A Quick Refutation of the Kantian Moral Argument

The Kantian Moral Argument is one of the weirder arguments in Christian theology. The argument is presented as follows:

1. Moral behavior is rational.
2. Moral behavior is only rational if justice will be done.
3. Justice will only be done if God exists
4. Therefore, God exists.

The first premise, and thus the entire argument, hinges on Morality being objective. We don't have any real evidence to support this conclusion besides our intuition, so we already see that this argument isn't the strongest in the world.

Another way around this premise is to say that morality and reason are basically two separate things. So the premise would still fail. I'm not too sure about this objection, because I feel a way to have morality is to be reasonable and rational.

The second premise seems to simply be describing a bad moral system. It's basically saying "this system makes NO SENSE at ALL unless you accept that you'll be punished if you break it". I think you can have systems of morality that are actually rational. For example, it would be moral to give to charity becuase you're giving to a person who needs it more, which can be considered rational.

Premise 3 is a premise that is actually specifically arguing for types of Gods that will punish you. I think someone can get out of this by inserting some form of karma and reincarnation, but I don't think that's good enough of an objection.

I think, like with the Moral Perfectionist Argument, the premises of the argument do not work in favor of Christianity. This is because most Christians adopt a view of; if you accept Christ as your lord and savior and repent of your sins, then you can go straight to heaven. So Hitler could go to heaven if he did whatever that denomination of Christianity said to do (it varies based on denomination). That would mean killing the Jews was not irrational, because justice will not be done for him. If Hitler cannot be saved, then there would be no rational problem with killing 6 million more Jews, because his eternal damnation was inevitable.

This also works for Catholics who believe in purgatory. This is because Catholics also accept the view of damnation if you don't believe in Christ. So if an atheist or Bhuddist or whatever went and killed ten million babies, they wouldn't be irrational because their belief already made damnation inevitable.