Questions to ask yourself

Should incontrovertible evidence come to your knowledge -- whatever form it might take -- that the entire Bible is just a bunch of hooey and that there is absolutely no Christian God, would you not still feel for your fellow man as you do now?

Proponents of the moral order have long sought to heighten the persuasiveness of moral precepts by appealing to reason. A primitive but familiar argument invoked a myth of divine decrees enforced by sanctions, which consisted usually of reward or punishment after death. The myth itself was not sustained by any appeal to reason whose cogency we are apt to certify, but, granted the myth, the argument by appeal to it was indeed a rational argument to the effect that moral behavior is in one's own interest.

Another familiar argument from self-interest is that we are all better off if we all respect one another's interests. The fallacy is familiar too: any one of us might be better off by infringing on another's interests, if the rest of society behaves properly. The weakening of the fabric occasioned by the one man's deviation is unlikely to harm him appreciably in his lifetime. Police and punishment are our way of redressing the balance by bringing further self-interest to bear.

Might we way then that self-interest does offer a rational warrant for altruism once we have instituted police and punishment? No, for two reasons. One, the penal code demands only erogatory altruism, leaving the supererogatory untouched. Second, self-interest condones even some unaltruistic cheating at the erogatory level, when the cheat sees his way to eluding police and punishment.

The enlightened moralist thus recognizes that self-interest, however enlightened, affords no general rational basis for altruism. Altruists are simply persons who prize the welfare of others outright and irreducibly, just as everyone prizes his own.

Some moralists feel that this lack of a rational justification on the basis of self-interest is a threat to morality. I say that such a justification would have been unworthy anyway, smacking of the venal and the sordid. Let virtue be its own reward.

I respect and admire the efforts of folks like Kant and John Rawls to provide "a rational warrant for altruism." But, like Quine, I don't think their efforts ultimately succeed. We cannot reason our way to what he calls the "supererogatory" -- to what the theologians call love.

How about the Golden Rule, then? It has a compelling logic and seems to ground morality in a kind of enlightened self-interest. But that apparent element of self-interest provides little guidance "when the musical chairs get down to one."

One form of religious impulse involves what Quine describes as "divine decrees enforced by sanctions, which consisted usually of reward or punishment after death." Yet the religious/spiritual motivation for altruism -- and I'm not speaking only here of a particularly Christian motivation -- is not primarily about following orders or obeying commands under threat of punishment. (I agree with Quine that if this were the primary motive, it would smack of "the venal and the sordid.")

The spiritual/religious impulse toward altruism is not only an expression of gratitude and worship, although that too is part of it.

For me, the most powerful religious motive is the faith that life has meaning, that justice is more than an illusion. It is the faith that, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s phrase, "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Without that -- the sense that life makes sense, i.e. the virtue of hope -- I can't say for certain that I'd be capable of altruism.

In one of my favorite novels, Camus' The Plague, Dr. Rieux is a man without such hope. He sees a world in which life is brutish, nasty and short. People suffer horribly and they die. Rieux responds heroically, altruistically, risking his own well-being to ease, somewhat, the suffering of others. The hope he clings to, such as it is, is expressed near the end of the book:

... there are more things to admire in men than to despise. Nonetheless, [Rieux] knew that the tale he had to tell could not be a final victory. It could only be a record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

Rieux sees this striving to heal as simply "what had had to be done." Yet he doesn't fully understand it either.

Whether theists or atheists, we are all of us "unable to be saints." Yet in the midst of pestilence, some -- for whatever personal reasons or motives -- "strive their utmost to be healers."

I will never fully understand all the various motives of all the various people who make that choice, but that hardly matters.


*This was all posted at
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2004/04/using_my_religi_1.html*
I think its an interesting topic