Religious Skeptics Should Question Their Moral Theology – New Ideal

When I was a teenager, I went from being a devout Catholic to questioning all religion in the space of just under a year. Entering high school, I made some Jewish and Muslim friends. As I started to explore their belief systems, I couldnt help but think that the only reason I considered myself Catholic was that Id been raised by Catholic parents, not because Id done a rational survey of the major religious alternatives. Since I also knew that most of my peers hadnt done much more thinking than that, I became generally skeptical of religious belief.

I came to this conclusion because Id discovered a simple version of an argument thats been employed with great success by many critics of religion, from David Hume to Julia Sweeney.1 It works by pointing to the worlds vast diversity of religious belief as evidence that familiarity with ones own religious tradition doesnt rationally justify preferring it to the alternatives. These different religions cant all be true, so familiarity is no rational guide to the truth.

I know many who have had the courage to abandon religious belief when they too realized the provincialism of their own religious upbringing. I want to encourage them to take one more step. Too few secular people have thought to extend the same skeptical attitude toward another set of beliefs that is just as crucial to the way we live our lives, even though it is often packaged along with beliefs about deities. Im referring to our basic beliefs about moral values. Its time that more secular people decided to challenge the moral doctrines theyve absorbed from religion along with the rest of its theology.

We can choose whether or not to believe in God, but we have no choice about our need for some view about the universe if we are to navigate our way through it. The most scientific secularists reject a belief in the miraculous and adopt a naturalistic commitment to the law of causality, knowing that science relies on it to help uncover natures secrets. But should physicists use their knowledge to build an atom bomb for their government? Should biologists use their knowledge to clone human beings? Should political theorists use their knowledge to redistribute wealth to feed the worlds poor? In each case, its not enough to know the means to the end, the end itself needs to be evaluated. To navigate life, we need more than scientific principles of cause and effect; we also need scientific principles of ethics.

Many secular people who have thrown off the religion of their parents have scrutinized at least some of their most provincial beliefs about ethics. For instance, its likely that the Kinsey reports revelation of the diversity of sexual practices helped weaken the hold of conventional Christian doctrines in favor of chastity and against homosexuality. Its not an accident that as European cultures began to discover more about cultures around the world (and about their own ancient history), Enlightenment philosophers began to question traditional European moralities.

But sadly, this willingness to challenge traditional morality has not extended much further. Secular people will challenge the idea that God is the ultimate source of morality, but they are less clear about an alternative principle on which to base their ethics. Too often, it seems their moral views default to what they learned from a religious culture. For instance, those who reject a morality of chastity might still regard money-making as vicious on the principle that selflessness is a moral ideal. Yet that is the same ideal that Christians celebrate when they praise Christ for casting the money changers out of the temple and sacrificing himself on the cross. How confident are secular people that this is a doctrine they can neatly separate from the religious baggage usually associated with it?

We know that those who abandon religion dont automatically abandon everything they picked up from religion. How many ex-believers still feel crestfallen that they might never experience an afterlife? I did. We also know that there are powerful incentives to hold on to religious views when alternatives are not available. Prominently, people have to make life choices and need some code of values to guide them.

If so, we should fully expect that religious ethics should continue to hold sway even for ex-believers whove rejected other elements of religious doctrine.

Unfortunately, those searching for a truly secular ethical alternative will find that there are few prominent options. At least when we look to what prominent secular intellectuals have had to offer, I would argue that they themselves continue to be under the sway of religious ethics.

Some noteworthy critics of religion have lately made an attempt to offer secular alternatives in ethics. Admirably, New Atheist thinkers and other secular public intellectuals like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer have devoted significant attention to the question of how science can ground morality. But their approach amounts to looking for ways to reconcile most of our existing basic moral beliefs with science. A truly scientific approach does not seek reconciliation. Atheists dont reconcile the idea of God with science, they reject the idea. And yet even the most serious defenders of science arent up to radically rejecting our cultures morality.

The basic moral belief the New Atheists take from our culture is that morality consists in impartial rules that guide our behavior with others. In his recent book Rationality, Steven Pinker describes this as the idea that the perspective of an individual on his interests is morally irrelevant, the idea that any argument that privileges my well-being over yours or his or hers . . . is irrational. Its an idea that is not far from the ideal of selflessness at the heart of Christian ethics.

Pinker is not the only popular secularist to make the claim. Harris writes a whole book that turns on the assumption that we are not, by nature, impartial and much of our moral reasoning must be applied to situations in which there is tension between our concern for ourselves . . . and our sense that it would be better to be more committed to helping others.2 Likewise Shermers book on morality begins by invoking Peter Singers principle of impartial consideration of interests and goes on to quote Pinkers endorsement of the same.3

Whats interesting about Pinkers discussion of impartiality is the way he is self-conscious about the affinity between impartiality and Christian ethics. But rather than seeing this as a sign of parochial thinking about ethics, he presents that affinity as a strength. He suggests that variations of the impartial Golden Rule were independently discovered by Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Bah as well as by a multitude of philosophers (Spinoza, Kant, and Rawls among others). By portraying different religions as having made this independent discovery, Pinker implies that even unsophisticated mystics were in a position to observe some obvious fact that secular philosophers had otherwise studied more systematically.

