Reasonable Dissent

An atheist’s morality is not disproved by one philosopher. Sorry.

Below I’ve posted a “video” of a response to another video (who knows how far back that goes, I just picked this one up). While I completely disagree with what he’s saying, it wasn’t an offensive video, so give it a quick watch.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bss9T2EJ0W4

He says at 1:05:

While it is true that some atheists can be moral, it is not true that one can be logically consistent and be an atheist and moral realist at the same time.

Uh oh. My B.S. sense is acting up again. Time to set a few things straight. I’ll begin with his first point. He cites the philosopher David Hume’s famous assertion that you cannot derive an OUGHT from an IS, meaning that if your belief system is such that you build up only from what you know IS, there is no way to make the jump to what that implies you OUGHT to do.

I don’t want to detract from Hume’s results or his very influential philosophy career, but anyone that has done more than pick and choose his philosophical quotes will know, the field is awash in extremely different ideas that exist because it’s not a hard science. This is philosophy.  So while we’re choosing whatever quotes we want to, it’s my turn. I invite you all to also read one of Plato’s great works, Euthyfro. This is especially apt given his claim that there is no morality unless it is given by God. To paraprase the paradox in terms that make sense for Christianity, does God command things because they are moral, or is it moral because God commands it? It’s a simple question, but opens up quite the can of worms.

Does God command what he does because those things are moral?  If this were the case, it seems to imply that God is not actually the source of morals. He may know about the morals, but isn’t the moral authority himself. He just passes the info on down to us. (And it’s a good thing we’ve only got 1 god in the “telephone” chain, as opposed to what Plato had. Have you ever played that game with more than about 3 kids? Who knows what moral commands we’d get!)

Ok, so are things moral because God commands them? Yikes, what consequences could this have? The first word that comes to mind is “crusades”…   Are we saying that, assuming that it’s true, if God commanded killing some huge number of people, we would not only be allowed, but morally imposed to go out and do so? And how do we filter out the people that really heard God make this out of the ordinary command and those who just wanted to get away with it, or who were crazy in the first place?

So I think we already have some philosophical issues with assuming that God is the source (or deliverer) of morality. Let’s not put too much trust behind one claim of one philosopher.

But let’s investigate this issue from the side of an atheist wondering how he ought to act. There are huge branches of philosophy that deal with this. The most broad is simply Normative Ethics, philosophy trying to deal with exactly this question. From the vantage point of an atheist who values above all else reason and verifiable reality ( “IS” statements, to use our previous terminology), I would say that consequentialism provides the best theories. We have, in basic descriptions, a few to choose from:

• Utilitarianism – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the good done to the most people.
• Egoism – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the good done to the self.
• Situation ethics – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the love of the consequence.
• Negative consequentialism – Moral worth is derived by minimizing bad consequences.

And there are more. I may also add that none of these are inconsistent with atheism. They are completely orthogonal topics. This isn’t the place to get into a huge breakdown of every possible ethical theory, so I’ll just take one as an example.

Utilitarianism – we determine the moral worth of something by the good done to the most number of people. So essentially we are deciding what we OUGHT to do based on what we predict will happen. Here’s where we get into what I think this video’s poster would claim is a sticking point. How do we know something will happen, so that we can make a moral judgement? This question is more or less immaterial. For a reasonably rational person, prediction is at the heart of nearly every action that we make. Science is built upon predicting results. I claim that tomorrow I’ll see the sun in the sky just like I did today. This doesn’t have to be true, strictly speaking, but throwing out predictive power is ridiculous. And if you try to do it, you’ll become an actionless pile of mush on the floor.

We are very experienced with actions and consequences. Using a small amount of predictive power, we can estimate the outcome of our actions, and thus derive morality.

And to dust off a tired old hat: If you’re only not killing your neighbor because your God threatened you with eternal torment, well, that scares me more than someone thinking for himself.

Tags: atheism, General, morality