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The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 3 (Fall 2007).
One of the frequent and abhorrent objections made to or about nonbelievers is that we have no foundation for ethics, no moral compass, as it were. Without a god to guide us in our everyday communion with our fellow humans, we must be drifting in a sea of relativism, guided by animal instincts, hedonistic desires, and acting moment to moment to fulfill our individual interests. As expressed on the Web site ChristiansAnswers.com: “Atheism leads most Secular Humanists to adopt ethical Relativism—the belief that no absolute moral code exists, and therefore man must adjust his ethical standards in each situation according to his own judgment. If God does not exist, then He cannot establish an absolute moral code. Humanist Max Hocutt says that human beings ‘may, and do, make up their own rules…. Morality is not discovered; it is made.’”
In my experience, this just isn’t so. This myth is based upon a number of conceits that do not stand up against the weight of the evidence. Chief among these is the notion that morals come from some higher power and that humankind, were it not for the beneficent and stern guidance of its supernatural dictator, would devolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all. This thesis is objectionable for a number of reasons, and it ultimately devalues human morality as found in nature and as expressed in everyday acts of beneficence and kindness. Ultimately, those of us who come to our ethics via secular means often marvel at the grand hypocrisy of religious proselytizers who chide their congregations into accepting millennia-old ethical codes handed down from primitive, hierarchical societies, picking and choosing those commandments they be lieve worthy and conveniently forgetting those that make no sense in our modern world. Isn’t this a form of ethical relativism?
It is easy to find examples. Modern Jews and Christians ignore wholesale a range of clearly crazy commandments from their holy texts. Take, for instance, some famous examples of laws handed down by the Judaic God, which though they might not have fit onto Moses’ tablets, nonetheless had the force of law:
So clearly (and thankfully) almost every Christian and Jew picks and chooses which commandments to follow and which ones to disobey. Let’s hope Pope Benedict doesn’t turn back the clock so far as to require obedience to the letter of the law—although it seems he’s working on it, having recently declared Catholicism the One True Church. (If he decided this meant killing all non-Catholics, at least the Scriptures would back him up.) This kind of thinking is, of course, a form of relativism, and it undermines attacks made by believers on those of us who choose to look for ethics through reason, rather than dogma.
Obviously, the dogma and specific commands of each religion can be critically examined, picked apart, and questioned for their current relevance, common sense, or usefulness in general. A more interesting question, and one that most of us are wont to ask, is “By what authority is a commandment valid?” The self-sealing argument of believers is that the authority is God’s. Numerous problems arise then, not only as believers pick and choose which commandments to follow but as multiple drafts of commandments emerge and conflict with one another. The commandment, for instance, to not kill is contradicted by other commandments. Modern interpretations of ancient strictures, moreover, complicate matters even further. Consider the case of adultery, which is specifically prohibited by the famous Ten Com mandments but is a narrower crime in the Bible than under, for instance, Alabama law. The biblical definition of adultery is the breach of a marriage contract and occurs when a man (married or unmarried) has sexual intercourse with a woman who is either married or betrothed to another man. (Bill Clinton was clearly reading his Bible carefully.) By biblical definition, my ancient namesake, King David, committed adultery with Bethsheba, while Clinton was only a fornicator. David the adulterer wasn’t impeached; nor was he put to death. It’s good to be king.
The God of the commandments demands subservience and tolerates no questioning, no appeals. His authority may not be questioned either, and his commandments are, for all time, etched in stone—except when they are conveniently forgotten or reframed by new uses of language. These ancient rules seem quaint now, and we can understand the temptation of most Christians to chuck those bits that make no sense and keep those that seem to accord with universal values (like not murdering people). But is this ethics, and can one who says that he or she abides by the commands of an unquestionable authority, but picks and chooses among them, be said to be acting morally? We can do so under some conceptions of ethics, perhaps, but not if we are serious about the existence of the good.
One of the great remaining problems in philosophy concerns describing the nature of morals and reconciling numerous disparate schools of philosophical ethics. Empiricism has brought remarkable success to studies of the natural world. The sciences have given us ever greater understanding of our universe and the ability to make predictions about it and exert influence over it. We have a nearly complete model of the subatomic realm and can now peer into the deepest reaches of space, back to the expansion of our universe. We can model with great precision the biological processes responsible for life, and we are coming to understand the role of that remarkable strand that ties all earthly life together—DNA. Yet philosophers remain at odds as to ethics, which says more about philosophers than morality. Still, for those of us who concern ourselves with ethics and the nature of morals, this is an exciting time.
