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May 06, 2009
Thoughts : Atheistic Ethics
"The Big Question" forum by Eucharist seems to get me thinking, which means it also will tend to get me blogging. This past Sunday, the topic was the basis for ethics and morals, and included a discussion of theistic morals (those derived from some concept of a deity) and atheistic morals (those derived without recourse to deity). I have a lot to say on the subject (much, but not all, I was able to contribute to the meeting). I'll start with my views on atheistic morals and deal with theistic morals in my next post.
Unlike some Christians, I have no problem with the idea that one can derive a reasonable set of ethics without resorting to God, although I do believe the process by which this occurs will result in some differences with more theistic morals. Fundamentally, I think morals/ethics are "memes" (the idea-equivalent of genes) which will tend to evolve in any society of sentient beings. Once people come together to gain the benefits of community (economies of scale, specialization, etc.) then some principles become necessary for the community to work together cooperatively. A community will not last long if there is no sense that people can't kill each other for any reason.
So atheistic ethics/morals tend to evolve over times to allow a society to adapt to its context. New ideas spring up (the meme equivalent of mutations) and if they prove helpful to society they will gain acceptance as the norm. Those that are not helpful will tend to be discarded over time (although they may still be held by a minority of a population as long as the ideas are not too harmful – the equivalent of rare alleles of a gene).
The advantage of this scheme is that like all evolutionary processes, it tends to give optimal solutions given enough time. You can even explain "golden rule" type morals this way – there is a trade-off between the benefit gained to the individual by it being acceptable for them to do something to someone else, and a cost to it being acceptable for that thing to be done to them. As the population of a community increases, the number of people who would be interested in doing whatever it is to the individual will tend to grow faster than their ability to gain benefit by doing it to others. So as population grows, it becomes advantageous to say "it is bad ethics/morals to do to other people what you would not want done to you".
The disadvantage of this scheme is that like all evolutionary processes, it can be slow in responding to changes in the environment, and such periods of transition can be difficult. This is reasonable when the transitions are gradual; but as the pace of societal change increases, the ability of evolved ethics to keep up becomes a problem. In the biological realm, a rapid environment change will often result in large numbers of species being wiped out while other species that had been on the edge of the ecosystem may find themselves better suited and come to dominance. In the ethical realm, rapid societal changes will tend to result in the overthrow of long-cherished moral ideas while fringe views may suddenly become the norm. Readers are encouraged to look at what has happened in our culture over the last 40 years for examples of this in effect.
As a concrete (although intentionally controversial) example of the process of atheistic ethics at work, I would claim that history shows us that ethics that support slavery are advantageous in pre-industrial, agrarian society and therefore those memes are likely to flourish in such societies. The fact that the "slavery meme" was in fact quite successful around the world is proof that it had some advantage. Yet as societies became industrialized, the anti-slavery meme started to gain acceptance, although the transition was often fraught with conflict. I don't give this example to show how atheistic morals are bad, just how they tend to be adaptive to the environment.
Friday – some thoughts on theistic ethics.
Posted by Steven at May 6, 2009 05:00 AM
Comments
"I don't give this example to show how atheistic morals are bad, just how they tend to be adaptive to the environment."
I'm glad you don't provide that example to show how atheistic morals are bad, because the morality of the slave business of that era was supported predominantly by the christian cults and not by godless people. Within the USA early opposition to the slave trade developed within the Quaker community; early on it was not necessarily evident even to the Quakers that negros were human, but they believed that even animals should not be treated so abusively. Exposure to educated escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass helped to convince people that even the negro was a human being.
Posted by: MadScientist ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://sighsandmusings.stevenanne.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 7, 2009 05:13 AM
Yes, it can be quite interesting to read what many famous abolitionists actually thought about negroes and just how unenlightened they were by our current standards. Does make one thing what attitudes we hold today will be viewed as unenlightened in another century.
Posted by: Steven at June 7, 2009 07:21 AM
Oh, and thanks for the comment!
Posted by: Steven at June 7, 2009 07:24 AM
