Thoughts on Ethics vs Religion
A case for "Socio-egocentric empathy"
Many a discussion has been had between atheists and the religious on the validity of morality and ethics without a divine underpinning. The Vancouver debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson being but one profound example. Some religious people go as far as claiming something along the lines of; Without religion, we would all just go around killing and stealing, because morality can only come from God, and without him there can be no ethics. If you point out to a diehard Christian, that morality seems to have existed long before Christianity, you might even get something like: "That humans are inherently moral actually proves the existence of God. Because God created us in his image!". It is almost as baffling an argument as: "I do not have to prove or argue for anything, because religion is about believing, not about prof." It's a kind of rhetorical infinite loop that pretty much kills any rational conversation.
The rest of this thought experiment will disregard the above madness, and instead focus on the problem that sparked me to think about all this in the first place: An argument for ethics and morality based in evolution.
Firstly, it seems to me like the whole problem, about having a personal ethics codex, is one of mental optimization and social coherence. Religion provides a foundation of shared rules and values that you can simply plug-in and use. Easy and convenient. If you are in doubt, there is a book and professionals you can turn to, and they will gladly tell you what to think and feel. If however you choose the path of the atheist, it seems to me you have one of two choices; run on autopilot, or think for yourself. And for the latter, you are in for some serious mental work.
If you go with the flow, saving bandwidth, not actively thinking too much about ethics and morality, everything is fairly easy. You might get confronted with difficult choices, but you can just let the unconscious algorithm run, and it will give you an answer. Some would call it using common sense, but I actually think that, most of the time, humans are unconsciously running the same morale/ethical software as the primary culture of their upbringing and society. In this case, you might not identify as a Christian, but you probably act like them if you were brought up in a Christian part of the world. This approach eases up on the mental load, as you have an inherited/unconscious codex of rules to follow. This is where religious people might sneak in stamens like: "But see, you are a Christian! You just don't realize it." And yes, to some extend your values are probably culturally linked with Christian values. The question is then whether your values are indeed fundamentally Christian, or if Christian values are based on human ideas (I wrote about that [here|western-values]).
The last option, if you do not choose religion or autopilot, is that you create your own codex of ethics and morality. Actively questioning everything (culture, upbringing, genes etc.) and try to scratch build a framework for your own morality. The mental load here will be immense. I believe most do not do this, for the same reasons we do not need to think about breathing; it requires too much energy and focus. Instead we have learned to automated it. Creating your own moral codex is also where some religious voices will say that you, as a simple human being, cannot ever hope to succeed without divinity. That if you try to find a foundation for ethics, you will ultimately end up with something based in ego, selfishness and desire/pleasure, and thus "evil". Ethics based on love and charity is reserved for the religious. Christianity gives us the 10 commandments, and says that humans could never come up with these by themselves because we are fundamentally sinners. But God could. Implying that without God, we would all go around stealing, killing and being jealous, as our biology commands us.
If you choose the path of the conscious atheist, you would indeed need to make your own 10+ commandments. Obviously it is not tenable for everyone to come up with their own written morale and ethical rules for every thinkable situation. Also, from a societal perspective, it becomes a mess if everyone has different rules. So a shared set of rules that we all agree on, is the better solution. The problem is that all rules can be questioned. Unless, of course, those rules are divine, and created by a god that is omnipotent? Religion. Many a dictator, king and pope has realized this, making laws and telling people that those are indeed mandated by god, and not by them.
I don't remember where, but I once heard someone say something along the lines of; "atheist ethics always has a hole in it that is god shaped", or indeed that the human soul has. The strange thing is that it seems to me like religious people try to mold their image of God to fit that hole, not the other way around. To see this, you only have to listen to Christians trying to explain away passages of the old testament (e.g. god ordering the killing of children and animals) to fit their own modern believe of charity and altruism; "Ah but you should not take that passage literally! It is hyperbole and imagery, that should be interpreted!" Isn't that exactly molding your vision of God to fit the hole? When you interpret something, isn't it then seen through the lens of your own values and idears? Do you then have your values from the bible, or are you projecting your values onto the bible?
Back to the question then: Could we not create a non-divine framework for ethics and morale? Could we not logically derive altruism and charity from behavior and human evolution? Someone like Sam Harris wrestles with this idea. His take is that everyone can agree that "Moving away from the worst possible suffering" must be something that everyone can agree on as a foundation for ethics. In other words, and a bit simplified, meaning; when confronted with an ethical dilemma, we should choose the path of least suffering for conscious creatures. The idea seems logical, but it gets critique on the fact that suffering is often subjective and relative (what if you are a masochist? What if suffering is needed to reach a goal, like winning a war?), and also that no one really knows what consciousness actually is (or if it even exists. Is animals and plants consciousness?).
