These Christians, who generally call themselves evangelicals and fundamentalists because they take the fundamental tenets of their religion seriously, have managed to become powerful enough to dominate the Republican party and in 2000 they elected* one of their own as President of the United States. Within a year, this very Christian President began laying out plans for torturing his enemies.

Christianity and torture have, unfortunately, a long historical association. Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition perfected many of the most famous torture techniques, including waterboarding. You might think that Christians would be eager to strand Christianity’s associations with torture in the distant middle ages. You would think wrongly. Under the champion of Christianity residing in the White House, torture of prisoners became the official policy** of the U. S. Government.

It is difficult to write calmly about what has recently been done under the auspicies of the United States of America — difficult to avoid the intense anger and shame I feel as an American. But in the face of the Bush administration, anger and shame are unavoidable for anyone who cherishes civilized society. What is shocking is the extent to which evangelical and fundamentalist Christians embrace what Bush has done, much like the Holy See embraced the Inquisition.

I am no Christian, yet I am shamed by the way American Christians have embraced torture and other odious, uncivilized and unAmerican policies of the Bush Republicans. The evidence for the torture policy was obvious in 2004 — yet Bush was reelected. Reelected, it has to be pointed out, primarily due to the support of the most dedicated Christians. We must not forget that those who attended church regularly overwhelmingly supported Bush despite his policies, while those who rarely or only occasionally attended church opposed him.

This is a colossal moral failure on the part of American Christianity. Amazingly, among church-attending Christians there is little question about abortion’s immorality, but much doubt about whether torture is immoral. Or if torture is admitted to be wrong, it is denied that “simulated drowning” is torture. When pressed, Bush supporters have equated waterboarding with merely being dunked in water a bit — and who could object to that? Yet, everyone knows full well that the entire point of waterboarding (the water cure it used to be called) is to create the experience of drowning in the subject. As described by former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach,

the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. — “Waterboarding Used to be a Crime”, Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2007

Or consider the description by Scylla at StraightDope.com who tried waterboarding hmself,

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it’s all over.

. . . . So, is it torture?

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question. – Scylla at StraightDope.com

It is tempting make the assumption that Christianity’s lack of moral compass on issues like torture is due to its flawed doctrines. Christians believe in a “perfect” God who, it so happens, will torture most people in hell for an eternity. To reconcile this with “perfection” requires a perversity of mind unimaginable to me, though hundreds of millions of Christians seem to have no problem with it. Apparently they reason that if God does it, and if God is perfect, then torture can’t be so bad, can it? So torture becomes acceptable, even respectable.

Still, one might ask, how can decent human beings ever end up there? Are Dawkins and Hutchings and Harris right? Is religion essentially an evil enterprise, one which warps the human mind and subverts decency? Sometimes it seems that way, I admit.

But the better explanation, the one that makes most sense to me, is the one provided by psychologist Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians and endorced by John Dean in his book Conservatives without Conscience and his Findlaw Writ columns. Altemeyer’s studies explain how it is possible for dedicated Christians to become the least morally grounded of all Americans. It happens not because they are Christians or even because they are religious, but because they have a personality trait which certain religions both encourage and attract.

In my opinion, The Authoritarians is a must-read book. You can download it as a PDF, or order it here. Nothing else more clearly reveals the nature of the problem facing us.

——— Footnotes ———

* “elected”– or more accurately mis-elected. In the Supreme Court’s worst moment, its decision in Bush v Gore tossed aside the provisions in the U. S. Constitution for handling Presidential elections (as if the Constitution had nothing to do with the process) and prevented the State of Florida from following the laws set up by its Legislature for choosing Presidential electors. Had the Constitution been followed Bush would likely have become President anyway — but it would have happened constitutionally, a process the religious conservatives on the Court were afraid to trust.

** “official policy” — according to John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in torturing prisoners for the Bush Administration. As Scott Horton wrote in Harpers

But this week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate. Here’s a key piece of the Kiriakou statement:

LAUER: Was the White House involved in that decision?

