Can we be moral without God?

Many believers claim that you cannot have morality without God.  I actually agree that there is no ultimate grounding of ethics without God, but where I differ is in the belief that God helps at all.

I will start with a simple example, the well-known tragedy of the commons.  Fisheries have an unfortunate tendency to over fish.  It is in the interest of each fisherman to  maximize his yield, so they harvest as much as they can.  Since everyone does this, the fish decline and soon there are no more fish.  It is in the long term interest of the fishermen to limit their yeild so that the fish can last.  But that is only useful if everyone else also limits their catch.  So we can say that a rational rule is for each fisherman to take only a limited harvest.  But the problem is, why should an individual fisherman comply?  If everyone else is limiting their yeild, then he can take more, get rich, and still have fish left over because of the kindness of the others.  If everyone thinks this, we are back where we started.  That often happens, which is why fish are being depleted.

The point is that you can have an ethical principle that makes sense to follow if everyone follows it.  But looking just at your self interest, there is no reason for an individual to follow it.  There is no reason not to cheat.  If the rules are enforced by a government and a punishment will follow, then there is a good reason to comply.  In this case, the reason to comply is still self interest–the desire not to be punished.

This also applies to more general moral principles.  Let’s say we use Utilitarianism, doing the most good for the most people.  Let’s say we are able to accurately determine which action will do that.  Still, the question for an individual is “why shouldn’t I do what is good for me, even if it does produce less good for others?”  The same is true for any other moral principle, such as the golden rule.  A person can still ask what binds them to this rule?  Why not just pursue your own self interest?

I would say that one reason to follow the golden rule is because it is in our best interest.  If we follow it, others will treat us that way in turn, and we will be happier.  Many moral behaviors follow from human nature.  In the end, most people are happier if we give to others rather than take, if we are honest rather than lie, etc. We are social creatures, we need love, we need the good will of our fellows to succeed.  It’s part of who we are and how others respond to us.  So it is in our own self interest to behave morally.

We still have the problem of cheaters.  Regardless of what I said above, at least some people can be happy by lying and taking advantage of others.  Let everyone else follow the golden rule, and you get all of the benefits.  If a person takes advantage of other people’s good nature, they can do quite well for themselves, in the same way that a cheating fisherman can take advantage of the good will of other fisherman.  Morality appears to be subjective and there is no ultimate answer to why we should behave morally.  If we say that we should behave morally to maximize our happiness, yet others are able to be happy without behaving that way, how can we say they are wrong?

Here is where God seems to be able to help.  In response to the question “why should I personally follow this particular rule, which is good for the group but not necessarily for me”, the theist can say that the reason to behave morally is because of God.

At first this seems to solve the problem because it has taken the source of ethics outside of ourselves.  We now have an objective basis for morality, no longer dependent on human whims.  But it really hasn’t solved the problem.  A person can still ask “why should I care what God says.  I will be happier if I behave different than what he says”.  To this, most theists can respond that if you do not follow the rules, you will not go to heaven, or will go to hell (although this is far from universal among religions).  So in other words, it is just like the fisherman being punished.  The reason to comply is still self interest.  Morality is not based on something outside of myself, but because it is in my own self interest, in the long run, to behave this way.  I don’t want to go to hell, so I should follow the rules.  All that religion does is makes the punishment more guaranteed and more severe, and the long run now is much longer.

Without God, we can say that we should behave morally because, when we consider human nature and society, it is in our own best interests to behave that way.  We will be happier in the long run.  If we believe in God, still the ultimate reason to behave morally is because it is in our self interest in the long run (and often that it is part of our nature).  In some ways it is worse.  Many Christian religions say salvation doesn’t depend on works, on behavior, but only on faith.  Even Hitler could have been saved, if he believed before his death.

We cannot have completely certain ethics without God.  But we can be mostly certain.  Science has been described as knowledge without certainty.  Some people dislike science because of that.  Science doesn’t give absolute answers, it just gives approximations of the truth, and some people are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.  The same is true with ethics.  We have no ultimate policeman, but we can get close to truth, and we can police ourselves.  This is not subjective ethics, it is just not absolute ethics.  Some people are also uncomfortable with this.

I still have many loose ends to tie up on this topic, but this is already too long for one post, so I will write more later.

Tags: ethics