No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Moral majority or pious plurality?

A Division by Zer0 has an interesting post on the difference between subjective morality and moral relativism. The latter, as formulated by its opponents, is the position that there are no universal human values; we may find slavery abhorrent, for example, but other cultures see nothing wrong with it, so who are we to judge them.

This of course is an incoherent stance, akin to a Cretan saying: "All Cretans are liars." But in my experience, moral relativism is more usually a strawman, an insult to be flung at the enemy, than a self-identified viewpoint. Subjective morality is another matter.

Theists often have fetishes about objective morality, seeing at as a royal road to proving the existence of their Sky Daddy. The theologian William Lane Craig, in particular, is cringe-inducing in his enthusiasm for this argument:

It is fantastically improbable that just that sort of creatures would emerge from the blind evolutionary process who correspond to the abstractly existing realm or moral values. This seems to be an utterly incredible coincidence, when one thinks about it. It is almost as though the moral realm knew that we were coming.

--The Existence of God (II). Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2003

To me, this is about as laughable as going on about how incredible it is that the human foot evolved to fit the sock so perfectly. I have argued before that it is perfectly reasonable to believe that morals evolved along with the human societies in which they are found. One can argue that the concept "thou shalt not kill" exists in some timeless platonic sense, like the concept of pi or square roots. But did the concept really exist billions of years ago, when there were no intelligent minds in the universe to grasp it? One might as well say that the concept of Tuesday is eternal and universal.

So if morality is subjective, on what basis can we condemn slavery? That's simple. Slavery causes suffering. The slaves themselves, even if no-one else, know what freedom is and yearn for it. And simple empathy with one's fellow humans ought to convince one of the injustice of the institution.

It seems to me that many of the practices of past centuries which today strike us as barbarous were accepted simply because of limited contact between different peoples, and suppression of independent thought by the church. Improving technology gives us more opportunity both to think and speak for ourselves, and deal with other people as individuals and fellow humans despite differences of "race" and what not.

Thus, ironically, our supposedly deficient and crippled subjective morality is actually far superior to the divinely ordained morality of the bible in alleviating human suffering. Go the bible with a question and you will come away with twelve different answers, all of them equally arbitrary arguments from authority and antiquity. In fact I would say that the bible gets the right answer far less often than by random chance; it contains not a single word of condemnation of slavery!

So if some bible-thumper tells you that your morality is subjective, you can take it as a compliment. Religious morality is also subjective, being based on which dusty collection of scrolls the adherent chooses to believe; it's just more arbitrary, self-deluded and incoherent.