"What's in it for me?"

In Book II of Plato's Republic, Glaucon presents an argument that justice is good only for the sake of what comes from it, and not for its own sake. That is, those who have a reputation for being just are rewarded, and that's the only thing that makes justice worth doing.

I agree with Socrates that justice is good both for its own sake and for the sake of what comes from it.

I believe Glaucon's argument is based on the following claim:

If a person is motivated to perform an action, then that person must believe that performing that action is in her own self-interest. 

I believe that there are plentiful counterexamples, i.e., cases in which a person is motivated to perform an action, and yet the person does not believe that the action is in her self-interest. Doing what morality requires is often not in our self-interest, and yet those of us who are not sociopaths are strongly motivated to do what morality requires anyway. But most people I talk to can't seem to understand how it could be possible that a person is motivated to do something that is not in her self-interest. Why is that?

Here's a quick and rough speculation. Most people around here are Christians, and Christians are taught to believe that human beings are intrinsically and necessarily flawed creatures. No matter how virtuous we become, we will always be sinful. Sin is turning away from God, and God requires that we love our neighbor. Human beings are incapable of doing God's will perfectly, so even the most virtuous among us will succumb to what Kant called self-love when given a chance to help our fellow human beings. Christianity is so cynical about human nature that it holds that human beings must be bribed to be virtuous. But the promise of heaven merely appeals to self-interest. Christians are taught from the very beginning to wonder about any action, "What's in it for me?"

This might explain how the Republican Party succeeded in uniting certain libertarians and fundamentalist Christians. Because libertarian followers of Ayn Rand ask the very same question: "What's in it for me?" They have the same dreary view of human nature, but they worship it as the pinnacle of human virtue. For them, our only moral obligation is self-interest, and altruism is morally perverse. Since they share this view of human nature, it's not surprising that they are often allies.

This is one area in which atheism does better. An atheist does not do the right thing in the hope that she will be rewarded in the afterlife. Many atheists do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and that's it. There's nothing really mysterious about this to me. It is actually unremarkable. I do not need to be bribed, and I do not need to be rewarded. The mere fact that it is morally wrong to perform a particular action is itself sufficient reason not to do it, and that's that.

P.S. Lesli, I'm disappointed that I can't read your blog anymore. Can we make some kind of arrangement? If the character of your blog has changed and we cannot, that's all right. Please let me know. Thank you.

Because they work, bitches.

Source: http://xkcd.com/836/

A Christian offers a psychopathic defense of morality

A Facebook friend recently introduced me to the writings of one Matthew Archbold, blogger for the National Catholic Register. Let's just say that he's no St. Thomas Aquinas.

In his post "Atheists Love You. They Just Don't Know Why," Archbold tries to show that the moral thinking of atheists is somehow dependent on or presupposes his religion.

Archbold's target is Richard Dawkins' charitable website. The site was created in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti early this year. At that time, Dawkins wrote on the website that "When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow humans." Archbold had this to say about Dawkins' altruistic efforts:

If he’s helping people because he wants to help people then I almost hate to tell him that he’s kind of supporting some of our arguments. While Dawkins argues that he can be good without God, I think he’s actually only proving that Richard Dawkins can be good while not acknowledging God.

I have to wonder from what philosophical grounding does Dawkins’ altruism emanate? Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God? From what philosophical groundwork is he basing his good works on? Dawkins, it would seem to me, hasn’t defined his terms and is only borrowing our definition of “good.” Because without our definitions he’d have to ask the question, “What is good without God?” And that’s something I haven’t seen answered yet.

In fact, I think Dawkin’s efforts to do good is one of the best arguments for innate knowledge of right and wrong.

I almost hate to inform Mr. Dawkins that his little plot is actually helpful to believers as we believe that no matter what you espouse verbally each man has written on his soul the ability to tell right from wrong. And while Dawkins denies it, his actions indicate otherwise. There is a moral sense which you can ignore but your choosing to ignore or embrace it has no effect on its existence, much like God Himself.

Let's take Archbold's last point first. Archbold is clearly arguing that one cannot be good without God. In the third and fourth paragraphs, Archbold argues thus:

Human beings have an innate knowledge of right and wrong.
Therefore, no one can be good without God. 

This argument is obviously question-begging. For the conclusion does not follow without additional premises, which are (2) and (3) below:

1. Human beings have an innate knowledge of right and wrong. 
2. Only God can be the source of an innate knowledge of right and wrong.
3. An innate knowledge of right and wrong is necessary to do good. 
4. Therefore, no one can be good without God. 

Now, what reason has Archbold given the atheist to accept (2)? None. His readers will certainly accept it. But as a moral argument against atheism, this is a bush-league pile of shit, because it convinces only those who already agree with him.

In the second paragraph, Archbold asserts that God is the source of morality. The only argument he appears to give for this assertion is this: there is no other possible source of morality. Unfortunately, his lone premise is false. In Atheism: A Brief Insight (New York: Sterling, 2009), Julian Baggini writes:

[A]t the very root of morality is a kind of empathy or concern for the welfare of others, a recognition that their welfare also counts. This is, for most of us, a basic human instinct. Total indifference to the welfare of others is not normal human behavior, it is symptomatic of what we would normally call mental illness. Its most extreme form is that of the psychopath, who has no sense of the inner life of others at all. This recognition of the value of others is not a logical premise but a psychological one. If we accept it, then we have the starting point for all the thinking and reasoning about ethics that help us to make better decisions and become better people. But the truth of the premise, the fundamental conviction that others do count, is not something that can be demonstrated by logic. . . . Moral reasoning can only get going if we have a basic altruistic impulse to begin with (66). 

