1/ Do you need God to be good? Some thoughts on morality and religion, prompted by debates like this: @RFupdates
2/ There are lots of interesting questions about morality, like (i) what are the origins of morality, (ii) what explains its content, (iii) what motivates people to be moral, (iv) are there objective moral standards?
3/ Natural (scientific, atheist) accounts of ethics answer all of these questions, whereas super-natural accounts (like Christian theology, or ‘divine command theory’) do not.
4/ According to one common naturalist account, morality is a collection of traits, dispositions, rules etc that attempt to promote cooperation, the common good #moralityascooperation #MAC. On this account…
5/ Moral Origins: Morality is the product of the evolution (the legacy of our social primate ancestors) and more recent cultural invention.
6/ Moral Content: Cooperation explains the content of morality. Different types of cooperation–coordination, exchange, conflict resolution–explain different types of morality–love, loyalty, reciprocity, bravery, respect, fairness, property rights…
7/ Moral Motivation: Our moral values reflect the value of cooperation. We are intrinsically motivated to cooperate, ergo we are intrinsically motivated to be moral. Cooperation is *so* valuable that our moral values usually feel obligatory.
8/ People who lack the motivation to cooperate are called anti-social, criminal, psychopathic. We try to detect, shun, punish, imprison them. We hold *eachother* accountable for our actions. This provides additional ‘extrinsic’ motivation to be good
9/ Moral Objectivity: Moral values are subjective preferences for *objective* states of the world (ie more cooperation). ‘More cooperation’ (technically, superior equilibria) provides the objective moral criterion by which we evaluate our actions.
10/ Whether something promotes cooperation or not is an objective empirical fact, not a matter of opinion. It can be true or false irrespective of how anyone feels about it doi.org/10.1093/bjps/a…
11/ Hence cooperation provides the criterion for moral progress: people are constantly striving to invent new & improved cooperative rules (as circumstances and opportunities change); sometimes they succeed. This is what moral progress looks like.
12/ By contrast, supernatural accounts of morality, like ‘divine command theory’, do not answer these questions.
13/ Moral Origins: Supernatural accounts do not explain the origin of morality. Saying “God did it” ≈ “it was done by magic” ≈ “we don’t know”. And of course there is no evidence that ‘God did do it’, or even that there is a God in the first place.
14/ (What would constitute evidence that ‘God did it’?)
15/ Moral Content: Supernatural accounts do not explain the content of morality. Even if God ‘did do it’, where did He get it from? Why did he decide on those rules as opposed to others? Nobody knows. #mysteriousways
16/ (Besides, it’s not clear He made any significant contribution to ethics–eg The Bible is a mixture of the mundane (do not steal), the bizarre (do not eat shellfish) and the atrocious infidels.org/library/modern…
17/ …which puts Christian apologists in the unenviable position of having to defend genocide: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…)
18/ Moral Motivation: Supernatural accounts tend to assert that (a) we have no intrinsic motivation (we’re all sinners), and (b) put their faith in extrinsic motivation (divine punishment). There’s no evidence that either claim is true.
19/ (Worse, divine punishment reduces morality to the rather childish instruction to ‘do as your told or face the consequences’, and, if taken seriously, diminishes the importance of seeking justice in the here and now.)
20/ Moral Objectivity: Supernatural accounts of morality – like divine command theory – provide an objective standard only if they are true, and there really is a divine commander. But there’s no evidence that they are true.
21/ General point: basing ethics on things that definitely exist (eg people, cooperation, well-being) is better than basing them on things that probably don’t (eg gods, original sin, divine punishment).
22/ In sum, naturalistic accounts of morality provide straight-forward, non-question-begging, empirically-supported answers to the deep questions of ethics; supernatural accounts do not.
23/ Saying ‘without god there would be no morality’ is like saying ‘without god there would be no weather’ or ‘there would be no animals’. Creationism was never a good theory of anything; and now we have much better theories for everything. The end.
