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Can the Secular Define Evil?
I’m a fan of Dennis Prager, though I split my listening between him and Rush, as they’re both on at the same time. Dennis is an unabashed advocate for religion, and the notion that goodness flows from it. He frequently challenges secular people or atheists — like me — to contradict his claim that “[w]thout God there is no good and evil.”
It’s a good challenge, and I’ve been contemplating it for a long time. Not only do I think we should always confront our opponent’s best arguments directly but I really do think its important to ask myself — as secular person — how I draw the distinction between what is good and evil if I am not going to trust religion to define it for me?
First, how does religion define good and evil? Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland defined evil thus:
Evil is a lack of goodness. It is goodness spoiled. You can have good without evil, but you cannot have evil without good.
I think this is gibberish. First, it assumes that these are measurable quantities in any meaningful sense. Second, there’s a pseudoscientific feeling to it as well which mimics the notion that cold is the absence of heat and darkness is the absence of light. I don’t think this is a very good definition of evil at all. Evil is supposed to be the antithesis of good, not its absence; further, it implies that the mere act of not doing good is itself evil. It seems to negate the possibility of benign neglect.
From my outsider’s perspective, the Judeo-Christian tradition defines evil:
- As either against other people or against God;
- As acting in a fashion which is morally reprehensible, sinful or wicked;
- As violations of the Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments; and
- As violations of the Golden Rule.
Being as I am secular, I’m going to write off the evils against God right off the bat. Each person who isn’t a a Jew or a Christian in the world commits these “evils” either passively or actively on a daily basis. I don’t think I or anybody else is committing a sin or acting evilly when we don’t observe the proper obeisances to God. Why? Because none of us is harming anybody by not doing so.
So, what about the rest of those commandments? I can’t imagine another morally normal person who would assert that murder, theft, rape, perjury or adultery are acceptable or not evil. The secular generally agree on these. So where do I draw the distinction?
The things that all of us — secular and religious — seem to agree on as being evil is when someone acts maliciously in one’s own self interest without regard to the harm that those actions cause others. Compare this to enlightened self interest or the Harm Principle. Violating these is an outrage to the conscience of morally normal people. The Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) is generally a good thing; violating it may not be explicitly evil, but to do so wantonly most likely is.
So let’s talk about some examples and see which of these responses are either good or evil:
- You come across a person on the side of the road who is unconscious and bleeding. Do you a) keep on walking, b) render aid and call 911 or c) rape, rob and kill them because they don’t know any different?
- You pull up to a red light. Standing in the intersection is a bum who is disheveled and inebriated. The bum has a sign with something cute like “Not going to lie, I just need a beer.” You have $20 in your pocket which you do not need. Do you a) Give them the $20, or b) keep on driving.
- A person who is a perfect stranger to you approaches. The stranger asks for a gun with which they can kill themselves. You have a gun. Do you a) hand them the gun and plug your ears or b) insist that this person get assistance?
Why or why not you do any of the options is just as important.
There are right and wrong answers. I’ll reveal mine in the comments.
Published in General, Religion & Philosophy
So you’ve never changed your mind on anything that touches on morals?
Those doesn’t strike me as relevant questions. If society believes in a Judeo-Christian God and the morals He has delineated through the Torah and His prophets, then society has a fixed, objective guide to morality. Whether God exists or not is not the question. It’s whether society believes in that God and His morality.
Also, you seem to be heavily implying that all change is bad. That seems as wrong-headed to me as the progressive notion that all change is good.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of tradition, but we clearly live in a morally superior world than our ancestors did.
Absolutely. I abhor the fact that in my youth I supported abortion. That’s why society requires an objective moral guide, especially in my opinion in a free society.
Well, if God doesn’t exist, then the standards aren’t objective and are just as easily dismissed as being arbitrary.
The relevant questions for you seem to be how do you convince people to believe in God and what — as Maj suggested — your contingency plan is for dealing with those who don’t.
A few thoughts:
Under normal conditions, most people are moral, most of the time.
In extremis, religious people are probably more moral than atheists – but I doubt the percentages are all that high even for religious people.
This is why we institutionalize morality, through law and societal norms: to minimize in extremis situations, and get everyone used to being habitually moral. Or at least: why we used to do this.
