Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world–and there clearly are–then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.
Sam Harris, The Moral landscape
Who has the moral authority to decide what is good and what is evil? As we have seen, moral codes have played a key historical role in maintaining order and harmony in rapidly growing urban societies. We also saw that moral codes are so central to the functioning of the group that they are considered divine in origin, and as such they represent absolute standards of conduct for the faithful. The absolute character of moral codes is what the faithful believe gives them their power and authority. Further, the religious claim that, without a belief in God or gods, there is no logical foundation for an objective morality.
Even today, belief in God itself is considered a value in most countries. In a famous 1991 essay, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus asks “Can atheists be good citizens?” The answer: No. “We may safely assume,” he writes, “that [atheists] abide by the laws, pay their taxes, and may be even congenial and helpful neighbors. But can a person who does not acknowledge that he is accountable to a truth higher than the self, external to the self, really be trusted? …. It follows that an atheist could not be trusted to be a good citizen, and therefore could not be a citizen at all.”[1]
Even though the number of people without any religious affiliation has risen since Neuhaus penned his essay, for most people around the world belief in God is needed to be moral (see graph below). As one of the sponsors of a poll on religion in America writes, “One message arrived loud and clear: Americans strongly equate religion with personal ethics and behavior, considering it an antidote to the moral decline they perceive in our nation today. Crime, greed, uncaring parents, materialism–Americans believe that all these problems would be mitigated if people were more religious. And to most citizens it does not matter what religion is involved.”[2]
Source: McKay R. & Whitehouse, H. (2015). Religion and Morality, Psychological Bulletin, 141(2) 447-73.
According to the Conservapedia, an online encyclopedia written from a conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view, atheists are to blame for practically all types of crimes, from being the biggest mass murderers in history to cannibalism to infanticide to animal abuse (interestingly, pedophilia does not make it into their list).[3]
Assessing the claims of the religious on morality
Let us examine the claims made by religious conservatives: only religion can provide a basis for objective morality, and it is an antidote for moral decline. For the first claim, it is relevant to quote Plato’s dialogue “Euthyphro,” in which the eponymous character tries to explain his conception of piety to Socrates: “the pious acts,” Euthyphro says, are those which are loved by the gods.” But Socrates finds this definition ambiguous and asks Euthyphro: “are the pious acts pious because they are loved by the gods, or are pious acts loved by the gods because they are pious?”[4]
This is known as Euthyphro’s Dilemma. Translated into contemporary terms, the question Socrates is asking is this: are morally good actions morally good simply in virtue of God favoring them? Or does God favor them because they are—independently of His favoring them—morally good? If the latter is true, there are independent moral standards: some actions are right or wrong in themselves, independent of God’s commands. This view is accepted by Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue. It follows from this view that God no longer plays a vital role in the foundations of morality. Therefore, the claim that only religion has an objective basis of morality is invalid.
Most religious people believe the former: the mere fact that God favors them is that makes morally good things morally good. In other words, there are no moral standards other than God’s will: without God’s commands, nothing would be right or wrong. Whatever God commands must be good: even if he commanded someone to inflict suffering, then inflicting suffering must be moral. This is known as Divine Command Theory (DCT) or voluntarism.[5]
In this view “goodness” becomes a truism, with no independent content. To say that God chooses the good is just like saying that the Equator is at zero degrees latitude, or that in football a touchdown is worth six points. However, unless you are a believer, there are no compelling reasons to accept this definition of what is or is not moral. In fact, there are good reasons why we should not. For instance, one implication of DCT is that there are no moral reasons to obey what God commands, only the fact that He can make us suffer if we disobey. The same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation to obey tyrants.
