Morality

[mmcirvin]

John Scalzi posted an outraged post about the MCA, and some way down the thread somebody named Paul posted a defense of the law that included the following sentence:

7. I find it interesting that people who profess no faith in God or any other higher power can be so dogmatic about "morality". Morality is simply a recognition that some things are right and others are wrong based on some accepted standard. On what do you base your morality? Who sets the rules for you? How do you "know" that something is wrong?

I'd just been reading Fred Clark (who is a Christian, and... let's just say he wouldn't agree with Paul) talking about related subjects and was having warm fuzzy tolerant feelings about ways in which religion could be constructive, and this guy goes and ruins it for me. For Paul, apparently, religion isn't so much a source of moral insight as it is the admission ticket you need to lecture people about right and wrong. He's a God-believer and John and I are not, so what right do we have to tell him it's wrong to torture people? It reminds me of something I read from, I think, Orrin Judd a few years ago, complaining that atheists who behaved decently were free riders, mooching off of God-derived morality without acknowledging its divine author. He seemed almost disappointed that atheists weren't all monsters, as if we were using up his precious morality supply.


On the other hand, I do have to admit that I've been wrestling with Paul's particular question for a long time. Sometimes I think I'm almost a utilitarian and sometimes I think I'm almost a Kantian, and sometimes I almost agree with Raymond Smullyan's cheerful pseudo-Taoist take that axiomatized moral systems (as opposed to ethical feelings) are a dreary and monstrous waste of time, but all these positions seem unsatisfactory to me for various reasons. There are hard moral questions, and even a few easy ones, on which I've made decisions I later decided were wrong, and a more clear-cut moral system might have helped me.

Nevertheless, I find that there are many subjects on which I have no uncertainty whatsoever, such as whether half-drowning prisoners to extract information from them is right or wrong. If you ask how I know these things, I suppose the most honest thing to say is "because I was brought up that way". My parents and society inculcated certain values in me from childhood, and instilled in me, among other things, the idea that empathy is important, that you should treat people as you'd like to be treated, that some rules exist for a reason, but that injustices should be resisted; and that certain things are still right or wrong even if nobody is going to reward or punish me for them. These values do come into conflict with one another, but they have generally served me well. It's not a terribly satisfactory answer, but in practice, that's pretty much all anyone has. And, I suppose, more than some have.


I do know enough to get all Euthyphro on people who think it helps to bring God into it. If there is a God and God likes good things because they're good, then they must be good for some other reason, and theists and atheists are in the same boat morally, except possibly as regards enforcement. If good things are good just because God likes them, and if God decided tomorrow he wanted you to eat babies, that would become good—well, that may be internally coherent, but it seems hardly less arbitrary than saying good things are good for no particular reason, except, again, as regards enforcement. The angle that really makes my head hurt is that it leaves no way to exclude the possibility that God is lying to his prophets and followers about what he wants us to do, just for kicks; if God did it, it would be perfectly OK!

I suspect that what enthusiasts of divine command sometimes really mean is the more pragmatic argument that there's no reason for you to be good unless you're going to be rewarded or punished in the afterlife, but that's not how I was brought up at all.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...To be perfectly fair to divine command theorists, I should repeat what a commenter, on, I think, Sean Carroll's old blog named Arun pointed out to me a long time ago, that the "lying God" scenario isn't a problem if what you care about is what God commands rather than what he really wants. That's fair enough, though it does of course still leave the problem of how you know he exists and what his commands really are.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

If good things are good just because God likes them, and if God decided tomorrow he wanted you to eat babies, that would become good—well, that may be internally coherent, but it seems hardly less arbitrary than saying good things are good for no particular reason, except, again, as regards enforcement.

No, that makes sense.

Morals depend on rules. There has to be someone telling you what's right and what's wrong. It could be God, or someone claiming to speak for God, or it could be secular law.

Ethics depends on the amount of harm being done. Ethics can be in direct conflict with morals, because laws and rules can be made with some purpose other than ethics in mind.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The ethics v. morals divide might indeed be an important one, though I'm not sure the precise distinction is universally agreed upon.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

People who believe their rule-makers do have the right set of best interests in mind would not agree with my statement.

There's still lots of room for debate in ethics, because sometimes the choice is about doing less harm instead of no harm, and we can talk for hours about what constitutes 'less harm'.

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Your "because I was brought up that way" response is about optimal, I think.

The Religious can claim that their morality comes from God, but as far as I know there's no reinforcement loop that proves that their idea of God's Morality is actually coincident with His own. I know of no instances where God came down from the heavens to reward those who act morally, nor to punish those who act immorally.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I know of no instances where God came down from the heavens to reward those who act morally, nor to punish those who act immorally.

