What is "morality" and where does our sense of it come from?
When we look for reasons to justify our morality, we are looking to justify our own rationality. We want to know that our morality contributes in a significant way to our rational behavior.
The majority of people I suspect arrive at this through their religious upbringing which amounts to a textbook on how to behave. But as we’ve advanced in our thinking those ideas are riddled with flaws not befitting a work calling itself the inspired word of God. So the foundational idea, finds itself without a foundation. What guides our moral compass then?
I suggest, it can best be understood as a result of the collapse of foundationalism, which can in turn be best understood as posing a problem regarding the rational authority for our beliefs which are the basis for our morality. Traditional ‘bedrock’ foundationalism said that knowledge must be justified in order to be rational, and it attempted to justify our knowledge by deriving it from an indubitable and infallible source. Descartes, it is well known, declared that the God-given intellect is such a source, and that whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive with it must be true. But by the eighteenth century, many philosophers had grown skeptical of attempts to ground rational knowledge upon a priori intuition. These philosophers regarded sense experience as the only criterion of truth. They said that our general theories must be inferred inductively from experience. And they demanded that we eliminate beliefs that could not be grounded upon sense experience alone.
Kant pointed to Euclidean Geometry and Newtonian Mechanics as examples of what he called a priori synthetic knowledge. And he tried to explain how a priori synthetic knowledge was possible by saying that the mind imposes its laws upon nature in order to understand it, and that all rational beings impose the same laws. This was the situation in epistemology before Einstein. Kant’s attempt to salvage the rationality of science collapsed when Einstein imposed a non-Euclidean geometry and a non-Newtonian physics upon nature. Einstein described a natural world that rational beings before him had never conceived. And his descriptions were then corroborated by the results of the experiments that he conceived in order to test them.
Once again our morality must be consistent to maintain our rationality as human beings. But how is that done without a foundation that has just been shattered?
The success of Einstein’s theory shattered all hopes of explaining the rationality of science in terms of a priori foundations. If Kant could be wrong about the a priori certainty of Newtonian Mechanics and Euclidean Geometry, then how could anyone ever claim to be a priori certain again?
If we look to a foundation to supply us with our morality we can see that since the foundation is fallible, our moral decisions rest on a fallible source.
The observation statements that report our experience never entail the truth of a strictly universal statement (or theory). So universal statements (or theories) cannot be justified (or verified) by experience. But it takes only one genuine counter-example to show that a universal statement is false.
I think in the end, what makes our beliefs in our morals rational is not a foundation without its own stated need for itself as its own base which is an illogical assumption, but our ability to criticize those ideas.
Hume's problem of induction was ‘no number of true test statements would justify the claim that an explanatory universal theory is true’. So what makes our science rational is not that we can prove our theories are true. They are rational because they can be criticized. If our morality is based on a demonstrable foundation then we don’t see it. If we did, we’d have one moral identity. If we accept the fact the morality would embrace the truth, then what we would hope to do, is determine what is true. Our morality would have to be consistent with truth for it to be moral. What kind of morality would be based on a falsehood? We can’t demonstrate truth. But we can demonstrate what’s false. When we eliminate what's false from our sight, we have a clearer vision of what truth looks like. Our morality flows from that vision.
Likewise, in order to accept Locke, you must first accept the premise that his ideas are based on: That a God exists. I would have to ask, according to whom? The entire philosophical position of Locke is circular reasoning based on a Theistic view. God exists. According to who? the Bible. so what's the Bible based on? The inspired word of God. Beliefs must be justified by an appeal to an authority of some kind (usually the source of the belief in question) and this justification by an appropriate authority makes the belief either rational, or if not rational, at least valid for the person who holds it. In other words, it’s an appeal to authority and appeals to authority are always invalid. Even an expert can be wrong, if we accept our own fallibility.
So unless Locke is willing to launch into endless regress v his own dogma to justify the basis for his philosophy, he’ll have to resort to the circular reasoning I pointed to. What is the authority his philosophy is based on? It begins with a belief in God. That’s not demonstrable. That’s metaphysical and can never be shown as true. If God exists and Natural Law exists, then the obvious question is can God change natural law? If he can…then natural law is not universal since its possible to change it. If he can’t, then God is not Omnipotent. It seems that Locke subscribes to Divine Command Theory. The name “divine command theory” can be used to refer to any one of a family of related ethical theories. What these theories have in common is that they take God’s will to be the foundation of ethics. According to divine command theory, things are morally good or bad, or morally obligatory, permissible, or prohibited, solely because of God’s will or commands. The Euthyphro dilemma (Illustrated by Plato) begins by posing a question: Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?
If they are morally good because they are willed by God...then they are arbitrary since there is nothing to inform God of their moral goodness. If they are willed by God because they are morally good, then they must exist outside of God a priori to his designating them as morally good. How could anything exist outside of God? Did they precede God?