Now we use law and societal norms to bake immorality into the system. Coerced redistributionof the fruits of our labor. Protection and celebration of libertine behavior in sex and drugs. And so on.
I’m actually working on a post about The Walking Dead that makes this exact point. :)
Great minds think alike.
And so do ours.
This is precisely the nub.
I also do not believe that G-d’s existence can be logically proven either way.
And the Torah gives us the alternative: Ancient Egypt was a place of harmony with the forces of nature, of unambitious hedonism. And it worked.
As far as I am concerned, the choice is always between these extremes. And we are seeing this now in society: nature worship (global warming/recycling/organics/demonization of technology etc.) vies with the notion of man as something more than merely another animal, as being in G-d’s image.
You might respond: but if there is no G-d, I can reject pantheism as well. And you may be right, at least for yourself. And yet: we see that humanity desperately craves its deities. When traditional religions wane, radical Islam resurges, and so does the celebration of dirt-worshipping tree-huggers. The choice is NOT between G-d or no-G-d. The choice is between G-d of Life versus G-d of Death (radical Islam). Or G-d and Gaia.
I don’t really disagree. Again, I not only think that Christianity and Judaism are very good at this, but that I’ve yet to see any other option that is as effective on such a massive scale.
That said, I begrudge the notion — said by others, but not you — that holding moral values absent a belief in God is impossible and/or more arbitrary than doing so with reference to Him.
Ouch. ;)
Tom, the difference is that theists stipulate a factual premise: God exists (and the Bible is true, etc.). From this premise, Judeo-Christian morality logically flows. The opposite of this is to say God does not exist and the Bible is not true. Now you have no premises, so your only choice is to assert arbitrary statements of value, like “human life is important” or the Harm Principle. Whle morality logically flows from that, getting people to accept value statements as premises also allows them to reject those values if they choose. On the other hand, factual premises can at least, in theory, be verified (acknowledging that this particular factual premise cannot).
Basing a moral system on a belief in God and what believers in Him accept as His commandments is only potentially arbitrary . If God is not real then the moral system has no basis, if He is real, then the moral system is not arbitrary at all.
Now just because belief in God is ultimately an act of faith and not perfectly rational, doesn’t mean that there is no evidence for His existence or that there are no rational arguments to make the case for his existence. The just aren’t testable scientifically. So to call a moral system based on God arbitrary because God’s existence can’t be proven definitively seems a bit unfair.
The truth is, you cannot prove to me that you exist, nor can I prove my existence to you. So, by your standard, everything is arbitrary. Hence my warning about the slide into nihilism.
I guess the point is that at least a moral system based on belief in God has internal logical consistency. How does one establish the same internal consistency to a moral system without the premises that one derives from God? To me a moral system could be derived from atheistic premises, however it wouldn’t look like the moral system that most secular humanists claim.
Any dictator would argue that they have, by virtue of being in charge, demonstrated that they are worth more than some peasant. Atheistic premises always reduce in practice to some form of “Might Makes Right.”
I would agree, as explicitly atheistic regimes have shown repeatedly.
Agreed.
It’s the last one that’s the kicker. Saying that it’s my opinion that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself is not meaningfully inferior to saying that it’s my opinion that God said we should do so; it simply moves the Truth claim from one place to the next.
Obviously, it’s convincing if you accept the claim that God exists. But that begs the question of whether that’s the rational thing to do.
It’s not the moral system that’s derived that is arbitrary, but the decision to believe in the claims of one religion to the exclusion of all others that I find so.
Again, it’s simply swapping one set of difficult-to-derive/prove claims for another; I don’t find the latter claim inherently easier to demonstrate than the former.
Not really, the belief claim about God’s existence and his commands is based on evidence, albeit unverifiable evidence. The atheist belief claim is based on the effectiveness of the system which theists have created. But the effectiveness of the theists moral system relies on the unverifiable belief claim. If people reject the theist belief claim that underlies their moral system the moral system ceases to be effective.
The atheist truth claim rests on the truth claim of the theist while simultaneously denying the theist truth claim. The atheist is dividing by zero.
By that logic, post-Thomist Christianity is “based on” Aristotle, rather than simply using him to explain things that he happened to get right for reasons he didn’t fully understand.
Wanna go there?