There is another possible source of morality: a basic altruistic impulse. Archbold would credit my possession of this impulse to a benevolent creator, but as we have seen, he has given us no reason whatsoever to believe that such a creator exists. The best evidence available to me that one can be good without God is that I actually am good without God. I am an atheist, and I and the atheists I know often have a greater capacity for morality than theists I know. And that is a fact.

The key statement Archbold makes is, "Why is other human life worth anything if there is no God?" The problem with Archbold's religion is that it is psychopathic. In his post, Archbold speculates that Dawkins' real motivations aren't exactly pure. Archbold writes, "If Dawkins is running this charity to show up religion and helping Haitians is only a secondary consequence then we could hardly claim that what he’s doing is good by most definitions." But notice this: when helping fellow human beings, Christians always have an ulterior motive, i.e., to do what pleases God. And Archbold seems to admit that this ulterior motive is actually their only motive, for if God does not exist, then they have no reason to help their fellow human beings at all.

The atheist helps her fellow human being whether it pleases anyone else or not, simply because it is the right thing to do. As Baggini writes,

[T]he average ethical atheist actually appears to have more moral merit than the average ethical religious believer. The reason for this is that religion, with its threat of punishment and promise of reward, introduces a nonmoral incentive to be moral that is absent in atheism (58).

Having such nonmoral, prudential reasons to be moral "appears to undermine morality rather than support it," writes Baggini. "Acting morally because it is in one's own best interest to do so does not seem to be acting morally at all" (63).

I believe that most Christians are not psychopaths. Their moral sense is as strong as mine or any atheist's. But Christians are being indoctrinated into accepting a psychopathic philosophy of morality, according to which the only reason they have to do what they know is right is that God has commanded them to. That, combined with atrophied or non-existent critical thinking skills, can produce psychopathic behavior.

If there is one thing that disgusts me these days, it's theists who complain that they are oppressed and yet attack atheists with pseudo-intellectual garbage. Archbold doesn't know the first thing about philosophical groundings. He should leave the philosophy to the experts.

Update. Denying that morality is grounded in religion does not entail that God does not exist. God, rather than being the creator of morality, would instead be an infallible detector or discoverer of it. Even though I am an atheist, I have not argued for atheism here. Even theists can therefore endorse my objections to Archbold's amateurish post.

"We're a nation of religious illiterates."

Here's the lead of a recent Associated Press/CBS story:

A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths. 

The survey in question was released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Who performed best on the survey? Atheists: 

Most Protestants "could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation," according to the AP/CBS. Given the importance of Martin Luther to the history of Protestantism, one would think that more Protestants would know who he is.

Boston University Professor Stephen Prothero told Byron Pitts of CBS, ""We're a nation of religious illiterates. We have a lot of people who really love Jesus, but don't know much about him. We have a lot of people who believe and hope that the Bible is the word of God but they don't really bother to read it."

Perhaps theists are relatively ignorant about the tenets of their own religions in part because no reasonable person would accept them—at least not without brainwashing, though I don't think brainwashing is a reliable way of making persons reasonable.

Here's an example of what I am talking about. According to the AP/CBS, "Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn't know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ." This is known as the doctrine of transubstantiation.

If I were some Catholic VIP, I would not advertise the official Catholic view regarding communion, because the official Catholic view regarding communion is insane. That might explain why so many Catholics are unaware of of the doctrine of transubstantiation. That might also explain why so many atheists are not Catholic.

Why on earth would I want to consume the body and the blood of the savior? Why would a religion encourage and promote cannibalism?

I am not a theist in part because I have knowledge of many of the tenets of theism, and I find those tenets far too incredible to be believed.

According to the AP, the survey also discovered that

many Americans don't understand constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools. While a majority know that public school teachers cannot lead classes in prayer, less than a quarter know that the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly stated that teachers can read from the Bible as an example of literature. 

"Many Americans think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are tighter than they really are," Pew researchers wrote. 

This is not surprising, given that so many Christians in this country appear to think that they are being persecuted and oppressed. The very idea is laughable. How could one be oppressed when one has so many opportunities to pray, read the Bible, go to church, consume religious programming on radio and television, and so on? 

With sufficient brainwashing, anyone can be made to believe virtually anything.

Update. Godless Girl has some thoughts about the study which you might find interesting. 

Why I Am Not a Christian: Exhibit A

If you follow current events and have some knowledge of history, you've probably noticed that Haiti seems to be victimized by one disaster after another. And perhaps you've even wondered why.

There are at least two answers to this question. One is informative and enlightening; the other is unbelievably stupid.

According to Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press, Haiti's bad luck is attributable to "a killer combination of geography, poverty, social problems, slipshod building standards and bad luck, experts say."

With regard to geography, Haiti is prone not only to hurricanes and other tropical storms, but also to earthquakes, according to Borenstein.

Haiti's social problems make natural disasters even more difficult to deal with. "It starts with poverty, includes deforestation, unstable governments, poor building standards, low literacy rates and then comes back to poverty," writes Borenstein.

Some, however, disagree with the experts.

According to Pat Robertson, Haiti's suffering is attributable to its being cursed:

ROBERTSON: [S]omething happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal."

And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. ... They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God.

This is one reason why I am not a Christian. When some Christians attempt to make sense of reality, they sound like time travellers from the 16th Century. Not only is Robertson's apparent ignorance of 500 or so years of scientific progress breathtaking, but the possible moral implications of his view are repulsive and sickening. Is it wrong of us to send aid to Haiti? Should we all just turn to God and pray and leave it at that?

All of you morons who send money to CBN and their propaganda show The 700 Club need to stop. Pat Robertson is evil. By supporting him, you participate in the evil and are thereby complicit in it.

If there is a hell, it is intended for people like Pat Robertson, not me.