Can Atheist Michael Martin be a Moral Realist?

This is a good article by Philosopher/Apologist Paul Copan,

At the outset of his essay, he states that the theistic claim that "atheists can provide no objective reason for not raping people" is "startling." He argues against the Mackian thesis that atheistic morality is necessarily subjective. Furthermore, he maintains that the commonly-held theistic position on morality (rooting objective morality in God's character rather than his commands) still does not escape the Euthyphro dilemma.

Is Atheistic Morality Necessarily Subjective?" A Question of Epistemology vs. Ontology

Martin points to two Oxonians, Richard Swinburne and J. L. Mackie, to reinforce his emphasis that an atheistic ethic need not be subjective. Martin claims that a case can be made for an objective morality that is independent of what particular human beings happen to believe or practice with regard to morals. Positively, Martin approvingly cites Swinburne's argument: "Genocide and torturing children are wrong and would remain so whatever commands any person issued." Martin adds: "[Swinburne] assumes that it is possible to objectively settle moral disputes concerning this topic if God did not exist." General moral principles are necessarily true given their allegedly analytic nature, he argues. Thus there is no possible world in which such moral truths cannot be coherently conceived.
Martin rightly notes that not all theists share Swinburne's perspective. These theists, Martin adds, "maintain that atheistic morality must be subjective," and they usually assert this "without argument."
What is the position of these theists? In Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, Martin lays out their premises, which we'll call Theistic Argument A ( TA-A ):
If morality is objective and absolute, then God exists.
Morality is objective and absolute.
Therefore, God exists.
To make their case, Martin argues, theists must refute the following argument (Atheistic Argument A, or AA-A ) before their views on theistic morality can be taken seriously:
1. In order to show that atheistic morality necessarily is subjective, theists must show that all attempts to ground objective morality on a nontheistic basis fail.
2. But theists have not shown that all attempts to ground objective morality on a nontheistic basis fail.
3. Hence, theists have not shown that atheistic morality is necessarily subjective.

One is led to believe that Martin will provide just such a basis, but, as we shall see below, his attempts to "ground objective morality on a nontheistic basis" do indeed fail. In addition, the challenge Martin offers can be taken up by theists, who can show that atheism lacks a sufficient basis for objective morality and, going further, show how theism furnishes precisely the necessary moral context. We shall proceed to take up this two-fold challenge.
To cite J. L. Mackie as the atheistic perspective on ethics, Martin claims, is unfair, as his is not the only one to consider. Mackie's views "certainly do not represent the views of all atheists." Nor do Mackie's arguments for a subjectivist ethic work, Martin holds. For instance, Mackie argues from disagreement (disagreement in ethical opinions supports ethical subjectivism) and from strangeness (moral properties are so strange that they would not fit into a naturalistic worldview). Martin disagrees with both of these arguments.
In response, Martin directly addresses the matter of disagreement, but his response to the strangeness argument is that, contra Mackie's internalist account, "moral realism is compatible with externalism." Martin does not give much of an argument for the latter except for a passing footnote
However, in the next section of his essay ("Is Theistic Morality Necessarily Objectivist?"), Martin offers a more substantive argument for his position. I quote him at length:
Let us assume for the moment that the Biblical position on rape is clear: God condemns rape. But why? One possibility is that He condemns rape because it is wrong . Why is it wrong? It might be supposed that God has various reasons for thinking rape is wrong: it violates the victim's rights, it traumatizes the victim, it undermines the fabric of society, and so on. All of these are bad making properties. However, if these reasons provide objective grounds for God thinking that rape is wrong, then they provide objective grounds for others as well. Moreover, these reasons would hold even if God did not exist. For example, rape would still traumatize the victim and rape would still undermine the fabric of society [even if God did not exist].
Thus on this assumption, Martin claims, in this case, atheists could provide objective grounds for condemning rape?the same grounds used by God. Elsewhere Martin makes a similar statement about cruelty: "If I criticize Jones for being cruel, the criticism might well be correct even if God does not exist."
