… Or, should I say, Richard Dawkins.
Apparently, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are consulting their lawyers to see whether the Pope can be charged when he visits Britain in September.
Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.
The Guardian reports that a letter written by the Pope in 1985, when he was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, urged that a paedophile priest in the US not be exposed for the “good of the universal church”.
Mr Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told The Times: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”
Mr Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, added to the London-based paper: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment.”
Several media outlets say the Vatican insists Pope Benedict is free from prosecution because he is a head of state.
This, in simple terms, is a stunt, and it makes me angry because it is a particularly egregious stunt. It irritates me even more because it is an egregious stunt perpetrated by atheists who in other fields are brilliant and persuasive thinkers. This applies with some force to Dawkins, who is probably in line for a Nobel Prize one day for his work on evolutionary biology.
I have always found the willingness of British courts to facilitate the prosecution of heads of state and former heads of state rather stunt-ish, even where the individual in question (Pinochet, Mugabe) was/is a monster of the first water. It’s undignified, and in any case I’ve long suspected that the best treatment for evil leaders is targeted assassination (so three cheers for Israel, just don’t nick my passport while you’re at it).
For what it’s worth (and those of you who know me will know my opinion of international law), I think the Vatican is right, and that the Pope does enjoy sovereign immunity. I note that Geoffrey Robertson (one of the lawyers involved in this bit of tedious one-up-man-ship) refers to the arrangement made between Mussolini and the Catholic Church before the Second World War to deny the Pope sovereign immunity. Perhaps Mr Robertson needs reminding of the principle of ‘general and consistent state practice’ where, pursuant to Article 38 (1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, courts have recourse to the behaviour of nation states as evidence for the underlying substratum of international law. The Pope has always been treated as a head of state, and relevant Vatican officials have always enjoyed diplomatic immunity. That the Vatican is not a member of the UN is of no moment; for many years, nor were Switzerland and Indonesia. That did not deprive either country of statehood.
In this case, however, the law is the least of my worries. My real concern is with an issue that I touched on in my ‘Cats That Will Not Be Herded‘ post: to wit, that the claims of atheism are largely epistemological, not moral. That is, atheism is a claim about knowledge, not morality, and — hitherto — it has been impossible to draw links between the epistemological claims atheists make and the moral (or political) claims they make. It is possible (as I pointed out in that post) for atheists to be politically conservative.
This isn’t to say that we should leave moral claims to religious people — far from it. Indeed, I do think it is very difficult, once one’s epistemological claims have been undone (as those of the monotheisms have been) to then build moral claims on a foundation no bigger than the head of a pin. However, that latter point is by-the-by. My concern — when I see stunts like this — is that atheism is morphing into a ‘movement’ with political and moral ‘views’ that must always and everywhere align. Well, let’s just say that this is one cat that will not be herded. I hope other atheists around the place (many of them read this blog) are also horrified at the thought of being drafted into some dreadful exercise in groupthink. Atheists, may I remind Messrs Dawkins and Hitchens, come in all political hues.
If it were not obvious, please do not think I am excusing the Catholic Church on this issue. It is abundantly clear that the organisation generally and the Pope in particular are under enormous institutional pressure, and that at this stage there is no telling what will become of it. The Archbishop of Canterbury has already made some trenchant (perhaps too trenchant) observations about ongoing loss of moral credibility for Christianity generally and Catholicism in particular. His remarks could (and should) be extended to Islam, although perhaps not to Judaism. It is worth exploring why Christianity and Islam are bedevilled by a grab-bag of criminals (paedophiles, terrorists), bigots (queer haters, misogynists) and idiots (creationists) in ways that Judaism is not. I have long thought that if one is to be monotheistic, one should be a Jew… but the Jews have always had the good sense to police entry to their ‘club’. To be a Jew is to take on a heavy burden, and not just the burden of history.
I do have one final point to make, and it concerns Dawkins in particular. I need to frame it carefully, because I am not a biologist and Dawkins is probably the world’s greatest living biologist.
It is Dawkins (in addition to Darwin’s pioneering work) who has revealed the extent to which we are the tools of our genes, and that genes are survival machines of the most powerful sort. For this finding, he has been made — by those who do not understand his work — into a wild-eyed prophet of laissez faire and a supporter of all and every sociobiological insight into human behaviour. This is quite false and most unfair, and involves a pernicious form of intellectual laziness. Here is what Dawkins has actually said on the difference between biology and our ability to manage our biology:
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave. My own feeling is that a human society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live… Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature (The Selfish Gene, p. 2-3).
Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some influences of both types may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse. Some may be usually hard to reverse but easy if the right agent is applied. The important point is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irrevocable than environmental ones. (The Extended Phenotype, p. 13).
Human beings have a massive cerebral cortex that allows us to engage ‘manual override’ of our biology. It’s one reason why we don’t have a baby every 2 years like we’re programmed to do (‘come in, Charlie Darwin, we hear you’). In the best Humean tradition, therefore, Dawkins is not trying to bridge the ‘is-ought’ gap. He is not saying that because biology drives us in one particular direction, (the is) we have to ‘go with the flow’ (the ought) and organise society accordingly.
He is, however, pointing out that engaging in manual override of our biology may sometimes be very, very difficult. In some cases, our institutional structures may have to acknowledge the immense power of the biological drivers, and sometimes, ground will have to be conceded. It does appear that staffing an entire institution with celibate males stretches the biology too far, and can’t be carried off without massive institution-wide complications. Regular commenter Lorenzo is a medievalist, and he has a pile of posts at his place on how the Catholic priesthood has been disproportionately (although not majority) same-sex attracted since LATE ANTIQUITY, and that people were starting to notice it even then.
He has researched the penalties handed out to nuns in medieval convents for ‘rubbing’, for example (this was usually a fine). The blokes, however, tended to get burnt at the stake (he has some horrible period images). It is one of the few cases where sexism impacts disproportionately on men. The reason, of course, that the priesthood became disproportionately same-sex-attracted was social hostility towards gays and lesbians. They literally had nowhere else to go. They could, however, hide within the Church.
He has done so much writing on this topic that rather than link to specific posts, I’ll wait for him to turn up in the comments and provide links to his most revealing research.
That apart, Dawkins is also capable of nuance on this point. In The God Delusion, he makes a cogent case (based partly on his own experience of being molested by a school teacher) that we as a society are far too hung up about ‘improper sexualisation’, and that we are just going to have to accept that sometimes authority figures and their underlings will bonk each other and — generally — a good time will be had by all. What causes the problem for us is pretending that it won’t happen, or that we can always and everywhere stop it from happening:
Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692 [...]. The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today’s Just Williams, today’s Huck Finns, today’s Swallows & Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less). (The God Delusion, p 315-6).
Dawkins goes on to point out that
All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, 50 years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience). (The God Delusion, p 316).
That people can elide the difference between sexual predation and murder is amply evidenced by this brain-explosion from Bob Ellis, where he equates Catholic pedophilia with Islamic terrorism and argues that, ergo, we should bomb the Vatican. Sorry, Bob. One of these things is not like the other. Even the most serious sexual offence (rape) should not be equated with murder.
However, the extent to which the prosecutorial Dawkins of this attempt to go after the Pope is not like Dawkins the biologist author of The God Delusion is evidenced by this observation:
The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonised over the issue, especially in Ireland and America. I suppose some additional public resentment flows from the hypocrisy of priests whose professional life is largely devoted to arousing guilt about ‘sin’. Then there is the abuse of trust by a figure in authority, whom the child has been trained from the cradle to revere. Such additional resentments should make us all the more careful not to rush to judgment. We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers. (The God Delusion, 316)
Dawkins then goes on to argue — very persuasively — that the physical abuse meted out by the Christian Brothers in Irish schools and by nuns in the infamous Magdalene Asylums (much of it borne of a hostility to human sexuality that refuses to engage with biological realities) was worse than the sexual abuse, but that physical abuse attracts no compensation cheques. He has a point.
What is the upshot of all this? Does the fact that, biologically, we are highly sexed, mean we should screw around to our heart’s content? No. Does the fact that, biologically, we are highly sexed, need to be taken into account in institutional design? Yes. The Catholic Church’s troubles stem in large part because they’re trying to reason backwards from an ought to an is. I suspect this is just as impossible as the version Hume originally assayed. Do we all need to get over our issues with TEH GAY? You bet, and if we’re lucky, we can have the debate now, as uncomfortable as it may be. Do Dawkins and Hitchens represent all atheists? No way. In fact — if Dawkins’s arguments in The God Delusion are to be believed — this stunt doesn’t even represent Richard Dawkins. Legally, too, Dawkins and Hitchens don’t represent the victims of the abuse. They are harnessing their dislike of the Church to the legitimate grievances of the victims, and I do hope that the English courts are bold enough to say, ‘bugger off, you two, you don’t have standing to sue’.
I do not pretend for a moment that any of this is easy, but we should be able to do better than take cheap shots and engage in mean sniggering. I have the greatest respect for Dawkins and Hitchens, but what they are doing is cheap and mean. In doing it, they do not speak for this atheist.
One final word: the title of this post comes from a track by a band called The Low Anthem. Their beautiful and haunting song about ‘Charlie Darwin’ as they call him is below. It has a wonderful claymation clip, and some great lines.
168 Comments
Not to take away from your other points, but conservative Judaism has plenty of misogyny and homophobia, not to mention racism. They’re just not a majority faith in as many places as Christianity and Islam.
This is a ridiculous stunt by Dawkins (Hitchens, at least, is being pretty consistent) – I’m wondering if he’s trying to prove to theists that atheists DO TOO have morals.
The Pope clearly is a head of state, so it is a ridiculous stunt.
My posts on abuse are listed under abuse with the first two being particularly relevant to the issue of incentives on priests.
The Catholic priests have been disproportionately same-sex attracted is something that was commented on by St Peter Damien in the C11th, who denounced a “sodomite” Church-within-the-Church, while LeRoy Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou found homosexual networks that were urban and clerical in the C14th.
The dynamics are perfectly obvious: if you had to be celibate (or at least unmarried), then one may as well get the most social kudos possible for that state. And service in the Church was a way of “proving” you were devoted to God really: of being “the best little boy (or girl) in the world”.
I haven’t actually posted much on the medieval penitentials, apart from summarising some of what’s in various books I have reviewed. But the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, which is online, has some useful entries.
This applies with some force to Dawkins, who is probably in line for a Nobel Prize one day for his work on evolutionary biology.
Dawkins won’t get a Nobel for these reasons:
“The Selfish Gene” concept was too narrow, never widely accepted in the sci. community, and has been overthrown.
The Meme concept was plain stupid.
The NeoDarwinist model is old and in need of repair.
He has spent too much time writing books and public speaking.
He is slowly but surely turning atheism into a religion. Should have gone for the agnosticism line, more intellectually honest and less inclined to lead to another religion.
Is there such a charge as “wasting the court’s time”?
I don’t buy the idea that this is a silly stunt by these two intelligent guys. They know exactly what they’re doing and why.
Of course they’re aware that their stunt will not succeed. However what will is the possibility that it will get them more publicity and their appearance price goes up.
You say:
“My concern — when I see stunts like this — is that atheism is morphing into a ‘movement’ with political and moral ‘views’ that must always and everywhere align. Well, let’s just say that this is one cat that will not be herded. I hope other atheists around the place (many of them read this blog) are also horrified at the thought of being drafted into some dreadful exercise in groupthink”
I don’t understand why you think this. Did Dawkins make a pronouncement saying “anyone who calls themselves atheist must support me on this” ? Did he threaten excommunication from atheism if you disagree with him ?
Dawkins is his own person, and can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t claim to be the leader of the atheists, and doesn’t demand everyone agree with him.
I’m surprised you see it necessary to make a statement that you won’t be herded. Neither will I, but I wouldn’t have bothered making that announcement until I saw an attempt to herd me.
As a free thinking individual though, I’d be happy to see the pope arrested and tried for crimes of enabling pedophilia, or at least make the prospect of it cause him to cancel his trip to the UK which us taxpayers would be fitting part of the bill for.
I hate to be picky, but Dawkins isn’t in line for a Novel Prize. He’s not even close. His work in biology was decent enough, but never up to that standard. His idea of memes was in vogue for a while, but has drifted far out of the academic mainstream.
He never came up with any paradigm-shifting ideas, nor did he develop any new or interesting ways of looking at existing ideas. He was a good scientist, but never in that top echelon who are actually a chance at winning the Nobel. Especially given that he’s a biologist, so his best chance would be Medicine, in which his contributions are pretty much negligible.
I got into a lot of trouble for asserting that in Crim. In fact I basically ended the class.
For a fuller discussion of the Pope as Head of State point, read the comments to this post: Can the Pope Be Sued? Maybe…
Thanks for that link, Patrick… although I do think that only a couple of them pay sufficient attention to consistent state practice [Art 38 (1)(c)]. Of course, none of them address the issue of standing, which is probably of greater import on this issue.
All in good fun I say… and with an underlying message… the Catholic Church needs to be reformed.
And here’s some more fun:
I’m at the final day of the UN climate talks in Bonn, gracing what the BBC just described as “the most colourful display in NGO alley.” We gave the rather po-faced delegates a good laugh when CFACT’s Christina Wilson sold “carbon indulgences” to all assembled, dressed as Mother Earth, and pardoned us all for our “climate sins.”
Our “carbon indulgences”, on parchment scrolls rolled up and tied with ribbon (Christina was up all night doing that), told delegates that they were “hereby forgiven for flying when you choose; machine-washed clothes; driving your vehicle; using your computer; taking hot showers; exhaling CO2; making things in factories; growing food with tractors; eating meat; watching TV; refrigerating your food; using Edison’s light-bulbs; turning on the AC or heating or both; and, above all, attending international conferences.”
The scroll made it plain that “This indulgence will not meaningfully alter the weather or climate. It is therefore the most honest carbon trading strategy you can find.” The High Representative of Guatemala, a Catholic, said the indulgences were a great idea. They reminded him of his youth, when anyone who ate meat instead of fish on a Friday had to pay a fine into the Church poor-box.
Dawkins says he did not say he’d “arrest the Pope”, but he is strongly in favour of legal action.
I can’t help feeling that whenever Dawkins forcefully challenges the shibboleths of organised religion he’s portrayed as aggressive, belligerent, antagonistic, shrill and now even as a “mean sniggerer”.
We want our intellectuals and media to challenge exploitation, abuse, cruelty and manipulation, yet when it comes to religion there seems to be a heightened nervousness about propriety.
What Dawkins and Hitchens are proposing might be poor tactics, but it is very mild compared to the common tactics of political and ideological change agents, as well as compared to the scale of the crime of global institutionalised paedophilia.
I never thought for a moment that Dawkins and Hitchens would be doing any actual arresting. That’s strictly a Peter Tatchell stunt (with Mugabe). No, they’re aiming for the appropriately ‘legalistic’. That, I think, is part of the point.
If the Pope can be considered a Head of State then I think that is part of the problem. The Church, in covering up sexual abuse, has been acting as if it were not subject to the usual laws and mores of the societies in which it conducted its business, as if it was a kingdom within a state. That said, I think the only appropriate legal actions are the class actions being taken by victims. The Dawkins/Hitchens action smacks of arrogant grandstanding and antireligiosity and worse, to me, it could negatively affect the perception of those class actions by lumping them together as part of a concerted attack on religion.
I disagree with quite a lot that Dawkins says about abuse and I think his writing on this shows the same kind of facile and superficial thinking as his writing on religion. What I do agree with is that the Catholic church is being unfairly stigmatized. Sexual abuse begins with an abuse of trust and organizations in which people collectively place a lot of trust are therefore particularly prone to opportunistic abuse of the less powerful. Concentrating on the characteristics of those organisations is a diversion I think and leads people to circumscribe abuse as something that happens at Scouts or boarding school or with your Priest, rather than the society wide problem that it is.
The reason why so many of the abuse cases we hear about happened within institutions is that victims are more likely to come forward when they know they are one of many and it is much more likely that you will hear of others if the abuse was associated with an institution. You are far less likely to come to hear of fellow victims if the perpetrator acted from within the general community, frequently moving on and leaving behind victims widely separated in geography and time.
For sure there should be no attempt to “herd” atheists into a single moral position. Atheists are absolutely free to hold any moral view they like on any topic.
That is the great thing about atheism, there is no right and no wrong moral position. After all, what person, or even what group of persons, could set themselves up as being the arbiter of absolute moral truth?
