Ethics and the Death of God

Posted on November 22, 2009
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion | 11 Comments

I was reading a post at Secular Right that was bringing up the old canard about needing the idea of God to ground moral order. This is the idea that atheism intrinsically leads to immorality. Now of course this is demonstrably false. I don’t see any evidence that atheists or agnostics in the US are particularly more immoral than believers of any particular faith. However the way both sides tend to debate the issue always struck me as odd.

Now first my usual caveats. I don’t study Ethics much and tend to be a skeptic towards most philosophical conceptions of ethics.

That said, it seems the real question is less what the good is than the question about why on earth one should want to be good. There the real issue isn’t God but life after death. After all, it’s quite possible to believe in God but believe there is no after life. (Some even think that the early Jews may have held such an idea with the belief in the resurrection being a much later belief) If you end absolutely at your death then the existence of God can’t really ground whether you ought behave well in life. Likewise one could easily conceive of the non-existence of God while believing in life after death. (Say reincarnation)

How does death then change the issue? Well for one, it makes Utilitarianism not only an issue of what the meaning of the good is, but also a reason to pick it. (Since you presumably would prefer to achieve greater happiness yourself – something possible if your life continues long enough) If, only the other hand, death is absolute, there are fewer reasons to be good, beyond your biological instincts. (Which I actually think are good enough to get most people to wish to be fairly good – and the people lacking such instincts are not apt to be convinced by rational argument)

Now why I think people wish to invoke God is that idea that God gave the instincts towards good. But I think evolutionary psychology, for all its weaknesses and overstretch, can answer that well enough. Evolution could easily provide us with instincts towards group unity, charity, sacrifice and so forth. That’s not to say for the believer God might not give other instincts. Just that as an argument the idea God is necessary here is quite weak.

The other reason is the old vengeful God. (i.e. you’ll be punished after death) However not all theists accept such a view and really this is just the hedonist argument (do what makes you happy) applied with the idea of a post-life judgment. But I think for many people hedonism isn’t a terribly great argument for why to be ethical. Especially not most theists. To the degree the hedonist argument can be made, it’s usually tied to the idea that being good is its own intrinsic reward. i.e. doing good acts makes you happier. But such a view can be argued without an appeal to God.

What makes all this kind of silly to me is that the reasons why people act good seem quite unrelated to theological or philosophical argument. It has more to do with the environment they are raised in, the genetics and environmental factors leading to their brain structure, and the context in which they make a decision. The philosophy has little to do with it. But those arguing this debate must, if only unconsciously, think that rational deliberation is why people choose to be good. I’m really, really skeptical of that.

Related posts:

  1. Religion and Brain Death
  2. More on the Atheist Debate
  3. Meaning of Life
  4. Death, Embodiment and Grace
  5. Who believes in the God that the argument from evil would seek to refute?
  6. Death of the Humanities?

Comments

11 Responses to “Ethics and the Death of God”
1 Michael Dorfman on November 23rd, 2009 1:27 am

Clark: But those arguing this debate must, if only unconsciously, think that rational deliberation is why people choose to be good. I’m really, really skeptical of that.

Exactly! Always look for the unstated assumptions….

Speaking of which– I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Clark,
I share your skepticism about the role of rational debate in persuading people to be good. It seems that the study of ethics is an attempt to discover axioms from which we can inferentially reproduce the morality that comes from our instincts. If the end result is to only reproduce what our instincts already tell us, then what’s the use? There are some situations where our instincts don’t inform us one way or another, and here the axiomatic moral system may be used to derive moral principles that are at least consistent with our instincts, but most people don’t take these principles too seriously because the axiomatic system by itself doesn’t produce the emotional response needed to compel moral action.

A little off topic, but where do you think Joseph Smith comes down on Euthyphro’s dilemma?

Well Roger, I think one defense of ethics is to expand beyond instincts. i.e. take our instincts as applicable to only a small region of behaviors and events our ancestors encountered and expand to new realms not using instincts.

But this gets into one of my big complaints of how a lot of philosophy is done in the Anglo-American tradition. There is this sense of appealing to instincts in precisely the realms in which instinct seems ill suited. That is consider philosophy as a way of unpacking meaning (either instinctual or linguistical) to these realms where events are unusual. Yet to me that is precisely where we ought be most skeptical of our language and instincts. You’ve probably seen me being skeptical of this in the free will debate where this sort of thing happens quite often. Although Gettier case in epistemology also fit.

The problem of “beginnings” is well known in Ethics though and goes all the way back to Moore in terms of a really clear annunciation. Moore saw the issue as working out implications we might not otherwise see. (Well, eventually he saw that anyway)

My own view is more a Peircean one in which Ethics is itself under evolution. So society as a whole can be seen as running an experiment in which we are deciding on what is Ethical. Thus it is unstable in terms of meaning.

As for Euthyphro’s dilemma, I tend to agree largely with Blake Ostler’s excellent treatment in his second volume.

Michael, I haven’t followed the evolution of the term, but I’m pretty sure that “new atheist” predates 2007 (only 2 years ago!). Further I think the behavior of new atheists predates that. I do agree that in a sense the movement does evolve as a countermovement to attacks on atheism and the politicizing of some anti-science views among the religious right. (Especially evolution)

As for arguments for God, I find most of them baloney. The only argument for God I find persuasive are empirical ones.

