Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on Morality Without God
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. If there's no God, there can be no morality. Without God, chaos would reign. Belief in God is needed to curtail the worst instincts of man. Those who go to church, synagogue and mosque are more ethical than those who don't. These are all common enough claims and all hogwash.

at least according to the author of Morality Without God, Walter Sinnott Armstrong. Walter Sinnott Armstrong, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Glad to be here. The topic we're going to focus on today is morality without God. How can you have morality without God? Well, it's very simple. Morality is based on harm to other people and our relations to other people. What makes it wrong to hit someone is that that person gets hurt.

It's not that God told you not to do it and that's why it's wrong. The entire basis of morality has to do with human relations to each other, maybe even other species, but causing harm to other creatures. That's what morality is based on. And we don't need religion to tell us that. But yet the history of humanity is the history of people obeying laws that have apparently been given to them by God.

Religious people like to claim that those rules come from God. But notice that those same rules about not harming others in certain crucial, essential ways are shared by many, many different religions. And that shows that they're not really based on any particular religious revelation. They're just common sense. Religions have to have a certain connection to common sense in order to thrive and succeed in

So of course they're going to say, don't do this, don't do that when it's obviously immoral. That doesn't show that they get credit for it. That just shows that they are mimicking common sense in order to be able to become popular. Are you so sure that it is natural for people to be concerned about harming other people? It's not so obvious to everyone because people are pretty nasty to each other.

Sure, there are lots of people who are nasty to each other, but that doesn't mean there isn't a natural tendency also to avoid harming others and to dislike seeing other people in pain. There's plenty of good psychological evidence that most people care about each other.

There's going to be 1% that don't, maybe even more than 1% that don't, that are willing to harm others. And they can cause a lot of problems in our society. But most of us are pretty nice, decent people. Have you ever killed anybody? I haven't. I wouldn't want to kill anybody. There are a few people out there who want to, but most people, atheists or not,

They don't want to engage in those kinds of activities. They find it terribly horrifying and aversive to even think about the kinds of immorality that a small percentage engage in. Isn't it strange that so many people quote Dostoevsky on this and say, look, if God doesn't exist, anything is permitted?

It really is strange. In fact, it's just wrong. It's not true that if God is dead, everything is permitted. Even if God were dead, rape would cause harm to the victim. So if the basis for morality is harm to the victim, it doesn't matter whether God's around or not.

Here's the problem. Look, two people have different views about what the right thing to do is in a particular case. Let's say they're arguing about euthanasia. If you believe in God, there's probably a right answer you can work out. And it exists even if you can't work it out. If you don't believe in God, who's to say what the right answer is?

The problem there is that if you have two people disagreeing and they're citing different religious texts, they're not going to be able to work it out. One's going to cite the Bible, the other's going to cite the Koran, and then there's going to be a secular person there who's not going to believe in either citation. So citing these texts is not going to help resolve the problem. So then the question is, what is the way to resolve the problem?

It seems to me the way to resolve the problem is to think through this in systematic ways that have been provided by philosophers and even just common sense people through the ages. You think in terms of analogies. You ask other people. You engage in conversation with people who are informed and impartial. And you try to work it out. You won't always be able to work it out. Life is tough.

But you'll sometimes be able to work it out. And that's the way to do it. Citing the texts from religious sources is not going to do it. I was trying to make a metaphysical point. Look, if God exists, there is a right answer. If God doesn't exist, there may not actually be a right answer whether or not we can discover it.

Well, I think there is a right answer. I think there's a right answer. Rape is wrong. It's wrong to force yourself upon someone who doesn't want to have sex with you and thereby cause a tremendous amount of pain just so that you can feel powerful and maybe get sexual pleasure. That's just plain wrong. And it's not because God told you not to do it. To think that that's wrong because you were told by some supernatural creature is childish.

It's like the kid who thinks that when his parents leave home, now it's OK to hit his little sister because they're not around anymore. It just doesn't depend on those kinds of features at all. Rape is an easy case, though. Take the harder cases where there's genuine moral disagreement.

There are many extremely complex moral issues that we need to work through carefully over a long period of time, working together. My first point is appealing to religion is not going to help. It might actually exacerbate the problem. But I'll give you an example of how secular people have resolved a controversial issue. It used to be controversial whether or not a doctor

has a moral requirement to inform a patient about an alternative treatment that that doctor thinks would be a mistake but that the doctor believes the patient might want to do. So, for example, if a woman has breast cancer and the doctor thinks that she ought to have a mastectomy, he might not mention breast

the possibility of a lumpectomy with radiation treatment because he thinks that would decrease the survival rate. But for her, she might rather go with that less aggressive treatment and take the chance of the cancer spreading. Well, in the early 70s and the 60s and the 50s, doctors would just decide whether or not they should inform the patient on the basis of what they thought was good for the patient.

