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The Good, the Bad and the Grenholm

A critique of Micael Grenholm’s meta-ethics

“Job Rebuked by His Friends”, William Blake, 1757–1827

Note: this is quite a long essay, if you prefer to read it in PDF-form you can download it here.

Introduction

The apparent conflict between an all loving God and evil is a problem that’s plagued theologians and philosophers all through the ages. If God exists and is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, how can evil exist in the world?

According to the Swedish theologian, author and Christian apologist Micael Grenholm in his essay The Problem of Evil – a challenge both for theism as well as naturalism[1], the problem of evil is not just an issue for the theist, but for the atheist as well. In his essay he defends two contentions: A) evil may be compatible with the existence of God, and B) The existence of evil presents a meta-ethical problem pertaining to the grounding of moral judgments, that can’t be answered successfully without reference to God.

The first claim is very modest – Micael has in debates elsewhere been much more forthright in his defense of God’s compatibility with evil, and I assume his humble assertion in the essay is done to limit the scope of the text – rather than him not feeling like his arguments are up to the challenge. He concludes that

“…there appears to be no feasible way for the naturalist to justify the existence of objective evil, and without this I do not think he can use the problem of evil as an argument against the existence of God. This does not mean that the problem of evil as a challenge to theism is resolved, but it throws a wrench into the works of those who believe that the existence of evil without question makes naturalism more credible than theism.”

So, according to Micael, while the theist indeed does have a challenge in the problem of evil that needs to be addressed, the issue is even deeper – and seemingly more unanswerable – for the atheist. In this essay I aim to mainly analyze and critique Micael’s second contention and subsequent conclusion, but I will start by saying something about the first.

Theodicies

An argument that aims to show that God’s existence is compatible with evil and/or suffering is called a theodicy (from the French Théodicée, meaning vindication of God), and many theodicies have been proposed and defended throughout history by theologians. Micael starts by suggesting two possible theodicies: 1. The existence of free will explains why there is moral evil in the world (a variant of an Augustinian theodicy), and 2. We live in a fallen world and thus we should expect there to be evil (a biblical theodicy). He swiftly – and rightly – concludes that the first theodicy fails to account for natural evil,[2] and is therefore at best only partly successful, and that the second is incompatible with a scientific world view and evolutionary biology (in so far as it postulates a biblical account of humanity’s origin).

Micael then goes on to suggest two further strategies that can be employed by the theist when discussing the problem of evil, with the first one being so called skeptical theism. He classifies skeptical theism as a different type of argument than typical theodicies, but when considered as a response to why God would allow gratuitous evil it might as well be classified as yet another theodicy. Irrespective of how we classify it, the idea of skeptical theism is basically the adage of “God works in mysterious ways”: in our limited knowledge as fallible humans, we are not in a position to judge or even understand the mind and working of God, so we can never know that He lacks sufficient reasons to allow the evil in the world. When considered as a theodicy I think this is one of – if not the – strongest arguments against all versions of the problem of evil.

However, there are issues with this argument. The shear amount of suffering in the world that has existed for millennia, and still exist today is prima facia evidence against the God of classical theism: if God exists, He’s all-powerful which means He has the ability to construct the best world possible. He’s also all-good and therefore wants the absolute best for all His creatures. Consequently, He wants us to suffer as little as possible, and He has the power to make sure that we do. While He might for various reasons allow suffering that has some greater good attached to it – i.e. a silver-lining – He will never allow gratuitous suffering – evil without any justification. Any suffering that exists in a universe controlled by God thus must have some sort of justification that explains why God is allowing it, and that justification must entail some even greater good that would be forsaken if God didn’t allow that instance of suffering in the first place. The idea that all human and animal suffering – all moral and natural evil – that’s played out for millions of years in His creation is all required for the world to exist and be perfect – is highly implausible and cries out for an explanation. If God is equated with a parent (which He typically is in traditional forms of theism), He seems to be failing in His fatherly duties. If your children suffer and you have the power to ease their suffering, it seems reasonable to assume that you would do so, unless their suffering is required for an even greater good. But even in that case, a parent will do everything to ensure their child that they won’t suffer more than necessary, and reassure them that things will be all right and attempt to comfort them. God’s silence either means He’s a bad parent – or simply absent.