One thing that’s interesting to all this that I didn’t mention in my original post is the implications for praise or punishment. If our instincts are to be reasonably good, it hardly seems difficult to do this. Thus any judgment (in a Mormon context anyway) for how good one is has to deal with when we move beyond our instincts and social order.

On one level we recognize this. After all a psychopath with an instinct to hurt who doesn’t hurt seems more praiseworthy than a suburbanite with good instincts who is nice to their neighbors but never goes much beyond that. This has always been a big strain in LDS thought. (Elder Ashton back in the 90′s gave a fantastic talk along these lines, although not exactly making the same point) Mormons reject the idea of original sin, thinking that Christ automatically makes up for any sinful way given us “by nature.” Most Mormons don’t draw the obvious implication that it ought apply to those good by nature as well.

Given that Mormons see this life as some essential test for whatever it was we were as spirits, it seems that what is praiseworthy or blameworthy is what we do beyond the typical. Further it seems a fair bet that our cosmology entails that it is going beyond this that is important for us. Something to think about as we sit in suburban America thinking we are good and are doing enough.

Moving beyond instinct carries a significant risk of doing evil. Sure, if the psychopath moves beyond instinct, he does good, but if the suburbanite with good instinct moves beyond instinct, what does he do? Sacrifice his only son? If we’re operating outside our instincts, aren’t we engaging in behavior about which we can’t feel right or wrong by definition? If so, how do we know we’re not doing the wrong thing? We can’t all be moral philosophers, knowing the difference between good and evil through finely tuned reasoning skills.

Roger, I think that’s why philosophers have been after the idea that ethics can be determined by a pure act of reason. (And if they acknowledge fallibilism, it’s more the fallibilism of doing a calculus properly – as in say Utilitarianims – we know the good we just can’t calculate the exact thing to do)

My own view is that what you say is correct and that risk is an essential part of ethics. (Clearly this aspect of my view arises out of the Continental tradition) That is we don’t have a calculable good. The risk isn’t just due to limited information. Rather it is because doing good (or evil) is essentially risky.

I think that this view has a lot of affinity for Mormons, give our view of the necessity of this life. (i.e. the veil of forgetting our pre-mortal life being essential for a certain kind of moral freedom) So instead we have to engage in a process of inquiry where we leap beyond our knowledge. Put an other way there is an essential tension between law and justice. It isn’t that law has trouble representing justice. It’s that law is never up to the task. (Clearly a theme in Paul’s epistles) I think in the LDS tradition (especially in 2 Nephi) there is also a tension in the other direction. That is not only is law always doing violence to justice or mercy but that justice and mercy have to take into account the context which is the law.

I think that LDS philosopher ought really engage with these issues of why Mormons demand a probationary period cut off from God and thrown into a world of suffering as a necessity for growth. I think the question of justice really becomes key here. But there are other places. For instance could an eternal being experience the angst due to anticipating death? How can you anticipate death if there is no death? But for us there is, which provides a huge experiential difference.

I tried to make the same point over at LDS-Phil awhile back that you made in your last post Clark, but did not get any feedback on it. So I thought it was not worth the time to talk about it.

To me, it makes everything here make sense as to why Christ *had* to came here and die.

Hi, I am from Australia.

Please find a completely different understanding of ethics & justice via this essay.

http://www.dabase.org/p9rightness.htm

Plus related essays on God, religion, science and human life altogether.

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-god.aspx

http://www.dabase.org/spacetim.htm

Plus Reality & The Middle (extraordinary Metaphysics with a capital M) via this url (scroll down for the url)

http://www.dabase.org/s-atruth.htm

To me, one of the more fascinating things about the claim that God is necessary for morality is the way it takes moral behavior, however that’s defined, as a self-evident good anyway, working out God’s existence only after the fact.

I mean, what do you say to a Jew or Muslim who asks “You don’t believe in my god? Then what’s to stop you from eating pork?” And from that Jewish or Muslim mindset, not even the vegetarian can answer satisfactorily, because his opposition to pork is based on the pig’s rights as an intelligent, feeling creature, and not the pig’s “uncleanliness”. (I say this as an atheist who nonetheless just enjoyed a hot dog, guilty me.)

Clearly, there is a difference between commandments like “Worship only God” and “Do not kill”, a way in which the latter is seen as more serious than the former, despite the former being, in a way, the one and only thing that stands between you and Heaven. Additionally, there must be something to ethics beyond God’s whims — so what is it? Could there be a universe in which it was “good” to cause suffering and coercion, and if not, what’s to stop God from creating such a universe?

I’m also fascinated by the apparent fact that faiths that believe in posthumous punishment don’t reserve it only for committers of “secular” evils, like theft, rape, and murder, but also for nonbelievers. The idea that most humans who have ever lived are right now suffering in Hell kind of takes away the whole common “afterlives were invented to comfort us” idea. (I think the afterlife exists more as a solution to paradoxes about the soul, the classic “dead body problem” of anthropology.)

I’m not sure all do that. Rather they see(rightly or wrongly) God being nevessary to pick out what is actually good verses all the theories. (say between the utilitarians and Kantians). The problem with that is that even if they believe this they aren’t any better at saying what is or isn’t good for the mist part. That is the exegesical questions are just as problematic and the debates in ethics in philosophy. Even the most ardent literalist and inerrantist in the US typically has passages of scripture they reject as informing ethical behavior.

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