Euthyphro's Dilemma: Why You Don't Have to Be Religious to Be Moral

In the last few years, the secularist movement has gained a lot of ground. When asked what religion they belong to, more and more people are responding "none", and so the demographers have dubbed them "Nones". I'm one of them. I'm not an in-your-face atheist in the mold of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, but I do read books and follow organizations associated with atheism and secular humanism. But I don't identify with the movement completely, and there are things about it I don't like. First, most of the humanist organizations seem to take it for granted that all their members are atheists, which grates on me, because I'm not. Second, most of them have far too many members who love to ridicule religious people. I think that's generally both disrespectful and counterproductive (though I admit I've done it with some true wackadoodles, like Pat Robertson). Third, I don't like the idea of identifying myself in terms of what I'm not, or what I don't believe in. I'd rather focus on what I do believe in.

Still, I do identify with the secular movement enough to be sensitized to something: lots of religious people assume you can't be moral if you aren't religious. As a non-religious person, I don't much appreciate that. I don't like the idea that I can't be good or moral. Not only is it insulting and prejudicial, it's not true. I'm actually a pretty decent sort, and so are a many other non-religious people. It's just that we base our morality on different foundations than most religious people.

Still, I do understand the "morality requires religion" line of reasoning. The argument is that if morality comes from God, and if you aren't a true believer, then you can't really be moral, since you have nothing to base morality on. That seems to make sense at first, but I think it's misguided for at least two reasons. One is that there's a lot of evidence that people have a complex sense of morality as a result of evolving as an intelligent social animal. That doesn't mean our moral sense always tells us what is really good and right (often it doesn't) but it does explain where our moral sense comes from. The second reason it's wrong is that it's logically incoherent to think that morality is ultimately based on God's will.

Here's why, and I think this is surely one of the most important philosophical ideas ever put forth (it's called the Euthyphro Dilemma, because it comes from a dialogue between Socrates and a man named Euthyphro).

If you say that morality is based on what God wills, that raises the following question: does God will it because of some independent standard of what is moral, or is what is moral simply whatever God says is moral? Many people would say they believe the second option, but only the first actually makes sense. If you think that what is moral is whatever God says is moral, then you would have to agree that if God said that, for example, torturing babies was moral, it would be. But practically nobody would think that, which means they do think there's a standard of morality independent of God. Now, you could say that God is good, so he would never will something bad, but that also shows you believe in a standard of goodness independent of God. 

The Euthyphro Dilemma doesn't (necessarily) mean God is irrelevant to morality, but it does mean that when we ask what makes things good or bad, or right or wrong, saying "because God says so" is not a sufficient answer. So, whether you're religious or not, if you want to seriously think about morality, you have to think about why something is good or bad, apart from God's will, or some "because I said so" command in the Bigle. It's not enough to say something is wrong or right. We have to grapple with why it's wrong or right. Some people might think we still have to rely on God to tell us what is moral, even if there's a standard of morality other than his will, because he knows that standard better than we do. Maybe, but I don't think so (for reasons I don't have time to get into here). I think we have to use compassion, evidence, and reason to decide what is right and what is wrong, and those things are just as available non-religious people as religious people. 

It's true that people might behave better if they believe in divine punishments and rewards (unless they believe they will gain divine reward by doing something awful--and we all know that happens), but such beliefs won't make people more intrinsically moral. If you're only good because “God says so”, or because of the anticipation of rewards and punishments, then you're actually not very good. Good behavior is great, but it's a lot better to be good because we truly feel it's the right thing to do. People who can do that have a true sense of morality, whether they are religious or not.

What Is and What Ought to Be: Speaking Freely About the Big Questions

Sometimes I think all serious questions in life are just variations of two basic Big Questions. Big Question One is "What is true?" and Big Question Two is, "What is good or right?" Put another way, the Big Questions are: 1. What is? 2. What ought to be? For years, I was more interested in Big Question One. I wanted to figure out the basic facts about what reality was like, so I read all about science, history, and other fact-oriented fields. I even tried to write a humongous book attempting to tie the most important facts together in a coherent narrative. Nobody wanted to read it, of course, but I put it online just in case.

After all that time pondering Big Question One, it ocurred to me that I had mostly forgotten to consider a whole other dimension of life; Big Question Two. So, in the last couple of years I've gotten fascinated by the second Big Question, and thought a lot about the foundations of morality and ethics. I want to know what determines what's good and bad, and what's right or wrong. On what basis can we decide how to behave, and how to treat others? This blog has mostly turned into an exploration of those questions.

