Monday, June 11, 2012

Meditation 96: Morality without God


Teaching ethics a number of years ago, I was told by an earnest student that there can be no morality without God. He seemed to agree implicitly with the idea that “If God does not exist, then all things are permitted.” He also believed in a visceral way that without God’s restraining hand, people would become riddled with vice, steal, kill, rape, take drugs or indulge in sinful sex of all kinds. It is almost as if humans are just waiting to escape the leash and run amok. On this view, there is no reason whatsoever to be moral without the promise of heaven in the next life or the threat of hell fire.

I found upon asking that many of my students felt the same way. This surprised me greatly, given the attempts in recent centuries to find ways to conceive of morality in secular terms. For example, neither Kantian ethical theory not Utilitanianism pin notions of right and wrong to the existence of God. Kant thought he could anchor moral thinking to the notion of duty and the categorical imperative, which demands that we treat all people as ends in themselves and act upon universal prescriptive principles. However, God still had a role to play in Kant’s philosophy as chief cheerleader for the moral law within us.

Utiliarianism is even more secular. It defines right and wrong in terms of maximizing pleasure and happiness, and improving the conditions of human life right here on earth.  Instead of God pointing to the moral law and endorsing it, we have an ethics that is based purely on human nature. If fact, utilitarianism gives us a way to judge God’s commands. If what God commands goes against the greatest happiness principle, then I am afraid it would be God’s commands that must be jettisoned.

There is no doubt that some valuable moral insights have been promulated by religion. In fact, some version of the Golden Rule seems to be a good place to start in thinking of morality. This is a principle that may have come from religion, but we can get there simply by reflecting on the ways human beings interrelate. “Treat others as you wish to be treated” or, better to my mind, “Do not treat others as you do not with to be treated” are both admirable rules for life. We may not get to “love your neighbor as yourself” from the Golden Rule, but we certainly get close.

What interests me in this regard is a thought experiment. Let us imagine that there was never a God based moral system, no Diving commandments, no rules of conduct springing from Supernatural Revelation. From this perspective, let us now look at the great moral debates of our age and see how they look.  

First, let us look at the debates currently raging in the moral sphere. Included in this list are abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, cloning, drugs, contraception, sex education and homosexuality. God’s finger actively stirs up these debates, because once  you believe in the existence of God, there can be no argument with His commands.

So my question is how these debates would look from a moral point of view derived without God’s special instructions to us.

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