So moral commands appear to be external.Īppearances can be accurate or inaccurate. Yet we all sometimes wonder whether a particular act is right or wrong, and consider it perfectly sensible to think others may have greater insight than we do into the matter. We know better than anyone else what we are commanding ourselves to do at any given point, so it would be obvious to us that we could establish the morality of any deed by introspection. If moral commands appeared to us to be our own commands it would strike us as silly to wonder whether an act is right or wrong, or think anyone else could provide us with moral insight into the matter. Command yourself to do something that has hitherto seemed obviously wrong to you – physically assaulting someone, say – and see if it suddenly starts to seem morally right to assault someone now.
That doesn’t appear to work – and we can test that easily enough. For one thing, it would mean we could make anything morally right just by commanding ourselves to do it. Could moral commands be our commands? That does not seem plausible. So if moral commands are a subset of the commands of reason – and they surely are – they must still be commands of an agent or agents. Therefore, reason’s commands are the commands of an agent or agents. Many philosophers maintain that moral commands are commands of reason. It follows that moral commands are the commands of an agent or agents. A command is a command, right? It is also true that commands (real ones, rather than apparent or metaphorical ones) are always the commands of an agent, a mind with beliefs and desires. It is trivially true that a moral command is a command. Nevertheless, I believe a few simple arguments demonstrate that morality requires a god.
I am, or try to be, a man of reason, not of faith.