Now, collectively, we spend money in ways that presuppose that some religious doctrines are false.  The question is whether doing so violates the religious freedom of people who hold the doctrines whose falsity the policies presuppose.  So, for example, should Christian Scientists have to pay that portion of their taxes that go towards medical research?

Of course, it is seldom true that governments spend money in ways that completely satisfy anyone.  Freedom of belief and conscience do not provide grounds for refusing to pay taxes.  Nor do they provide a reason for the state not to fund research that might show some opinions to be false.  If freedom of religion is merely a species of freedom of belief and conscience, then the religious have no grounds to refuse to pay any portion of their taxes.

But if freedom of conscience and religion do not provide grounds for refusing to pay taxes, neither can there be any complaint about subsidies to religion on that basis.  In other words, the non-religious cannot complain about the subsidies to religion on principle.  (If the religious start to complain about having to pay taxes that support things that they disapprove of, however, then the non-religious can make the same complaint.  American Catholic bishops have complained about having to pay for health insurance that covers birth control.   They are hypocrites until they stop taking subsidies themselves.)

The question becomes whether the subsidies are beneficial to society as a whole.  If subsidies to religion are beneficial to society, the benefit must be that they promote morality.  But what they promote are particular views of morality based on theories that beg the question (the divine command theory) or that involve equivocation (natural law).   What they uniquely promote is liable to be false.  The promotion of false moral views combined with a sense of righteousness is not beneficial to society as a whole.   On the contrary, it is liable to promote conflict and disagreement, and to prevent the development of a shared view of morality.

It supports it provided there are no alternative explanations.

I have an alternative explanation.

First, what we believe about ethics depends not only on the foundation of morality, which I believe all moral agents share, but also on the rest of their beliefs.  People can believe relevant falsehoods and lack relevant truths.  In fact, since ignorance and error are common  and since people are going to ignorant of and in error about different things, disagreement about morality is also going to be common.

Second, evolutionary intuitionism explains morality as the by-product of a combination of adaptations that have been selected for because they improve our ability to complete medium to long range projects that are in our interest and because they enable us to co-operate with others on such projects.  When it comes to cooperation on the projects, it is more important that people agree than that they get things objectively right.   So, groups of cooperators will tend to agree internally.  There will not be the same motivation to agree with outsiders.    Consequently, insiders will tend to agree with each other and to disagree with outsiders.  What they agree about and disagree about will often be a matter of chance, depending on what their forebears believed falsely and failed to believe at all.  Since cultural groups are groups of cooperators, it will appear as though cultural relativism is true.

It follows that the observable variation is not necessarily evidence for relativism.

Ethical thought must take into account what Darwinian nature has made of us, and political provision must be made for that. But nothing ethical per se—nothing good or bad or even meaningful is to be found there.

Same old criticism of same old adaptationism.  The critic under-estimates biology while the criticized under-estimate ethics.  What the two sides share is an inadequate understanding of the range of evolutionary possibilities.

HT Andrew Sullivan

But, if morality was a matter of taste, we should not have any moral opinions about things we have not experienced any more than we have opinions about whether we like a particular food that we have not tasted.   I like durian wafer biscuits and I really like pandan cake but, in each case, I had to eat some to discover that I did.   In contrast, we have moral opinions about things we have not experienced.   People who have neither abused nor been abused nevertheless believe that it is wrong to abuse children sexually and would reject the notion that they could not know it was wrong just because they lacked relevant experience as either victim or perpetrator.   Hence, morality is not a matter of taste.  Therefore, relativism is false.

This brings us to the old natural law of Thomas Aquinas.

First of all, Aquinas based his conclusions on informal observations of a small and biased sample of the organisms that inhabit it.  Bonobos, mudskippers, and wallabies were thin on the ground in medieval Europe.