So Dawkins can spout off as much as he likes but no one has to take the slightest notice of him any more than they have to take notice of the pope.
The paedophile, the torturer, the rapist, the murderer are just as “good” or just as “bad” people as Dawkins or Mandella or anyone else.
Yay for atheism!
As you say, we’re not all the same. Doesn’t that mean that for some their _is_ a herd mentality? And, if there is, is that as bad as our independent minds would like to believe – or is it part of being a social animal?
So, defer from supporting Dawkins on this one if you will but understand that many of us hope that along with being an atheist comes a secular morality that is actually preferable to anything that any church can, or has, come up with.
We can’t expect all atheists to join in this hope. If you don’t, I wish you well. And I wish you to “do no harm”.
Much of what you said concerning societal hysteria over sexual offenses is correct, but I have to cringe a bit at you even making a tangentially implied linkage between pedophilia and homosexuality.
I know that is not your intent and I don’t accuse you of having done so. But you should not be disingenuous enough not to see the potential inference of some readers.
And WOW….
a “freethinker” who moderates comments? Interesting….
Excellent post. This is really a bonehead play. In fact the whole anti-theist mvement is a bonehead play. It’s one thing to cast doubt on Abrahamaic mythology (I’m sorry the Asians were right). It’s quite another to go to war with its adherants.
They will lose that way. Defining one’s self by opposition to those who’ve raised this wicked bit of moral architecture is folly. They should, as you’ve done here, articulate the alternative tradition. Abrahamic faith is not entirely a bad thing and some people truly feel Divine Presence and it’s quite possibly true that they’re right. We don’t know.
I’m Catholic and have teeth marks in my neck to prove it. The cover-up and total lack of soul-searching viz the rape of minors was disgraceful. But arresting the pope starts a war that won’t be won.
John Evo, when people comment at this blog for the first time, their comment is moderated (just in case it’s spam). Next time you comment, your comment will appear straight away.
My two co-bloggers live in the UK, so during the daytime there’s just me to check. I have two children under five, and am doing a full time PhD, so it’s difficult to be checking the blog all the time.
It’s hard not to agree with all that has been said hereto.
A really good article by skepticlawyer and the considered opinions of the comment-writers of all persuations
We should not be at all surprised by this unholy alliance between three of the grandest poo-bahs of British arrogance and imperialism – Dawkins, Robertson, and Hitchens (oh god, imagine those 3 toffy nosed blowhards in the same room!) – as each has his own Jesus Complex.
Basically, Robertson, Dawkins, and Hitchens think THEY are the Popes of Justice!
Lorenzo
That data you seem to have on sodomy in the early Catholic church looks like dynamite. Can’t wait to light it!
With the right conditions, Jews behave no differently to Catholics and Muslims. Only in the last couple of months the Israeli press have reported the following:
- A very prominent rabbi was exposed as having molested students over many years (he was protected by his environment, which is very common among the ultra-orthodox)
- The Chief Scientist of the Department of Education declared himself an evolution denier (and a climate change denier to boot, because “god protects us so it can’t be true”).
- Settlers in the occupied territories planned to harm civilians in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on a one-to-one basis. This was exposed after several attacks occured. (they call this plan “price tag”.)
So you see, Jews might be the chosen people, but we were chosen by a clearly malevolent god so when we feel god’s on our side we behave as normal humans do…
It could very well be the case that when you take into account the numbers, the proportions are not at all favourables to Jews.
Eran Segev
President of Australian Skeptics and Cultural Jew (mostly on good-food holidays)
Are you serious?
You are a lawyer and you have such an opinion of the rule of law that you prefer “targeted assassination” by rogue states? You think that the main argument against using due process is that it is “undignified”? Undignified to whom? You can’t be serious….
Basically, Robertson, Dawkins, and Hitchens think THEY are the Popes of Justice!
Ironical fantaticism?
Adrien
Oh Geoffrey “Apotheosis Now” Robertson is beyond nauseating, as he swans around the world dictating to the former kaffirs, coolies, kanaks, and assorted coloreds of the British empire what their new legal systems and constitutions must contain and omit.
I can just hear him on his death bed:
Oh my learned friend, Empress (Kathy) Robertson, I do believe I am turning into a god!
helen
I am not sure how much relevance the very English myth of the “rule of law” has in the extra-sovereign world.
Helen P: I have long suspected that people who call Israel a ‘rogue state’ often have all the sympathy in the world for dead Jews, but none at all for those Jews who happen to be alive and surrounded by hostile neighbours. It is a very interesting phenomenon and perhaps merits some serious academic study.
I’ve also often been told in my life that I shouldn’t have certain opinions, or that I ‘can’t be serious’. This tends to come from people on the ‘cultural left’, and explains in very large degree why I want nothing to do with them. If you poke around on this blog, you’ll find quite a serious discussion of the merits not only of targeted assassination, but of creating a market in targeted assassinations. And — as is usually the case with this blog — the three blog admins disagreed with each other, while commenters (of various stripes) also disagreed with each other, other commenters and so on. Politely. It can be done.
I’ll also point out that the legal equivalent of throwing ballbearings under foreign heads of state has precious little to do with the rule of law, which is concerned with things like prospectivity, publication, consistency, intelligibility, stability, adjudication, natural justice and the separation both of the prosecution services from the police, and the judiciary from other organs of the state. There has been a mountain of scholarly work on this, from people as ideologically diverse as F.A. Hayek and Joseph Raz.
Su: you are absolutely right as to who should bring suit in this matter. It is the victims, who undoubtedly have both civil and criminal claims. It is a point that Sinclair makes with some force over at Catallaxy, and one that I should have made with more force here (when I discussed the issue of standing).
JC & JP: Yes, that’s the cynical position and both of you may be right. I hope not, but there you go.
Finally, I’m going to quote a comment Jason Soon made over at Catallaxy because it sums up my position (and the reason why I have great problems, as an atheist, with this kind of moral grandstanding):
Is this excusing religious bodies? Not at all; as I think I’ve made clear, Dawkins’ comments on pedophilia and sexuality from The God Delusion are subtle, thoughtful and have the effect of forcing his interlocutors into engaging with genuine moral complexity. When he’s grandstanding with Geoffrey and Hitch, he’s not writing interesting books, and that’s a damn shame.
Hi Eran!: I still think that Jews manage to do religion mostly ‘right’ as compared to the other two monotheisms, although as lilacsigil says aways up the thread, that may be a function of being a minority everywhere.
Apologies for the long comment all, but I only just woke up (it’s 7 in the morning here). LE has been managing a popular thread on her own at the same time as child-wrangling.
Most people agree that the rape of a child is is the most heinous of moral and legal crimes. This discussion is about just that. It should be more widely known that the severely mentally ill (sufferers of schizophrenia, bipolar 1 disorder and severe clinical depression) have a majority cohort of some 66% who have been sexually abused as a child or young person and a global suicide rate of 10-13%. Certainly not “murder” in a legal sense, but an incredible degradation of life and its quality.
Deprivation of life and sexual abuse of the young are iinextricably intertwined.
1. afaik, the Vatican is as much a state as the PLO was a few years ago (UN observer status), and we know what Israel’s attitude to Arafat’s “immunity” was – and Arafat was much less in control of his rogue elements (especially splinter groups) than the Pope is. Besides, imho, head-of-state immunity is a crock, only encouraging evil overlords to be even more evil to retain their evil overlordship and ill-gotten immunity.
2. As to religion, in Oz states there is only one true religion – either footy or thugby. The officers of these religions, testosterone-laden entertainers, coaches, and club presidents, are held to a much higher standard by politicians and public (pilloried even for slurs or degrading comments about race or gender, club cultures under great pressure to change), than the self-styled guardians of the morals of our society. I suppose it’s like the difference in sentences between blue-collar and white-collar criminals if they steal a given amount of money, or indeed helping them avoid prosecution. Dog-collar criminals and their protectors seem even more privileged.
One can also draw parallels with the Mafia after it diversified its interests, having both legitimate and illegitimate income sources… yet the padrones were in control of all (again, less than the Pope), protected their guilty members, and were still targetted by law enforcement, who looked for ANY means to drag them to gaol (think Al Capone, not done for murder but tax).
Eran, I would agree that there’s sexist and unsavoury streaks in Judaism. I caught up with a friend on the weekend. This friend has recently gone ultra-orthodox. When I exclaimed with joy at seeing him (he’s been in Israel for the last year) and went toward him, he visibly recoiled. I’ve known this guy since he was six. I wouldn’t have minded so much if his face hadn’t showed that he was horrified at the thought that I would touch him. (I have another friend who’s Adass, but he manages to greet me in a way that is not hurtful, and doesn’t make me feel less of a person). To be honest, I was deeply hurt. Just the mere fact I am a woman rendered me unclean and horrific, and less of a person.
Well yes but two things:
.
1. He does attempt to address the crimes against humanity perpetrated by and within certain states. I think he should pick fights he can win and perhaps tone down the Bono dance but I must admit that I’d be amused to see ol’ Ratzinger on the stand. He would make a formidable opponent I’d wager.
2. I really used to like Hypothetical. Especially when he nailed Cat Stevens to the floor over the Rushdie brou ha ha.
Helen P –
I’m afraid in geopolitics there isn’t much by way of due process. Between states there is very little legal process that’s actually enforcable. Targeted assassination is not legitimate according to international law but going to war is. Which one would you rather?
Adrien
Indeed. No Law In The Arena.
I actually “have all the sympathy in the world for dead Jews,” AND a great deal “for those Jews who happen to be alive and surrounded by hostile neighbours.” So I guess I am not so interesting a phenomenon, and do not perhaps merit “some serious academic study”.
However, I do manage to make a distinction between Jews and the present government of Israel, and I believe it is an appropriate and useful distinction to make (just as it is to make a distinction between Australians and the present government of Australia etc etc).
I am not sure what you mean by “people on the ‘cultural left’,”, but like you (or one of the owners of your blog), I don’t find categories of left and right wing particularly illuminating, I’d much rather ask what a person thinks than categorise them in a certain way and therefore dismiss what they do in fact think.
I am unpersuaded of the merits of targeted assassinations, and of the merits of advocating targeted assassinations, even if “Politely”. And the fact that the way of the world is lawless is not an argument against the rule of law. Indeed, quite the opposite, one would have thought?
Adrien, “going to war” is not per se legitimate in international law. Absent just cause and just means, going to war may in fact be as illegitimate as targeted assassinations. I find the writings of Miss Anscombe to be very persuasive on this topic, and oddly enough, she is usually categorised as a right-wing Catholic. Odd.
Adrien, I seem to recall the nailing in question. It was achieved back in the days before Islam became another sort of sacred cow.
A few more stray thoughts:
1. Atheism and skepticism are not coterminous. Yes, there’s Venn diagram there with a pair of overlapping circles, but they are not the same. I am both an atheist and a skeptic, but I know skeptics who still follow a religion but strongly support evidenced-based policy and debate (and who are appalled by things like creationism). There is also a strand of Buddhism (of considerable antiquity) that is atheist but not skeptical. You won’t find them supporting creationism (it’s incompatible with important parts of the Pali Canon), but they often have a strong sense of the numinous/supernatural, such as to annoy most if not all skeptics.
2. If one makes extraordinary claims and then fails to live up to them, expect moral opprobrium. It is this that is bedevilling the Catholic Church at the moment and allowing Dawkins and Hitchens to garner popular support for this suit. In many respects it is unfair, and it carries (or should carry) no weight at law, but it does fly among the general public. Shorter me: it is quite wrong to hold the Catholic Church to a higher standard than, say, USA Swimming, but USA Swimming has never made large moral claims (it also threw the book very hard at molesters among its coaches when it got the chance). Many people are just not very impressed when institutions or individuals fail to live up to their own standards.
3. There is (as CL has pointed out at Catallaxy, and Kim at LP) some nasty sectarian bigotry buried in all of this. As I tried to make clear in the post, all the monotheisms (with the possible exception of Judaism, although see Eran and LE’s comments above) are in crisis at the moment. This crisis is independent of numbers of adherents or how cashed up the relevant bodies are. It is to do with the fact that the institutions are struggling to come to terms with the modern world and the vast changes wrought in that world since Adam Smith showed that private selfishness led to public gain.
We may never be the same again.
[UPDATE: This is not an Israel/Palestine thread; any comments that further derail it in that direction will be summarily deleted. Those who want an Israel/Palestine thread (with added targeted assassination sprinkles) should go here.]
Oh good god. We’ve gone from the High Tory Trifecta to the Quadrella, with George Moonbat throwing his tuppence ha’penny in.
What is it about Oxford haute bourgeois males of a certain age?
Who next? Clive Hamilton?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/12/pope-trial-law-equality-leaders
Adrien, “going to war” is not per se legitimate in international law.
I didn’t say it was. But if your neighbors lob rockets into your territory on a regular basis then you do have a basis, for example. Or for another, what if the CIA bumped Hussein instead of the Iraq War? (Not that that’s legitimate).
I’m just saying this stuff happens in a nether zone outside of ‘legitimacy’.
No. It won’t. This is unprecedented.
Last warning on the Israel/Palestine stuff, peeps. Just sayin.
Sorry Skeptic, I read the I/P kaput notice after I posted.
I’m not especially enthusiastic about that particular rhetorical black hole.
I should point out a slight conflict of interest on SL’s part: not only is she one of those lawyers who don’t believe International Law has any legitimacy, but she’s been seduced by the wares of the Chabbad bagel man…
In defence of Bob Ellis, I suggest very strongly that his point was that if we used a particular logic to justify invading Iraq/Afghanistan etc and chase Bin Laden with rockets, why do we not use the same reasoning with the Pope and the Vatican?
Not quite the same as suggesting we should do or should have done either.
Bagels are good. Bagels are very good. Particularly with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Even my picky child likes bagels.
I’m also a big fan of chicken soup with matzah balls – I think I might have some tomorrow, actually – always good when you have a cold.
To your musings concerning Judaism, as a “cultural Jew” I make no specific comment in support of your claim that Judaism is relatively free of the types of criminals you identify as followers of Christianity or Islam; and I support lilacsigal@1 comment that much of the old law is misogynist, homophobic and racist. Modern Jews have done their best to reject those elements, and even many Talmudic Rabbis declared much of the genocidal behavior demanded by the Book of Joshua to be “a closed book”, centuries before the rest of the world had invented notions of anti-racism and universal humanity.
However, I will point out that the moral laws of Judaism, in contrast to those of Christianity and Islam, do not regard the flesh as inherently sinful (how can God’s creation be sinful?), and we do not consider ascetism to be a moral virtue. Certain moral practices of celibacy and abstinence demanded by devout Christian and Islamic customs are known to deform the personality and mental state of the average “sinful” person. But as far as I know, nobody ever went mad, molested a child or strapped on a suicide vest, all for want of an oyster.
Mercurius, I do find the way in which the sages dealt with the more vicious parts of the Bible very interesting. For example, the evidence required before the death penalty would be ordered was extremely high. In effect, this meant that the death penalty was very rarely ordered.
Makkoth 7a says:
I like this way of dealing with overly harsh religious precepts – make it very hard to mete out the sentence in practice. Although obviously, as the exchange above shows, there was still difference of opinion among the rabbis.
Hey SL, there is nothing cynical about my comments. That is the reality – atheists can certainly generate laws but they cannot legitimately generate any absolute morality. And laws and morality are certainly not the same thing.
You say that you hope I am not right. Well, I think it wiuld be wise and responsible to try and show that I am not right before making any further moral statements.
Enjoyed the article SL. Keep up the good work.
Enjoyed the comments too because I’ve never read much of Dawkins’ stuff. I’ve always thought of him as a popularizer trying to reach out to as many people as possible rather than tackle deeper questions. So because I’m already an atheist, I haven’t bothered with his superficial approach – while I think it’s valuable, I’m past the stage of actually becoming an atheist.
I have the same concerns as you about any “atheist movement”. I also certainly agree that murder is worse than child sexual abuse even though both are horrific.
Incidentally, I disagree that assassinations work. I think that you always have power lusting thugs and that if the conditions are right, they find their way into power. Ie: I think that if they’d killed Hitler, another Hitler would have filled his place eventually.
Finally, a question that’s been on my mind for some time:
Is it really true that Christian clergymen abuse children at a higher rate than the rest of society? (I believe they do because of the warped view of original sin ie: sex, and because of the ridiculous requirement for celibacy but have never actually seen any stats on this).
