Abnormal Interests

Do sensible people claim "that religious faith is a prerequisite for human morality" or rather that God is the ground and basis for morality? If the latter why shouldn't apes be moral beings?

Tim,

I would find it easier to agree with you if I didn't know three otherwise quite smart people who do think that "religious faith is a prerequisite for human morality." While at least one of them admits to knowing moral people who claim no religious faith, this person simple thinks all those who claim no religious faith are lying to themselves or to everyone else.

Oh :0

You said "we should wait and read research in a form published by the researchers"

OK, here is a paper that demonstrates spontaneous non-reciprocal altruism by chimps. Neat bit of experimental design.

Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children Warneken F, Hare B, Melis AP, Hanus D, Tomasello M (2007) PLoS Biol 5(7): e184

From the abstract:

Here we present experimental evidence that chimpanzees act altruistically toward genetically unrelated conspecifics. In addition, in two comparative experiments, we found that both chimpanzees and human infants helped altruistically, regardless of any expectation of reward, even when some effort was required, and even when the recipient was an unfamiliar individual—all features previously thought to be unique to humans. The evolutionary roots of human altruism may thus go deeper than previously thought, reaching as far back as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.

When comparing semi-wild free-ranging chimpanzees and 15-month old humans:
The only species difference found was that the helping of human infants was faster. Differences in reaction times should obviously be interpreted with caution because of the dissimilar locomotor skills and room setups.

Generalized reciprocity in rats has also been demonstrated:
Rutte, Claudia and Taborsky, Michael, PLos Biology, 2007-07-01

Here we show experimentally that cooperative behavior of female rats is influenced by prior receipt of help, irrespective of the identity of the partner. Rats that were trained in an instrumental cooperative task (pulling a stick in order to produce food for a partner) pulled more often for an unknown partner after they were helped than if they had not received help before. This alternative mechanism, called generalized reciprocity, requires no specific knowledge about the partner and may promote the evolution of cooperation among unfamiliar nonrelatives.

Hi Duane,

We are going to have to discuss this further.

What I object to, first of all, is the assumption that morality is the result of an objective evaluation of right and wrong in a rational process. This is, after all, the standard Cartesian line which, though manifestly false, is still parroted by many (not least, among atheists; no, I don't mean to generalize, but still).

I thought you held to some such position, based on previous things you've said. But maybe not, if the moral behavior of chimps is your point of departure.

I really don't know enough about chimps to draw a lot of conclusions. The cognitive psychologist I trained with, Giovanni Jervis, taught us to be cautious in this regard. Similarities and dissimilarities are equally cogent.

Surely, however, if we have learned anything at all from Piaget's cognitive development theory (for example, as explicated in The Moral Development of the Child) and from subsequent work by Lawrence Kohlberg and Richard Schweder, morality and convention simply cannot be separated. Morality, in short, is a cultural artifact.

We are already very close, whether you like it or not, to the observation that "religious faith is a prerequisite for human morality." To be sure, I think you may have taken this, not as an observation, but as a prescription - I admit that it is hard to keep the two levels distinct. But we must distinguish.

Of course the observation does not mean that, historically, all people have bought into morality defined by convention and sanctioned by appeal to metaphysics. But enough people have to result in ideas of conventional obligations a child can pick up via social interaction in his cognitive and emotional development.

I hope I have clarified my position to some degree. I have no idea how you respond to the above. For the record, I'm used to hemming and hawing in reply, and speculation about how one might just as well remove the metaphysical underpinnings from traditional morality, and they will still stand. The anthropologist in me rebels. Based on everything we actually know, isn't this almost pure wishful thinking? Can a sufficient degree of repression of anti-social instincts and a sufficient degree of reinforcement of cooperative instincts occur without a well-fertilized religious humus to grow in? BTW, if you are an atheist who concedes the point of the question (I have known many atheists who do: they wax eloquently about the social utility of religion for the hoi polloi), excuse my even bringing the matter up.

Yeahbout how It may now be clearer as to why I think of Darwin for example as an unreconstructed theist on many levels. It is, after all, very touching, precisely from a Christian point of view, that Darwin was reluctant to proceed romantically with Fanny, in light of his tottering faith. It appears that he didn't want to subject her to the torment of believing that he was destined for eternal torment (as an unbeliever), even though he wasn't concerned about it himself.

I have no idea why Darwin's tenderness should count for something from an atheistic point of view - perhaps you can enlighten me - but from a theistic point of view in the fully Christian sense, it counts for a lot. It's as if Darwin took 1 Corinthians 13 to the self-denying limit.

This is a great subject. I could go on at length. We really need to reverse the Cartesian dictum, cogito ergo sum. Antonio Damasio has done a great job showing this. But really, he was beaten to the punch a long time ago by the author of 1 John, who said (I paraphrase slightly), I love, therefore I know.

Damasio's research with patients with prefrontal damage points the way. Such patients are able to reason logically, but their damaged emotional capacity impairs their ability to make (so-called) rational decisions. They are able to endlessly enumerate advantages and disadvantages, but without emotions they did not know what to choose in the end (see Descartes' Error, 44-51, 191-96).