Box 7: Is Religion the Answer to Moral Decline? Many Americans think that religion – any religion – makes people more just, compassionate and moral. This belief has deep roots in US society. Benjamin Franklin noted, “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others.” This sentiment is not limited to the American population. “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible,” Dostoevsky wrote. The evidence, however, does not support this widespread belief. Quite the contrary, at first glance religion has the opposite effect. In an extensive study, published in 2005, the researcher Gregory S. Paul examined the statistics from eighteen of the most developed democratic nations1. The study reveals clear correlations between various indicators of social strife and religiosity, showing that whether religion causes social strife or not, it certainly does not prevent it. In general, higher rates of belief in, and worship of, a creator correlates with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion. The United States experiences more homicide rates than more secular countries such as Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. After the US, the country with the highest homicide rate is Portugal, which is also the most religious of all the countries in the study (in terms of percent of the population with absolute belief in God.) The number of abortions in the US surpasses that of other “less Godly” countries, this despite the efforts of “pro-life” Americans. What is the meaning of these statistics? One angle could be that religion may be a hindrance to the development of moral character. Or religion may hinder progress by distracting us from our troubles (with imaginary solutions to real problems.) However, several problems were noted by other researchers on Paul’s methodology such as lack of clarity in his definitions and concepts of “religion” and “secular”, lack of statistical rigor, and not indicating the limits of his sources of data in such as the diverse linguistical understanding of “religion” in all cultures in the data used. In a follow-up paper in 2009, Paul notes “high religiosity is not universal to human populations, and it is actually inversely related to a wide range of socio-economic indicators representing the health of modern democracies.” He holds that, “once a nation’s population becomes prosperous and secure, for example, through economic security and universal health care, much of the population loses interest in seeking the aid and protection of supernatural entities. This effect appears to be so consistent that it may prevent nations from being highly religious while enjoying good internal socioeconomic conditions.” Whether religion leads directly to dysfunctionality, or religions merely flourish in dysfunctional societies, are still open questions, since the study computes correlations but does not determine causality. In fact, evidence shows that religious people tend to be more altruistic. In his book Who Really Cares (Basic Books, 2006), the Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks argues that when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering, conservatives outperform liberals. Unquestionably, religion is an important factor in many people’s lives and behavior, which makes it an important subject of research and study. 1. Paul, G. S. (2005) Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in prosperous democracies, Journal of Religion and Society 7; for a critique see Jensen, G. (2006). Religious Cosmologies and Homicide Rates among Nations: A Closer Look. Journal of Religion and Society, 8.
If goodness is based on the whim of a deity, we can never be sure if goodness and evil are arbitrary, which is why we should reject the idea that goodness is defined by God. There have been many attempts by religious apologists to address this issue. One typical example: “God’s nature, His divine character, serves as the standard of goodness, which He follows. Since He is pointing to His own nature as the standard, that standard does not exist above or outside Himself. And since He is immutable and perfect, He will not be whimsical or arbitrary in His declaration of good and evil. He will always tell us the truth.”[6] These arguments suffer from circularity, as they introduce other elements, God’s perfection, and immutability, that are assumed to be God’s attributes. They do not address the criticism that goodness is arbitrary.
The idea that religion serves as an antidote to moral decline can be tested empirically. Some of the world’s lowest crime rates are seen in countries that are more secular, such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, and Iceland. In contrast, the countries with the highest crime rates are also more religious, such as El Salvador, South Africa, Brazil, and Honduras (see Box 7).
In a 2014 study, researchers asked 1,252 adults of various religious and political backgrounds in the United States and Canada to record the good and bad deeds they committed, witnessed, learned about, or were the target of, throughout the day. The goal of the study was to assess how morality plays out in everyday life. The researchers found that religious people are not more likely to do good than their nonreligious counterparts. And while they may vehemently disagree with one another at times, liberals and conservatives also tend to be on par when it comes to behaving morally.[7] While further research is needed, the evidence does not support the claim that religion is an antidote to moral decline.
Where does science come in?
If religion should not be the arbiter of morality, what should? Could it be true that without absolute dogmas we do not have an objective basis of morality? Not really. The answer is not to be found in the heavens but on “down-to-Earth” human nature and well-being. We saw in Idea 7 that morality is the way in which evolution “solved” the problem of cooperation. So, can morality be translated into facts that can be studied scientifically?
The classical philosophers believed it was our moral duty to pursue the good life. It was natural for them to derive moral lessons from their views of the cosmos and the nature of Man. Yet, the idea of using scientific knowledge to help us determine what is or is not moral is anathema not only for the religious but also for many philosophers. In the 18th century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume famously argued that no description of the way the world is (facts) can tell us how we ought to behave (morality). Following Hume, numerous philosophers believed that statements concerning facts and statements concerning moral values are of a different kind, and so they cannot be related in a meaningful way; going from the “is” to the “ought” is to commit what the philosopher G. E. Moore referred to as the “naturalistic fallacy.”[8]
In essence, this means that even superior knowledge of the empirical nature of the world does not provide a higher insight into morality than that provided by non-empirical methods, such as religion. Many scientists and public intellectuals seem to support this view, including the late Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most famous defenders of evolution. In his book Rocks of Ages, he lays down a principle that sets the boundaries between science and religion, which he terms NOMA, i.e., Non-Overlapping Magisteria. A magisterium, Gould tells us, “Is a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.”[9]
Gould is correct in that scientific facts are not ipso facto good or bad. It is not knowledge per se that it is good or bad, but how we make use of it. There is a long, pitiful historical record in the use, or rather misuse, of pseudoscientific reasoning to justify and reinforce prejudices and preconceived notions (see Idea 6), more so in the case of evolution. Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy. Francis Galton based his “science” of eugenics on it. Similarly, eugenicists in the United States invoked evolution to conclude that only the brightest and talented should be allowed to reproduce. These ideas resonated with the Nazis, who used them to justify the extermination of “inferior” beings.