The third strategy Micael employs is the so called "Overrider Response", from C. Stephen Layman:

“…theists may simply admit that the problem of evil is a special difficulty for theism […], nevertheless natural theology and/or religious experience provide adequate reason or warrant for theism.”[3]

The idea with this response is to say that even though evil counts as evidence against the God of classical theism, the vast number of other arguments for such a God still count in favor of belief in that God, on balance. Addressing all other arguments for the existence of God (which, as you know, are legion) would go far beyond the scope of this essay, so I’ll simply hand wave away this argument by saying that no argument I’ve come across so far for the existence of God have been compelling to me. We could change the argument around and say that since there are so many arguments for God’s existence and they all fail, that is in and of itself an argument against the existence of God. Because, if He did exist, surely the time devoted by so many smart people throughout the ages would’ve yielded compelling evidence for his existence. However, this all hinges on whether you think other arguments for the existence of God work or not – if you do think so, you’ll find The Overrider Response compelling, and you’ll be a theist. If you don’t think so, you’ll dismiss The Overrider Response – and you’ll be an atheist.

Micael then turns to Layman’s so called Comparative Response: even though theism may have a difficult time answering the problem of evil, atheism has an even bigger problem. Why? Because evil presupposes suffering, and if suffering is to exist there must be conscious experience. Consciousness presupposes the possibility of life. Evil also presupposes the ability to choose to act immoral, which in turn presupposes free will. All of these (consciousness, biological life and free will) are difficult to account for in an atheistic world view. But his main focus is the meta-ethical issue: if God does not exist, there is no metaphysical grounding of objective moral values, and since objective moral values exist (according to Micael), then so too must God. This is the second contention I mentioned in the beginning, which Micael spends the rest of his text expounding upon.

Meta-ethical quandaries for the atheist

Let’s start by unpacking the objection. Micael thinks there are moral propositions (like “it’s wrong to torture someone to death for no reason”) that are objectively true, but he spends little time arguing for this in his essay. It would be very easy for an atheist reading Micael’s text to simply dismiss his entire argument by appealing to some type of moral anti-realism: the view that there are no objectively true moral propositions. In fact, some of the main positions in meta-ethics would accept that position and thus would have no problem with Micael’s argument: error-theory (there are no true moral propositions), ethical subjectivism (there are no objectively true moral propositions) and various types of non-cognitivism (there are no moral propositions) are all defensible philosophical positions to take in the meta-ethical debate on the anti-realist side (among several others), and Micael spends no time trying to show why they are false.

With that said, I’m tentatively (at least for the sake of this essay) inclined to accept that we can differentiate between true and false moral propositions. My reason for this is mainly linguistic: moral language is expressed as if it contains propositions, and genuine disagreement about these propositions seems to be possible. If I say “It’s wrong to eat meat” and you disagree, the disagreement appears to be about a fact that can either be right or wrong. If both our positions can be true at once (i.e. if there is no genuine disagreement) that requires an explanation that becomes more round-about than simply saying that one of us is right and the other is wrong. Furthermore, the proposition “it’s wrong to eat meat” seemingly isn’t just a psychological state but rather some type of relation between that state and a fact of the external world. (Of course, if you’re an anti-realist, none of what I just said make sense to you.) So, I accept that moral language is prima facia objective, and without a defeater to that position we are justified in holding to it – much like we’re justified in thinking that “1+1=2” is an objective fact about the world, without some further argument against it.

So, let’s accept that moral language expresses propositions, that some of these propositions are true, and that they say something more about the external world than simply signifying a psychological state of the agent in question. My feeling is that most theists (Micael included) would be happy to agree with this, and that they would want to jump in and say that the external source is God. Micael writes that, for the theist, the metaphysical substance (and hence its ontological grounding) of objective moral values are the thoughts of God. Moral values are made of God’s thoughts, which explains how they can exist out there apart from us. However, this seems to be a strange and rather unhelpful answer. If Micael’s aim is to establish that a theistic ethic is objective – i.e. not depended on anyone’s thoughts about a given moral proposition – grounding them in God’s thoughts would seem to make them, at best, divinely subjective. But what we’re after, if we’re looking for an objective ethic, is a way to ground ethics apart from what everyone thinks – God included. We want the truth-maker of the theory in question not to be a subject – like you, me, or God – but rather an object. If Steve think that eating meat is wrong, and his way of grounding that is to refer back to himself – his preferences, his feelings, his thought that it just is so – we call that subjectivism. In the same way God is no different than Steve.

