Is Morality Determined by Society?

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Is Morality Determined by Society?

June 26, 2025

Questions about how to respond to someone who says morality is determined by society, whether our evolutionary biology causes us to think it’s objectively wrong to torture babies for fun, and whether someone with multiple personality disorder could both trust and reject Christ.

* How should I respond to someone who is unpersuaded by the moral argument for God, who insists people just do what makes them happy and doesn’t offend people or the law, and who says morality is determined by social structures that have evolved?

* Can the idea that it’s objectively wrong to torture babies for fun actually be explained by our evolutionary biology making us want to protect the babies in our group?

* Would it be possible for someone with multiple personality disorder to trust Christ with one personality and reject him with another? If so, how would we make sense of their eternal state?

Transcript

Welcome back to Stand to Reason's hashtag, STRask. And in the last episode, we were talking about objective morality and subjective morality and various questions people were sending in. So we've got a couple more today.

And this first one comes from David. Last evening, I was talking to a man who was unpersuaded by the law. waited by the moral argument for God.

He insisted that the only thing people did was what made them happy and didn't offend against the law or other people. He put everything down to social structures that have evolved unmoved by my many responses. Well, I'm confused about this.

If he looks at the motivation of people, people are motivated by what makes them happy. That completely circumvents the whole question of morality. He may be entirely right.

People are choosing what they want that will make them happy or satisfied or whatever. The thief, when he steals something, he's stealing something because it's going to benefit him. The man who molests a child, he does so because it's erotic to him and he is satisfied, gets some satisfaction out of that.

A person who murders someone who he hates is satisfied getting his vengeance out in that person. All of those could be perfectly accurate statements without ever touching on the question of the morality of those things I just described. I could have taken the other side too.

Mother Teresa loved caring for all of these people who were down and out in India. Was that good or bad? Or the other things I mentioned, were they good or bad? This observation, people do what makes them happy. But wait a minute, aren't some of the things people do to make them happy? Virtuous? Mother Teresa, aren't some of the things that people do to make them happy, leave their wife and their family and go off and just do their own thing? Isn't that, well, un-virtuous? Isn't that, in many cases, wicked? Or does this individual that David is talking with just brush all that off is those kind of distinctions are not useful or not relevant.

They're not even accurate. Okay. People are just trying to make themselves happy.

It may be what he means, but I guarantee you if David were spending time with this person here and there around town conversing about things where no philosophical turf was being defended, that this individual would be speaking forth all kinds of language using language and words that all were morally freighted in the objective sense because he cannot do otherwise. And this catches them all the time because the human beings made the image of God. This is the inside out tactic.

They can't get away from this. I mentioned at the end of that chapter, that section on the inside out tactic is they can run from God, but they can't run from themselves. This is something God has put inside of them.

It's like a homing beacon of sorts and not even an atheist can get away from it for very long. So, Greg, specifically, the idea that social structures have evolved, how would you argue against like cultural relativism, where the idea that everything that, yeah, we call it good and bad, let's not call it happy anymore, let's call it good and bad, but it's just what we call what society has said we can do and can't do. All right, well, that's a little different issue.

I would never take exception with the idea that cultures have evolved, but the question is whether morality is one of those things about culture that has evolved. So, my question might be, well, do you think the culture that we have now is a better culture than maybe we had, say, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jim Crow laws, segregation, all kinds of discrimination against black Americans. Do you think what we have now is better? That's the question I would ask.

Now, I said, yes, I said, okay, I want to be careful I understand you correctly. When you say it's better, are you saying it's you like it better, you like it more, or are you saying it's a moral improvement over the past. Now, what he can't say, he can say he likes it better, likes it more, but he can't say it's a moral improvement over the past.

If there is no objective morality because there's no standard to measure it by that we're getting better, all right, but it's worse than that because of all morality, good and bad, then the majority always rules. What the majority says is right is right. So, if you oppose the majority, then you're opposing the right and good.

And if you're posing the right and good, then you're bad. That would make Martin Luther King bad. That would make Gandhi bad.

That would make Jesus bad. That would make Hitler good. And that would make Hitler good.

Exactly right. Because they were doing what the changes that were that were being spoken up by the first three were in the face of the majority of the people at the time. Civil rights had to be fought for.

And it was a rough fight. I was, you know, in high school during the 60s when all of this happened. So, I was 14 and 64 when the Civil Rights Bill was act was passed.

So, gee, that seems like a moral improvement to almost everybody. Or look at the the Supreme Court deciding in 2015 on the Obergefell case that that gay should be married by the state. Okay, was that a good improvement? Was that an improvement of moral good? Most people think or like many people on that side of things think it is, but they reject God and transcend it right.

