Ethics Based On The Human Experience And Critical Thinking

I can remember having a conversation with my grandad, I suppose I must have been about 10 or 12 years old at the time.  In this particular conversation I had fetched home a prize from Sunday School - a bible - he asked me what I thought about the bible. 

I told him that some of the bits in the ten commandments seemed to make sense but there was an awful lot of other stuff I couldn’t make sense of at all, let alone agree with.  I remember he smiled at me and seemed happy with what I had said.

My grandad was in the royal marines and took part in D Day.  He fought in Africa and Italy as well as France and this, not surprisingly, was a formative experience in his life. He died before I had reached the stage in life when I would have sat down and had a proper discussion with him about the war and what he learned from it, but looking back at him from 20 odd years of additional perspective, I am fairly sure he was not a religious man and that he was pleased with my answer because it showed that I was thinking for myself.  I would like to think that my answer went some small way towards making him feel that his sacrifice in the war was worthwhile, but I will never know.

This conversation came back to me unbidden as I sat down to think about ethics just now.  My grandad was a deeply ethical person who cared a great deal about others and always seemed to have a view on right and wrong without ever referring to any kind of god or holy book.  He seemed to work things out using the Golden Rule and it saw him through his whole life.  I am aware of the old saying, “there are no atheists in foxholes” but I like to think he may have been an exception to this.

I do think that morality plays a central role in human life; indeed, ethics was developed as a branch of human knowledge long before today’s religions proclaimed their moral systems to be based upon the word of their particular god.

If you have read this blog before you will know I have views on ethics.  If you look back two posts ago you will see some comments from Paul on the subject of ethics and morals. 

This post is an attempt to answer his questions;

    “Oh, and another thing. Your "non-religious ethics" tells you its wrong to lie, does it?              

      What do you mean by "wrong"? And what is a "lie" - or more significantly, what is   

      “truth"? What is "ethics" with no external absolute? What is "religious", and in what way

      are your ethics therefore "non-religious", and David's not?”

I will leave aside the observation that Paul could rephrase his question so as to doubt the existence of anything at all without the external absolute (I presume he means god via the Bible) I will now try to answer these questions. 

I would take the view that ethics is an autonomous field of inquiry, that ethical judgements can be formulated independently of revealed religion, and that human beings can cultivate practical reason and wisdom and, by its application, achieve lives of virtue and excellence.  I take the view that ethics should be based on the human experience.

Paul has asserted that is isn’t possible to know right from wrong without some external absolute, but he has given us no evidence that this is the case.  Please do Paul.

If by this external absolute Paul means “the word of god in the bible” as a moral and ethical guide then we can look into this further, indeed some people already have.

There is an fascinating online experiment, asking people to answer moral questions based on various hypothetical scenarios.  You can have a go yourself, if you like here.

The results are interesting;

Extract from this article;

“Non-believers often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, and have worked to abolish slavery and contributed to other efforts to alleviate human suffering.”

And from this one;

“On the view that morality is God’s word, atheists should judge these cases differently from people with religious background and beliefs, and when asked to justify their responses,

should bring forward different explanations. For example, since atheists lack a moral compass, they should go with pure self-interest, and walk by the drowning baby. Results show something completely different. There were no statistically significant differences between subjects with or without religious backgrounds, with approximately 90% of subjects saying that it is permissible to flip the switch on the boxcar, 97% saying that it is obligatory to rescue the baby, and 97% saying that is forbidden to remove the healthy man’s organs. . When asked to justify why some cases are permissible and others forbidden, subjects are either clueless or offer explanations that can not account for the differences in play. Importantly,  those with a religious background are as clueless or incoherent as atheists. “

So this evidence seems to disprove that element of Paul’s implied claim.

If, on the other hand, by external absolute Paul means simply that god did it, (whatever that means) and because god exists people know right from wrong, then there is no way of testing this one way or the other. 

We can’t ask people outside of Paul’s god based system for their opinions can we?  If this is indeed his assertion, it is not falsifiable, which does not mean it is true or not true, merely that we can never test to find out if it is is true or false.  In this very real sense his claim is ultimately just a sentence which makes sense to you if you agree with Paul and is meaningless if you don’t. Clearly such a claim will not change anyone’s mind, well not anyone who makes up their mind based on reasoned arguments.

It seems fairly straightforward and obvious to me that because human’s evolved from social primates over millions of years, a sense of morals, ethics, group need’s and basic Golden Rule-ish principles would have evolved as a survival mechanism.  Indeed, the Golden Rule would appear to be the simplest distillation of this kind of thing.

Furthermore, if we look at the animal kingdom there are examples of moral behaviour in primates and other animals, something which presumably Paul would agree with me in claiming is “not god given”.

For me, ethical conduct is, and should be, judged by critical reason - cogita tute.  Look around you, see what is right and wrong, look at what other think and ask them why, make up your own mind in a rational way. Follow the Golden Rule.

This extract from a secular humanist site;

“Morality that is not God-based need not be antisocial, subjective, or promiscuous, nor need it lead to the breakdown of moral standards. Although we believe in tolerating diverse lifestyles and social manners, we do not think they are immune to criticism. Nor do we believe that any one church should impose its views of moral virtue and sin, sexual conduct, marriage, divorce, birth control, or abortion, or legislate them for the rest of society. As secular humanists we believe in the central importance of the value of human happiness here and now. We are opposed to absolutist morality, yet we maintain that objective standards emerge, and ethical values and principles may be discovered, in the course of ethical deliberation. Secular humanist ethics maintains that it is possible for human beings to lead meaningful and wholesome lives for themselves and in service to their fellow human beings without the need of religious commandments or the benefit of clergy. There have been any number of distinguished secularists and humanists who have demonstrated moral principles in their personal lives and works: Protagoras, Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Hume, Thomas Paine, Diderot, Mark Twain, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow, Robert Ingersoll, Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Max Born, Margaret Sanger, and Bertrand Russell, among others.”

A couple more points I would make on this subject are as follows;

Firstly, look how morals change - even “Christian” morals - look at the role of scripture in slavery, first as justification and then as a reason for abolition.  Hardly an absolute standard  to judge things by.

Secondly, but of course a related point to that above, look at the contradictions in the bible.  Should we kill gay people or merely banish them.  Is it OK to beat or kill your kids if they talk back at you? What about the rule about not killing and the previous two sentences?

What about the bit where “smashers of babies” will be blessed?  Again hardly an absolute standard to judge things by.

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On this topic I regularly have Hitler, Stalin and others thrown at me in righteous indignation, as examples of what happens when you don’t believe in god. (David Anderson was one to do this)

I would make the following points;

    Hitler was a Roman Catholic.

    I would assert that these evil people did what they did because they were irrational. 

    The experiment mentioned above shows identical results for believers and non-believers.        

    From this we can infer that the same proportion of believers and non-believers alike    

    would give answers the average person would view as evil.  (3% of people apparently    

    wouldn’t save a baby from drowning if that would mean ruining a new pair of trousers -

    that’s 3% of believers and 3 % of non-believers alike - seems pretty evil to me)

    I can give examples of very bad behaviour by both religious and non-religious people, all

    of whom were irrational.

This is one of the problems I have with religion, it teaches people to be irrational.  It says being irrational is good, and from irrationality can come evil.

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If you are there Paul,  I am genuinely interested in your reply.