KIRIAKOU: Absolutely, this isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

Horton goes on to observe that the Bush administration has resurrected

the process of official cruelty under the Stuart monarchs in seventeenth century England. Persons accused of state crimes very frequently were interrogated with the use of specific techniques, including the rack, the thumbscrew, and waterboarding. King James I personally described the process in The Kings Booke (1606). He would, on the advice of his officers, “approve no new torture,” but he would certainly avail himself of the existing practices. In ascending order of severity they were: thumbscrews, the rack and waterboarding. That’s right. Waterboarding was considered the most severe of the official forms of torture. Worse than the rack and thumbscrews.

In the depraved humor of Dick Cheney, of course, it’s just bobbing for apples at a Halloween Fair. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

This is the face of American Christianity today. Are Christians ashamed? Or will they continue as a group to support the Republicans who have brought us to this point?

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling “whatever you say and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?” But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.*

There must be a source for our moral sensibilities, C. S. Lewis is saying, outside of our own personal preferences and likes. If there is no outside criteria for truth, justice, fairness and the like, no criteria outside of me, then I can never rationally exhort others to behave the way I believe they ought to. Fairness, justice, right and wrong: it’s all merely my word against theirs, my preference instead of someone else’s preference.

Of course I may by force impose my moral viewpoint on others, but I have no basis outside myself for doing so; by extension, the same applies to any government or state: although it can impose by force, it can have no moral authority since there is no basis except the personal preferences of the governors.

In order to overcome this difficulty, Antony Flew once suggested that a sort of “market economy” of individual moral preferences holds sway, that this “moral market” acts like an invisible hand to create price or value for various behaviors, much as the economic marketplace establishes values and prices for goods. Although this is an interesting concept, it misses the crux of the issue at hand.

That is because the issue at hand is not how to establish agreement about which behaviors are moral and which aren’t (although that is a vital secondary question); rather the issue is where does our moral authority itself come from. What can serve to place the basis for morality outside of our individual or social biases?

Here, there is an alternative to God. It is an alternative that is not entirely free of relativism, in the sense that it is necessarily species-specific. Nevertheless, it is free of relativism from one individual in a species to the next. That is to say, it does not rely on my exotic personal biases, or on yours.

Human morality, according to this alternative, is built into the nature of the human body and its biological instincts. The sense of fairness and justice is as built into us as are our other senses. And the ability to apply this moral instinct to specific situations is as much a part of being human as is our ability to reason and remember.

Unfortunately, we are not all equal in moral skills, just as we are not all equal in reasoning skills or equally adept at remembering. Or for that matter, at throwing or running or catching. Skills must be developed by practice, and this applies to the skill of applying our moral instincts, sensibilities, empathy, to specific situations.

From an evolutionary point of view, the basis of human morality is very clear: morality is a human instinct, much like language, much like the fear of being alone in dark woods, or the desire to walk upright. Different as these are, they are all human instincts.

Just as the language instinct takes practice to be developed to its full flowering, so too with the moral instinct. It needs practicing. And this is something that a strong fundamentalist upbringing can thwart. Call it the commandments approach to childrearing. Some parents send their children the strong message that there are no moral decisions for them to make: that they must always defer to the moral commandments dictated by the Bible or some other religious authority.

For example, in commandment childrearing, a child might be told that lying is simply wrong always and in all situations: the Bible says so, end of subject. In fact, there are certain situations where lying is the right moral decision. Even murder could be the right choice in extremely rare circumstances. The commandments approach prevents a child from developing adequate moral decision-making skills because of the parental insistence that there are no situational moral decisions for the child to ever make. Instead the child has a rule-book to follow to the letter: the Bible.

As a rule, religious children are taught to look to a book or authority figure for the source of their moral sensibilities rather than to their own bodily instincts. The result is that their own moral instincts and feelings are suppressed, and the skill of making moral decisions by refering to those feelings never gets well-developed. Since the basis of morality actually lies in feelings, substituting unfelt words (the letter of the law — in this case Bible law) for those feelings is a setup for failure.

What happens when a fundamentalist child grows up and discovers that the religious authority they have always relied upon is questionable or contradictory? With few moral feelings to fall back on, the result is often disaster.

Our prisons are filled with such disasters.

