be debilitating problems for any “good without God” moral system.46

Other Naturalistic Moral Frameworks

So far, briefly examining three famous secular ethical systems has revealed theoretical and practical problems that prevent these systems from supplying a stand-alone foundation for morality. Do other secular frameworks, such as intuitionism, moral essentialism, or emotivism, fare better?

The first two of these frameworks (intuitionism and essentialism) recognize that morals must be real and authoritative. Both systems attempt to solve the problem of identifying morality’s foundation—the source of the values for objectively calling some things (like happiness and well-being) good and other things (like pain and harm) bad—by saying these values are self-evident. They simply are, and no other justification is available or needed.

Intuitionists presuppose that the self-evident source of morality is the type of intuition by which most people would agree that recreationally torturing others is wrong.47 But how do we know our intuitions are good? And what happens when different people’s intuitions conflict? Noting that “any one intuition can be countered with a contrary intuition,” Englehart observed that “There is no conclusive way to mediate among conflicting intuitions by appealing to intuitions.”48 For this reason, Shafer-Landau remarked that intuitionism “has struck many as lacking credibility.”49

Unlike intuitionists, moral essentialists presuppose that statements like “recreationally torturing others is wrong” do not rest in humanity but exist independently as abstract objects or concepts. They are immaterial, eternal, self-existent truths which have always floated “out there” in the cosmos. However, belief in immaterial entities (much less, ones with moral authority) hardly computes with the materialistic naturalism that atheism classically endorses.

Belief in a pantheon of eternal, self-existent, morally authoritative entities demands a leap of faith which atheism forbids.

Atheistic moral essentialist Evan Fales tried to sidestep this dilemma by redefining naturalism to allow for belief in immaterial objects but not “disembodied minds.”50 But without being all-knowing, how can Fales assert there are no disembodied minds? The most he could say is that naturalism, which restricts knowledge to perceivable physical reality, cannot show there are disembodied minds. But then, how can naturalism show there are immaterial objects like moral truths? Belief in a pantheon of eternal, self-existent, morally authoritative entities demands a leap of faith which atheism forbids.

Even if naturalists made this leap anyway to affirm that moral truths exist, how could a naturalist know these truths? Moral essentialists may reply that humans can reason their way to moral knowledge by observing material reality—an idea called “ethical naturalism.” Although many philosophers would agree with Hume that observations of nature tell us only what is the case rather than what ought to be the case,51 ethical naturalists believe that some non-moral facts do entail moral conclusions.

As Dave Elder-Vass argued, however, such values cannot be derived from observable facts without presupposing other ethical values—even though ethical naturalism assumes all such values can be empirically derived.52 For instance, the observation that action X causes suffering does not entail that X is wrong without the prior assumption that suffering is inherently bad. In other words, ethical naturalists must arbitrarily presuppose that certain brute ethical facts are true in order to deny the is/ought distinction and thereby argue that brute facts are true. Elder-Vass concluded,

Unless and until a more tenable argument can be offered, then, there is no foundation for moral realism that is compatible with scientific realism; indeed, it is difficult to see how there ever could be. Scientific realists must surely agree with Mackie that ‘There are no objective values.’53

Nonetheless, Fales maintained that humans can reach moral conclusions by observing what is good for organisms.54 This answer requires a presuppositional belief in teleology—the idea that objects and organisms have specific purposes—which oversteps naturalism’s bounds. Purpose implies design, so naturalistic evolutionists often prefer to speak of natural features as exhibiting function rather than telos.55 But Fales, echoing Aristotle, believed that organisms do possess purposes and that elements which help an organism achieve its telos are good for the organism.56 For instance, the nutrients required for a tiger cub to mature—and the claws that help attain those nutrients—are good for the tiger. But as Fales’ fellow atheist Michael Ruse commented, this fact does not entail that claws (or even tigers) are intrinsically good.57

Besides, why should the tiger’s good be the “good” good to advance above the good of a person being stalked by the tiger or an antelope being stalked by the person? Rooting goodness in the telos of individual organisms produces a constellation of conflicting claims to goodness without an overarching standard for resolving these conflicts. Arguments responding that some organisms simply have higher moral rights than others, again, must arbitrarily presuppose immaterial truth claims that cannot exist—or at least, cannot be known—within naturalism.58

