A Recent Washington Post article got me thinking about ethics in the religion vs. atheism dispute. Aside from the article not making a solid case against atheism, but rather pointing out what the author thinks is an unfortunate consequence if atheism prevails, the article also missed a point that I thought could use some clarifying.
The article tries to make a case that, without religion, without god, there would be no grounding for morality whatsoever. But that only follows if nothing replaces religion or god. The article, and that argument generally, addresses nihilism or general agnosticism, not any necessary correlate of atheism.
Take this quote, for instance:
These are cleary satirical suggestions for the locus of god-free morals, but his dismissal of them is still telling: He doesn’t acknowledge that they are potential explanations, because he asserts his ability to doubt them. An atheist can just as easily say “to hell with god, I’ll do what I want,” and it proves just as little about the validity of god as a foundation for morals.
What I’m saying is that all that is required for valid moral imperative is the belief that there exists an objective (and possibly also discoverable) truth. One can found morals in science, or on god, and one can debate the merits of either, but as long as there is something which is true for everyone, there is the potential for a prescriptive moral code that applies to everyone.
I wonder, though, if anyone can make the argument that the denial of objective truth none-the-less allows for moral prescription. I’d like to hear it.
And yet the very decline of the world, as you so happily point out, could be traced back to a lack of ethical thinking by those who possess the power.
As for the matter of question… you may want to start with this thread to find some of the responses already crafted on this board. Might have the answer you are seeking.
Actually I believe there is a decline because there is too many ethics and forms of morality operating in the world since I believe suffering is due to a moral proposition.
So would a universally recognized ethical tradition be prefferable? Especially one where suffering is used as the basis, and the goal is to minimize suffering.
Sounds like Bentham to me. Maybe there is something to be found in the universality of human greediness?
I generally agree with the cited part of the article, but I think it’s largely an academic thing. I think there are a good many reasons why an atheistic culture may end up (not) doing the things we call (un)ethical. I just don’t think those reasons are likely to be actually moral. An atheist is far more likely to defend such behavior on the grounds that it’s practical, or efficient, or oriented towards the survival of the species. What they will not be able to rationally say, is that these things are good.
So no, an atheistic society will not necessarily fall into a moral decay as we reckon moral decay. But such a society will, I feel, be irrational in calling some of the things they do ‘good’ and others ‘evil’, if they persist in doing so.
All religions or philosophies have some foundation for ethics, but they differ. Not in outcome, if you’re going to be ‘good’, then you’re going to be ‘good’ and what ‘good’ is is generally agreed upon. But it’s my view of how the foundations differ that makes the veracity of the religion or philosophy questionable.
For example, a Buddhist does no harm because he’s awakened to a realization that there’s no separation between ourselves and other phenomena. So if he harms another, he’s harmed himself. A theist does no harm because all phenomena are created by God and God will ‘save’ him only if he turns his will over to God and follows his commandments.
what kills me is that theists, in making the claim that morals will vanish if god does too, makes it sound like they would say “oh gosh, there really is no god, i guess that means i can rob, steal, murder and rape now”.
Morals are not products of religion. The potential for morality is inherited at birth. Granted they do need to be molded, but that does not mean that they are some sort of “gift” from above. If you think that the world would go down the shitter if people stopped subscribing to religions then you need to rethink the way YOUR morals work. People should be smart enough to realize that they have the power to be moral.
Moral codes are accepted by the majority. There is evidence throughout history that moral codes have changed and that religion changes with them. NOT the other way around.
Uccs, I don’t think that religion has a monopoly on the word good. While a materialist might describe her moral imperatives as seeking efficiency, utility, or survival, it is implicit that those qualities are being held up as good. In the same way, one can describe the actions of a believer as being guided by god’s will, but we still recognize that they believe gods will to be synonymous with good.
So I don’t see any reason why a society without theistic religion would be unable to call its actions ‘good’.
I disagree about the ‘irrationality’ of it, since the division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ boils down to some other system. Theists say that they are determined by God, Consequentialists say that they are determined by their results, ect, ect. These concepts don’t exist in isolation.
You may be right, Xunzian. Can consequentialism define good and evil metaphysically, though? The way I’ve understood it, the claim there is that an action is good because it’s results are good, or evil because it’s results are evil. Does consequentialism have an explanation for what good and evil are, or is that another thing? That’s the problem I’ve had with most non-theistic ethical systems, that I tried to get at here- they can create rules to sort behavior into the right lists (that is, lists that resemble mine), but seem to fall short in justifying calling one list ‘good’ and the other ‘evil’.
