Morality from the Bottom Up
(Continued)

But does the system even have to be perfect? No, because our moral emotions are so strong that we feel guilt even if no one is around. Think about a time you have, to take a trivial example, taken Post-it Notes® from work. Now, no one saw you, you didn't get caught but wasn't there a twinge of guilt? You knew you didn't own them and no matter how well you justified it to yourself, the fact of the matter is, the emotion was still there. That, to me, demonstrates just how good our built-in sense of morality is. All one has to have is the concept that certain things belong to you, certain things don't, you prefer not to have your things taken and so a safe assumption is that others have that same preference and there you have the beginnings of an internal rule 'it's wrong to steal'. Christians arguing against the capacity for humans to be moral without a top-down Lawgiver willfully blind themselves to these facets of human behavior (or dishonestly ignore them).

They go further, however, they hold non-theistic ethics up to a standard that they then dismiss for their own ethical system. To get an example, next time you are confronted by someone claiming that without god, one cannot be good, ask that person about Christian support for slavery, or for Jim Crow laws, or for genocide against any of a number of indigenous peoples who were minding their own business until Christians showed up. Most of the time, you will get some dismissal along the lines of “well, they weren't really Christians” or some other such silly rot. Of course, they were really Christians and they were behaving in ways perfectly consistent with Christian ethics at that time. So the Christian ethical system is far from perfect, yet if a non-theistic ethical system allows for any deviation at all it is an utter failure? I think not.

So going back to the 'command to kill' thought-experiment it is only fair for me to put it through my own filter as a non-theistic Buddhist. The answer is obvious and immediate. If the Buddha had, in one of the sutras, commanded that all non-Buddhists were to be put to the sword the moral thing to do would be to avoid killing. I do not want to be murdered and I do not want violence done against my person. I cannot realistically ask for something that I then demonstrate myself wholly unwilling to give others. “Everyone but me” as a moral foundation simply does not hold up. Contrary to popular thinking, religious belief does not make one more moral than not believing in a religion. It might make one more smug to believe that one will be rewarded in the afterlife but the true benefit of any ethical system worth following is that one becomes an ethical person in this life, not rewarded for something in the next. If the only reason why someone would pick up a person stranded at the side of the road is because he will be rewarded in some sweet by-and-by, then they are no better than the Pharisee who, in the parable of the Samaritan, crossed to the other side of the road. You will recall in that story that the Pharisee saw no profit in it for him for helping a stranger, but the Samaritan helped without thought of profit at all. Ethical or moral behavior for its own sake is what impresses us about that story.

Folks who advance the idea that one requires god to be good would have moral behavior be salvation on the installment plan and if there's no salvation, no need to make payments. I would suggest that the benefit of ethical behavior is that it is far more likely to have either good or, at worst, neutral impact on others while unethical behavior will certainly have negative effects on others.

Aj Davis lives in an intentional community of meditative geeks in Portland,
OR. Her avocations are open-source/free software projects, digital divide
issues, writing and the public understanding of science. She cycles to work
and does regular Zen meditation. Her writing assistants are the five cats
that allow the humans to live in the house.

< 1 2 3