Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart Read online

  Let’s address these one at a time.

  Are we capable of making choices? Just as we can make observations about the world around us, we can make observations about the type of thoughts and desires that exist in our mind when taking actions. We’re all intuitively aware of our ability to act as independent agents. We first gain awareness of our ability to control our own limbs as toddlers and to use our bodies toward our own ends. We learn to reach for a bottle in order to eat or to bang on the kitchen table to get some attention. As our development continues, we learn about delayed gratification and how to exhibit self-restraint. By our teens, we develop the ability to align our actions with our intentions and gain a sense of our ability to act as independent agents.

  A famous study called the Stanford marshmallow experiment tested the idea of “delayed gratification” in young children. Conducted in the 1960s, the study tested preschoolers to see if they could delay gratification.1 Each child would sit alone in a room with a marshmallow, Oreo, or pretzel stick (whatever the child preferred) for fifteen minutes. The child was told that, if he or she hadn’t eaten the treat after that interval, he or she got a second treat. As it turned out, just one-third of the six-hundred participants waited long enough to get a second treat. Would the outcome have been the same if the study were conducted on adults? Probably not. We are increasingly able to delay gratification as we age,2 and by the time we reach adulthood, skills such as self-restraint and self-control are well entrenched.

  Of course, some physiological needs are impossible to completely suppress. We all need to eventually breathe, urinate, or sleep. While we might be able to suppress or delay these impulses temporarily, ultimately they are beyond our realm of self-control. But when we talk about the ability to make choices, we’re talking about voluntary behavioral choices, not the life-giving functions of bodily organs.

  We’ve each seen how our own choices affect the outcomes of events around us. What clothes do we choose to put on each day? What words do we choose to say? How do we choose to kiss a lover? Choices confront us throughout each day, and we can observe our ability to make choices independently. Through these personal observations and through introspection, we can conclude that we do indeed have the ability to choose how to behave.

  There are limits to our ability to choose, of course. Genetic makeup and environmental factors provide constraints. We can’t choose to fly. We can’t choose to be a foot taller. A person who only knows English can’t instantly choose to speak Spanish. Constraints around our abilities, intellect, life circumstances, and financial resources abound and limit our choices, and some people are more limited by these circumstances than others. Our ability to choose how we act just means that whenever we face a choice of actions that we can take, we have the ability to choose among them. The concepts of “preferences,” “desires,” and “wants” would have no meaning if we lacked the ability to choose how we act.

  Some people contend that choice is merely an illusion and that all of our actions are dictated not by choice but by the laws of physics. This argument goes as follows: Our bodies are composed of matter—atoms, elements, chemicals, cells. Our bodies follow the laws of physics, so our future actions aren’t chosen by “us” but by our biochemical state.

  The apparent conflict here is caused by a mismatch of reference frames. The first reference frame is at the atomic level, which looks at the world at the scale of atoms and particles. The second is at the psychological level, which looks at our minds as a collection of thoughts and memories. Both of these viewpoints are valid, but both have limitations to their domains of knowledge. They both have scopes of relevance, applicability, and terminology.

  The atomic reference frame is valuable when designing semiconductors or nanotubes, but at larger scales it doesn’t provide much useful information. The complexity grows too vast as the number of atomic interactions increases and the predictive power in a practical sense is reduced to zero.

  But just for fun, imagine we could3 describe a basketball game in terms of the motions of every one of the 1030 atoms colliding during the game.4 You could even say the outcome of the game could be predetermined if we had perfect information about the state of all those atoms before the game began. But such a description wouldn’t be very useful in explaining concepts such as “dunk,” “pick and roll,” and “three-pointer.” These terms have no meaning in the reference frame of atoms colliding, but they have great relevance to understanding and enjoying the game of basketball.

  Another example: if we gave you a choice between spending two hours reading the machine code for the videogame Call of Duty or two hours playing the game, which would you choose? Even though the machine code determines and describes what’s happening on the screen, we know that there’s an enormous difference between the experience and information presented when playing the game and the experience and information presented when studying its code.

  That’s why human beings have developed other reference frames for the study of these larger macro systems. Biologists study muscle behavior at the cellular level; oceanographers study sea currents at the oceanic level; and psychologists study behavior at the level of thoughts and memories. As theoretical physicist Sean Carroll has argued, while our mind’s inner workings are no doubt tied to physical atomic interactions, those interactions do not discredit the psychological reference frame.5 Rather, these two reference frames are simultaneously compatible. They just require us to look at the way the mind works with two different perspectives and terminology. It’s at the psychological level, not the atomic level, that the notion of choice has descriptive power and meaning. And it’s there, at the level of human psychology, that we’re all aware of our ability to act as independent agents, to align our actions with our intentions, and to make decisions and choices.

