God is dead, so be good for goodness sake

Comments (6)

1. One point I would like to have seen added to Ruse’s criticism here is that of the theists who say that if there are no Gods to underwrite moral norms, then there are no standards. This in effect implies that the only thing that stops these theists from becoming psychopaths is their faith.

   Not actually. What it implies if true is that the only thing that stops these theists (or, indeed, anyone) from being psychopaths is God; that’s not at all the same thing. Theists of course believe that God exists; and, what is more, those who take this line hold that God has set things up, so to speak, in a broadly moral way; and these combined with the position that God grounds moral norms are committed not to the claim that you need faith to be moral but to the claim that under atheist assumptions one can at most loosely approximate a genuinely moral life if one is purely consistent (which most of them will think you can’t be unless, in fact, your brain is defective in the way a psychopath’s is). And in fact even divine command theorists, who aren’t exactly well known for careful distinctions, have been pointing this out for well nigh three hundred years now; it’s set out crystal-clear in Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses, and it’s not difficult to find similar things in DCTers since. And if DCTers are easily avoiding the problem, pretty much everyone is. Saying that the theists who take this line are committed to saying that they are only not psychopaths because of their belief that God exists is a clear category mistake; what they are committed to saying is that they are only not psychopaths because God exists, and that an account of moral norms that does not recognize this will be either inconsistent or inadequate. Different versions will, of course, add additional claims to this.

   Which is not, of course, to say that you can’t find occasional theists holding this line that can’t keep the doxastic and the ontological straight themselves.

2. Re the last sentence … well, we won’t challenge all the norms of our society at once. Although we may not follow them all, it’s a bit like Neurath’s boat: if we try to change the whole of the moral norms of our society at once, we’ll sink.

   But we can certainly examine particular norms, challenge them, repudiate them, recommend alternatives, whatever. That’s one of the ways that moral progress (or “change” if you prefer a more neutral term) happens.

3. Because we are purposefully designed to be a species of ape, that gives a basis for saying that we ought to behave like a species of ape.

   If, on the other hand, it is just a matter of random chance, or natural regularity (such as common descent), then those give us no basis for choosing to act like apes.

   I call this an “ethical filter”.

4. This in effect implies that the only thing that stops these theists from becoming psychopaths is their faith.

   A friend of mine who grew up in Arkansas and taught college in Kentucky for several years tells me that this is not merely a logical consequence of beliefs held by fundamentalist Christians but something that they—anyway, some significant number of them—will explicitly affirm. He reports such persons saying things like, “If I didn’t believe in God, I would be committing every crime in the book.” Those who say such things do not, of course, believe themselves to be any worse-natured than their fellows: they think that human beings are incapable of acting on any motives but selfish fear and selfish desire, and that the only motive to moral behavior can be fear of the consequences, whether in this life or the next.

5. Well, I’ve heard people say similar things. But from my own conversations with them, I don’t think it’s accurate to interpret them as implying that there are no motives but selfish fear and selfish desire. Setting aside cases where it’s just obviously hyperbole, they tie the objectivity of moral principles to God — thus, removing God removes any objectivity. On their view, God’s existence makes the world in some sense fundamentally moral; it then makes sense to be moral, just as it makes sense to take gravity into account. Taking God away is something they associate with nihilism (one reason why they tend to by ‘godless’ to mean ‘nihilistic’). And in a nihilistic universe, there’s not much room to say that morality makes more sense than nihilism. They are the sort of people who would read John’s account of morality in the post as merely an obvious reductio of his position, i.e., as essentially a concession that morality is optional and pointless — in other words, as a sort of pushpin-as-good-as-morality view, with just about anything substitutable for pushpin. That they would read it in this way seems to me to be more a sign of a lack of sympathetic imagination than a defect in their theory of motivation.

6. Brandon, I think that it depends on what sort of people you are talking about. I do not pretend to either doctrinal or sociological expertise on evangelical Protestantism, but it is my understanding that its adherents hold that human beings have no capacity for moral goodness at all, but can only receive it through God’s grace, which itself can only be received by the believer. That, I think, is the view of the people that my Southern friend was talking about. You seem to be talking about adherents of some more generic variety of theism.

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