Even if the now fundamentalist adult never figures out the questionable nature of Biblical morality, there is still a problem. The Bible simply can’t speak clearly to many of the moral situations modern society presents. The authors of the Bible — whether divine or human — failed to address most of the complexities of modern society. Trying to use the Bible as a rule-book simply breaks down.

Moral decisionmaking, furthermore, is very much about engaging our feelings, emotions and desires before we act, weighing them with our sense of identity with other human beings (this snuck into the Bible as the “golden rule”), and making a skilled decision about what to do. If your moral upbringing was all about “following rules” from holy books and religious authorities, then you never developed the necessary skill to do morality on your own. Little surprise that so many fundamentalist preachers end up making the news as hypocrites.

But back to C. S. Lewis. Remember his words,

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?*

Lewis forgets here that morality only applies to moral agents. We hardly consider a volcano immoral for erupting, nor do we condemn the sky for causing tornadoes. But make nature the result of God’s agency and then the volcano and tornado put God’s morality into question: because God is, after all, a moral agent. The atheist doesn’t face an equivalent difficulty with nature since the atheist doesn’t claim that nature is a person.

The problem for the atheist is not, as Lewis mistakenly asserts, that the universe seems “cruel and unjust”. The universe is not a person. It would be as irrational to expect the universe to behave “morally” as it would be to expect morality from a rock. But the atheist does have something to explain, not about justice as it applies to the universe but about justice as it applies to other human beings. Where does our sense of justice, as it applies to human behavior come from?

Lewis’ answer, that it comes from God, doesn’t work, and I refer you to my essay Atheism and Morals (about Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay “Atheism and Morals”) for a full explanation of why that answer fails. However the short explanation is that it becomes impossible to know whether an act is right because God says so, or whether it’s right because it’s actually good. If God’s say-so is what makes something right, then we have no way to distinguish God from the devil. God becomes, to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s explanation,

. . . a Hobbesian sovereign whose title to legitimate authority rests not on his absolute paternal care, his goodness as a father, but solely on his power, and the devil’s lack of such a title rests solely on his inferiority in respect of power. Satan becomes a Hobbesian rebel who fails to be a Hobbesian sovereign only because he is unsuccessful.*

This won’t do, even for Christians. C. S. Lewis answer, that God is the source of morality, has the effect of insulting God. It makes God’s goodness disappear, replaced by God’s raw power. The source of our sense of justice has to lie outside not just our agency, but outside of God’s agency as well. Otherwise neither our decisions nor God’s decisions can be good or bad — and the same goes for the devil.

For God, the only solution that works is for there to be a moral sense built into God’s nature separate from his agency (his actual actions); and somehow God must reference that innate moral sense before he acts if he is to determine the right thing to do. The same solution applies for us. There must be a moral sense built into our nature separate from our agency, and by which we can judge the rightness or wrongness of our actions.

Now, that moral sense must have gotten into us in one of two ways: either because God put it there, or because we evolved as a social species and the process of evolution put it there. Either answer is viable. But — and this is a significant but — the theist faces an additional problem: what or who put God’s moral nature into God? Is there another God behind God, responsible for God’s moral nature? And what about that God’s moral nature?

The theist, unfortunately, can’t resort to evolution to explain God’s moral nature because, for one thing, God doesn’t exist in competition with other species (or with other Gods, supposedly). Nor is God a member of a social species to which God’s moral nature could apply — until God peopled the universe, his moral nature had no application, no purpose, no reason to be. And yet, as we saw earlier, God must have a sense of morality separate from his agency, by which God (and all subsequent beings) can judge the morality of his actions. How did he get this? Why should it be a moral nature rather than an immoral nature — that is, why is God God rather than the devil?

If God is a moral actor, in other words, then God must have a sense of justice to which he can refer when making decisions. “But how,” we can imagine God wondering (anticipating Lewis) “how did I get this idea of just and unjust?” And God might likewise wonder, “Why do I feel obliged to do the right thing for the creatures I created in my world?”