I know Christians who dismiss concerns of sexual abuse by believing that it’s just media beat up, that people have something against Christians (Christians often love to think they are being persecuted) and that rates of sexual abuse crimes are not actually higher amongst church leaders.
Is it really true that Christian clergymen abuse children at a higher rate than the rest of society?
I am aware of a correllation between extreme forms of religiously mandated sexual repression and abuse of various forms. Children make easy targets. Religions in which sexual abuse has taken place in the context of religious authority and sexual shame include the Catholics, ultra Orthodox Jewish communisites and the Hare Krishna movement.
I believe from personal experience that homosexual Catholics often join the Church to escape their moral quandaries and that this becomes disastrous when they’re out in charge of adolescents of the same sex.
Think about it. Get a straight guy when he’s 17. Tell him it’s a sin to have sexual thought about women, forbid him sexual acts including masturbation. Let him cook for 20 years and then give him a job wherein he’s required to supervise adolescent girls including inspecting them when showering.
What will happen? No brainer really.
TimR: I do not know about the differences between religious and non-religious organisations, but I have seen CPS data (when I was handling a sex-abuse matter over here) that indicates that it is commoner among Catholics than Protestants, and commoner among Sunni than Shi’a. I didn’t see any Jewish data for comparison, probably for the reasons various Jews have already pointed out on this thread: Jews have always and everywhere been a minority. It is, in fact, remarkably low among Shi’a, but then Shi’ism tolerates ‘temporary marriage’ (mu’ta), a cultural hangover from Persian civilisation and originally developed by pagans and Zoroastrians.
Catholic abuse is also disproportionately male on male, while Protestant abuse follows the ‘societal’ pattern (ie, the data sets we have for the wider population), where abuse of girls and young women is about half-as-common again as is abuse of boys and young men.
Similarly, child sexual abuse in families where children are raised by both biological parents is very low (lots of people do not seem to realise this; failure to appreciate it is widespread despite the fact that there is a mountain of empirical evidence to the contrary). Where there is abuse of children in biologically intact families, it is often in the form of the ‘family friend’ or ‘uncle’.
In broken families, the culprit is almost always a stepfather, overwhelmingly with a post-pubescent female (typically, the presence of the stepfather brings about earlier menstruation in the step-daughter). This suggests a biological origin for the behaviour, which means it is something for which we need to carefully and deliberately engage ‘manual override’.
SL
Indeed. I have a friend who was the victim of stepfather sexual abuse. I am not kidding when I tell you this, but one hungover Saturday afternoon we were watching Big Cat Diaries about how younger male lions kill the cubs of a pride they have just won from a group of weaker/ageing lions. My friend jumped up and said “Oh. My. God. That’s what that prick [her stepfather] did to me!”
This is a piece from a researcher who states that on the available evidence, the clergy (any denomination) do not abuse children at a rate greater than that for the general populace. He also does not believe that celibacy is a risk factor since the clergy from other denominations had a similar rate of offending.
Su, that completely flies in the face of everything I’ve read on the topic, and it sounds like he’s making excuses, to be honest. In fact (just reviewing my notes), all that data seems to come from work by this one researcher who relies very heavily on qualitative studies. I find that highly dubious.
My only caveat is that CPS data is based on complaints we receive at the CPS, which are then sorted into matters that are prosecuted, matters that are not prosecuted and matters that (for various reasons) are allowed to lapse. Of course there is a separate data set again for successful and unsuccessful prosecutions. The latter are interesting but not terribly revealing for the simple reason that they depend very heavily on too many other variables (like how skilled the counsel were).
To pretend that the complaints data is unrepresentative, however, would be to suggest that the whole English population is engaging in some massive conspiratorial cover-up of sexual abuse cases (or, alternatively, that the English are a different species from Americans, from where Plante draws his data).
Any criminal lawyer worth his salt knows that domestic violence is commoner among the poor, that step-families have higher incidents of child sexual abuse, and that few men are rapists (but those that do rape are among the most persistent recidivists one will ever encounter). I have seen worthy and well-meaning attempts around the place to refute this, usually with the sound of ideological axes grinding in the background.
In fact, Steven Levitt makes the point (based on data drawn from the 2002 National Crime Survey) that sexual offence rates are (a) routinely exaggerated and (b) very unevenly distributed depending on factors such as social class and family structure.
[UPDATE: just to make it perfectly clear, there is no good UK data comparing religious and non-religious organisations, and I am highly skeptical of Plante's American attempts to do this. There is only good comparative data across denominations (in the UK) and good data on things like correlations between family structure and abuse of all kinds. I strongly suspect that sexual abuse is less common than commonly portrayed everywhere (religious, non-religious, whatever), but where it does occur, it is marked by persistent recidivism/repeat offending and is strongly correlated with social class; some of that can be subjected to empirical study - as Levitt has done -- but much of it cannot].
Interesting
He is cited in Sex Offenders: Identification, Risk Assessment, Treatment, and Legal Issues(p326). You can view the page on google books. I am completely open to the possibility that Plante’s research may be dodgy however. Do you have any links, I can’t find many other studies online?
Su, the CPS is letting me into the bowels of their data sets on the grounds that I work for them from time-to-time. New Labour’s obsession with targets means that much of what is online for the general public only concerns successful prosecutions. Still, it is a start:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/equality/vaw/vaw_strategy_annex_b.html#a02
The discussion of 2002 National Crime Survey data is in Levitt, 2004 and also more generally in the revised edition of Freakonomics (p 292); the best journal on this stuff (for the UK) is The British Journal of Criminology. I have also seen good comparative studies in the more broad-ranging Criminology.
Updated to add: in terms of prosecutions, I think I should also point out that the undertaking we all have to sign (available here):
http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/code2010english.pdf
Explicitly directs the CPS to bring prosecutions for sexual abuse crimes particularly where the alleged abuser is part of an organisation (religious or non-religious) that involves the exercise of authority. That will skew figures as well, and may also result in the unsuccessful prosecution of some cases that ordinarily would not go to trial because the evidence is too weak.
PP @22. I don’t have any original data, I am just reporting the work of scholars in the area. But the history of the Catholic Church is full of sexual excess. Julius III comes to mind
Then there is the pornocracy period.
On Plante’s material, there is some playing with time periods here. I suspect that the rate of abuse by Catholic clergy now is probably lower than the level among the general adult male population. I seriously doubt that was true in the 1960s and 1970s.
Also, celibacy is not the issue except
(1) as a sexual refuge and
(2) creating a hierarchy who lacked that visceral “it might be MY child” response.
Lorenzo, if celibacy is not the issue, what is the issue? I was looking up stats on the issue, and the rate of abuse by clergy of 12 – 17 year old boys is much higher than in the general population. Do you think that a higher than usual proportion of men who become priests are attracted to young men, and that they enter the priesthood to try and resist their sin? Or is the preference for boys simply opportunism – that is, teenage boys are the primary group with whom the perpetrators mix? Or is it a mixture of both?
I was reading something in Pagans and Christians (which I’ve loaned to a friend) about how the early Christians attempted to live a celibate life, but were distressed to find that once they became celibate, many found that their dreams became very sexual and they had many more “nocturnal emissions”. In an effort to stop this, they fasted and prayed more and more. I was fascinated by this – it seems the brain needs imaginary sexual outlets if there aren’t real ones around. Some people can be celibate, I’m sure, but I think it’s probably extremely difficult for most human beings.
Just thought of another point re Mercurius above – there was a group of ascetic celibate Jews around the time of Christ, the Essenes, who were argued to have influenced Christianity. I really don’t know how asceticism can go well with Judaism. After all, as one of my friends puts it, most of the festivals can be summarised very shortly: “We were persecuted, we survived…let’s eat!” Apart from Yom Kippur, but there’s still eating at the end of that – none of this month of fasting business you get in Christianity with Lent and Islam with Ramadan.
I think the issue with celibacy is that in societies that give no outlet to gays and lesbians, they are then forced to take refuge in the church (or, as in times gone by, get burnt at the stake). Make no mistake, there is sexual abuse in protestant and orthodox churches as well; less of it is same-sex, but it still happens.
That said (based on CPS complaints data), in both cases, the commonest model is the ‘older male with teenager’ familiar to us from classical antiquity.
As even the public links I’ve provided show, there are enormously complex intersections with ethnicity, religion, poverty, family structure and education levels.
There are no easy answers.
Skepticlawyer (36).
You say you are a skeptic. I wonder about such a claim, because I would presume that if someone said they were a skeptic, they would be skeptical about that and, therefore, wouldn’t be a skeptic.
Also, I may be missing the whole point about this arresting the Pope bizzo, but it smacks to me of the stunt in Australia of trying to pin ‘industrial manslaughter’ charges on Peter Garrett.
The mistake is made that the odious extra-curricular activities of a number of adherents makes an organisation, ipso facto, ontologically debased. There are enough epistemological gaps in such a thesis that Joe Hockey on one of Tones’ quad bikes could drive straight through them (and also with Bronny Bishop on the handlebars, fully assured that her beehive will remain totally functional).
Pretentious, much?
Moi?
Great post – thanks.
Only one minor side point. You say “It is one of the few cases where sexism impacts disproportionately on men”. Not so – may I recommend Warren Farrell’s The myth of male power.
I won’t be around very much today as I am working and also have to see my supervisor this afternoon. Do play nice and remember that LE has a young family and so can’t always be on hand.
Related to discussions here, Cardinal Bertone has created a furore by drawing a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. Personally I would think that homosexual men are no more likely to be paedophiles than heterosexual men.
He’s actually misread his own data, which is even more depressing. Maybe someone needs to send the Vatican ‘MATLAB and LaTeX for Dummies’. I’m sure there’s such a book.
This link — if you read it through — makes it clear just how badly he’s misread his data (which is consistent with what I’ve seen at the CPS, by the way).
LE
There is also the very problematic notion that when we are talking about the cultural differences across the globe – which is the reality for the Catholic Church – of where ‘pedophilia’ ends and ‘taking advantage of confused young adults’ begins. Remember, in many parts of the world the age of consent is 14, and even 12, for example.
I posted this elsewhere, but I think it justifies reposting here.
There is no doubt that until very, very recently, the priesthood was the perfect hideout for homosexuals, and not just blokes.
A woman friend of mine – now an academic economist as it happens – enjoyed two blissful years during her HSC in an S&M relationship with one of the nuns. Another female acquaintance – bisexual – used to go on holidays to Sth. America, often staying in nunneries known for their kinky nuns.
There are also squillions of men/boys who rhapsodize over the sexual fun they used to have with the younger brothers at school.
None of the friends/acquaintances I have referred to above considers s/he was a victim of ‘pedophilia.’
Things are never as simple or black and white as people would like them to be.
PP, one of the things I have been thinking about is the fact that at least two of my gay friends started out in relationships with much older men (say 40ish) when they were 16 or 17 and just realising they were gay. Now they are in their 30s and are both in relationships with guys of their own age. Were those initial relationships a ‘taking advantage of’? I don’t think that they were, even though there was a large age gap. The relationships were entirely consensual, although the father of one of my friends said, “That older guy “turned” my son, he’s a predator.” No, that older guy didn’t turn your son, don’t blame him, your son has always been gay.
LE
It’s a tough one, but cannot be swept under the carpet.
From the BBC article I linked above:
This is why I quoted the material from Dawkins in The God Delusion in the second half of my post, because these kinds of ‘age-gap’ relationships (both heterosexual and homosexual) are very common, and often consensual and enjoyed, but it hasn’t been widely approved of since antiquity. I suspect (as Dawkins does) that it has a biological origin, which means stopping it from happening is going to be like pushing shit up hill with a pointy stick.
It is very complicated.
SL
Your raising ephebophilia is a very welcome added layer of nuance to this debate. The current strategy of some in the Vatican and elsewhere to dismiss all this as the actions of “sick” or perverted” gays, and the explicit linking of homosexuality and pedophilia is as offensive as it is contradicted by the data. There is a world of difference between being attracted to 15 or 16 year olds and 5 or 6 year olds.
The world is full of perfectly normal and sexually healthy adults who are aroused/attracted by the first blushes of sexual maturity/puberty. And plenty of eager ephebes very open to that attraction.
All societies have had to grapple with regulating age asymmetric sexual relations, which usually necessitates a somewhat arbitrary lower age-limit being drawn, or at least excusing under-age acts, so long as both parties are so underage.
As I said, in some even modern societies, the age of consent can be as low as 12. For most European countries, it is 14, rising to 18 in Turkey and Malta. Perhaps tellingly in the Vatican City it is 12, except when some relationship of care is involved, when the age limit is 15. Why the Vatican would have an age of consent of 12 is beyond me. In China it is 14, India 14 to 16, Philippines 18, Brazil 14, and so on.
These lower age limits reflect the obvious reality that a lot of kids are sexually raring to go at a young age, and enjoy sex immensely.
The one fact that cuts through all this is the law. Each society has very strict laws, for reasons peculiar to that culture, and that should be the end of that. But when we have a deluge of cases of young catholic priests and teachers sexually involved with high school students and teenage parishioners, we move into a murkier area, where the denunciation justified does become much more in the eye of the beholder.
Of course, ultimately any person, whether 15 or 50, who complains of being forced or coerced into sex against their will or knowledge pretty well has the last say.
But as spectators from afar, like a lot of these blog discussions, trying to gauge the appropriate temperature of our outrage at “the Catholic Church” or “the Vatican” let alone “the pope” is more than fraught. The whole debate could do with a breather, and a display of respect to just how complicated it all is.
As of now or over a particular time period? The reason why I ask is that the incentives have changed quite significantly and the psycho-emotional training for priests has improved a lot.
Yes. Celibacy attracts people who want to hide from their sexuality/get the most from being celibate/want to prove God loves them/they love God really.
There is an element of opportunism. I read somewhere that, when they started having choir girls, the cases of female abuse went up.
That is venturing into areas I have not seriously looked into. I am, however, struck by how the patterns change over time when you look up the John Jay data.
My @73 is a reply to LE @58.
The “rule of law” isn’t a rule that says you should obey the law. It’s a statement about how we should be governed. A king that rules by making laws is vastly superior to a king that rules by moment to moment whim.
Are Catholic priests who molest children hypocrites? The Catholic church claims that there are absolute standards of right and wrong and therefore on those terms such priests who are breaching their own professed code of morality, are hypocrites.
Now, it makes sense for Catholics or other Christian believers to level such criticisms, but what I don’t understand is, on what basis can atheists get all outraged about this? I mean, is there some “Code of Atheist Morality” that I just don’t happen to know about?
I don’t think so. Of course each atheist can make up his/her own individual code of morality and promote it as much as they like. But no one, let alone other atheists, need take the slightest notice of what they say. Why should they?
If atheism is true, then morality is just an artificial construct, and everyone can construct whatever moral values they like. It seems very weird then that rational atheists on this site think that it means anything for them to be expressing outrage about anyone else’s behaviour.
Then there is the pornocracy period.
That’s it. It’s time for a political party. The Revolutionary Vanguard of Pornism.
Actually I suspect they’ve already taken over.
A close relative of mine had a best friend at (posh Catholic) school. This friend, from a ridiculously devout family, had his reelling brain seared by the realization that he was a homosexual.
His first act, in genuine emotional desperation, was to have my relative hire a lot of hetero porn (he was too bashful himself). He hoped that this would ‘cure’ him. N’uk.
Seriously!
My relative did this but managed to talk him ’round to accepting himself eventually. The guy went to uni and joined the local queer society. He continued to hide the fact from his family.
Now take out this understanding friend, the association of gay men etc and what happens?
The Church hates the sin but loves the sinner. So the life of cloth is the only path of virtue yes?
I suspect this has been going on for centuries and is responsible for much darkness, unrevenged and unspoken.
A @78 I suspect this has been going on for centuries and is responsible for much darkness, unrevenged and unspoken.
Yes.
JP @76 The notion that, without God, morality is just a personal construct is pretty silly. Ask yourself this: without a moral sense, how can one have a society beyond a local protection racket? Then read Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments.
Lorenzo – What do you understand to be the basis for morality in a godless world? Unless you believe that moral values are somehow generated by the physical universe, then the only alternative seems to be that moral values are just constructed by people.