Much as some people would like to claim otherwise. (Cf: the nimrods who insist that the devastation of New Orleans was due to the immoral behavior of its residents.)

One thing I like about the Craft is that it makes no moral claims; at least, not the kind that I'm being trained in. It can help you clarify certain things in your own mind, but as that's mostly a matter of mental discipline one needn't be a practitioner to gain even that.

Of course, that's just another reason people like me are totally hellbound, dontcha know.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's something I find comforting about pondering and studying science and mathematics, that they make no moral claims. Though of course there are many ethical issues involved in their practice, and they can also inform moral reasoning that is ultimately based on other grounds.

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

(Cf: the nimrods who insist that the devastation of New Orleans was due to the immoral behavior of its residents.)

I was too busy surviving the aftermath to have ever gotten caught up with this sort of thing & I keep hearing about it. Where/who/what are these people who claim (ed) this?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Your "because I was brought up that way" response is about optimal, I think.

There's still the problem that not everybody was brought up that way, and you've got to translate any persuasive argument you want to make into terms they'll assent to. But this is the same problem Fred was talking about with regard to religious believers talking to unbelievers.

[jwgh]

Also, many people consciously reject some aspects of how they were brought up.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I figure Kant is the best example of why an ethical system derived entirely from logical principles is a an utterly nonsensical and completely useless concept.

[jwgh]

Part of the problem with saying that God defines morality is that it makes the idea that God is good vacuously true, which I don't think is what most religious people have in mind.

(Worshipping a god because you think he's good makes more sense to me than worshipping a god because you think he defines what good is, although neither makes a whole lot of sense to me, so I should probably just shut up about it.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

C. S. Lewis wrote some stuff that suggested to me that he took the first option: worshipping God not because he's a deontological bully who gets to say what good is, but because he is both good and wise, seems to have deep understanding of good and can teach us how to be good. Of course that's assuming one believes that in the first place.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Well, worshipping a god because you think he's good sort of implies there are other options, which would often imply the existence of other gods. Some religions are just fine with this, and just claims theirs is the best, but Abrahamic religions seem to somewhere along the way have picked up the idea that even the existence of other gods is to be forbidden, which leads to all kinds of problems and inconsistencies with older material that doesn't believe this. It all ends up sort of neurotic.

Which incidentially is why I can't stop giggling when I think of Shinto. Shinto has "innumerable" gods, and you just pick and choose convenient ones to worship, such as those who happen to be within hearing distance, or whatever. And at some point the Buddhists show up and say, hey, you should worship the Buddha instead! And the Shintoists go, OK, he sounds pretty awesome, let's do that! And they keep worshipping their innumerable gods and also Buddha. And next, the Christians show up and say, hey, you should worship Jesus instead! And, of course, the Shintoists go, awesome, let's add him too!

I was discussing this with a Japanese friend, and the result is pretty much that as a modern Japanese person, if you're going to pray, you might very well call upon the gods in general, Buddha, and Jesus to listen to your prayer. Because hey, the more the merrier.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

The atheist-bashing is really bothersome.

Why is such a number of people in America so afraid of atheists? Have American atheists indulged in terrorism, civil wars and evil conspiracies? Burnt churches and beat up kindly nuns? Islamophobia I can see some sort of distorted rationale for, but atheists?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A number of things are going on here, but one part of it is a holdover from mid 20th century Cold War anxiety about Communists. During the McCarthy/HUAC era when Soviet-backed Communists were feared to be infiltrating everything (similar to the paranoia about Muslims today), atheism was considered one sign of a Communist. That was when "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, among other things.

Another root of it has to do with religion in the schools. Up until the 1960s, many, maybe most American public schools had collective prayer and Bible readings as part of the curriculum, First Amendment be damned. Many communities were so unanimously Christian that nobody saw anything wrong with this, or if they did, they didn't speak up about it. Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair successfully sued in the early 1960s to get many forms of coercive prayer removed from public schools, which was the root of much of the continuing debate over school prayer. She became the leader of American Atheists (and a very public firebrand) and was a major focus of paranoia by religious conservatives who saw encroaching atheism actively trying to remove Christianity from American public life. (She also kept picking fights with other atheist groups, unfortunately.)

Even after she was murdered in 1995 (by an office manager for American Atheists in the course of robbing the organization), she was still the focus of endless e-mail rumors about how she was campaigning to get this or that aspect of religion banned.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, unlike in Europe, in the American mind atheism never quite lost the aura of criminality that it had had in Europe in the 18th century. This is weird considering that the founding leaders of the US were mostly a bunch of Deistic and Unitarian freethinkers whose civic God was a not-very-Biblical, rationally comprehensible entity; but it's not so weird when you realize that they were a rich, educated elite, and many the rest of the colonists were descended from people who left the old country to practice their particular brands of hardcore religious fanaticism out in the American wilderness.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Why is such a number of people in America so afraid of atheists?