Here a major deficiency emerges in the objectivist ethic of the atheist. Martin completely ignores the ontological level of the discussion. He merely addresses the epistemological level and appears content with stopping there. That is, what counts as being good is one thing, but how we know the good is another. Atheists may be aware of the content of morality, but this does not furnish them with the basis for explaining how it is that there are moral truths and that we are able to know them.
Let me reiterate. Martin's working assumption seems to be this: If a nontheist can simply recognize or know that objective moral values?and thus universal moral obligations?exist, the job of justification is complete. We can be good without God! But this does not go far enough. The theist does not dispute that nontheists can know moral truths or principles. Whether atheists, Confucians, or Theravada Buddhists, nontheists can properly affirm that the Holocaust or Stalin's purges were immoral.
However, Martin does not tell us why such moral knowledge is possible. At the epistemological level, Martin and Swinburne are correct: One need not appeal to God to know whether or not cruelty, rape, genocide, or torturing children is wrong.
But if Martin thinks his task is completed, this is where he makes his major mistake. He gives no ontological foundation at all for his reasons to oppose child molestation, torture, or rape . It is unquestionable that rape is wrong because it violates the victim's rights and traumatizes the victim. But to affirm this is still not to offer the ontological basis for such affirmations. In his popular-level book The Big Domino in the Sky, Martin makes the same sorts of pronouncements, but again without ontological justification. For instance, he rightly declares that there have been "atheists of high moral character." Thus there is no reason to think that atheists are less moral than believers. Of course, Martin concedes, the question is not one about the moral character of atheists, but "whether they can justify their actions."
So does Martin justify his vantage point? Hardly. The sort of "justification" Martin offers is to claim that "there have been many secular moralities." "There have been various attempts to construct a naturalistic foundation of ethics that is both objective and absolute." Certain ethical philosophers "have given objective accounts of morality that are compatible with atheism."
Notice that Martin's position simply presupposes the dignity of human beings, universal human rights, some objective purpose (e.g., that life has meaning if lived in a particular way), moral accountability, and the like. When Martin speaks of "bad making properties," he simply assumes that human beings possess an intrinsic worth which snails and sea urchins do not. But on what naturalistic or materialistic basis can human dignity or human rights be affirmed? What is it within Martin's worldview that furnishes us with such an ontology or metaphysic of personhood as being of intrinsic value or worth? Nothing, so far as I can see. Moreover, Martin makes no effort. He merely claims that "ethical absolutism is compatible with atheism." Martin suggests, following Roderick Firth, an ideal observer view of ethics (in which a "good" is what "an ideal observer would approve under ideal condition") is an atheistic alternative. Another suggestion Martin makes is William Frankena's "sophisticated version of non-cognitivism." Even if such views could carry the day for the atheistic moral realist, the problem still remains?namely, accounting for the metaphysical or ontological status of personhood and its attendant intrinsic goodness still remains. While moral truths can be known and moral judgments made in both systems, these systems still presume upon ?without justification?the foundation human dignity, human rights, and obligations. But why suppose that human persons have moral worth?
Throughout his writings, Martin offers no reasons. He simply states that it is so:
I see no reason to suppose that if the cultural and intellectual accomplishments of X are worthless, then X's life is worthless. A mother who has raised intelligent, healthy, morally upright children, a doctor whose life has been devoted to caring for the indigent, a teacher who has spent a lifetime teaching pupils to be just and compassionate?each may have accomplished little from a cultural or intellectual point of view, but each has led a worthwhile life nevertheless.
But if Martin is going to insist that "it has not been shown that all attempts to ground objective morality on a nontheistic basis fail," he must do more than repeat the mantra: "But human beings do have dignity."
