Only as Good As
My colleague didn’t get lost yesterday, and I did manage to figure out which square Starbucks in a square outside the entrance to Westlake Mall he meant (it was kind of unmistakable, in fact, a freestanding little glass mansion of Starbucks all on its own), so we did meet up as opposed to standing around stupidly in the wrong place. They wanted to go someplace pretty and not too far away as they had to get bus back to the airport quite soon, so we went to a park on the water about a mile north of downtown. Then we argued about whether this park beat Nonsuch or not – I said no!!, they said yes!! – but then we agreed: Nonsuch is better as a park, Elliott Bay Park has a far more spectacular location and view. It’s too bad there was a good deal of cloud draping the horizons yesterday, because it meant Mt Rainier was entirely invisible (as it usually is) and the Olympics nearly so – we could just make out the foothills, and I had to inform them that in fact there are spectacular mountains rising just behind those. Never mind – they’ll familiarize themselves with the look of the Pacific Northwest over time. And there was plenty to look at – water, islands (which they refused to believe were islands – but they are, it’s just that the ends aren’t always easy to make out), peninsulas, ferries, sailboats. It’s true – the actual view from Nonsuch doesn’t compare. (The view from Richmond Hill, on the other hand, is another matter, and the one from the lawn east of Kenwood is not so dusty either.)
Now, back to unfinished business. Or not so much business as pontificating. But hey, if the pontiff can pontificate, so can the rest of us. So back to unfinished pontificating then. We were discussing this question of whether religion can motivate people to be good – not in the sense of motivation through fear, which as James Mill pointed out is a revolting selfish motivation, but in the sense of externalizing and personalizing an idea of goodness and then deriving motivation from that external personification. I think that is one – only one, mind you – way religion can work.
But of course one of the problems with that is that the result is only as good as the conception of goodness is – and all too often people’s conception of goodness is absolutely crappy; is in fact worse than common or garden badness would be. All too often, people’s conception of goodness boils down to making other people submit and obey and be under rigid control. All too often it hasn’t got a damn thing to do with kindness or generosity or compassion or mercy, and in fact looks far more like cruelty and lust for domination. As Mary McCarthy famously said, religion is only good for good people; for bad people it’s terrible.
And then there’s the larger problem, which has to do with the role of religion in public morality and public debate; with the fact that religion is wrongly but widely thought to have some kind of expertise in moral issues, and therefore public debate is cluttered up with bishops and priests and mullahs, who in fact have no expertise at all, but rather a deep knowledge of Authority, which is no help. Religion may at times with the right people under the right circumstances motivate goodness – benevolence, courage, altruism – in individuals, but religion is not a useful contributor to public discussion of morality. Either it has nothing whatever to add that is not available to secular thinkers, or what it adds is the wrong thing to add. In other words – sure, sometimes religious talking heads manage to say something sane, but that’s because they’ve done some thinking, the kind of thinking we can all do, and because they’ve been influenced by various humane ideas in the culture (that racism is bad, that capital punishment is not the way to go, that justice and equality have something to be said for them), not because they have some special religous wisdom. And other times they say things that are absurd or downright hateful, because they think their deity hates contraception or women who are not enslaved. So what is it that they add? Nothing.
Public discussion of morality has to be secular and rational, because the other thing just doesn’t work, and can’t work, and shouldn’t work. If you tell me your God thinks the babies should have their heads dashed against the walls of the city – I’m not going to be impressed, am I. ‘God says so’ just doesn’t cut it in public discussion, any more than ‘my gut says so’ does. But there are people of the ‘God says so’ party on every ethics panel and many chat shows. That’s a bad situation. That’s one reason there is a need for energetic resistance, and even, at times, rudeness.
“We were discussing this question of whether religion can motivate people to be good – not in the sense of motivation through fear, which as James Mill pointed out is a revolting selfish motivation, but in the sense of externalizing and personalizing an idea of goodness and then deriving motivation from that external personification. I think that is one – only one, mind you – way religion can work.”
