Craig Blomberg Misrepresents Naturalistic Morality

Blomburg, Craig. Can We Still Believe in God? Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020.

 

"Ethicists rightly point out that if a person rejects the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving being, they still have no satisfactory explanation for evil in the universe." (2)

 

No citation for this is given. Which ethicists point this out? I can't think of any. I'm sure Christian philosophers claim this. The use of the term 'ethicists' is suspicious, because it makes it sound like this is a common belief among even secular philosophers who specialize in ethics. But without a citation, I have no reason to believe this, and I suspect that all, or nearly all, secular philosophers who specialize in ethics would disagree with this on multiple levels.

 

Even worse, even if it were the case that ethicists claim this, they wouldn't be rightly pointing anything out. They would be confused and mistaken.

 

Even worse still, I can think of at least one secular philosopher that specializes in ethics, Russ Shafer-Landau, who would argue that it's divine command theory, the common metaethical view of Christians, that fails to give a satisfactory explanation of evil in the universe. (See The Fundamentals of Ethics, Fifth Edition, Chapter 5.)

 

Even worse still, I can think of at least one Christian philosopher who specializes in ethics, Anne Jeffrey, who says that you don't need God for objective morality. See: https://soundcloud.com/capturingchristianity/cc021-if-god-does-not-exist-why-be-a-moral-person

 

At 8:15 she says:

 

"My view turns out might have more in common with an atheistic Kantianism than with a certain form of Orthodox Judaism." 

 

At 12 minutes, she says "It could be wrong to rape and torture even if God didn't exist."

 

(At around 15 minutes she speaks about how divine command theory is a view taken seriously by theistic ethicists, but Catholic theists will gravitate more toward natural law theory.) 

 

She even suggests that sophisticated naturalistic systems of objective morality could show God's concern for our actions. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsCgf_GmEQ. Timestamp 1:04:45. 

 

She says:  

"I think that there's a lot to be said for how the reason that God has given us to come up with very good explanations for morality. . . . It's actually more evidence that God is good and gracious that God provides us with the sorts of cognitive faculties that can come up with naturalistic arguments for real, objective morality, because objective moral obligations are so important for us to believe in . . . that it's better, for all of us, if more people believe in it. And if belief in certain varieties in theism is waning, all the better that these arguments are available. . . . I think [naturalistic explanations for morality are] impressive stuff and important . . . it's nice to have a sort of backup theory, that your moral beliefs are not so precarious . . . even if God didn't exist, I think I still shouldn't kill innocent people and it doesn't depend on what I care about or what I'm committed to . . ." 

Additionally, Christian philosopher Dustin Crummett has criticized William Lane Craig's moral argument, and instead argues on behalf of theism from moral knowledge.   

 

Even worse still, it's unclear what a "satisfactory explanation for evil" means. Does this mean an explanation of where evil comes from? Or what makes something evil? Or how we can know that there is evil? And are we speaking about axiological evils, or moral evils, or both? It doesn't matter; naturalism has excellent explanations of all of this, even better explanations than Christianity, because the naturalist doesn't have to worry about challenges to divine command theory, to natural law theory, and to Christianity in general.

 

Here's where the author might help us, a few sentences later:  

"But where do the concept of evil and the idea that it is something to be alleviated come from in the first place? If neither revealed religion nor natural theology (ultimate truths that can be inferred from what exists) points to a transcendent God who concerns himself with the affairs of humanity, from where do the ideas of good and evil originate?" (2)

The answer is our experiences: Badness and goodness are phenomenal concepts, as I have explained elsewhere. See: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2026/02/response-to-lance-bush-on-certainty-of.html

Badness is worth eliminating for its own sake. Though some badness gives rise to greater goodness; that badness is a good deal. Discipline is painful, but that pain is worth the benefits of discipline.