  That takes care of the first concept needed to recast statements of obligation into statements of preference and choice. Now let’s consider the second: that nothing forces us to act in a particular way other than our own thoughts, desires, and environment.

  It seems reasonable to think that if any such external motivating force were to exist, we might be forced to choose to obey the external motivator instead of acting independently and making an uncoerced choice.

  What do we mean by an “external motivator?” If choice and preference are internal motivators, then an external motivator would be something separate from ourselves and our desires that drives us to choose certain actions. If a waiter held a gun to your head while you were dithering between the steak and trout and announced, “Order the trout or I’ll shoot you!” that threat would be an external motivator (and probably a compelling one) for your decision.

  A less extreme example can be found in the rule of law in our societies. The threat of punishment imposed by the legal system, such as jail time or a fine, regularly serves as an external motivator to influence our choices.

  But when it comes to choosing how we behave, the external motivator most associated with ethical choices is morality. It’s very common for people to express the reasons for their actions as following a moral code. In evaluating this form of external motivator, we can ask the simple question, Does an objective moral truth exist?

  If an objective moral truth existed, it would likely be the prime motivator for our behavioral choices. Since this is a question about the existence or nonexistence of an entity, we can use the framework of belief we have developed (the first five non-commandments) to get the answer. This gives us a way to link the world of facts and observations with the world of behavior and ethics.

  What does “objective moral truth” mean? An objective moral truth is a morality that exists independently of the way any person perceives it. It means that for any moral dilemma a person encounters, there’s a predefined, precisely correct path of action, a “right answer.”

  Just as a belief in an objective reality implies that truth exists, so the notion of an ob
jective morality implies that moral truths exist.6 If we deny the existence of an objective morality, we are affirming the contrary—a subjective morality. Such a morality would not be a definitive, universal set of rules. Instead, it would exist only as it is interpreted or viewed by the people who rely on it, so it would naturally exist in many different forms.

  At this point we can draw a parallel between the three core assumptions we made earlier about the nature of existence and the starting points we might need for a meaningful system of objective moral truth. Remember, to make progress on the question of what we should believe, we laid out three core assumptions that also established three central concepts: the acknowledgment of existence, a method for perceiving that existence, and tools for describing and thinking about that existence.

  To make similar progress in the field of objective morality, we first need to determine whether an objective morality actually exists, then determine which ethical senses we are endowed with to perceive the moral truth, and finally determine what tools we can use to evaluate and think about morality.

  The same tools of intellect, language, logic, and thought (what we called “definitional truths”) still work for ethics, so we don’t need anything new here. But to build a system of objective morality, we also need two new beliefs:

  That objective moral truth exists.

  That there is an ethical sensing faculty that allows us to perceive and evaluate the moral truth.7

  Without these two beliefs, the parallel to the belief system we constructed for objective reality would fall short and the effort to generate a coherent system of universal objective ethics would seem insurmountable.

  The faculty we use for sensing what is moral and what is not is that of our mind and intellect. Included with the intellect are the faculties of “emotion,” or the “heart,” as discussed earlier. These terms are merely a description for specific aspects of our mind’s abilities. Emotions can be thought of as an impulse response that reflects deeply ingrained preferences acquired over time. And that makes our minds, which include both thoughts and emotions, our sensing faculty for perceiving ethics.

  That said, there are differences. People perceive the world around them in very similar ways through their five senses, but we differ dramatically in the way our intellects perceive objective moral truth. In particular, our intellect seems to need much more interpretation and processing to reach a moral conclusion. By comparison, our senses are more mechanical in nature—they just perceive what is before them. For example, sight can be understood as light waves focused on the retina, stimulating impulses in rod and cone cells that transmit electrical signals to the brain, which interprets them as vision. Little subjective interpretation is necessary to perceive light. In this instance, there is a physical interaction that occurs between an external entity and our sense organs—photons interacting with nerve receptors. Similarly, the perception of sound is caused by the physical interaction between an external entity and our sense organs. External pressure waves traveling through the air into our ear canals cause the thin membranes of our eardrums to vibrate and allow us to recognize sound.

  But no such interaction exists for moral sensing. We can reduce moral feelings to the mechanism of chemical concentrations in the brain, but the repeatable interaction, or communication, between some external moral entity and any internal moral “organ” is simply not evident. Rather, the interpretive ability of our mind in sensing morality is one that depends on the experiences we’ve had, not to mention our personality and outlook. So if we are forced to decide whether our ethical senses are perceiving an objective morality truth, or are forming a subjective morality, it surely seems the latter.

  This discussion might seem silly. How can we possibly think of morality in the same way we think of physical objects? That’s exactly our point—we can’t. Morality cannot be thought of in the same absolute, unchanging way we think of physical things because there is an objective reality, but there is no objective moral truth.

  What about moral principles that have been presented throughout history as objective moral truths?