With both Big Questions, however, if you want to think and write about them, and discuss them with other people (and that is essential) then before long you'll run smack into religion, and then things get touchy. In this country, a majority of people try to answer one or both questions by turning to their Christian faith. Of course, Christianity is diverse, and the Bible is big, complex, and subject to a wide range of interpretations, so different Christians answer those questions in a different ways. Some think we were literally created in God's image sometime in the last few thousand years, while others think scientists are basically right about evolution and the age of the universe, but still think God's ultimately in charge. Some Christians think homosexuality--to take a currently contentious example--is wrong because of things the Bible says, while others think the negative passages about homosexuality should be dismissed as belonging to an ancient, pre-scientific, and rather cruel culture.

Since I live in a country with a large Christian majority, if I want to write openly and honestly about the Big Questions that interest me, I can't avoid discussing the traditional Christian answers to those questions. That's why I end up talking about religion a lot in this blog. I'm interested in morality, which is bound up with religion in most people's minds, and in science, which is often at odds with religion, at least when it comes to more literalist branches of Christianity. In both cases, I usually disagree with the conservative Christian interpretations of these things, and sometimes even the liberal Christian interpretations.

And these aren't trivial disagreements, like disagreeing about whether licorice tastes good or not (it doesn't--it's gross). These are disagreements about things that matter. It matters that people think gay people shouldn't be able to marry, or that global warming can't happen, because of their interpretation of the Bible. Those beliefs determine their actions, and their actions affect others. So I find myself at odds with conservative Christianity a lot of the time, even though I respect some conservative Christians a great deal (I'm planning to blog about the respect issue soon). 

Another reason I talk about religion a lot is that I think it's important for people in a country with freedom of speech to actually speak freely, so I've been much more open lately about being non-religious. These are Big Questions, after all. The answers are important; important enough that if I think some of the dominant religious answers are wrong, and even harmful, then I can't just keep my mouth shut about it for fear of offending the religious. To do so, I think, would be immoral. Which brings me to my next post.

Of Nameless Nonsense and Naked Emperors

When I write these posts, I usually spend a couple of days writing down the things I want to talk about (as they pop randomly into my head), and then sit down and arrange them into a rough outline before I start writing. But this time I'm skipping the outline, because I can't seem to arrange my thoughts into a coherent form. Sometimes you don't really know what you think until you sit down and write about it for a while. Which is one of the reasons I have this blog.

Anyway, this post is going to be a little unstructured, because I only have a vague idea of how the things I'm thinking about relate to each other. Worse, there's no word for the category they all fit into. Let me try to explain what those things are, by telling about some recent encounters with them.

I recently went to a conference for librarians. When I got to the hotel, I asked one of guys out front where the parking was. He said, "Oh, it's all valet parking. We'll take your car, sir." I looked at him and thought, "Well, crap." The thing is, I hate valet parking. It's always presented as a helpful, top-shelf service, offered up to make your life easier. But it doesn't. All that happens is some stranger takes your keys from you and whisks your car off to parts unknown. If you leave anything in it, you have to ask a valet to go get it. And then you have to tip him. I hold that valet parking has two purposes, neither of which have anything to do with convenience: 1. Making socially-insecure people feel like they're doing something fancy 2. Making money.

After the valet had careened out of sight in my car, I wrestled my bags back from a bellboy that wanted to carry them, headed up to my room, and sat down in an elegantly excruciating chair to look over the conference program. It was packed with ads from vendors and corporate sponsors, and for some reason, this reminded me of the valet parking. Professional conferences, I thought, can be a lot like valet parking: they don't necessarily serve the purpose they claim to serve. People think of them as a way to meet other professionals and share ideas (or to get drunk, hook up, and go sight-seeing). And they are all these things. But they're also a way for vendors to try to sell you things, and to get your contact information so they can bug you later. Conferences also seem to be big moneymakers for the organizations that sponsor them. In the case of libraries, they charge the librarians (who already pay yearly dues) to go to the conference, and they also charge the vendors big bucks for the best spots to set up their booths. And then they sell ads in the program.

Even the people attending the conference aren't there for the reasons they might claim. They aren't just there to share information and build professional networks. The people giving presentations, for example, aren't just trying to share what they've learned. They're giving a talk at the conference because it looks good on their resume. Sometimes it's based on a paper they wrote. And why did they write it? Because it looks good on their resume. Or they need to get published if they want tenure (academic librarian jobs are often tenure-track). Maybe they also did it because they had something valuable to contribute, but anybody who has read many academic papers, or sat through many conference presentations, will know that's not always the case.