Here the theist offers just such a foundation: Human beings possess intrinsic or inherent worth because they are made in the image of God. They share the moral likeness of a personal God in their very nature or being, and, by virtue of their personhood, they are moral agents. As Keith Yandell puts it: "nothing which is not a person is a moral agent. Morality concerns only persons." Their personhood derives from the personhood of God. Their having basic moral intuitions about justice, goodness, and kindness reflect this moral connection. Thus we ought to be moral because we have been made as moral beings in the likeness of a good God. We have been made to know God personally, and when we are in right relationship with God, all other goods find their proper place; that is, we function the way we were designed to function. Thus, when human beings experience guilt (for murder, adultery, theft), it is not because they have simply violated societal laws, a social contract, or some set of Neoplatonic laws that are somehow part of the furniture of the universe. They have violated the character of the ultimate personal Being. Mackie's problem about the queerness of morality in a non-theistic universe persists; objective morality is just as strange as mental properties: just as mental properties are distinct from physical ones, so goodness belongs to persons rather than impersonal objects.
Martin, who frequently cites David Brink as offering a model of moral realism without appealing to God, may likely argue: "But why can't moral properties be viewed as comparable to supervening mental properties? After all, many nontheistic contemporary philosophers of mind hold this view." Brink himself reasons: "Assuming materialism is true, mental states supervene on physical states, yet few think that mental states are metaphysically queer." However, such optimism is misguided, as it assumes a smooth transition from the nonmental to the mental (and the nonmoral to the moral). But to use mental supervenience as a plausible analogy for moral supervenience is astonishingly bold and, so far as contemporary philosophy of mind goes, unwarranted.
The same could be said for moral properties. Just as consciousness is easily accommodated within a theistic framework (in which a maximally-aware Creator creates conscious beings), so moral properties fit into a theistic scenario (in which a supremely-good/moral personal Being creates morally-constituted persons). Therefore affirming human dignity and universal human rights is not simply a brute fact. A theistic universe helps make far better sense of human dignity or human rights than a non-theistic, naturalistic universe. The Christian offers a superior contextual framework?a "richer metaphysical account as to why the cosmos is such that there are objective values."
Martin might reply: "You theists might claim that God is the sufficient reason for the existence of morality, but you are still just positing God in terms of a brute fact, some ultimate stopping point. So what prevents the atheist from claiming that objective morality and intrinsic human dignity simply exist as brute facts?" Up to a point, the atheist is correct: justification must end somewhere. But this does not mean that the theist and atheist are at an impasse.
Again, context is important. For instance, a hundred dollar bill has a greater value than a single dollar bill?even though they are the same size and contain (roughly) the same amounts of ink. It is the context (in this case, a conventional one) which enables us to ascribe varying values to these pieces of paper. What then is Martin's context for making sense of human worth? From his atheistic viewpoint, "There is no cosmic purpose if there is no God." We have before us the two relevant alternatives: (a) There is no cosmic purpose if there is no God and (b) There is a cosmic purpose if there is a God. At least prima facie, the existence of an objective human purpose is more obvious if God exists than if he does not.
Now Martin takes position that moral properties do exist independently of human beings:
Atheists not only can but have rejected this view [that human beings create values and do not discover them]. There is no reason why atheists cannot argue that values are discovered. For example, atheists such as Bertrand Russell in his early ethical writings argued that ?good and bad are qualities which belong to objects independent of our opinions just as much as round and square do.' Such qualities were discovered not created.
Now correlated to this affirmation is that somehow, intrinsic worth and a moral constitution supervene upon human beings through their having achieved a certain level of organismic complexity . According to David Brink, to whom Martin approvingly refers, this position is the most plausible position to take: "it is best for the [nontheistic] moral realist to claim that moral properties supervene upon physical properties."
So with this moral constitution, human beings have some inherent purpose, and therefore one ought to live one's life in a certain way (Says Martin: "Like Kant, I believe that one has a duty to fulfill one's talents.")
But if Martin's claim that there is "no cosmic purpose" is true, the relevant context for affirming a limited purpose is far from obvious. Martin moves from purposeless, impersonal, amoral, materialistic or naturalistic processes to? viol? !?the emergence of intrinsically-valuable, personal, moral beings. Again, I simply do not see that his worldview has the ontological resources to bring about this remarkable transformation. Within theism, on the other hand, there exists a continuity, a smooth transition of intrinsic dignity?from a maximally-great personal Being to valuable created persons?as opposed to the naturalistic shift from the nonmoral to the moral. This moral continuity ?the transference of moral properties from one moral Being to beings made in his image?has greater explanatory power than the disjunction between them on the naturalistic view. In the theistic view, moral properties have an ontological simplicity?as opposed to the naturalistic construal, in which moral properties are not ontologically simple.