And this brings us to the 1000-lb gorilla: the problem of evil. Not the evil that might result from human misbehavior, but the evil that results (assuming the universe is the product of God’s agency) from God’s decisions when designing the universe. For example, those before-mentioned volcanoes and tornadoes. If God is a moral agent, with a sense of justice, then he must recognize his own culpability in the death and destruction to sentient beings which the forces of nature unleash. He must also recognize the pain and suffering due entirely to his decision to create a world in which life must eat other life in order to survive. If God does not recognize the wrongness of this, it can only be because he is indeed a Hobbsian sovereign who is morally indistinguishable from the devil. But if God does recognize the wrongness of it, then it follows that he also recognizes his fallibility, his own lack of perfection.

And so must we.

The atheist has the easier path. The atheist needs only to demonstrate that evolution can result in a species with an internal sense of right and wrong by which to judge actions, and do so by showing how it might have evolved and by identifying its development in existing species. Scientists face no major difficulty in any of this. We do in fact see a sense of right and wrong exhibited by other primate species, for example; and game theory shows that altruistic behavior along with “tit for tat” can be viable evolutionary strategies. It is possible to invision how such strategies could have been internalized into a social species’ genetic makeup.

The atheist task, compared to that of the theist, is the easier.

In a later post, when I discuss consciousness as “sensations” distinct from the brain’s other, non-conscious “behaviors”, it will be possible (I hope) to explain how morality fits into the picture. In particular, I will argue that decisions are made in non-conscious parts of the brain, and that moral feelings of shame, regret, ought, moral satisfaction, and so on — like our other brain-created sensations — serve a role related to longer-term memory formation and future decision-making. Untangling why we humans have moral sensations, in other words, is very much tied up with untangling why we have consciousness at all, the nature of that consciousness, and its evolutionary role.

———-

*Quotes are from:

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis, 1952

Atheism and Morals, Alasdair MacIntyre in The Religious Significance of Atheism, Columbia University Press, 1969, p. 35

”My central thesis is the direct opposite of their view: I hold not that a loss of theistic belief produces a loss of moral belief and a change of practice, but rather that a change in the character of morality is at least partly responsible for the modern inability to accept theistic belief. That is, I wish to invert the Dostoyevskian contention about the relation between theism and morals.” [p. 38-39]*

Theism requires, MacIntyre maintains,

”a particular position with respect to morality: more specifically, if theism is to be coherent [it] must rely . . . upon an independently understood moral vocabulary. To this conclusion I now wish to add another and stronger thesis: namely that theistic practice depends upon the existence of independent moral practices.” [p. 39]*

Moral practices, he makes plain, which have ceased to be common today. But what exactly is he getting at? He asks us to consider why someone obeys the law against stealing. There are essentially two reasons. First, because if you don’t you may get caught and punished. The second reason you might not steal is because you find it beneficial to live in a society in which you can generally depend on the things you own being there when you need them. Laws which rely on both of these command our respect as well as our acquiescence. On the other hand,

”A legal code which arbitrarily ordains and prohibits actions that are without reasonable point or purpose commands our allegiance only insofar as it is able to deploy power to enforce its sanctions. As with legal code in general, so also with divine law. if God’s commands are not to be mere fiats backed by arbitrary power then they must command actions which can be seen to have point and purpose independent of, and antecedent to, the divine utterance of divine law. “ [p. 35-36]*

Good, God & the Devil

Many theists today miss the importance of this point when they argue that what is good is good because God declares it to be good. This is clearly erroneous, according to MacIntyre.

”What I wish to show is that this view is internally incoherent, and the most vivid way in which I can begin to show this is by pointing out that it is difficult, if this view is correct, for theists to distinguish between God and the devil in the way that they must. For if “God is good” and “We ought to do whatever God commands” are transformed into tautologies by means of redefinitions of “good” and “right,” it follows that we can have no moral reasons for obedience to divine commandments.” [p. 34]*

In this scenario God’s benevolence is unjudgable. God must therefore be regarded as “right” simply because we bow to his omnipotence rather than because we recognize his omnibenevolence. Furthermore the devil is “wrong” not because of his non-benevolence but simply due to his lack of omnipotence. MacIntyre remarks,

”God has been transformed by the proponents of this view into a Hobbesian sovereign whose title to legitimate authority rests not on his absolute paternal care, his goodness as a father, but solely on his power, and the devil’s lack of such a title rests solely on his inferiority in respect of power. Satan becomes a Hobbesian rebel who fails to be a Hobbesian sovereign only because he is unsuccessful. Christian theism in particular can scarcely tolerate this. . . .” [p. 35]*

Now we begin to understand clearly why MacIntyre considers it so important to maintain that morality is something independent of God.

