A brief primer on why Morality does not come from Religion

Today, I have a guest blogger taking the reins. Hussain M Elius is a business student, computer geek, photograph enthusiast, and an infrequent blogger. Here, he has some words to say about morality. I want to thank him for his submission - be sure to give him your thoughts.

“The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion” – Arthur C. Clarke

For thousands of years, man has attempted to define objective moral values: Aristotle had his virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics, Bentham and Mill had their utilitarianism and Kant had his Categorical Imperative. There are many more iterations of moral virtues and vice, but the most popular once are the ones promoted by religion. In fact, many even believe that morality stems from religion, so much so that the first question several ask me when they learn I am a skeptic is to ask any variation of, “How can you differentiate between good and bad without God?”

Such a statement poses two immediate problems. Are actions designated good or bad, morale or immoral, simply because a celestial being wants or doesn’t want us to do? If so, morality is objectively meaningless- it is no different than following random rules made by a child in his own little game. All one has to do to be morale then is to subscribe to a certain sky-daddy doctrine- you are simply doing as you are told and not because there is a good reason for it.

On the other hand, if you reason that God has a legitimate motive for deciding what morale is and it is not, then you have superseded God on such issues. Not to mention that this line of thought implies that He, too, is bound by a code of conduct!

Where then, does morality come from?

Being that many animals can grasp right and wrong on a basic level, it astounds me that anyone would suggest that morality comes from a holy origin. A dog understands benefit and detriment; apes have a sense of humor; elephants show emotions; and dolphin families spread culture. It doesn't take a human to understand right and wrong, so it makes sense that a man-god cannot be the only authority for morality. We humans, as animals, have a natural internal sense of what is right and wrong, developed through the evolutionary process.

Right and wrong are understandings ingrained in the very development of our species. Because our survival depended on cooperation— dealing with everything from predators to hunting food to battling nature— those who were more capable of fairness were more likely to survive. Altruism, sympathy, kindness, forgiveness, and even hatred, all have their origins in interacting with other people for a common cause. Without these, cooperation is more likely to break down and that's when survival is endangered.

As the human culture has grown more complex, so has our varied opinion on what is right and wrong, and how much something is right or wrong. Any thinking person, regardless of belief or non-belief, will have a very large set of moral positions that they hold. These positions are complex and nuanced, and if the person is open-minded, are subject to change over time (e.g., One may chose to be for the death penalty until confronted with the stats showing that some of those who are put to death has been found innocent years later). In fact, I have yet to meet two people with identical morals, so I will cautiously suggest that morale absolutism doesn’t exist.

Some example questions: What should the legal age of consent be? Should all hard drugs be legalized? What limits should there be on warfare, and can it be moral to kill even one innocent civilian? To what extent are the wealthy obligated to help the poor? Abortion? The list goes on. Such topics can be debated and arguments can be sliced and diced between philosophers, scientists, and the common people, but when religion comes into play, all arguments halts. Religion is based on the authority of the supernatural: you can't be more right than a being who knows everything (or, for the matter, a being that can put you in an eternal torture chamber). Homosexuality is condemned in the Abrahamic religions, but it is no longer a part of debate that a person doesn’t chose to be homosexual, rather, they are born that way. Even if there was a choice, is it really morale to look at a person’s private life and judge whatever he may chose to do?

I’ll take an aside here and say that the concepts of hell and heaven has many flaws, but the chief one that bothers me most is the way it tries to enforce this so called morality on people. Doing something because of punishment or reward, might be a rational thing to do, but that doesn’t mean that rational beings are by default, morale. Take the example of the character Dexter in a TV show of the same name- a true psychopath, but not the one that goes around killing whoever he finds in sight. He knows that if he does so, even if he wants to, he will be prosecuted; an intelligent decision, no doubt, but not necessarily a morale one. If the reason you are doing what is “right” is because you fear punishment, then you are no better than a potty trained dog! “Doing what is right...” implies thinking long, hard, and carefully about what “right” is. I'm amazed this fact is not self-evident to some. There is no black and white source of universal moral law, which is why religion fails to be of any real use in a debate about morality.

That being said, a simple code of ethics like the golden rule doesn't yield an easy answer either. Take the infamous trolley problem as an example. Is it better to kill an innocent, or allow many innocents to die through inaction? What if you have a choice of letting one of your better friends die or letting, say, five people you don’t know die? And what if one or all of those five people are respectable members of the society?

Today, after millennia of social evolution, we have a conscious counterpart to evolutionary altruism called the social contract. The social contract is a collective understanding about behaviors necessary for civilization to endure. To illustrate a case, if a society collectively decided that theft was allowable, the benefits from property rights would be sacrificed. Laws and social norms are an incarnation of the necessities for societal balance. As such a change in laws and norms, which happens almost everyday, is a reflection (albeit a bad one) of morale development in the society. It will perhaps be safe to say that, reversibly, it is the morale development, aided by newer information that we are presented with, that eventually changes some laws. To derive from a previous example, the death penalty is now illegal in more places then it was a hundred years ago.

Enforcing Bronze Age beliefs as laws shows, in my opinion, the inability and unwillingness to move forward and accept changes in the social environment. While it might be true that some changes might not be for the best, other changes certainly will be. Claiming what you “know” to be right and enforcing them is short-sighted at best and disastrous for humanity at worst.