Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart Read online

  To understand why, imagine if we wanted to create the objectively perfect cookie. You might think that a smart way to approach this problem would be by polling a large sample of people and having them test a variety of different cookie recipes under various conditions. But the reality is that we’d immediately run into problems. Some people like the Girl Scouts’ Thin Mint cookies, some like chocolate chip cookies, and some people, for reasons unclear, prefer oatmeal raisin. Some like their cookies crispy, and some like them soft.

  If we try to make a cookie that appeals to each person’s ideal, we’d end up either with an incoherent mess of ingredients in an attempt to please everyone or a bland consensus cookie in an attempt to offend no one. There is no “best possible cookie,” just as there is no “best possible poem,” “best possible painting,” or “best possible running playlist.” As the old aphorism says, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there’s no accounting for taste. However you put it, preferences are subjective; different people have different preferences, and they are often incompatible.

  Even if we put aside for a moment the blunt reality that it’s impossible to reach a complete consensus “best possible cookie,” it would still be entirely irrelevant to the question of whether that recipe was an objectively perfect cookie. Instead, all we would have created is the current best cookie consensus. Our history is littered with consensus moral beliefs that were once wildly popular but seem utterly wrongheaded, even barbaric, to us in the rearview mirror of history. Women as chattel, human sacrifice, infanticide—the zeitgeist changes significantly over time.13 As Steven Pinker argues persuasively in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the consensus has evolved to be more sensitive to the moral concerns of more people over time.14 This constant evolution is a great benefit as it recognizes that changes in human circumstances also require changes in moral perspective. But because consensus opinions change as the needs and desires of human beings change, this constant evolution also shows that consensus can’t possibly serve as a universal objective moral truth.

  Human-designed Moral Codes

  If we can’t create an objective moral code by averaging the moral preferences of individuals in a society, maybe we can design a universally binding code of ethics. As you can imagine, it has been tried many times. A few examples of human-designed moral codes include Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, and John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.”

  Utilitarianism is the idea that moral decisions should be made based on the principle of utility, providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.15 The system suggests that when you consider a moral conundrum, you should look at the consequences of choice A, B, C, and so on, and choose the one that produces the best consequences for the greatest number of people.

  Kant’s categorical imperative suggests that we should only act in a way that we think should be allowed for everyone in the same situation.16 If you are considering becoming a thief, you should ask what the world would be like if theft were practiced by everyone. And since you wouldn’t want people stealing from you, the categorical imperative leads you to conclude that stealing is immoral.

  Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” says we ought to make moral decisions from a blind perspective regarding our own status, skills, mental and physical capacity, and position in society.17 If you were born with high natural intelligence and low athletic ability, you’ll likely want to live in a society that rewards people of high intelligence, and you’ll be indifferent whether athletes are rewarded for their skills. But that isn’t fair to people born with low intelligence and high athletic ability. The only way to create fair circumstances, Rawls argues, is for us to ignore everything about us that positions us relative to others and then make ethical decisions blind to our own talents, skills, and capacities.

  Do Bentham’s, Kant’s, and Rawls’s philosophies meet the requirements of being absolute moral standards? Certainly they are universal in the sense that they apply to all people. But that isn’t enough to elevate any of them to the one true moral code. Claiming to be universal doesn’t make any of them automatically or exclusively valid.

  As you may guess, each of these thinkers asserts that his moral code is universally binding, meaning everybody has to obey it whether they want to or not. One could similarly dream up many wicked moral codes and assert that they are universally applicable, too. How would we decide which moral code to pick? Kant, Rawls, and Bentham each considered their own axioms to be the ultimate source of moral goodness. It’s unclear what a Kantian, Utilitarianist, or Rawlsian could say to each other to convince the others to abandon their asserted objective moral codes.

  Imperatives demand a reason. When we hear a command, if we don’t already understand the reason, we ask, “Why?” To simply reply, “Because I said so”—known as the appeal to authority—is technically a reason, but a pretty weak one. Because we don’t generally act without reasons, a command that fails to provide or at least imply a reason fails to motivate us to act. You might also recognize a parallel to the “folly of the lottery ticket” here. Choosing one exclusive moral code out of so many potential choices18 is as dicey a proposition as choosing one god out of thousands.

  To meet the criteria of being an objective truth, these man-made moral codes would need to be objectively justified or to exist as an independent standard separate from any individual’s ability to form them.

