Can someone be a secular idealist and still be a Good person? Of course they can. But that is not the point.
New York Times editorials
Some aggressive atheists and many not-so-aggressive advocates of secularism have sought to defend their position against the criticism that “people who don’t believe in God can’t have a moral compass.” This defense was discussed again in an article by Molly Worthen in the NY Times last week. (“Wanted: A Theology of Atheism,” by Molly Worthen, The New York Times, May 30, 2015.) And it was supported by a series of letters, published this morning (June 7th) on the Op Ed page.
I know lots of secular idealists. (I defined this back in my blog post “Why Secular Idealism is Insufficient,” http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-secular-idealism-is-insufficient.html.) These are people who don’t believe in any kind of transcendent reality; this materialism makes them secular. But they do believe in moral priorities, which makes them idealists. And all of my friends and colleagues who fit this bill are kind, caring, trustworthy and moral people. There is nothing in my worldview that makes this problematic. So, I don’t believe that being a secular person means that you can’t be a Good person.
(I do believe that thinking that there are moral priorities is difficult to reconcile with a thoroughly materialistic view, but that is not what I want to address here.)
My problem with secular idealism is that it allows us to make only extremely limited prescriptive statements about how others should behave. It is not a “transitive morality.”
The importance of transitive morality
Why is that important? Well, somewhere around a third of the women and girls on our planet are treated not much better than animals or property. Their dignity and their natural rights are denied by the societies and communities in which they live.
And American corporations have exhibited morally reprehensible conduct in support of selling tobacco products and arguing against environmental controls. Some former manufacturers of asbestos containing products knew that the manufacture and installation of their products was dangerous, but bribed scientists to keep the data hidden.
And awful people around the world prey on the innocent and powerless around them, for their own power, profit and glory.
And politicians like Hastert, Livingston, Hyde and Gingrich led cynical campaigns to impeach a President for sexual peccadillos that were no worse than their own behaviors.
And a ghastly number of children in the US, not to mention around the world, are hungry, as you read this, because we haven’t summoned the moral courage to demand justice from ourselves and others.
These are hideously immoral actions. Do we have a responsibility to act? Are you willing to accept the world’s monumental mistreatment of women and girls as something we can’t do anything about? After all, a secular idealist might say, that is their custom, their culture, and who are we to judge them? At most, we might hope to educate them, but we certainly can’t intervene. On what moral basis would we support such intervention?
Exactly. If there is no transcendent ground for morality, you might very well develop your own moral principles and live by them, but you are not able to act upon situations in which other people’s moral priorities are palpably offensive. Your moral priorities may govern your own behavior, but they form no basis for prescriptive views of the behavior of others.
The ability to be prescriptive
This is what I mean by a “transitive morality.” Does my moral philosophy allow me to prescribe and proscribe behavior by others? If so, then there is a transitive quality to my morality. The reason our moral priorities need a transcendent ground is so that we can offer moral condemnation of the behavior of others and demand correction. Only moral priorities that transcend time, place, culture, can legitimately form the basis of corrective actions.
The final letter this morning in the Times suggests that everything will be fine as long as we all live by some version of the Golden Rule. Yes, that would be fine, if we all did. But what if others don’t agree with you that this is a good moral position? What if some people wish to force others to conform to a specific moral code, and are willing to punish misbehavior by death?
What empowers the notion that we should not do what we would find hateful in our neighbors is that that notion is grounded in a tradition that respects the transcendental nature of moral values. As long as there are immoral people in the world doing horrible things, and as long as we choose to act together in response to that immorality, we will need a transitive morality to call their immoral conduct into question and to unite us as a community in opposition to it.
Righteousness without self-righteousness
And, yes, I understand that believing in a transitive morality opens the door for my moral views to oppress others. That is a responsibility that I, that we, have to live with. We can not be so scared of self-righteousness that we walk away from the responsibility to be righteous.
Of course people who don’t believe in God can be moral people. But can we, as a community, unite to act against immorality at home and abroad without a transcendent ground for our common moral priorities? Of course not.
