Without God, there's no morality (and that's good)

Religious fundamentalists often say, "If you don't believe in God, you have no basis for morality." This irritates non-believers like me.

Hey! I'm moral! I know the difference between right and wrong. My morality just isn't based on supernatural dogmas.

But what if those fundamentalists are correct? What if there's no such thing as atheist morality? And -- most importantly -- what if this is no big deal, because morality is as unnecessary to live a good life as believing in God is?

Such is the basic thesis of Joel Marks' "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist." Marks is a philosophy professor, and his essay was published by the New York Times, so in places it's fairly difficult intellectual reading.

He makes good sense, though. Here's some excerpts that resonated with me.

The day I became an atheist was the day I realized I had been a believer.

...But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall.

...The entire set of moral attributions is out the window. Think of this analogy: A tribe of people lives on an isolated island. They have no formal governmental institutions of any kind. In particular they have no legislature. Therefore in that society it would make no sense to say that someone had done something “illegal.” But neither would anything be “legal.” The entire set of legal categories would be inapplicable. In just this way I now view moral categories.

...I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.

...In the process my own desires are likely to undergo further change as well, in the direction of greater compassion and respect, I would anticipate – and not only for the victims of the attitudes, behaviors and policies I don’t like, but also for their perpetrators. But this won’t be because a god, a supernatural law or even my conscience told me I must, I ought, I have an obligation. Instead I will be moved by my head and my heart. Morality has nothing to do with it.

At the moment my wife and I are trying to convince some people who, along with us, are co-owners of a vacation cabin, that our understanding of a septic system problem is correct.

Like Marks says, there hasn't been any need for us to think in terms of good or bad. I don't feel that I'm better than the co-owners who disagree with us. I just think that my wife and I have a better explanation for what's going on with the septic system.

And I do my best to keep in mind that everybody involved in what sometimes have been heated discussions about septic subjects feels that their viewpoint is just as defensible as I feel mine is.

Yes, I consider that there's a right thing to do. However, I can explain what "right" means without any reference to morality.

I can argue that risking contamination of ground or surface water by the cabin's failing septic system isn't a wise course of action. I can refer to public health experts who have said such-and-such about this-and-that. I can feel motivated to do the right thing without calling the desire that impels me in a certain direction "moral."

It's simply a desire, as Joel Marks says in another essay on the same subject, "An Amoral Manifesto."

There I am, then, honestly discussing particular issues with opponents, and justifying my positions to them by their moral lights. But how do I justify them to myself, since I have no moral lights anymore? For example, on what basis would I myself be a vegetarian? The answer, in a word, is desire. I want animals, human or otherwise, not to suffer or to die prematurely for purposes that I consider trivial, not to mention counterproductive of human happiness.

...But if I were conversing with another amoralist, how would I convince her of the rightness of my desires? Well, of course, I wouldn’t even try, since neither of us believes in right, or wrong. What I could do is take her through the same considerations that have moved me to my position and hope that her heartstrings were tuned in harmony with mine.

...A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil.

Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

I had to read Marks' New York Times essay twice before I felt like I grasped what he was saying. At first it seemed like giving up morality would be a loss, even for us non-believers in God.

But now I'm inclined to agree with him: secular morality is an oxymoron.

"Morality," as the word is almost always used, isn't necessary for anyone who dismisses the notion that the knowledge of what's right and wrong is handed down from some divine source.

As Marks says, if "sin" is a meaningless term for an atheist, then so is "morality." While this argument initally jolted my psyche, it didn't take long for me to feel comfortable with it.

(Not all that surprising, since three years ago I wrote about "I'm right vs. I like morality," the latter being pretty close to what Marks advocates.)

Comments

[cc]

Where there's sensitivity, morality is meaningless. It's programming for a robot.

[tAo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc-yg04rVw4

The Ides Of Something Are Upon Us

It was the time of religious wars. It was a time of materialism and intellectual darkness. It was a time of epidemic moral compromise and the end justifying the means by whatever means. It was a time of the worship of the transitory and the elevation of drunken ignorance over the thirst for truth. Truth was a refugee in flight on a violent night. It was a time of deception and reaction toward the solution of freedom as an intolerable state and a non commercially viable condition. It was a time of precessions and regressions and a confusion of the moment on the doorstep of irrevocable change. It was a hard time to live in unless you were one of the few who made existence hard for everyone else. It was a time of images and symbols that were wielded as weapons upon superficial minds so inclined and submissive in a pornographic sexual exchange that mocked the true surrender of the deeper self to the higher awareness and all things human. It was a time of debasement for the virtues and a celebration of vice because it was a time of political correctness masking the hatred for all that was good and real.

We were the people that might have been; you should have gotten in touch with us then. We were the unseeing in relentless persecution of those envisioned who were labeled a threat to the disorder of order. We were pawns engaged in our own destruction, proud and stupid and false. We cheered in the coliseums and informed on our fellows. We raised perversion to be normal and locked normal in a barn. We laughed with merciless humor at persecutions that came by our consent and everything that was true and meaningful within us, got up and went. We were the Hell-bound in denial of the heaven sent. We embraced the animal as the civilized way, cannibalizing our loved ones and killing ourselves, like a collection of poor unfortunates who gnawed off their own foot. We held what was trivial as a worshipful profound and we went all too quickly into the cold and forgotten ground. We made heroes out of rogues and pariahs out of our most important friends. We were the generation of vipers, ever and ever after, amen.

You will not see or I could show you. You will not hear or I could tell you. You will not be stopped or moved. You will see perdition as the holy gates and hear the lies of your corrupted guides as they take you through corridors of the condemned up the thirteen steps. We would have served and healed you but we were cast out from our quarters as your neighbors and friends.

Into this time of darkness came a signal event. They called it 9/11 and they made it into a royal seal, like a lock on a letter for the eyes of the few who composed the lies it contained and who carried out the crime. You could not see the contents but you had their guarantee that all was well and legal, keeping moving, there is nothing here to see.

You vain and fatuous mortals you shall reap the indifferent wind that was roused by your indifference and nothing will be the same again. You dance and pray and celebrate the horror and the lies. You pinch your face and become solemn though you must be uneasy beneath and your keepers snicker and make jokes at your expense. You lick their hands for they are your master and determiner of fate.

You can’t get there from here.

You can’t get there from here.

You can’t get there from here.

We few who wait by highway, we hold up the signs, “the bridge is out” and the road is slippery when wet with the blood of those you have driven over through proxy and malicious assent. You cannot hear and you will not see so you will be forced from both perspectives and you will be brought to your knees. A pestilence moves among you motivated by hunger and greed. They are the habitation of demons. They are the demons seed and you are honored and privileged to serve on their behalf which is the end of all of you. It is no wonder that they laugh.

They will not change. They cannot change they are the expression of what cannot be pacified or convinced. They are open to no argument that might affect profit or excess. They are the poisonous few in your midst. They pretend they are you and you are content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc-yg04rVw4

[Mike Williams]

Hi Tao,
I would bet money you and I are the only people here whom have a remote clue what's going on.

The new world order is about to take
down the entire system including
the monetary.

If ron Paul doesn't get in, it looks
like the end.

The federal reserve and central banks must be abolished.

Sell the eurodollar. EUO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVWYUDDmXxA&feature=fvst

[Karatasian]

This looks like glass half full versus glass half empty to me. If you reject both realism, and anything-goes, you are left with preferences. Utilitarianism, for instance, is based on aggregate preferences. For utilitarians , murder is wrong because it most people don't like it. And utilitarians think their philosophy is a moral philosophy.

[cc]

"Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development."

Oscar Wilde