But when people thought it through over the decades in hospital ethics committees using completely secular reasoning, they've now actually come to the consensus that doctors have to inform patients about all reasonable alternative treatments.

Now, there's an example of reasoning leading people to a moral consensus about the rights of patients in hospitals and solving a controversial problem without citing religious leaders, without citing religious texts, without having anything to do with God or religion. Take Christianity. That has a tradition of people disputing the interpretation of religious texts and so on.

Surely that embodies all kinds of important reasoning about how we ought to live. Oh, sure. The Bible and Christianity give you a lot of advice about how to live, and some of it is very good. I think they're magnificent passages in the Bible. I love religious songs and so on. The problem is that there are also horrible passages in the Bible. The New Testament says that women should not speak in church. It says it repeatedly.

People ignore those passages. The Old Testament endorses a procedure for selling your children into slavery. And the New Testament says slaves ought to obey their masters. That book is chock full of very controversial and very bad moral advice.

Now, good Christians, and there are many, many good Christians, will read that book and pick the passages that provide good advice. But that's because they're good people. They know which passages to follow. It's not because the book itself is guiding them, since if you really followed everything in the book,

you'd be selling your children into slavery. Many good people are Christians. They find the good passages, and those passages help them feel more secure in what they already know. That's a positive role for religion and for the Bible. But it doesn't mean that you can follow the Bible word for word and end up a good person. You can't because there's so many bad passages in it.

What about the argument that we sometimes hear that being religious actually increases the chances of you being a good person because you're constantly striving to obey God's law?

Well, that's something that, again, people claim. Now, how are we going to settle that issue? You're not going to be able to think about yourself and whether you would be good or not if you didn't believe in God or if you did believe in God. We need to look at the statistics. And the statistics of Paul and Jensen recently suggest that actually belief in God is correlated with higher murder rates.

higher teenage pregnancy rates, and so on. Especially, by the way, interestingly, belief in the devil. People who believe in God and the devil. That type of belief is correlated with higher murder rates. What about intolerance? Religion has consistently been correlated with higher rates of intolerance towards blacks, people of other religions, women. It is true that religious belief is correlated with less cheating and more charitable giving.

But when you think that through, it's not clear that religion is causing those people to be more charitable. It actually just might be that people who are not charitable tend to not go to religious ceremonies as often because they don't like to have that plate passed to them. So they don't go to church. So there are lots of ways of explaining this, the correlations that do exist. So are you claiming that belief in God is actually correlated with immorality? Yes.

Well, it is correlated with immorality of various sorts. That doesn't mean it causes that. And there's no evidence that I know of that shows that religious belief causes that immorality. But the correlation is just there to be studied empirically. Now, you're expressing this with some force. Is there a personal story here?

Sure, there's a personal story here. I was raised down south in Memphis, Tennessee. I went to church. I was an acolyte. But I became an evangelical Christian for a while and actually studied the Bible as a biblical scholar. One of the first courses I taught was in New Testament. And I can say from personal experience that it's a very rewarding thing to be a Christian.

You get a lot of personal satisfaction out of the friendships. It's nice to have everybody greet you when you come to the meetings. But then when you think through the doctrines in a serious way, they often just don't make sense. So what advice would you give to somebody trying to find out how they ought to live if they've been relying on what you see as a crutch of religion? What do you do? How do you behave?

I think the main thing is to think about other people, not focus your attention on some other world where some eternal unchanging being that's not at all like us lives and what he tells us to do. You want to focus on other people and what they care about and what's going to hurt them and what's going to help them and fashion your life in helping other people because that's what's going to give your life meaning. It's helping other people.

not trying to get your own self up into heaven. In England, it's pretty easy to be an atheist. It must be quite tough in America.

It's very tough for some people. I mean, I'm very lucky. I'm a tenured professor of philosophy. People expect me to be an atheist. But if you are in certain areas, especially in the central parts of the United States, and you are a business person or a lawyer or a doctor, and you come out publicly as an atheist, you're likely to lose your clients and your customers. And it's going to do serious personal harm to you and to your family. When your kids go to school, they're going to

be accosted. And so many people who are atheists hide in the closet. One difference is that in recent years, more of them are starting to speak out. But it's going to take a long time, at least in certain areas of the United States, for that to change.

A good indication of this is another empirical study. There's a Gallup poll in 2007 and they said if a candidate were nominated by your party and was running for president and they were very well qualified and agreed with you on the issues but they happen to be an atheist, would you still vote for them?

and only 45% said they would. That means 55% would not vote for a person who is in their party, agrees with their views, and has lots of experience. They still wouldn't vote for them just because they're an atheist. I'm just lucky to be a tenured professor that I can admit what my views are. Walter Stenlott Armstrong, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. And you can hear more Philosophy Bites at www.philosophybites.com.