Can Atheists be Moral? Can the Religious?

[Purple Knight]

Question for Debate: Can Atheists be Moral? Can the religious be moral?

I've heard the idea that atheists can't be moral, because physically, we're all just selfish apes, protecting and increasing our genes, and without some supernatural addition to this formula, good is not possible. The ape mother protects her child because that increases her genes. This act, the idea goes, is not moral, but selfish. Any time a human helps another human, this idea would apply.

I've also heard that religious people can't really be moral because whatever they do that is supposedly moral, they don't do it for its own sake, but for the reward. I've even heard that religious people can't be moral because their morality is unthinking. Random total obedience is morally neutral at best, so, the idea goes, if you're just blindly trusting somebody, even a powerful entity, that's not really morality.

Both of these ideas frankly seem to hold water so I'm curious if anyone can be moral.

[The Tanager]

[Replying to help3434 in post #160]

I think "consequential" is doing a lot of work here that needs to be explored in more depth. Why are moral preferences more consequential than taste preferences? What do you mean when you say that?

[help3434]

[Replying to help3434 in post #160]

Why are moral preferences more consequential than taste preferences?

Why? Because that is how we normally use those words. For those who don't of us who don't have this top-down divine command theory of morality, we use the word "morality" to refer to behavior with consequence for good or evil.

[Difflugia]

Hey canthelpmyself! Thanks for joining us here. I hope you get to share your thoughts and get to hear those that challenge yours as well.

I agree with you. I don’t think atheists are sociopaths, psychopaths, can’t be moral, etc. My point was something else. My point was that if atheism is true, then moral differences (treat others how you wanna be treated vs. use others for your own benefit) are really just like taste differences (I like chocolate but hate coffee ice cream flavors).

Your analogy holds to a certain degree; my preference for chocolate or coffee flavors don't impact anyone else. There's a fundamentally human reason that "inconsiderate" is usually considered a pejorative, but I'm not even aware of a word that means "likes different flavors than someone else," let alone a pejorative one.

So, while we have been conditioned to think moral preferences should be treated differently than taste differences (we tolerate the person who likes coffee ice cream but not the rapist), there is no rational reason to treat them differently.

The truth of this depends on to what degree empathy is a conditioned response. What would wreck your analogy is if the ice cream flavors included "the tears of crying children" or "the blood of prisoners of war." Ice cream flavors are allowed to be merely taste differences specifically because they don't impact others. If they do, they take on much more gravity than mere preferences. We still have to consider them and arrive at judgements about them, but they're not simply valueless choices, either.

[Tcg]

[Replying to CANTHELPMYSELF in post #157]

My point was that if atheism is true, then moral differences (treat others how you wanna be treated vs. use others for your own benefit) are really just like taste differences (I like chocolate but hate coffee ice cream flavors).

The phrase "if atheism is true" is quite problematic given the many different ideas of what atheism means. My atheism for instance means quite simply that I am not convinced that any god/gods exist. Assuming that I'm telling the truth, how could that be considered to be either true or false? Much better to say, "if no god/gods exist" and I assume that's what you mean here.

So, while we have been conditioned to think moral preferences should be treated differently than taste differences (we tolerate the person who likes coffee ice cream but not the rapist), there is no rational reason to treat them differently.

How about this one. No god/gods required.

"We try to be good for its own sake because of the dignity of humans and our desire to see them experience goodness."


Tcg

[The Tanager]

[Replying to Tcg in post #164]

The phrase "if atheism is true" is quite problematic given the many different ideas of what atheism means. My atheism for instance means quite simply that I am not convinced that any god/gods exist. Assuming that I'm telling the truth, how could that be considered to be either true or false? Much better to say, "if no god/gods exist" and I assume that's what you mean here.

That is what I meant.

"We try to be good for its own sake because of the dignity of humans and our desire to see them experience goodness."

Where does the dignity of humans come from? Where does objective goodness come from?

[The Tanager]

[Replying to help3434 in post #162]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #163]

I agree that it’s a way to categorize certain actions differently, but I’m questioning the importance of that difference. Why should we care what affects other people, if they don’t affect us?

[Difflugia]

Why should we care what affects other people, if they don’t affect us?

First, your assertion ("they don't affect us") is false for most questions about morality. In a practical sense, social living is successful, both in the biological and anthropological senses of the term. Helping a group will generally help us. Hurting the group will generally hurt us. Someone that is solitary will be less successful than someone that is social.

Our sense of justice lives in the area that is referred to as cheating in game theory. Things like freeloading and betrayal can help the individual at the expense of the rest of the members of the group. In a practical sense, we can discuss how much freeloading or theft is tolerable without even resorting to morality.

We've evolved emotional attachments to certain forms of behavior as heuristics for solving problems that would otherwise fall under game theory and be much more expensive to compute. This is the part of morality that we feel and that theists often want to diagnose as gods-given. In aggregate, our ancestors evolved on both sides of sociality: contributors vs. freeloaders, trustworthiness vs. betrayal. It should surprise nobody that as individuals and groups, we have strong feelings about those behaviors. As an aside, an interesting smoking gun pointing to the evoluton of morality over divine fiat is that we suffer from sexual jealousy to the point that in those circumstances, our responses would often trump those that would tend to help us prosper in other ways. Murdering a sexual rival generally has profound immediate personal consequences, but jealous people are also more likely to raise more of their own offspring. In the space so directly tied to reproduction, the dynamic between the individual and the group will tilt toward the individual in ways that would otherwise be anomalous. Eusocial animals have solved this particular tension between sexual reproduction and sociality by rendering sterile most members of the collective. It's difficult to see why such an exception would be carved out by all-knowing gods (or even ones that just kind of know a lot), but it's easy to see how it would have evolved.

