A sense of virtue
Clerics will say anything, and they’re allowed to; that’s their job. In some jobs you have to try to get things right and then report them truthfully; in others you’re allowed and indeed encouraged to just make things up. Archbishops are firmly in the second camp.
Many Catholics see in the dismay over MPs’ expenses and the behaviour of the financial markets, a growing public conviction that all is not well in the moral life of the nation. They believe it presents a rare opportunity for the Church to make its voice heard, and see in the archbishop a forceful and articulate spokesman…[The archbish] said the revelations about expenses and the activities of the markets showed rules alone could not make a society work. He insisted they showed that some sense of “virtue” – such as that offered by Christianity – was also needed.
From an obvious truism to a ridiculous non sequitur. Of course ‘rules alone’ can’t make a society work, but who ever said they could? What’s that got to do with anything? Nothing, apart from the automatic slandering of all things secular. ‘Those pesky unbelievers – they think rules alone can make a society work – how shallow and uninformed and clueless can you get? Typical godless.’ Nobody said rules alone can make a society work, and in any case, why is the only other option ‘some some sense of “virtue” such as that offered by Christianity’? It isn’t, of course, the archbishop just felt like saying it is, and his job description says he’s totally allowed to do that.
So – what would this ‘sense of virtue’ be? Especially this ‘sense of virtue’ offered by Christianity? Think hard now. Hmmm. Is it anything like the virtue of
the religious congregations in Ireland? No, probably not. What then? Oh…humility, turning the other cheek, loving your enemy, that kind of thing. Unless you’re in charge of an industrial school, of course, in which case humility and turning the other cheek and loving your enemy is quite the wrong kind of thing. So that must not be what’s meant by a sense of virtue then? So what is? Hmmm. Not getting hitched to someone of the same sex? Yes, perfect! But then – that’s just a rule, right?
Well, the archbishop probably did have something in mind, but I’ll be damned if I can guess what it might be.
The truth is that religion has nothing to offer to morality. It may have some utility as a morality-assistant, but it’s worthless at moral reasoning. That’s not to say that no religious people can engage in moral reasoning, it’s just to say that the religious part doesn’t add anything to the reasoning. Well it doesn’t. Moral reasoning is secular, and religion either gets it dead wrong, or muddies the issues, or simply applauds what everyone knows anyway.
This is why I won’t be applying for any archbishop jobs soon.
An interpetation of ‘sense of virtue’ that fits both the Bishop’s statment & the church’s behaviour in Ireland is ‘a sense of dread that if you do not follow the church’s teachings the church will make your (and your children’s) life intolarable’
An interpetation of ‘sense of virtue’ that fits both the Bishop’s statment & the church’s behaviour in Ireland is ‘a sense of dread that if you do not follow the church’s teachings the church will make your (and your children’s) life intolarable’
And before some yobbo comes along and twists some heinous fallacy out of OB’s stance, I think it’s worth saying that atheism as such has nothing to offer on morality, either. After all, not believing that gods exist does not give someone special insight on morality any more than believing does.
On the other hand, religious authority figures in specific and religious believers in general do go about claiming to know things they do not know and generally makin’ shit up – about morality as about everything else. That’s the nature of faith, to make or adhere to claims which are not (and usually cannot be) supported by evidence and reasoning. After all, if a claim could be supported by legitimate arguments, in what sense would believing it require or involve faith?
In contrast, atheists are almost always disinclined to go around making unsupported (and unsupportable) truth claims or otherwise believing things because they want to. In fact, every atheist I know is a dedicated fan of careful, evidence-supported reasoning, although not all are equally good at it – and Lord knows none of us are perfectly consistent. ;-)
But I hadn’t noticed anyone going around treating atheists as if they have special insight into morality. In contrast, people – not just individual people, but politicians and journalists and other influential people – treat religious authorities as if they do have special insight into morality all the damned time in the absence of any justification whatsoever for doing so, and in the manifest presence of many thousands of justifications for NOT doing so. (Shall we count those justifications? One for every abused Irish child, just for starters?)
So the most important idea here is that moral reasoning is in fact a species of reasoning: Faith is (almost) always an obstacle to reasoning, and faith is (definitely, without qualification) never a legitimate substitute for or worthwhile addition to reasoning. So it isn’t just that religious authority figures lack any genuine insight into morality: Rather, the defining characteristic that makes one a religious authority, faith – both the faith that religious authorities have in their own unsupported beliefs and the faith of their flocks which comprises the sole basis for their authority – actively prevents clear moral reasoning. Thus, religious authority figures are the very last people anyone should ever turn to for moral insight.
I have nothing against virtue ethics. By and large, we do try to instil virtues like honesty, courage, kindness, cooperativeness, etc., in growing children, rather than just teaching rules.
I just don’t think that virtue ethics, to the extent that it’s a good thing, has much to do with religion. Epicurus was a virtue ethicist, after all. It was the default position of the ancients. Indeed, the distinctively religious “virtues” (piety, chastity, self-abnegation, silence) are not virtues at all … as David Hume pointed out a long time ago.
“The archbishop insisted that people needed to know that religion brought its own kind of reason”
I believe it goes something like:
God said so
Therefore P
I’ll be the yobbo then.
What this post seems to avoid mentioning is that ‘just making it up’ is a feature of modern-made religions changing in response to change in society. When they vote to allow divorce, or permit divorced people to marry, or ordain a woman minister, they break from a consensus reasoned out in the distant past, which has remained grounded in the principles of that religion and a part of the general social compact in those societies.
