The Silliest Moral Position of Them All
I sometimes encounter an argument for the transcendence of morality which is something like “Despite the failures of science and logic to do establish objective/absolute morality, my intuition tells me some acts are objectively morally wrong therefore there is more to the universe than science and logic can detect.” Some like to continue this argument by saying this is the only way we can save ourselves from an amoral existence. Indeed something like this thought process seems to be the basis for the argument “If God does not exist then objective moral values do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore god exists.”
However even if the latter statement were true (which it isn’t), and an amoral existence was guaranteed so long as we stuck to just science and logic, it still wouldn’t follow that we should accept the first premise and reject science and logic as the sole basis for knowledge. I think it’s only the high stakes around the human desire for morality that allows people to commit such an obvious error in reasoning. I can hardly imagine someone putting forward the argument “I intuit Aristotelian physics therefore we should disregard what science and logic tell us about how objects interact” or “I intuitively know OK Go’s videos are better than all other videos therefore my intuition proves there are objective facts about the quality of music videos.” (On second thought maybe so).
Without logic there’s literally no basis around which to form any justified belief. So even if an absolute moral code existed if science and logic were unable to give us access to this moral code we would be totally unjustified in acting as if we’d discovered it and understood its principles. It wouldn’t matter if you thought that transcendental nature referred to Plato’s forms or Yahweh it would be equally unverifiable. In fact these would be just two of an infinite number of unverifiable possibilities for the origin of such inherently inaccessible proposed facts of reality. All this to say discarding science and logic in order to rescue transcendent morality is quite silly indeed.
