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.

[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.

[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.)

[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?

[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]

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.