Morality and Ontology

I want to set out some thoughts on the issue of morality and objective moral standards, because morality is a contentious topic within faith and in dialogue with others of different faiths or no faith at all. Specifically, I want to critique one approach that I have seen used by many Christians to argue for the existence of moral absolutes. It is a common Christian argument against relativism to point out that relativistic statements reflect absolutes. To give a trivial example to say "everything is relative" or "what's true for you isn't true for me" are absolute statements that suppose objective realities. This fact is used by those who argue against relativism, situational ethics, and any other form of ethics or morality that does not claim to make contact with universal absolute truth, and it is true. It seems that we cannot articulate moral statements without implicitly universalizing them, even if our statement is trying to affirm the contextual nature of ethics and morals.

The problem I have with this approach is the next step that is usually taken. After it is shown that 'relative' statements have elements of absoluteness in them, it is argued that this shows that there are therefore actual moral absolutes. This is a completely unwarranted step. At best, what has been shown is that human language has a tendency towards universalizing its claims, or that human reason functions in such a way that it is unavoidable to make absolute statements, but this does not mean that these absolute statements must correspond to an ontological reality. Just because my mind is constituted to assume there are absolutes says nothing about the actual existence or nonexistence of these absolutes. It is entirely plausible that this could just be an example of Kantian categories like time and space that Kant held to be unshakable and irremovable features of human perception that could never be shown to exist objectively or not outside of the human mind because of the limits of our reason. Might this tendency to speak in terms of absolutes be a similar example of our reason pushing beyond what it can know simply because of the way it naturally functions?

I am not saying that this the case, but I am pointing out that it is entirely plausible and shows that the fact that we tend to speak in moral absolutes (even when we try not to) does not provide direct evidence that there in fact are moral absolutes. While I do think that there are moral principles that should be observed everywhere (although the ways in which they are observed will be highly contextual), arguing from the way we speak is clearly not going to get us there. Perhaps one might say that Christianity provides a more satisfying account of reality because it provides a reason for why we happen to speak this way, namely because it reflects a larger moral reality, but this is not something that can be demonstrated. Trying to make ontological claims on the basis of moral language (or any kind of language) seems like a misguided approach. Drawing connections between language and ontology is a difficult and muddle task. Clearly, language seeks to mirror reality, but its difficult to say to what extent we are justified in drawing ontological conclusions based on the way that we use language.

This is an important topic, because morality is often a major point of contention in atheist/theist debates, with theists claiming that while atheists clearly can and do act morally, they have no ontological basis for it. I'm not sure entirely what to make of these claims or how far they can be pressed, although there is some intuitive plausibility to it. Clearly, however, other accounts of morality can be given. The debate is then over which explanation can better satisfy the kind of moral claims that a person would like to make. This issue isn't strictly related to arguing to moral absolutes from moral language, but I bring it up just to throw some features of this contentious topic. I may have some further thoughts on this topic that I'll post later. It's just something that I keep thinking about and haven't come to any real conclusions on.