It's not exactly an honest thing to say that God is concerned with the affairs of humanity. I don't see that at all. But even worse, I don't see how it's relevant that there be a transcendent God when it comes to the origins of the ideas of axiological and moral goodness and badness. Even if God existed, it would still be the case that axiological goodness and badness are phenomenal categories that we have direct access to, and that moral goodness and badness can be explained in light of axiological goodness and badness. Adding God doesn't do anything, except make the world far more mysterious given the problem of evil.

This is page two of the book. Given mistakes this egregious right out of the gate, is it worth reading more?

56 Questions on Morality

1) Descriptive metaethics: What do people mean when they make claims about what is good or bad, better or worse, right or wrong, good or evil, okay or not okay, fair or unfair, deserved or undeserved, justified or unjustified, reasonable or unreasonable, obligatory or prohibited, blameless or blameworthy, supererogatory or non-supererogatory, a duty, a right, a responsibility, a moral failure or success, a moral mistake, faulty or sound moral reasoning, a moral truth or falsity, a moral fact or opinion, a virtue or vice, or what someone should or should not do?

2) Self-descriptive metaethics: What do you mean when you use the above moral terms and make claims using those terms?

3) Prescriptive metaethics: What should people mean when they use the above moral terms and make claims using those terms?

4) What does it mean for something to be good or bad? What is the good-maker of good things and the bad-maker of bad things?

5) What is well-being? What does it mean to live a good life?

6) Can goals be good or bad, better or worse? What should the ultimate goal of the human being be?

7) What does it mean for something to be objective or objectively true? (More generally: What does it mean for something to be true?) What does it mean for something to be subjective or subjectively true? What does it mean for something to be true in a relative sense versus true in an absolute sense? What does it mean for a truth or claim to be stance-independent or judgment-independent? What is a stance or a judgment?

8) What is value? Are there facts about value? (Generally: What are facts?) Is value objective or subjective?

9) If there are judgment-independent value facts or moral facts, does this mean there are judgment-independent gustatory facts or aesthetic facts? Why or why not?

10) What are mistakes? Can someone be mistaken about what’s good or bad?

11) What is poor reasoning? Can someone exercise poor reasoning over determining what’s good and bad?

12) What is normativity?

13) What does ‘should’ and ‘ought’ mean?

14) Can we derive an ought from an is? Why or why not?

15) How does description differ from prescription?

16) What is a categorical imperative? What is a hypothetical imperative?

17) Is there a categorical imperative?

18) Is there an irreducible normative property? What would that look like?

19) Are moral claims meaningful? If yes, then what makes moral claims meaningful? (Generally: What does it mean for a statement to be meaningful?)

20) What are moral intuitions, and what role do they play in our moral theories? (Generally: What are intuitions, and what role do they play in our philosophical theories?)

21) Are moral intuitions data? Are our intrinsic goods and evils data? Why or why not?

22) How does moral normativity (what we ought to do) relate to epistemic normativity (what we ought to believe)?

23) What does it mean for something to be right or wrong? What is the right-maker of right actions and the wrong-maker of wrong actions?

24) Is there a difference between epistemic wrongness and moral wrongness? “The sun is smaller than the moon” is wrong. Sending a person to prison for a crime they did not commit is wrong. Does ‘wrong’ mean the same thing in both cases?

25) Are there moral facts? If so, what are they?

26) Are there moral mistakes? Can someone be mistaken about what’s right or wrong?

27) Is morality objective or subjective?

28) Is there objectively good and bad moral reasoning? (Generally: Is there objectively good and bad reasoning?)

29) If there is moral knowledge, how do we obtain it? If there are moral facts, then how do we discover them? (Generally: If there is knowledge, how do we obtain it?)

30) Are there morally justified and unjustified actions?

31) What does it mean for an action to be justified, and how does that relate to holding a justified belief?

32) Are there external reasons, or are reasons only internal? (Generally: What are reasons?)

33) How can we tell whether a reason for acting is motivating versus justifying?

34) If someone has a reason to act, must they be motivated to act?

35) Are humans ultimately always motivated by their own pursuit of happiness? Does this make all humans implicit egoists? Is genuine altruism possible? If not, does this threaten the moral value of our actions? Why or why not?