‘Just making it up’ was religion’s response to geology, at least after denial became untenable. Similarly to the changes in increasingly-secular society. When religious organisations ‘make it up’, they generally argue internally for years before they negotiate a new agreement inside their councils based in modern ideas even if the media show it as though from the collective belly button.
This has some advantages over responding to activist hyperbole.
A far more egregious ‘making it up’ was that taught by postmodernism, wherein a framework was created not only for making up moral postures to suit individual political needs, but also intentionally undermining the operative social consensus on morality. At least western religion moves to accomodation with modern social consensus, rather than progressively creating decay in line with the fashion of the hour.
I can’t quite figure out who’s the yobbo ChrisPer.
Gee whiz, ChrisPer, I guess I missed out on that one. You’re speaking of the church’s way of accommodating to contemporary mores. But, where in the distant past was this consensus reached by reason? As I recall, Jesus mentioned the rules of divorce laid down in Judaism, and then said something to the effect that ‘it shall not be so among you.’ And he even went further, and said that the man who looked with desire on another woman had already committed adultery. Now, that’s reason for sure! Desire is having sex in your head and that’s just as bad as really having sex. Right? Got that. I must say, the reasoning stuns.
What you seem to be trying to say is that religions already have a reasoned morality, and that any departures from it amount to mere temporising with that originally reasoned consensus. But, to take marriage only, the Christian doctrine of marriage was a late development, and is based primarily on a growing distaste for the sexual couplings of human beings. It was not a reasoned position. It was made up of whole cloth for quite other reasons, largely having to do with clerical control of the laity and their lives.
So, I don’t see your point. Perhaps you could make it more clearly. And postmodernism is just a red herring here.
Seen any religious soaring lately? Really, how do these guys get away with trundling out this paltry nonsense, and then get it reported around the world? The mind simply reels. I’m just reading Peter de Rosa’s popular history of the papacy. Good bracing stuff! It has it’s shortcomings, of course, like all popular history, but there’s lots of stuff which would make Nichols blanch, and makes the abuses of the Irish industrial schools look like child’s play, but not a lot of reasoned morality in sight.
The truth is, and this is something that should be taken note of more than it is, the papal claim to infallibility is effectively the claim of all religions. The Roman church claims that its morality accords with natural law, but the discernment of natural law is a reasoned process. It has no definitive conclusions. The only way to bring reasoning to an end is to claim some higher kind of knowing, and this must be infallible, or it is worse than reasoning itself. If it is above reason, and you cannot go higher, then it must be true by definition. So, the doctrine of infallibility is merely an unfolding of the logic of religious believing. It must end in declarative statements for which no further reasons can be given, for which, in the nature of the case, no evidence of having received such truths is available, and not way to disprove them either. The hopelessness of this enterprise should be clear.
He is going on about “rules”. Surely rules are the basis of all religion? Indeed, being a follower of one is precisely about following the rules that can be observed externally, yes?
Even if you think something entirely different while doing so.
Ritual ablution, confession, marriage for life, …. it’s all just rules.
Rules is rules!
And why do they devote effort to changing the law so as to more closely conform to their “teachings”? The Catholic hierarchy here in Spain currently has an anti-abortion campaign claiming that the Iberian lynx has more legal protection than the newborn baby. Curiously, the poster shows a Eurasian lynx cub, an animal not found here!
http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2009/03/19/espana/1237465898.html
Not surprisingly, some leading figures from the conservation movement have condemned the campaign.
“the papal claim to infallibility is effectively the claim of all religions.”
Quite. This is basically the claim for which ‘God hates women’ is metaphor and shorthand.
“it’s worth saying that atheism as such has nothing to offer on morality, either.”
Indeed. On the other hand atheism could be seen as making a contribution by subtracting something as opposed to adding anything. The subtracted something is of course the delusion that God endorses this or that axiom or virtue or rule.
Hmm, G., I don’t know about that.
(“That” being that atheists as such have nothing special to offer morality).
I think the “God” and “no God” positions are often not actually about the factual existence or nonexistence of a deity.
Rather, I think they’re often about authority and hierarchy and the “natural order of things.”
If you are inclined to a hierarchical, authoritarian perspective that valorizes the strict patriarchal father, well…you’re going to have an easy time accepting the idea of an arbitrary God who wants you to obey his commands, even if they don’t make sense to you.
And the converse is true as well, I thnk. If you are told that this arbitrary God exists, you are more likely to accept the abusive husband or father or State.
If you’re told that “god” is more of a benevolent parent, or a synonym for the universe, or a metaphor for something…I think it might make you more inclined to use your own reason and compassion to figure things out.
And of course if you think there’s no “god,” no Authority-with-a-capital-A dictating things, then all you’re left with is your own reason and compassion.
Basically I think the God-impulse is often authoritarianism in disguise, and can in turn create authoritarianism. Atheism can work in the opposite direction (though it doesn’t always, I hasten to note). There’s a reason anarchists once had a saying “Ni dieu ni maitre” (neither god nor master), meaning that they refused to be enslaved either by a human master or by a supernatural one.
Not sure you’re disagreeing with me at all, Jenavir. At least, I don’t disagree with much in your comment. When I said atheism as such, I meant mere fact that one does not believe that a god or gods exist does not have any bearing on morality. However, as I think the rest of what I wrote bears out, the motivations and inclinations that separate believers and non-believers have a great deal of bearing on moral reasoning. It’s at the very least why believers aren’t as good at moral reasoning – although of course they engage in it anyway, as they must.
I certainly think it’s empirically true (although not universally true) that atheists lean strongly against authoritarianism. Indeed, what is the demand for evidence-supported reasoning other than a rejection of epistemological authoritarianism?