If you argue that morals are produced by matter that would seem to be a very odd sort of thing for molecules to have generated. And even if it were possible to show that moral values are some sort of naturally occurring phenomena, how would you account for the fact that there are obviously differences of opinion as to what is right and wrong? If morality is natural why shouldn’t we all agree? When disagreements arise, as they often do, how could you know who is right and who is wrong? Do some people have a better “moral sensor” than others, but if so, again how do you know whose “moral sensor” is working well and whose isn’t? It would seem to be entirely subjective.
Perhaps more importantly, why should anyone care about responding to a moral sense that simply happens to have been thrown up by impersonal, mindless and lifeless matter? The physical universe could not care and cannot penalise anyone if they should breach this odd morality. So it is hard to see why anyone should bother to abide by uncertain moral values that come from such a source.
If matter is an inadequate source for morality, and if there is no God, then we are only left with people. Individual people can make up their own moral values and/or communities can agree on what they will call moral or immoral behaviour. But that is all it is – something that they make up and because it is only made up it can be changed whenever it suits them. Morals would be completely subjective and relative.
Therefore, as I suggested earlier, the paedophile, the torturer, the rapist, the murderer would be just as “good” or just as “bad” people as Dawkins or Mandella or anyone else.
You may hate torture but the torturer may think it is good and your opinion would be no more valid than the torturer’s. You could say that most people in your community hate torture and that makes the torturer wrong. But who is to say that a majority opinion makes something “right”? Certainly a majority may be able to enforce something but does might make right?
JP Since remarkably similar basic moral judgments are reached by people from quite different views of the divine, such judgments do not rest on particular views of the divine.
Indeed, the most obvious use of God in moral argument is to justify excluding certain groups from the protections of morality, in full or in part.
But moral norms no more need God than legal norms do, or rules of games, etc. A structure of norms takes two things: sentient beings with enough moral sense that they can act sufficiently normatively (chimpanzees seem to lack that, for example) and a process of interaction which generates common norms.
One does not have to get into metaphysical claims about the basis of consciousness, merely observe that this is what humans are like and this is what humans do. There is an evolving moral sensibility that arises out of that, including our widening interactions, under which things are treated as good or evil. Judgments which simply are not the same as “I like fresh asparagus but find the tinned stuff revolting”. No more than law is personal opinion, the rules of chess are personal opinion, etc.
Not only is God not necessary for the process, not is the way the absolutely trumping authority of God is invoked often actively hostile to the process, but God is no solution. See the literature on what is wrong with divine command theories of ethics.
To start with, any command has to be communicated, so divine command theories only make sense within a particular tradition of revelation. Secondly, no such tradition of revelation is sufficiently complete that one does not still have to develop an independent notion of ‘the good’ anyway. And does God command it because it is good (in which case it is good independent of God) or is it good because God commands it (in which case God can command great evil). And so on.
The notion that morality is mere personal opinion without God is a deeply silly idea.
Lorenzo
Indeed, I have a theory that moral norms developed independently of deism/theism/religion. At some point some bright spark worked out it was much more discursively efficient to hook moral/legal discourse onto that power that caused the thunder, the rain, the crops to fail, and so on.
This is a weird article that seems to be arguing against things that aren’t there.
Firstly, Dawkins is NOT behind the legal action being considered against the pope, although he supports it: http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,5415,Richard-Dawkins-I-will-arrest-Pope-Benedict-XVI,Marc-Horne—-TimesOnline,page2#478580
Secondly, the action is NOT being taken in the name of atheism. Atheists may be involved, but no one is saying “we do this in the name of atheism”.
Thirdly, what’s this about being herded? Who said anything to imply they wanted to herd you? Are you saying no atheist anywhere should take legal action against anything because one atheist speaks for all and you don’t want to be spoken for? If Dawkins or anyone else takes legal action against anyone, religious or otherwise, it has nothing to do with trying to herd you in the same direction.
Fourthly, what’s all this rubbish about morality and how atheists don’t share a common moral ground? OK, yes, and so what? Again, no action is being taken in YOUR name. And are you suggesting that some atheists won’t approve of this action because they support sexual abuse of children?? I can’t see the point of using morality-is-grey defense for something so black and white.
I don’t know about the head-of-state thing, although it does seem dodgy if such people are basically above the law. If the guy covered up child abuse, he should be held accountable, whoever he is.
It is amazing how taken aback people are by this idea of legal action against the pope. Even I as an atheist had a kind of feeling like “Whoa, that’s going too far”. But this just highlights how preconditioned we all are, that this guy deserves some kind of special treatment. I don’t know about legal technicalities, but from a moral perspective, the guy should be put on trial.
Then read Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments.
People don’t actually read that book. It serves as useful corrective for those who advocate the bleak facts of The Wealth of Nations to demonstrate that their sage wasn’t heartless ergo neither are they.
The notion that morality is mere personal opinion without God is a deeply silly idea.
I think it’s important to remember the herd instinct aspect of morality. Whilst it’s true that other animals don’t spend much time in reflection on the consequences of behaviour there is a collective will to some kind of normative behaviour. The obedience to hierarchy is, for example, ubiquitous in the Great Apes. Such obedience is what most of what we call ‘morality’ seeks to reinforce. The social order is just because…
Naturally due to reflection we can also say the social order is unjust. That makes us different. There’s no current debate amongst gorillas I’m aware of which say that harem-type sexual arrangements are a raw deal for example. We can alter our behaviour if we have the will and propserity to make it possible.
God is very useful in morality because it supplies us with an authority higher than that of the highest temporal one. Someone to whom even the monarch must kneel. I don’t think the assertions of believers viz the atheism of Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany are entirely unfounded.
Without some afterlife and final judgment the facts become nihilistic. There is no moral economy in the universe and it’s left to us to be good for no better reason than it makes sense to do so. That requires a certain strength many don’t have.
The consequences of this can be seen in both the rise of fundamentalist Christianity and high levels of drug use in the United States.
Thanks Lorenzo, you have dealt with the ‘atheists can’t be moral’ trope most effectively.
Rob: I find Dawkins’s comments on ‘not being behind’ this a trifle disingenuous, especially as I have made it clear that the relevant comparison is with Pinochet or the (successful) project that ensured Tzipi Livni was unable to come to Britain. Physically performing citizens’ arrests is a Peter Tatchell speciality; this whole exercise will be far more legalistic and careful than that.
Seriatim
1. Of all recent Popes, Benedict has done most to try to stamp on pedophilia in the Church. I think it is revealing that sometimes his attempts to do this were blocked by his predecessor and other officials within the Vatican. This attack on him is spectacularly misaimed.
2. For better or for worse, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens are now ‘standard-bearers’ for atheism, and are beginning to base moral claims entirely on their atheism. This is unwise. Moral claims (as Lorenzo points out) can come from lots of places. Those who think that atheists (or non-Christians/Muslims) cannot be moral need to look at Aristotle, the Stoics or Buddhism.
3. At the same time, religious people need to stop using Aristotle’s proofs for the existence of God, because he only gets you as far as a watery polytheism and is emphatic that — if there are Gods — not only will they not, they cannot interfere with the choices or future of humanity.
4. The idea of standard bearers freaks me out. I have been asked a dozen times in the last week whether I ‘want to arrest the Pope’. I keep sending my interlocutors to this post.
5. Dawkins is more nuanced than Hitchens, as the comments from The God Delusion reveal. Here he is in The Times:
I think he’s onto something, there. Just as multiculturalism is probably an enemy of feminism, it’s also an enemy of religious liberty. We ought to bear it in mind.
Adrien: some of the ‘evangelical atheism’ comments directed at Stalin do hold, but not those directed at Hitler. Hitler gets dragged in because many modern people are incapable of seeing pagans as militarily aggressive. Hitler wobbled between Catholicism and paganism, dragging out whichever suited him at the time. The number of people who conflate paganism with atheism is staggering, and the number of times I’ve had to point out that, you know, Ancient Rome, Imperial Japan, Mesoamerica, South America… those guys were all pagan, and they were very, very warlike.
Indeed, a signal characteristic of paganism is its militarism. Yes, you can build a strong case that it was better on sex and gender and tolerance, better on the great diversity of the human race than the monotheisms. It did not, however — in any form which we have encountered it — evince much in the way of compassion for victims, and it never developed anything approaching notions of a ‘just war’, even at its most sophisticated. Roman officers didn’t like atrocities because they were evidence for a breakdown of discipline, not because they were atrocities. If the troops were given the cry havoc order familiar to us from Julius Caesar, they killed everything, even pet dogs and cats. You knew when a Roman army had sacked a city: everything once alive had been cleanly bisected.
Hitler was in the same tradition: war without mercy or pity.
Lorenzo@81 on chimpanzees.
Counter argument: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627554.800-chimps-reject-unfairness-to-their-fellows.html
That article suggests chimps will refuse a benefit if the transaction is linked to another treated unfairly.
I’ll also note that rats will resist their own hunger pangs if pushing a button for food if that button also delivers a shock to the rat in the next cage and the first rat hears the second rat’s screams. Can’t find the paper though.
Just as it is arrogant for theists to assume morality is confined to deists, or even their own particular brand of deism, I think it arrogant to ignore the evidence that the possession of moral norms is exclusive to homo sap.
db
Similarly with elephants.
DB @87 It is not much of a counter-example, since it is a single case where the chimpanzees were trained by the researchers. My point was not that only homo sapiens have a moral sense–bonobos seem to have quite a strong moral sense for example–merely that it is a natural characteristic of some species. (Including ours.)
A @85
Deferring to God no doubt explains why the Middle East is full of wonderfully humane polities.
Deifying Leaders as substitute Gods is unlikely to be an improvement, true.
That no doubt explains why the Scandinavian countries are so unpleasant to live in.
As distinct from the much higher levels of drug use in Iran? And where does Prohibition fit in this scheme?
Trying to get empirical evidence for the moral effect of monotheism in general being positive is, shall we say, difficult.
PP@82 Quite.
There were two stages in this. One is Order v Chaos. Order was good because it meant the crops grew when you wanted. (The Egyptian concept of ma’at, for example.) Chaos was bad because it disrupted things in a situation where disruption could mean starvation.
Then Zarasthustra/Zoroaster came along and said, no, it is Good v Evil and the world was never quite the same again.
I think the pagan metaphor holds for Stalin and Hitler. During the 30s when Stalin began making his influence felt on the Soviet arts you see this clear tendency to Pharonic iconography. And the art of the Nazis speaks for itself.
But neither man really advocated the worship of anything apart from himself and the State.
Deferring to God no doubt explains why the Middle East is full of wonderfully humane polities.
That’s glib and superficial. The people of the Middle East have a certain civility. We fibnd it archaic but it is there. You will find very high standards of morality. Just saying.
As distinct from the much higher levels of drug use in Iran?
Really?
And where does Prohibition fit in this scheme?
I’m not sure it’s material here. By drug use I refer also to various legal psychoparmaceuticals.
There can be many reasons for drug use. Extreme poverty and the depair it breeds for example. But when it grips the affluent and secular ask yourself why.
Lorenzo (and SL since you said you liked what he wrote) – I asked what is the basis for non-theistic morality. As far as I can tell from what you wrote Lorenzo you seem to be advocating that morality is a naturally occurring by-product of the physical universe – “there is an evolving moral sensibility . . .”
My argument is that in the absence of God morality is just a human construct – please note that I have not said that there is no morality without God, only that such morality is completely subjective and relative. In response you say that moral sensibility is no more personal opinion than are laws or the rules of chess, personal opinion. But these analogies go completely against what you are advocating. Of course laws and chess rules have been agreed to and have been written down, but laws and the rules of chess have most definitely just been made up by people.
If that is not the case you would have to argue that laws and chess rules are the product of molecules in motion and in some sense have to be the way they are. That is clearly absurd. There is nothing necessary about our laws as is shown by the fact that laws are constantly being changed. Yes, the rules of chess stay the same but the rules could have been otherwise. If the rules were different it would be a different game but there was nothing necessary about the rules being as they are. The rules of chess, just like the laws we have, are absolutely human constructs.
In the same way, in a godless universe there is nothing necessary about moral values. Again this is illustrated by the fact that there is disagreement amongst people as to what is right and wrong (yes there is significant agreement on some things but probably never 100% agreement on anything and considerable disagreement on many things) and by the fact that moral values do change, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the community.
As I asked previously, if moral values are the product of the natural world, why don’t we all have the same moral values all the time? Do you believe that is because some people are just less morally evolved than others? If so, how can you tell which people are the more morally evolved – are they the ones who just happen to think like you?
Or would you say that you can you tell who is more morally evolved because they happen to make up the majority on any given issue? If a majority was all that was needed to establish moral superiority that may be very convenient as it would simplify things but how would you prove that a majority position does achieve that?
Besides, if 51% of people thought abortion was wrong would you immediately say that abortion must therefore be wrong?
If you wouldn’t, why not? Who is to say whether it is right or wrong? If you say, well let everyone decide for themself abortion, then there you have it, morality is just a construct. If you say, the morality of abortion should be determined by what the law allows, then again you are accepting that morality is a human construct as the law is determined by people.
Please, both of you, just spell out clearly what you understand to be the basis of morality if there is no God. (And again in case you missed it, I am not saying that atheists cannot espouse moral views, just that those views are necessarily completely subjective and relative. In other words, why should anyone care what an atheists moral views are?)
I am rather surprised at this, but the Wikipedia article on Hitler’s paganism is remarkably detailed and thoughtful. Stalin was, however, a thoroughgoing atheist. For the most part his killing (and that of his underlings) did not arise from his atheism, but sometimes it did.
This was even more the case with Lenin, who boasted in a 19 March 1922 letter to Molotov that ‘the peasants, reduced to cannibalism, will not oppose the wholesale execution of the clergy.’ I think ‘movement’ or ‘New’ atheists must deal with the troubled history of Soviet Communism, because there were often killings in the name of atheism by that benighted regime. The attempt to call Hitler atheist is, however, demonstrably unsound. The man was manifestly religious, although sometimes in ways unfamiliar to us moderns.
JP@93 The metaphysical claim that “just molecules” cannot produce morality is an assumption, offered without evidence. My point is that you do not have to get into metaphysical claims about what “molecules” can and cannot do to get to morality.
No-one has eternal morals. ALL moral traditions evolve. Without exception. Sometimes they do not evolve very far, but they all do. Because circumstances change, because our understanding changes, because knowledge increases, because new questions come up. The choice is not between “eternal” morality and “temporary” morality, but different understandings of morality which are ALL in motion. (The Catholic Church, for example, no longer advocates burning people alive for participating in same-sex marriage ceremonies.)
Morality is a particular set of norms. Law is a particular set of norms. We can see that law is not merely “completely subjective and relative”. That something is a human construct does not make it subjective and relative. And there is not much that is “just” about law being a human construct.
Morality is the base set of norms about dealing with other humans. It clearly evolves. It is a particular example of what Hayek called “spontaneous order”, an evolving spontaneous order of how to interact in a mutually restrained fashion. But it is quite clear that we can appeal to a broad set of moral understandings in a society. Which has areas of dispute and is in motion but still is clear enough.
The other side of the coin is that appealing to God solves nothing. There is no accepted set of revelations, there are no accepted set of implications, no set of known commands. Appealing to God does not solve moral arguments: indeed, typically, appeals to God are used to justify truly appalling behaviour towards others on the grounds that His authority is so overwhelming, it sweeps all other considerations before it.
We do not need moral necessity in some profound metaphysical sense, we merely need moral authority. God does not give us moral necessity, nor does He provide moral authority in any way that is useful, given we do not share a particular religious tradition (and particular understanding of that tradition).
Which is why we need morality, and morality without God indeed. Which, clearly, we have. For who judges us? Ourselves and those around us.
A @92 Civility is a common feature of societies based on lineage-based social networks, since the possibility of violence is so real and there is constant need to maintain various connections. It is not about God, it is about protection in societies with weak formal structures.
Yes, the drug abuse problem in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries is quite serious. “Spengler” writes about it:
So does Ibn Warraq.
You will be very hard-pressed to get any correlation between drug use and signs of religiosity that suggests the latter leads to less of the former. Certain sorts of religious faith perhaps, but not faith in general.
Lorenzo – you said, “we merely need moral authority”. I am really not trying to be obtuse here, but could you please tell me, as simply as you can, what is the basis of “moral authority” in a godless world?
