Moral Truths Are Not Necessary Truths

Moral truths do not contain certain properties that some Christian apologists attribute to them.  I particularly have in mind the fact that nothing about moral claims--besides how moral truths must be consistent if they exist--has the same necessary veracity as logical truths.  By this I mean that, unlike truths about logic, ethical truth claims do not possess some inherent, immediately verifiable trueness.  For instance, the claim "Truth exists" is true by inescapable necessity and the utter impossibility of its falsity [1].  In contrast, the claim "Stealing is wrong" is not true by necessity--in other words, it is at least hypothetically possible that it is untrue, unlike the claim that truth exists.

I will list some reasons why moral claims are not true by necessity:


1).  My sense of moral outrage over certain acts or attitudes does not mean that moral truths exist, whether my moral compass was conditioned in me by a particular society or innate in me from birth.

2).  The near universality of moral impulses in humans alone does not mean that moral truths exist.

3).  Unlike how no one can deny (at least certain) logical truths without affirming them either unknowingly or knowingly, one can deny or doubt the veracity of moral claims without falling into contradiction.


This might help people comprehend why in an atheistic universe nothing could ground moral truths.  Moral truths do not possess the same properties as purely logical or mathematical truths; whereas it is absolutely impossible for logical and mathematical truths (ultimately nothing but logic involving numbers) to not be true and they would hold even in the absence of an uncaused cause or some other supernatural entity outside of the material world, no one can rationally claim that moral truths are immediately obvious in an epistemological or ontological sense on the basis of reason or experience, nor can they rationally believe that moral truths must or can exist at all apart from God's existence the way logical truths do [2].

Moral epistemology and ontology are not simple, trivial, or irrelevant to everyday life, but many people do fail to recognize that discovering facts about them does not come easily.  Ultimately, no one can correctly or soundly propose that moral truth claims are true by pure logical necessity or that one can identify true moral claims with the ease some Christian apologists imply one can.  Hopefully more people can recognize this and spare themselves and others the fallacious moral arguments one can commonly find in my culture.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-axioms.html

[2].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html