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Morality: No God, No Good

Moral Absolutes?

"I dislike the frequent use of the word virtue, instead of righteousness … it sounds too much like pagan philosophy." — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

At a conference concerning the teaching of moral values in the public schools, a well-known philosopher from an Eastern university asserted that moral virtues were (1) those values without which we humans do not flourish because they are rooted in human nature, and (2) those values that enjoy a consensus that spans culture, country and century. That moral values described or derived in either of these two ways are not really moral values, much less moral absolutes, is the burden of this article.

Values determined either by human flourishing or by human nature are not truly right or wrong — not properly moral absolutes. Instead, they are pragmatism or utilitarianism masquerading as good. They co-opt the language of virtue, to which they have no philosophical or theological claim.

As the following analysis will demonstrate, one must not contend that human nature and human flourishing yield moral absolutes. Such a theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in human nature, and (3) the selection of "flourishing" as a category of moral discernment.¹

The Origin of Human Nature

If human nature arose as the chance result of a mindless evolutionary process — a process behind which exists no divine mind and no divine plan — then moral absolutes disappear. That is, if human nature is the result of evolutionary accident, and if right and wrong arise solely from human nature, then right and wrong are accidents, not moral absolutes.

Biological chance cannot serve as the foundation of right and wrong; it is instead their undoing. If human nature and the human mind are the unintentional outcome of the chance collocation of atoms and of the random meanderings of natural selection, then we have no convincing reason to trust them as indicators of moral goodness.

Nor have we any real or enduring right and wrong.

Changes in Human Nature

Had the evolutionary process been different — had the primordial soup been mixed from a different recipe, so to speak, or stirred at a different temperature — human nature might have been radically altered, along with the allegedly moral values this theory insists arise from it. Evolution might well have yielded a quite different array of species than it has, and humans (if they existed at all) might not be the most intelligent species and they might flourish in radically different ways.

One can easily imagine a set of markedly different biological conditions that would have demonstrated the physiological supremacy of a non-human species, one that flourished after the fashion of a cockroach. Cockroach-style flourishing would then become the measure of virtue.

According to this system of thought, moral absolutes are neither truly moral nor truly absolute. They are simply that set of actions which we perceive to tend most effectively toward the pleasure and prosperity of our own species — simply species bigotry parading as morality.

If something noticeably different from us (but something sufficiently close we could still call it human) evolved, then likely a different set of human actions would yield human flourishing. That altered means of flourishing would then become the definition of right and wrong.

But precisely why actions conducive to the flourishing of the most intelligent and biologically innovative survivors of natural selection should be called morally virtuous is not clear and has not been (indeed, I would say cannot be) established. In other words, what has been described here is not true virtue. It is an intellectual misfire based on the philosophically injudicious assumption that somehow biological might makes right — that a species, merely by succeeding biologically, gets to use itself as the measure of good and evil. This is not a system of moral absolutes; it is a system of biological relativism.

Those actions that are conducive to the flourishing of the most intelligent and innovative survivors of natural selection ought not to be called moral. To do so merely confuses with right and wrong those actions that seem to permit that species to flourish at one particular point in its evolution.

What are now called right and wrong are not moral absolutes, then, but simply that set of actions perceived as most efficient at the moment. What set of actions will be so perceived in the distant future is still an open question — a question that might receive a starkly different answer than either it now does or previously did, but which this system must nevertheless consider morally correct and universally binding.

In short, to our previous charges of species bigotry and biological relativism we now must add time relativism and moral contradiction — but not moral absolutes.

Put differently, not only does the doctrine of evolution entail that the human species and human nature are likely to change, but this likelihood is amplified by the very real prospect of the species orchestrating its own evolution by self-experimentation. This self-conducted mutability is the death knell of any and all moral absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.

When we do acquire the power to modify the nature of the race — and some speculate that our ability to do so is soon to be gotten — will what we produce still be truly and fully human? Will right and wrong then be rooted in human nature as it was or in human nature as it is in whatever it is we shall have made of it?

Let's assume that (1) the alteration in human nature happens one person at a time (rather than in the entire race all at once), and (2) that two sorts of persons with a defendable claim to human nature exist simultaneously.

In this case, which version of "human" nature supersedes the other? Which is to be considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise? Will those who possess the other human nature be subject to a system of right and wrong that arises from a nature not entirely their own?

What if our experiments do not always succeed? That is, what if the treatment does not always "take"; what if it yields occasionally idiosyncratic results that produce far more than merely two varieties of human nature? Which variety takes precedent? Shall we fall into the logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes, each with different content?

The answers to such puzzling questions might be difficult to identify. They will likely raise insurmountable difficulties for those who advocate this inadequate system of moral absolute. They will make absolutely no difference at all to our purpose because any answer exposes the foundation of this ethical system as mere shifting sand — not moral bedrock.

Furthermore, if humans did not exist at all (and under the direction of a mindless evolutionary process they easily might not), and if right and wrong arise from human nature, then right and wrong would not exist (regardless of whether we considered right and wrong as either moral absolutes or as the biological relativism that emerges from biological success). In other words, because this theory of ethics ties morality to human nature, the fate of human nature is the fate of morality.

That fate, if the second law of thermodynamics is correct, is oblivion. The material world is winding down to something like an amorphous, motionless mass of dead matter at a low temperature, incapable of sustaining life. Along with the demise of the physical universe go this ethical system's alleged moral absolutes, the true name of which we now see is "nihilism." In this system, morality, like everything else, comes precisely to nothing. When human beings cease to exist sometime in the future, as any worldview that leaves out God must assert, right and wrong cease to exist at that same moment.

In short, what was intended by this philosopher to be the foundation of ethics is really its death warrant.

"Flourishing" as a Category of Moral Discernment

Why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of virtue cannot be proven. To select flourishing as the measure of moral discernment, or to define flourishing as one thing and not another, is merely to elevate one's personal preference for, and definition of, flourishing (whatever it happened to be) to the level of an absolute — which they neither are nor ever could be.

One might just as easily have selected, as did the Marquis de Sade, private pleasure at the expense of another's pain as the measure of appropriate conduct. One might even prefer death to life, as do virtually all who commit suicide. That happiness or prosperity (and not death) is the proper content of flourishing cannot be established from a merely evolutionary basis.

Again, whatever else such private preferences might be, they are not moral absolutes.

Finally, I do value the work of C.S. Lewis, in general, and his The Abolition of Man, in particular. However, I would be misusing his book were I to argue from it that, because there appears to be substantial agreement among the people of the world about right and wrong, therefore right and wrong are moral absolutes. Consensus, regardless of how extensive or how enduring, is no sure measure of morality. All too often the majority has consented, either explicitly or implicitly, to colossal evil. Morality is not determined by nose count. "Majority" is no synonym for "morality."

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What is the source of morality?

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As Archibald Alexander somewhere observed, virtue is not known by reason alone, but by revelation and by Providence. Sir Philip Sidney's way of saying it was to insist that the only impregnable citadel for virtue was religion. Both were precisely correct.

In other words, if there is no God, there is no good.