Second, when Aquinas purported to read God’s intentions off the piece of the natural world to which he was personally exposed, he based his conclusions partly on the false assumption that there are species essences, which means that his conclusions would have been unwarranted even if he had had an adequate sample of animal behaviour.  In a world like ours in which there is evolution by variation and natural selection and in which there are no species essences, the only thing that can be read off the living world is that God wants all organisms, provided they survive long enough to make the attempt, to try to maximize their genetic legacy by using capacities that are partly the result of chance variation and partly the result of natural selection in an environment that may no longer exist.

Finally, Aquinas systematically equivocated.    For example, human beings are supposed to be essentially procreative.  Not only is there no such thing as a species essence but some human beings are not procreative at all.  Aquinas and his followers infer that they are defective human beings.  The trouble is that if human beings are essentially procreative and if some individuals are not procreative, then what follows is that the latter are not human beings at all.  Thomists have to use one definition of human, presumably that they resemble human beings or have human parents, to categorize them as human in the first place and subsequently have switch to the false essentialist definition to label them defective.   That’s equivocation.   Thomists have to equivocate to reach any normative conclusions at all.

Intellectual garbage in, moral garbage out.

Let us assume that morality says something other than that an organism should do what maximizes its genetic legacy.   If that was what ethics said, it would tend to be either unnecessary (because it’s what organisms try to do anyway) or impossible to fulfil (because organisms lack the ability to do what is supposedly required).   It is implausible as an ethical principle anyway.

For evolved organisms that are moral agents, some types of moral theory are a better evolutionary fit than others.  In other words, the fact that an individual is both a moral agent and a product of evolution by variation and natural selection tells us something about the nature of ethics.  It does so because, if a moral agent accepts a set of ethical precepts and acts in accordance with them, his actions will have an effect on his fitness, that is, on his viability or fertility.  For example, the person who makes no moral distinction between his own and his neighbour’s children will probably be less fertile than someone who prefers his own children.  And, anyone who does not prefer his own life to his neighbour’s will probably be less viable than someone who prefers his own life.  These are statistical truths, not universal generalizations, so single counter-examples are insufficient to show that they are false.  If we take groups of individuals who respectively prefer their own offspring and do not prefer their own offspring, the average individual in the former group will be more fertile than the average individual in the latter group.

Ethics can either fundamentally prescriptive, telling us what kinds of actions to perform, or it can be fundamentally proscriptive, telling us what kinds of actions not to perform.

Suppose that ethics is fundamentally prescriptive.  There will be variation in the capacity to do what is prescribed.  It will always be harder for some than it is for others.   The less morally able an individual is, the more energy he or she will have to put into the attempt.  The more energy he or she has to put into the attempt to do what morality requires, the more his or her fitness will be reduced.  We have assumed that morality requires us to do something other than maximize our genetic legacy.  But natural selection rewards organisms that do what maximizes their genetic legacy.  This means that the less morally able is an individual, the greater is the selective pressure for amorality.   Hence, in a world in which evolution by variation and natural selection occurs, there would be selection for the elimination of a fundamentally prescriptive ethics.

Now, suppose that ethics is fundamentally proscriptive.   It primarily forbids acts such as killing, injuring, or robbing another.  The first thing to note is that it is almost never necessary for an organism to put energy into an effort to prevent itself from killing, robbing, or injuring another.   The second is that, although there will be instances in which killing, injuring, or robbing another increase the fitness of the perpetrator, these will be relatively rare.  The third is that, even when committing the acts would increase fitness, there will often be superior alternatives.   Situations in which there are no alternatives will be very rare.  Fourth, the benefit to the organism of committing such acts will seldom if ever be greater than the benefit to the organism not having to guard against being the victim of such attacks.   In sum, if ethics is fundamentally proscriptive, adhering to morality will not reduce fitness and may increase it.

It follows that, on the balance of probabilities, in a world in which moral agents are products of evolution by variation and natural selection, that is, in a world like the actual world, we should expect ethics to be fundamentally proscriptive and not fundamentally prescriptive.