So, it seems that Micael might fall into the metaphysical subjectivism camp after all, which is what he was attempting to argue against. However, you might think that it doesn’t matter if it’s metaphysically objective (i.e. grounded in an object and not a subject – like God) as long as it’s epistemically objective (roughly meaning moral statements can be considered true or false when considered rationally and impartially), but on Micael’s view this also seems impossible. Consider again the moral proposition “it’s wrong to eat meat”. On Micael’s view, if this statement is true it’s true in virtue of God existing and – presumably – thinking, or at least him having the propositional attitude that meat eating is wrong. But that fact in and of itself lends no credence whatsoever to it actually being true that meat eating is in fact wrong, and that we ought not to eat meat. For that to be the case a further unstated premise in Micael’s argument would have to be true, namely that we ought to do what God thinks we ought to do. Without that we seem to be trying to get an ought (don’t eat meat) from an is (it is the case that God has a certain propositional attitude – in this case, the thought that meat eating is wrong). Micael can’t make his ethic objective without first adding the moral obligation to obey God’s command to his ontology. And that obligation must be assumed to be the case as an axiomatic ought, logically prior to all other moral statements – and I see no reason to accept it. Micael gives us no such reasons.

Furthermore, the framing of Micael’s entire essay is a bit of a false dichotomy: Ethics is either objective and therefore grounded in God, or – if God doesn’t exist and “naturalism” is true – objective ethics and the idea of moral knowledge is illusory. Either theism, or naturalism. But the meta-ethical divide looks nothing like this, as we have seen. Rather, there are many different, common views of various types: naturalism, non-naturalism, error-theory, emotivism, expressivism, subjectivism, convergentism – as well as divine command theory.[4] So the idea that morality is somehow dependent upon God is just one view among many others, and a minority view at that. The problem with Micael’s text is that he seems to assume that there are only two meta-ethical positions (theism or naturalism), that the theistic position seemingly doesn’t need to be justified, and that the naturalistic position cannot be justified – neither of which is true.

Moral realism

So, Micael fail to establish that the theist has an advantage over the atheist in grounding an objective ethic, because he fails to show it’s even possible in a theistic framework. But, if God can’t ground moral judgement, what can? The reader might be disappointed to hear that I have no definitive answer to that question, but I’ll attempt to sketch two possible views.

Basically, when it comes to grounding objective moral values there are two main positions: either naturalism or non-naturalism. The naturalism construed here is not the general metaphysical view that “all that exist is natural”, but rather the meta-ethical view that moral statement express propositions that get their truth value from a natural fact – which means that moral properties are reducible to non-moral properties. Non-naturalists agree with naturalists that moral statements express propositions and that some of these propositions are true, but disagree that they can be reduced to the non-moral. Non-naturalists are therefore anti-reductionists, and construe moral values as sui generis: to say that “it’s immoral to eat meat”, while it might be explained by more basic moral principles, cannot be explained by a further non-moral fact of the world.

An inconvenient fact about Micael’s essay is that most theistic attempts to ground an objective moral theory – like Divine Command Theory – falls into the naturalistic category rather than the non-naturalist, since they try to reduce moral statements to a type of non-moral statement. Micael’s attempt to reduce moral propositions to God’s thoughts have that character as well (at least on the face of it). In the context of Micael’s text this is confusing since the entire premises of his essay is to construct a schism between the theist on the one hand, and the (albeit metaphysical) naturalist on the other – so it’s a bit troublesome that his own theory is a type of (ethical) naturalism. Making the distinction between metaphysical and meta-ethical naturalism elucidates that seeming contradiction, but since the entire discussion is about meta-ethics in the first place it’s needlessly confusing to construe the discussion in such a way. An objective theistic ethic of this type is a type of naturalism, albeit a super-naturalism – at least potentially so, because as we saw earlier, Micael’s theory is not even an objective theory of ethics.

But I digress. We have two possible ways of grounding an objective ethic: either moral propositions are reducible to some type of non-moral property, or they are true in virtue of some foundational or axiomatic moral fact. A version of the former I find plausible (though not wholly convincing) is some type of consequentialism based on wellbeing: the statement “it’s wrong to eat meat” then simply reduces to whether or not eating meat (and participating in and contributing to the meat industry) maximizes wellbeing – of everyone involved that can experience wellbeing and suffering – or not. The axiom this view requires us to accept is the idea that wellbeing is good and suffering is bad, which is open to a number of philosophical objection. But – unlike the axiom that we ought to obey God’s commands – the idea that suffering is bad is something that most (if not all) people accept. If not, ask them to put their hand on a hot stove and see how long they can keep it there.