Skepticlawyer – Lenin was an atheist and he had a set of moral values. You are an atheist and you have a set of moral values. It seems that you don’t like Lenin’s moral values and that you think he was wrong.
On what basis do you claim that he was wrong and that you are right?
Lorenzo –
Yes. And surfeit also of many layers of civlization dating from long before the notion that governments somehow manage society.
Back then they were upfront about it being a protection racket.
Well I haven’t tried and I won’t. Not good at that stuff. I’m not saying that religious faith erradicates the usual human vices. I wouldn’t say that because I don’t believe it.
What I am saying is that the tendency to take prescription drugs for mental health reasons and/or to organize one’s spirituality around rituals involving drug use (spirituality is a hazy thing that doesn’t require tradition or genuine belief to articulate) indicate a black hole at the centre of secular humanism.
The latent contest between the Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths has been resolved. The Asians were metaphysically correct. Ironically it’s because we were wrong, I think, that we went so much further than they. We thought we could figure God out. They knew that Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their velocity etc.
But this black hole is a well articulated existential crisis for us. This is why you see this hostility to Darwin. If all we are is apes then many of us will have to face the bitter truth that we’re not much more than that. Hence the militant folly of anti-Science Christianity. And the even more foolish militant response.
I believe Messrs Dawkins and Hitchens are wrong to war on Christitans. It’s strategically wrong it’s also scientifically wrong. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and the rational position on the Almighty Whatever is I don’t know.
I think those of us who follow the tradition of secular humanism laid down in Greece so long ago need to create alternative rituals and institutions that provide the same raison d’etre as churches and mosques. We need to assert our morality and live by it. Hence the proper attitude to the God fearing is to regard them with toleration and approval if they reason.
Yes?
Skeptic – Hitler was a pagan. I stand less ignorant.
Dawkins needs to redo Evolution 101. A trait persists because it confers some survival value to the organism. Religion must have some mighty traits to persist so long and be prevalent in every culture. We can point out the absurd nature of religious doctrines all we like but until we identify those aspects of religion that people find to be valuable we are whistling in the wind.
A possible primary value in the belief that death is not the end. On Q & A someone mentioned this to Dawkins and responded with words to the effect that living forever would become boring. Silly response. It might the case that the fear of death is not the primary issue, I don’t know, but it is obvious that only religion can offer people comfort against the reality of death.
I’m agnostic, I don’t believe science is very good at explaining the big questions. In fact it is rather hopeless at it. Wittgenstein wrote: “It seems to us that when all the scientific questions have been answered the truly important questions of life remain completely unanswered. ” There is an old Sufi saying: “Thirst is proof of the existence of water.”
Dawkins places too much faith in science. Man can not live by science alone. We make up stories of our place and role in the world. Just stories, not science.
I will point out here (to try to drag the two intersecting conversations together) that quite a lot of the pagan beliefs (or pagan-derived philosophies, like Stoicism) had no afterlife, but the people who followed them were still religious. Much of paganism was (and is) heavily ritual and performance based (go to a Shinto shrine; watch or better still, participate in Bon). Lorenzo uses the phrase ‘sensuous immanence’ over at his place to describe a lot of this stuff, for it is indeed very beautiful.
Just need to get rid of the nasty militaristic streak in it, ’tis all.
While religion can take nastier (or nicer) forms, it isn’t going away, which is my core problem with the ‘New Atheists’.
Another issue there SL is that there may have been a selection pressure towards religiousity. If you refuse to accept the tribal customs … .
Nice perspective on the intelligent design – evolution arguments.
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2010/3/designing-minds/1
…
Such thinking rests on the familiarity and deceptive simplicity of mentalistic explanations of behavior, as when Dawkins uncritically appeals to the foresight and purpose of the watchmaker rather than entertaining possibly deeper questions about the origins of the watch. He may be giving human designers too much credit.
Actually, that’s a good point, which hadn’t occurred to me.
SL,
Some people would question that such behavior can be driven by genes but I continue to be amazed at the similarities in behavior of separated identical twins. Even the way they comb their hair, the partners they choose, the work they do. Striking and raises some fascinating questions about intentionality and cognition.
For all the talk about the evils of religion I like to emphasise to people that the vast majority of religious people are good people. I think if our intention is to improve society then there are much better issues where we can get a greater return for effort. For example, Dawkins has done an excellent job of introducing an evolutionary perspective to the wider public. I suggest that contribution will far outweigh any of his current efforts.
John H, I did medieval history at university. I always wondered whether there were any medieval people who felt as I did – whether they wondered whether the whole organised religion thing was a crock, but did not dare question it for fear of being branded a heretic.
I do think religiosity is inherited. They’ve done studies with identical twins who were separated at birth, from what I recall.
Evidently there is not a very strong religious streak in our family. I have a religious cousin and grandmother, but that’s it. The rest of us are all agnostic or atheist. At times I have wished that I could find it in me to believe a creed (it might be comforting) but it just doesn’t work for me. Nonetheless, perhaps because I don’t have one of my own, I find religions absolutely fascinating.
LE,
There are some neuro-imaging and genetic studies which provide some hints. Cleese has wonderful fun with it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvijJTjZ8Rg
LE@106: said “I did medieval history at university .. wondered whether there were any medieval people who felt… the whole organised religion thing was a crock”
I’m pretty sure Peter Abelard yelled out “Oh BALLS!!!”
Thanks SL, you have given me pause for thought:
http://healthycuriousity.blogspot.com/2010/04/meaningful-death.html
Some extra detail for you John: the Sadducees (who were an important part of Judaism in Roman-era Judaea) didn’t believe in an afterlife (IIRC this belief is still weak across much of Judaism, although LE will know more detail).
Stoics (pantheists) had no afterlife, nor did quite a few of the Goddess religions (eg Cybele). All these people were (with exception of the Stoics, who varied quite a bit depending on individual taste) religious in a way we’d recognise, however. Indeed, Judaism is such a well-preserved religion that a modern Hebrew-speaking Jew (if popped in a time machine) would be able to have quite an interesting chat to a Jew from 1st Century AD Judaea.
It’s just occurred to me that maybe the reason so many people confuse pagans for atheists is the lack of an afterlife in some parts of the former. I don’t know. Still very religious, though. Male priests of Cybele cut their nuts off so they could enter the most sacred parts of her temples alongside the priestesses (there was a bar on blokes otherwise), so it’s not as though they didn’t take it very seriously.
Whatever form religion takes (this world, other world, whatever) my main point is that it ain’t going anywhere, and Dawkins, Hitchens and Co need to face this reality.
SL, yes, the Sadducees didn’t believe in an afterlife. The Pharisees did believe in a rather vague heaven and hell. They seem to have come to this via Hellenistic beliefs. “Sheol” or “Gehenna” is Hell. They didn’t like the idea of eternal punishment. Some souls could go up to Heaven after spending a year in Hell being “purified”.
You don’t have to be Jewish to get to heaven, as long as you are righteous (according to Maimonides).
The main continuing belief of which I’m aware is that when the Messiah comes, there will be a resurrection of the dead and there will be Heaven on Earth (see the parallels with Christianity here). However, Reform Judaism explicitly rejects the notion of resurrection. Some Jews believe that the Messiah cannot come until the Jews claim back certain parts of and places in the Promised Land: hence the conflict over Israel.
Gehenna, by the way, was Jerusalem’s municipal rubbish tip during Roman times (the Romans invented rubbish collection in its modern form, as in, weekly collections of boxes of crap off the sidewalk). Needless to say, Gehenna did not smell good and would smolder during summer.
JP: Having pointed out that God provides no answer to the issue of moral authority, the question is not “where is moral authority in a Godless world” but more “where is moral authority, period”.
Another way to look at it is, where do the authority of any set of norms comes from? Where is the authority of the rules of a game, for example? Clearly, we think they have authority and that they have authority whether or not there is an enforcing body. The answer is: the rules of a game get authority from being accepted by the participants.
The same with the origins of law. Law predates the state. The law does not get authority from the state, it gets authority from being accepted by those in the community.
People can refuse to play with game cheaters, and they can refuse to deal with law cheaters.
Authority is always about acceptance. In fact, acceptance is the essence of authority. Now, that acceptance might be for various reasons, but it is the acceptance that gives authority.
Which is the same for all religious claims, of course.
So, where does morality get its authority? From exactly the same place religion does. From being accepted by people.
Now, how does that acceptance happen? From argument, example, contemplation, interaction with others, etc among people who have a moral sense to appeal to.
So, when SL says Lenin is morally wrong, she is both making a personal judgement and appealing to more widely accepted notions of what is right and what is wrong, what it means to be moral. One obvious form of which is that we can look at the consequences of what Lenin thought according to the basic principle of morality: how people are treated matters.
It is a complete furphy to imply that religion has some extra lever of authority. It just, in the case of monotheism, makes grand claims about levels of authority. But it is appealing to acceptance like all other sets of norms.
You can, of course, refuse to “play” the game of morality. But if you opt out of the “game” you also opt out of its protections. Which no one actually wants to do, hence people are typically surreptitious in their bastardry or attempt to give it some moral gloss.
Which is why one should always be suspicious of grand projects: because their grandeur is so often used as an excuse to strip people of moral protections. That is what is similar about Nazi, Leninist and monotheist oppressions: they all use grand projects as excuses to strip people of the protections of morality.
Which is also a crucial element in what is wrong with bigotry. It strips people not only of moral protections, but also of the ability to signal that they accept the restraints of morality. They are not even allowed to play the game.
Philosopher Mary Midgely has some good sense to say about this in her Evolution as a Religion. Really, how one can look at human achievements and say “not much more than monkey’s” is a bit beyond me.
I would also point out that the attack on evolution is a Protestant and Muslim phenomena: that is, from religions which give scriptures direct-from-God authority. Catholics and Orthodox Christians are generally not much fussed, since St Augustine established the principle back in the C4-C5th that the world is the direct creation of God, scriptures are the indirect creation of God, so truths about the world trump scriptures.
It is not so much the burden of Godless existence, as the burden of creating your own sense of belonging and purpose. That is real, and modern society is often not much help.
This business of seeing all religion as equally noxious is, indeed, puerile. Religion is a very mixed bag, and should be treated as such.
Well I don’t. You don’t. People here don’t. But what about those with not much appreciation of these things, people who live in cultural wastelands and live lives of eternal drudgery and squalor?
Again. Who can do this? Nietzche thought this kind of positive nihilism a venture fit only for the elite; those brave enough, strong enough. I agree with him.
Nope. I’d wager one day that a new Year Zero will emerge sometime in the midst of the 1960s. All over the world the young went to war against the old and the cultures that were were no longer. We have a political system and an economy. There’s not yet a fully developed culure with rituals and traditions that go with it.
The old ones can’t really compete with 3D movies and e’s Friday night.
A: I would also blame the progressivist intelligentsia. They have been so busy promoting their superiority of their pure intentions over everything and everyone that nothing real or grounded in experience gets much of a look in. Particularly not in the education system.
Lorenzo – I proposed previously that in a godless universe moral values must be either the by-products of lifeless matter or just made-up social constructs. You rejected the latter possibility stating that “The notion that morality is mere personal opinion without God is a deeply silly idea.”
However you now say that “when SL says Lenin is morally wrong, she is both making a personal judgement and appealing to more widely accepted notions of what is right and what is wrong”. So you appear to acknowledge after all that morality is a personal judgement. But you add that it also involves an appeal to more widely accepted notions of right and wrong. However what are these “more widely accepted notions of right and wrong” if not other people’s personal judgements?
Your definition of morality then seems to boil down to it being a collection of agreed personal judgements. How is that any different to it being a social construct? – something which you previously strongly rejected?
You make a big thing of moral authority being based on what people accept. This seems to imply that authority is established by whatever the majority accepts/decides is right. Do you really believe that all that is needed for moral truth to be established is to get a majority of people in a society to agree that something is right? And therefore those who hold a minority position are then necessarily immoral people?
I asked you previously and you didn’t answer but I’ll try again: if 51% of the population said that abortion is immoral would you immediately say, yes abortion is therefore wrong because most people accept it is wrong. If you had lived in Alabama in 1850 would you have said that slavery was not immoral because most people in that society accepted slavery and that therefore gave their views authority? If you lived in Ethiopia today would you say that female genital mutilation is morally right to do because most people in that society accept it and therefore that gives that position authority?
If you would say no to any of the above, why would you?
I would also blame the progressivist intelligentsia.
Yes. Self-important craven lemmings spouting a long dead rebellion and steadfastly refusing to take regular walks on the street.
JP –
JP you can derive general principles of morality from a reasoned view of things without recourse to God. The Buddhists have been doing this for longer and better than many of us.
You start with the way things are, and the way things oughta be. Then you consider what’s possible and derive the principles from there.
For example: No-one wants to die. Many others don’t want you to die. Ergo you can’t kill people.
God’s just a way of making it simple when it gets complicated.
Everyone makes personal judgements. This doesn’t change. Think of all the schisms and esoterica of Abrahamic faith. And this from fairly simple basic rules.
A@118 You have such a good way with words …
A@119 Nice try, but I do not think JP is listening
JP@117 You are clearly not listening, but I will try again.
Is there anyone who accepts that what is morally right is established by majority vote?
Not that I am aware of. So the answer to your question on abortion is clearly “no”.
Please stop going on about “a godless universe” because, as I have repeatedly pointed out, God solves nothing in the matter of morality.
What is morality for? Its function is so we can interact with each other at some level above that of protection-gang. So it can never be a matter of “merely” personal judgement because morality has a wider social function.
“I hate tinned asparagus” is a personal judgement: it is not a moral judgement because it is not about the function of morality.
People have different senses of how that function is best performed, so there are grounds for moral dispute. There is an evolving sense of what is right and wrong, of what fulfills the function of morality. It does rely on people accepting it, but it is not mere personal judgment because of morality having a function.
This is why certain features are common to all moral systems. They are necessary part of a socially functional sense of right and wrong. In that (very limited) sense there is “moral necessity”. Very limited because judgments about who is in the moral community vary dramatically.
To take the case of abortion, central to the dispute is one sense of the boundaries of the moral community. Is a foetus a person, so within the moral community, or not? If yes, what is its status within that moral community. People answer the moral question differently depending on where they stand on those boundary issues. These may be personal judgments but they are not “only” personal judgments because they are addressed directly to the moral question: what is right, what is wrong? A question which gets its urgency from the brute facts of human interaction and mutual vulnerability. Mere pragmatic calculation would never work well enough. Only beings with a sense of their being right and wrong actions could make it work.
This is why I keep going on about the common features of all types of norms. They all rely on human acceptance, but they all have functions and it is that functionality which means that they are not “only personal judgments”. The function of morality never goes away, so the moral questions never go away.
Adrien – You say: “You start with the way things are, and the way things oughta be.”
This phrase – “the way things oughta be” – goes to the heart of the question of morality.
Is there actually a way things oughta be? Clearly you think so, but what makes you so sure that things ought to be a particular way? Where does this sense of “ought” come from?
Even if it is accepted that things ought to be different to what they are now, how do you know in what they ought to be different? How do you know what you are aiming for?
Also, what do you say to the person who claims things ought to be different in a way that is not the same as how you think they ought to be different? What makes you right and him wrong, or vice versa?
Lorenzo – you previously said: “where does morality get its authority? . . . From being accepted by people”. How else can you claim that something is “accepted by people” unless it is by determining that a majority of people agree with it? Therefore I don’t see why you want to take issue with my saying that your position is: moral truth is established by getting a majority of people in a society to agree that something is right. If it is not that, how else do you determine “acceptance”?
In relation to abortion you clearly acknowledge that there are different positions on its morality but you provide no way as to how it can be determined whether it actually is or is not a moral act. Please make it clear how something specific like that should be determined.
Lorenzo – You have such a good way with words
Thanks. Shame about the spelling.
JP – Where does this sense of “ought” come from?
This is the retort advocates of Natural Law jursiprudence make to positivists. And there’s no definitive answer.
It would have something to do with the natural tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, the wisdom to realize that pleasure overindulged leads to pain and flights of imagination born of repulsion at the unpleasantries in life and wonder at how things might be different.
Everyone’s Utopia is different of course which is one of the rubs. And of course Fortuna is a wry ironist so when you try to improve things you often end up making them worse.
But we do know, for example, that walking on the pavement is better than walking in the mud. So sidewalks are good.
