Tag: atheist morality

Empathy Is Such a Stupid Basis For Morality

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized28 Comments

If you’ve spent more than a few minutes arguing with atheists on the internet, the subject of how they justify morality will have come up and they will have tried to justify it by saying that “they have empathy”. Usually, though not always, in very self-satisfied tones. It is curious that they are oblivious to how stupid this is. And not just in one way.

The first problem, of course, is that empathy doesn’t inevitably lead to treating people well. It’s very easy to lie to people because one doesn’t want them to suffer, to give too much candy to a child because you can’t bear to hear them cry, to give alcohol to an alcoholic because he feels miserable without it, etc. Empathy also provides no check against suffering that cannot be seen. It’s hard to shoot a man standing in front of you, and not so hard to shoot him when he’s 200 yards away, and not nearly as hard when he’s inside of a building that you’re bombing. It can be downright easy when it’s giving orders to people who don’t feel empathy to execute people in a camp hundreds of miles away.

For that matter, empathy can even lead to being cruel; if two people’s needs conflict and one feels more empathy for one person than another, that empathy can lead one to harm the other for the sake of the one more empathized with. Parents are notorious for being willing to go to great lengths for the sake of their children, even to the point of doing all sorts of immoral things to spare their children far less suffering than the harm they cause to spare it. I can testify to the temptation. If I were to consult only my feelings and not my principles, there’s no limit to the number of people I would kill for the sake of my children.

Which brings us to another problem: empathy is merely a feeling. To claim that the basis of morality is empathy is to claim that the basis of morality is a feeling. In other words, “morality is based on empathy” means “do what you feel like.” That’s not morality, that’s the absence of morality. Moreover, human beings demonstrably feel like doing bad things to each other quite often.

(Unless, of course, the atheist is trying to claim that one should privilege the feeling of empathy over feelings experienced more strongly at the time, in which case there would need to be some rational argument given, not based in empathy, for why it should be thus privileged. But if one were to try this, one would run into a sort of Euthyphro dilemma—if empathy is good because it conforms to the good, then it is not the source of goodness, and it is a distraction to talk about it; if good is good because it conforms to empathy, then to call empathy good is merely to say that it is empathy, and there is no rational basis for preferring it to other feelings.)

The fact that people feel like doing bad things to each other really gets to the heart of the problem for the atheist. It’s all very well for the atheist to say “I prefer to harm no one.” He can have no real answer to someone else replying, “but I do.” Indeed, he has no answer. If you ever suggest such a thing, the atheist merely shrieks and yells and tries to shout down the existence of such a thing. His ultimate recourse is to law, of course, which means to violence, for law is the codified application of violence by people specially charged with carrying that violence out.

(It’s hardly possible to arrest someone, try, convict, and imprison them all without at least the threat of force from the police; if you don’t think so try the following experiment: construct a medium sized steel box (with windows), walk up to some random person while manifestly carrying no weapons, and say “In my own name I arrest you and sentence you twenty years inside of my steel box. Now come along and get in. I will not force you, but I warn you that if you do not comply I shall tell you to get in again.” Do this twenty or thirty times and count how many of them the person comes along and gets in.)

Of course, when the atheist appeals to the laws which enforce his preferred morality, we may ask where his empathy for the transgressor is. Where is his empathy for all of the people in prison? It must be a terrible feeling to be arrested by the police; where is the atheist’s empathy for them?

If you go looking for it, you will find that the atheist’s empathy is often in short supply, though he credits himself in full.

Atheists and Morality

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized2 Comments

When I was young, I heard a fair amount of argumentation that “atheists can be just as moral as Christians,” and in a very theoretical sense—and neglecting the duty of piety to God which an atheist must necessarily transgress—there is a sense in which this is true. As time has proven, though, it’s an irrelevant sense.

There are two possible meanings to “atheists can be just as moral”, though they end up in the same place. The first meaning is that an atheist can, through practice and effort, form virtuous habits according to whatever theory of morality he holds, and continue in these virtuous habits all the days of his life. This is true, especially for people who become atheists as adults, since adults tend to be fixed in their habits relative to children. Habits formed in youth are, certainly, possible to keep even if the reason for them has been rejected. It is not easy for such an atheist, since the continuation of his habits will have only the support of his prejudices and not of his intellect, but it is certainly doable. At least so long as he doesn’t face temptation. Upper middle class bachelors, with cheap hobbies, few wants, and no family obligations, will in fact tend to be harmless until they return to dust.

This misses is that there is more to morality than simply being harmless, or even than simply being “a productive member of society”. These are fine things, but human beings were made for greatness, not for being somewhat more convenient to their neighbors than absolutely nothing would be. It doesn’t really matter, anyway, because of the second possible meaning.

The second possible meaning of “atheists can be just as moral” is that they can be just as moral, according to their own moral standards. If this sounds good to you, consider that Genghis Khan thought that pillaging, raping, and murdering were heroic actions and that he was a really great guy for doing them. Being moral according to your own moral standards—assuming you’ve done your best to ensure your moral standards are correct—may possibly be sufficient to make you saveable by the salvific power of Christ on the cross atoning for the sins of the world, but it doesn’t mean that you aren’t being immoral according to the correct moral standards.

To say that an atheist can follow his own moral standards is, in fact, to say that he is liable to be immoral precisely to the degree in which his standards differ from real morality. It is no answer to say that he will approve of himself while he fornicates, adulterates marriages, and murders. It is no answer to say that he will only murder the people he believes it’s perfectly fine to murder, or that he will only murder people he declares aren’t human beings before he murders them. Approving of his evil actions doesn’t make him less wrong, it makes him more wrong.

When the famous enlightenment philosopher said, “there is no God, but don’t tell that to the servants or they will steal the silver,” it is no answer to say, “perhaps, but they will not think that it’s wrong to steal the silver while they steal it.”

This does bring up something of a side-note, which is sometimes talked about in this context: people who believe that God sees everything and punishes wrongdoing in the afterlife are more likely to think that they cannot get away with a moral transgression than are people who think that no one will catch them now or later. There is something to this, since the feeling that someone will know what you do is a support to doing the right thing. This is not the entirety of morality, however. People can habituate themselves to virtue such that they do not need this support in order to do the right thing, i.e. so that they can do the right thing even if they don’t believe anyone will know, merely because it is the right thing to do. Which brings us back to this second point: that does no good if the person’s theory of right and wrong is wrong.

If someone’s theory of right and wrong is wrong, he will not just do wrong (that he approves of) when no one is looking, he will also do wrong when everyone is looking.

Many atheists of the late 1800s and early 1900s took great offense at the idea that an atheist could not recognize moral standards. All people know right from wrong, they indignantly said. That modern atheists are busy villifying those older atheists for not living up to the different moral standards of modern atheists tells you what you need to know about this silly claim.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether atheists can, through effort and practice, create virtuous habits and stick to them even if no one is looking, until the day they die. History tells us, if common sense didn’t already, that they will alter their moral standards before then. Once that happens, it’s only a matter of time and temptation before they form new habits accordingly.