Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything … that good always triumphs over evil….
From Secondhand Lions.
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to improve the practical argument for beliefs in God. Some theists, most famously Kant and William James, called our attention to a particular set of beliefs, the Jamesian-type beliefs, which are justified by virtue of their practical significance, and these theists tried to justify theistic beliefs on the exact same ground. I argue, contra the Jamesian tradition, that theistic beliefs are different from the Jamesian-type beliefs and thus cannot be justified on the same ground. I also argue that the practical argument, as it stands, faces a problem of self-defeat. I then construct a new practical argument that avoids both problems. According to this new argument, theistic beliefs are rational to accept because such beliefs best supply us with motivation strong enough to carry out demanding moral tasks.
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Notes
For example, Schroeder (2012) provides an argument for why “state-given” reasons like practical reasons are not necessarily the wrong kind of reasons for belief.
The wrong-kind-of-reason objection presents a more serious challenge to those who intend the practical argument to provide something stronger—a justification for believing God.
Adams’s original reconstruction contains only (1) to (5); I added (6) to complete the argument for the rationality of accepting theism. Following this interpretation of Kant, Zagzebski (1987) offers a similar argument in which she argues that moral knowledge, in face of the threat of moral skepticism, requires a belief in God. It should be noted that some philosophers take Kant’s argument more as an effort to justify morality than an effort to justify theism—thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pointing this out.
Stoics, of course, believe that a life in accordance with virtue is a happy life. But their notion of happiness, which has nothing to do with satisfying natural desires, such as desires for food and wealth, is quite different from the notion of happiness in the current argument. See, for example, Baltzly (2010).
There is an ambiguity regarding the term “virtue”: virtue as a quality of a person (one’s being virtuous), and virtue as a quality of a person’s action (one’s performing a virtuous act).
Some moral theorists, such as utilitarians, may understand a moral act as referring to an act that objectively brings about the best outcome, and a virtuous act as referring to an act that is accompanied by a good motive. Thus, for them, a moral act and a virtuous act are different. However, this distinction is irrelevant in the current discussion, given that the most relevant moral framework here is a Kantian or a theist one. There are two reasons why a Kantian or a theist moral framework is the most relevant in the current discussion. First, this is obviously an argument made by Kant to justify theistic beliefs. Second, if an act-centered moral framework such as utilitarianism is presumed by the argument, it will be unclear why theism is needed for believing in HHV, which is a point we will discuss later in this section. For these reasons, I treat moral action and virtuous action as synonymous in the current discussion.
For further discussions on challenges to Premise (4), see, for example, Adams (1987).
By contrast, Self-Fulfilling is immune to this kind of problem, because in Self-Fulfilling the likelihood of p’s being true is influenced by whether S believes p—that is, no conclusive evidence can be had prior to S’s choice of whether to believe p. If the agent already knows that p is false, then from the agent’s perspective, believing it to be true would not make p more likely to be true, and thus one of the conditions of Self-Fulfilling will not be satisfied.
This constraint is different from James’s momentousness condition, which has more to do with the nature of g’s practical significance. The current constraint has more to do with the nature of the reason(s) to want g.
This argument may sound like James Beattie's consolation argument in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism. However, Beattie’s argument places the justification of theistic beliefs on the good that such belief brings to the suffering—namely, consolation. In this sense, his argument is more in line with the Jamesian-type practical arguments. By contrast, the current argument places the justification solely on the moral reason to act morally.
It should be noted that some other theorists try to ground the motivating force of morality, in part, on the reason to act according to the function (ergon) of a human being. Does this idea of the human function bear any reason-giving force such that those who believe it would be sufficiently motivated to act morally even in the face of grave moral adversity? First, the idea of a human function bears a quite non-naturalistic smell. Some theorists have tried to construct a naturalistic interpretation of it. For example, Hursthouse (1999) developed a theory of ethical naturalism, according to which “human beings are ethically good in so far as their ethically relevant aspects foster the four ends [individual survival, continuance of the species, enjoyment and freedom from pain, and good functioning of the social group] appropriate to a social animal, in the way characteristic of the species.” This theory is naturalistic because the four ends, on the basis of which ethical good is evaluated, are natural ends. However, if the special reason-giving force of being characteristically human resides in the desirability of the four natural ends, then appealing to the human function will not provide any extra reason-giving force in addition to what we already have in desires for those four ends (survival, pleasure, and so on). Consequently, this theory fares no better than utilitarianism and classic social contract theory in terms of providing moral motivation, and thus would face the same problems that those theories face.
It may appear that my argument presupposes anti-Humeanism—the thesis that beliefs about moral facts have internal reason-giving force and thus are motivating. I find anti-Humeanism plausible (for reasons given by Shafer-Landau in his Moral Realism: A Defense). However, my argument need not presuppose anti-Humeanism, because the reason-giving force that I talk about here could come from our desires as well, desires that we would not have should we not believe in the existence of a transcendent being. For example, our desire for confirmation by a higher being or our thirst for the ultimate meaning could provide strong motivation for us to act morally.
Another often raised objection to the practical argument is that we cannot control our belief and thus, even if it is rational to believe in God, it is not in our control to choose what to believe. But this objection presupposes that the purpose of the practical argument is to show there is a rational requirement to believe in God. While some versions of the practical argument do seem to serve this purpose, it is not the purpose of the current practical argument. Moreover, even if we are not in control of what we believe, we are often in control of whether to put ourselves in a position that will lead us to believe.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Stephen Wykstra, Kelly James Clark, Max Baker-Hytch, Peter Vallentyne, and Crystal Allen for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to participants in the weekly Calvin College philosophy colloquium for their very helpful criticisms and suggestions. This research received support from the “Values and Virtues” Program of Nagel Institute at Calvin College (funded by Templeton Foundation) and from the Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation (Grant: Contemporary Epistemology Research, 14ZDB012).
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Liu, X. A moral reason to be a mere theist: improving the practical argument. Int J Philos Relig 79, 113–132 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9517-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9517-2