As for recourse to God to explain the understanding of Justice as something innate, that’s well and good. I have no trouble with it unless injustice is perpetrated by someone in the name of God surfeit of unreason. What you say you believe in doesn’t make you a moral person. How you behave does.
I also suspect JP is not listening, in that he or she thinks that without God, all morality becomes relative, and that ‘relative’ is identical with ‘capricious’. Still, I will try too, as some of this relates to my thesis (which I submit on Friday).
This question departs to a large degree from questions of morality and enters the realm of political philosophy and jurisprudence. The former is a subset of moral philosophy but the latter is not.
In terms of political theories, liberalism (above all) has wrestled most with the implications of the brute fact that people disagree with each other (and not only over moral claims; I’m in the Tory party over here, and you should see the shit-fights over tax policy). One resolution has been recourse to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, although this is frequently violated in practice (think, for example, of the war on drugs). The essay I’ve linked focusses on freedom of speech, and in certain respects that is useful, because (manifestly) people say very different things because they disagree with each other. Above all, liberalism is about avoiding crude majoritarianism: ever since the days of classical Athens and the Roman Republic, people have wrestled with the fact that there are minorities and majorities that intersect across all sorts of boundaries and that to let the majority have its way without some protection for those who disagree is to invite blood in the streets. If we could call forth Socrates and Cicero on this point, they would both probably have some useful things to tell us.
Jurisprudence is concerned not only with defining and exploring the concept of law, but also with working out law’s boundaries. It is well-known, for example, that many laws enacted with the best will in the world do not work. Many of the laws so enacted concern moral claims, although many do not. One thinks of the failure of anti-drug laws, which were proceeded by the failure of laws against prostitution, alcohol consumption and abortion. All three types of laws, in fact, brought about what economists call ‘unintended consequences’, where the effect of the law on the very thing it was intended to govern was worse than if no law had been made at all. For this reason — apart from the stubborn persistence of anti-drug laws — many of them have been repealed over the years. Whatever else it is, law is not very good at enforcing moral claims over which there is large disagreement.
The response of liberals to widespread disagreement about moral claims has often been to refrain from making laws altogether, and leave moral decisions over which there is disagreement to private citizens. To someone who does believe in a universal morality, this seems pretty poor, even wrong, but to do otherwise is to let the perfect become the enemy of the good: even if you can prove something is ‘morally wrong’ (abortion, say), that does not mean it should have force of law. Giving it the force of law may do anything from bringing morality into disrepute to producing an unintended consequence so large that the law simply has to be repealed lest the polity sicken and die. Prohibition falls into this category.
In other words, the acceptance of a moral principle among some (or even all) people is one thing, its enactment as law is quite another. Whatever else, however, it does not involve crude majoritarianism.
Adrien – why should anyone care about anyone else? Why shouldn’t people just seek their own, and perhaps their loved ones, pleasure, and seek to avoid only their own, and perhaps their loved ones, pain?
For sure, if some people want to care about others, let them, but if other people want to care only for themselves, why shouldn’t they?
You acknowledge that everyone’s Utopia is different and then seem to try to lightly set that problem aside by just saying that is “one of the rubs”. But a huge problem it is, because is one Utopia better than another or are all equally valid? Who can possibly say?
Lorenzo, Adrien, SL – that doesn’t seem to be a very helpful way to engender thoughtful discussion – trying to put down those who question your views by saying they aren’t listening. I admit I may not be a great moral philosopher, as you may all believe you are, but I do want to try and engage with others to try and determine what is true, so yes, I am listening to you. (Unless of course if you mean by listening that I ought to have come quickly to agree with you.)
SL – yes, I do believe that without God all morality must be relative. By relative I mean that it is not absolute; changeable; and yes perhaps capricious (but not necessarily). If moral values have not been given by someone greater than human beings, that is by God who made human beings, then how can moral values not be relative?
I am not saying that there can’t be morality without God – I fully accept that people can and do make up moral values, but my question is, what gives any godless morality any authority? What makes it fixed as opposed to being relative? Every person, every society, can make up their own moral values (with some things that are agreed upon and other things that are not), so how can you say that morality is not relative? And given the differences in moral values who gets to decide which values are “correct”?
With regard to my comments about acceptance, I was responding to Lorenzo’s claim that it is acceptance of moral values by people that gives moral values their authority. I was simply asking him how he determines if a moral value is “accepted by people” – is it by claiming that a majority holds a certain view? (Lorenzo – once again, if that is not how you establish that a moral view is “accepted by people” how else would you do so?)
With regard to abortion, I was not commenting on whether abortion should be criminalised or not, rather I was asking, given the strongly divergent views on abortion, how should it be determined whether abortion is moral or not?
My objective in originally entering this forum was to find out from atheists if they could establish a basis for claims to have absolute moral truth. If there is no such basis, and I don’t think anyone has yet shown that there is, then morality must be relative.
If that is so, then, as I have asked before, why are the moral values of the atheist Lenin any worse, or better, than the moral values of the atheist, SkepticLawyer?
The rusted-on lefties at New Matilda are unhappy with us. Fortunately, they share much of their readership with Eureka Street, so they’re not having it all their own way.
And why is no-one paying any attention to issues of standing to sue and exhaustion of local remedies? I know I addressed sovereign immunity first, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to as well.
Gah.
I recommend this post featured at Online Opinion, by Ben Matthews, a law lecturer from QUT. I thought it was very logical and even-handed.
“Absolute moral truth” is a metaphysical claim, it is not a moral claim. The trouble with all traditions that claim there is “absolute moral truth” is that:
(1) their conclusions change over time; and
(2) none have ever demonstrated a way in which such alleged moral truth may be definitively found (see [1]).
An example of such “objective moral truth” claims is the Catholic/Orthodox natural law claim that it is an “objective moral truth” that any deliberately-induced orgasm that does not involve an penis ejaculating unobstructed into a vagina connected to a uterus whose functions were not deliberately suppressed is immoral. An alleged “truth” about the universe no other culture has ever managed to “discover”.
St Thomas Aquinas thought it an “objective moral truth” that two men having sex was worse than a man raping a woman and that the gravity of a rape of a woman was partly dependent on the level of harm done to any man who may be responsible for her. (Raping a virgin was an offense against her father, raping a wife an offense against her husband …) And so on. That all moral traditions are works in motion shows they all appeal ultimately to an evolving moral sense.
“Better” implies an evaluative criteria. Is there such a criteria built into the structure of the universe? No, see above comments.
Are there such criteria available to us? Yes. Can we make judgments on the basis of them? Yes. Can we evaluate such criteria themselves? Yes, by their demonstrated consequences.
The “moral” judgments of Lenin (such as they were) led him to conclude it was fine to oppress, slaughter and tyrannise. So, any criteria which held it was wrong to oppress, slaughter and tyrannise would judge his moral values to be bad ones. Because, as moral values they are about what rules we are all supposed to live under. (And we know what people thought about living under Lenin’s morality, because countries that applied them had to fence their people in.)
When making such judgments you are also making a statement about your moral standards. Your assessment of right and wrong.
Which leads us back to my point about why we have morality (so we can live together at some level above protection gang) and morality as an evolving “spontaneous order” of interacting senses of right and wrong.
As to where does ‘ought’ come from? From having purposes, from being purposeful beings. Which means having preferred states of the world. These preferences vary depending on which normative realm they operate in. ‘I prefer not to eat tinned asparagus’ is just about personal preferences: about decision-criteria for myself. ‘That killing people is wrong’ is a statement about what is right and what is wrong: that is, what morally binding rules apply to people generally. When you are making a moral statement you are making a statement about how people in general ought to behave, appealing to a common moral sense but also signaling how you think people ought to behave (including yourself).
We have to interact with each other: morality emerges out of that because we possess a sufficient moral sense that it can. It is not capricious, it is not “merely relative”, it is the evolving base norms of human interaction. With consequences both individual and collective.
You can refuse to “play the game of morality” but that both has consequences and implies something crucial about you (indeed, has consequences in part because it implies something crucial about you). People’s sense of right and wrong is actually quite a basic criteria by which we judge people all the time.
Law is subject to the judgement of accepted judicial officers. Morality is subject to the judgement of all of us. It may not be “grandly metaphysical” but it is very real, surprisingly powerful and, what’s more, all any of us actually have. The claim that there is something “more” on offer is spurious.
And, in fact, quite dangerous since it becomes an “absolute” way to judge people that they cannot appeal against. The notion that there was “absolute moral truth” led to people burning other people alive for what they thought, how they had sex, etc. We can judge such claims by their consequences too.
JP, what happens if God says that it’s fine to kill other people because the other people are infidels and deserve to die? Is that still moral? I don’t think it is.
This is why the idea of morality emanating from God worries me – it seems to depend on what message an individual thinks God is giving them. So a suicide bomber is convinced that killing people is morally justified according to their particular conception of what God’s rules are. In which case, it’s really no different to an atheist making up moral rules by themselves.
JP, do you believe morality needs to be absolute? Do you believe it needs to be universal? If either (or both, they are conceptually distinct), why?
JP, do you believe morality needs to be absolute?
Good question.
Lorenzo – you say that “moral values are about what rules we are all supposed to live under”. Now I know you believe that to be true but I don’t believe you provide justification for such a strong claim. You assert that we are supposed to live under certain rules – certain moral values. The use of “supposed to” or “ought to” entails that there is some sort of over-arching master plan that we need to be aligning ourselves with. That sounds rather like what a theist might say, but it seems to make no sense at all for an atheist to make such a claim.
You say that “ought” comes from having purposes, from being purposeful beings, from having preferred states of the world. I don’t deny that people create purposes and have preferences in their lives, but there are no particular purposes or preferences that people “ought” to have. I don’t see how your argument follows. Yes we have purposes and preferences but people are completely free to take up any purpose and preference they like – just like they are free to take up any moral values they like.
You say there is a difference between ‘I prefer not to eat tinned asparagus’ and ‘That killing people is wrong’. I don’t see the difference: they are both simply expressions of preferences that people have. “Wrong” as you use it here seems to me to be just shorthand for “I don’t like murder or, I would prefer that people don’t commit murder”. There is no more objectivity to statements about moral claims than there is to statements about food preferences. If you disagree, where is the objectivity in your moral claim?
You say that the statement about murder is different because it is a moral statement which is a binding rule that applies to all people. But that is simply an assertion on your part. Of course you can claim it applies to all people but it is not necessarily correct – any person is perfectly free to say they disagree with you and say that it does not apply to them.
You claim there are base norms of morality – that again is a completely subjective claim. You write as if you have some access to special moral truths but every individual would appear to be just as able at manufacturing “moral truth” as you are. You may not like their “moral truth” but that doesn’t make them wrong.
Yet, intriguingly you seem to say that one set of moral values is no “better” than another – they cannot be evaluated against another. That seems to be quite inconsistent with what you say elsewhere.
You write about why we have morality and the function of morality. That seems a very odd way to put it. You seem to be saying that morality is an instrument for an end – “so we can live together at some level above protection gang”. But again this is just an assertion you make. Who says that morality has a function or purpose? Even if we feel it has, who can authoritatively say what that purpose is?
In an atheistic world it is hard to see how anything has any identifiable purpose or end beyond what any individual may choose to make up for his/herself.
I was interested to see you use the expression “play the game of morality”. At last we agree on something!. Yes, in an atheistic world, morality is just a game like soccer. We have made up rules about soccer and can change those rules if we want. We have made up rules about morality and can change those “rules” too. People who break the rules of soccer can be thrown out of the game but that does not make them immoral people, it may just make them rugby players.
People who break the rules of accepted morality are not immoral people either, they just hold to a minority view. Was Nelson Mandela immoral even though he spent 27 years in jail? No he was just different. In an atheistic world morality is just a game, although the penalty for breaching the rules can be harsher.
SkepticLawyer – yes, if morality is going to be meaningful then I think that it must be absolute – in the sense of not being changeable, and universal, in the sense of it applying to everyone. These however are necessary but not sufficient conditions. A further necessary condition, as I’ve mentioned previously, is that morality must be given by someone greater than us, i.e. by God who has created us.
If moral value values are changeable, on what basis do they/should they change and how and when do we know if they have changed or should be changed? If moral values are not universal, then, assuming that all people are of equal value, why should some people be treated morally differently to others? If there is no God who has created us and given us a moral code, then all the problems of a humanly-derived morality, which I have tried to outline previously, seem to me to apply.
In invoking the idea of a creator God, that does not necessarily entail that all the varying understandings of God are equally valid or true. I am simply saying that in principle, for morality to be meaningful it is necessary that we have been made by a being greater than ourselves who has given us a moral code. Otherwise we are not able to get out of the subjectivist, relativistic bind that human- initiated morality leaves us in.
Legal Eagle – for myself as a Christian I very much struggle with Old Testament morality – God commanding people to be killed, etc. I do not know how to reconcile what Jesus taught about morality – commanding those who follow him to love their enemies, etc, with what is written in the OT . I don’t know if it is possible for these apparently conflicting teachings to be reconciled or if it is the case that the OT gives a misleading understanding of God. It is certainly the case that the Bible states very clearly that the clearest picture we have of God is seen in Jesus.
I fully realize that in saying this I leave myself wide open to strong criticism in view of what I have written above, but I do not mind being honest with others. At this stage though, as far as I can make sense of things, in the absence of God, morality seems to be essentially meaningless. While acknowledging the problems my own position has, I am not prepared to say that morality is meaningless, so I am continuing to try and reconcile the problems which I am well aware that are within my own views.
JP – just teasing out the issues here – do you believe that the only legitimate morality emanates from the teachings of Jesus? Or do you believe that other religions may contain moral truths as well? Therefore, can a believer in a religion other than Christianity be a moral person?
Also, to what extent do you think the moral worth of a person depends upon their belief and to what extent does it depend on their behaviour on Earth? This is something that has always troubled me.
JP – I do not know how to reconcile what Jesus taught about morality – commanding those who follow him to love their enemies, etc, with what is written in the OT
.
That’s quite simple but for some reason is a long ignored part of theology. The Old Testament revloves around a covenant made between G-d and those he chose to make it with. Jesus came along with a new covenant – a new deal – for everyone.
At the centre of the deal is that God forgives us our wicked ways and sent His Son to die in our place. Instead of an eye for an eye, it’s turn the other cheek.
Yes?
This is vulnerable to the criticism I make of the ‘New Atheists’ in the main post, in that it is founding morality on an epistemological claim. The problem with doing this is that if the epistemological claim is undermined, then the morality (good, bad, indifferent, whatever) is lost along with it. The arguments for a single creator God of the sort conceptualised by the monotheistic faiths are very poor (although I do concede that Aristotle’s arguments, used as they are supposed to be used, do make a case for ‘lesser Gods’). Aristotle only gets you as far as a cross between polytheism and deism, however, and that fact needs to be acknowledged. When it comes to morality, we are on our own, and can’t fall back on epistemology. Even if we were polytheists like Aristotle, we’d struggle with moral claims that align with religious belief: the essence of polytheism is that the Gods have different attributes, all of them necessary but not all of them good.
JP sez:
Adrien sez:
Adrien, that’s the conventional explanation given to a young Christian in a religious school, but if you read the texts carefully (as JP clearly has), it doesn’t square with what JC actually said (he was to fulfill the law, not overturn it; all of the laws remained and so on and so forth). I personally like JP’s answer because it is a refusal to be glib; much monotheism is frighteningly glib, and when people refuse to be glib that is very welcome.
Similarly, some of the things Jesus said and did were not pleasant either (although not on the scale of the stuff in the OT). Counselling people to leave dead parents unburied? Big no-no in Judaism, and a dreadful insult to one’s family in both Jewish and Roman culture. Counselling people to hate their families? A direct contravention of the 5th Commandment for a Jew and clear-cut ‘impiety’ to a Roman (the Romans were a ‘filial piety’ culture, and rather Confucian, complete with the whole ancestor-worship/family shrine/light a candle business).
New Religious Movements (Moonies, Scientologists etc) are routinely associated with the break-up of families. We don’t like it now; there is a mountain of evidence (see Robin Lane Fox, Pagans & Christians), that Romans did not like it then. That said they seemed to react with more kindness than one would expect, not disowning/disinheriting their children and tolerating the family member who had become monotheistic, but then the ‘default’ for paganism was tolerance.