The spark of this whole train of though however is that I believe there is an rather obvious foundation for morality. One that might actually be rooted in human nature. For lack of a better term, I have named it "Socio-egocentric empathy". Why do we not kill? Because we do not want to be killed ourselves. Why do we not steal? Because we do not want our stuff to be stolen. Why do we help someone in need, even if they are our enemy? Because we would want that if we were the ones in need of help. We are hardwired with empathy but also the ability understand causality, meaning we understand how others feel, and we understand how others behavior effects us. So ethics says you should not steal, because through empathy I'm able to feel the other persons pain, and through understanding causality and reason I see it could have been my pain if the roles were reversed. In a way it is like the Christian "Love your neighbor as yourself". Only, instead of being arbitrarily dictated by some notion of the divine love, it is native to our social/tribal nature and ego. You are part of a tribe, and for the purpose of ethics and morality you would want others to act in a way benefits you. It is in your best interest that your tribe acts in a way that is in your best interest. Would it not be possible to create a shared ethical codex around this? A socially shared codex of ethical and moral rules based on an egotistical mapping through empathy, of our own needs and desires, onto the group we are part of? A kind of ego consensus. To me it make perfect sense to think that we evolved to actually live like this, and the ethics of the bible is not actually from god, but from common sense winning over animal instinct. If we had evolved to unconsciously understand that our own desires also reside in the rest of the members of our tribe. To unconsciously know/feel that it is in our best interest to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? Why would we believe this value to be divine, and not simply originate from reasoning? Would it not make sense that the reason why many religions have ethics along these lines, is not because some divine being dictated it, but simply because the people who invented the religions saw that it they were a good foundation for a functioning society?
I think we live by these values already. Not because they are divine and we do them contrary to our nature, but because they are in our nature. We are still animals, with all the instincts and capacity for violence that survival dictates, but we are more, we have the ability to monitor our behavior, and the behaviors of others. The ability to understand causality. Also, an interesting observation is that where different cultures sometimes differ in ethics is when religious doctrine takes over. Like when the old testament dictates that the Israelits kill their enemies, or a bishop dictates that all witches are to be prosecuted.
Try, as an experiment, to look at those of the ten commandments that are on morality/ethics: "Honor your father and your mother", "You shall not murder", "You shall not commit adultery", "You shall not steal", "You shall not bear false witness", "You Shall Not Covet". If viewed through the lens of the lens of socio-egocentric empathy, they all make perfect sense as rules for a tribe that you are part of. Even from a purely egotistical point of view, wouldn't you want those rules?
The idea proposed here is that we base ethics on the need of the ego, but mapped on to humanity. What does an ethical rule for protecting the environment look like, if you could have been anyone on earth? Of course we should try to save the planet, because it benefits us. Not because some God wants it, but because we know we could have been anyone, present, past or in the future. We want others to make the choice that would be best for us, and so it only makes sense for us to act the same way.
A place where socio-egocentric empathy seemingly gets into trouble is animal rights. If we widen the empathy part to also encompass animals, killing animals becomes a problem. If we keep empathy to meaning humanity, animal cruelty is kind of not encompassed, or is it? In reality I do not think there actually is a problem. Even if the social part does not include animals, the empathy part does indirectly. Dogs are not part of humanity, but most of us do not like animal suffering. So we map out egoistical adversity of animal suffering onto the tribe. But some people do not care about animal suffering you might say? But this is about making ethical choices. It is not about a single persons ego, but social ego. If you could have been one of those that suffer when animals suffer, it is in your best interest to have a set of ethics that prevent animal suffering too.
Another interesting, yet dangerous, area to test the theory on is abortion (remember, this is a thought experiment, nothing else). If you could be anyone in society, you could be the baby, the mother, a relative, or a stranger. If you were the unborn baby, could you care? No. If you were one of a million strangers, would you care? No (here you might say yes, because you think it is murder, but if you try to argue for why you think this, you might run into something like because "life is sacred", which is ok to believe, but is religious). If you were a relative, would you care? Probably mostly about the mother, right? If you were the mother, would you care? Yes! So the ethics of abortion would thus be based on the ego of the mother. But not about her directly, but rather as if we could all have been her. In that situation, wouldn't you have wanted the choice?
There is at lease one major problem though. If we were to try to make a shared set of ethics from these principles, we would all need to agree on what the principles were. We would need the same axioms. It does not work if some of us think truth originates with some god or deity, and the others that truth is subjective. The problem is, that if we did try to make a ethical codex in this way, based on these or other principles, it would be a codex made by humans. And humans can be questioned.
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Thought of the day:
God created us in his own image. Or well... He created prokaryotes, and hoped that some of them would some day evolve into something that was in his image.