Moral Independence & Human Nature

But just as morality must be something independent of God’s decisions and judgments, so it must also be something independent of our human decisions and judgments.

”What morality is required to be by theism and what it usually has been considered to be is a set of rules which are taken as given and are seen as having validity and authority independent of any external values or judgments. It is essential to morality so conceived that we accept the rules wholly and without question. We must not seek rational grounds for accepting them, nor can we decide, on rational grounds, to revise them—although we may discover by chance that we were mistaken in what we thought the content of the rules to be. When morality is considered in this light, theories about morality are accounts of why the code of moral rules includes the items that it does and no others. Platonic and Aristotelian morality both offer theories of this kind. Aristotelianism grounds its explanation in the view that human nature has certain inherent goals, needs, and wants. The cogency of this theoretical explanation depends on the fact that the society which upholds the given moral rules agrees upon a way of life defined in terms of just those goals, wants, and needs.” [p. 37-38]*

But that last point is just the problem today, MacIntyre asserts. Western society no longer agrees on goals, wants, or needs—nor even accedes that there can even in principle be agreement on goals, wants, or needs. Instead two inimical beliefs have risen to the forefront of modern thought.

”The first of these beliefs is that disagreements between rival moral views are essentially irreconcilable, that there is no shared criteria to which men may appeal in order to settle fundamental disputes. . . . The obvious counterpart to the idea that fundamental moral disputes are in principle irreconcilable is the belief that there is not just a single determinate human nature; that human nature is immensely malleable; and that around the relatively unchanging biological core society and culture may weave very different patterns, resulting in widely varying wants, needs, and goals. It is just because this belief is dominant now that no ultimate shared criteria can be invoked by which moral disputes may be resolved.” [p. 44]*

That is the predicament we face today. It is the predicament faced by theism, but it is also the predicament faced by the secularist, agnostic and atheist. In fact MacIntyre warns atheists against expressing too much glee at the difficulties faced by theists because of this sea-change in the modern moral framework. After all, this development has

“placed not only theism but also its atheistic critics in a position where their debates cannot supply contemporary cultural needs.” [p. 54]*

In fact, to a significant extent it is the failure of atheism and secularism to develop a non-religious moral framework capable of reconciling the current moral anarchy and restoring belief in a “determinant human nature” which has allowed us to end up where we are. For if it is true, as MacIntyre has convincingly argued, that morality is properly independent of theism, then it is absolutely necessary for atheists and secularists to provide a non-religious vocabulary “for the traditional religious and moral questions.” [p. 53]* Atheists have not been up to the task, to say the least.

How We Got Here

We might ask how and why the “traditional attitude to moral rules” became overturned. Although there are many causes, MacIntyre sees two as most influential. The first

”was the impact of those versions of Christianity—mainly Protestant, but in some cases Catholic—according to which human nature is seen as so corrupt that human morality must be considered of no account. The consequence of this view is that from any human standpoint the divine commandments do become arbitrary fiats imposed on us externally; our nature does not summon us to obey them, because we cannot recognize them as being for our good. The motives of hope of eternal reward and fear of eternal punishment then must completely replace temporal motives for morality.” [p. 39]*

The second (and perhaps more important) influential cause requires more exposition and therefore warrants a longer quote from MacIntyre’s lecture.