Thus theists can take up Martin's challenge and offer a far more plausible basis for objective morality than the atheist can. We noted earlier Martin's argument ( AA-A ) against the theist who claims to have an objectivist ethic that the atheist does not have: In order to show that atheistic morality necessarily is subjective, theists must show that all attempts to ground objective morality on a nontheistic basis fail. But theists have not shown that all attempts to ground objective morality on a nontheistic basis fail. Hence, theists have not shown that atheistic morality is necessarily subjective.
On the epistemological level, Martin is rightly shocked by "Christian apologists"?whoever they may be?who claim that "atheists can provide no objective reason for not raping people." Theists and atheists alike can affirm the same moral principles as objectively true. But at the ontological level, it is the theistic apologist who is rightly shocked at Martin's claim. For Martin's worldview offers no obvious resources to affirm the uniqueness and dignity of the human being, individual human rights, personal responsibility, moral obligation, and the moral value of a cohesive social fabric. Thus, we can reply to Martin with the following syllogism (Theistic Argument B, or TA-B ): To ground an objective moral order, the atheist must show how naturalism furnishes an ontological framework for the intrinsic dignity of human beings, universal human rights, and moral responsibility. The atheist has shown no such ontological foundation (based on naturalism) to account for intrinsic human dignity, human rights, etc. Therefore, the atheist's attempt to ground an objective morality fails.
On the other hand, the theist (as we saw above) can make a plausible moral connection between God and human beings. It is this personal and moral connection which grounds the dignity/value, rights, purpose, and responsibility of human beings. It is only on this assumption ?at the ontological level?of humans' being intrinsically valuable that we can rise to the next level?the epistemological ?to know that rape, for instance, "violates the victim's rights . . . traumatizes the victim . . . undermines the fabric of society, and so on."
What we have before us is then is a matter of theism's greater contextual probability. Furthermore, there are certain additional facts about the world which are much more probable or make much more sense if God exists than if he does not: exist at all). "
Moreover, the theistic foundation for morality has the virtue of greater simplicity on its side in that it offers a plausible linking of two distinct entities that, in an atheistic world, must be joined in some ad hoc fashion. These two entities are objective moral values and human persons.
On the one hand, a metaphysical naturalist like Martin apparently presupposes that moral properties supervene on "correctly-related" or "complexly-conjoined" non-moral ones. Then somehow two apparently unconnected components within the universe?namely, (a) these emergent moral properties and (b) the moral principles of justice, mercy, and kindness, which are analytically-true brute givens whether or not any human beings exist?happen to be, by fantastic coincidence, intimately related. Now Martin holds that moral truths exist as part of the cosmic furniture, and he also maintains that humans (independent of these standards) evolved naturalistically to such a point at which they became moral beings.
But why think that these moral principles which exist even apply to us or morally obligate us? To say that moral values are "just there" seems insufficient. Isn't it an extraordinary coincidence that out of all possible creatures that have evolved, human beings should just happen to have obligations to these pre-existing, analytically-true objective moral values? It seems that the evolutionary process somehow anticipated the arrival of human beings on the scene. But a less ad hoc candidate is the theistic alternative. (And, we could add, even if moral properties did exist on a naturalistic scheme of things, why think that moral obligation exists?particularly when such a duty conflicts with my self-interest?)
Whereas these are two unconnected entities appear to pose a problem for the metaphysical naturalist, theism brings them together in a much more concise way: A personal God, who is the source of moral values, makes human persons in his image, and thus they share important moral and spiritual characteristics with God. Theism provides a match between our moral make-up and the structure of ultimate reality.
Thus objective moral values are quite at home in a theistic universe. Given God's existence, moral realism is natural. But given an atheistic universe (despite Martin's claims to the contrary), objective morality?along with its assumptions of human dignity, rights, and moral responsibility?is unnatural and surprising and "queer."