Now, back to the first part of your question. "Why should we care," becomes almost self-evident once we realize how beneficial social behavior is, but we can even set that aside and still have a number of satisfying answers. The big one for me is that empathy is real. I have visceral reactions to seeing things happen to other people and imagining them happening to myself. Valuing the same things in others that I value in myself works very well for me psychologically. I suppose that I could condition myself to dampen personal empathy, but even if we're ignoring the benefit of social behavior, what would the point be? Even if you want to argue that I could objectively improve some aspect of my life, like more resources or something, you'd still have to expect me to place a disproportionately low value on other parts of the human experience, like varieties of love and social acceptance.

That's a long-winded way to say that people are moral because morality has evolved as part of a system that's really successful. Now that we've developed math, there might be ways to tweak things to get better outcomes, but it seems insanely disingenuous to me to suggest that it works so poorly that we should dispense with it, but in the next breath claim that we should adopt a worse version of it because it's from a comic book that you like.

[William]

[Replying to Tcg in post #164]

So, while we have been conditioned to think moral preferences should be treated differently than taste differences (we tolerate the person who likes coffee ice cream but not the rapist), there is no rational reason to treat them differently.

How about this one. No god/gods required.

"We try to be good for its own sake because of the dignity of humans and our desire to see them experience goodness."

Then someone argues "your good = god" and who is to know which is which or who is right or even if having to know the answer to that make any difference at all?

"We try to be god for its own sake because of the dignity of humans and our desire to see them experience godness."

Good is god. o

And if someone where to resist that by saying "but god told people to rape" one could ask "are you saying that good tells people to rape?"

"No - it says it right there in the god-book!"

"Are you saying that good isn't god because it says in some book that god told people to rape?"

Where does the onus sit?

If we have knowledge of God and Devil, what onus is upon us to figure out which is which?

[The Tanager]

[Replying to Difflugia in post #167]

Sharks are a successful species and they forcibly copulate. Praying mantis are a successful species and the females will sometimes eat their mate after sex.

If we should care about social behavior because it benefits us (all things considered) as individuals, then when it doesn’t benefit us as individuals, we should not care about it.

I may be wrong, but I’m not being disingenuous. And I’m not talking about what works for the goals we have been conditioned to like, but whether morals are objective realities or subjective preferences. Whatever my favorite comic book says.

[Difflugia]

Sharks are a successful species and they forcibly copulate. Praying mantis are a successful species and the females will sometimes eat their mate after sex.

And neither of them are social animals. That was my point about jealousy. Most of what we consider our moral framework is made up of social adaptations. As a selfish precept within an otherwise social framework, jealousy is a moral anomaly. It demonstrates that our moral sense is much more likely to be natural than divine. "The exception that proves the rule."

If we should care about social behavior because it benefits us (all things considered) as individuals, then when it doesn’t benefit us as individuals, we should not care about it.

Why? Where are you getting this "should?" Why are you trying to convince me that I "should," from whatever standpoint, start acting even worse than Christians? In most cases, more people are better off if fewer people harm society to their own benefit. If we're legitimately better off with a more selfish set of moral standards, then why are you claiming that a god gave us a presumably different set of moral laws? Are the gods just trying to mess with us and force us to do things that are worse?

I may be wrong, but I’m not being disingenuous. And I’m not talking about what works for the goals we have been conditioned to like, but whether morals are objective realities or subjective preferences. Whatever my favorite comic book says.

The short answer is "both," but there's a lot there to unpack.

In the way you're using "objective realities" and "subjective preferences," here, they're subjective preferences whether you think gods are real or not. The difference is whose preferences. If you're asserting that our moral sense is subjective in the absence of gods, then I don't see how the moral sense of a god is qualitatively different than that of a person. They're presumably bigger, wiser, and smitier, but the result is still subjective by any reasonable definition. Even if their rules were perfectly straightforward and unambiguous, they still originated with someone, rather than being an independent part of reality.

If you think that our moral sense is objective by virture of being at least partly built-in and instinctive, then that's objective whether Jesus put it there or it evolved there. I personally think that's true. Much of our moral sense is baked in, but it can be modified through experience and conditioning, hence "both." If you think that morality is somehow woven into the fabric of reality, though, then it's there whether gods put it there or not. If you can derive a moral code from reality in some objective way, then that's just as true for atheists as believers.

I don't think it's how you mean it, but when philosphers talk about an "objective morality," they mean one that applies to everyone equally, independent of social situation or personal feelings. By that standard, Christian morality isn't objective. Paul's "judged apart from the Law" (Romans 2:12) and "unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean" (Romans 14:14) represent subjective moral standards by definition, even if you try to argue that gods are objective sources of morality.