Ethics without religion was this morning’s topic for Peter Singer, perhaps Australia’s most prominent philosopher and renowned activist for animal rights, who is now based mostly at Princeton in the US. The talk introduced some light philosophy laced with plenty of intuitively attractive examples to carry the argument.
Oft quoted words from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov are the standard launch pad for arguments about whether we can be good without God. “If there is no God everything is permitted… “ But, says Singer, tongue in cheek, the lie was put to that last night at dinner when someone’s wallet was left unstolen after lying unprotected on a table in a room full of unbelievers.
Singer’s philosophy today started with Plato’s Euthyphro where Socrates asks about the source of the good. Is something good because the gods oblige it, or do the gods oblige it because it is good? Now is not the time to tease out the issues, but it’s no surprise that philosophers and theologians over the centuries have challenged the dilemma in various ways. Nor is it a surprise that Singer hasn’t “seen a satisfactory answer.”
Singer cited examples of Christians selectively cherry-picking morality from the Bible. After various Old Testament examples, Singer said “some will say ‘that’s the Old Testament, we follow Jesus.’ But,” he continued, “Jesus is not really much better.” He cited Jesus’ attitude to divorce and then elided Jesus with his followers by commenting on rich Christians who don’t seem to be following Jesus’ example. (How often the Galilean is judged by those who follow him! A logical fallacy but a powerful wake up call to Christians.)
Singer also challenged the idea that the motivation for being good was to be found in religion, quoting the fact that three of the four biggest philanthropists in history have been atheists (Gates, Buffett, Carnegie. Rockefeller was a protestant.) A poor anecdote to make the point. Singer also emphasised the need to be balanced: atheists don’t have a great history either: Stalin and Pol Pot got mentions.
I resonated with the words of Henry Spiro, a significant animal rights activist and civil rights campaigner, when asked about what drove him to work for others: “I guess one wants to say that one’s life has been more than consuming products and generating garbage… to do whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering.” Applause followed.
So where does morality come from? asked Singer. His answer: morality is a naturally evolved phenomenon. That is why moral practices are more universal than you would expect, given the diversity of religions; because morality has evolved as a common feature of humans. So a comparison of religious cultures reveals common judgements: look after your children is universal, reciprocity (tit for tat in both the good and the bad) fosters cooperation. Things work better if we work together.
Singer doesn’t agree with those who say that Jesus was a great ethical teacher. He said some laudable things but turning the other cheek is simply impractical. It would lead to perpetrators thriving and reproducing with the result that society will be based on using force to get what you want. So retaliation is a better way to go although ideally through the legal or social system.
Singer alluded to some indications that morality is hard wired into the human brain but warned that even if that were the case we should not take it as a moral guide. (Is he having it two ways here?) Nature and the good are not to be equated, he said, because our moral judgements have evolved for situations we are familiar with and might give us the wrong answers in new situations. For example, while there may be some biological component to an instinctive racism, it “is something we need to get over because the world is a very different place to what it was. We shouldn’t fall into a trap of thinking that a natural response is necessarily right.” For example we have no evolved response to the plight of strangers on the other side of the planet, nor to eating non-human animals, nor to the climate change implications of turning on our air conditioners, driving our gas guzzlers, or eating ruminant animals.
In the end Singer’s measure for morality is rooted, not in the divine, nor in nature but is a subtle version of the pleasure principle: of maximising the well-being of all sentient beings. But this too must be recognised as a moral intuition. It is not grounded in empirical evidence, especially if, as Singer did today, we rule out a naturalistic basis of ethics. I’m not sure whether that will satisfy the ruthless empiricists that dominate this conference.
Finally, an interesting quotation from today’s talk: “A glass has no intrinsic state of good and bad but we do, and non-human animals do too because we have consciousness.” Did he mean to say intrinsic?
Chris Mulherin has degrees in Engineering, Philosophy and Theology and is currently writing a doctorate on scientific and religious knowledge. He is an Anglican minister and lives in Melbourne.