So, where is it that you, how do you make sense of calling it good if there's no standard to measure that by? You can say you like it, but you can't say it's morally better if there are no moral standards. Okay, that's like saying somebody is, if the complaint against the way things are, is like saying there somebody is broken rule in a game that has no rules or they're just utterly arbitrary with whatever culture says, okay, well, the culture makes the rules and you can't improve on that. You can change it, but you can't call it a moral improvement.

It's just a change. And you certainly can't judge any other culture. I guarantee you, well, I can't, you know what? I can't even say I guarantee you because I've had a conversation before with someone who would not let this go no matter what culture I brought into this, that in a normal conversation, they would have condemned for certain things.

But for most people, they will speak in moral terms about other practices that they don't do or that other cultures have done in the past or whatever it is. And that's when you can say, well, if they're doing what their culture said, then you can't judge them. And again, they might not agree to that at the time, but maybe later they'll think about it.

So that's the best question. Question would be, tell me how you can, you're justified in judging them on your view. Now they got to respond in light of their view, given the counter example.

And that's, that's, it's a killer because nobody can consistently live this way. It's a point that I made in the book, Relativism. You push their, their moral hot button, whether it's gay rights or abortion or gender or, you know, some political figures or whatever, we just, just push that hot button and then force them to respond relativistically in light of their own view.

And if they don't do it, don't say you got you. It's not a mic drop moment. You say, just tell them you're confused.

I'm really confused now because you were saying before that there are no moral absolutes. There are no objective moral principles. It's all subjective.

It's all, but now you're saying this. So how am I supposed to understand what you're saying? Help me to understand that. Is there, isn't there? Okay.

Oh, no, there isn't. Well, then why are you saying, oh, you're just emoting? Okay. Well, I don't want to hear it.

Why should I be obliged to hear to your emoting? Because I have no moral obligation according to you, to even listen to you, or even to be nice to you on your view. Anyway, that's taken the roof off, by the way. Yes.

Okay. So here is, I have one more question here, a challenge to objective morality. This one comes from Simeon.

My question is, could the argument for morality, like the statement that torturing babies for fun, could that be explained by our evolutionary biology to want to protect the babies in a group such explanation seems to make sense as naturally you would be inclined to not hurt the younger generation of a species? Okay. That is a counter regarding morality in general, not just this one point. It seems to make sense with regards to what seems to be a clearcase example of immorality, torturing babies for fun.

All right. But we could choose, how about this? Rape. Rape allows you to get your genes into the next generation much more effectively.

So that would be consistent, it seems to me, with the evolutionary model. And there's a host of other things too. I know that evolutionary biologists who try to make sense of morality in evolutionary terms will look for some kind of, I think, strained reproductive benefit, because that's all that of different moral virtues, okay? But it's a strain, first of all.

But secondly, there's a much bigger problem. If a person is acting out of evolutionary compulsion, is that sense of morality on the inside or is it regarding morality on the outside? Well, obviously, it's on the inside. In other words, it's just another form of subjectivism, which is another form of relativism.

The best that the evolutionary pushback can provide, if it provides a coherent response at all, I don't think it does, ultimately. But even so, the best it could do is tell you why some people act the way they do, based on internal motivation, this is what their genes are telling them to do. It's not because something is wrong in itself on the outside, it's because you have this conviction because of biology on the inside.

Biology cannot make rape wrong. No doubt, just think about that. It can make it wrong for you, but it can't make it wrong in itself, and only wrong for you because your genes are dictating that.

Incidentally, I think this is a problem, and I wrote about this at length in street smarts. How is it that evolution can dictate our ideas? Our ideas are not physical. And if they are dictating our ideas, then our ideas are not even chosen by us at all.

This makes us machine-like in our behaviors. I think this is the liability of the naturalistic Darwinian model. How could it dictate our ideas? So it's making us believe that rape is wrong for evolutionary benefit, or torturing babies for fun is wrong.

We'll keep with that illustration. But it's not really wrong. We are just believing that it's wrong.

The late Michael Roos just died a couple of months ago, I think. Philosopher, evolutionary, atheistic philosopher says we have been an evolutionary trick to believe that certain things are objectively wrong because it helps us get our genes into the next generation. And part of the trick is that we believe they're objective.

But, so ironic, countenance this, I know that there is no basis for that, yet I still believe that morality is objective. He's telling us he's been tricked and he knows it, but he still believes it. That's silly, obviously.

But he has to do that in order to maintain his paradigm. Okay? And so this is the difficulty with this view. All it can give you, if it gives you anything, is relativism, which is not objective morality.

