In chapter 8, What Difference Does God Make to Morality?, in the book Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? (eds. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia), Richard Swinburne says the following:
Against William Craig , I shall argue that the existence and actions of God make no difference to the fact that there are moral truths
This all hinges on what Swinburne means by 'make no difference'. My view is God's existence and actions make a huge difference to the fact that there are moral truths. Without God (who is The Good), there would be no true moral propositions about goodness; without God's divine commands, there would be no true moral propositions about rightness. Rather than flesh all of that out here, I'll wait until Swinburne makes his case.
Swinburne proceeds to discuss the nature of actions, the idea that some moral judgments are true or false, and the idea that the moral properties of actions supervene on non-moral properties.
But the key idea Swinburne has is this:
So what makes it the case that promise keeping and truth telling (possibly subject to some qualifications about circumstances) are obligatory, and killing someone (except perhaps an enemy combatant in a just war or a crim inal justly sentenced to death) is morally wrong? My answer is simple-the very nature of the act itself. An act of killing being an act of killing (not in specified circumstances) entails that it is morally wrong. Just as a surface could not be blue without having something in common with a surface that is green, which something is being colored, so promise keeping and truth telling could not be what they are without having in common that they are (possibly subject to qualifications) both morally obligatory.
Thus, the nature of certain actions (I'll call it 'murder' rather than 'killing') entails that such actions are morally wrong. Notice that Swinburne asks what makes it the case that certain actions are obligatory or morally wrong. This sounds like he is asking for a ground here. And if he is, he is satisfied with that ground being the nature of the act itself. The analogy to surfaces is supposed to explicate this. Blue surfaces have something in common with green surfaces by virtue of the fact that both surfaces are colored surfaces. And so, telling the truth and keeping your promises have something in common by virtue of the fact that they're both morally obligatory.
This doesn't help me very much. I'm not asking how it is that two instances of a class have something in common. I'm asking for an explication of the ground. I'm asking how the 'nature of the act itself' grounds that such an act is morally wrong or obligatory. Grounds are something that exists (facts, states of affairs, events, things, etc.) that explains whatever is being grounded. Is Swinburne reifying natures since he appeals to the nature of actions as what makes it the case that such an action is morally wrong or obligatory? I'm not sure Swinburne wants to do that.
Perhaps Swinburne is arguing that green surfaces are green by virtue of the fact that such surfaces are colored. A green surface could not be green if 'green' was not an instance of 'being colored'. The analogy seems to imply that we need to quantify over existing things here. Some existing thing, a colored thing, needs to ground another existing thing, a green thing. If that's the way to understand the analogy, perhaps I'm to understand existing murder-type-things as being grounded by existing morally-wrong-things or existing obligatory-things. But what else could these things be but so many abstracta? Does Swinburne really want to ontologically commit himself to abstract objects such as the property 'being morally wrong' or the property 'being obligatory'?
Perhaps Swinburne could be an anti-realist about such natures or properties. But if he is, I can't make sense of the grounding-relation. The grounding-relation is a relation that involves, at least, the existence of whatever it is that's doing the grounding.
Swinburne then goes into how we "acquire a sense of morality" involving issues of "reflective equilibrium", which gets into moral epistemology. Most of Swinburne's thoughts here are very plausible.
Swinburne's view is made more explicit by his peculiar response to the Euthyphro Dilemma:
Put in theistic terms (and phrased simply in terms of command and obligation), the Euthyphro dilemma becomes the following: Is that which is obligatory commanded by God because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because it is commanded by God?
Kant gave the simple answer of taking the first horn of this dilemma;
other thinkers in the Christian tradition (perhaps William of Ockham, and certainly Gabriel Biet) have taken the second horn;
but the view that I am putting forward takes the first horn for some obligations and the second for others.
In my view we ought not to rape or to break a just promise (that is, one that we had the right to make), whether or not there is a God; here God can only command us to do what is our duty anyway.
But for the latter, only a divine command would make it obligatory to join in communal worship on Sundays rather than Tuesdays . That there are very general principles of morality, including not only the principle of the obligation to please benefactors but other principles as well, was recognized by both Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus .
Aquinas held that "the first principles of natural law are altogether unalterable." He does not tell us much in the Summa Theologiae about which these are , but he does write that they are principles too general to be mentioned in the Ten Commandments, principles such as that no one ought to do evil to anyone, which he says are "inscribed in natural reason as self-evident."
Scotus tells us that the only moral obligations from which God could not dispense us are the duties to love and reverence God himself, which Scotus sees as constituted by the first three of the Ten Commandments .
So both writers hold-and, I have claimed, are right to hold-that there are necessary moral truths independent of the will of God, but that the will of God makes a very great difference to what are the contingent moral truths.
That's it. End quote. I'm not saying that Swinburne doesn't go on to flesh out really interesting consequences of his position: that there are necessary moral truths independent of God's will, consequences in moral epistemology and consequences having to do with the difference God's existence and commands make to certain goods and/or contingent moral facts, or making us aware in certain ways of the relevant necessary moral truths. But there isn't any argument for the thesis that necessary moral truths are independent of God's will. He quotes Aquinas and Scotus. But nothing in those quotations comes close to providing an argument for how the necessary moral truths are independent of God's will. They provide good reason for how the moral truths are necessary, which is close in meaning to unalterable. But that's all that can I see.
The key premise here (or perhaps intuition) is that Swinburne believes that rape, for example, would still be wrong whether or not God exists. God's commands here would involve commands for us to do something that is already our duty even if no commands were given. And it's already our duty to not rape whether or not God exists because (and here is the intuition again) the moral truth (one ought not to rape) is necessary.
The problem here for Swinburne's view is that he doesn't provide a reason to accept the thesis that necessary truths can't be, or don't need to be, ground. Of course, it might depend on the kind of alethic necessity for a particular philosopher. But in this particular case it seems evident that Swinburne needs to provide a positive reason for thinking that the mere necessity of moral truths is sufficient basis for the thesis that necessary moral truths are not grounded in God.
Craig makes a criticism along these lines:
The assumption here seems to be that necessary truths cannot stand to one another in relations of explanatory priority. Not only do I see no reason to think that assumption true, but it strikes me as obviously false.
For examle, "States of consciousness exist" is necessarily true, since "God exists" is necessarily true. That is to say, the fact that a personal, metaphysically necessary being like God exists explains why it is necessarily true that states of consciousness exist.
To give a nontheological example, the axioms of Peano arithmetic are explanatorily prior to "2 + 2 = 4" , as are the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory to the theorems thereof.
In metaphysics, "No event precedes itself' is necessarily true because it is necessarily true that "Tempo ral becoming is an objective and essential feature of time."
I should regard as utterly implausible the suggestion that the relation of explanatory priority in such cases is symmetric. But if necessary truths can stand to one another in asymmetric relations of explanatory priority, then there is no objection so far to holding that moral values exist because God exists.
This seems to me very plausible. And since Swinburne doesn't press the dialectic beyond the idea that moral truths are necessary, I don't have a good reason to go along with him here.