”A second tendency also inimical to that morality was that embodied in the liberal principle that the individual is sovereign within the sphere of morality. In classical liberalism this principle is often and significantly expressed in an incoherent form. For it is first of all presented as itself an objective truth whose moral validity and authority in no way depend upon individual moral agents’ assenting to it or deciding to make it their own; and yet since the right that it ostensibly confers upon the individual is an unrestricted right to make his own decisions as to what principles shall be binding upon him, it is a self-destructive principle. Certainly the picture derived from it of each individual as uttering moral injunctions to himself which gain their authority from no source other than his own will and choice is inconsistent with the morality that theism requires. Kant’s moral philosophy will provide us with illumination at this point, for Kant wrote at a key period for the history of the relations between theism and morality, when the rift between them had become clearly apparent, and morality had half, but only half, changed its character. . . . The autonomy of morality he recognizes when he asserts that men cannot derive it from theism if they are to call God or “the Holy One of Israel” good in any significant sense; yet he still invokes a theistic explanation to give morality point. He must do so, since for Kant the heterogeneity, the variety, the incompatibility, which mark man’s natural goals, needs, and wants entail that these can provide us with no stable criteria. He cannot find, as the medieval Aristotelian would, any point or proof for morality in terms of the satisfaction of the needs and wants of a human nature created by God to be of a certain determinate kind; and he invokes theism only as an assurance that goodness will be rewarded in another life. While theism is assigned this attenuated role, the autonomous moral agent is presented as one whose moral prescriptions have no authority other than that derived from himself as a rational agent and yet have the character of a law.

“But what authority can a law have which I utter to myself? And what sanction can a law have of which I am expressly told that there are no earthly sanctions to back it and when the theistic sanction is invoked to make morality theoretically intelligible rather than to provide one with a motive? In other words, in Kant’s writings the notion of morality as a law, and with it the traditional notion of one true morality, is combined with a liberal individualist recognition of the individual’s sovereignty, and so is considered as a law only in some rather curious sense at best; and this unstable combination was indeed bound to lead to a victory for the liberal individualist elements of the conceptual scheme and a defeat for those elements derived from the traditional ways of regarding morality. And this is because these matters were not merely episodes in the intellectual history of theology and philosophy, but stood in intimate relationship to what was happening in society at large. For the morality that had become so irrelevant in theory was having its roots in social practice destroyed by a rate and type of social change which made ordinary men far more conscious of actual and potential variety of competing and conflicting moralities and ways of life and the need to choose between them, and thus it was undermining the notion of one true morality.” [p. 40-43]*

MacIntyre misses one of the essential aspects of the milieu in which the victory of liberal individualism developed. Platonic and Aristotelian morality depends not just on a universal acceptance of a fixed human moral nature, but also on a society with the type of power-system in which that universal acceptance can be forced on the population at large. Autocratic societies pretend otherwise, but ultimately humans exist as individuals and human actions occur as individual actions. All moral behavior—as is all behavior—is necessarily carried out by individuals.

What changed with the enlightenment was that individuals started to claim the right to govern themselves and began throwing off the autocratic governing previously done by Kings, Aristocrats and Popes. Instead of being controlled top-down, Western societies began to be controlled bottom-up. This meant in practice that moral decisions, like political ones, started to be made in a manner more representative of individuals themselves.

The shift in the moral framework which fuels MacIntyre’s pessimism occurred precisely with the shift to democracy and the concurrent desire that morality — like politics — also be controlled bottom-up rather than top-down. MacIntyre is pessimistic precisely because he recognizes that this shift is not reversible while at the same time he perceives its harmful effect on theism.

Democratizing Morality

Here MacIntyre and I part company, because my perception is that the democratization of morality will in the long run be positive. I believe so specifically because I remain convinced that there is a more-or-less determinate human moral nature, one written not by God but by our evolutionary past. Whereas MacIntyre sees the individualization of morality in terms of a Pandora’s box, I see it in terms of a democratization which moves power (in this case moral power) to its biologically correct position, that is to say, to the individual.

Nevertheless, MacIntyre is entirely right when he points out that the current result is that morality has lost its “moral force”, and that this loss is due to the fact that Western societies (and particularly American society) no longer believe in a determinate human nature and believe consequently that moral disagreements are, in MacIntyre’ phrase, “essentially irreconcilable”. The core ideology of multiculturalism, for example, is that no culture can legitimately judge the practices of any other culture as inferior or superior, or as right or wrong — for there is no valid external reference point to act as a fulcrum for such a judgment.

