Q&A: Moral relativism, is-ought, and the placebo effect
Moral relativism, is-ought, and the placebo effect
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Full disclosure: I’m a secular young man who is reading your book “God Plays Dice.”
It is argued against atheist positions (as you argued in your book) that one cannot formulate a moral position from facts. Likewise, that without God one falls into moral relativism, and what is “bad” or “evil” is nothing more than my opinion alone. Therefore God gives objective validity to one moral theory or another.
My questions are these:
Don’t believers themselves fall into subjective relativism, since their god is one among many that people believe in—that is, there are other gods in the general human pantheon, each of which claims truth?
And if so either way, could it be that God in fact functions in our lives as a psychological-social placebo effect? That is, belief in God helps us turn things into “truth,” even though logically it is hard to define many social and moral axioms as “truth.” All this without any “real existential physical” implication in itself. Meaning that there “is no” God, but belief in Him is vital for us.
Thank you very much for your time.
Answer
I am not claiming that God gives validity to one moral theory or another, but rather that He is the only one who can give validity to the very concept of morality. Quite apart from the debates over what morality commands, the very existence of a moral category is contingent on belief in God. Disagreements exist whether there is a God or not. Even in science there are disagreements; that proves nothing. One may think that in this dispute one side is right and the other is wrong, or that there are two truths. Either way, you need God in the background, otherwise the whole debate loses its meaning.
Discussion on Answer
See the previous reply. I didn’t write that morality without God is not uniform, but that without God there is no morality at all. See the fourth notebook, part 3.
About a decade ago I read your book God Plays Dice with great pleasure, but unfortunately I don’t have it with me now.
I wanted to understand the claim that morality without God is not a uniform morality. Why isn’t public agreement on a certain system of laws enough for that? And if you would say that it may change—so what? After all, in every religion we plainly see that interpretations of the laws change. On the contrary, we are in a certain predicament because of the unchangeability of certain laws. I wanted to understand your view on this. Have you written about it on the site or elsewhere on the internet?