Are human values moral values?

Revisiting the Unbelievable? online discussion group this weekend after a period of absence, I noted that considerable to and fro was in full swing regarding the show in which Paul Thompson ("Sinbad") debated Mark Roques on the question of "human value". This is a pretty diffuse term to begin with, and the discussion on the show didn't define it with any precision. The debate illustrated a typical clash of mindsets that could not be resolved during the limited time for the show, and although the online forum discussion allows for greater depth, it isn't any more likely to reach a resolution.

Rather than dwell on that particular discussion in isolation, I'll simply point to its similarities with the 11 September 2010 edition of Unbelievable? — a discussion between Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, and Peter D. Williams of Catholic Voices. The show wasn't explicitly about human values, but it showed the same clash of mindsets as the more recent broadcast.

Andrew Copson is one of humanism's most articulate advocates, and the fact that he made no impression at all on Peter Williams during their discussion illustrates the futility of attacking the theist position on the metaphysics of morality. Unfortunately the show's format prevented this aspect of their disagreement being further explored. Not that such exploration would have made much difference, I suspect.

The theist position is that morality must by definition have a transcendent basis. The humanist position is that such a basis is neither proven nor necessary. While it may be too much to hope that theists such as Peter Williams will be swayed by the arguments Andrew put forward, there may have been theists (and others) listening to the show who don't necessarily buy into a fundamentally transcendent nature of morality, and who will see that Andrew's humanist viewpoint is a perfectly valid stance, and one that is based on reality rather than some disputed, unproven supernatural proposition.

Andrew's point at the end of the exchange was well made: as a result of the discussion he said he was more convinced of his own position than he had been before.

In brief, as I see it, the problem with the "moral argument for the existence of God" as espoused by some theists, is mainly one of definition. A humanist may go into some detail as to how he or she derives moral values without a belief that those values are god-given (as I have done myself), but theists are unable to accept such a line of argument because they believe that any values derived from something other than God aren't "moral" values at all. It's as if they define morality as "a system of values dictated by God". Never mind that such a definition impales itself on the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma — which, despite theistic protestations to the contrary, has never been successfully resolved.

Should atheists talk about evil?

That depends. "Evil" could be said to be an exclusively religious term. To talk about good and evil is to talk in the same realm as that occupied by "sin" — which seems a much more religious term.

Some might make the case that talk of "morality" is also exclusively religious. Indeed many religionists scoff at atheistic moral pronouncements, claiming that atheists have no business talking about morality because they have no grounding for it. But such a view is itself not so much grounded as perilously perched atop one horn of the Euthypro dilemma: that what is morally good is whatever God decrees — and however arbitrary such a decree may be, nothing else really counts as "moral".

It should also be recognised that some religionists make no distinction between morality and absolute morality. They seem unable to grasp that there can be any morality that isn't absolute. As an atheist who occasionally engages in online debate and discussion, I've come across this religious blind-spot more than once. After explaining at length how I see morality — what it is, where it comes from and so on — I'm still asked to justify it on metaphysical, transcendental grounds.

I'm currently reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I'm about halfway through, but so far Harris has fairly comprehensively laid the groundwork for a thesis that the distinction between facts and values is not as clear cut as the philosopher David Hume would have us believe. Hume's contention that you can't derive an ought from an is sounds on the face of it to be reasonable, leading to the kind of demand for moral grounding mentioned above.

Harris makes a good case for knowledge of moral facts about the world without resort to metaphysics. We know what the difference is between a state of everything being as lovely as it possibly could be, and the state of everything being as horrible as it possibly could be. And crucially we know that one of these is good and the other is bad. We do not need a transcendental moral law-giver to tell us which is which. Spread out between these two extremes are a myriad states of relative well-being, and while it may be difficult and in some cases impossible in practice to tell exactly where on a hypothetical scale of well-being these states lie, there can be no doubt that such a determination is possible in principle.

From what I've read so far it's too early to draw definitive conclusions from Harris's moral exposition, but I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.