Recognizing such challenges, a more consistent secular framework called emotivism claims morals have no foundation but are artifacts of human feelings.59 Morality becomes subjective—a matter of personal preference. This view flows logically from evolutionary thinking, for to presuppose that moral emotions evolved to benefit organisms’ survival or reproduction is to concede that morality bears no authoritative weight. Ruse adopted this stance, stating,

So how then do I justify my substantive ethical beliefs? I claim simply that there is no justification! I think the substantive ethics, claims like “love your neighbor as yourself,” are simply psychological beliefs put in place by natural selection in order to maintain and improve our reproductive fitness.60

If Ruse was right, then so was Nietzsche’s madman: there is no longer any up or down.

A Biblical Solution

We find, then, that major human-made ethical systems fail to provide a functional, self-sufficient foundation for morality. As Engelhardt pinpointed the problems with such systems,

An appeal to any particular moral content begs the question of the standards by which the content is selected, an appeal to a formal structure provides no moral content and therefore no content-full moral guidance, and an appeal to an external reality will show what is, not what ought to be or how what is should be judged.61

Is society therefore doomed in the way Nietzsche’s madman foresaw? Fortunately, no—not if the madman was mistaken about God’s “death.” Here returns the moral argument for theism: objective morals are necessary, and they necessarily depend on an eternal, self-existent, knowable source. That source is the character of an eternal, self-existent, knowable God.

God is not an unjustified stopping point for morality’s infinite regress and does not have to be believed through arbitrary circular argument. By his very nature, God possesses the qualities a nonarbitrary stopping point would need. He is eternal, self-existent, all-knowing, and can legitimately attest to the truth of his own Word. Furthermore, the biblical God’s existence passes the test of a valid presupposition, leading to beliefs that are consistent with themselves and with observable reality. For instance, belief in God—unlike belief in abstract moral objects—aligns with countless observations from science, archaeology, eyewitness testimony, and fulfilled prophecies.

Grounding morality in God’s character also avoids the objection to theism known as the Euthyphro dilemma.62 This dilemma states that either certain actions are moral because God commanded (or wills) them, or God commands (or wills) certain actions because they are moral. In the first case, God could assign moral values arbitrarily; in the latter, morals would exist independently of God, nullifying the moral argument for theism. But a biblical worldview states God himself is good;63 thus, God remains the source of goodness, and that goodness is nonarbitrary.64

Not only does a biblical worldview supply a theoretical foundation for morality’s existence, but it also overcomes the practical problems other systems face regarding moral knowledge, performance, and motivation. Regarding knowledge, divine revelation serves as the mechanism by which humans can know moral standards. Regarding performance, a biblical worldview alone acknowledges that while humans cannot live up to morality’s demands, God himself provided atonement for human failings and helps believers “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Finally, regarding motivation, a biblical view overcomes the sensible-knave problem by offering assurance that God “will repay each person according to what he has done” (Matthew 16:27).

Conclusion

A biblical worldview not only supplies this self-existent foundation for morality, but also provides a basis for moral knowledge, practice, and motivation, avoiding the problems which secular systems encounter.

Ultimately, an overview of major human-made ethical systems, including Kantianism, consequentialism, contractarianism, and other common naturalistic frameworks, reveals that none of them provides a functional, self-sufficient foundation for morality. All of them pose theoretical and practical problems, the most fundamental of which is that they fail to justify the ultimate standard of goodness they presuppose. The quest for that justification leads to infinite regress or arbitrary circularity unless an eternal, transcendent, self-existent value source can be found. As the moral argument for theism concludes, that source must be God. A biblical worldview not only supplies this self-existent foundation for morality, but also provides a basis for moral knowledge, practice, and motivation, avoiding the problems which secular systems encounter. Contrary to the concerns of Nietzsche’s madman, “up and down” remain unmoved in reference to the character of our unchanging Creator.