Chapter 3 - Ethics and Morality

The Basis of Morality

How can we have morality without a God? If religions are a creation of humans then the ethics and morality dictated to us by those religions are also a creation of humans. Therefore, if our creator is unknown then the basis for our ethics and morality must be humanity itself, something unknown to us, or a combination of the two. Since we can't look to the unknown for our answers, we must look to what we do know as best we can. We are most likely the basis of our own morality.

Let’s take the idea of an island of isolation. If you were living on an island all alone, what actions and thoughts would be considered immoral? Would walking around the island naked be improper if nobody else was there to see you? What words would be bad if nobody could hear them and be offended by their meaning? What activities would be immoral if you were the only one there and the activities only involved yourself? If you grew up all alone without any knowledge of religion, where would you get your morality and understanding of what is ethical beyond what you decide as right for yourself?

Society

Let’s add a few people to your island. Once again let’s assume there is no knowledge of any religions. How would you know what is considered to be the right and wrong behavior between the people? You may say it’s unethical for the stronger to take food from the weaker, but how is that belief shared by everyone and established as a moral truth?

When a group of people gather together and attempt to work together for the common good of their society, then they often establish a shared set of ethics and morality to govern that society. This could be decided upon by the majority, the strongest, the oldest, or any other collective method. Not only can they define this, but they can make it a reality by enforcing those standards through forms of punishment or by rejecting the members of society that do not conform.

We join a society almost naturally by just being born into a family. Families stay together as their own little society for many reasons that generally begin with the natural love for our offspring and the desire to help them grow into individuals that can take care of themselves. We have a connection with and pride for the offspring we create.

Over time, our families have joined larger societies that ultimately help us individually. Each person’s contribution to that society can work to a greater good that benefits all members of that society. It is like a pack of wolves that is able to hunt larger prey as a pack and become much more effective than individual hunters.

The Good of the Society

Your society collectively defines what is right and wrong for your place in society. It could be determined that the stronger taking food from the weaker is bad for society because the weaker are less capable of helping the hunt in the future if they are hungry. The weak may group together to punish a strong individual if they are able to or may just break off into their own society and isolate themselves from the stronger individual that is preying on the weak.

Ultimately, if the society doesn’t work for the good of the society then it can eventually be destroyed by the bad elements of that society. How strong would a society of cannibals be if they didn’t have ethics over how their cannibalism was practiced? How well could a society of thieves or pirates work together to support the society if their tendency is to just take from each other? How could a society survive if they lacked the ethics to work and contribute to the common good and were only looking out for themselves? A society full of bad behaviors directed at themselves will eventually tear itself apart and destroy the benefits and bonds of that society.

The good of the society is a very important basis for sound ethics and morality for any society to function. What is bad for society is what is bad for individuals and vice versa. The argument for the need of religion is that it provides us with our morality and the definition of what is good for society. But a society can determine that for itself without religion because it is a natural human need for the survival of the society. Religion is just one way the rules can be defined and passed along from person to person, just like telling our children to be good so that Santa Claus will bring them presents or to not do certain things because the police will arrest you and society will put you in jail.

Intelligent Morality

Basic decisions of right and wrong can come naturally to a society of animals. When you expand this concept to intelligent humans we get morality defined for a society that can be traced more to people’s perceptions and desires instead of just their basic survival instincts. Their intelligence complicates the survival instinct and results in a much more complicated view of morality and what is right and wrong.

Bertrand Russell answered a variety of questions on the topic of “God’s Law” and good and evil. This exchange covers the topic of an intelligent human morality very well:

Since you deny 'God's Law', what authority do you accept as a guide to conduct?

An Agnostic does not accept any 'authority' in the sense in which religious people do. He holds that a man should think out questions of conduct for himself. Of course, he will seek to profit by the wisdom of others, but he will have to select for himself the people he is to consider wise, and he will not regard even what they say as unquestionable. He will observe that what passes as 'God's law' varies from time to time. The Bible says both that a woman must not marry her deceased husband's brother, and that, in certain circumstances, she must do so. If you have the misfortune to be a childless widow with an unmarried brother-in-law, it is logically impossible for you to avoid disobeying 'God's law'.

How do you know what is good and what is evil? What does an agnostic consider a sin?

The Agnostic is not quite so certain as some Christians are as to what is good and what is evil. He does not hold, as most Christians in the past held, that people who disagree with the government on abstruse points of theology ought to suffer a painful death. He is against persecution, and rather chary of moral condemnation.

As for 'sin', he thinks it not a useful notion. He admits, of course, that some kinds of conduct are desirable and some undesirable, but he holds that the punishment of undesirable kinds is only to be commended when it is deterrent or reformatory, not when it is inflicted because it is thought a good thing on its own account that the wicked should suffer. It was this belief in vindictive punishment that made men accept Hell. This is part of the harm done by the notion of 'sin'.

Does an agnostic do whatever he pleases?

In one sense, no; in another sense, everyone does whatever he pleases. Suppose, for example, you hate someone so much that you would like to murder him. Why do you not do so? You may reply: "Because religion tells me that murder is a sin." But as a statistical fact, agnostics are not more prone to murder than other people, in fact, rather less so. They have the same motives for abstaining from murder as other people have. Far and away the most powerful of these motives is the fear of punishment. In lawless conditions, such as a gold rush, all sorts of people will commit crimes, although in ordinary circumstances they would have been law-abiding. There is not only actual legal punishment; there is the discomfort of dreading discovery, and the loneliness of knowing that, to avoid being hated, you must wear a mask with even your closest intimates. And there is also what may be called "conscience": If you ever contemplated a murder, you would dread the horrible memory of your victim's last moments or lifeless corpse. All this, it is true, depends upon your living in a law-abiding community, but there are abundant secular reasons for creating and preserving such a community.

