What follows in this section will presuppose that there can be practical reasons for
belief; I make this assumption to assess whether the case for our full reality can be
supported by practical reasons even granting the possibility of practical reasons
for belief.
Kant thought that our moral practices presupposed what he calledpostulates of
practical reason. According to Kant,“These postulates are those ofimmortality,of
freedomconsidered positively (as the causality of a being insofar as it belongs to the
intelligible world), andof the existence of God.”^42 Our moral practices presuppose
that we have genuine freedom. (We will discuss the idea of genuine or transcendental
freedom more in a bit.) Moreover, our moral practices make sense only against a
background belief in which the universe is fundamentally a just place in which desert
and reward ultimately coincide. But for desert and reward to ultimately coincide,
there must be a God in charge of the development of the universe and there must be
more to our existence than our earthly lives.
Let’s consider a practical argument that is based on the idea that taking morality
seriously demands taking some moral properties to be fundamental. Here’s a snapshot
of the kind of argument I am envisioning. Suppose a form of reductive naturalism is
true according to which moral properties are identical with non-fundamental prop-
erties that can be designated by recognizably non-moral predicates. Since these
properties are non-fundamental, our normative vocabulary could very easily have
designated other properties without missing a joint in reality: fundamentally speaking,
nothing is really right, wrong, good, or bad, and so on. Moreover, our concepts that have
these properties as their content areincorrectin the sense elucidated in section 6.2.
(Presumably the concept of correctness is also incorrect given reductive naturalism,
which in itself is somewhat disquieting.) Once we view morality in this way, the
importance of morality itself seems greatly diminished. Can our moral practices survive
the realization of their fundamental insignificance?
Adams (1987) asks us to consider a scenario in which we learn that the omnipotent
and omniscient creator of our universe is indifferent to moral considerations. In this
scenario, some acts are right or wrong, some states of affairs have intrinsic value, and
so forth, but this entity does not care. Adams suggests that our realization of the
indifference of our creator to morality would undercut the felt importance that we
attribute to morality even if it did not lead us to change our moral beliefs. I suggest
that learning that moral features reduce in the way described above would have a
similarly deflating effect. Adams’s hypothesis of an indifferent creator merely puts a
personal face on the idea that the universe is a fundamentally amoral place. Accord-
ing to this argument, we therefore have a practical reason to think that the universe
is not a fundamentally amoral place, and so there are at least some fundamental
moral features.
(^42) See Kant’sCritique of Practical Reason(1999b: 146, Ak. 5:132).