How would you feel if someone not only rejected the one thing you loved above all else, but also believes it doesn't exist? That's what sets atheists apart from mere infidels.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I've had this argument years ago with someone else, and I'm not sure I really have the will or energy to want to go through it all again and demonstrate how Paul and people like him are pathetically wrong, but I'll try to be as succinct as possible: there is an instinctual sense of right and wrong, based on empathy, which also makes objective sense, in that universal selfishness is obviously self-destructive. If no one had empathy for anyone else and acted in a destructive manner, then everyone is vulnerable. Furthermore, there is no way to maintain any kind of social group without empathy between the group's members, which eliminates the posibillity of beneficial group actions.

On this instinctual moral foundation, you can build a logical ethical structure, reasoning out the rightness or wrongness of actions of non-obvious morality. But the moral core is there. And, despite claims of divine revelation and the occasional ethical inconsistency, every religious moral system seems to share the same moral core, based on empathy. Except that flaws creep into most religions as the theologians begin to rationalize some immoral actions as being "good". Such as when they argue that God wants all the Canaanites to be put to the sword.

If you look closely at what Jesus actually said, you'll see he's a strict empathy proponent. He may not have been the one and only son of God, but he was certainly a very good human being. It's a pity that his teachings aren't fashionable among Christians.

[jwgh]

They are among some, but typically not ones who make the news these days, I think.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, from my atheist perspective Jesus was an odd duck, if you go by all the stuff attributed to him in the Gospels. Some of it is extraordinary, tremendously moving material, with some almost left-wing radical overtones--the Beatitudes, the admonition to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the radical insistence that rich people need to give away all their stuff, those great fights with the Pharisees over the stupidity of religious hyperlegalism--and some of it is this strange near-term apocalyptic prophecy and some sort of viral "no salvation except through me" statements. Sometimes he seems to be preaching love and kindness to all the world, and sometimes he seems to be trying to construct a strange little insular cult of wandering ascetics. And then there are the stories that are just baffling, like the bit where he curses the fig tree. I suppose it's pretty much what you'd expect from a collected mishmash of 2000-year-old stories about a purported messiah.

[jwgh]

When I think about the things that my morality is based on I tend to rely on some informal ways of thinking about the world that make sense to me. I most often come back to this one: I am a more or less typical specimen of humanity, neither more nor less special or valuable than most people.

hey Matt

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

I've spent many years studying philosophy; I have multiple degrees in the subject and a few bookshelves that terrify casual acquaintances. So I say the following with a respectable amount of institutional authority:

You are a good man.

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I ain't so sure myself. You don't see the highly illiberal, petulant and sometimes bloody thoughts that cycle through my head when I have not gotten much sleep in days, people I respect are telling me my country is dead and civil war or a new Holocaust is coming soon and they're going to torture and rape and kill my wife and my baby and me and it's my fault for not marching in the streets and smashing shit when it might have mattered, thugs are running the government and a lot of Americans seem to like it, it's 4 AM and the baby WILL NOT STOP CRYING.

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And there's something else that haunts me. Scalzi got a couple of other interesting comments, not from defenders of the law but from people outside the US chiding him for a sort of collective guilt.

Commenter annika: "Your pose right now is pretty sad, all considering. You are a pompous ass who believes himself humane. Leave the world alone and spare us your tripe."

Commenter jj: "I think you a the moral cowards.
You and the bunch of US Americans Netizens that think the can safely influence the world behind their computer screeens.
You should be out on the streets.
But you are too far from the streets.
The only people on the streets of the USA are the disenfranchised.
You have for over 50 years built your homes on the basis of isolation and distance form the streets (on streets, there lives "niggers").
You have comitted yourselves to nothing but consumerism.
Now reality is eating you up alive. Through 9/11 and Iraq.
"May you live in interesting times.""

It's probably because I'm a political idiot, but I have no idea what I should have been doing that they're accusing me and other Americans of not doing. Europeans have these very European-labor-movement ideas about general strikes, and some people have proposed 1960s-style campus takeovers, or general smash-shit-up rioting, but I'm not sure how that addresses the general problem of Republicans fomenting fear in the heartland. Those things are scary shows of power; you don't reduce fear that way. Nixon won in '68 and '72, in the latter case by a massive landslide.

But it still haunts me. I feel as if the deterioration of American liberal democracy, and the things America has done without my moving to stop them, morally taints me in an indelible fashion. In some sense I am an evil person by way of being American regardless of how good I am personally. I think part of the rarely-acted-on "I'll run to Canada" fantasy is the idea among ashamed Americans that we can somehow lose that taint by rejecting Americanness. But of course I know that I'm never more an American than when I'm in another country.