The Moral Argument in a Secular Age

Begin by conceding the thing that is always conceded too late: people who believe in no God at all are frequently better neighbours than people who believe in one. Any moral argument that starts by denying this is dishonest and will be treated as such.

The question was never whether an unbeliever can know that torturing a child is wrong. He can, and he does. The question is what makes it wrong, and what makes the wrongness binding on someone who does not care.

Three candidate grounds

The interesting question is not whether atheists can be good. It is what grounds the obligation.

Social contract accounts explain a great deal about cooperation and almost nothing about obligations to people who cannot retaliate. Evolutionary accounts explain why we have moral feelings and are silent, by construction, on whether the feelings track anything.

Non-natural moral realism — the view that moral facts simply exist, unexplained and unattached — is a serious position. It is also, as several of its own defenders concede, an odd thing to find in a universe that is otherwise fully described by physics.

The theistic claim

If persons are obligated, obligation is the sort of thing that runs between persons. That is not a proof. It is a claim that one hypothesis makes the moral data less surprising than the others do.

How to argue it badly

By implying your interlocutor has no morals. By treating a hard question in metaethics as a rhetorical trap. By pretending the Euthyphro dilemma is new or that it has never been answered.

Do it well and you are not scoring a point. You are pointing at something both of you already see.