Listen to selected audio of Peter Singer on “Ethics Without Religion” [Dur:28.38; Size: 26.2 MB] For technical reasons we were unable to record the entire talk.
Studies are showing that we share a great deal of our morality, or moral intuitions, not only with primates but even with other mammals such as dogs. Fairness, working together, sharing, helping others who are in trouble, sympathy and compassion: these are all moral qualities, and they pre-date religion.
We humans are mostly moral, most of the time, because we have to live and work together to survive, and without those basic values and rules it won’t work.
And we pass on those values and rules to our children. Societies that don’t do that don’t seem to do very well. As Singer said.
Also, we aren’t actually as selfish and horrible as religious people (and Ayn Rand atheists, I guess) like to claim. Homo sap seems to be a warm species whose members like to be liked; being nice is an essential part of our nature. It’s not the only part, unfortunately, but a much more important one than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. So we mostly don’t rape, torture and kill because we don’t want to. We’d rather just get along.
We will still disagree over many points of morality. I often disagree with Singer, for example, about our moral duties to each other compared to the moral weight we give the needs of animals. But there are other issues always up for moral debate. Do you tell the truth, if you know it, when the Nazis ask you where the Jews are hiding? Is it wrong to divert a train, knowing that it will roll into and kill a family of five, in order to save the lives of 10 passengers inside?
Atheists will argue over moral conundrums, as will religious people. But what needs to be understood is that religious people bring no special knowledge to the table whatsoever.
As Plato observed so long ago, if a god said to do something evil, that wouldn’t make it right. And in fact, religious books often tell believers evil things that they accept, for example to be nasty to homosexuals. Their religious books also tell them evil things that they used to accept but no longer do, like “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. Religious people who cherrypick bits of their divine texts and call that “god’s eternal morality” may be fooling themselves, but not others.
That is, it’s not just that gods don’t exist, but also that even if gods did exist, what they commanded wouldn’t necessarily be moral. Even if the god is a really, really big god, like Allah, YHWH or Krishna, that’s no reason to take it’s believers seriously, when they say various kinds of hatred are good.
Debates about the origins of moral feelings and rules will probably continue as long as humans are around. But religion adds nothing to them, and those debates will probably have less religion in them, as time goes on.
Margaret Coffey suggested, surprisingly, that I comment here that Communism is a political philosophy about economics and the role of the state. It has nothing to do with atheism.
Pol Pot was a Marxist, a mass-murderer and (according to Norodom Sihanouk, who would know) a man who believed in an afterlife and thought he was acting according to direction from heaven. Stalin was a Marxist, a mass-murderer and, though he took religion seriously enough to train to be a priest, an atheist. Robert Mugabe is a Marxist, a mass-murderer and a Catholic, who was sheltered in the Vatican the last time he visited Europe (in June 2008), as otherwise he might have been arrested on human rights charges. Mao Zedong was a Marxist, a mass-murderer and a believer in various supernatural forces (he was “superstitious”). The Communist regime in Burma is Buddhist.
And so on. Some Marxists are religious believers. Some Marxists are atheists. Most atheists are not Marxists. Most religious believers are not Marxists.
Neither religious people nor atheists can take the blame for the disaster that was, and is, Communism. The correct name for Communists is not “atheists”, or “religious believers”, but “Communists”.
“Singer alluded to some indications that morality is hard wired into the human brain but warned that even if that were the case we should not take it as a moral guide. (Is he having it two ways here?)”
No. This is an essentially avoiding drawing and ought from an is. The whole point is, yes we evolved a morality but in our capacity to restructure and arrange our environment we have introduced situations from which we have no evolved moral sense. From there we must constantly re-evaluate our moral axia and progress with an informed decision within ethical frameworks. This process must also never stop.