36) What is the difference between moral reasoning and prudential reasoning?

37) How do reasons relate to moral justification?

38) Why be moral? Why be a good person? Why care about these things? How do these questions relate to the question: Why be rational?

39) What are rights?

40) Who has rights or should have them?

41) What are moral obligations? Who has them and when? How do we discover what our obligations are?

42) Which actions are supererogatory, and how can we tell?

43) How great should the moral burden we place on ourselves be? How hard should we strive to be moral, and why?

44) What is justice and injustice?

45) Does anybody deserve anything? What are just deserts? What does it mean to deserve something?

46) How does punishment relate to justice?

47) What is moral responsibility? How does it relate to blameworthiness, blamelessness, and free will?

48) What does it mean to be a moral agent or to have “agency”?

49) Is it possible to knowingly do what’s wrong? Or does everybody always do what they think in the moment is best, in some cases making highly conflicted choices, and in some cases coming to believe that they made the wrong choice?

50) What does it mean to forgive? When should we forgive or withhold forgiveness?

51) If actions are made wrong by something, what is it? Are they made wrong by their consequences, or by the nature of the actions themselves (e.g. a lack of good will behind the action), or by the viciousness of the kind of person who would engage in that kind of action? Or is it all of the above depending on context (pluralism)? Or is it something else (e.g. rationalism)?

52) Can we subsume moral concerns surrounding good will and treating people as ends unto themselves under consequences? Why or why not? 

53) What is virtue? What is vice? Are some actions knowably virtuous or knowably vicious? If so, how?

54) Can we subsume moral concerns surrounding virtue under consequences? Why or why not?

55) Where does morality come from? To what degree is morality selected for by evolution? In what ways, if any, is morality a social construct? Do debunking arguments give us reason to doubt the existence of moral facts, or to doubt the objectivity of morality?

56) How would a best Divine Command Theory—or any theistic metaethical system—spell out God’s relationship to goodness and badness, right and wrong, the objectivity of morality, God’s obligations—or lack thereof—toward creation, and God’s status as a moral agent?

God and morality in a nutshell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew654htG7yg&lc=Ugy6FjPwwYLqcvNTfWN4AaABAg.ANqDmMA9W-sANqLGq_TAnd 

 

In the 2015 Germanwings flight tragedy, the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane, killing himself and everyone on board. Such an act is bad regardless of anyone's opinion of it being bad (just as the moon is smaller than the sun regardless of anyone's opinion). This badness is easy to see, dissect, and understand, without appealing to God at any point.

 

First, I don't see how God is supposed to solve this puzzle. Let's label the bad / evil act mentioned above E. If I ask: What is the wrong-maker of E, how is God meant to answer this?

 

Maybe: For an act to be wrong is for God to command against it and for an act to be permissible is for God to permit it.

But 1) God hasn't commanded for or against all human acts. So how do we know which are right or wrong?

 

2) It's controversial exactly where God's commands are (the Bible? The Quran?), which ones count as commands for which people at which times (just the Israelites, or us too?), or whether they really came from God and not from humans inventing a God character. (Christians, after all, are committed to the belief that Allah is a fictional character. Or if Allah refers to Yahweh, then Christians are committed to the view that the event of Yahweh sending Muhammad as a prophet is a fictional event.)

So the "God commands it" answer to the wrong-maker question seems pretty useless. Even Christians are forced to use their own judgment when it comes to modern day moral dilemmas; God is of no help to them. The Methodist church recently had a schism over gay marriage.

And 3) Doesn't this open up the Euthyphro Dilemma? If the right-maker is purely God's command, then God could command E and that would make E right. But my intuitions say, like that of Christians, that a good God could never make such a command because the act is wrong prior to any command made for or against it. So it must be something else that acts as the wrong-maker.

 

You might play William Lane Craig's card and say that something is good when it is aligned with God's nature, and God's commands are aligned with God's nature. But this shifts the arbitrariness of God's commands to the arbitrariness of God's nature.

