On choosing to be good

Before taking a course on ethics, I was a subjectivist. I've mentioned a while back¹ that I found the idea of objective morality unconvincing:

About halfway through the semester we talked about subjectivism. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the article, but the author's position was that subjectivism was meaningless as an ethical philosophy. If subjectivism is true, then everything can be moral, and nothing can be moral. It shouldn't be of any interest to moral philosophers because it isn't useful. The value of ethics is to come up with a way to figure out what's morally good in general.

They extended this thinking to cultural relativism, which is the idea that morality differs between cultures. They argued this belief was a form of subjectivism because there's no smallest society that can have its own distinct morality.² Of course, that doesn't mean you have to be racist to be moral, because if you think about it for more than five seconds, it's pretty clear that most cultures do have the same underlying moral principles, even if their applications look different. Even our Western Canadian obsession with lighting the Earth on fire comes from the moral belief that poverty is bad, and the mislead belief that the only way to prevent poverty is to light more hydrocarbons on fire.³

When I first heard this argument I felt really uncomfortable with it, but the more time I've spent with it the more convinced I've become. Nowadays I'd call myself a deontologist, which is the belief that there are objective moral principles to which we are duty-bound to follow. There's some caveats to that, because there's some moral greyness in the world that's hard to dismiss, but for whatever reason I think this is generally a useful way of thinking about the world.

One argument for why people ought to be religious is that religion instructs people on morality. A counter argument I've often heard from atheists is that you shouldn't need religion to be moral. Often, it goes further to suggest that if you do need religion, that if you'd be less moral without it, that's more indicative of your own moral depravity than the value of religion itself. Indeed, friend of the show Pope Pius IX seemingly confirmed that belief in God is not the only pathway to heaven, albeit in a condescending way:

There are, of course, those who are struggling with invincible ignorance about our most holy religion. Sincerely observing the natural law and its precepts inscribed by God on all hearts and ready to obey God, they live honest lives and are able to attain eternal life by the efficacious virtue of divine light and grace. Because God knows, searches and clearly understands the minds, hearts, thoughts, and nature of all, his supreme kindness and clemency do not permit anyone at all who is not guilty of deliberate sin to suffer eternal punishments.

In other words, God has somehow shown you what it means to be moral. You have the divine spark which enables enables you to do good; you've just got to choose to do it. I'm not a Catholic but I do agree that people have some kind of innate goodness. Because I'm not Catholic I don't believe that our most holy religion is the only or even the best path to get there. But I am prepared to accept that it's one of them.

The reason I don't really like the atheist counter-argument, the thing that motivated this article, is that I think it misses the point. More than anything, I'd want to ask people who believe it: if not God, then where do you think your morality comes from? And do you feel like it's a satisfying thing to believe? That's an earnest question, because I do think there's a lot of unique and good answers to it. There's also some answers that I don't personally think are all that good. For example, I think morality as a byproduct of evolution is a decent enough explanation, but I don't think it's a particularly satisfying explanation. It's not an explanation that makes me feel inspired to do good. Maybe there's a way it could be framed to feel more inspiring, but I've never seen it, and as such it's not the one I've latched onto.

I suspect the vast majority of people, if they were really pressed on it, would say the reason they prefer doing good things to bad things is because doing good makes them feel good. It certainly does for me. But I don't think it's good to only do good when it feels good. We've also got to do good when it feels bad or uncomfortable. We ought to do more than the bare minimum, and to do that, I think it really helps to have a source of inspiration.

I don't know if I have one. I'm not convinced by the Kantian notion that the fact that we're rational beings binds us to a certain moral principle, that morality comes from reason itself. Or at the very least, I don't think I find that notion very inspiring. I'm a utopianist, so it might have something to do with the Revolution. The belief that a better world is possible, and that to commit to doing good is to in some small way help realize that possibility.⁴ But I don't really know. I ought to spend more time reading; it'd probably help.

Footnotes

Or, maybe I'm just a little more aware that I have Christians who read my blog and I want to seem less annoying :)

In any case, I do still feel like the contradiction is laid bare by modern American Christendom, which has left your friendly nonbinary pagan with an unusual amount of respect for the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches. When I am slain with the sword of him that sat upon the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth: and all the fowls are filled with my flesh, I can only hope the Faithful and True represents something intellectually consistent, if not "good" in the conventional ethical sense.

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