External Morality

Is it time to stop talking about objective morality?

I believe objective morality exists. I believe God is the only explanation for objective morality. But skeptics will run you in circles trying to prove that objective morality can exist apart from God or by bringing up the Euthyphro dilemma. Perhaps it’s time we take a page from their playbook and adjust our approach to the issue to disarm or even preempt some of their objections. We can do that by shifting our focus from objective to external morality.

I won’t rehash the defense of objective morality or a universal moral code here. Let’s skip straight to the point: a law is only a law when it comes from an authority. If it’s not external, it’s not binding.

Let’s allow for the sake of argument that evolution could insert in human beings the notion that one shouldn’t kill whomever one wants. Is that a law? No, it’s an impulse, a predilection for non-killing. Going against the impulse has no moral consequences. We have an instinct for self-preservation. People go against that instinct regularly, some harming themselves, some putting themselves in harm’s way for the sake of others. Evolution doesn’t care why you let yourself get killed; you’ve gone against the biological impulse to survive. From evolution’s point of view, killing yourself or sacrificing yourself to save your comrades in war are equal. But there’s no penalty beyond what you did to yourself.

If there is merely an evolutionary impulse not to commit murder, then the penalty for going against that impulse is ...? There is none. There can be none. “Nature” doesn’t care what we do. So there is no moral “law”. At best we would have an evolutionary moral illusion. Yet we know there is a moral law in the same way we know 2 + 2 = 4 or the law of non-contradiction. It’s an obvious part of reality to us. Murder is wrong. If it is not a product of nature, and if it’s binding, it has to come from above us, external to us.

So what would external morality mean? External morality is simply a rule that is imposed from outside you by some other authority. A rule you make for yourself is only a rule as long as you want it to be. A rule imposed on you from outside is a rule until that authority removes it.

Take the speed limit as an example. Everyone in your neighborhood can agree that 35 miles per hour is a safe speed limit on your roads. All is well as long as all the drivers abide by that, but if someone tears through there at 60, there’s nothing you can do about it. Someone with authority has to set the speed limit. And if that someone hates happiness and sets the limit at 25, it doesn’t matter that you all believe 35 is perfectly safe. The law now says anyone going faster than 25 mph may be punished.

Not only are we governed by laws, but our governments can be as well. We have local governments, regional governments, and national governments. A city’s laws may run afoul of its state’s laws or national law, and the states are bound by national laws.

But what are national governments bound by? If the US federal government decided to chunk the Constitution, is there someone who could say, “Naughty, naughty, you’re not allowed to do that”? Treaties are only worth the paper they’re written on. As we’ve seen many times, nations can back out of treaties, even brazenly break them if no one has the will to force the issue. There is no further level of government that can say, “You shall not exterminate people.”

If our highest human governments are the ultimate authority, when one of those governments decides to oppress its people, commit genocide, or start a war, they are not doing anything “wrong.” There has to be another layer of authority that can impose its rules on them.

This is where attempts to determine a naturalistic moral system fail. Even if there were a naturalistic objective morality, what would enforce it? If evolution has convinced us all that murder is “wrong” because that’s not a good way to propagate the species, that’s not binding on governments. If we define a moral system as “maximizing good and minimizing pain”, that’s not binding on governments. And what if China thinks Uighur slave labor maximizes good for the greatest number of people? Who can tell them that’s wrong?

There is no binding morality unless it can be imposed from above by an authority external to us.

In the end, moral systems all boil down to either divine command, utilitarianism, or relativism. People will try to show divine command is incoherent using the Euthyphro dilemma: “Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s good?” The fact that we can go between the horns of this dilemma doesn’t stop them from trying it again and again. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter. If God’s moral code is simply something he came up with by playing Boggle, it’s still binding on us in a way utilitarian codes can never be because he has the power and authority to impose it.

What do you think? Is external morality a useful way to approach the subject? Would this avoid some of the objections to objective morality? Let me know what you think.


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