Mine’s a Newt makes an important point and with the points made by Singer, resonate with something I raised from the beginning with this blog: the religious don’t bring anything special to these discussions, they either have a morality informed along similar lines to the non-religious (as above) or they are selectively choosing what they want from their holy texts (without revealing their criteria for these choices, which are ultimately informed by their own subjective moral positions, eg slavery vs homosexuality).
This results with an expectation for a disproportionate level of respect expected for the religious moral position when they are clearly expressing their own subjective morality via a proxy of psuedo-objective morality. Overall only serving to confound, obfuscate and derail genuinely useful and progressive discussion with unsupoorted, unverified and frankly irrelevant (read: ancient) moral “truths”.
For the same reason I am not a racist I ignore the “teachings” of Jesus, they are both out-dated and irrelevant modes of thought to the modern world. I can however arrive at some similar conclusions to early morality but along lines of deductive reasoning from an axiom of avoiding/minimising harm which I feel that I can defend but will not always offer an easy answer to moral challenges.
Thanks Mine’s a Newt for pointing out the complexities.
Hypothetically, if Jesus was never in the picture, I humbly ask of the believer – do you really need someone to be of a divine origin, born of a virgin, and to rise from the dead to actually take common sense seriously? Do words such as “love your enemy” or “turn the other cheek”; lessons such as “be charitable”, “help those less fortunate”, “love one another” etc, have any less meaning if they were spoken to you by a complete stranger with no divine authority at all?
flawedprefect – nevermind those moral preachings are all known to pre-exist Jesus across time, space and culture and vary in source from deity to philosopher to messiah and prophet.
Perhaps they simply represent the basic elements of our evolved morality which aided our success as a social animal.
Often goddists will argue since because evil so often goes unpunished in this world, the moral code must reflect another reality, in which souls are judged and punished or rewarded after death.
A small child doesn’t steal cookies because she knows Mother will spank her if she’s caught. An adult is moral because not hurting others is the mature way to act. Even an adult Christian is moral because that’s pleasing to God. People making the Heaven or Hell argument have the morality of a small child since they are afraid of God spanking their bottoms forever.
‘Singer alluded to some indications that morality is hard wired into the human brain but warned that even if that were the case we should not take it as a moral guide. (Is he having it two ways here?)’
No. We evolved as social apes in the African savannah, what’s ‘wired into us’ is the sense of clan-loyalty and co-operation, various warning and disgust and delight responses.
What we’d call ‘instincts’. That must have served us well, because we didn’t all get eaten by sabretoothed tigers. But – and this isn’t controversial, is it? – these instincts, while powerful, have to be put aside sometimes and can be actively dangerous in, say, a modern, multicultural, urban environment.
We are intelligent. Probably uniquely among animals, we can analyse our instincts and go against them and learn. We can plan, we can set aside smaller advantages for the bigger picture.
Human bodies are survival and replication machines for the genes they carry. Therefore the only good is what aids and promotes survival. We usually find out that what aids survival are things like cooperation, empathy, love etc., while hatred, destruction, violence etc. retard it.
‘Singer alluded to some indications that morality is hard wired into the human brain but warned that even if that were the case we should not take it as a moral guide. (Is he having it two ways here?)’
Further to Steve Jeffers comments on this point above. Are you honestly unable Chris to see that what is instinctual isn’t always moral? Instincts are about directing reproductive survival, not about constructs of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Evolution is a slow process, especially compared to the technological progress which has resulted from the uniqueness of our large brains and which has all but outstripped the reliability of our evolved instincts in extant complex situations. This is the catch 22 of our modern life – we have made it riskier, more densely detailed and finely nuanced than we are able to keep up with ‘off the cuff’ & this is the point Singer was making.
It is more than ever time to make use of the flexibility of our cognitive processes and recognise that if we have outgrown our own instincts, we have certainly outgrown the rigid proscriptions of bronze age or even middle age mythology (as the plethora of interpretive flavours which have sprung up across the globe clearly tell us).