The Morality Delusion

 

Dorothy considers
the scarecrow

In Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, Dawkins poses the question "If there is no God why be good?" [p226].

This sounds like Karlund's comment to my post "On Atheism and Morality". But, unlike Karlund, when Dawkins poses the question he sets out to expose the 'positively ignoble' outlook of the religious. He says:

my immediate temptation is to issue the challenge: 'Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval [...] to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up

But is this really how religious people reason? Do religious people actually seek God's approval?

Dawkins admits to this straw man argument later:

My imaginary religious apologist has no need to admit that sucking up to God is the religious motive for doing good. Rather his claim is that, wherever the motive to be good comes from, without God there would be no standard for deciding what is good. [italics his, p231]

I don't know enough about "the religious motive" to comment, though I imagine there may be a variety of "motives" from faith-to-faith. Regardless, what I want to address in this post is an apparent blindspot in Dawkins' reasoning.

Apart from the body,
 what's missing from this picture?

Earlier in The God Delusion Dawkins refers to something called "moral sense" and synonymously "our sense of right and wrong" [p222], but what is it we are sensing when we employ this faculty?

Surely not something physical; not something existing in the material world. It is not something that can be found at the scene of a murder, even with the best of forensic technology. So what is it that our brains perceive when we use this "moral sense"?

Pinocchio needed Jiminy Cricket
before he became "a real boy"

Perhaps morality is actually a delusion.

The philosopher J. L. Mackie says that if morals actually existed they would be "qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe" [1]. This is known as the argument from queerness. It's hard to disagree with Mackie's argument but it's also hard to live with that kind of scepticism. That is, unless you are a psychopath.

But those of us who recognise morals tend to say that psychopaths lack something, not that they are more complete. In saying that the psychopath does not have a conscience, for example, we imply that they are unable to perceive something we take for granted.

However, if we agree with Mackie's scepticism then the psychopath is actually someone who, in some ways at least, sees reality more clearly.

Is this analogous to Dawkins' claims about a belief in God being a delusion?

If we're to be sceptical about one thing why not the other?

It seems to me that neither the statement "morality exists" nor "God exists" are empirically testable, just as the statements "this is wrong" or "this is right" are not subject to empirical tests.

Put another way, to say that "killing is wrong" is not to say anything about an act of murder itself, but to group it among acts of a similar nature as those that we should never carry out. It is a statement not of hard fact but of belief. Yet I still believe the statement "killing is wrong" is true, with the usual caveats about defending one's self, one's loved ones, and perhaps even one's country.

Which is what bothers me about Dawkins' approach. The difference is that Dawkins perceives one as useful and the other as redundant. He doesn't seem to be interested in truth so much as selectively applying the scientific method to that to which it is inapplicable. Science might provide a useful descriptive analysis of how we have morality, but it can't provide the normative why.

Even in a descriptive sense, Dawkins seems to fall short: Karlund and P@ both make a key point in the comments to the last post, which is that religion cannot have had any significant evolutionary disadvantage to have persisted for so long. It may even have had an advantage.

As an atheist (but by no means an anti-theist), my own thoughts are that religions may constitute a codified (perhaps even sophisticated) version of morality, one in which values and beliefs about what is right and wrong are bound up together more closely, and in which the belief in non-physical "things" is taken that one stage further.

Could it be that in approaching the religious, our moral faculty perceives a pattern among the various "moral laws", just as we might perceive constellations in the "starry heavens".[2]

Of course these final thoughts are just my own attempts to understand religion as a non-believer. My main problem is with Dawkins' book, in that for all his "scepticism" he doesn't even seem to see moral scepticism as an issue, let alone try to deal with it. It is also the problem I have with arguments I have heard from self-described Brights and Sceptics, who claim that science will one day be able to answer these questions too. I suggest that when it comes to morality, a "burden of proof" lies just as much with atheists as it does with those of faith.

[Coming soon: "The Self Delusion", or how none of us actually exist.]


___________________

[1] Mackie, J.L. 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. (Harmondsworth: Penguin) p38

[2] The phrases in quotes are from a translation of Immanuel Kant, whose own work in moral theory (to grossly simplify) was actually secular, but also retained something of the spiritual, for which see:

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

— Kant, I. 1788. Critique of Practical Reason [My own copy is somewhere at home; I obtained the translation from this page: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#Critique_of_Practical_Reason_.281788.29 Last accessed: 28-January-2011]