Why are emotions so important? You are well-read in evolutionary biology, so you know that the faux Darwinian notion of the selfish gene is a bunch of hooey. Already according to Darwin, the development of morality has its roots in social instincts reinforced or modified by community opinion (The Descent of Man, 101-31 in the 1989 edition thereof). If I'm not mistaken, the study of such occurs within the field of sociobiology, though I note with a smirk that a sociobiologist like Wilson comes across in the end as just another soapbox preacher. He goes so far almost as to point out what charity work we ought to support. What a coincidence.

In line with observations by John Teehan ("Kantian Ethics after Darwin," Zygon 38 (2003) 49-60 (57)), as humans evolved into a self-aware and markedly social species, the development of emotions (as even Spock understood at some level) was a necessary co-requisite.

En-minded feelings, to coin a phrase, matter. Not just the cruder, elementary ones evolutionary biologists are inclined to study (anger, pain, hunger, and fear, which can (but usually are not) be mindless). More important still, for morality, are sophisticated emotions, such as paranoia (projection), nostalgia, and possessiveness (jealousy); at a higher level: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.

Perhaps the three aptly named "theological virtues" I just referred to can be recast in non-religious terms. But, as a matter of observation, they have not been recast to a significant degree by atheists, but rather, adopted without attribution, or modified into something base in comparison (Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, pick your poison).

In closing, I note that only a part of what I say above comes straight out of my head. I regurgitate a number of things that have long bounced around in my mind-body continuum, but which I have framed in the language of the admirable synthesis I'm reading in Thomas Kazen's "Dirt and Disgust: Body and Morality in Biblical Purity Laws," in Baruch Schwartz et al., eds., Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2008).

The note about Darwin and Fanny derives from a comment by A. Steward on the Fabricious thread over at Faith and Theology.

John,

Thanks for the extended comment. Much but not all of the literature you cite is new to me. I will not attempt to address the whole of your comment here. I am working on a more detailed response but it may take sometime. Ethics is not really one of my abnormal interests. What concerns me about your response is that, to my eyes, it appears to be an attempt to save theism rather than an attempt to explain either ethical behavior among people as a natural phenomenon (people after all are part of nature) or an attempt to spell out an ethical system that controls such behavior. I think these two things are related but they need not be. When it comes to the first, how to explain the existence of ethical behavior, while the details are far from clear, I believe it has evolutionary origins. When it comes to an ethical system itself, I tend to think tenable systems must come from an extrapolation and generalization of kin altruism, something that is seen in many other animals. As such, I agree that emotions and enculturation are important elements. In general, I find non-theistic deontology (one form of neo-Kantianism), as far as I understand it and with important modifications from its most common expressions, the closest philosophical match to my own views. I am an ethical realist and in that regard, I think you and I share a common view. The real issue is that we start from quite different places. You start with a theistic assumption and I start with a non-theistic assumption. An outside observer, should such a demon exist, might be quite surprised that we would make mostly the same ethical decisions when faced with the same ethical contexts. Please don't hold me too rigidly to any of this just now.

Hi Duane,

Thank for a generous reply. Your inheritance in the realm of theistic deontology looks pretty strong if you ask me. Even if you regard that deontology as not "neo" enough and ultimately in error, perhaps you will agree that nonetheless, the sins of the fathers rest upon the children to the third and fourth generations.

If instead virtues are in view, it might mean that even your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be stuck with the consequences. I'm not bemoaning the fact, nor I am sure why you must. Far from it.

Still, I'm not trying to make a case for religion in general, theism in particular, or a specific form of theism (Christianity), though I do not hide my commitment to the latter - which is a little confusing.

I'm just pointing out, first of all, that faith/religion, lightly reconstructed equivalents thereof among atheists included, is an anthropological constant of sorts, without which social mores as we know them are inconceivable.

True, my attempt to understand the underpinnings of the social mores typical of human behavior is an example of fides quaerens intellectum at work.

But even neo-Kantianism, it seems to me, is based on the assumption of universals, a strong notion of personal identity (a "soul"), and a meta-concept - an Aristotelian God of some kind - to account for both.

I like your remark about extrapolation of kin altruism as the basis of sound social mores.

"Love your neighbor as yourself" of course began its career in biblical religion meaning little more than that (charity begins at home).

It then came to be greatly extrapolated, illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan (and analogues among the Pharisees).

It seems like we are saying the same thing. Except that, when my children ask me why they should be altruistic, I can answer, "because the God who made us all and seeks to save us" is altruistic. It seems to me that all you can say in response is, "it is your evolutionary destiny."

That sounds like law, not gospel, to use a Pauline / Lutheran distinction.

John,

Hmmm. With regard to the "golden rule," its not surprising to me that a religion would incorporate an important element of the human moral nature within its cherished doctrines. After all, both the founders and the followers of any theistic movement are humans. The truly shocking thing is the many cases where doctrine and religious traditions contradict that moral nature.

"Destiny" has a teleological element that I find troubling. I would prefer to call it an ethical heritage. All of us have this heritage of moral behavior. It is part of us, just like walking upright is part of us. Shirley and I tried to teach our children that to act against that heritage was to deny a part of themselves. Looking back, we did not articulate it at the time, it is clear that we believed it more important to teach, by example reinforced with words, our children to be moral agents in keeping with that heritage than to have any theistic beliefs. We knew, because of our own pilgrimage, that theistic beliefs were subject to question, change and abandonment and wanted to be sure that the heritage of moral behavior would survive that questioning, change and possible abandonment. As far as I can tell, it has.