I) The argument
1) There exists an objective or absolute universal moral law.
2) An objective or absolute universal moral law requires a moral law giver.
3) The moral law giver must be absolutely good in nature.
4) Therefore, there must be an absolutely good moral law giver.
II) Defense of the premise #1
1) An objective or absolute moral law is a set of laws that are valid and binding
independently of whether anyone believes in them or not.
A) Examples
1) The Holocaust would be objectively wrong even though the
Nazis thought that it was right. Even if the Nazis had won WWII,
and brainwashed everyone into thinking that it was the right
thing to do, it would still be objectively wrong.
2) When Mrs. Smith locked her two young boys in the car and pushed
them into the river and killed the boys, it was objectively wrong even
if she perceived it as being right.
B) These two examples are still objectively and absolutely wrong even if the
whole world believed that they were the right things to do. Why? They go
against the absolute moral law that states that they are wrong.
2) There must be an absolute or objective universal moral law for a number of reasons.
A) Moral disagreements would not make any sense.
1) Real moral disagreements are not possible in the absence of an absolute
or objective standard by which each side of the argument can be
measured.
2) If an objective moral standard does not exist, then both sides could be
considered correct. For example, “The Holocaust was wrong” vs. “The
Holocaust was right” cannot both be true. This would violate the Law
of Contradiction. (Meaning one cannot say of something that it is and
that it is not in the same respect and at the same time).
3) When the statement “I do not see anything wrong with their action” is
made, there is, of necessity, an objective moral standard that it is being
compared against. If their were no objective moral standard, the
statement could not be made since there is nothing to measure its
truthfulness by.
B) All moral criticisms would be meaningless.
1) Again, “The Nazis were wrong” has no meaning in the absence of
objective moral standards.
2) Without an objective moral standard, what would the word “wrong”
mean in the context of the statement? The word would have no
meaning whatsoever.
3) It is only when we have an objective moral standard to compare the
statement to that we are able to come to the conclusion that “The Nazis
were wrong”.
C) Without an objective moral standard, justice, in any real sense, could not
exist.
1) Justice is based upon what is right and what is wrong.
2) Right and wrong can only exist if an objective moral standard exists.
3) The concept of justice does exist.
a) You come home from work and find that your house has been
broken into, Several items of great value have been taken. What
do you do? You call the police, fill out on incident report, and
hope that the police find the person or persons responsible and
lock them up. Why?
b) The Drew Peterson case, the Joan Benet Ramsey case, the
genocide in Rwanda, why are we looking to punish the ones
that have done these things?
c) In all these cases, we are looking for justice to be carried out.
We want restitution from them for the wrong that they have
done to others. Justice is something that is universal. All
cultures past and present have demanded it at one time or
another. All people in the past and present have demanded it.
d) Justice is a real concept that is universal in scope.
4) Therefore, objective moral standards do exist.
5) If they do not exist, then we are not justified in pursuing any type of
restitution from the other. They have every right to act in any way,
shape, or form that they choose. No one has the right to impose their
standards on anyone else.
D) If objective moral standards did not exist, then we would not make any
excuses for breaking any moral law, yet we do all the time.
1) Examples
a) The person who steals from the company makes the excuse
“The company owes this to me”.
b) The person who blames the rape on their genetics.
c) The person who tries to justify the an affair by saying, “ They
were not giving me what I needed”.
2) All these examples have on thing in common, they are an attempt to
justify their actions. Why do they need to justify their actions is the
site of others?
3) There would be no reasonable explanation for them to act in this
manner if there were no objective moral standard.
4) The fact that people do make these attempts indicates that there is an
objective moral standard that people do recognize as existing.
3) These factors and others show that there is something that is inherently
right and inherently wrong even if some do not believe that they are. When
someone attempts to say that they do not believe in an objective moral
standard, they deceive themselves.
A) Whenever you find someone who says they do not believe in any
real right or wrong, You instinct find the same person going back on that
statement a moment later. They may break their promise to you, but
if you try to break one to them, they will be complaining ‘It’s not
fair’ before you can blink.
B) A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, the next minute,
they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to
break is an unfair one.
C) But if treaties and promises do not matter, since there is no such thing
as right and wrong, what difference does it make? Have they not “let
the cat out of the bag” and shown that, whatever they say, they really do
know that there is such a thing as objective moral standards?
III) Defense of premise #2
1) An objective or absolute universal moral law requires a moral law giver.
2) There are only two ways this objective moral standard came into existence.
It was either by natural means or by a objective moral law giver. It could
not have existed for an infinite time since an actual infinite cannot exist.
A) The moral law is not herd instinct
1) Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it
been developed just like all our other instincts?' Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct--by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires--one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
2) Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The thing that says to you, 'Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,' cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.
3)Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call ' good,' always in agreement with the rule of right behavior. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses--say mother love or patriotism--are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kind of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
B) The moral law is not social convention
1)Isn't what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?' I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behavior from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different--we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right--and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.
2) There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as
mathematics. The first is that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great--not nearly so great as most people imagine--and you can recognize the same law running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers--people who understood morality better than their neighbors did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something-some Real Morality--for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said 'New York' each means merely 'The town I am imagining in my own head,' how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if the Rule of Decent behavior meant simply 'whatever each nation happens to approve,' there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.
C) The moral law differs from the laws of nature
The moral law is not to be identified with the laws of nature. Nature’s laws
are descriptive (is), not prescriptive (ought) as are moral laws. Factually
convenient situations (the way it is) can be morally wrong. Someone who tries
to trip me and fails is wrong, but someone who accidentally trips me is not.
D) The moral law is not human fancy
The moral law cannot be mere human fancy because we cannot get rid of it
even when we would like to. it were fancy, then all value judgements
would be meaningless, including such statements as “Hate is wrong,” or
“Racism is wrong.”
E) Injustice does not disprove a moral law giver.
We will cover this in next weeks lesson.
F) Since this objective moral law has not come about by natural means,
then we are justified to conclude that it came about by a universal moral
law giver. It is the only option left.
IV) Defense of premise #3
1) The moral law giver must be absolutely good in nature.
2) The law giver must be absolutely good because;
A) Otherwise all moral efforts would be futile in the long run, since we
would be sacrificing our lives for what is not ultimately right.
1) Many examples can be found in history that show this. MLK,
the people that helped the slaves escape to freedom, etc... These
people sacrificed their lives for the cause that they were fighting
for.
2) If the law giver was not absolutely good then there would be no
reason for them to give their lives for the cause. There sacrifice
and the cause is meaningless.
B) The source of all good must be absolutely good, since the standard of all
good must be completely good.
1) The standard that we measure our moral judgements must be
absolutely good or we could not be able to measure any actions
by anyone, yet we do all the time.
2) If the moral law giver was not absolutely good in nature then the
standard by which we judge is not absolutely good and we are at the
same point as before. We are not justified to make any type of moral
judgements since we have no standard by which to measure. We are
reduced to relativism.
V) Conclusion
1) Therefore, there must be an absolutely good moral law giver.
A) If the premises are plausibly true, then this conclusion is logical and valid.
B) The simple fact that we even have this discussion gives evidence to the fact
of the conclusion.