One kind of prescriptive ethics is virtue ethics, which recommends achieving a state of eudaimonia.  Another is perfectionism, which recommends developing our abilities without regard to the effects on fitness.  No such ethical theory is plausible in a world in which moral agents are products of evolution by variation and natural selection.   They might have seemed plausible when people thought there was such a thing as a human essence but they are implausible in a world without species essences.

An additional problem is how to explain why one moral agent ought to regard another as worthy of moral consideration in his own right and, therefore, someone to whom he has obligations.  An ethical theory that does not provide a plausible explanation for this is unlikely to be true.

The explanation often given by philosophers these days is that the two moral agents share non-moral properties on which the property of being of value supervenes and that one ought to treat the valuable in some ways and not others.

But the supervenience account does not explain what needs to be explained.   If a moral agent denies the supervenience account, as I do, it becomes impossible to establish that he has obligations to others – even if the supervenience account were true.

First, someone’s being of value because he possesses properties on which his value supervenes does not entail that he has any obligations to others.  Proponents of the view that we have obligations to animals use the argument from marginal cases to contend that, for any set of properties on which value might supervene and which could possibly justify maintaining that only human beings are of value, some animals possess them, while some human beings lack them.  It follows that, on the supervenience account, there will always be some animals that are worthy of moral consideration in their own right.  Consequently, if someone’s being of value did entail that he had obligations, we would have to infer that animals have obligations that they obviously lack.  Furthermore, that the other individual is of value does not entail that the denier has any obligations either.  If it did, again, animals would have obligations that they obviously lack.

Second, on the supervenience account, it is not necessarily inconsistent for a person to affirm that he is of value but deny that he has any obligations to others.  He may be mistaken but it is impossible to charge him with inconsistency unless he actually believes not only that he is of value but also 1) that value supervenes, 2) that there is a set of specific non-moral properties on which value supervenes, 3) that he is of value because he possesses those properties, and 4) that the person with respect to whom he denies having obligations possesses those very properties and possesses no value-negating properties that counter-act the value-supporting properties.  But he is not inconsistent if he simply denies the supervenience account.

It would be question-begging to attribute the beliefs to him on the ground that we need to do so in order to explain why one moral agent ought to regard another as worthy of moral consideration in his own right.   To make the attribution, we need empirical evidence that he actually believes the propositions that he explicitly denies.   We do not have it and there is no prospect of our obtaining it.

It cannot be countered that rationality requires him to believe the supervenience account.  If it did, there would be empirical, logical, or conceptual support for the account.  But there is no such support.

It also cannot be countered that morality requires him to believe it without developing an ethics of belief that requires people to believe at least some true propositions and in particular the propositions that constitute the supervenience account.   But there is no argument for such an ethics of belief.   Furthermore, it would be peculiar to have an ethics of belief that required us to believe propositions for which we had no evidence and it was noted in the previous paragraph that there is no such evidence.  Finally, even if there were such an argument, it would be odd that obligations to believe would be more fundamental than obligations to act or to refrain from acting.  But, unless they were more fundamental, either there would be some other basis for our obligations to act or to refrain from acting, or the account would be circular.

It is an appeal to ignorance to argue that his denial must be false because he lacks support for it.  It is also an appeal to ignorance to demand that he accept the supervenience account unless he can come up with an alternative one.

At this point, some will surely protest that we must accept the supervenience account because it is the only game in town.  But, at some points in our history, this kind of reasoning would have enabled us to prove that disease is caused by demon possession.  The limits of the abilities of some individuals to conceive of possibilities are not the limits of possibility.

It follows that any moral theory that relies on the supervenience account, or that fails to address this issue at all, has not been developed sufficiently to take seriously.

But why would anyone keep results that they accepted on the basis of particular arguments when they realized that the arguments were inadequate?   The sensible thing to do would be to surrender the results when it turned out that they were inadequately supported.