  There are five main categories of these allegedly objective moral codes: God-created moral codes, leader-created moral codes, consensus moral codes, human-designed moral codes, and duty. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

  God-created Moral Codes

  God-created morality holds that all moral rules exist only by God’s command. To follow his commands is to be moral.

  Moral philosophers call this divine command theory.8 Many religions set down in an absolute way how a person is supposed to behave—that is, which behaviors are moral and which are immoral. The Ten Commandments are an example of God-created morality and are by no means the only ones. The twelfth-century Talmudic scholar Maimonides counted the various laws, behaviors, and beliefs (mitzvot) that God prescribed in the five books of the Old Testament. The final count was 613 laws to be followed by observant Jews.9

  A few examples from his list include to worship God (no. 6); for women not to wear men’s clothing (no. 71); not to sleep with a woman before marriage (no. 123); a rapist should marry his victim if she is unwed (no. 132); not to have homosexual relations (no. 157); not to marry non-Jews (no. 163); not to eat shellfish (no. 178); not to eat dairy and meat together (no. 196); not to wear clothing made of wool and linen woven together (no. 238); to give to charity (no. 250); not to stand idly by if someone’s life is in danger (no. 489); to pay wages on time (no. 519).

  God-created morality isn’t just a collection of the opinions of mere men, or of collective society, but the will of a supreme supernatural being. Our earlier conclusion that God doesn’t exist presents an existential challenge to God-created morality. Without a God to attach it to, such a moral code loses any sanctity, as well as any claims to objectivity or truth. However, even if a God existed, we’d still run into that problem of having no way of knowing which of the gods is the correct one, meaning that there would be no way to tell which set of “godly” laws to follow.

  Leader-created Moral Codes

  If we can’t turn to the gods for moral guidance, what about human leaders? An example of a moral standard developed by a human leader is the Code of Hammurabi. Created in 1772 BCE by the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi, this code provided basic moral rules for Babylonian society. An almost complete copy of the code survives on a stone tablet held at the Louvre.10 The code consists of 282 laws. A few examples: if anyone is committing a robbery and is caught, then he shall be put to death (no. 22); if a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn off (no. 195); if a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out (no. 196).11 Not the most enlightened moral code by modern standards.

  Can ruler-created moral codes qualify as objective moral codes? No. They can be dismissed as merely reflective of the views of the leaders of those societies who imposed them onto their subjects by force. We don’t follow the Code of Hammurabi in the modern era because our own ethical concepts have evolved past those of the ancient world—a time in which (among other things) women were often considered the property of their husbands. We aren’t particularly concerned with, or motivated by, what Hammurabi thought almost four thousand years ago, nor should we be.

  Consensus Moral Codes

  If the leaders of societies can’t provide an objective moral code, then can objective moral codes arise from the moral consensus that has evolved over time? The moral zeitgeist is the moral spirit in a particular place and time—the consensus opinion.12 Can the moral zeitgeist be considered an objective moral truth? If we get a high degree of agreement among people as to what is moral or what is not, could that indicate that we have found an absolute moral truth? If nearly everyone is against murder, for example, could that mean that “murder is immoral” is an objective moral truth?

  Once again, let’s take an analytical approach. If we had the ability to poll every person in a community on
a particular moral question, and then analyze the responses, we could determine the most frequent responses. Sometimes we might even find that nearly everyone agrees on an issue; other times we might find that there is considerable debate. Theoretically, at any given point in time, there exists a precise answer as to what the most popular response to any given moral question would be. As long as we could record responses and count how many of each response we received, we would arrive at a populist moral standard, occasionally with nearly unanimous consent.

  Instead of taking a poll to determine the exact moral responses of people, we might instead infer what the typical response would be through discussions with other people who make up a sample of the community. If we were to do this for all types of moral thoughts, we might develop an awareness of the typical moral inclination of the people around us and, in the process, determine the moral zeitgeist. Just as we, as individuals, are capable of forming impressions of what the most popular fashions and hairstyles are, we’re also capable of forming impressions about the popular moral inclinations of our society.

  By pulling together all of these subjective preferences, we might regard the current moral zeitgeist as approximating an objective moral standard. But there’s a big difference between a standard based on popularity and one based on a truly objective moral code. In the end, the moral zeitgeist is just a collection of many subjective thoughts. It still lacks a form of moral truth that is independent of any one individual’s ability to influence it.

  Even if we could reach 100 percent agreement on a given moral issue—a very unlikely thing—it would still only mean that we have a consensus of subjective preferences, not a notion of objective moral truth. There was a near-unanimous consensus in many parts of the antebellum South that blacks and whites shouldn’t intermarry and have children together, but few Southerners today would say that made it an objective moral truth. There is no level of consensus that could ever justify regarding our subjective preferences as objective moral truths.