"If everything happens for a reason, then we don't know what reasons are"

In this post I'm going to comment on an essay by Sharon Street: “If ‘Everything Happens for a Reason,’ then We Don’t Know What Reasons Are: Why the Price of Theism is Normative Skepticism.” In Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief: Disagreement and Evolution, eds. Michael Bergmann and Patrick Kain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 9. 

Sweet is an atheist philosopher, and her essay is a variation on the argument from evil. Here's a sample:

Given the way atheists are often stereotyped in the culture at large, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that arguments from evil against the existence of God start from a place of moral conviction and moral common sense. More importantly, as I will try to bring out, they refuse to leave that place in the face of skeptical challenges from the theist. In the exact reverse of what is often supposed, it is the atheist who insists on taking moral appearances at face value until given a strong reason to do otherwise, and the theist who pushes a deeply skeptical hypothesis according to which moral reality is very different from what it appears to be. 

Let us begin with some moral common sense…One among endless possible examples of horrific real-life evil is a drunk-driving accident…In the crash, a seven-year-old girl, who had been a flower girl at the wedding, was decapitated…The mother picked it up and clung to it, screaming to her husband that "Katie is dead." In spite of repeated requests by emergency personnel, the mother refused to give up her daughter's head, holding onto it for nearly an hour as she watched the rest of her family being cut from the wreckage. 

The idea that there was a good moral reason to permit this scene of unimaginable horror to take place defies every last shred of moral common sense. This is so in the sense that if there was such a reason, then the moral reality of the world is very different from what our everyday moral and factual capacities are capable of discerning. I assume that no one among the likely readership of this essay would seriously entertain the thought that any of the parties deserved this. What, then? When we examine the world as we might have thought we knew it, we can find no circumstance–moral, empirical, or otherwise–that would seem to supply any good reason to permit such an event to occur. Importantly, for our purposes, this is not to say that there couldn't be a morally good reason to permit such an event to occur. Of course there could be. There could be a morally good reason to permit anything. But it is to suggest that cleaving to the view that there was a morally good reason to permit this crash to happen–which, as I will argue, belief in God entails–might come at a very high price. It might come, in particular, at the price of our ability to trust our own faculty of moral judgment going forward. If there was a morally good reason to permit this to happen, in other words, then we are hopeless judges of moral reasons. 

Presumably we can all agree that in such circumstance it would be morally depraved not to prevent the accident…Suppose that one day you see the man from across the street standing there and watching impassively while one of his children drowns in front of him in the family swimming pool. The natural response to this factual observation would be to revise one's view that the man from across the street is a good man…Another logically available option is to hold fixed the moral idea that the man from across the street is a good man, and instead revise one's view that "A good man does not stand by and watch while his child drowns." If, for some reason, one was unshakably convinced that the man from across the street was a good man, then even if one had no idea the man's reason for standing there impassively and watching while his child drowned, one might opt to revise one's commitment to the general moral principle about what a good man does, and conclude that "There can sometimes be a good moral reason for a man to stand by and watch his child drown, and this is one of those cases, even though I don't know what the reason was." 

But everything we have seen so far is that moral common sense is no guide whatsoever to what God would or wouldn't do with regard to any matter. Moral common sense would have suggested that God would prevent a flower girl's decapitation, that he would not permit tsunamis that kill tens of thousands of innocent people at a time…But in every case without exception, moral common sense has turned out to be no guide at all to what God will or won't do. This assumption is eviscerated on a daily basis by every horrendous evil that God permits to happen for reasons that are completely opaque to us. 

If we simply pay attention to how things appear to us–both morally and factually–then the [drunk driver] accident would appear to be an utterly unmitigated evil. It would appear that there is nothing redeeming about its having happened, that there is nothing in the world that makes it okay that it happened. These are appearances that I think we should take at face value until we find an extremely good reason to do otherwise. To go with theism is to deny these appearances. It is to claim that, contrary to how things look, such horrors are not unmitigated after all–that in spite of how it might seem, there is something redeeming about this thing having happened, and there is something that makes it okay that this happened. To my mind, this is not only a radical denial of the appearances, but also a moral disservice to the people who were involved. It furthermore seems to me a disservice to any force at work in the universe that is worthy of the name "God". Nothing makes it okay that this accident happened. 

Her argument is powerfully expressed. She makes about as strong a case for atheism (from the problem of evil) as can be made. 

1. I take issue with her contention that Christian theism exacts an extra cost on morality. Both Christians and atheists live in the same world. A world where horrendous things happen. In that respect, Christians and atheists have both been dealt the same hand. And it's a hard hand to play, for Christian and atheist alike. If I were the dealer, if I was a cardsharp, my inclination would be to reshuffle the deck, to yield an easier hand. 

However, Christian theism doesn't impose a moral surcharge, in contrast to naturalism. To the contrary, Christian theism offsets the moral predicament. By contrast, naturalism is the counselor despair. 