These were my thoughts as I sat there reading that program. But then I remembered why I was there (or did I?) and decided to go to a keynote speech by a mover and shaker in the library world. The talk lasted about 45 minutes, and to be honest, I can't remember just what it was about. But I do know she was a great believer in "going forward" and "reaching out", and that she used the word "conversation" at least 35 times in 45 minutes. She seems to know what she's doing, too, so my money is on "conversation" as the go-to buzzword in the coming year. If you want to get ahead in 2013, don't say "let's talk about that". Say "we need to have a conversation about that". "Conversation" is the new "leverage". It will take you far.

I don't mean to sound too cynical about conferences, much less librarians, most of whom really do want to help people. It's just that librarians--like members of every other subculture--have their fads and bandwagons. One way of showing you are on a particular bandwagon, or that you belong to a particular subculture, is to use its buzzwords. As my friends and coworkers will tell you, I have a bit of a thing about buzzwords. I hate them. Corporate-speak, education-speak, bureaucratese, technobabble and psychobabble; they irritate me to no end. But it's not just a mindless peeve. They grate on me because I'm a passionate believer that people should think for themselves, and think about what they are saying. If people are using faddish buzzwords, that tells me they're doing neither. Instead, they're acting like a talking herd animal, sort of a cross between a parrot and a lemming. They're not thinking. They're imitating.

Some of those buzzwords don't really mean anything at all, but they serve a purpose nonetheless. They show that the person saying them is part of the in-crowd, and up on the latest fads...er, trends. They also seem to inspire a certain kind of impressionable person, so they get plastered all over educational manifestos and corporate websites. And conference programs. Buzzwords have some nastier cousins, too. Things like euphemisms, weasel words, loaded language, and vague or impenetrable language--like buzzwords, they have a purpose other than clear, honest communication. But these can be used to obscure and distort the truth. As George Orwell put it in his important essay Politics and the English Language, this kind of language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

So, how did I get from valet parking to buzzwords? The point I'm trying to make is that people are always saying, doing, and believing things not because they are true or useful, but because they serve some other purpose, which usually has to do with money, in-group identification, or both. That's what ties together valet parking, resume-padding professional activities, buzzwords, catchphrases, and all kinds of other things people do without stopping to think about why they're doing them. There's a disconnect between the assumed purpose of the words, ideas, or activities and their actual purpose. Sometimes they have no purpose at all, except that they have caught on, and people will feel like they're out of touch if they don't do them.

This is a problem, because doing things that are, at best, useless, is a waste of time...at best. Life is just too short for that nonsense. But it's hard to speak clearly about the problem, because that there's no standard term that describes this category of things. There's no widely-known conceptual framework for understanding what they are, and how they relate to each other.

Personally, I tend to relate them to the Hans Christian Anderson story The Emperor's New Clothes--surely as wise a fable as has ever been told. If you haven't read it in a while, here's a refresher. Two swindlers convince an emperor that they can make him a wondrous set of clothes. These clothes will make him invisible to stupid or incompetent people, and in fact, the clothes themselves will be invisible to such people. The swindlers get their looms and go to work, pretending to spin and weave. When the emperor and his ministers come to check on their progress, each of them realizes with horror he can't see the clothes. But of course they all keep their mouths shut, so everyone thinks everyone else can see the clothes. Finally, the emperor strips, dons his new, invisible finery, and parades down the street. None of his subjects says a word, because they've all heard that stupid people can't see the clothes, and besides...it's the emperor! It takes a little boy to point out the obvious: "But he's not wearing any clothes at all!"

I love that story, because it seems to me that a whole lot of the things people take seriously in this world are just different styles of imperial non-clothing. They're just...made up. They don't serve any purpose, or not the purpose people think they serve. But people believe in them, and therefore we all have to spend a lot of energy dealing with them. The naked emperor holds up non-existent hoops, and makes us all jump through them.

As insightful as the story is, though, it doesn't give us a good word for this kind of nonsense--this misplaced importance we give to things that may not even be real or true or valuable. Saying "that sounds like the emperor's new clothes" is just too wordy. Other options--bullshit--for example, aren't precise enough and may not be socially acceptable, despite their clear usefulness. Also insufficient are the various terms for pointless activities (jumping through hoops, going through the motions), and the necessary multitude of terms for pointless or misleading language (cant, bafflegab, blather, drivel, verbiage, twaddle, buzzwords, codswallop, weasel words, euphemisms, loaded language, purr words and snarl words, lip service, etc). There's no term that draws all these things together in one basket and gives us a handle to carry it with.