 

a) If God's nature happened to be pro-atrocity, then those atrocities would be good. God could transform into a swan like Zeus and rape a woman named Leda, and because God's nature happens to be pro-rape, this action is good. If God's nature happened to be pro-genocide, then God could command genocide and that command would align with God's nature.

b) If goodness is defined as that which is aligned with God's nature, then saying "God is good" is to say "God is aligned with God's nature", which is a silly thing to say. But Christians don't see themselves as saying something silly when they say "God is good."

c) We call things good all the time – good friends, good food, good movies – without invoking God. These things aren't good because they are aligned with God's nature – they are good because they are intrinsic, extrinsic, or saving goods.

Second, I say again that the badness of E is easy to see, no God required.

1) We can give a phenomenal definition to intrinsic goodness and badness. Intrinsic goods are characterized by their felt experience, same with intrinsic bads (evils).

2) Extrinsic goods are those that lead to intrinsic goods. Extrinsic evils lead to intrinsic evils.

3) Saving goods are those goods that prevent evils. Depriving evils are those evils that prevent goods.
 

4) We also use 'good' as a success term. A good chess move might not be a chess move that is intrinsically, extrinsically, or savingly good, but good because it leads to success with respect to the goal of winning the chess game. A "good" torture device is good for torture.

And so by this analysis we can easily see what the bad makers are of E. The intrinsic evils of the suffering of the victims and victims' families are bad in their essence. The depriving evils of the deaths of the victims are bad too, grounded in the self-evident concept of "better" as used in the sentence: A joy feels better than a pain.

Now the wrong-maker is trickier. A consequentialist approach could be like this: The act that produces the worst outcomes (most badness + least goodness) in a situation is the worst act, and the act that produces the best outcomes (the least badness / most goodness) in that same situation is the best act.

Assumption 1: There is no difference whatsoever between epistemic and value-based wrongness. Both amount to being incorrect or mistaken in some sense.

Assumption 2: Every morally relevant act is caused by a belief or set of beliefs, or something like a belief that could be translated into a proposition.

Idea: The wrong-maker of an act is the falsity of the false belief that grounds the act.

People often (always?) act thinking that their action is the best action they could take, the action that maximizes goodness over badness. If that belief is false, then the wrongness of that belief transmits to the action, making the action wrong too (strictly speaking, there are no wrong actions, only wrong beliefs and bad actions).

He who succeeds in believing what's right will act rightly too. There are no categorical imperatives, only hypothetical imperatives: If you want to believe what's true, and act accordingly, and if you succeed in always believing what's true and acting accordingly, then you will never do wrong. Your actions will always be grounded in true beliefs.

If you want to do what's right, then you should act according to what's true – and there we see the hypothetical imperative. "Should" always applies to goals – given the goal of doing what's right, you ought to believe what's true. If you want to maximize goodness, then you ought not commit acts that fail especially badly to maximize goodness (which we call evil acts).

Of course, we humans are ignorant and stupid, and so we constantly fail to believe what's true. So we constantly act according to false beliefs and do actions that are bad. (And our answers as to why we chose to do these bad actions are always filled with lies, falsehoods, contradictions, confusions, or irrelevancies).

Is genocide worse than anthropocide?

Here's an intuitive idea: It's bad to murder one person. It's even worse to murder two people. It's worse still to murder three people. And so on, until you arrive at the worst form of murder: genocide, which is the systematic killing of a group of people, usually based on religion and/or race.

If one genocide is bad, then two genocides is worse, and so on. But what if you committed genocide against all groups of people? That would be anthropocide, the killing of all humanity.

Clearly then, anthropocide is basically the single most evil thing that someone can do, short of throwing everyone in hell and torturing them forever.

(As an aside, I feel like torturing a single person for eternity is worse than anthropocide, because the former is an actual infinite of intrinsic badness while the latter is not.)

Anthropocide is clearly far worse than genocide. And yet, if someone did commit anthropocide and instantly and painlessly killed everyone by pressing The Button, no one would know. No one would know and no one would ever find out or care, assuming there is no afterlife.

