Abstract
People in many parts of the world link morality with God and see good ethical values as an important benefit of theistic belief. A recent survey showed that Americans, for example, distrust atheists more than any other group listed in the survey, this distrust stemming mainly from the conviction that only believers in God can be counted on to respect morality. I argue against this widespread tendency to see theism as the friend of morality. I argue that our most serious moral obligations – the foundations of what can be called ‘ordinary morality’ – remain in place only if God doesn’t exist. In recent years, some atheists have reacted to society’s distrust of them by claiming that atheism accommodates ordinary morality just as well as theism does. The truth is even stronger: only atheism accommodates ordinary morality. Logically speaking, morality is not common ground between theists and atheists. Morality depends on atheism.
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Notes
- 1.
For economy in what follows, I’ll refer explicitly to preventing suffering, rather than relieving it, but nothing of substance turns on this choice, because to relieve suffering is simply to prevent more, or worse, suffering.
- 2.
I don’t define ‘ordinary morality’ in this paper, because I don’t think it has a nontrivial definition. Even so, we can identify some obligations that belong uncontroversially to it. There are hard cases, but some cases are easy, such as the obligation we at least sometimes have to prevent easily preventable, horrific suffering by a child.
- 3.
A number of prominent theistic philosophers have defended precisely this reasoning, among them the Christian philosopher Eleonore Stump, who writes that ‘if a good God allows evil, it can only be because the evil in question produces a benefit for the sufferer and one that God could not produce without the suffering’ (Stump 1985, pp. 411–412) and ‘other things being equal, it seems morally permissible to allow someone to suffer involuntarily only in case doing so is a necessary means or the best possible means in the circumstances to keep the sufferer from incurring even greater harm’ (Stump 1990, p. 66).
- 4.
Note that this moral standard can constrain the conduct of a perfect being even if the standard isn’t part of ordinary morality – which, as the label suggests, concerns the conduct of imperfect beings like us.
- 5.
‘Police: Man tortured 4-year-old to death for wetting his pants,’ http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/15/michigan.child.torture (accessed 26 May 2011).
- 6.
I owe this objection to Robert Lovering.
- 7.
Theistic appeals to free will arise whenever I present this argument, including at a session of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting at which my commentator based his criticism of my argument almost entirely on the idea that God would never curtail human freedom.
- 8.
- 9.
For a more detailed refutation of the free-will reply, see Maitzen (2009, pp. 120–122).
- 10.
Compare Alston (1996, p. 112), which defends a view quite close to this one.
- 11.
Yet another view is that intense suffering is always a gift from God, a blessing, in part because it is an analogue of Christ’s suffering. Christopher Hitchens attributes this view to Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Hitchens 1995, p. 41). Even if we ignore the highly questionable features of this view, it fails to blunt the theistic threat to morality for which I argue here, since if intense suffering is always a blessing in disguise, we never have an ordinary moral obligation to prevent it.
- 12.
Matthew 19:26 (KJV); for similar affirmations, see also Job 42:2, Jeremiah 32:17, and Luke 1:37, all cited in Leftow (2011), p. 106.
- 13.
As William Hasker, himself an open theist, emphasizes (Hasker 2010, p. 308).
- 14.
See, e.g., Gellman (2010), responding to Maitzen (2009) and replied to in Maitzen (2010). Oddly, Gellman explicitly declares that he’s describing a perfect God (2010, p. 191), but I see no way to characterize as perfect a God who suffers from the apparently severe limitations in power that Gellman sketches in his article.
- 15.
See Oppy (2011) for discussion of a similar worry.
- 16.
As proposed by Hasker (1992) and defended in Hasker (2010). Hasker’s explanation assumes that God has no moral obligation to prevent such suffering, and hence God can’t be faulted for letting it occur, even though God’s letting it occur creates for us a moral obligation to prevent it if we easily enough can, an obligation we can be faulted for failing to honor. I can’t see how God could permissibly delegate such an obligation – that is, delegate it without thereby exploiting the sufferers in a morally objectionable way.
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Maitzen, S. (2013). Atheism and the Basis of Morality. In: Musschenga, B., van Harskamp, A. (eds) What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6343-2_15
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