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]

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.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

I think the stuff that sounds like he's trying to create a little insular cult is actually not religious in nature, but political. It's sort of obscured because two thousand years of Christian theology has reinterpretted a lot of stuff (like the word messiah) in a religious sense. But really, Jesus was, primarily, the lineal descendant of King David. Christians mention this, but don't seem to grasp the significance of that statement in Roman-controlled Palestine.

And I think a lot of the near-term apocalypse stuff is basically Jesus warning his followers what restoring the Judean monarchy would most likely mean. Lots of death.

My personal interpretation of "I am The Way, The Truth, and The Light" and statements like that are that he's speaking poetically on behalf of a philosophical principle, not that he was identifying himself as the unique embodiment of that principle. Can't prove that, of course, but then, you can't prove any other interpreation of that line, either. It's just my feeling on it.