Atheism and Morality

A very popular attack on atheism (at least from the religious side) comes in the form of a question of morality. Atheists are accused of having either no morals or morals that are loose and weak. Because most other religions derive their morals from some form of moral code or sacred texts or religious figures, they expect atheists (which a lot of religious people believe atheism to be a religion in itself) to have some soft of moral code too. From childhood these individuals have been told not to do certain things because it was written in the Bible or the Koran or whatever, and so, they expect all people to derive their moral standards based on some sort of written laws or principles.

Of course the next leap of reasoning, which a lot (but certainly not all) religious people make, is this notion that, because atheism doesn't have a moral book, or some sort of moral document which tells us how we should act, all atheists are amoral and therefore a danger to society. The Roman Catholics love to bring up names like Stalin and Hitler and Mao (all atheists) as 'evidence' of this amorality. It is believed that a lack of morals leads to a life of violence, chaos and torment. And that's a reasonable claim. But who said atheists don't have their own morals?

Here's an interview that Richard Dawkins did with Bill O'Reilly this year. As far as interviews go, this is a typical scenario where the scientist gets repeatedly cut-off before he has a chance to explain his point-of-view and a case where the religious defendant briskly changes the subject once his opinions start to get jeopardized. But this interview clearly shows the attitude that a lot of fundamentalists Christians and other religious people have towards atheists:

I am certainly not the first atheist to tackle a response to this accusation. Many atheists have had to answer this question in their own lives, but I believe that most atheists are not providing very good explanations. And I sympathize with them. It's hard to explain why we do certain things the way we do. And it's not just atheists, this goes for everyone. Morality is not simple. Morality is not like mathematics where an equation has a determined number of possible answers. We run into social scenarios every day where there is an infinite number of possible outcomes and choices, a very large number of which are 'good' and a lot that are 'bad.

A few years ago a fellow classmate had asked me if I believe in a 'right' and 'wrong'. This is basically the same question of morality, but rephrased. At the time, I was positive that yes - there was a 'right' and a 'wrong' choice for every situation. My mate argued the other side. He was positive that a situation had more than one possible 'right' answer or perhaps no 'right' answer at all. This was a very difficult debate because, even though I had a good idea of why I was right, I had a hard time determining why he was wrong. It was only recently that I had come to realize that we had both been right.

The short answer is that our moral codes are both fundamental and numerous. This is possible because morality evolves. The longer answer, I will get to in just a second. First let's take a look at a popular poor response to the atheist morality question. This one comes from AskTheAtheist.com:

And although I agree with Jake's natural instincts to the feeling that there is some sort of "social contract" out there, this doesn't answer the question "where do people get their morals from?" and it doesn't answer more difficult moral questions (eg. abortion, capital punishment, etc...) The 'social contract' is great and so is the 'golden rule', but that simply is not enough. It does not answer all the questions. So where do we get the answers to more difficult moral issues? From a holy book? Certainly not.

To illustrate my point let me quote a passage from Moral Minds, a brilliant book about the origins of morality by Marc D. Hauser:

Consider the following scenarios:

1. A surgeon walks into the hospital as a nurse rushes forward with the following case. "Doctor! An ambulance just pulled in with five people in critical condition. Two have a damaged kidney, one a crushed heart, one a collapsed lung, and one a completely ruptured liver. We don't have time to search for possible organ donors, but a healthy young man just walked in to donate blood and is sitting in the lobby. We can save all five patients if we take the needed organs from this young man. Of course he won't survive, but we will save all five patients."

Is it morally permissible for the surgeon to take this young man's organs?

2. A train is moving at a speed of 150 miles per hour. All of a sudden the conductor notices a light on the panel indicating complete brake failure. Straight ahead of him on the track are five hikers, walking with their backs turned, apparently unaware of the train. The conductor notices that the track is about to form, and another hiker is on the side track. The conductor must make a decision: He can let the train continue on its current course, thereby killing the five hikers, or he can redirect the train onto the side track and thereby kill one hiker but save five.

Is it morally permissible for the conductor to take the side track?

If you said "no" to the first question and "yes" to the second, you are like most people I know or the thousands of subjects I have tested in experiments. Further, you most likely answered these questions immediately, with little to no reflection. What, however, determined your answer? What principles or facts distinguish these scenarios? If your judgment derives from religious doctrine or the deontological position that killing is wrong, then you have a coherent explanation for the first case but an incoherent explanation for the second. In the train case, it makes sense -- feels right -- to kill one person in order to save the lives of five people. In the hospital case, it feels wrong to kill one person to save five. You might explain the hospital case by saying that it is illegal to commit intentional homicide, especially if you are a responsible doctor. That is what the law says. That is what we have been raised to believe. Our culture inscribed this in our minds when we were young and impressionable blank slates. Now apply this bit of legalese to the train case. Here, you are willing to kill one person to save five. You are, in effect, willing to do something in the second case that you were unwilling to do in the first. Why the mental gymnastics? Something different is going on in the second scenario. For most people, the difference is difficult to articulate. In the hospital case, if there is no tissue-compatible person nearby, there is no way to save the five patients. In the train case, if the side track is empty, the conductor can still switch tracks; in fact, in this scenario, the conduction must switch tracks -- an obligatory act -- since there are no negative consequences to turning onto the side track.

Hauser goes on to explain why we act in one way and not the other, and goes on in detail to explain where exactly these moral ideas come from. But the facts are in - we do not get our morality from books or texts or "social contracts". We make these moral decisions instinctively, and usually with little or no reflection. If morality did in fact come only from the Bible or any other text, we would be required to think hard about these two cases because they are so different from anything encountered in the Bible and, in fact, most peoples' decisions tend to contradict the Bible's basic rules. The experiments done by Hauser also disprove the idea that all morality comes from a "social contract" because these two scenarios alone (and there are many more that have been tested) show that it's not simply a "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" case. In fact, it doesn't apply to this what-so-ever. Something else is behind our moral reasoning.

If we can get people from all corners of the world to take the same morality test and we can find enough evidence to show that most people will act in the same way independent of their religion, culture or location, then we can conclusively prove that religion, culture or where you are from has nothing to do with your moral decisions. And these kinds of tests have, surely enough, already been done. These include the works of the anthropologist Kim Hill, and economist Ken Binmore. Furthermore, studies have been done by the political scientists Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer show that for the most part, humans from all backgrounds generally respond in the same way to moral situations. There are slight variations here and there based on cultural differences. But those differences should be expected. The evidence is - religion has absolutely nothing to do with morality. Not only does it have nothing to do with morality, but religion is, craziest of all, a bad thing when it comes to morality because it tries to teach lessons based on irrational laws. The best example of this comes from Islam:

"The United Nations Commission on Human Rights reports five thousand honor killings per year... In the Arab world, more than two thousand women die every year from honor killings. In the West Bank Gaza Strip, Israel, and Jordan, nearly all murders of Palestinian women are the result of honor killings... In Islamic cultures, there is nothing in the Koran that would allow for or encourage honor killings. However, deep within Islamic tradition is the attitude that women are property. The owner has the power to do with property as he pleases."

Even today in the Western world, in some cases, passion crimes are sometimes forgiven and excused by the justice system. Something tells us that sometimes killing can be allowed. Even though our instincts tell us that all live is sacred and all murder is wrong, when situations come up, we adapt and modify our instincts. John Rawls suggests that perhaps we can deliver moral verdicts based on unconscious and inaccessible principles. It's the idea that we all have moral instincts and that morals are not rigid. They are flexible and change over time, much like languages.

For more insight into the question of morality I highly recommend Marc D. Hauser's book. It is life-changing.