My thinking might be similar to Uccisore’s on this. Human beings have moral-ethical social tendencies hard wired in. So we can expect some moral behavior from people regardless what they believe. But without a conception of the Ultimate Good, what is the ground for our thinking about goodness, righteousness or justice?
A troublesome pattern that I see is that the atheist begins with religious presumptions of what’s good and evil, then develops his own system of arbitrary rules, that when applied to behavior, produces a list of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviors that resembles the religionists’. In fact, he judges his system based on how closely it matches the list of the religionists’- “See, my system condemns and endorses all the right things, just like yours!” and then, having duplicated the results the religious have defined, he declares his system independent of religious values. It’s not precisely contradictory, and not precisely circular, but it’s…something unsatisfactory, I’m quite sure of that.
See, and I don’t see that as an issue at all. Since I don’t think God exists, for example, I don’t see, “Because God said so” as anything resembling an “Ultimate Good”, rather I see it as a weak-at-best explanation for behavior. Defining “good” and “bad” relative to other human beings, now you are cookin’ with gas.
Personally, to the best of my recollection, I’ve never connected God (or any kind of ‘higher power’) with my own ideas of right and wrong (save for a phase I went through regarding pre-marital sex).
Is the author implying that, for example, people in the most remote, out-of-touch areas of the world are completely without morals? That they kill and rape without discretion? It’s completely absurd if you ask me.
While some people may found their morals on what a book suggests, athiests and plain old never-heard-of-God-ers are living proof that God has nothing to do with what we think is right or wrong. If someone asked me “why don’t you go kill that person over there?” my answer wouldn’t be “because God says it would be wrong!”. In fact, I’d wager most people wouldn’t answer like that.
Anyway, I’m rambling on about nothing so I’m going to go now.
I think the idea with concequentialists is that the titles of good and evil aren’t truly applicable for what they are trying to accomplish. While they acknowledge some value in such systems (the prime example being deontological systems) the idea was never to divide action based on what the action is but by what it accomplishes. The idea that what the action produces is of value, not of what the action is: thus under a truly concequential system I don’t think there would a boundary of ‘good’ (permissable) and ‘bad’ (non-permissable) acts… merely the action that would maximize x (x being whatever your particular ethical system is trying to measure) to the highest degree would be the correct action to take. I suppose this could create a very short list with one ‘good’ and many ‘bad’ actions, but I think at this point the nomenclature would be useless.
Yeah, I think we’re on the same page, BlueChicken- the consequentialist ends up doing the right things, but has no real reason to call them ‘good’ things, or the other things ‘evil’. To that extent, I don’t really see what makes it a system of morals at all.
Xunzian
Is morality really about explaining behavior? Maybe that’s our difference, because I don’t see that as terribly important. Where you and I would agree (I think) is that 99% of the time, we don’t need any elaborate system to tell us right from wrong, that’s kind of natural, right? For that reason, when I’m thinking about morality, I’m thinking about the phenomenon of an act being evil- what it means to identify and experience something as being that way, and whether or we are observing something real about the act when we experience such. Identifying a rule that would keep us from doing the things we experience as forbidden in the first place seems rather…inconsequential.
I’m not sure how, in a virtue-based ethical system, you can have act be evil. We can have evil people, but the quality of an act itself is dependent upon the actor and its context. I speak in terms of consequences simply because that is the common currency of moral action, after all, if your moral system does not bring about good ends, then it probably should be discarded, though ‘good ends’ alone is (in my mind) insufficient to make a complete moral system from.
That is why Mencius argued that the sage was the measure of all things. Expanding on this, Fung Yu-lan said that the notion of “highest good” is real (we can imagine such a thing existing) but the “highest good” itself is not actual (just as there is no perfect square in the world, there is no “highest good”). In this case, the sage is the individual that understands the principle of the situation well enough to say, “good enough” since the “highest good” collapses as soon as it encounters actuality. Just as I can tell a square from a rectangle while recognizing that the square is not perfectly square (or even having seen a perfect square in my life!), so too can a cultivated individual tell right from wrong without demanding a representation of perfect goodness. From there, it just becomes a matter of discussing the penetrance of goodness in an individual.