God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes. If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from murdering each other left and right?
Suppose Omega makes a credible threat that if you ever step inside a bathroom between 7AM and 10AM in the morning, he'll kill you. Would you be panicked by the prospect of Omega withdrawing his threat? Would you cower in existential terror and cry: "If Omega withdraws his threat, then what's to keep me from going to the bathroom?" No; you'd probably be quite relieved at your increased opportunity to, ahem, relieve yourself.
Which is to say: The very fact that a religious person would be afraid of God withdrawing Its threat to punish them for committing murder, shows that they have a revulsion of murder which is independent of whether God punishes murder or not. If they had no sense that murder was wrong independently of divine retribution, the prospect of God not punishing murder would be no more existentially horrifying than the prospect of God not punishing sneezing.
If Overcoming Bias has any religious readers left, I say to you: it may be that you will someday lose your faith: and on that day, you will not lose all sense of moral direction. For if you fear the prospect of God not punishing some deed, that is a moral compass. You can plug that compass directly into your decision system and steer by it. You can simply not do whatever you are afraid God may not punish you for doing. The fear of losing a moral compass is itself a moral compass. Indeed, I suspect you are steering by that compass, and that you always have been. As Piers Anthony once said, "Only those with souls worry over whether or not they have them." s/soul/morality/ and the point carries.
You don't hear religious fundamentalists using the argument: "If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from eating pork?" Yet by their assumptions - that we have no moral compass but divine reward and retribution - this argument should sound just as forceful as the other.
Even the notion that God threatens you with eternal hellfire, rather than cookies, piggybacks on a pre-existing negative value for hellfire. Consider the following, and ask which of these two philosophers is really the altruist, and which is really selfish?
"You should be selfish, because when people set out to improve society, they meddle in their neighbors' affairs and pass laws and seize control and make everyone unhappy. Take whichever job that pays the most money: the reason the job pays more is that the efficient market thinks it produces more value than its alternatives. Take a job that pays less, and you're second-guessing what the market thinks will benefit society most."
"You should be altruistic, because the world is an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and the strategy that fares best is Tit for Tat with initial cooperation. People don't like jerks. Nice guys really do finish first. Studies show that people who contribute to society and have a sense of meaning in their lives, are happier than people who don't; being selfish will only make you unhappy in the long run."
Blank out the recommendations of these two philosophers, and you can see that the first philosopher is using strictly prosocial criteria to justify his recommendations; to him, what validates an argument for selfishness is showing that selfishness benefits everyone. The second philosopher appeals to strictly individual and hedonic criteria; to him, what validates an argument for altruism is showing that altruism benefits him as an individual: higher social status or more intense feelings of pleasure.
So which of these two is the actual altruist? Whichever one actually holds open doors for little old ladies.
Would you be willing to summarize your view in a couple sentences, even if doing so would result in a caricature of your position? The main idea I drew from your comment is that when we think about how murder is immoral, this feels like something different than just that murder is not in our best interest (even after folding in that we have self-interests in being altruistic).
Another way of putting this idea is that while I currently have no motive to murder --- you wrote:
sometimes people are motivated to murder. Presumably I could be motivated to murder, and in that case, why shouldn't I? If there was a higher moral authority, I might find that the moral authority compelling enough to tip things in favor of not murdering. However, without that moral authority I'm free after all.
I think the effects of the absence of a moral authority is more obvious in more mundane aspects of life, especially in cases where you are making a choice and one choice is not obviously more moral. Perhaps it is a complicated choice and there are positive and negative moral consequences with either choice. In these cases, I feel that there are a couple 'moral compasses' working simultaneously. Some of them I would describe as more immediate and pragmatic, some of them are more deontological. There is one which feels quite distinctly different, which may actually point to an action that is not immediately intuitively moral but which nevertheless feels most like the right choice. Religious training causes us to recognize this different compass, call it "God", and trust in it.
By studying religious texts that identify this compass and how it is different (mostly through examples) atheists articulate what is special about this compass and determine (individually, I suppose) if this compass is trustworthy and superior to the others.
There are spectacular examples of religious people following a terrible wrong compass they've mistaken for God's (mostly in novels that I've read) but on the other hand there are lots of morally successful theists that claim they have found through experience this compass is reliable.
A religious upbringing could be largely about developing a feel for this nuanced, more reliable compass within ourselves. Without a reason to elevate it, I'm afraid we might never develop a reason to 'trust' it -- especially in cases where it seems contradictory -- and instead we would follow more immediate and pragmatic compasses that aren't really reflecting the full morality we're capable of, and on top of that not have the security of following a compass that has God's approval behind it.
Perhaps these thoughts are overly biased by a theistic childhood. Maybe there isn't a single 'superior' compass. Maybe the single superior compass is just a recognition that in complex cases, the moral choice is more felt than decided. How do we teach a generation of atheists that morality is very subtle, so that it is difficult to hear and easy to misinterpret, and that they need to listen carefully, without causing the anxiety that they aren't getting it right? What should we say they are listening to?
Someone making a choice to do X is not necessarily making this choice for moral reasons. If (a) they are doing X for moral reasons and (b) you suddenly take away those moral reason... (read more)