The improper use of scientific facts, however, should not cloud the obvious: science, by helping to uncover the workings of human emotions and cognition, provides a wealth of resources that can inform, in a practical way, our moral deliberations. Not all natural facts are relevant to ethical or moral discourse, but all facts that are relevant to ethical and moral discourse are nonetheless natural facts. Indeed, some facts have moral relevance that is difficult to ignore.
Consider homosexuality, which some religions deem an abomination and a sinful lifestyle. In some Islamic countries homosexuality is punishable by death. In medieval times, some people thought homosexuals were responsible for earthquakes. The stigma against homosexuality persists even today. For many years, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality” disorder that needed treatment. It was only in 1973 that the APA finally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
Now we know that homosexuality is not a life choice that people make because of bad parenting, unresponsive mothers, or exposure to homosexual lifestyles, or any other reasons people have put forward. Although we can choose whether to act on our desires, the evidence shows that sexual orientation is not a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed. Numerous studies have established that same-sex attraction is a heritable trait. [10]
This knowledge may not change the minds of all the faithful regarding their rejection of homosexual lifestyles, but it may open their minds to the idea that sexual orientation is not the result of weak morals. Something similar is happening with obesity, which has reached epidemic proportions in the Western world. Traditionally, obesity has been associated with gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. Weight stigma is prevalent in Western society and has numerous negative effects on people with obesity. However, more and more physicians now consider obesity, at least in the most extreme cases, as a disease, not as a failure of willpower (see also Idea 14).[11]
Contrary to what Gould claims, there is no clear boundary between facts and values. As Sam Harris writes in his 2010 book The Moral Landscape:[12]
The divide between facts and values is illusory in at least three senses: (1) whatever can be known about maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures – which is, I will argue, the only thing we can reasonably value – must at some point translate into facts about brains and their interaction with the world at large; (2) the very idea of “objective” knowledge (i.e., knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depend upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.); (3) beliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain: it appears that we have a common system for judging truth and falsity in both domains.
As Harris shows, there is no contradiction or ambiguity by defining “good” as that which supports well-being. In other words, there is no doubt that maximizing well-being is “good.” Furthermore, Harris makes the case that consciousness is the only domain of value:[13]
What is the alternative? I invite you to try to think of a source of value that has absolutely nothing to do with the (actual or potential) experience of conscious beings. Take a moment to think about what this would entail: whatever this alternative is, it cannot affect the experience of any creature (in this life or in other). Put this thing in a box, and what you have in that box is – it would seem, by definition – the least interesting thing in the universe.
I find the ideas of Harris compelling. This does not mean, though, that it is easy or uncontroversial to apply them in practice. There is, for example, the question of what counts as a conscious creature. We know that animals such as monkeys and dolphins exhibit some self-awareness (see Idea 15). Does the well-being of “higher-consciousness” creatures count more than those of “lower-consciousness”? This is an inherently difficult question to answer, although a case can be made that we should care about the welfare of nonhumans.[14] This is a radical, interesting proposition, but its discussion will take us away from our main topic
Moral dilemmas: When science cannot help
The type of situations where there are no obvious right or wrong answers are known as moral dilemmas. That is, situations in which a person stands under two conflicting moral requirements, none of which overrides the other. Putting it differently, moral dilemmas are situations in which every available choice is wrong. We can actually “see” the brain struggling with moral dilemmas, when neuroscientists look at brain scans. Moral decision-making involves competing brain networks vying for supremacy. Simple moral decisions – being asked if killing a child is right or wrong? – are simple because they activate a straightforward brain response.
More difficult moral decisions, by contrast, activate multiple brain regions that conflict with one another. In a brain-imaging experiment, researchers asked volunteers to imagine that they were hiding in a cellar of a village as enemy soldiers came looking to kill all the inhabitants. If a baby was crying in the cellar, researchers asked, was it right to smother the child to keep the soldiers from discovering the cellar and killing everyone?[15]
The reason people are slow to answer such an awful question, the study indicated, is that emotion-linked circuits automatically signaling that killing a baby is wrong, clash with areas of the brain that involve cooler aspects of cognition. One brain region activated when people process complex choices is the inferior parietal lobe. This part of the brain, in essence, was “arguing” with brain networks that reacted with visceral horror. These complex competing forces may have come online at different points in our evolutionary history; basic emotional response is probably more “primitive” than the cognitive ability to evaluate costs and benefits.
Science, however, is of limited value when it comes to some questions for which there are no clear-cut answers. Consider, for example, one of the most fractious issues of our time: The abortion debate. The extremes of this debate are represented by the so-called “pro-choice” and “pro-life” camps, a misnomer since no one is really against life. As with most intractable issues, the conflict arises because abortion pits two core values against each other: The rights of the mother against the rights of the unborn child.