We need one. We need a word that lets us identify this stuff to each other, so we can try to root it out. We need to be able to point to empty buzzwords and activities done for the sake of appearances, and say "Hold on, that's _______!" I'm not suggesting we use such a word as a thought-terminating cliche, along the lines of the current usage of "class warfare". The word should promote critical thinking, not shush it. We need a good word for describing things that are useless or worse. We need a word that reminds us it's time to look around and see if we're on a bandwagon, and to check whether the driver is wearing any clothes.

Such a word might remind people to spend more time asking questions like: "That word you keep saying: what does it actually mean?", and "How do you know that's true?", and "Does this idea really do anything useful, or is it just fashionable?", and "Is this crap really necessary?" What, in other words, is the actual point of this thing we are talking about? Of course, such a word should itself be watched closely, so it doesn't turn into another meaningless buzzword, emptied of all meaning. That would be ironic, but not unprecedented. After all, "drink the kool-aid" began as a clever, if tasteless, metaphor for the dangers of blind conformity. Now it's become an overworked corporate tic, and the only people who can sincerely say "don't drink the kool-aid" in 2013 have, in fact, drank the kool-aid.

The reason we need this word, and the reason people should ask these questions, is that even though the emperor's new clothes don't actually exist, they still manage to do real harm, because people believe in them. Think about how many people spend big chunks of their lives doing things for the sole purpose of padding their resumes: joining committees they don't have time for (and possibly aren't even needed), writing papers that don't advance knowledge a single step, giving talks nobody really listens to, and so on. Parents push their kids to take on too many extracurricular activities, for the same reason. Some people waste their precious days in other ways, but still for the sake of appearances. Does anybody buy a Cadillac Escalade, for example, to actually take off road? No, because that's not what it's for. An Escalade is for showing people that you drive an Escalade. And then there's the stuff people believe in, that just isn't true. How many people have devoted their lives to forgotten religions that nobody believes in anymore? How many people were murdered for questioning those forgotten, non-existent gods?

The common denominator of all these things is that they involve mistaking appearances for substance or ideas for reality, and that people do them without stopping to ask why. They "give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".

If it's true that nonexistent imperial clothing causes trouble, so do the naked emperors themselves.  Some people make a whole career out of imperial nakedness. In fact, maybe "naked" isn't a strong enough word. As Lewis Grizzard said, "'Naked' means you ain't got no clothes on. 'Nekkid' means you ain't got no clothes on and you're up to something." These people are full-on nekkid. Those who learn to manipulate language and appearances, and make others believe in things that aren't really there, can become extremely powerful, and often quite destructive. They may actually believe their own nonsense--they probably think they're really wearing clothes--but that's beside the point. The point is that they're hawking nonsense and people are wasting their lives buying it. Skilled naked emperors go far, because we take them seriously. For example, the speaker I saw at the conference, who kept saying "conversation", is pretty powerful in her world. She may mean well, and she may even be doing a lot of good, but I can't help thinking that part of the reason she rose to the top of her field is that she's good at keeping up appearances--at joining the right committees and throwing around the right buzzwords. Lots of powerful people--politicians, university presidents, corporate heads--have an intuitive sense of managing perception. Maybe my view is jaundiced, but many of the ones I've met strike me as soulless phonies; "perma-grin zombies", I call them. You can go a long way by being a soulless phony--a nekkid emperor--if people are gullible enough to think they're admiring your clothes, instead of staring at your bare backside.

How do we respond to all this imperial nakedness, and even outright nekkidness? By not putting up with it. By teaching kids to ask tough questions about whether conventional wisdom is true, and whether common practice makes sense. If society has made up various types of nonsense, it will take a society-wide movement to un-make it. When questioning and critical thinking fail, satire is a time-honored method of dealing with nonsense. My whole point here, after all, is that nonsense should not be taken seriously, and nothing deflates a bloated sense of importance like laughter. Naked emperors, in other words, deserve to be mooned. As Orwell says about bloated, insincere language (just one variety of imperial nakedness): "One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase...into the dustbin where it belongs".

So how about it? What are we going to call this stuff, so we can actually talk about how to rid of it?