01.04.09
The atheist and morality
Today’s post: Atheists and morality, on
Atheists have moral reflections too
by Sue Blackmore
Reposted from: Dawkins site
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/04/religion-atheism-radio4-bbc
Blackmore raises some perfectly valid points, but some distinctions should be made here. We might distinguish
atheists in general
atheists who are Darwinists/Dawkins followers, and/or adopt Darwinian views of the evolution of ethics
[many other possibilities, e.g. atheists who are Nietzscheans, vs atheists who are Kantians, or Buddhists, or .....etc...]
A confusion in many religious traditionalists over the nature of ethics suggests a careful reading of Kant might be helpful. Kant, who is no atheist (and not a standard theist), makes it clear that morality demands autonomy, and theistic authoritarianism is actually taken to be completely antagonistic to ethics. So in one sense atheists have an edge here!
So atheists, considering the framework of Kant, have a very strong defense against the charge that atheists due to their lack of religion are somehow deprived of morality. It ain’t so. It is worth reading Kant’s Groundwork (or skim the work to start and read a commentary, Kant’s obscurity gets to be a problem), his first work on ethics, to note that Kant’s aim is to assist the ordinary man, and his common ordinary morality. Kant attempts, whether successfully or not, to evoke this inherent morality already present in man. This morality is something we observe in action, and sense, and can’t put our finger on. Whatever it is, it is present in atheists almost by definition, as members of the species homo sapiens. Kant’s effort is to try and elucidate this built in morality. It is a classic and profound effort, but one that many have rejected, offering nothing in its place (and, no, Nietzsche didn’t produce much insight here). But note that universal aggreement is elusive on this.
And my second point is that this ‘common ordinary morality’ can suffer confusions as we reflect on it (as if we reflect on language and get confused, although we can automatically speak perfect grammar in a native language, the analogy is not perfect) or for other reasons.
Here, I must say it, Darwinism and scientific reductionism has introduced just such a confusion, or a whole series of them. The Just So Stories of ethical evolution via kin/group selection scenarios are a set of fallacies, and they have, in any case, never defined or explicated, as Kant attempted, morality as we see it in action.
Scientists refuse to grant what Kant considers fundamental (and these issues are the real core of his thinking, more even than his oftern challenged categorical imperative), which is that the ethical actor has a will, that can decide between alternatives, and, more controversially, that he does so according to a rational set of decision procedures, called hypothetical or categorical imperatives.
Note that Kant strains to accept the causal framework of Newton, and then turns around and suggests how transcendental idealism can reconcile this with the action of free will.
Scientists who reduce ethics to causal mechanics, obstinately and compulsively, just don’t get it, and confuse the whole question of ethics.
In any case, an atheist who is not a Darwinist (whose case remains obscure), will usually show some clear variant of this common ordinary morality. The case of the Darwinist, to a close look, will not be an exception, save for the distortions created by his scientism.
It should be said that this is a shaky argument, in some ways. Do all men agree on this ordinary common morality? Clearly not! So what is its essence? How could we speak of it? Kant tried to suggest one approach. It has been attacked so many times, but still refloatates due to its cogency. (The latest attack seems to be Kauffman’s misguised critique in Reinventing The Sacred)
I think the question is the real challenge to ideas of evolution, what to say of philosophy. No known theory of evolution can really address this, and the current concealed nihilism of the trained scientist (competing with his built in common ordianary morality) constantly misses the point, and ends up in the reductionist pseudo-explanations of the type suggested by natural selection.
In a word, then, there is no reason why an atheist can’t be as moral as anyone else.
But atheists are being systematically coopted by the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens/New Atheist movement, which is strongly connected, unnecessarily, with Darwinism and scientism, and, one suspects some background reading in Nietzsche (who systematically trashes ethics, and transcendental idealism’s elucidation of the will, replacing ‘will’ with the most vulgar obscenity Nietzsche could think of, the ‘will to power’, what was this fellow thinking? ), and about all that can be said is that people who were atheists before, e.g. Buddhists, need to choose a new label for themselves, because they have no place in this new movement.
Some, it should be said, have always been suspicious Kant was a closet atheist who turned around and reinvented ‘god’ around ethics!
Hard to know who he was!
Scientists have to decide how long they wish to remain frozen in Kant’s classic antinomy: if they wish to do causal science, they will by definition fail to do ethics right. If they wish to do ethics right, they will cease to be scientists.
They can pretend otherwise with pseudo-sciences like Darwinism, but at the end of the game science itself will be discredited.