God, Good, and Good Enough

Preface as to why I'd bother writing this

If we are going to have a civil conversation on any topic, all parties need to seek out the legitimacy in the others' views. With this approach, the ensuing discussion can take place in an atmosphere of respect. While we may begin and end in disagreement, we would do well to not squander the middle in misunderstanding. When we are willing to listen and be challenged, we all stand to benefit. 

Nowhere is exchange more needed or more in need of levelheadedness than ethics in our multicultural milieu. Specifically in the US, members of the longstanding religious majority must earnestly confer with members of the ascendant secular minority. Religious people ought not dismiss secularists as misanthropes, hedonists, or at best, suspicious waifs without an ultimate commitment. Secular people ought not dismiss religious people as dolts, bigots, or at best, credulous simpletons with dangerous devotions.  

Toward this end, Troy Jollimore, a philosopher frustrated by prejudice against atheism, investigates why (in North America, at least) so many people suppose ethics without God is impossible. He offers a rationale for the intransigent union of monotheism and ethics, why known forms of secular ethics are hardly actionable, and proposes a secular ethic better suited for real people. I offer my summary and response below.

Summary of what I'm responding to

Jollimore begins by rejecting religiously-rooted ethics with the same flippancy he finds irksome from people of faith. Briefly, he states religions don't provide genuine knowledge because there are contradictory beliefs among them (which I have previously addressed in part here). Beyond questionable knowledge claims, the author argues God is unable to ground ethical systems because he is either unnecessary or counterproductive. Jollimore takes the existence of non-self-interested reasons for moral actions as sufficient to make secular ethics possible since the religious ethicists he disputes supposedly contend that without God, all moral motivation would be self-interested.

Next, Jollimore calls upon the Euthyphro Dilemma to turn the tables on religious ethicists. With its help, the author claims that either the good is good prior to God anointing it so (in which case, why don't we subtract God from the picture since the good is so independently?) or God makes the good good by his choosing. If God makes the good good by his choosing, then the good is, paradoxically, immoral (or, I'd clarify, amoral) since all bad deeds would be permissible without his post hoc condemnation. Furthermore, good deeds could get as wacky as God capriciously wanted. Jollimore illustrates the point by writing God's autocratic decree could convert what we call fashion norms into binding moral ones.

Given the ease with which God-based ethics can be dismantled, the author wonders why it is that so few common people take secular ethics seriously. He blames the available secular ethical regimes of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics for being so uninspiring and sterile no one would try to actually live by them. (I'll spare the reader my contention that Jollimore grossly misreads Kant's ethics as secular. Contact me privately if you want to read that tirade.) The legalistic system's failure to take root in society at large is one of the main reasons why secular ethics aren't able to fight back against Western religious-based (i.e., monotheistic) ethical systems.

Having taken down religious belief and inadequate atheistic systems, Jollimore builds. The lion's share of the essay is an argument in favor of virtue ethics, an ethical program (rather than codified system) that is wholly  devoid of theistic appeals. The author, instead, relies upon rationality as well as human sociology/psychology to ground his proposed program. The author argues that virtue ethics is better suited for flesh-and-blood humans and the complexities they inhabit than the cold, rigorous rule-based systems of the Enlightenment. 

My response: beating the author at his own game

I agree that, to the wider population for whom the debate about ethics is not principally academic, virtue ethics is more appealing that the heady 18th-19th century variants. Philosophers, who cooked up those systems, are paid to ponder. The rest of us rarely can afford the luxury of running utility calculations on, for instance, whether we should report suspicious behavior to the authorities or imagining all possible outcomes to determine whether or not, for instance, buying a locally created good can be universally willed. Virtue ethics seeks to craft a second nature, a temperate character capable of judging and acting properly in all of life's myriad scenarios. The author, to his credit, recognizes the intricacies of moral action. He fails, however, to persuade complexity-accommodation is unique to atheistic ethics.

To take one example, Jollimore's regime can easily be translated into a Christian schema. Developing practical wisdom can be an analogue for the theological concept of sanctification. Mimicking the ideal virtuous person can be an analogue for mimicking Christ. 

Further, if real-world mapping intricacy is the measure of ethical viability, theistic ethics should not be discounted. Christianity as I know it benefits from overlapping ethical approaches. At once, it contains a codified and character-based ethics. The former is culled from God's commands to harbor and spurn certain thoughts and to perform and abstain from certain actions. The latter is borne out of the command to emulate Christ, who was and is "the way."

Not only does it provide for both types of ethics, they're both on surer footing. The rules, which are abstract and theoretical when concocted by professors, are woven into the universe and our hearts when spoken by God. Jesus is the personal template. Christ's disciples are to mimic him to the extent that human frailty and divine grace allows. Thanks to the chronicled accounts of his deeds and teachings in the Bible, he is more concrete than Aristotle's lauded but elusive virtuous man. We can more readily infer Jesus's judgments than the decisions of an idealized actor.

(Note: These simultaneous systems create additional tension for the moral agent, such as when a rule conflicts with the course we presume Christ would take. These tension are not to be avoided or construed as a failing. They're a consequence of our ambivalent selves participating in our ambivalent world with the perfectly good Creator giving us room to act.)

The central irony of Jollimore's essay is the very argument he supposes dismantles God's place in ethics could, with slight modification, be used to even more powerfully dismantle the good person's place in virtue ethics. (Let's presume the Euthyphro problem is legitimate, since Jollimore uses it. I have reservations given the thought experiment's assumptions about time, specifically thinking temporally about a pre-temporal event we call creation.) The Euthyphro dilemma could be directed to Aristotle's good man. Imagine the virtuous man does a virtuous deed. He helps an elderly woman across the street. Either (1) the virtuous man chooses to help the elderly woman across the street because doing so is a good deed already established in the world or (2) the virtuous man's choice in itself is good because he chose it. If (1), then the good is so apart from virtuous people. If (2), then the good is capricious.

If (1) is true, then the good exist apart from human choice. Jollimore seems to prefer this option given his appeal to human nature. A thoroughly committed empiricist will be unmoved by this metaphysical concept, a more palatable synonym for the old-fashioned, unverifiable soul. Science is a long, long way from determining what human nature is--so far, in fact, that belief in essences is no more preposterous than the persistence of faith in the contemporary world. Survey the available scientific literature and try to find a consensus on something as central to virtue ethics as, say, human flourishing. Hard science continues to excuse itself from discussions of value. 

The unique quandary for the secular ethicist is that if, seeking to avoid the messy position of species and nature the metaphysical status of the good, (2) is correct, then he is committed to an even more arbitrary view of the good than the religious believer. Who is more fit to be the arbiter of right and wrong: humans or God? Whereas the religious believer can appeal to a being who is above the fray, as it were, who created all good things and knows them completely, the secular believer must hold that the good is determined by a fallible partisan. Thus, the virtue ethicist is hard pressed to avoid the charges of discrimination, unjustifiable preferences, and smuggling in the ideals shared by his/her class, political party, etc. To wit, Aristotle was an aristocrat. Is it any wonder he saw social strata as good, slaves as necessary, and magnanimity--the highest virtue--possible only for those with ample wealth and resources, both in terms of money and leisure time?

Jollimore concludes by saying, "[m]orality can get along just fine without God." What he presumably intended to be an understatement is unwittingly accurate. It's possible. But should we be satisfied with mediocrity?

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