In the case of genocide, however, many people go through the hellishness of that experience, and the survivors and families are traumatized. To a lesser extent, everyone who hears about what happened is haunted by the genocide too. 

Genocide purely adds to the problems of humanity, but anthropocide, technically, solves all of humanity's problems forever. So how is anthropocide worse than genocide?

Maybe this is just the old Epicurus argument against the badness of death in disguise. When death isn't here, there is no death to be feared. When death is here, there is no me to fear it. So whence the fear of death? Or put another way: When death isn't here, there is no death to harm us. When death is here, there is no us to be harmed. So whence the harm of death?

Alex Pruss suggests there are distributive goods and bads. [https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-epicurean-argument-on-death.html] 

These are goods and evils that cannot be located at a particular time, but nonetheless appear over a stretch of time or over one's life as a whole. I suggest that harms involve the loss of flourishing, while being impoverished is to have never flourished in the first place. The unborn are impoverished (assuming they would have lived a good life), but the unborn are not harmed by not being born. But it might sound strange to say impoverishment is not a harm. But it seems to me worse to lose something than to never have it in the first place (notwithstanding the common wisdom that "it's better to have loved and lost"). I suppose it depends on context: How painful is it to lose the thing in question versus how good was it to have it for a time?

In the case of one's life, it's not painful at all to lose your life because you have no conscious awareness of being dead. The badness of loss is realized when the loss is consciously experienced. 

If impoverishment is not a bad thing, then it's mysterious why God would create people. Presumably, God creates to maximize flourishing. But that implies that had God created nothing, the world would be a worse world compared to the one where God does create. You might say that God has options to create from a variety of perfect worlds. Perhaps one perfect world is one in which God creates nothing, and another is one in which God does create people. Maybe God, in his perfection, must create all perfect worlds, and so we live in a multiverse (Klaas Kraay's arguments to this effect come to mind).

Setting God aside, if impoverishment (i.e. a lack of flourishing) is not bad, then why would couples ever have kids? Presumably, couples have kids to maximize flourishing. This allows us to say that even though death or not-being-born are not experienced, they are still bad in the sense that their badness generates reasons for reasonable creatures to act according to those reasons.

I want to say badness must cash out eventually in terms of conscious experience, but maybe badness instead is anything that generates reasons in a fully rational person to avoid, disable, prevent, cure, or otherwise act against the badness in question. Bad conscious experiences certainly generate such reasons, but unconscious deprivation or impoverishment generates those reasons too. (Though this might leave it mysterious as to how unconscious bads generate those reasons. Even worse, it might just be circular: "I have a reason to avoid death." "Why?" "Because death is bad." "Why is death bad?" "Because it generates reasons to avoid it." It's perhaps then better to say something like: the difference between conscious flourishing and conscious not-flourishing is self-evident, and it's self-evidently the case that conscious flourishing is better. Deprivational evils are comparative evils, and comparative evils are as self-evidently bad as intrinsic evils.)

So if deprivation theory explains why death is bad, then deprivation theory explains why anthropocide is worse than genocide. Anthropocide, while not generating the reasons pertaining to intrinsic evils that genocide generates, still generates a vast amount more weight in the reasons from deprivation, or failing to maximize flourishing. So a fully rational person, cognizant of all the facts, would choose genocide over pressing The Button if forced to choose.

But is that true? Imagine you polled the world on whether we should collectively commit genocide against a group of people, say, Lithuanians. I'd imagine that 99.99% of people would vote no against genociding Lithuanians. But if you asked the world whether we should press The Button, I'd imagine that fewer people would vote no. I imagine that roughly 75 - 95% of people would vote no. Counter intuitively, we seem to acknowledge that there is something more pointless and gratuitous about genociding Lithuanians compared to killing everyone. Even nihilists who would press The Button uncoerced would not vote to genocide Lithuanians, I would think. 