The Kantian Divide

MacIntyre has identified Kant as

“the coherent and consistent recorder and analyst of an incoherent and inconsistent set of moral concepts which were embodied in an incoherent and inconsistent moral practice, and one that had become so as a consequence of the very tendencies which I have been noting.”*

As we saw earlier, MacIntyre criticized the Kantian moral framework because

“the picture derived from it of each individual as uttering moral injunctions to himself which gain their authority from no source other than his own will and choice is inconsistent with the morality that theism requires.”*

But why, we should ask, did Kant require a morality that eminated from the individuals “own will and choice”? Kant required it because his goal – unlike MacIntyre’s — was to build a requirement for the existence of God from the “moral ought” we find residing within ourselves. Kant, we must remember, had already demolished what remained of the traditional proofs of God’s existence. His contribution was to provide a new one based on the recognition of a universal moral obligation within us. At the same time, moral decisionmaking had to be seen a rational process driven by the human will – Kant realized — for if it was merely instinctive then it failed to point beyond nature to God.

In other words, theism can only have it one way: either the moral imperatives inherent in human nature proceed from the human will and rational choice and thereby constitute proof of the existence of a God (Kant’s position), or the basis of morality in humans is irrational (instinctive or god-centric) and there is no proof of God’s existence from moral ought. MacIntyre prefers to abandon proof of God’s existence, perhaps because (like most of his theistic contemporaries) faith in God’s existence is accepted as “enough”.

And it has to be “enough” since if MacIntyre’s analyzis is correct, morality is an inherent consequence of possessing a “determinant human nature” and not a fiat from God. As such, it could never serve as evidence of God’s existence; for both evolution and divine creationism can be invoked to account for human nature, and the first can stand without God.

Conclusion

If there is no determinant human nature, Christianity is left wrecked. There remains no sound basis for morality other than divine fiat, and yet Christians have no way to distinguish morally between God and the Devil.

Unfortunately, the consequences don’t stop there. If there is no determinant human nature then we must fall back on human fiat — that is, on the sheer power of majorities — despite the fact that minorities may have a divergent moral nature. This is not a situation in which “might makes right” prevails so much as one in which “might pretends right”.

The alternative is to claim that there is a determinate moral nature. But if so, how is that nature to be determined? And by whom?

Theism has no workable answers. Does atheism?

—————–

*All quotes are from:

“Atheism and Morals”, Alasdair MacIntyre in The Religious Significance of Atheism, Columbia University Press, 1969

“The existentialist…finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven….Dostoevsky once wrote, ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted,…” — www.science.wayne.edu/~mlee/antipsyc/duerf2.html

Even Christiaan Stange’s Doetoevsky Research Station website admits the uncertainty of the quote.

But apparently the phrase does occur in the novel’s original Russian – according to an email to sent to Cortesi by someone named Valeria. She claims that the Russian phrase “esli Boga net — znachit vsio pozvoleno” is indeed spoken by Ivan Karamazov in the untranslated novel. She translates it as “if there is no God, that means everything is permitted/allowed/permissible.” Unfortunately, she didn’t reveal to Cortesi where in the novel this wording occurs so that it can be confirmed.

Searching for the Russian phrase on Google, Yahoo and AltaVista got me nowhere. Additionally, I have been unable to locate the novel in its original Russian online, or else it would be easy enough to search for the quote (and thereby locate the corresponding passage in the English translation).

As far as the English translation goes, I have tried to go through it searching for every phrase containing the word “God” and I cannot see where Ivan used this particular wording, or anything close to it. Ivan presents the general idea, surely enough, but not the wording in question. For example, in Book I “History of a Family” Chapter 6, we find Miusov recalling a speech in which Ivan

“solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That’s not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position. ” [emphasis added]

Asked if this is what he really believes, Ivan himself responds,

“Yes. That was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no immortality.” [emphasis added]

Although the idea is here, the famous quote is not.