Funnily enough, as I slid from the airy fairy, never really thought too hard about it, doubt Jesus was divine, liberal Anglicanism of my youth, into the cold hard atheism of my adulthood, it pleased me to think of God as some kind of externalisation of my own moral sense, personifying my own disapproval at the bad things I did. Nowadays I’m quite capable of being disapproving of myself, and that seems to keep me in line. I wonder if that is a common experience?
OB: bearing in mind that you have been wrestling with this for quite a while, apologies in advance if this comment covers well-trodden ground.
If I am asked what useful social function, if any, do vicars and priests and suchlike perform, the first thing that springs to mind is they transmit a moral tradition. I approve of some parts of that tradition, such as the golden rule, the notion that we have an obligation to provide for the sick and the poor, that wars of conquest are wrong etc. OTOH, I certainly don’t appreciate being told what to read or how to manage my sex life. But on the whole I find that religion has made a compromise with secularism which I can live with, while seeking a few more concessions here and there.
When you say “[believers have] been influenced by various humane ideas in the culture”, it seems to me you downplay the active role that believers play in creating and preserving those humane ideas. They aren’t the only ones of course, or necessarily the best. Lots of public benefactors are unbelievers. In many cases however, when you dig a bit into their life histories, you find a parent or grandparent whose concern for the public good had a religious basis. That’s why I wonder where you are coming from – or going to – when you say that “public discussion of morality has to be secular and rational.” What is a rational morality founded on? I’m no philosopher (but if I won’t let a priest do my thinking for me I surely won’t entrust it to a philosopher either); however I have a strong impression that when Kant constructed his ethics he rigged the game so as to get something pretty well identical to the golden rule. Isn’t that pretty typical? Is there really any escape from tradition? I presume not, which means that morality evolves through a continuous debate which is almost a process of negotiation. In fact from what I know of religious history, my impression is that the dogmas themselves developed in that way. So if we try to hold a secular and rational discussion of morality we are sure to find that a lot of the views presented have religious roots.
Quite likely you have acknowledged this yourself in earlier posts and established that it poses no problem for you. But rightly or wrongly I have got the sense from your recent posts that if you were defending a moral principle and it was shown to rest, ultimately, on the unsupported word of some prophet, you would be embarrassed by that.
“it pleased me to think of God as some kind of externalisation of my own moral sense, personifying my own disapproval”
Right – though I was also thinking of it as personifying approval – and love and such. I know that’s how Mary works – I’ve read that a million times – and for some people, Jesus; I’m guessing that for some that’s the basic idea of God. Of course that requires not noticing what a bastard God actually is, but that’s another subject.
KD, well, but which moral tradition? The one we operate with now isn’t the one that’s been handed down – that’s part of my point. A lot of people have deep illusions about how kind and compassionate Christianity has been over the centuries; well it hasn’t. Yes some religious people have contributed some ideas – but the ideas have been good ideas independent of theism; that’s also part of my point.
A rational morality is founded on things like preferences, and a massive amount of argument, much of which is never resolved. But argument is all there is – agreement is all there is – and ‘God said so’ doesn’t get you there – unless there is a theistic consensus that I for one would not want to live under (theocracy, in other words).
Well, if I were defending a moral principle and it were shown to rest, ultimately, on the unsupported word of some prophet, I would certainly think again – I would certainly want to know if there were any other reason to support it. In other words, I would want to know if I really did think it was a good moral principle. It’s not a question of embarrassment, it’s a question of not wanting to perpetuate stupid cruel destructive moral imperatives – like the ban on condoms, or like deranged hatred of gays that can never explain itself except by saying ‘Yes but God says.’
I’m not bothered by religous roots, but if that’s all there is, then I want to figure out if that’s enough.