2. Her allegation that the atheist takes moral common sense seriously whereas it is the Christian who's the moral skeptic is tactically adroit, but deceptive. For instance, in the very same book, fellow atheist Walter Sinnott-Armstrong mentions that some philosophers are moral nihilists. And, of course, those are naturalists. 

Moreover, he discusses psychopaths. These are statistically deviant, standing outside the normal moral community. If, however, their viewpoint is rational, that poses a challenge to moral realism. Here's a precis of his chapter: 

Despite disagreements on some moral issues, almost all individuals and cultures agree on certain basic moral judgments, such as that theft, rape, and murder of peers for personal gain are immoral. Psychopaths seem to be an exception. To test this common assumption, this chapter surveys research on moral judgments in psychopaths. The evidence is less clear than many assume, but probably some psychopaths disagree with our fundamental moral judgments. Does this disagreement support the skeptical conclusion that our fundamental moral judgments are not epistemically justified? Not if psychopaths are irrational, but the argument is that they are not irrational in any way that would justify dismissing their views as irrelevant to moral epistemology. These conclusions have radical implications within many theories, but contrastivist moral epistemology is shown to handle these surprising facts.

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669776.001.0001/acprof-9780199669776-chapter-3 

So her insinuation that the popular view of atheists is a caricature is misleading.

3. More to the point, the fact that many atheists take moral common sense for granted when mounting the argument from evil doesn't mean their assumption is warranted. Indeed, I'd say that cuts against the grain of naturalism. They lack the courage of their convictions. Many atheists blink at the grim implications of their worldview. And that's not just my opinion. As I've often documented, there are secular thinkers who admit that naturalism conduces to moral and/or existential nihilism.

4. Sweet constantly appeals to taking "moral appearances at face value". But that's a category confusion. Good and evil don't lie on the surface of events. Moral properties aren't empirical properties. You can't directly perceive right and wrong, good and evil. Rather, moral judgments are something we bring to events. We evaluate events in relation to a moral frame of reference that's physically imperceptible. This doesn't mean events lack moral qualities, but that's not something you can simply read off the events, like shapes and colors. 

5. In addition, it's demonstrably false that atheists, or at least thoughtful atheists, take "moral appearances at face value". To the contrary, many atheists peel back the moral impressions to explain what lies behind the moral impressions. Take the distraught mother, clutching the dismembered head of her young daughter. From a cold hard Darwinian perspective, that's the conditioned response of a higher mammalian mother. Natural selection has programmed female animals to be protective of their young, and feel distress when their young are killed. That confers a survival advantage. From a Darwinian perspective, maternal instinct isn't moral or immoral but amoral.

Likewise, Sharon Sweet is a higher female mammal, and her reaction to the accident reflects the same evolutionary conditioning. Yet there's nothing objectively moral about it. That's how the mad scientist of naturalistic evolution wired their brains. But while their brains are wired for empathy, the brains of psychopaths are wired for indifference or cruelty. 

6. In addition, her appeal to moral common sense is confused. The same event can be bad in one respect but good in another. Take science fiction scenarios where a time-traveler struggles to make the future a better place. And he may succeed in his immediate objective, by eliminating a particular evil. The problem, though, is that changing one variable in the past changes multiple variables in the future. He's unable to control the side-effects. Unable to eliminate the bad variables while leaving the good variables in place. And moral common sense can acknowledge such trade-offs. 

7. It's appropriate for human moral agents to prioritize the needs of those closer to us in time and space. Real human beings, whose situations we know best. Compared to hypothetical humans in the future.  Real people can suffer real harm, and the future is largely beyond our control. Becomes less predictable the farther out we go. 

8. It's a wild overgeneralization for Sweet to claim that:

But in every case without exception, moral common sense has turned out to be no guide at all to what God will or won't do. This assumption is eviscerated on a daily basis by every horrendous evil that God permits to happen for reasons that are completely opaque to us. 

To the contrary, many Christians experience tragedies that seem inexplicable at the time, but in retrospect they come to see how good came of it. What appears to be inscrutable when it happens may be seen to have unexpected value in hindsight:

Cardinal Newman remarks, though, that when people argue for atheism from evil, they focus on evil happening to others. When people connect the evil to first-person experience, he thinks they find it much more difficult to argue for atheism, because they see how that evil fits into their life. So if Newman is right, the argument from evil has a certain disconnect from experience, too.

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2017/03/heaven.html?showComment=1489672662565#c8201255170735155270

9. Sweet's indignant repudiation of Christian theism is ironically subversive to the very thing she cherishes. If naturalism is true, then human lives are worthless. There's nothing of consequence to salvage. Her empathy and moralism are fatally misplaced. Assuming naturalism is true, value is a mental projection on valueless people and things. An illusion foisted on us by evolutionary brainwashing.