The disagreement hinges on the definition of when life begins. Most pro-lifers contend that life begins at conception, with some Christians claiming that the soul makes its appearance at this stage. The pro-choice group counters with the argument that life starts weeks later, and so abortion should be allowed in the interim. Science can inform this debate, but it cannot settle the discussion either way, less so in the case of the human soul.
When does life begin? In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, on Jun 24, 2022, this question has become unavoidable, as activists and politicians demand concrete answers. However, according to the philosopher Michael Hooker questions of this type are “conceptually undecidable.” To illustrate this, he imagines having a large glass urn full of marbles, to the point that anyone looking at the urn would observe, “Wow, that’s a lot of marbles!” Suppose you begin removing marbles, one by one, until there are so few marbles that anyone looking on would say, “Goodness, there are hardly any marbles in there.”
Which marble was it that, when you look it out, caused the onlookers to shift from a state of saying “a lot of marbles” to a state of saying “hardly any marbles”? The answer, says Hooker, is “there was no single marble.” In that regard, he explains, fetuses are like urns of marbles. “There is no point in the life of a developing human being when you can say, ‘Yes, at that point it becomes a human being.’ There is no discrete even … There is no ‘moment of conception.’ It is a continuum of biochemical events. The concept that there is a moment of conception is unintelligible. It cannot be made real when you reduce it to the level of molecular biology.”[16]
If science cannot help with this big question, and if not all of us recognize religion as the ultimate arbiter of moral authority what, then, is left? The plain answer is that moral issues may be a source of perennial conflict. Many complex factors influence our collective moral thinking, such as experience, changes in material and cultural circumstances, the demonstrated success or failure of moral principles as means of coping with the problems of life, personal example, charismatic authority, and appeals to emotion.
This is why moral dilemmas are not static but change as moral attitudes change. Only a few years ago, there was widespread opposition to same-sex marriage in the US. Today, most Americans support same-sex marriage. It is possible, however, that our collective moral thinking will never converge into a social consensus. If this is the case, the decision on complex issues such as gender preference and abortion should be ours to make, not the government or the church.
To conclude: A hopeful lesson
Beliefs regarding values and morality are at the core of peoples’ worldviews. They are what bring people together or set them apart. Alongside this, there are a growing number of people that are not affiliated to any religion. As we saw, there is no evidence, philosophical, logical, or empirical, that non-religious people are less, or more, moral than those who abide to the absolute moral code of a religion, although they may think they are.
Instead, the criteria for morality should be well-being. More specifically, the morality of an action will depend on its impact on the well-being of conscious creatures, not if it conforms to a particular dogma. In Idea 9, I explore how we can develop a moral compass based on this idea of well-being, taking into account personal responsibility.
If our moral values are to be found in our own nature, and not in the supernatural, then I think that is a powerful, hopeful message. Perhaps, eventually we will all agree that, at their core, all major religions support the same thing: The value of an ethical life. This common understanding, I strongly believe, can be the foundation of a new universality in the human community. It is for us to define what exactly the ethical life is. This decision is too important to leave it in the hands of the gods.
[1]“Can Atheists be Good Citizens?”, First Things, August 1991. [2] Public Agenda Special Online Edition. For goodness’ sake: Why so many want religion to play a greater role in American life. Jan 10 2001. p.44, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED482820.pdf. (Retrieved Jan 25 7 2022). [3]https://conservapedia.com/Atheism_and_morality (retrieved Sep 17, 2022). [4]See e.g., Religion and Morality, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-morality/. [5]Theological Voluntarism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voluntarism-theological/. [6]What is the solution to Euthyphro’s Dilemma? Compelling Truth. Web. Retrieved Jan 26 2022. [7] Hoffman, W. et. al. (2014). Morality in Everyday Life. Science, 345, 1340. [8]Moore coined this term in his magnum opus Principia Ethica. (Moore, G. E. (1988). Principia Ethica. Prometheus Books). [9] Gould, S. J. (1999). Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. The Library of Contemporary Thought. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group, p.5. [10]Ainsworth, C. (2015). Sex redefined. Nature 518, 288–291. Also, Mills, M. C. (2019). How do genes affect same-sex behavior? Science, 365 (6456). pp. 869-870 [11]See, e.g., “New Drugs Could Help Treat Obesity. Could They End the Stigma, Too?” by Gina Kolata, The New York Times, May 11, 2021. [12]Harris, S. (2010). The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Free Press. p. 11. [13] Ibid. p.32. [14] Nussbaum, M. (2023). Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. Simon & Schuster. [15] Greene, J.D., Nystrom, L.E., Engell, A.D., Darley, J.M., Cohen, J.D. (2004) The neural bases of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment. Neuron, Vol. 44, 389-400 [16] Hooker, M. K. (1992). How to think about ethics, Institute of Global Ethics, p.6.
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