Then there’s not bringing peace but a sword. One wonders what the local constabulary made of that… oh, wait. We do know. Jesus had followers with names like ‘Simon the Zealot’ and Judas Iscariot (meaning of the sicarii). I’m reasonably sure that he wasn’t personally tangled up in the First Century AD version of Al Qaeda, but some of his followers undoubtedly were. And we do know that the Romans prosecuted their version of the War on Terror with rather more of the ‘shock and awe’ than we currently attribute to the United States. Jerusalem finished up as flat as a pancake and, one suspects, had they modern weapons, it would also have glowed in the dark.
What master plan? Please read up on the concept of “spontaneous order”. There is a reason why I invoked it more than once. Morality is not plan-like, it is web-like.
If there are not, then there is no morality, law, games with rules, etc. Norms entail ‘oughts’ you are supposed to act on. But my point is that we are purposive as a general feature of our nature.
No, one is a preference and the other is a precept. That is, a proposed general rule.
‘Free’ in a factual sense or ‘free’ in a moral sense? People are able to propose lots of values, the definition of ‘moral’ is not unbounded. Does it purport to perform the function of morality, for example?
What do you mean by ‘objectivity’? Do you mean “built into the structure of the universe?” Or do you mean ‘has authority regardless of personal preferences’? I mean the latter: it is a normal feature of norms, for example. As lots of people find out when they are before the courts.
Well, I am asserting it, but I am not claiming it is moral because I assert it. Nor am I claiming it is grounded in my assertion. I am claiming it is a moral precept: part of the rules that allow morality to perform its function of regulating our behaviour towards each other. You keep claiming some sort of atomised individualism when my point is precisely that is not an option if we are to have functioning societies.
People who believe in objective systems of morality in the sense of being built into the structure of the universe make the same claim, so clearly not.
That is no more true than the notion that people are “free” (again, are you making a factual or an evaluative claim?) to make up any legal truth as they like. A fundamental feature of morality is that it is normative.
That is precisely what I did not say: at some length.
No, it is a conclusion drawn from analysis of the human condition.
If they cheat it does make them immoral. Breaking the rules of morality is what “being immoral” means.
You keep saying ‘in an atheistic world’ but utterly refuse to address the issue that adding in God solves nothing. Are you seriously going to say that people who do not know about God cannot know about morality? Yet we have evidence of clearly moral behaviour, and a notion of right and wrong (in some general sense at least) from every human society (and, indeed, some animal species).
Since moral behaviour, moral belief and sense of right and wrong extends way beyond belief in any particular set of Revelations, clearly belief in God, or particular set of revelations, is not remotely needed for morality and moral behaviour.
Even within a particular set of revelations, LE@133 has put forward Euthyphro’s dilemma: is something moral because God says so? (In which case morality is merely God’s arbitrary will.) Or does God say it because it is good? (In which case the good has an existence independent of God.)
John Stuart Mill pointed out that no set of revelations was sufficient to define all moral questions, so some notion of right and wrong is needed to “fill in the gaps” which would also be independent of God.
Nor can morality be God’s command without it being communicated–a command is not a command unless it is communicated. Which leads us back to the problems of different traditions of revelation I already noted.
My arguments presume nothing about the existence of God. But that is my point: the moral dilemma confronts us whether or not God exists and whether or not we believe.
As for unchangeable morality, as I pointed out ALL moral traditions are in motion. Either we do not have reliable access to the “unchanging moral truths” or morality is something that evolves.
The use of “supposed to” or “ought to” entails that there is some sort of over-arching master plan that we need to be aligning ourselves with.
There is a master plan. It’s all true. The One True Faith exists..
It says: there is an over-arching design. You are part of it and you have no idea what that is and never can.
Sounds about right.
it is a refusal to be glib; much monotheism is frighteningly glib, and when people refuse to be glib that is very welcome.
Mmmm.. methinks a subtle hint’s a playin’ addagio someplace.
Yes. Jesus is the Messiah come to fulfil the Law, Jesus is making a New Deal. I grew accustomed in such tutelage to a spelled-out golden rule followed by something directly contrary to it.
In a Cath’lic school it’s called RE.
Science can, in the very least, make very important contributions to our moral structures.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/rationally_speaking/about_sam_harris%E2%80%99_claim_science_can_answer_moral_questions
Legal Eagle – these are very important and challenging questions you raise and I don’t know if they are easily responded to briefly, but I will try to set out succinctly my understandings on this.
Regarding whether Jesus is the only legitimate source of moral teaching: a person’s response to that will largely depend on who they believe Jesus to be. If Jesus is only a fellow human being then his moral teaching, while perhaps interesting, will, I believe, still be subjective and relative just like every other human being’s moral position. It is only if Jesus is God and our creator, as Christianity believes, that his teaching can break out of that bind and thereby be worth taking notice of.
Assuming for now that Jesus is the creator God, does that mean legitimate morality only emanates from him? I think this question opens up another door that has to be entered first: was Jesus primarily a moral teacher – was he just concerned with teaching people to live a moral life? Certainly Jesus wanted people to be moral but the teaching of the New Testament is that people are fundamentally separated from God and until that is made right, through repentance and forgiveness, it is just not possible for anyone to live a truly moral life.
So I would not deny that some people or religions do teach moral truths that are in agreement with the teachings of Jesus. I believe God has made all people with a moral conscience with an awareness of right and wrong. However, unless or until a person’s relationship with God is restored, I do not believe that anyone succeeds in living according to the moral convictions that are revealed by our conscience and the teachings of Jesus.
(I hasten to add that even after a person seeks God’s forgiveness and comes into a right relationship with God, that does not mean that they then immediately become morally perfect – as is all too painfully obvious. However, it is clearly taught in the NT that such a person’s life should change morally and continue to change for the better throughout their life. If that does not happen then there is every reason to believe that they did not truly seek God’s forgiveness in the first place or that they subsequently turned away from God again.)
Can a believer in a religion other than Christianity be a moral person then? Up to a point it could be said yes, but because the primary issue is, as far as Christianity is concerned, being in right relationship with God in a complete, whole of life sense, and not just in a limited way relating to acting rightly on some moral issues, the fact that a non-Christian may act morally, more or less of the time, is not sufficient.
Your question regarding to what extent the moral worth of a person depends upon their belief and to what extent it depends on their behaviour on Earth, is crucial. From what I have written above, I hope it is clear what I believe. Jesus himself spelt this out emphatically, “ . . by their fruit you will know them. Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:20-21)
So I think moral worth that truly counts depends upon both belief and behavior. For the person who knows nothing of the Christian gospel but who sincerely seeks to live according to the moral revelation which I believe God places on everyone’s conscience, that is all to their good in terms of their ultimate relationship with God. (Exactly how that will work out I could not say.) In contrast, the person who does know the Christian gospel and who claims to believe it is true, but whose life shows nothing of moral maturing in their behavior, then their professed belief, as Jesus indicated, is probably meaningless. Equally, if a person knows the Christian gospel but rejects God’s free offer of forgiveness, then I believe that whatever their level of moral behavior, it will count for little in the end.
As I noted at the beginning none of this makes any sense if Jesus was just another human being. But if Jesus was only a human being and if there is no God at all, then what is the alternative? It is hard to see what difference it would make if there were inconsistencies between a person’s belief and behavior. Indeed, a person may espouse moral values publicly while acting contrary to those values in private. If they are careful, and perhaps lucky, they may succeed in being regarded as moral paragons all their life while living quite differently. And why shouldn’t they? Too whom would they be responsible beyond themselves?
JP –
This may be a little late in the day but I very much appreciate your comments on this blog in highlighting the complexities of the subject.
For me a major difficulty with the Christian theological discourse has always been its exclusionary nature and the way it seems to ignore or dismiss those ancient non-western civilisations which clearly incorporate(d) highly developed and functional normative/spiritual systems quite independent of any Judeo-Christian influence.
With this in mind, if I accept your claim that being in right relationship with the Christian God (as the only, true God) is the key issue, dont I face a major dilemma? What sort of God would apparently condemn millions of humans to damnation because, through no fault of their own, they just happened to live in the wrong time or place and didnt have the opportunity of knowing Jesus or the Bible? Surely if God created the world and made humans in his own image he loves all of them and would want them all to have the opportunity for salvation?
As someone who retains a spiritual orientation to ethical issues, this suggests to me that normative systems are actually the product of different revelations in different times and places which do indeed reflect the mind of God, but a truly universal, ‘panentheistic’ God.
B Wit – from what I understand, if you happen to have been born before Jesus and you were a good person, he forgave your sins. Likewise if you lived in darkest wherever and didn’t know about Christianity – you can’t be blamed for not believing in something you don’t know about. You might end up in limbo according to Catholic belief. However, if you are exposed to Christianity and you then choose not to believe, it doesn’t matter how moral you are, you are not saved.
JP, is this correct?
Since we’re all dancing around it, I may as well provide a link to the Euthyphro Dilemma.
A couple of points: this was originally written by a pagan dude, so it concerns ‘piety’, which is both a bigger and smaller concept than ‘morality’. Always remember that classical paganism is severely contractual in ways modern people don’t grasp (until the day they sit down and sign an instrument of mortgage). Try to imagine a religion that looks like it was designed by a bunch of property lawyers. Also, too, it acknowledges that the gods disagree among themselves, so before discussion can even start, Socrates has to try to work out what all the gods find pious.
To a pagan, a good person was a good person, independent of religion. They would find attempts to tie goodness (and a notion of rewards for goodness) to a given religion incomprehensible.
SkepticLawyer – I’m not sure if I understand your point, which I take you are making in response to: “morality must be given by someone greater than us, i.e. by God who has created us”. I don’t think that is foremostly an epistemological claim. I am just saying that the only possible way out of the bind of subjectivism and relativism is if there is a perfectly good God who has both made us and is the source of moral values. Yes, there are then the questions of who that God may be and how do we know the moral values that that God may have given, but such questions do not refute the original claim.
Regarding your comments about Jesus “unpleasant” morality: in view of his wider teaching, there can be little doubt that at least some of the quoted statements should be taken as hyperbole. Yes, Jesus did say that unless those who follow him hate their father, mother, wife, children, even their own self, they cannot be his disciple. (Luke 14:26), but elsewhere he said that his followers are to love their neighbours as themselves (Matthew 22:39) and the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37) makes clear that our “neighbor” includes everyone, even one’s enemies (Matthew 5:44). But love for God is to be paramount and relative to that love, love for family will be closer to the hatred end of the spectrum of emotions.
Jesus did say that he came to bring a sword and not peace (Matthew 10:34 and following) and it is the case that very strong conflicts often do arise, including within families, when people commit themselves to becoming followers of Jesus. Jesus was warning those who were considering following him to expect that this would be the case – conflict rather than peace in relationships – and yet he warned them that they must be prepared to follow him regardless of the conflict that might be involved. This is not to say that he did not also promise peace in another regard, as in, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)
Jesus was not an advocate for violence as both his command to his followers to love their enemies and his own personal conduct leading up to the crucifixion, makes clear. One of his disciples was a zealot but there is no indication that that man continued to use violence. Rather the evidence is that for the first three hundred years of the church Christians were virtually all pacifists and this only changed under the influence of Constantine. (For what it is worth, I am pacifist by conviction.)
It’s an epistemological claim. It requires a certain thing to exist, and — even worse — to have certain attributes. Until you’ve established the epistemological claim, then you can get no further. That’s why all the subtleties of theology — while very interesting — come to nought unless you can establish the epistemological claim.
If you can’t, you don’t just lose theology (except as something historically interesting), you lose your moral code (which may not be a bad thing; as Lorenzo has already pointed out, societies with largely liberal, secular moralities are generally nicer places to live in. It was Christians who used to burn gays at the stake and Muslims who still stone them to death. And that’s just TEH GAY).
Similarly, when atheists have tried to ground morality in an epistemology (Lenin in particular), they’ve slaughtered huge numbers of people. I’d much rather live with the relativism of the harm principle (which is derived from Stoicism and Liberalism) than the absolutism of people who make moral claims on the basis of their epistemology.
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
On early Christian behaviour, they were widely associated with arson by their pagan neighbours (and no, I’m not talking the Fire of Rome, which was one of Nero’s stitch-up jobs), but things like this. Many more are collected in Macmullen’s magisterial study, which Lorenzo reviews here.
JP –
I’ve encountered many interpretations of this JP. I remember a born-again type in biology (during an Evolution stoush) declaring that he would go to heaven whatever he did because he accepted Jesus as his saviour. Some time before I’d been made aware of this One True Faith routine and I realized that what was being said was that my two best friends: one Jewish, one Muslim, were condemned simply for following what they’d been brought up to believe was the One True Faith.
For this reason I declined to be confirmed. I can understand that people truly feel the existence of the Divine but what kind of God creates such a moral storm on Earth and seriously only rewards one group of people? This is especially exacerbated by the fact that when I declined confirmation I got into trouble. I was told to just do it because conventional. Most of the boys at school with me did that. Does that not indicate that they were simply doing what was done rather than truly accepting the Catholic faith as the ritual dictates? And in that event how are they any better than a Muslim, a Jew or a Buddhist simply following inherited rules?
Apologies for appalling spelling. Need coffee. Bye!
[ADMIN: fixed!]
Skepticlawyer
Interesting point about the contractual nature of Classical paganism. What seems quite distinctive about Christian dogma is its attempt to create a curious ‘historical theology/theological history’ which blends the emphasis on personal belief with an historical justification of the faith (i.e. the historical example of Jesus as garauntee of future salvation based on the unquestioned unity of the old and new testaments).
One practical consequence of this, for anyone approaching Christianity from a critical perspective, is the sense of encountering a type of indeterminacy syndrome – i.e. when the epistemological and ontological claims proferred seem to falter one is referred back to the subjective, personal foundation of faith (and vice versa). So one never seems to be offered the possibility of reaching the type of epistemological validation you emphasise.
Its this type of difficulty that Habermas seems to referring to in his discussion of pre-modern belief systems as ‘distorted’ modes of normative communicative action.
I should not do long comments when I am tired, there were far too many spelling errors in my comment @136.
So, people are not moral in themselves, they are only moral because God holds them to account? What is the claim here: that morality needs an enforcer and only works if it has a perfect enforcer?
People can be successful hypocrites. That is true in any normative system. A thing does not have to work perfectly to work, or to be worth having, or to be worth aspiring to.
The trouble with Christian arguments of the form JP is making is that there are Zoroastrian, Jewish and Muslim versions of the same and they do not have the same conclusions. (It is extremely unedifying to have Christian commentators attack the Islamic concept of dhimmitude and then denounce same-sex marriage: denying people equal protection of the law on the basis of categories salient due to religious claims is what dhimmitude is.)
Besides, our moral dilemma is not our relationship with God. The most common use of ‘God’ in moral discourse is to justify stripping various categories of people of moral protections regardless of whether they have trespassed against anyone else’s moral protections.
The moral dilemma is our relationships with each other. That was true before Zoroaster, Moses and the Jewish prophets, Jesus and Mohammad. It is true regardless of whether you have ever heard of any of them. It will remain true if they all get forgotten.
We create the web of morality between us in order that we may live together. It is neither built into the structure of the universe nor mere atomised personal judgments but something our actions and outlook strengthen or weaken from moment to moment.
Lorenzo, I’ve had a go at tidying @136, so hope it should be all right now
SkepticLawyer—in reference to the Euthyphro Dilemma, I think this response is worth consideration: http://creation.com/what-is-good-answering-euthyphro-dilemma.
The article makes this point: “The Euthyphro Dilemma can be turned around on atheists: Do you approve of an action because it is good, or is it good because you approve of it? If the latter, then your moral standard seems to be subjective and arbitrary, so you complain about God’s alleged arbitrariness. And if the former, then you are back to explaining where this objective moral standard comes from”, which is more or less what I have been trying to say all along.
You say, “I’d much rather live with the relativism of the harm principle (which is derived from Stoicism and Liberalism) than the absolutism of people who make moral claims on the basis of their epistemology”, which I am sure you would, but my question is, why should anyone care what your preference is?
The bottom line is that it’s all arbitrary, whether you get it from God or from somewhere else. I know what feels right to me. Obviously, there’s some fundamental principles that most societies have, because otherwise you fall apart.
In the end, it doesn’t matter to me where people get their morality from as long as they treat others decently and respectfully. Obviously, you can infer from this that I’m not a Christian, but I would say that I try to live according to the golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do to you), and that I respect others who do so, whatever faith or belief they have. The only difficulty with the golden rule, I suppose, is when a person treats herself awfully, she won’t treat others any better.