There are existential reasons in favor of anthropocide that do not apply to genocide (at least, according to some forms of nihilistic thinking). In fact, it's exactly the existence of heinous evils like genocide that motivate the nihilistic reasoning behind wanting to press The Button. But even if there are unique existential reasons in favor of anthropocide that don't apply to genocide or murder, those reasons are surely overwhelmed by reasons pertaining to deprivation / comparative evils. Maybe deprivational reasons, being more abstract, are not as emotionally compelling as the visceral reasons against genocide, despite weighing far more.

Four Problems with Kant's Ethics

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says the following:

"Understanding, wit, judgment, and whatever else the talents of the mind may be called, or confidence, resolve, and persistency of intent, as qualities of temperament, are no doubt in many respects good and desirable; but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will that is to make use of these gifts of nature . . . is not good." (393)

My first problem with Kant's ethics is that he provides no analysis of good and evil.

My second problem is that here he calls these virtues good and desirable. But good in what way? Good on what basis? An obvious answer is that virtues are good because of their good consequences.

Consider what Kant says here:

"To be beneficent where one can is one's duty, and besides there are many souls so attuned to compassion that, even without another motivating ground of vanity, or self-interest, they find an inner gratification in spreading joy around them, and can relish the contentment of others, in so far as it is their work. But I assert that in such a case an action of this kind – however much it conforms with duty, however amiable it may be – still has no true moral worth, but stands on the same footing as other inclinations, e.g. the inclination to honor, which if it fortunately lights upon what is in fact in the general interest and in conformity with duty, and hence honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not high esteem; for the maxim lacks moral content, namely to do such actions not from inclination, but from duty."

For some context, Kant says we perform actions out of three possible motivations: from duty (respect for law), from immediate inclination (feeling or desire), or from a means to an end.

Kant gives the example of a shopkeeper, which we can adapt to show these three motivations:

1) The shopkeeper who does the right thing, treating his customers fairly, purely for the sake of business. This is doing the right thing but for a reason that's not morally praiseworthy.

2) The shopkeeper who does the right thing because he wills the good of the customer and he delights in their flourishing. That sounds like having a good will, and Kant would say from the outside it's indiscernible from having a good will, but technically this motivation is without any moral value on Kant's view. The reason why is because in this case the shopkeeper is doing what comes naturally to them; they are acting on inclination or desire. They happen to desire something good. But had this person desired differently, they would have acted differently, and so there is no guarantee they would have done the right thing. There is nothing praiseworthy in doing what it was you wanted to do in the first place. (Obviously, this is not true. Clearly there is something praiseworthy about having a good desire, because what kind of a person has good desires? A good person.)

3) The shopkeeper who does the right thing not out of a means to an end or out of inclination, but out of respect for law. He does the right thing for the right reason, which is what it means to have a good will. Doing the right thing because it profits you, or because it satisfies a desire or staves off a discomfort is doing the right thing for a selfish reason (which can be evil or morally neutral). It's only when you do the right thing out of duty that you do something morally praiseworthy.

In all three cases, the shopkeeper acts in conformity with duty, but only in the third case does he act from duty, and it's only this action that has any moral value whatsoever.

So if all that is true, then again, on what basis is it true that "an action of this kind . . . deserves praise and encouragement, but not high esteem . . ." It sounds like Kant is saying these good actions deserve moral praise, and yet deserve no moral praise. Which is it? If the only source of moral value is a good will, and virtues, happiness, and good inclinations all come apart from a good will, then in what way are these things morally good? Would Kant say something can be good and yet not morally good? But in what way is a good action good if not morally good?

Again, it seems obvious to me that actions from good inclinations (but not respect for law) are good because of their good consequences.

So Kant,

1) Fails to analyze good and evil;

2) Calls virtues, happiness, and actions from good inclinations good and deserving of praise, and yet has no basis to call these good.

3) But the problems do not stop there. My third problem is that Kant says an action from an inclination has no moral value even if that inclination is good. But I think this is clearly false, again because a good person is the kind of person to have good inclinations.

