Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

30 J.J.C. Smart
with a neurophysiological account of the mind. The intuition of goodness or
rightness would not be at all like vision, where we have a theory of photons
striking the eye and thus affecting the nervous system. However, Leslie differs
from Moore and Ross because he denies that we intuit or know facts about
goodness and rightness. We believe the axiarchic principle because we conjecture
it, and part of our conjecture is that it is certainly effective and explains
the existence and design of the world. Leslie draws an analogy between
ethical and causal requiredness. He holds that the ethical uses of words such
as ‘must’, ‘have to’, ‘are required to’, have ‘more than punning similarities’ to
their causal uses. In this way Leslie thinks that his theory of ethics can be
objectivist without requiring the postulation of mysterious ethical intuitions.
He also thinks that the analogy between ethical and causal requirements
overcomes the already mentioned problem for objectivists of the sort of Moore
and Ross, that you might intuit that an action is good or right while feeling
no motive to do it. So perhaps Leslie’s own brand of objectivism about the
ethical principle overcomes the main objections to non-naturalistic ethics
such as that of Moore and Ross.
Leslie’s principle, then, is conjectural, something like a scientific hypothesis,
and accepted by argument to the best explanation. But is it the best
explanation or even a good explanation? We may accept that there is some
analogy between the ‘must’ of ethics and the ‘must’ of causal law statements,
but there is much disanalogy too. It is notorious that ‘ought’ does not imply
‘is’. If it did the world would be a better place. Leslie would reply that, despite
appearances to the contrary, the world is the best that is logically possible
granted the value of free will, and in the case of natural evils, granted the fact
that ‘satisfaction of all ethical requirements simultaneously may well be logically
impossible’ (ibid., pp. 82–3). He acknowledges that we have no reason to
like this fact. Seeing a child in pain we need not comfort ourselves with cosy
Panglossian optimism. Here of course we are in the midst of theodicy and
‘the problem of evil’, which I shall discuss in a later section.
Thus the question ‘Why is the universe as it is?’ (e.g. ‘Why the “fine
tuning”?’) is answered by ‘Because it is good that it is’. This is nearer to being
an answer to the question ‘Why is the universe as it is?’ than it is to the
question ‘Why does anything exist at all?’ If the principle is to do the latter
job it has antecedently (in a logical, not a temporal sense) to exist itself, and
we are back to the ‘Who made God?’ type of problem. Perhaps it could be
said that the axiarchic principle, like God, would be a necessary being. Whatever
a principle is, perhaps a proposition, the question of whether a proposition
is necessary truth must be distinguished from the question of whether
the proposition exists. Do we need to postulate propositions? It is already
doubtful in what sense the axiarchic principle expresses a necessary truth,
and doubtful also whether the existence of such a proposition could itself be