Agnostic Guide Chapter 8 - 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 really look to the unknown for specific answers, we must look to what we do know as best we can. We’re most likely the basis of our own adaptive morality. Critically looking at morality with our reason shows this to be true.

Think: If you were living on an island all alone, what actions and thoughts would be considered immoral?

Imagine yourself on an island all alone. Would walking around the island naked be immoral or improper if nobody else was there to see you? What words would be bad to say if nobody could hear them and get 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 is 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 behaviors between the people? You may say it’s immoral 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, 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 of establishing agreements and rules. Not only can they define this, but they can make it a reality by enforcing those standards through punishment or rejection of members of society not conforming to society’s rules.

Think: What is it that makes you feel like you’re a part of any given society? How many societies do you really belong to?

We join a society almost naturally when we’re born into a family. Families are their own little society staying together for many reasons which generally begin with the natural love for our offspring. We usually have a desire to help them grow into individuals capable of taking care of themselves. Most people have a connection with and love for their offspring but even that isn’t universal and absolute.

Over time, our families have joined larger societies which ultimately help us as individuals. Each person’s contribution to that society can work to a greater good benefiting all members of that society. It’s like wolves are able to hunt larger prey as a pack and become much more effective than individual hunters. All of humanity is a society as strong or as weak as we want to be by deciding to work together for humanity or to live as individuals without a care for anyone other than ourselves.

The Good of the Society

Your society collectively defines right and wrong for your place in society. It could be determined that strong people taking food from the weak is bad in a more primitive hunter society. The weak are less capable of helping the hunt if they’re too hungry to work. The weak may group together to punish a strong individual hoarding food if they’re able to or they may just break off into their own society and isolate themselves from a strong individual preying on the weak.

Ultimately, if a society doesn’t work for the good of the society then it can be destroyed by the bad elements in society. Even a bad society can flourish if they’re working for the good of their own group despite being bad for humanity. A society of cannibals could have ethics directing their cannibalism outside of their group. A society of thieves or pirates could work together for their society and flourish if they don’t steal from each other.

A sense of tribalism and differentiating a group from the rest of humanity is detrimental to us all. How could any society survive if they lacked the ethics to work and contribute to our overall common good instead of looking out for themselves? A society full of bad behaviors directed at their own society will eventually tear itself apart and destroy the benefits and bonds of that society. A humanity splintered into self-serving groups behaving badly to other groups is bad for us all.

The good of 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. An argument for the need of religion is it provides us with our morality and the definitions for what’s good for society. However, a society can determine what’s good for itself without religion. It’s a natural human need to do what’s right for the survival of our society which doesn’t need outside guidance to figure it out.

Religion is just one way the rules could be defined and passed along from person to person, just like telling our children to be good so Santa Claus will bring them presents. A secular society tells everyone to not do certain things because the police will arrest you and the courts will put you in jail. Jail is the secular version of a religious hell.

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 a morality defined for a society more relatable to people’s perceptions and desires instead of their basic survival instincts. Our intelligence complicates the survival instinct and results in a more complicated view of morality.

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

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 doesn’t always lead to true harmony among all people.

Think: If religious people follow an absolute morality from their god, then why don’t they let their god condemn and punish unethical behavior instead of getting involved in what other people are doing when it doesn’t personally impact them?

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’re not applying God’s ethics then you’re 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 reconciling the moral viewpoint of the majority with the viewpoints of various minorities.

A simple view is ethics can balance “right versus right” and can be entirely situational. Two people in conflict caused by differing morals can be put there by circumstances, environments, and situations mostly out of their control. The only thing under their control is their choice of resolution. The morality of controversial subjects such 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 on moral absolutes which for the most part has been resolved by the modern world. The Christian Bible doesn’t condemn the practice of slavery and instead tells a person how to treat their slaves, yet modern society has determined it immoral. Both sides of the issue made use of the Christian Bible to support their moral viewpoint of slavery as good or bad when this issue was debated in the United States. However, on our own as humans we determined it’s unethical to enslave each other. The immorality of slavery is becoming shared by most people around the world independently of their religious teachings and literature.

Freedom from Absolute Morality

Morality doesn’t have an unchanging and universal absolute. Morality is a set of ideas and beliefs which can be evolved and improved over time. This leads to an application of ethics adaptable over time as the world changes. I won’t get into the details of everything I believe to be moral or immoral. I won’t explain the ethics of how we should all act in specific situations since such beliefs aren’t absolute and eternal. It’s more important to just point out our morality and ethics need to be personally evaluated throughout our lives. Hopefully our collective human morality improves over time and through the generations as we learn from each other the best way to be a human and how to function as members of the overall human society.

We should all be free from an absolute morality based on one of the religions of the world. We should also be free from a secular set of unchanging laws. This doesn’t mean we should give up and live without morality or ethics. Instead, we should strive to continuously improve our laws. It can be harder when we each define our own sense of morality and collectively codify and update societal laws. The important point to remember in living an ethical life is that working for the good of society usually benefits each of us individually. This should remain a core moral guide of any society or that society will be reduced to a loose association of individuals lacking any mutual benefits.