  It should be added that the ideas captured by these moral theories are still meaningful and may very well play a role in how we make moral assessments. Concepts such as applying behaviors universally to everyone or examining ethical dilemmas from an unbiased position are powerful tools for examining ethics. But that doesn’t mean that such standards imply the existence of an objective moral truth, much less that any of these moral codes is holding the winning ticket to the moral lottery.

  Duty as Moral Code

  Finally, another commonly cited manmade motivator is duty.19 Do we really visit our mothers because their company makes us happy or because duty compels us to? You might say it depends on the mother.

  But what is duty, really? The textbook definition is, “What one performs in fulfillment of the dictates of conscience, piety, right, or law.”20 In other words, duty is the name we give to nonphysical notions that compel us to act in a particular way.

  When we say, “Duty requires us to act a certain way,” we’re really saying, “I’ve made a commitment to act that way, or my preexisting commitments require me to act that way.” As a result, while duties might seem to be external motivators, they are not. Duties are simply a person’s commitments. A person will only feel a duty to do things that relate to commitments he or she has made. Consider a daughter who loves her father dearly. She feels that the father-daughter bond creates a duty for daughters to visit their fathers. But if the daughter didn’t love her father (maybe because he was abusive), she is less likely to feel this duty because she doesn’t have a commitment to respect her father.

  So duty isn’t really an external motivator—it’s an internal motivator, a specific type of life-happiness preference. Duty expresses a preference some of us have for honoring our commitments and regulating our own behavior when it comes to actions that, while they may lead to diminished short-term happiness, could lead to more significant long-term life-happiness.

  This doesn’t mean duty is an unimportant concept. A husband who remains faithful to his wife may claim this to be an act of duty, but it may also be his preference to avoid the potential consequences of hurting someone dear to him, being shunned by his family or friends, or feeling guilty about his behavior. The soldier who says she fights for her country out of duty may also be motivated by the life-happiness she expects to gain in the form of self-esteem, self-respect, and the praise she receives from others for her choice. Duty may well play a strong role in certain aspects of our decision-making proces
s. Indeed, duties remind us of our commitments we’ve made to others in the past and help us choose our future commitments. The point at hand, though, is that duty is not a separate, independent force or an objective moral truth but part of the makeup of our choice preferences.

  In summary then, neither God-created moral codes, leader-created moral codes, consensus moral codes, human-designed moral codes, nor duty satisfy the requirements for an objective moral truth.

  Having shown that we possess the ability to choose how we act, and having found no objective moral truth, the question, “How ought we behave?” now seems semantically incorrect. It falsely assumes that there is some external motivator dictating how we should behave. Instead, we can answer the question as follows:

  There’s no one way we “ought to behave.” We choose to behave in the way that we think optimizes our life-happiness.

  Without an implied external motivator, our behavior is dictated by the pursuit of our own life-happiness and by our choices, rather than by any supposed external moral obligation.

  Of course, our life-happiness may very well be influenced by things like duty, popular opinion, ethical theories, culture, and religion. But even though we might choose to incorporate these influences into our subjective decisions, that doesn’t make them objective moral standards. Rather, they are factors we may choose (or not choose) to incorporate into our ethical decision-making processes, based on our own subjective desires.

  The seventh Non-Commandment

  This chapter focused less on creating a new belief than on displacing a false one about obligation to an objective moral truth. As a result, we can now add the rejection of an objective moral truth to our list of non-commandments. But this non-commandment is not yet complete. We still have to explore where our morals do come from. In the next chapter we will explore what moral beliefs arise from a worldview based on choice and preference.

  To recap the list of Ten Non-commandments, so far:

  I.

  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

  II.

  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

  III.

  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

  IV.

  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

  V.

  There is no God.

  VI.

  We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.

  VII.

  There is no universal moral truth.

  More to come . . .

  9

  Moral Happiness

  Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.

  —George Washington

  Having failed to find even one objective basis for moral truth, we are left to conclude that morality is subjective.

  That simple sentence is enough to give many people an anxiety attack. The belief that we need absolute objective morality runs deep and wide in most of us. As the psychologist William James put it, “We are all absolutists by instinct, and only by reflection can we achieve empiricist moderation.”1

  We’re here to bring some of that empiricist moderation. But we do so humbly, because once upon a time we both believed in objective morality. John was a Kantian during college, and Lex as a teenager was a believer in the “objective moral duty” view of morality.

  While reading some of the coming discussions, the idea of absolute moral truth might occasionally surface in your thoughts as the question, “How ought I behave?” But remember that we just spent a chapter rejecting the whole idea of “ought,” or that there is an objectively correct way to behave. We’ll revisit this point, since it’s important to deal fully with the abandonment of an objective moral truth if we’re going to keep moving forward.

