Is Morality Natural or Supernatural?

Commonly accepted moral obligations, such as 'Do not kill' and 'Do not steal', exhibit certain features that seem so puzzling to some religious thinkers and moral philosophers that they consider they can only be explained adequately by recourse to supernaturalism. These metaphysicians think that morality necessarily transcends the natural world that we live in. I use the term 'supernaturalism' in this essay to capture a range of views that appeal to some non-natural, supernatural, supranatural, transcendental, otherworldly or out-of-the ordinary realm. On this view, common-sense morality cannot be explained entirely with reference to our ordinary, mundane world of people and things and their interactions. I include here appeals to the following metaphysical ideas:

• Absolute in Hegel's Idealism
• mystical One of Perennial Philosophy
• moral unfolding of the universe in Process Philosophy
• 'good' as a non-natural property in intuitionism and moral sense theory
• Plato's 'Form of the Good'
• Divine Command Theory
• grounding in God's nature

In this essay, I argue for a natural grounding for morality based on the following line of reasoning.

I see accepting a natural grounding for morality as having the following benefits:

1. Our ontology is not burdened unnecessarily by extraneous supernatural elements.
2. We are not required to buy into some grand but controversial metaphysical scheme before we can accept our common moral obligations.
3. Moral argumentation is more productive by relying only on publicly accessible reasons while avoiding appeals to private religious experience and obscure metaphysical reasoning.

The type of analogical argument I advance here is not new. David Hume [1777: sec. iv/210] drew just this analogy with the regulation of highway traffic in his Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding in which he wrote:

They cannot even pass each other on the road without rules. Waggoners, coachmen, and postilions have principles, by which they give the way; and these are chiefly founded on mutual ease and convenience.

The point here is that there is nothing mysterious about the normativity of our moral laws just as there is no need for a religious or transcendental grounding for our traffic laws. Both kinds of laws are necessitated by the aim of constraining and coordinating human behaviours for mutual benefit.

The plan I will follow for this essay is that in the next section I will list the essential characteristics of moral laws and explain how each requirement is mirrored by traffic laws. In Section 3, I delve into another key similarity in that each is a composite system of elements comprising specific aims, duties immune to utility calculations, assigned roles and responsibilities, rewards and punishments, and inculcated character. In what follows, I will use the term 'law' and 'rule' interchangeably throughout this essay. If you the reader find one of these terms problematic, simply replace that term with the other.

Copyright © 2026 Leslie Allan