But you should love your neighbor isn’t a statement of reason. It is a value statement. Your comparison is inapt.
I would also argue that Christianity isn’t based on Thomism. Thomism is a school of thought which seeks to explain the metaphysics of revelation. But one can accept revelation and practice Christianity without knowing anything about Thomist metaphysics and theology. The morality of Christianity didn’t change after Aquinas.
I have never claimed that morality and values can be derived solely through reason. It can — at most — be inferred based on what works and is successful. If you find that underwhelming, join the club.
I hold a number of unproven, unscientific beliefs regarding morality; I don’t see how they would be in anyway improved by claiming they derive from religious revelation, unless I can show there to be a lot of evidence to back up that revelation as true.
But what does that mean, to be “successful.” Successful by what standard? The moral system Kim Jong Un subscribes to is very successful by his standard. The moral system espoused by the Chinese Communists is very successful according to the standard of those in power there.
What is your standard for success? Once you state that standard I’ll bet we can find things that we might want to tinker with to achieve even greater “success” and I’ll bet you won’t have any reason why that is wrong, other than, “I don’t want to do that.”
Theists have a standard which is pleasing God, and when people want to tinker with the moral system that theists believe will please God, they can say, “we can’t do that because we have been told right here (points to piece of revelation) that we cannot do that.”
Sorry, wasn’t clear. My point was that just as Christianity holds that Aristotle got a number of philosophical claims objectively right, despite having a number of incorrect beliefs, so too might Christianity.
Afternoon Tom and iWc,
I think your are over-estimating man’s tendency toward moral behavior. In several experiments under the subject of “plausible deniability” subjects would often cheat, when a cashier would give the subjects too much money only 20% would correct the mistake, see Bersoff 1999. In “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely when subjects had the opportunity to enhance their pay by over claiming work completed most did. Ariely summarizes, “When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples weighted the averages, we discovered that the ‘majority of people cheated’, and that they cheated just a little bit” Ariely 2008. Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind” says, “they cheated only up to the point where they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty.
If we consider all the special deals that elected officials grant themselves, insider trading, the House Post Office, vacations paid by lobbyists, then theft seems rather the norm. I do not think elected officials are cut from much different stock than we. We may as part of our human nature advertise ourselves as moral and even convince ourselves, but I do not think the evidence is strong. Also if one is given a credible or authoritative reason then people will do dramatically harsh things, see the Milgram experiment in obedience.
But what makes “love your neighbor as yourself” right or wrong? For Christians it is right because God says it is right. For atheists it is right because … what? Because following that seems to increase prosperity for the greatest number of people? Well, that seems dubious. There are probably ways to up prosperity for even more people if we start excluding certain burdensome groups from the population of “neighbors” we love. How does keeping the severely mentally ill or vegetative alive increase prosperity for people beyond the mentally ill or vegetative? It doesn’t, in fact it reduces prosperity for people outside of those afflicted groups.
Here’s another way to increase prosperity. Don’t allow single women to have children unless they can prove they have the financial resources to care for them. That means that single women with income or wealth below a certain level would be required to either abstain from sex, use birth control, or have an abortion in the event of pregnancy. That way we could reduce the poverty caused to single mothers and their children and lessen the burden they place on society through welfare programs.
Those studies are harrowing, but I’m not sure how it directly bears on this.
What am I missing?
The answer is no, the rule of subjective justice is here.
The believe an increase of around ONE part in SIX THOUSAND, Poisonous c/o2 that is, partly due to mankind, is causing climate chaos and danger of
extreme cataclysm, melting the ice-caps, warming the earth! That is wrong on its face.
The fact is that this argument is taking place well within the calibration and error rates of our science, the data is hinky, the inter-glacial periods are relatively short respites and ours is kind of old……
They believe a man with a woman is the same as a man with a man.
This is wrong on its face.
The fact is the family is older than history and all children want to be with their parents which is as it should be.
They believe capitalism is destructive and Western Civilization is destructive and they prefer the alternatives which
are distinguished mainly by seriously amazing amounts of destruction.
They are obsessed by race and “diversity”.
Race and Diversity are absolute fraud, starting and ending nowhere good.
They have no evil to define, only appearances and preferences, definition is the enemy of relative morality.
No they can’t.