What I think is potentially good about religion-based morality–despite all the pitfalls you’ve described–is the very untouchable, authoritarian basis. Sticking to the Judeo-Christian relgions for now, there are two prongs to this. First, their moral system has its failings, and its points that are ripe for misuse, but its isomorphism with my idea of good morals is really pretty good. Definitely so compared with all the possible proposable moral systems, and many of those that have been proposed by secular intellectuals There’s not all that much to argue with in the basic foundations of Judeo-Christian morality, unless you’re a relativist or postmodernist or something, and we all know what B&W thinks about them. The second prong is the way this is enforced. Yes, Mill has a point that being motivated by fear is, in some sense, not “really” being moral. But (not thinking too hard about this, for now) that’s a kind of “romantic” way to think about it. It’d be nice if the world could be a good place driven only by personal moral convictions, but until we can figure out how to make that work, some stronger stuff is needed. Let’s say, again making broad jumps and not considering details, that if people are happy and leading fulfilling lives, the particular good that comes out of true personal moral decisions can be left out quite a bit, since at least they’re not [starving, unable to support children, caught in violent rivalries. . .] What Judeo-Christian religion does is provide the ultimate police force for its (“pretty good”) morality, to those who take it seriously (which, as you’ve said, may not be as many as we’d like). Because God is both the final judge of human action and supernatural, untouchable, beyond the veil of death, no influence from the world save loss of belief can prevent Him from deterring moral transgressions as best He can within a believer’s head. This encourages the ultimate in living by principles, because you don’t need to do the hard work of living by principles: no matter what you do now, whether Henry VIII beheads you or not, you’ll be judged afterwards by what you did, and no worldly force can change that (the belief says). Again, this is not a very pretty kind of morality, but I’d be reluctant to say it has no worth at all–and a widespread materialistic worldview would necessarily expel it forever.
Yeah – that’s pretty much what I mean with the stuff about being relieved, in certain contexts, that other people ‘have religion.’ It does have that enforcement capacity – which secular morality doesn’t.
Still…secular enforcement has been known to work in other societies – though at the price of a good deal of shaming, conformity, rigidity, etc.
[throws up hands in despair]
“First, their moral system has its failings, and its points that are ripe for misuse, but its isomorphism with my idea of good morals is really pretty good.”
But, to be fair, that is the case of most moral systems. They almost all have a pretty good relation to existing moral beliefs – otherwise no one would adhere to them.
RF wrote: “Because God is both the final judge of human action and supernatural, untouchable, beyond the veil of death, no influence from the world save loss of belief can prevent Him from deterring moral transgressions as best He can within a believer’s head.”
Unfortunately, this is one of the main problems with this “ultimate police force”. As “no influence from the world” can corrupt it, it is also immune to rational critique.
Alas, inspecting the past and present horrors, great and small, inflicted on others by “believers”, gives little cause to respect, or rely on, this “ultimate police force”.
It is begging the question to imply that people are good because of their religion, when the question is whether or not religion motivates people to be good.
We can presuppose that religious people are moral because of their fear of God’s judgement. But there are numerous other reasons that they might be moral that have nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
It might be the case that religious people don’t beat puppies for the same reason that I don’t — it just feels wrong to do things like that. There’s no rational basis at the time of action (or non-action in this case). However, religious apologists (and detractors) will often impute rationality to the choice after the fact. I believe this to be an error.
Yeah – I believe it to be an error too. As I’m always saying. I’ve just been trying to give religion its best shot, for once, in this particular discussion. It seems to be the case (though I don’t have any statistics or evidence to hand) that some people become better after they ‘find Jesus’ or some such thing. Happens when people hit bottom, I think – actually, maybe what they’re finding is the bottom; they only think that’s Jesus.
But anyway – religion so often makes people worse rather than better. How on earth would anyone tot up the balance sheet?
Yeah. That’s an interesting line of argument, really. I hadn’t quite thought of it before. Maybe this whole issue of religion making people ‘good’ is simply a problem of naming, and misidentification. That wasn’t Jesus, you fool, and it wasn’t even a vision of Jesus, that was the bottom of the glass, or your own long-delayed feelings of revulsion, or a stirring of compassion, or fear and despair, or nothing left to lose. People just label that Jesus or God or Allah.
Not unlike the alien abduction thing. No, you fool, that wasn’t a real alien, that was a combination of hypnogogic sleep and your memories of E.T.