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Perhaps the single greatest source of misunderstanding in popular atheist/theist dialogues seems to be the problem of moral realism – that is to say that some or all moral or ethical propositions have an objective truth value (for instance, the statement “rape is always wrong”).  This is an important point, as it’s used both as a logical argument for the existence of God and an emotive appeal to the consequences of atheism, and it’s easy to see why people wouldn’t want to agree with an atheist who, as a moral relativist, appears to deny that rape is unequivocally wrong.  All too often, my impression is that the two sides are arguing about different things, so I’d like to explain what I think the atheist community could do better.

The miscommunication happens at least in part because of the conflation of moral facts – what we reason to be good or bad – with moral intuition – what we feel to be good or bad.  The latter is trivially relativistic – people produce different moral judgements on different situations, as it witnessed by the fact that people who commit what we would consider great evils often feel morally justified in doing so.  They are also influenced in this by social and cultural circumstance – slavery, to pick an oft-used example, was considered morally acceptable by many more people in 18th century America than almost anywhere in the world today.  Our moral intuition is an evolutionary artefact of the benefits of group living, an inclination to act to benefit the group as a whole, and so obviously varies from individual to individual, and with the dynamics of said group.

However, if we are to exist in complex, organised societies, we require some means of determining moral facts that apply to all within that society.  This is where we often find a disconnect between the atheist and the theist, where the theist claims that if there are no moral facts and each person is free to make their own morality.  This is technically true of moral relativism*; it is, however, highly misleading, as it puts one in mind of moral anarchy where there is no consensus and no ‘good’ or ‘evil’ beyond what one personally approves or disapproves of.  It implies that as we cannot make an absolute moral judgement, we cannot make any moral judgement on more than an individual level.  An obvious example of a relativist moral system that lets us make such judgements is social convention – a moral fact is defined as a moral intuition that a majority of the group agrees upon, and if the intuition of the majority changes, so too does the moral fact.  This is something I feel more popular moral relativist atheists need to emphasise – allowing the moral realist vs moral relativist discussion to be framed in absolutist terms will do the atheist cause no favours.

The second disconnect is the assumption of many theists that objective morality may only be derived from a supernatural source (God).  William Lane Craig words this as a logical argument for the existence of God: 1) if objective moral facts exist, God exists; 2) objective moral facts exist (his supporting evidence appears to be “and I think we all know it”, but we’ve addressed that already); 3) therefore God exists.  It is 1) that is most problematic for me.  As it happens I am a moral realist – I believe absolute, objective moral facts exist, and that they are not dependent on any supernaturalism.  The moral theory I subscribe to is Alonzo Fyfe’s desire utilitarianism – where morality is defined in terms of desires (which we know to exist, making this an entirely naturalist theory).  A moral desire is one that tends to fulfil other desires, and an immoral desire is one which tends to thwart other desires.  Diverging into why I subscribe to this theory takes us outside of the scope of this post, but if you’re interested a more in-depth introduction can be found here; my point is merely that it, as well as objectivism, humanism, some forms of philosophical libertarianism and others, there exist theories of objective moral facts that are not dependent upon a supernatural power.

So those are the two points I feel atheists should emphasise when discussing morality: that moral relativism does not mean moral anarchy, and that moral realism is not dependent upon a god or gods.

*Amusingly, the idea that moral behaviour is defined as acting entirely in your own self-interest - egoism – is generally held to be a realist position.  I rather suspect that what most theists who rail against relativism (particularly in the USA) actually object to is pluralism – the idea that multiple conflicting moral facts are all valid in their own contexts.  We wouldn’t want to prevent the pious judging of other cultures, would we