4) My fourth problem is the problem of inclination itself and how it relates to respect for the law. Respect for the law is supposed to be a special inclination, but what makes it an exception to the rule? Doing something to satisfy a desire apparently has no moral value, unless that desire happens to be to do the right thing, to do your duty. But it seems to me impossible to avoid the idea that all human motivation is ultimately grounded in the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. Even the person who acts with the special inclination of respect for the law, and does the right thing for the right reason, must have the desire to maximize their happiness, and acting from duty does this either in the delight of one's identity as a good person (the happiness of self-admiration), or in the avoidance of the discomfort of conscience.

Wouldn't Kant have to say, to maintain his position, that the person who acts from duty does so without any feeling whatsoever of the avoidance of the discomfort of thinking of oneself as a moral failure? I think that it's psychologically impossible for humans to act in any other way except to satisfy inclinations. (When we act against an inclination, really we are just servicing an opposing and yet stronger inclination.) It seems obvious to me that even the person acting from duty is acting to satisfy an inclination.

But if that's right, then there's nothing morally wrong with acting to satisfy an inclination as long as it's a praiseworthy inclination, and if my objection 3 goes through then we must admit of morally praiseworthy inclinations anyway. The other option would be to say that all actions are inherently selfish (trying to pursue happiness or avoid discomfort) and thus have no moral value. But that's clearly a mistake, because what kind of inclination a person has clearly says something about their character. The better the inclination, the better the character. If it would bother you to not do the right thing, then good! That shows that you are the right kind of person. In fact, it is exactly this inclination of feeling bothered by wrongness that we point to as one of the prime indicators of a good character.

More problems are to come, and if given the chance I will show just how completely and deeply my moral system departs from Kant's.

Oliver Crisp on Closer to Truth - A sin against an infinite being is an infinite sin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_El29ogZdV8

Why think our actions have this kind of connection where the magnitude of the evil depends on the kind of creature you're sinning against? Is killing a baby not as bad as killing its parent because the baby is a lesser creature and the parent is a greater creature? 

And yet if anything our intuitions say preying on the powerless is the greater evil. So far from sinning against a greater being resulting in a greater sin, we might think sinning against a lesser being involves the added evil of abusing one's power or of taking advantage of someone's weakness.

Also, people, when they sin, wrong someone here on Earth. Their intentions of harm are directed at other humans or animals (or at themselves). So how is God meant to be wronged by these evils that aren't directed at him? God certainly can take offense to them, but why would murdering someone count as wronging God such that now the murder is infinitely bad? And what are the boundaries? Is shoplifting infinitely evil? Telling a lie so you don’t hurt someone’s feelings?

If God is infinitely offended by our sin, then doesn't that make God infinitely sensitive? Where's God's strength? If God is impassable, then God can’t be offended at all. If it’s a matter of accruing some kind of moral debt, then for the metaphor to make any sense, God is in full control to wipe away that debt. (Why  would human sins brought about by the very limitations God stuck them with accrue a debt in the first place, I have no idea.) If it’s a matter of justice, then it’s a kind of justice I cannot make sense of. (If God wants justice, all he has to do is attach survival structures to virtue and truth. You might say this violates free will, but it doesn’t violate free will any more than free will is already violated, and even if it does at some point we have to ask whether free will is worth the cost.)

Why would God be so offended by something so little? If someone sins out of ignorance, then God understands the origins of that sin. So God knows how not personal that sin is. Why would God take such offense from something that's not personal?

Imagine if someone were to bump into me aggressively on the street and knock me to the ground, and say "Move idiot!" as he walks past. I could choose to be horribly offended by this, or I could guess that there's something wrong with this person and move on and shrug it off. It would be a failure of mine to care too much about why this person did what they did, or to take it personally when there is no reason to.

God, as the greatest possible being, should be very good at shrugging things off. But like Kuhn suggests, a God who takes everything way too personally is petulant. It looks quite silly for such a begrudging God to create creatures who he knows will do nothing but commit crimes of infinite magnitude.

Does it sound loving for a God to put us at such massive risk?

Ben's Law

If you let someone speak on his or her moral system long enough, always, without exception, it will eventually sound like consequentialism (even if they explicitly reject consequentialism).