1. The Argument from Cross-Cultural Universality
Every known human society, however isolated, however different in custom, language, or belief, independently developed:
- Prohibitions on arbitrary killing within the group
- Some concept of fairness and reciprocity
- Care obligations toward children
- Sanctions against theft and deception
- Notions of honour and shame
This convergence is extraordinary. When a feature appears in every instance of a phenomenon, the most parsimonious explanation is that it is intrinsic to the phenomenon itself. The universality of basic moral feeling across cultures is strong evidence that it belongs to human nature as such, regardless of how that nature came to be. A creationist can accept this just as readily as a Darwinist.
2. The Argument from Developmental Psychology
Moral intuitions appear in human infants before they can be taught, reasoned with, or indoctrinated:
- Infants as young as 6 months show preference for “helper” figures over “hinderer” figures in experiments.
- Children as young as 3 years spontaneously share and protest unfairness, even at personal cost.
- The empathic response — distress at witnessing another’s pain, appears before language acquisition.
This strongly suggests that basic moral sensibility is not installed by culture or religion, it is present at birth. It is part of what it means to be a human being, in the same way that the capacity for language or facial recognition is. Its origin, divine endowment, natural selection, or otherwise, is a separate question entirely.
3. The Argument from Reason Alone (The Kantian Route)
Immanuel Kant demonstrated that basic moral principles can be derived from pure reason, without appeal to God(s), scripture, evolution, or even empirical observation of human behaviour. His core insight:
If I am to act rationally, I must be willing for the principles behind my actions to apply universally — to everyone, including to myself.
This Categorical Imperative generates recognisable moral rules through logic alone:
- “Do not lie” — because if everyone lied universally, language and trust would collapse, making lying itself impossible. The principle is self-defeating at universal scale.
- “Do not murder arbitrarily” — because I cannot rationally will a world where arbitrary killing is the universal norm, as I would be its victim too.
- “Respect persons as ends, not merely as means” — because rational beings have inherent dignity by virtue of their capacity for reason.
This argument requires no God(s) and no Darwin — only consistent thinking. It is accessible to a follower of any faith, or none.
4. The Phenomenological Argument — Moral Experience as Self-Evident
When a person witnesses a child being tortured, they do not calculate that this is wrong, they know it immediately, viscerally, and with a certainty that feels more like perception than inference. This immediate moral knowledge has been called:
- Moral Intuition (in analytic philosophy)
- Natural Conscience (in classical thought)
- The Inner Light (in Quaker tradition)
- Fitrah (in Islamic thought — the innate disposition toward good)
- The Still Small Voice (in the Hebrew tradition)
Remarkably, virtually every major religious tradition already affirms this concept — that moral knowledge is written into the human person prior to revelation or doctrine. The argument does not fight religion; it appeals to something all religions already acknowledge. The point of departure for Ecumenical Relativism is simply that this inbuilt moral sense is sufficient, without requiring institutional mediation.
5. The Argument from Moral Damage
If morality were purely external, and entirely the product of cultural instruction or religious command, then a person raised in complete isolation from all moral teaching should exhibit no moral instincts whatsoever. While such instances are rare and ethically impossible to study rigorously, the available evidence from tragic cases of severe neglect and isolation (feral children, extreme deprivation cases) shows instead that such individuals still exhibit grief, attachment, and distress responses to harm. What is damaged by deprivation is moral development and regulation, not the underlying moral sensitivity itself. This further points to morality as a baseline endowment of the human person.