It's not any real morality. But then it also follows from that that we are tricked by evolution to believe false things about the world that morality is objective and it's not. I don't know how it can cause us to believe anything, but if it does, it's causing us to believe falsehoods, which raises the question what other falsehoods has evolution caused us to believe? Maybe it's caused us to believe in the in the falsehood of evolution.

See, now you can't even trust the dictates of your own mind because evolution is in there. And incidentally, for people who complain about what the Bible says about what God allegedly told the Jews to do regarding Canaanites, et cetera, what they called their off the hook because they evolve their set of moral standards and you evolve yours. Why are you pitting your set of evolved moral standards against theirs as if yours is something better? So they lose that whole argument too, if this view goes through.

Yeah, you just can't be consistent with it ultimately. One problem is, okay, if your your genes are affected by evolution, and that causes you to act in certain ways that changes your behavior, but morality is not what we do. Morality is what we're obligated to do because a lot of times we fall short of it.

So it's not even that we're it's explaining what we're doing because we're not doing it. We're failing. How do you explain the failure on an evolutionary view? Morality is not descriptive.

It's prescriptive. It's not like you said, what we do, but what we ought to do. And so this is a question I raised in the relationship with some book on this view.

I call it monkey morality, by the way, this was way of viewing the genesis of morality and human beings. I said, why must I be good? Why should I be good tomorrow? Why should I be good tomorrow? That's the question. Well, because it's better for the species.

So you smuggled in a moral concept in trying to explain the moral concepts, you've got to do better than that. And this kind of round and round and round you go, and there is no solution to it from their side because their view is false. And it's just a big problem that you can't explain our sense of obligation.

Who are we obligated to on an evolutionary view? Where did that even come from that idea that we're up? Because that's a big part of morality. It's a sense of being obligated, and we're only obligated to someone. We're not obligated to gene or anything like that.

I remember having a discussion with an atheist here in the program with blindsided me a little bit. And so I invited a bomb for an hour or so by invitation, and this issue came up and I said, so you're saying that you have evolved a different sense of morality than I do. No, I asked him, so when you say something is evil or wrong, all you're saying is that your evolution is different from the other person's evolution.

And he said, yes, to which I responded, okay, I rest my case because that eviscerates morality obviously. Yeah, it goes back to not being able to be consistent, I think, with false views. And that's that's what happens.

All right, Greg, I am going to just change directions here. I'm going to throw something in here. I'm curious what you will say, and we only have like a minute left, so I'm curious what you say.

After all these years, I'm surprised there would be any surprises. All right, let's check it out. Well, I don't know what I'm going to say.

So I'm curious what you would say. All right, this one comes from Patrick. Would it be possible for someone with multiple personality disorder to trust Christ with one personality and reject him with another? If so, how would we make sense of their eternal state? I'm reminded of a line from the more recent production of True Grette, the Cone Brothers magnificent movie, I think it was so well acted.

And a guy was put with a, you know, what if, you know, a speculative thing. And he said, I don't go with speculation. Life is already too complicated to add anymore to it.

Something to that effect. It was when he was bargaining with the girl over the horses. And this is the way I feel about this.

I don't have any, any, any thoughtful way of responding. It's wildly speculative. Who knows? I could say one thing and be completely wrong.

So I don't, I'm just not even going to weigh in. Okay. It's too difficult to know how to respond.

And it's very, very unusual, unique, almost singular circumstance. I wonder if it's ever happened. I don't know, but I don't know enough about multiple personality disorder to know what's going on.

Yes, the one who trusts in Christ is the one who goes to heaven. And the personality that does not is the one who goes to hell. How about that? Okay.

Well, certainly not to make light of the question. It's a fair question. I just have no capability.

But you don't think that they're, I don't think they're actually are multiple persons. I think there's one person that somehow their psyche is divided in some way. So obviously, either they're saved or they're not saved.

I mean, ultimately, that's what it comes down to. Can it be that only one person would be aware of that self? One personality would be aware of that? I don't know, because I don't know how multiple personality disorder works. So, okay, I was hoping you'd have something brilliant to say on this, Greg.

Yeah. Nothing profound, unfortunately. Sometimes it's a profound to say you don't know.

Except for the reference to that wonderful movie, which I saw many times. Well, thank you so much for your questions. If you would like to send us a question, just go to x and use the hashtag STRSK or you can go to our website at str.org. And all you need to do is just look for our hashtag STRSK podcast page and you'll find a link there to send us your question.

We'd love to hear from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Coco for Stand to Reason.