Dove

A commenter on Roll to Disbelieve (a Patheos nonreligious blog I follow) has been contemplating ethics a lot lately, especially the idea that in an atheistic world ethics are subjective. As he put it:

The idea of subjective morality causes me to cringe: after all, if morality is subjective, what's wrong with oppression and Christian overreach? I would like to think that things like genocide and rape are wrong, period, no matter what one's subjective morality says.

Most of the commenters made arguments that morality has to be subjective, but I decided to be a contrarian:

I think it's likely that there is some ontological reality to ethics beyond human whim, and that this is consistent with the observation of altruistic behavior in non-human animals. The ethics that comes from that is likely fairly rudimentary and more descriptive than prescriptive, but there does seem to be a foundation for ethics that goes beyond social contract theory.

In other words, when we build ethics, we're not building it on something we made up but something built into our brains. However, if you want that foundation to be something that crosses the is/ought barrier, you're going to have to invoke the supernatural.

Quick definition of some terms:
The good: The end, goal, or purpose of an ethical system
The right: The actions an ethical system says on ought to do

I am, by natural inclination, a utilitarian. Utilitarianism's view of the good was one that seemed intuitively obvious to me (and I still think it's important); it's view of the right was consonant with that good. And utilitarianism destroyed me. I have a tendency towards ethical scrupulosity, so I came to feel like anything I wasn't doing to maximize happiness was actively evil. The money I spent on a doughnut was stolen from the mouths of the poor, my apartment had space I wasn't using that was therefore stolen from the homeless. But worse than that was that I lacked the courage to actually implement what I believed was the right. I still donated to charity, let my friend live in my apartment rent-free for years (not something I regret, btw, she was a great roommate), and tried to help others. But I didn't do what I believed was the right, and so I suffered intense guilt for what I viewed as my unpardonable selfishness. Utilitarianism makes an absolute demand: the right isn't only doing things that help or at least don't hurt others, it's acting in a way to maximize happiness/pleasure.( Read more... )

I don't consider myself an atheist, but if you use the famed "lack a belief in god(s)" definition that movement atheism paraded as the Objective Meaning of atheism back in the day, I probably qualify. I lack an active belief in a deity of any sort, but I don't consider myself an atheist because, fundamentally, I think that's a bad definition. It may be correct in an etymological sense, but in practice self-identification as an atheist tends to imply things that don't apply to me, e.g. a lack of desire to believe in a deity and a belief that objective morality is either undesirable or possible without a deity (and similarly for things like objective purpose and meaning). These things don't apply to me. I would like to believe in God and one of the reasons for that is that I value things that I believe cannot exist in the absence of God.

But suppose God does exist. What can we say about Her? Honestly, not that much. The problem with capital-G God is that She is necessarily the ultimate Other to whom all things relate. For example, the set of all things that exist cannot include Her; every element in that set can theoretically be the cause of any other element in that set, but no element can be the cause of the set itself. This means that if God exists, She does so in a way that is fundamentally unlike the existence of all other things.

Similarly, we cannot say with any certainty that God is good even if God has ontologically imbued the universe with objective morality. I adhere to a form of natural law theory which states, in essence, that moral values are defined in terms internal to the universe: murder and rape are bad because of how they manifest in the world as it is; a world that was fundamentally different would have fundamentally different morals. Since God is necessarily external (at least in part) to the universe, God is not bound by the morality which She has given to us.

It is because of things like this, things that make God fundamentally unknown and unknowable, that Olaf Stapledon sometimes refers to God as the "Dark Other" and "the Darkness Upon the Throne." We can feel a compulsion to worship the Dark Other, we can dread it or admire it, can attempt to relate to it, but we can say nothing about it but "Thou! O, Thou!" And that's an idea that either appeals to you or it doesn't. It appeals to me; I feel that compulsion to worship, I read Star Maker, Death into Life, or The Opening of the Eyes and I think I feel something like what Stapledon felt when contemplating the possibility of the Dark Other.

I don't agree with C.S. Lewis that God is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to Him, but I do agree with a form of Lewis' idea; God is so fundamentally Other that, in relation to Her, we are all One; divisions among us fade before Her gaze as we salute the Darkness Upon the Throne.