It does annoy me when Christians of my acquaintance tell me categorically that I’m going to Hell. I think it’s arrogant: how can they presume to know the mind and judgment of God? God is merciful, surely. I always think of that bit in C S Lewis’ The Last Battle where the decent Calormene got into heaven because he was a good person, and so he’d effectively followed God. That always seemed fair to me.
Why do some non-believers get visited by angels on the way to Damascus, and others don’t? I’d be likely to believe if God opened a stairway to heaven in front of me and told me I had to believe, but He hasn’t. Why do some people get a “leg up” in terms of belief? Doesn’t this mean that God doesn’t treat everyone equitably – some people get favoured by a visit to help along their faith, so they get to heaven, but others don’t? This is a serious question, I’m not being facetious. I’m genuinely curious as to the answer.
JP, to which my response is identical: why should anyone care what your preference is either? As Lorenzo has patiently and very carefully explained (so much so that I think you’re ignoring him), God doesn’t get you anywhere; religion isn’t a source of ‘objective’ morality, because it depends on an epistemological claim. In fact, you finish up in a recursive loop, as B Wit points out.
And since I think Hayek’s explanation of emergent morality in terms of ‘spontaneous order’ is very powerful, I’ll link to a nice potted explanation here (written by one of my academic mentors, no less).
Useful academic references for the concept are available here.
B Wit (@141)and Legal Eagle (@142) – B Wit, you asked: “Surely if God created the world and made humans in his own image he loves all of them and would want them all to have the opportunity for salvation?” In answer to your question, what you suggest is precisely what the Bible teaches. “God our Savior wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” (I Timothy 2: 3-4) and “The Lord is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (II Peter 3:9)
The disciple Peter thought that God’s plan was more or less only for the Jews until he met the Roman centurion Cornelius and then he said, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.” (Acts 10: 34-35)
I do not believe however that this means that universalism is true – that every person, whatever their beliefs or attitude, will be accepted by God. God, I believe, gives a general revelation to all people and that needs to be responded to positively. Hebrews 11:6 says: “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” The rest of that chapter then goes on to list a string of people – Noah, Abraham, Moses, Rahab – who never knew the name of Jesus yet who, because of their faith arising from the revelation they did have, were accepted by God.
In the end, I don’t believe that God wants to condemn anyone, but, given that God has given us a free will, anyone is free to reject God if they so desire.
So, Legal Eagle, I don’t think it is simply that moral behavior is all that matters – we are also required to have faith in God. If we know the Christian message and choose to reject it then it is not a case of God turning his back on us but us saying no to God.
Adrien @ 146 – I hope from what I have already written above that it is clear that I do not accept that those who merely “go through the motions” of Christian belief are Christians at all.
Lorenzo – you give the impression that you believe that people are morally responsible to someone beyond themselves. I just don’t understand how an atheist can justify that claim. You say the moral dilemma is our relationship with each other. But nobody owes anything to anyone: no one has to do good to do another or refrain from acting badly to another. For sure from a pragmatic point of view it may make life more comfortable and less dangerous to act in certain ways toward others but that is not morality.
You say: “So, people are not moral in themselves, they are only moral because God holds them to account? What is the claim here: that morality needs an enforcer and only works if it has a perfect enforcer?”
I have repeatedly stated that I recognize that people can create a morality for themselves so in that sense I accept that it can be said people are moral in themselves. What I continually dispute is that a human-generated morality can be generated that is not subjective and relative.
One person or group of persons can espouse a moral view – my question is, why should anyone take any notice of their view if it does not suit them to do so?
Legal Eagle – you say: “it doesn’t matter to me where people get their morality from as long as they treat others decently and respectfully”. I think that takes us to the heart of the issue. What do we do when people disagree about what is right and wrong? You think it is right that people treat others decently and respectfully. Other people though are only concerned about looking out for themselves and perhaps their loved ones and they don’t care about treating anyone else decently and respectfully. And they think that is the right attitude to have, at least for themselves.
If you want to live by the golden rule, then good luck to you, but just don’t expect them to do so. Rather, if life is made easier for them by stealing your car, then why shouldn’t they?
You can of course say they are immoral to steal your car and they can say they couldn’t care less what you think. Without any objective standard, what makes your moral views more worthy than theirs?
I would agree with you that Christians should not make judgements about your standing before God. I think it is reasonable and responsible for Christians to explain to people that they believe that they need to repent and seek God’s forgiveness, but to categorically say that they know someone is definitely rejected by God is something that I don’t think can or needs to be said.
You say that God seems to show favouritism in terms of his revelation to people. That may seem to be the case but the Bible certainly makes the claim that God does not treat people differently, eg. Romans 2:11 : “For God does not show favouritism”, and Acts 10:34: “I now realise how true it is that God does not show favouritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right”.
If we accept that the miracles recorded in the NT are genuine, as I do, we could feel that if we were to have seen such incredible things then we would surely have believed and so it is not fair that they got to see those things and we don’t. Yet most of the people in Jesus day did not believe even though they saw the miracles first hand. Judas, one of his closest companions, chose to betray him.
If God is a God of love and justice then there is no reason to think that some people are actually more privileged than others. Each of us apparently is able to make an equally free decision as to whether we accept or reject God’s love.
The Bible makes all sorts of claims, JP, very few of which can be sustained by recourse to actual historical evidence, particularly if one accepts the Biblical accounts of favouritism (Paul on the way to Damascus, say). One of these things is not like the other; it’s that simple.
I am not one of those classicists and empiricists who demands further evidence for the life of Jesus: to apply the extreme skeptical position to the life of Jesus would simultaneously reduce the non-elite population of the Roman Empire in the 1st Century AD to around 100,000, mainly soldiers and their women, for whom there are ample funerary records.
That people can be disingenuous in their rhetorical claims, however, is undoubted. As much as Paul makes claims about not showing favouritism, the evidence — if one accepts Biblical accounts — is against him.
You seem to fear relativism. A few points:
1. It is possible to have universal morality without it being objective morality; the first only asks that it be better than the available competitors; the second asks that it always and everywhere be true.
2. Relativism does not imply capriciousness; it may, however, imply spontaneous order.
3. There are large questions of morality where — by non-theistic standards — Christians, Muslims and Jews appear to be wrong, while the pagans that preceeded them appear to be right. These include such things as abortion, unilateral no-fault divorce, women’s property rights and gay rights. Coverture marriage did not exist in pagan Rome or among ancient and medieval Jews; Christians had to impose it from without.
4. Telling men in particular that lusting after a woman with one’s eyes was as bad as committing adultery with her was a clear case of ‘You Fail Biology Forever‘. Remedial reading of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate may well be necessary. [Caution, TV Tropes link].
5. Finally, a Hayek quote for you:
SL: Ta. it reads much better now.
JP
‘Subjective’ and ‘relative’ in what sense?
Moral judgements are not atomised personal judgements because lots of people share various moral precepts and agree that people should act on them. You keep reducing moral judgments to atomised individual views and I keep pointing out that morality is a system of general norms. The thing about morality that makes it different from law is that it has no specific mechanism of origin and enforcement.
It is true that, like any set of norms, people can fail or refuse to abide by moral precepts. The only enforcing mechanisms are people’s own moral sense, their concern for how others might think of them and behave towards them. That is why I say moralityy is “web like”. But if enough people did not have a capacity for a moral sense, then morality would not even get off the ground.
Do you mean as a practical issue or as a moral issue? Any set of norms has the authority it needs to function, or it fails to function. When people are making a moral judgement, they are implicitly or explicitly proposing or invoking a general standard of behaviour, as we all understand: that is why we have moral arguments and moral discourse and understand that “I hate tinned asparagus” is not a moral judgement.
Saying “it is just your opinion” is otiose. The origin point of morality is this generalised “conversation” about how we should act appealing to our sense that there are things which are right and things which are wrong.
Citing the Bible gets us no further than does citing the Quran or the Talmud or the Vendidad or the Upanishads or whatever. They only have moral force because people accept them. And not everyone does–either because they have never heard or them, or they don’t know what is in them, or they do not agree they have authority, or whatever.
Morality and moral behaviour did not spread out from Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Moses, Zoroaster, etc. Certain conceptions of moral behaviour did, but not moral behaviour in general. The writings of what they said are contributions (of varying quality) to the general moral conversation, but they are (despite the claims of their adherents) not some inherently different form of contribution.
The notion that morality is some profoundly metaphysically different thing than other norms is false. You remind me of the C18th Muslim commentator who found the spectacle of the British Parliament making laws utterly weird. God had provided humans with all the laws they needed with Shar’ia: universal precepts built into the structure of the universe. Man-made law was just a poor and pathetic imitation of the “real thing”.
No, actually, British law was as much law as anything in Shar’ia. Indeed, I will back common law over Shar’ia any time. On moral, epistemological, metaphysical and consequentialist grounds.
The law? Don’t need God to make laws. Asians have laws.
Thing is believers and non-believers will never agree on these things. But what, I think we can agree on, is that reason is necessary for a temperant polity. I prefer to agree to disagree on those things where that’s inevitable and also agree that extremist hostility from either side is undesirable.
Yeah?
I’ll buy that. Isn’t the essential issue here that peoples’ beliefs are primarily their concern and our concern is that their behavior do not impinge on our lives?
I have no time for religion, I even repudiate a so-called “scientific worldview” and scientific cosmology as being essentially religious ideas.
It is far more important that we get along together rather than agreeing on what it is all about.
Regarding the basis of moral positions, I love this little quote:
Dr. Strangelove’s Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius
Paul Strathern
157
Saint-Simon (French) the father of socialism. “We behave in a civilised fashion because we have more to lose by not doing so, rather than because we are morally superior human beings.”
224
Yes, I was going to say that I’ll just have to agree to respectfully disagree with JP. I can’t really go much further other than to say I don’t think a belief in God is necessary for a person to be principled and moral, and I don’t think our moral codes need to come from God. A person’s morality is not any more legitimate in my eyes because it comes from the New Testament. For me, the strength of a moral belief does not depend on where it comes from, but about how people behave in practice.
That being said, I acknowledge that many moral codes have been said to come from God – eg. the Ten Commandments. In understanding our morality today, we cannot ignore religion or the historical effect of religious precepts on the development our morality. Although I am not Christian or Jewish, I concede that my own moral code is in part a product of aspects of both Jewish and Christian belief.
Legal Eagle – one last go! You say a person can be principled and moral without God. Again, I will say yes that a person can make up principles and morals, and it may happen that you like the principles and morals that some, or many, may make up.
The problem is, what about those who make up moral principles you don’t like? You have to address that question. You assume that your moral principles are valid, but the person who has moral principles that you don’t like also assumes theirs are valid – you seem to have no basis for saying that one is better or more right than the other. You have to be able to answer that question – just hoping it goes away does not work.
John H – You say: “It is far more important that we get along together rather than agreeing on what it is all about.” The problem is that people obviously often don’t get along together – even you probably do things others don’t like. The fact is that some people just don’t care about getting along with others – you have to be able say why they should be moral. Is the best you can say to that, you think they ought to be nicer? Why should they care about what you think? Why should they not hurt you if they want?
The quote from Saint-Simon reduces morality to just pragmatism and that then is not morality at all.
Adrien – your last comment, as well some of the comments by other posters, seems to be saying that law and morality are the same. But that is clearly not the case. There are many things that many people regard as being immoral but there are no laws about eg, adultery, lying, greed, selfishness, and there are things which are illegal that many people regard as being morally acceptable, eg recreational drug use. To paraphrase, I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes: the courts are not about justice but about law. And for many people justice is a key element of morality.
Lorenzo – you say: “When people are making a moral judgement, they are implicitly or explicitly proposing or invoking a general standard of behaviour, as we all understand”. Again you seem to be saying that whatever most people in a society happen to agree to, that is what becomes morally right. So slavery was “right” in Alabama in 1850; female genital mutilation is “right” today in Ethiopia. Right?
You also say: “The origin point of morality is this generalised “conversation” about how we should act appealing to our sense that there are things which are right and things which are wrong.” But how is this “conversation” not just a sharing of each individual’s opinion? Any social morality is just a collection of individual opinions. It doesn’t ever become more than that just because a lot of people may agree with each other.
SkepticLawyer- you say: “the first only asks that it be better than the available competitors”, so of course I have to ask, how can you know one is “better” than the other?
You say: “There are large questions of morality where — by non-theistic standards — Christians, Muslims and Jews appear to be wrong” – what makes the non-theistic standards right and the theistic standards wrong?
As far as the Hayek quote goes, how could you have the former without the latter also?
Ah, JP, we get to the nub of the problem. I’m not concerned to pick a “best” or “most right” morality. For me, at least, the moral action depends upon the circumstances, and you can’t make an absolute rule which is right in all circumstances. So the Commandments say “Thou shalt not kill”, which seems like a creditable principle. But there are always exceptions to the rule – if someone is trying to kill me, should I just let him kill me because killing is wrong? Or should I fight back aggressively, possibly killing him? Generally, most people and cultures concede that there may be circumstances where it is justifiable to kill.
Morality, I think, is all about living with other people and having respect for them as human beings. We don’t usually let people kill other people because society would descend into chaos and anarchy, and we don’t want to be killed ourselves, and that’s what makes “Thou shalt not kill” a good general rule. It’s essentially a mix of self-interest and putting yourself in the shoes of other people when you do things which affect them.
JP
No, what I was saying is that is the current sense of what people generally think is morally right. It clearly changes over time. As it does in religious traditions too, of course. In Christian tradition, Christ’s life and death is held to have changed basic moral parameters. Even without that large example, it is no longer felt to be a moral/religious duty to burn people alive for having sex, for example.
We look back from the vantage point of the general sense of what is right and wrong having evolved over time. We cannot “take that away” and say “oh, well it was morally right back then”. It is true that some folk believed it was morally OK, or did not question its morality, etc but that does not make it, given our current moral understanding, morally right.
Is the law of the land “just people’s opinions?”. Are the rules of chess “just people’s opinions”? Rules are not “just people’s opinions”. They are operating rules because people adopt them: not the same thing. Morality is a form of social legislation, one that arises out of people acting on, thinking about and speaking about what is right and what is wrong. But without a sense that there are things which are right and things which are wrong, there is no morality. Personal opinion is not enough: it does not get you there.
Some people claim that their sense of right and wrong comes from God, or is grounded in how the universe is, or whatever but given they also evolve they are no more better “grounded” morality than Shar’ia is “better” law than British common law for allegedly coming from God.
JP –
At the heart of this is that you find it hard to accept that a moral system that is explicitly of human manufacture, acknowledged as such by creators and adherants, is inherently shakey – sans some cosmic authority. This is true. But that does not mean that it cannot be strong, that it has no tradition and that it is the product of the purely fanciful.
On this side of the line thru this thread stand enthusiasts for Stoicism. This, may I remind you, is older than Christianity. That the ‘canon’ of this creed was written (and still is) by ordinary mortals is, for me, a superior position morally. More courageous.
That the law is not morality is well established and understood. That the one has nothing to do with the other is absurd.
No. You don’t.
You simply disassociate from people whose morals you don’t like. If this ‘immorality’ impinges on the body politic or other individuals, you punish.
If there is a God and one is immoral in a non-legal way leave it to Him to punish. Didn’t Jesus say that somewhere?
Well, he can be made to say it.
Chimps confront death in human-like ways
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/04/27/2883520.htm
I wonder how the morality of JP explains the murder of Thomas Aikenhead (baptised 28 March 1676 – 8 January 1697). The charge was blasphemy, it was a first offense and the death penalty was to be applied only on a third offense. In spite of his recantation and pleas for mercy the Church of Scotland General Assembly urged for “vigorous execution”. To make it worse it is said that the preachers attended his hanging and prayed for his immortal soul, surely more blasphemous than anything he said. What happened to “thou shalt not kill”?
When watching Hitchens debating D’souza or Boteach (and similar events, which are really advertising their own books) and the subject of the various inquisitions comes up the answer is always “yes, but Stalin killed more”. This always reminds me of the schoolyard, “You’re a ‘whatever’”; “Yeah, well you’re a bigger one”. Surely even one killing for the merciful and benevolent creator is one too many.
The overriding commandment is “Lest ye perish”. Some morality?
SL in 36 I think you are confusing Smith with Mandeville.
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