  Here’s another sentence that might surface in some form in your mind: “A system of morality should tell you how to behave in any given situation.” The hidden assumption here is that there’s one absolute or correct way to behave in every situation. To believe in a subjective morality, on the other hand, is to recognize that a system of morality doesn’t tell us how we ought to behave; it guides us in understanding our own thought processes and then lets each of us choose how to act.

  But that leads to one of the most common concerns in any discussion of this kind: “If everything is subjective, then anything goes! All versions of morality are equally valid.”

  Frankly, this fear of complete moral relativism is misplaced. Even without an absolute moral truth, we can still have a meaningful conversation about right and wrong actions. It’s true that claims about right and wrong can’t be stated as certainties, but they can be stated as strong (and even enforceable) preferences. As a result, we can still debate ethical values by relating the preferences of the individual to the moral consensus preferences of society—that is, balancing what you want against what’s best for everyone.

  To explore the concept of subjective morality further and understand what it means, let’s posit an individual named Pete. Pete will share with us intimate details about his upbringing and his personal experiences. First we’ll look at how Pete might have formed his subjective moral outlook. Then we’ll look at what motivates Pete to act morally. Finally, in the next chapter, we’ll look at how Pete’s morals fit in the context of a larger society and how societal influences affect his moral outlook.

  As a child, Pete’s upbringing and exposure to life were largely regulated by his parents. They decided if he could drink soda or coffee—and so played a key role in nurturing the types of pleasures he could cultivate at a young age. Their influence was even more profound at times when they made an effort to reward or punish certain behaviors. Pete was encouraged to share toys with his siblings and reprimanded when he did not. While his parents couldn’t directly change Pete’s innate inclinations, they were certainly able to cultivate or nurture certain behaviors they favored through access, rewards, and punishments—sometimes referred to as “parenting.” So Pete’s pleasure preferences were strongly influenced by his upbringing and life experiences as a child.2

  As a young adult, Pete came to realize that he was free to make his own decisions. With this realization came the awareness that his parents’ reprimands or encouragements no longer had the same controlling effect on his behavior that they once did. At this point, Pete began to ask himself, “Do I really enjoy doing this or that, or have I been behaving in a particular way just to please my parents?” In other words, does Pete really enjoy cheesecake, or does he enjoy it simply because he was told by his parents to eat it at his grandmother’s house every Sunday? The answer is unclear, since Pete’s current love of cheesecake is a product of both his own inclinations and the reality that he has many pleasurable memories of eating cheesecake at his grandma’s. Pete’s pleasure preferences as related to cheesecake are a combination of many influences and experiences. Although the exact source of his pleasure is imprecise, the question he faces today is quite clear: Does he really like cheesecake?

  The answer to him is obvious—he does. His current set of pleasure preferences is now determined through his own personal choices, even if those choices originate from a period in his life when he didn’t have the ability to choose freely.

  There’s a practical element to life that doesn’t allow us to sit and contemplate the full consequences of every action we take. Instead, we tend to form rules of thumb as shortcuts to decision-making.

  Pete may realize that his enjoyment of cheesecake falls under a much broader preference for sweet foods. So wh
en he has a choice between two foods he’s never tried before, Pete can use this guide to influence his choices. Extending this idea, Pete may develop a larger set of general guiding principles for his culinary choices, such as a preference for larger meals or for eating with others. We may refer to this set of general guides that Pete develops as his culinary preferences.

  This example is a glimpse into how we form all of our behavioral preferences. The mechanism that creates Pete’s food preferences is the same process that creates his broader preferences, including his moral preferences. His preferences are a combination of his personal tastes, experiences, and influences.

  Viewed in this light, our system of ethics is just a collection of guiding principles and rules that we’ve collected over the years that encompass our preferences relating to a particular kind of behavior: interactions with other people.

  Such a perspective makes some people anxious. They worry that if personal preferences and happiness are our only motivation, we would all become hedonists who selfishly pursue nothing but our carnal desires. That’s overly simplistic.

  First of all, the concept of life-happiness means that we are striving for an optimal balance between short- and long-term happiness. Most of us would agree that pursuing only one’s carnal desires, while pleasurable in the moment, wouldn’t lead to long-term happiness over the course of a lifetime. Second, there are other mechanisms within a system of pursuing happiness that can and do lead to “typical” moral behavior. Enlightened self-interest is one; identification with others is another.3