The challenge of any ethical system is to accurately describe the nature of the good and to give sound reasons for people to choose the good over the not so good. Alternatives to this challenge include rejecting the distinction between the good and the bad and denying that these distinctions are meaningful beyond a particular subset of people or over a significant span of time. These alternatives are, in fact, part and parcel of the slander leveled against the nonreligious for ages. If you don’t believe in a god, it is said, you can choose to do any old thing. You could murder your children, a crime most of us would agree is reprehensible even when ordered by a god and even when your name is Abraham. So, the theist argues that, because his or her god has listed a spate of crimes, she can know with certainty that certain things are wrong, certain things are permissible, and still others, commendable. This list is provisional no less than that of the accused immoral nontheist, as the theist’s list is amendable at any time by the drafter: God. Today, killing is allowed, although thou shalt not usually kill. The victims aren’t of your tribe, so they don’t really count.
Consider, for a moment, the possibility that there is no right or wrong, that all our choices are contingent, equally permissible, and of equal moral worth. The nihilistic alternative could be the case, but it ceases to be an ethical system and leads us to wonder from whence spring our “moral intuitions.” Most of us happen to agree on the morality or at least the desirability of certain outcomes over others. Innocents ought not to be slain in their sleep. Automobiles ought not to be stolen. Wars should not be fought based on lies. These intuitions are so prevalent, even among the godless, that most of us are led to the conclusion that they exist for good reason. Philosophers may disagree as to the source of the good, but most rational people distinguish good from bad in remarkably similar ways. Paul Kurtz has spent much of his lifetime describing the common moral decencies, shared by most ethical systems and cultures around the world and that serve as the basis of ethical decision-making for most of us. (See “The Ethics of Humanism,” by Paul Kurtz, FI, Winter 2002/03.) We have come a long way, in many respects, from the notion of dogma as a sufficient source of ethical knowledge, but we still seem to have a long way to go.
Any ethical code requires more than a list of good and bad behaviors. Good empiricists, faced with proscriptions or commands regarding a set of behaviors or a collection of ends, must ask: why? This is the unfinished task of ethics. All sciences seek to uncover the causes, reasons, and connections between inputs and outputs. If ethics fails to do this, it will fail as a scientific pursuit. It is still relevant, if we are to delve into ethics as a field of study worthy of scientific rigor, to ask for reasons. What requires us to do such and such or to avoid doing so and so? Why must we develop this or that virtue? And failing to abide by these duties, obligations, virtues, or proscriptions, what warrants our judgment? Normative ethics attempts to develop a set of rules governing human conduct or a set of norms for action. It deals with what people should believe to be right and wrong, as distinct from descriptive ethics, which deals with what people do believe to be right and wrong. Hence, normative ethics is sometimes said to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. We are concerned with normative ethics, and the major contending schools of normative ethics are virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and deontological ethics. All three of these are in a stalemate, intellectually speaking. Is there a resolution? Is there some reconciliation? Can ethics proceed from this stalemate?
We secular humanists believe it can. While the current state of philosophical ethics is troubling, other promising developments are underway or on the horizon. In fact, the common moral decencies, shared across borders and throughout time, seem to be rooted in something very real. Recent studies in evolutionary psychology and neurology are revealing biological roots to behaviors we consider ethical. Being good makes good evolutionary sense. Cooperation conveys evolutionary advantages. Studies of a range of animal groups reveal behaviors similar to those we humans believed ourselves privileged to carry out. God doesn’t so much command us to be good as do those selfish genes that use us as the shell for their travels throughout time. We aren’t all that special. Ironic, then, that the two things that do seem to make us somewhat special—our capacity for cognition and our ability (if not necessarily our propensity) to reason—are what seems most to complicate the process of being ethical. Even more ironic, the one sure way of being unethical, of failing utterly to live up to any moral ideal, is to follow a commandment rather than act according to a principle.
“Religious ethics” is an oxymoron, like “military intelligence” or “jumbo shrimp.” One cannot act ethically if motivated by a command or a commandment, and motivation matters, not just in the abstract, but in the real world of rewards and punishments. We know we can be moral, and we dispel with our own experiences the false public notion that the secular cannot be ethical. But we must still make that case, and explain why.
David R. Koepsell is the executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism. He is the author of numerous philosophical articles and the author or editor of several books, including The Ontology of Cyberspace (Open Court, 2000) and Searle on the Institutions of Social Reality (with Lawrence Moss, Blackwell 2003).
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