FIRST
Many religious traditions assert that God is the ultimate cause of everything that happens in the world. And that even if God is the ultimate cause, humans appear to make decisions, pursue goals, and experience moral responsibility. From a practical standpoint, we act as if we have freedom: we plan, choose, and respond to reasons and consequences.
One way to interpret this is that God’s causation provides the conditions or foundation within which human freedom can manifest, rather than directly determining every choice.
However, the claim that God’s causation and human freedom coexist in this way is largely conceptual or verbal. Philosophers and religious texts assert it without explaining the mechanism or process by which freedom is preserved. It may be coherent in principle that divine causation and human freedom are compatible, but we cannot know that or explain that. And even if it were, it would not mean that it is the right explanation.
For that reason, there is no definite proof or strong evidence that God is relevant to morality. If he does wrong when we do, he is not a moral role model or fair judge at all.
THE ARGUMENT
A central philosophical question is whether morality—often associated with justice and love—is fundamentally rational. David Hume famously argued that it is not, at least not in the way many philosophers before him had assumed.
Hume rejects the idea that reason alone motivates human action. Instead, he argues that our actions arise primarily from passions, desires, and sentiments, with reason playing a secondary, instrumental role. Reason can inform us about facts and means, but it cannot by itself generate motivation. As Hume puts it, “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will, nor can it ever oppose passion in the direction of the will.” This challenges the traditional view that reason and the will govern the passions.
For Hume, the will does not operate independently of our desires; rather, it expresses them. Reason helps us calculate how best to satisfy our passions, but it does not determine our ends. In this sense, reason is not the “master” of action. This does not mean that humans cannot exercise self-control, but that such control itself depends on competing desires or sentiments rather than on reason alone.
From this perspective, morality cannot be grounded purely in rationality. Moral judgments, for Hume, arise from sentiments of approval and disapproval rather than from rational insight. This is why he denies that moral good is identical with what is rational, and why he argues that it is a mistake to label evil as “unreasonable.” Reason, by itself, cannot produce or prevent action, nor can it morally approve or condemn anything on its own.
Hume also argues that moral judgments do not describe facts in the same way empirical statements do. Saying that an action is morally wrong is not the same as stating a fact about the world. This is the point behind his famous claim that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” A description of what happens—such as a baby being harmed—does not, by itself, logically entail a moral obligation. The moral response depends on human sentiments, not on reason discovering a moral fact.
Importantly, Hume does not deny that moral judgments are meaningful or important. Rather, he locates their source in human nature—in our shared emotional responses—rather than in objective rational principles. When we praise an action, we do so because it evokes approval in us, often due to the motive we believe it expresses. However, this approval does not transform the action into an objective moral fact; it reflects our evaluative response.
In summary, Hume’s view challenges the idea that morality is fully rational or grounded in reason alone. Instead, morality is rooted in human sentiment, with reason serving as a tool rather than a foundation for moral motivation and judgment.