I said that there is another sense in which every man does as he pleases. No one but a fool indulges every impulse, but what holds a desire in check is always some other desire. A man's anti-social wishes may be restrained by a wish to please God, but they may also be restrained by a wish to please his friends, or to win the respect of his community, or to be able to contemplate himself without disgust. But if he has no such wishes, the mere abstract concepts of morality will not keep him straight.

There have been base and cruel passions, which religion opposes. If you abandon religious principles, could mankind exist?

The existence of base and cruel passions is undeniable, but I find no evidence in history that religion has opposed these passions. On the contrary, it has sanctified them, and enabled people to indulge them without remorse. Cruel persecutions have been commoner in Christendom than anywhere else. What appears to justify persecution is dogmatic belief. Kindliness and tolerance only prevail in proportion as dogmatic belief decays. In our day, a new dogmatic religion, namely communism, has arisen. To this, as to other systems of dogma, the agnostic is opposed. The persecuting character of present day communism is exactly like the persecuting character of Christianity in earlier centuries. In so far as Christianity has become less persecuting, this is mainly due to the work of freethinkers who have made dogmatists rather less dogmatic. If they were as dogmatic now as in former times, they would still think it right to burn heretics at the stake. The spirit of tolerance which some modern Christians regard as essentially Christian is, in fact, a product of the temper which allows doubt and is suspicious of absolute certainties. I think that anybody who surveys past history in an impartial manner will be driven to the conclusion that religion has caused more suffering than it has prevented.

Is not faith in reason alone a dangerous creed? Is not reason imperfect and inadequate without spiritual and moral law?

No sensible man, however agnostic, has "faith in reason alone." Reason is concerned with matters of fact, some observed, some inferred. The question whether there is a future life and the question whether there is a God concern matters of fact, and the agnostic will hold that they should be investigated in the same way as the question, "Will there be an eclipse of the moon tomorrow?" But matters of fact alone are not sufficient to determine action, since they do not tell us what ends we ought to pursue. In the realm of ends, we need something other than reason. The agnostic will find his ends in his own heart and not in an external command. Let us take an illustration: Suppose you wish to travel by train from New York to Chicago; you will use reason to discover when the trains run, and a person who though that there was some faculty of insight or intuition enabling him to dispense with the timetable would be thought rather silly. But no timetable will tell him that it is wise, he will have to take account of further matters of fact; but behind all the matters of fact, there will be the ends that he thinks fitting to pursue, and these, for an agnostic as for other men, belong to a realm which is not that of reason, though it should be in no degree contrary to it. The realm I mean is that of emotion and feeling and desire.

Ethics

Practical and applied ethics is often thought of as a process of reducing moral conflicts to the point of non-violent resolution. Without this approach, we fall back to the simplistic view of “I am right, you are wrong, and you should do what I say.” This kind of assertion is the basis of much authority and often leads to violence when backed by force. This is why a religious application of ethics does not always lead to actual harmony among all people.

If religion is promoted to the point of ruling over the ethics of society then it follows the “I am right, you are wrong” viewpoint of ethics. If you are not applying God’s ethics then you are wrong and God’s people are justified in their attempt to correct you and make your morality match theirs. If the idea of an absolute morality is embraced then a large society can have trouble dealing with the moral viewpoint of the majority and reconciling that with the minority viewpoints that do not match it.

A simple view is that ethics can balance “right versus right” and can be entirely situational. Two people in conflict caused by differing morals that are put there by circumstances, environments, and situations that are all mostly out of their control have only the choice of resolution under their control. The morality of such controversial subjects as marriage, blasphemy, slavery, sexuality, abortion, capital punishment, cloning, evolution, nudism, suicide, and women’s roles have often had people on both sides of an issue claiming they were right with equal conviction and proof.

Slavery is a good example of a conflict based upon moral absolutes since for the most part it has been resolved by the modern world. The Christian Bible does not condemn the practice of slavery and instead tells a person how to treat their slaves, yet modern society has now established it as being immoral. Both sides of the issue made use of the Bible to support their moral viewpoint that slavery was good or bad when this issue was being resolved. However, on our own as humans we have determined that it is unethical to enslave each other. The immorality of slavery is becoming shared by more and more people around the world independently of their religious teachings and literature.

Morality does not have an unchanging and universal absolute. Morality is a set of ideas and beliefs that can be evolved and improved over time in the ideal world. This leads to an application of ethics that needs to adapt over time as the world changes. I will not go into the details of everything I believe to be moral or immoral or the ethics of how we should all act in specific situations since such beliefs are not absolute and eternal. I think it is more important to just point out that our morality and our ethics need to be personally evaluated throughout our lives and hopefully they will improve over time and the generations as we learn from each other the best way to be a human and a member of the human society.

The important point to remember is that working for the good of society benefits each of us individually. This should remain as a core moral viewpoint of any society or that society becomes reduced to just a loose association of individuals lacking in any mutual benefits.