Ivan’s hypothesis, that if there is no God/ no immortality, then everything is lawful, is crucial to the plot of the novel. Influenced by Ivan’s ideas, Smerdyakov commits murder and justifies it by quoting Ivan. In Book XI, Chapter 8 (“The Third and Last Interview with Smerdyakov”) Smerdyakov tells Ivan he felt no compunction against behaving immorally

“chiefly because ‘all things are lawful.’ That was quite right what you taught me, for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it. You were right there. So that’s how I looked at it.” [emphasis added]

It appears to me that the most likely source for the famous quote is actually Ivan’s brother, Mitya Karamazov. In Book XI, Chapter 4 “A Hymn and a Secret”, Mitya tells Alyosha about a conversation he had with the atheist Rakitin.

“‘But what will become of men then?’ I asked him [Rakitin], ‘without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he [Rakitin] said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said. ‘A clever man knows his way about, but you’ve put your foot in it, committing a murder, and now you are rotting in prison.’ He says that to my face!” [emphasis added]

A final possibility is that the quote actually comes from another character, Father Zossima (in Book VI “The Russian Monk” Chapter 3 “Conversations and Exhortations of Father Zossima” Section F “Of Masters and Servants, and of whether it is possible for them to be Brothers in the Spirit”) for we find Zossima asking “if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?”

“It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that’s consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime?” [emphasis added]

So although the idea for the famous phrase “If there is no God, everything is permitted” can be attributed to Ivan Karamazov, it is quite possible that the actual quote comes from a different character in the novel: Smerdyakov or Mitya or Father Zossima. I’m hoping someone who has access to The Brothers Karamazov in Russian can search for “esli Boga net — znachit, vsio pozvoleno” and find out where the quote is located and which character says it. Anyone?

It is well known that people don’t always ‘speak their minds’, and it is suspected that people don’t always ‘know their minds’. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

“This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.”

You can take their tests here (if you dare). If interested, you can also volunteer to take part in Project Implicit.

“Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching’, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” – Pope Benedict XVI

Which is a very confused description of relativism. On the one hand it sounds like relativism = being open to “every wind of teaching”, that is to say it looks like our new Pope confuses relativism with open-mindedness — and opposes open-mindedness. The desire to be sure of the truth, to not be misled as a result of lack of exposure to ideas, which leads one to listen to “every wind of teaching” (the Pope says “swept along by” but that is mere hyperbole) he equates with being selfish.

It is selfish to want to know the truth, says our new Pope. It is selfish to listen to what reform Catholics — or God forbid non-Catholics — think. Relativism means simply “not bowing down to the wisdom of the Pope”.

In fact, what he said just before the part I quoted is telling,

“The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14).”

So that’s it. Relativism means people are abandoning the Church for other belief-systems. They are listening to other ideas.

Of course, that’s not what relativism means at all. Usually, when intelligent people talk about relativism, they mean to refer to the attitude that “what is true for you is true for you and what is true for me is true for me” or “there is no truth and we are free to make it up as we choose”. Or else, in the case of “moral relativism”, to the assertion that morality is ultimately a matter of individual or social taste, and does not have a source in anything more enduring.

Ratzinger/Benedict XVI is supposed to be a very sharp theologian, whose primary theme is opposition to “modernism” and “relativism”. But his real opposition appears to be simply to Catholics thinking for themselves, which he pretends is “relativism”. If they doubt the Pope’s decrees, that’s relativism.

I supposed that is why he condemned the Catholic theologian Hans Kung and others. No, the Catholic game of declaring itself “the one true faith” is laughable. Maybe there is one true faith. But whether it be the Catholic church is something every individual must question & investigate for themselves. As the saying goes, “God wouldn’t have given us each a brain if he didn’t intend for us to use it.”

—–
Speaking of moral relativism, has anyone noticed that “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is chock full of relativism? It seems to make each of us the judge of moral rightness. We are supposed to imagine what we would like done to ourselves in order to figure out how we should behave toward others. The moral reference is to me, myself, my own feelings and experiences. Not outside myself to God or to the dictates of the current Pope. But inside to me, how I would like to be treated.

Jesus, you moral relativist, you.

Fortunately Christians don’t have to worry about the teachings of Jesus. They’ve got the Pope.