The best explanation is that the retained results were never believed on rational grounds and that the arguments exist solely to make the results appear to be rationally held.

The only alternative is that the results are so intuitive that it would be irrational to reject them.  But this is not true of all the results retained by the new natural lawyers.  Consider the retained contention that sexual intercourse is immoral unless the participants are married and of the opposite sex and unless the act is open to procreation (or physically resembles the kind of sexual intercourse that is open to procreation).  Many people do not find plausible the “sex only within marriage and only when it is open to procreation” contention.  In fact, the only people who believe it are those who have been indoctrinated to accept certain theories and indoctrination warps intuitions.   The intuitions of people who have not been indoctrinated cannot be rejected without begging the question.

Moreover, it is biologically preposterous that sex would have been immoral before the development of the cultural institution of marriage unless there was a free rider problem and marriage was intended to eliminate free riders, that is, men who impregnated women and who left it to others to raise the children.   It would make sense for the community to make sure that the males who gained the evolutionary benefit of offspring paid their fair share of the costs of raising them, ceteris paribus.  And, controlled males would want to control females to make sure that they received the benefit that they “paid for.”   But it does not follow that it would be wrong for married couples to engage in sexual activity that was not aimed at procreation.  This is especially so because procreation cannot be the only biological function of sex for human beings – if it were, the amount of time and energy we put into it would be inexplicable.   Furthermore, it does not follow that sex outside marriage is wrong when the probability of pregnancy is controlled through birth control.  It is not accidental that the decline of the taboo against pre-marital sex has coincided with the availability of convenient and reliable birth control methods.  The immorality of sex outside of marriage is not a moral absolute but a function of social and economic conditions, and people’s intuitions have changed as conditions have changed – as they ought to.  False, theory-based, explanations for the immorality of non-marital sex are not similarly sensitive to changed circumstances and so persist despite the changed circumstances.

The new natural lawyers are strongly committed to the Roman Catholic variant of Christianity.  They are not trying to find the truth but to come up with an argument that supports views that happen to be held by the leaders of the organization, usually on the basis of the old natural law.  The new natural lawyers are not philosophers but partisan apologists who use philosophical argumentation to provide a façade of intellectual respectability for dogma.

The new natural law makes the same contribution to our understanding of morality as Potemkin villages do to urban development.

For example, a plausible moral theory must explain how it is possible to have moral agents who are impartial or who strive to be impartial or who even hold impartiality as an ideal when the causal processes of natural selection tend to produce individuals who are partial.  It must explain how impartiality can persist in a world in which the partial are more viable or more fertile than the impartial, as they would be, given individual selection, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, or group selection (if it occurs).

The claim is not that morality must be a product of evolution by variation and natural selection but that it would be eliminated by natural selection if it reduced the fitness of morally praiseworthy individuals, as it would if morality required them to be impartial.

Most evolutionary theories of ethics do not deal with this issue well.  Such theories assume that morality is an adaptation or a combination of adaptations and the existence and persistence of the conviction that impartiality is a good thing is a problem for the approach.   Although adaptationist evolutionary ethicists acknowledge the problem, they have a tendency to explain impartial actions away as “misfirings.”  Theoretically, it should not happen so they effectively deny that it does except as a “mistake.”  In other words, they go all creationist and discount disconfirming data on the grounds that it is disconfirming data.

If we are not going to ignore evolution or the evidence, our only choice is to explain morality not as an adaptation but as the inseparable by-product of an adaptation.  And if we do ignore them, we are not talking about the morality that exists in the actual world.

Most modern ethicists are science fiction writers.

But the theory is not the thing.   The existence of multiple competing explanations for a phenomenon does not prove that the phenomenon does not exist.  Along with what are now orthodox explanations for disease, there are competing explanations like karma, witchcraft, demon possession, and imbalances in one’s chi, but their existence does not entail that there is no such thing as disease.

Likewise, competing moral theories do not mean that there is no such thing as morality.