Moral Emperor...

And what sort of difference creates enmity and anger? Suppose for example that you and I, my good friend, differ about a number; do differences of this sort make us enemies and set us at variance with one another? Do we not go at once to arithmetic, and put an end to them by a sum?

Socrates in Plato's Euthyphro

It's odd that the right-wing seems to have a lock on morality and the discussion of moral issues in this country.  In Europe it tends to be the reverse, with the public viewing the political left as more aligned with moral issues such as public welfare, civil rights, and protection of labor.  Instead of concern for these populist issues, in America we have allowed the elevation of religiously motivated issues to the center of the moral stage.  Public policy efforts that could be spent on improving the health and well being of everyone are instead squandered on arguments about abortion, contraception and homosexuality.

This sorry state is an abrogation of an old armistice.  Religion has been at war with Science for probably as long as science can be said to exist.  Religions have fought to retain the favored status of their revealed knowledge, trying to halt or reverse the slow but inexorable march of scientific discovery, and yet always failed.  Although a few battalions of the faithful still skirmish against some truths from the natural sciences, most sophisticated theologians huddle in what they hope is their final impenetrable stronghold.  On the walls of their fortress is written their battle cry: no ought from is.

When David Hume expressed this principle in this manner for the first time in the 18th century it had already long been a contentious issue, and now in ethics it has been elevated nearly to the status of an axiom.  You cannot deduce an ought -- a normative prescription of what one should do or value -- from an is -- a bare fact or observed truth.  Facts can be tested objectively, but values are always subjective and, as Hume put it, "never the twain shall meet."  But how can we discriminate good from evil if such judgments are not amenable to any kind of measurement?  Theology leaps into the gap, promising that faith and God will provide the answers that science cannot give.

Science, mostly for the political expediency of getting on with its work, agreed to the terms of this cease-fire.  Stephen Jay Gould, not normally one to shrink from a fight, laid out the terms of the restraining order most clearly in his concept of Nonoverlapping Magisteria.  "The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value," he wrote.  "We study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven."  But religion has not honored the treaty.  They have taken this concession and pushed it farther, thrusting religious doctrine into policy matters which can be, and should be, decided based on facts.

It's time to storm the citadel.

We must start by asking, is religion the proper arbiter of morality?  Must values originate in the supernatural, or can we discover them by some other source?  We can approach this question many ways, although one of the clearest is the dilemma posed by Socrates when he asked for a definition of piety.  To paraphrase, he asked if what is good is good because God says so, or does God endorse it because it's good?  Do we quantify the good offered up by God by the strength of His authority, or by the depth of His perception?

If we define "good" as that which God wills, then morality is really just a set of arbitrary sanctions, enforced by threats of extreme violence.  While it might be prudent to conform to the wishes of a powerful super-being, can that be construed as a proper definition of "good?"  It does not seem to be, based in part on the revisionist Biblical scholarship presented to children.  How many Sunday school teachers, even in fundamentalist churches, would instruct their charges that selling children into slavery is good just because God suggested it in Exodus 21:7?

On the other hand (or the other horn of this dilemma, if you will), if we instead say that God didn't pick a morality capriciously but instead formulated rules and values that are universally good, then what was the standard used to decide that?  We may not have an objective measure for what is "good", but God obviously does or else He could not have made the selection.  If these objective standard exist independently of God in such a way that God Himself has to refer to them, we could discover them as well.  Cutting out the supernaturally inscrutable middleman, and his earthly interpreters, could certainly help clear up a lot of the confusion about moral issues.

Religion continues to don the mantle of morals and values, but that emperor has no clothes.  It's past time we stop bowing to their strongest claim on the public sphere and point out their nakedness to everyone.

- jack*

Comments

[jimBOB]

I suppose it's arrogant of me, but at this point in my life I've come to regard religion as pretty much of a blind alley in the pursuit of moral enlightenment. That is, humans trying to make moral sense of their existence have created this massive collection of mistaken notions in a desperate effort to get to a universally grounded system of morality. Unfortunately, IMHO you can't get there from here. It's all a titanic exercise in wishful thinking.

Supreme beings, devils and angels, eternal afterlives (involving rewards and/or punishment), ambiguous and endlessly studied religious texts, and elaborate structures of ritual and of divinely inspired law, are all astonishing products of human invention, but in the end they're just wrong. (Showing why this is beyond the scope of what I'm willing to put into this comment; I'll just say that my settled opinion is none of these things is more likely to be part of reality than is the Easter Bunny.)

If I am correct in this, then what is left to build a moral system out of? In particular, what sort of moral system could one build that could plausibly command universal assent?

I think the short answer is it can't be done, at least not in any sort of universalist way. We'll just have to admit that moral systems are artificial human inventions, not the reflection of some moral order inscibed into the fabric of the universe. However we shouldn't be deterred by this state of affairs; moral systems, whatever their basis, form an indispensable backbone for civilization and civilized behavior. Without them our lives would be much less pleasant. (Don't believe me? Try vacationing in Baghdad.) In the end, I think even agnostics realize that the benefits of morality are such that we all need to use moral thinking in our lives, even if that thinking has no ultimate basis,

In a sense, I guess my concept of morility is also an exercise in Tinkerbellism. ("Believe strongly enough, and it'll be true.") The good news is I'm not likely to assault or kill someone for not agreeing with me.

[[MAC]]

Daniel Dennett addresses this very issue in Freedom Evolves.

http://www.kenanmalik.com/reviews/dennett_freedom.html

[debbiemc]

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I already like it here