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]

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]

...to be fair, they didn't find the body until 2001.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

For a nation which is so secure and powerful America sure does have a lot of fear. Maybe that's connected.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think it's pretty much the nature of empires. When you're on top you're conscious that everyone wants to knock you down.

It conditions how we think. I remember, years ago, reading about some European academics wishing for the end of the American empire and feeling disturbed until I realized I was using the wrong analogy. They were thinking of some process analogous to the old European colonial empires giving up their possessions, and discovering a new way to live within their borders. I was thinking of Visigoths sacking Rome.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty confident the end and dissolution of the American Empire will not be something people in the Republic of California, Cascadia or the Federation of New England five generations later really cry over except when they watch historical movies and dream of lost grandeur over two beers too many.