In a thread I started yesterday about an atheist at a Christian funeral, it has been asserted that atheists’ morality (or ethics, if you prefer) is as faith-based as that of Christians. This is a … vexing … assertion which I feel the need to refute. The topic feels more like a Great Debate than anything else, so I am going to violate Rhymer Rule 17b and start a thread here. Despite the thread title, anyone is welcome to join in.
I will begin by explaining my thesis, briefly because I have actual work I should be doing and also I’m lazy.
Atheist ehticsis not faith-based for several reasons. First of all, an atheist who attempts to construct a system for making ethical decisions is not claiming to be the recipient of divine revelation or any other sort of knowledge not achievable through natural means. Rather, the atheist ethicist is doing something akin to creating a geometrical system. He–no, scratch that, I won’t speak for others. I, in constructing an ethical system, begin by choosing axioms which cannot be justified within the system itself. Now while selecting these axioms is certainly a matter of aesthetics–I choose the axioms I do because they appeal to me–I make no claim to be uniquely qualified in choosing them, nor do I claim that my axioms are unfalsifiable.
For instance, my first axiom is that the survival of the human species is the highest good, while my second is that that the minimization of human suffering is the second highest good. While I firmly believe both of these are true, it’s possible that someone could disprove them to me. Because I know myself to be of finite knowledge and wisdom, I allow for the possibility that further information or a more cogent argument could show that I am wrong about assigning priority as I have. Thus I am not taking either one on faith. A Christian, Muslim, or other theist, by contrast, is taking a unprovable assertion on faith: specifically that a creator deity exists and has moral opinions, and that this deity’s morality is unimpeachable and its directives comprehensible to humans.
That’s just the beginning; I’ll go into more detail after my meeting, if anyone comes into the thread.
As I understand it, it’s a pretty old debate, whether there can be any objective basis for a moral system. I tend to think that there can be. My basis is something like this:
-Cogito ergo sum.
-Part of my cogitation is the experience of desires.
-Desires, by definition (more or less), are things I think ought to occur. This is the step where “ought” enters the system.
-I’m pretty damn sure other beings also experience desires.
-If my desires are things that ought to occur, so ought those other desires.
-Unfortunately, not all desires can be realized. That’s where the negotiation comes into play, and that’s where it gets tricky.
I certainly admit that step three may be on shaky ground–but I also think it’s a defensible and rational position. Stated more simply, if I want my desires to be fulfilled, I see no reason why I shouldn’t also want desires of other beings to be fulfilled. And it’s a basis for a robust ethical code fairly similar to Singer’s preference-based utilitarianism (although I go back and forth between thinking a rights-based system is more rational than a utilitarian system, or to thinking that both systems are close enough for government work).
The other point is that the introduction of a deity into the equation doesn’t clarify matters, either. We’ve all read enough Bullfinch and Lovecraft to know that monumentally powerful beings can be jerkwads.
So either your ethical code says, “Good is by definition what YaHuWaHu [or whoever] says,” or your ethical code says, “It so happens that YaHuWaHu [or whoever] is always good, you can tell.” If you say the former, then you don’t really have an ethical code so much as you have a List of Ways Not To Piss Off God, which could just as easily include spit-roasting slow lorises for fun as anything else. If the latter, then you’ve just pushed the question back: by what objective criteria can you tell that Papa Upstairs is good?
Question for the OP: Do you think Cubans are suffering at all? They’re very healthy. Have little risk of starvation. Yet, many would like to leave. How does that fit into your belief system?
Personally, I don’t think one can have a a morality that he can expect others to agree with and live under without the threat of force if it is not based on something higher. It becomes the rule of Kings, which can simply change do to the whims of future kings. I think a foundation for morality needs to come from a higher order. I think the Declaration of Independence and its invoking of Natural Law lays out a very good basic framework. Mind you, I am not arguing for a nod to religion.
It seems pretty clear to me that our ethics are an evolved trait built from living in small communities. I don’t have cites on hand and I don’t have time right now to search, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen studies that show that communities of chimps and bonobos show clear ethical constructs.
What seems to be an obvious ethical good to us may not be obvious to an intelligent alien species evolved from, say, ants or lions or lizards. I’ve read enough science fiction that explores this concept to get pretty convinced. Ender’s Game explored it in the first (and maybe second?) book.
For example, an intelligent species evolved from lions may see no issue with a new pride male coming in and killing the children of the male he has defeated in combat. We would consider this pretty unethical. A species evolved from praying mantises may consider it disgusting in the extreme not to kill your mate after mating.
Our own ethical sense seems so natural to us that it sure looks like it’s in-built.
The term “belief system” has a religious connotation. I think that what Skald is describing is more like a logically built code of ethics. Of course, if he has no objection to your labeling it a “belief system”, I’ll go along with it for now.
It’s partly built on instinct, partly built on the fact that we’re all the same species and all live in the same universe with the same constraints*, and partly on a combination of logic and millennia of collective experimentation on what works and what doesn’t. Quite a bit of secular morality amounts to “we tried doing things that way and it really sucked, so let’s not do that anymore.”
A simple example; most people don’t want to be murdered. I don’t want to be murdered, you don’t want to be murdered, all the people we know don’t want to be murdered. Therefore, it’s in our collective enlightened self interest to forbid murder. Sure, that means I can’t get away with killing an annoying neighbor; but it also means he can’t get away with killing me so I come out ahead since I want to stay alive a lot more than I want to avoid annoyances.
*For example, if you kill me I won’t respawn like some video game character; so, killing is a big deal. Nor am I capable of omniscience, which limits the responsibility I can be expected to have.
just ask them, if God said it was ok to rob rape and steal, would they do it? (the implication being that it is actually their own conscience that dictates their actions)
It’s quite possible they’ll say “yes”, you know. “Fear of God is the only thing keeping everyone from running around robbing, raping and killing” is a common Christian argument. And I have heard Christians say that if God told them to murder someone then “by definition” murdering that person would be good and not murdering them would be evil.
That kind of “obedience to God” so-called morality is actually amoral, not moral IMHO.
First, there isn’t an atheist morality. There are lots of moral systems constructed by atheists, but they in no way represent a unified system. There will be similarities, possibly because of the verities LHoD mentioned and possibly because of our shared genetic heritage.
Individual moralities might have a belief component. I suspect Randian morality (which is atheistic) does. But you can also have a personal morality built from ethical principles without any beliefs.
Cuba? Do you think that the fact that Castro is an atheist somehow implies that atheists must defend Cuban law? Ayn Rand was an atheist also - how do you think she and Castro would have gotten along?
Oddly societies with dominant and universal religious beliefs - and strong state/church ties - needed just as much violent enforcing of morality as secular ones. Maybe more because there were more rules.
Skald is right, though-that’s a topic for twenty other threads that have already been done.
I would have to say that if there is any “faith” built into my ethics system, it is faith that I am not unique-that others fear, hate, love, etc. pretty much the same way I do, that they feel pain pretty much the same way I do, that they hunger pretty much the same way I do, that they have a point of view that they believe is correct the same way I believe my point of view is correct, and that, for the most part, that hokey “paying it forward” thing actually works in the long run.
The most popular ethical system among atheists is secular humanism, which is based on values, and most importantly, shared values.
Values are not a matter of faith, they’re a matter of … VALUE. Your values are what they are. You like what you like for your own reasons and don’t have to justify liking what you do. You may have to justify your values in order for others to share them, but for the most part, shared values are discovered, not convinced.