Non-naturalism is more difficult to parse, but the idea is that goodness itself is a non-natural property (i.e. not reducible to natural facts) inherent in the world, perhaps similar to arithmetic or the laws of logic. The reductio of this view has long been to characterize it as implying that goodness exists “out there”, floating in some Platonic realm (see for example J. L. Mackie’s Argument From Queerness[5]). However, I think this is a mistaken way to construe the way normative facts might be said to “exist”. The ontological status of normative values as opposed to, say, chairs and tables simply is of a different type. Derek Parfit elucidates this view clearly in a single paragraph:

“Though nothing could be truer than the truths of arithmetic, these truths have no ontological implications. I am a Non-Metaphysical Cognitivist about arithmetic, about normative truths, and several other areas of our thinking. Such truths involve entities and properties that have no ontological status. Numbers, for example, are neither real nor unreal, and neither actual nor merely possible. Even if nothing had ever existed, in the ontological sense, there would have been various truths, and abstract entities, in a non-ontological sense.”[6]

So even if nothing had ever existed, it would still be true that 1+1=2 – even though there’d be no one around to do the calculation. This seems to me to be almost self-evident (though I know it clearly isn’t, since many philosophers disagree). Parfit’s view is that this also includes normative facts.

I leave it up to the reader to decide which version they find most plausible, if they in fact lean towards ethics being objective in the first place.

Now, I’ve clearly not given either of these two views justice, and the inquisitive reader would do well to stop reading this essay and start reading the contemporary philosophers arguing for these views instead of my truncated summaries. But, my point in mentioning these views is not to show them to be true, but simply to show that they both exist and are some of the main views in contemporary meta-ethics on the realist side. In fact, out of all the main meta-ethical views non-naturalism is probably the most well subscribed view of them all. And among ethicists around the world, 64% accept moral realism, and only 18% accept theism.[7] Lest I be accused of making an argument from authority, I will hasten to add that this in and of itself isn’t an argument that either moral realism or atheism is true just because philosophers say so. What it does show, however, is that the idea that God doesn’t exist on the one hand, and that moral values are objective on the other, are not strange views to hold in tandem – in fact, it’s the most common view amongst experts.

As Micael concludes his remarks about the futility of trying to find normative facts that make no appeal to God he writes that “to my knowledge nothing of the kind has of yet been presented by naturalistic moral realists”. He must have missed most the discussion in 20th and 21st century meta-ethics on the subject. The only philosopher he decides to quote as an authority on the subject is Alasdair Macintyre. As Macintyre is well-known as one of the most prominent Catholics in contemporary philosophy, it’s unsurprising that Macintyre also thinks that all types of non-theistic moral realism fail.

Conclusion

I’ve attempted to show that Micael’s meta-ethical critique of the existence of objective moral facts in a universe without God is lacking. His attempt to turn the tables on the atheist to show that normative facts in a universe without God are impossible is unconvincing, because he neither shows what a meta-ethical ontology grounded in God would look like in a way that could retain its objectivity, nor does he prove that it’s impossible without reference to God – he merely stipulates that it is so. At the end of his essay he concludes:

“I have argued that the naturalist first needs to justify the existence of an objective ethic in order to use the problem of evil as an argument against theism. This seems very difficult: personally, I wonder if it’s even possible.”

I agree with Micael that justifying objective normative values is a difficult endeavor – no meta-ethical position is self-evident, without flaws or easy to argue for. But as I’ve attempted to show in this essay, it’s not easier for the theist – in fact, it seems even more difficult to imagine normative values retaining their objectivity while at the same time being depended on the existence of God. Personally, I wonder if it’s even possible.

Rasmus Pettersson October 3, 2022

[1] Original title: Ondskans problem – en utmaning för både teismen och naturalismen, here translated from Swedish to English by me. All subsequent references to Grenholm’s essay are translated by me, without comment.

[2] I would go much further and say that free will theodicies fail even to account for moral evil, for a host of various reasons – however, I will leave that for a (possible) future essay.

[3] Layman, C. S. (2003). Moral Evil: The Comparative Response. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 53(1), 1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40035915

[4] Even Richard Swinburne, one of the most prominent contemporary Christian philosophers, has argued against divine command theory and the idea that the existence of God is a precondition of there being moral truths. See for example: Swinburne, Richard, God and Morality, The Royal Institute of Philosophy, Think 20, Vol. 7 (Winter 2008).

[5] Mackie, John Leslie, Ethics: inventing right and wrong, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977

[6] https://philpapers.org/profile/10297/myview.html

[7] https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=All+respondents&areas0=30&areas_max=1&grain=coarse

#essay #micael grenholm #philosophy of religion #christianity #theism #atheism #meta-ethics #moral philosophy #theodicy

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