DominicBunnell
New
In his essay 'Ordinary Morality Implies Atheism', the philosopher Steven Maitzen argues that only atheism can make sense of our ordinary ideas about value and ethics. I don't agree with everything he says in the essay, but I think his main point is basically correct, except that it would be better to say, "Ordinary morality presupposes that there is no afterlife." Consider the following propositions:
1. Killing is wrong because death is a bad thing, and when you kill someone you are harming them.
2. We only have one world, and so we must do everything in our power to protect it.
3. When a baby dies it is a terrible tragedy, because they had their whole life in front of them.
There are lots of ideas like these that pretty much everybody accepts, and yet they only seem to make sense if there's no afterlife. As soon as you put the afterlife into the mix, you end up in all sorts of trouble. If there's a wonderful afterlife awaiting everyone, then it seems the morally right thing to do would be to kill everybody as quickly as possible. If this world is of little value compared to the wonders that await in the next life, then why bother worrying about trivialities like social justice, the gap between rich and poor, and the environment?
I think Maitzen is right to say that our everyday ideas about ethics are this-worldy rather than other-worldly, and this applies to religious people every bit as much as to card-carrying atheists and agnostics. So, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that consciousness does continue after death and that there is in fact an afterlife, and let's suppose that the evidence for this becomes overwhelming and pretty much everybody comes to believe it. How could we reconcile this with our basic moral intuitions? My moral intuitions tell me that death is a bad thing and that I'm harming you when I kill you, but I now know that death is actually a good thing and that I'm not harming you when I kill you. Something's got to give here. The fundamentalist Christian can at least say that God told us not to kill, but the person who believes in an afterlife on purely scientific grounds can't do this. What can they say?
1. Killing is wrong because death is a bad thing, and when you kill someone you are harming them.
2. We only have one world, and so we must do everything in our power to protect it.
3. When a baby dies it is a terrible tragedy, because they had their whole life in front of them.
There are lots of ideas like these that pretty much everybody accepts, and yet they only seem to make sense if there's no afterlife. As soon as you put the afterlife into the mix, you end up in all sorts of trouble. If there's a wonderful afterlife awaiting everyone, then it seems the morally right thing to do would be to kill everybody as quickly as possible. If this world is of little value compared to the wonders that await in the next life, then why bother worrying about trivialities like social justice, the gap between rich and poor, and the environment?
I think Maitzen is right to say that our everyday ideas about ethics are this-worldy rather than other-worldly, and this applies to religious people every bit as much as to card-carrying atheists and agnostics. So, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that consciousness does continue after death and that there is in fact an afterlife, and let's suppose that the evidence for this becomes overwhelming and pretty much everybody comes to believe it. How could we reconcile this with our basic moral intuitions? My moral intuitions tell me that death is a bad thing and that I'm harming you when I kill you, but I now know that death is actually a good thing and that I'm not harming you when I kill you. Something's got to give here. The fundamentalist Christian can at least say that God told us not to kill, but the person who believes in an afterlife on purely scientific grounds can't do this. What can they say?