This interpretation of the affinity is, frankly, ridiculous. For one thing, its not at all obvious that each of these religions would really agree to the same impartiality principle he has in mind.4 Even if they did, theres little reason to consider their views as based on independent discoveries. No social scientist would treat these as independent data, since we know they influenced each other (e.g., Judaism influenced both Christianity and Islam, Hinduism influenced Buddhism, etc.). Most importantly, Pinker gives no indication what rational methods these notably faith-based movements would have used or what facts they would have been observing to make their discoveries.

To a secular, scientifically minded thinker, the similarity between religious and contemporary secular moral views should generate at least some provisional skepticism. When we find out that most people in Poland have similar Catholic beliefs, we dont assume that they must have all independently discovered some facts about the local water supply that make Catholicism true. We ask what cultural forces affected this part of Europe, but not Belarus, to lead uncritical people to absorb one dogma rather than another. And if a Polish secular figure comes along who supports Catholic antipathy to homosexuality and abortion, most secularists would not likely sympathize with the idea that he and the Catholics have independently converged on the same independent facts.

Of course, its easy to criticize Polish parochialism from non-Polish soil. Its harder to see a blind spot that one shares with an entire intellectual culture that crisscrosses national boundaries. But theres reason to think the coalition of religions and secular viewpoints that Pinker mentions, while extensive, is not exhaustive. The moral doctrine of impartiality is far from being universally accepted in the long history of ethics. Pinker and other secularists who equate morality with impartiality completely ignore a major contrary data point: the entire moral philosophy of ancient Greece.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle founded the discipline of philosophical ethics and had an enormous influence on its history. Aristotle, for example, thought that the virtuous man is a lover of self or even selfish in some translations.5 He thinks that beneficence towards others is most praiseworthy when it is towards friends, friends being those one loves when they are like another self.6 There is nothing like the impartiality principle in his and other ancient Greek theories.7 On the contrary, all of the major thinkers in the ancient Greek tradition see a persons own eudaemonia (flourishing) as the end of ethics.

That the Greeks held this view doesnt mean they had the correct moral theory. But it does mean that we cant take the more modern view of impartiality, which various religions share with other more recent philosophers, as expressive of a transparently self-evident truth. Just as encountering rival religious beliefs should lead us to question our devotion to ours, recognizing that not just others but some of historys greatest philosophers had a different conception of ethics should cause a similar reckoning. Thats especially true when theres a decent chance that the secular philosophers who adopt this theory of impartiality actually got it from religion.

Sometimes scientists do vindicate ideas superficially similar to those first entertained by thinkers who lack scientific rigor. The atomic theory and the theory of evolution by natural selection both had predecessors in ancient Greece which had only a weak basis in the evidence. Far from being disqualified by this similarity, we think modern atomic and evolutionary theory are some of the best confirmed scientific theories available. But here its crucial that the modern theories are based on a wide array of converging well-substantiated evidence. What can be said for modern arguments in ethics?

We can find a dizzying array of such arguments in modern philosophy. Eminent philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Henry Sidgwick, John Rawls and Derek Parfit (among many others) all give laborious, abstruse arguments for their conceptions of morality as impartiality.8 We cant examine all of these in our limited space, but there are reasons to be skeptical that theres an unconditional need to survey the entire dizzying array if we are interested in finding a scientific account of morality.

When we examine the most influential philosophical arguments in ethics, we find that many of their most prominent advocates share the conviction that scientific evidence about natural facts is simply irrelevant to questions of value. Figures like Kant, Sidgwick, Rawls and Parfit all agree, in one way or another, with David Humes idea that scientific observations about what factually is the case have no logical relationship to what ethically ought to be practiced. This should raise red flags for the arguments they go on to offer: if theyre not scientific, fact-based arguments, what are they based on and why should secular people otherwise committed to scientific naturalism care about this alleged basis?

Much of the time, the arguments are said to rest on what the philosophers call intuitions. In one use of intuitions, the philosopher considers a series of artificial imaginary cases (say, one in which various runaway trolleys careen toward unsuspecting victims tied to the track) and their unfiltered reactions to them.9 Its thought that because intuitions are used in thought experiments which compare two cases with many variables held constant save for one crucial difference, they provide a test for various ethical theories.

But the method of intuitions is far from an approach that involves anything like the scientific method.10 A sign of this is how the reactions popular with Anglo-American philosophers turn out not to be the same as those of respondents from other cultures.11 One critic of philosophers reliance on intuitions notes that when intuitions conflict, theres no way to dismiss some as artifacts while holding others as authentic, not if we dont think there are observed facts that intuitions answer to. Its more likely that all of them are artifacts of our theoretical commitments, of what weve come to believe through education and socialization, etc.12 To repeat the lesson I learned in high school, familiarity is no rational guide to the truth.

