debate-points, philosophy, morality, booksHas anyone encountered a good summary of philosophical views on morality from an atheistic perspective (preferably sympathetic, but with comments on flaws in the approaches)? Failing that, can someone list the most important books that cover the topic?
Since theists tend to assume that they automatically have the high ground when it comes to morality, it would be nice to at least have an authoritative place to point them to explain current thinking on the topic, or to point atheists who are curious about the subject.
My impression seems to be that the justification for morality has been difficult for both religious and non-religious philosophers, and that almost every proposal has at least one and sometimes many nearly trivial serious flaws with it.
Possible authors include the Churchlands, though in those things that I’ve read, I’ve had the impression that they don’t think it’s an interesting problem; Dennett, though it has seemed to me in the past that he redefines his way out of the issue more than tackling it; Marc Hauser, except although he presents very interesting data on moral behavior, he doens’t really cover the logical justification for morality; and Sam Harris, who makes a head-on attempt that is solidly consequentialist and unfortunately fails to address the most basic problems with such an approach.
Sam Harris published The Moral Landscape last year: “How science can determine human values”. Or did you mean that when you noted that he “unfortunately fails to address the most basic problems [of consequentialism]”? If so, I’d be interested in details. As far as I see, Harris goes quite a bit further than consequentialism.
I’m not finished reading it but I can already highly recommend it. It is essentially a plea against moral relativism and aims to show (successfully, in my opinion) that questions of morality can in principle be answered by science, even if that answer still eludes us at the moment.
From the cover text:
Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and values in a “moral landscape.” […] Just as there is no Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality.
(I don’t particularly like the latter formulation. Clearly there are Christian and Muslim moralities. It’s just that they are misguided and wrong.)
I cannot recommend highly enough Stefan Molyneux's-
Universally Pereferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics
It is available for free as a PDF and also as an audio book. find it here.
Again, a secular life changer for me.
There are many ways of explaining morality, or ethics, or values without recourse to the supernatural. I will focus on answering with a summary that includes failings of one particular group, negationists of the latter half of the 1800s (i.e. Anarchists, Nihilists, etc).
In The Rebel by Camus, there is a section that builds up a hypothesis of morality’s development moving forward from the negationist philosophies of Pisarev, Nechaiev, Bielinsky, and Bakunin. For further background I recommend reading the whole section on “Historical Rebellion” in The Rebel.
He begins moving forward with the 1860s, which “began, apparently, with the most radical negation imaginable: the rejection of any action that was not purely egoistic (Camus 154).” This can be seen in Fathers and Sons (Turgenev 1862), in which the term nihilism is coined; for whom “the only value resides in rational egoism” according to Camus. This laid a foundation for developing a non-positivist ethics, a cynical ethics as Camus would describe it.
However, he continues with a criticism:
Reason among the nihilists, strangely enough, annexed the prejudices of faith; choosing the most popularized forms of science-worship for their prototype of reason was not the least of the contradictions accepted by these individualists. (Camus 155)
The criticism is not due to the association with faith, actually, it is that they didn’t sufficiently adopt skepticism as their model. Instead, they opened the door for nihilism to give way to socialism; “they chose to propagate a doctrine and became socialists (Camus 155).” From here, Camus cites two specific examples that are the threshold of Morality after this point, both of which seeking to rationalize the contradiction of [faith and doctrine] within [nihilism and rationalist egoism]:
Veidle quotes… Soloviev… in denouncing this contradiction: “Man is descended from monkeys, therefore let us love one another.” Pisarev’s truth, however, is to be found in this dilemma. If man isthe image of God, then it doess not matter thaat he is deprived of human love; the day will come when he will be satiated with it. But if he is a blind creature, wandering the darkness of a cruel and circumscribed condition, he has need of his equals and of their ephemeral love (Camus 155).
The movement began wanting to live life egoistically, subject only to reason, but eventually Bakunin (a contemporary revolutionary and collectivist anarchist) was of the sentiment that “He who has understood reality does not rebel against it, but rejoices in it; in other words, he becomes a conformist (Camus 156).” For Bakunin, evil was simply the rebellion against the divine (or less figuratively, “established”) will. It was not a categorical disposittion, rather a relative position.
For some negationists, science was an idol of their time. For Bakunin, it represented yet another figurehead of oppression. Nonetheless, he was an editor of the International Fraternity (1864-7), which established subordination of the individual to central committee (Camus 159). In developing some kind of ethics or morality or any other form of applied value-judgment system, negation was a first step, wherein all things were abandoned to the ego. However, each proponent seemed to mire in their own idolatry, allowing their ego and the ego of their brethren to be subsumed in the process.
I am not familiar enough with the content to summarize, but I happened across this article. It discusses many of the philosophers that wrote on morality during the enlightment periods in France and Britian.
The also just discussed something similar to the Sam Harris book recently over at Reasonable Doubts. It's about 40 minutes in or so.
I don’t think it is a good idea to rely on sources to point to, when dealing with fundamental ideas, and morality is a fundamental idea.
Everybody should be able to explain such fundamental questions as “how does morality exist without supernatural god?”.
My answer is, that, if you judge to need morality, and that you accept the idea of god based on the need for morality, you implicitly prove a moral decision which is independent from god. If you can judge, whether the idea of god is a good one, based on moral questions, you killed god yourself, and replaced him with a secular moral.
If you don’t accept an immoral god, which could lead you to immoral behavior, then you define yourself as the ultimate reason for moral. Then you claim your own reasoning as superior to every tale told by holy books. You already lost your believe, if you ever had such.
One attempt to put morality on a rational footing is Utilitarianism, whose best known exponent was John Stuart Mill.
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