Ethics without God

It's a mistake to think that if God does not exist, then neither does morality. This is one of the worst legacies of supernaturalism. I'll start by pointing out that it's simply counterintuitive to think, with Dostoyevsky, that "if God does not exist everything is permitted." Yes, I'm appealing to intuition here, but I mean nothing mystical by that word. Call it common sense. Most of us grow up with a sense of how we should treat others and ourselves. Sometimes it's called the moral compass. Adam Smith and David Hume, two of the great Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, spoke favorably of our "moral sentiments," fellow-feeling, sympathy, and the like. None of that requires a supernatural supreme being. (Before Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he revised until the time of death.)

In a previous post I pointed out, using a quotation from Bertrand Russell, that attributing morality to God presents more problems rather than it solves. We have only two possibilities. Either God invented morality or he discovered it. If it's the first, then morality, rather than being objective, is simply God's subjective arbitrary preferences, which he could change tomorrow, making mass murder a virtue and charity a vice. If it's the second, then we have been given no reason to think that we could not also discover morality using reason.

Clearly, anyone who subscribes to Dostoyevsky's principle must take the first alternative. If morality is nothing more than God's arbitrary preferences about how human beings should conduct themselves, then by definition, if God does not exist neither does morality. But why call this morality? It obviously does not refer to an objective standard of right and wrong, good and bad. And since that's so, why are we in any way bound by it? Why should we obey arbitrary commands? Oh, right: because God is bigger and strong than us. It has hell -- an eternal torture chamber -- to send us to. Well, if someone wants to regard obeying the capricious commandments of a celestial monster as moral, let him. But let him also know that he's participating in the destruction of a perfectly good concept.

If the second alternative is taken, then clearly morality would exist without God; it's built into the logic and nature of the universe, and God could not turn good into evil and vice versa. (Important Christians thinkers like Thomas Aquinas took this position.) Even an omnipotent deity would have limits on his powers. (He couldn't make a square circle either.) 

Moreover, if God can read ethics off the facts of nature, then so can we. What case can be made that discovering good ways of living is beyond the efficacy of reason? One would have to use reason to show that reason is impotent in this regard. You're welcome to try.

What this means is that a rational ethics is in principle possible. To bolster that claim, I note that as a matter of logical necessity, everything that exists has a nature; it is one thing rather than another; it has a finite set of specific attributes. This is true of human beings too, so the choices we make matter. Since that is so, Dostoyevsky was wrong. Everything is not "permitted" -- in the sense that consequences must follow from the choices we make about how to live and how to relate with our fellow human beings. If we want to achieve our own good (according to the kind of beings we are), we need to understand what that requires and then act accordingly.

As rational, social, discursive animals we best thrive in a society in which reason and respect prevail. (I almost wrote rule.) From there we can discover principles about which ways of living (the range could be wide) promote flourishing and which ways of living do not. Such an ethics would entail guidelines for developing excellence in oneself (the virtues like justice, courage, moderation, prudence), which would necessarily include considerations about how to deal with other people, who after all are ends in themselves and not merely means to one's own ends. Ethics has been called "the art of living."

This approach is known as virtue ethics, or eudaimonism, and it was elaborated by the great philosophers of Athens beginning in the fourth century BCE: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics. That was over 2,000 years ago, so it's nothing new -- and it requires no supernatural source. (See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. A popular presentation is Henry Veatch's Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotle's Ethics.)

This approach to ethics is objective because it is not arbitrary and it is derived from the nature of things. At its foundation it is completely unlike theistic ethics. In Athens philosophy was marked by reason and rhetoric; in Jerusalem religion was marked by revelation and commandment. What could be more different?

So the first step in thinking about ethics is to divorce it from theism. Unfortunately, some atheists accept the theist's poisonous premise without good grounds and award theism a victory it did not earn. As I've shown here, a God-based morality is not the only model of morality. When you see that, you will have freed yourself of the straitjacket of believing that without God we can have no objective ethics.

That's just an outline. I'll say more in future posts.