Throwing up their hands about the unreliability of our intuitions about cases such as a runaway trolley, other philosophers propose that we should instead rely on our intuitions about very abstract principles (like about the rule of impartiality itself). But this ignores the centuries of Western philosophers who would have disagreed with these principles, let alone treated them as givens. Its a classic case of explaining the already obscure by the even more obscure. Here again, the point is not that ancient philosophers disprove the modern view. Its that if the modern view seems intuitive to many philosophers, it may stem from a parochial familiarity that is no rational guide to the truth.

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An example of how a familiar-sounding principle may derive from something other than commitment to the truth can be seen in Kant. Pinker cites Kants idea of the categorical imperative as yet another instance of the doctrine of impartiality that Kant had independently discovered with the rest of its advocates: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. But Pinker does not cite Kants own explanation for what Kant himself thinks explains the intuitiveness of his idea of impartiality. His explanation doesnt sound like a sincere attempt to put himself in touch with anything resembling reality. He thinks that when we act according to rules in which one has no personal interest, one is thereby acting with a will free of sensuous impulses [by which] he transfers himself in thought into an order of things entirely different from that of his desires in the field of sensibility. Kant thinks that only insofar as we are a noumenal being in a world beyond the senses do we have the true freedom of a rational being, whose dictates somehow provide the ground of the world of sense and therefore also the ground of its laws.13

Does that sound like scientific rationality, or overly verbose storytelling about how an immortal soul somehow channels divinely inspired commandments?

When we encounter arguments for conclusions like Kants, its worth keeping in mind a lesson from debates in theology. Before critically analyzing various arguments for the existence of God, religious skeptics will often point out that almost no one believes in God because they were first persuaded by the arguments. Most theists simply adopt the same beliefs as their parents or peers, which means that the arguments are almost without exception post hoc rationalizations of beliefs already held, as the atheist thinker A.C. Grayling, puts it.

Graylings point by itself doesnt vindicate atheism. But it does point to a reason to suspect the rationality of theistic arguments. Because of what we know about how most people form their religious views, we know that many have a motive to find excuses for beliefs theyd have held even if they had no evidence or arguments. And to the extent that secular moral ideas resemble religious ones, when we know their secular advocates were raised in a religious culture, we should have a similar suspicion that they are just offering an excuse for something they want to believe, not making some independent discovery on the basis of intuitive data. (As it happens, Kant was raised and educated in a particularly devout sect of Lutheranism.14)

When philosophers treat their hot takes on controversial cases or even controversial principles as though they were scientific data, and work to systematize or make coherent as many of their hot takes as possible, all without reference to actual observed facts, it really does look like post hoc rationalization of something they want to believe because its familiar. Thats more akin to theological speculation than it is to scientific discoveries, such as the atomic theory and the theory of evolution.

But, you may say, we have to make important life decisions and so weve got to start somewhere. So, we cant just throw out everything we believe about ethics and start afresh, like some kind of Cartesian skeptic practicing methodological doubt! We might not know where our intuitions come from, but theyre all weve got.

Its true we need moral guidance, but its not true that hot takes are all weve got to work with. Before the ancient Greek project of moral philosophy was interrupted by religions millennia of monopoly on ethics, the Greeks drew their theories from real observations, observations about human nature, about the impact that different choices have on our character and our lives. The very fact that we know we need to make choices is itself a crucial observation to take into account when formulating an ethics that can help guide those very choices.

Later Charles Darwin observed another fact that has important consequences for a modern scientific ethics: for living creatures, even slightly different courses of action can make a difference for whether they remain in existence or not (which explains why small mutations can make a difference for whether a species survives or goes extinct). This isnt the conventional pop-sci claim that our knowledge of morality itself is somehow a product of evolution. If that were true wed have no need to rethink it. Its the point that if were going to rethink it, we should do so knowing that the kind of person we become can make a life-or-death difference.

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I think one can assemble quite a rationally defensible ethical code on the basis of observations like these. But dont take my word for it; continue your exploration of philosophical ethics by considering a few who make this case. Check out the modern-day thinkers who ground their ethics in naturalistic observations. You would do well to consider neo-Aristotelian thinkers like Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson who challenge Humes is-ought distinction and explore the important connection between biological requirements of survival and the nature of value. You would do even better to consider the work of Ayn Rand, who anticipated the Foot/Thompson point and integrated it with the fact that human beings live by reason and need guidance for the choices they make.

When I abandoned my parents religion as a teenager, I took quite seriously that my moral worldview was also a product of that same religion. For a period of time, I was thrown into something resembling Cartesian doubt about everything. But I knew I needed some kind of worldview to get by and my agnosticism did not last long, either about a godless reality or a rational morality. I encourage those who have taken the first step of challenging their belief in God to take the next step.

As Jefferson wrote to a young friend, fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.15 I want to add to that: question with boldness even the strictures of your morality. And if you value a homage to reason, the morality you abandon can be replaced by one that treats reason as our fundamental value, our guide to making the choices we need to remain in existence as human beings.

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Religious Skeptics Should Question Their Moral Theology - New Ideal