According to the first lines in the Qur'an, Allah (simply the Arabic for "god") is
beneficent and merciful, a judge, and one who keeps humans on the right path.
More specifically, Islam provides the standard for determining what behaviors
are good or bad. An action is fard if it is obligatory; performing the action is
meritorious, and not performing it is punishable. An action is halal if it is
allowed or permitted, but not required; performing the action is neither good nor
bad, moral nor immoral. An action is makruh if it is disapproved, though not
forbidden. Finally, an action is haram if it is forbidden or prohibited or unlawful;
performing the action has negative religious consequences.
Among the foods that are halal are milk, honey, fish, fruits, vegetables, and
meat-as long as it is sacrificed according to Muslim ritual (throat slit and drained
of blood, never strangled or bludgeoned to death). A foodstuff is haram if it
contains or comes into contact with blood, pigs, dogs, reptiles, alcohol, animals
with protruding canine teeth, or animals won by betting or gambling. But
ingestion is hardly the only area of moral concern. A man should not wear gold
ornaments or silk clothes, although a woman may; women should not wear tight
or transparent clothing, and in more than a few societies, should be veiled from
head to toe to show their modesty and preserve their honor. No one should alter
their physical features in pursuit of beauty, and all excess is disapproved. Gold
and silver utensils are haram, as are pure silk sheets and bedspreads. Keeping
dogs inside the house as pets is forbidden, too, as are songs that praise wine and
encourage drinking, all forms of gambling and lottery, and movies that depict or
incite sex, greed, crime, deviance, or false belief.
Just to show how very "moral" Islam is, in May 2009 Saudi Arabia actually
held a "Miss Beautiful Morals" pageant. The contestants were all heavily veiled,
as is proper, since the women were not being judged on their physical beauty
(and would definitely not be seen in bathing suits by strange men). Rather, as
pageant founder Khadra al-Mubarak asserted, "The idea of the pageant is to
measure the contestants' commitment to Islamic morals.... The winner won't
necessarily be pretty. We care about the beauty of the soul and the morals."20
And the categories in which the women were judged included "discovering your
inner strength," "the making of leaders," and "Mom, paradise is at your feet."
Now there is a commitment to morality the likes of which Western Christianity
has not achieved.
Outside the Western/Abrahamic religions, Hinduism is premised on the
concept of dharnaa, the transcendent order of the universe and the duty that it
imposes on humans. Failure to act in accordance with the dharma generates
karma, which functions like a kind of moral weight or dirt or rust on the atman
or soul. The entire caste system, the division of society into different and
unequal social and occupational groups, is a moral imperative, resting on the
spiritual purity or impurity of individuals; and many moral regulations go along
with it, including who may or may not marry or even eat with someone else.
One's specific moral demands depend on one's caste status: if one is pariah, one's
moral duty is to perform dirty jobs; and if one is kshatriya, one's moral duty is to
lead, to fight, to kill, and to die. The Bhagavad Gita, the beloved sacred tale of
the warrior Arjuna, affirms that neither killing nor dying is a moral problem for
the kshatriya warrior, since it is by definition meritorious, even mandatory, that a
soldier slay and be slain and, even more fundamentally, the soul cannot be
injured by death anyhow.
Buddhism has an elaborate and demanding set of behavioral strictures; one
could argue with justification that Buddhism is more morality than religion. The
very beginning of the Buddha's teaching is the "Eightfold Path," the discipline to
observe right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood,
right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These "rights" go beyond
the Judeo-Christian requirement to eschew lies and false witness: to observe
right speech, the Buddhist must abstain from lies and deceit as well as slander
and malicious words as well as harsh or hurtful words as well as idle chatter. But
the Eightfold Path is only the most general of moral rules. The Buddhist should
obey the ten precepts, to avoid harming any living thing, taking anything not
freely given, misbehaving sexually, speaking falsely, ingesting alcohol or drugs,
eating untimely meals, dancing/singing/miming, using garlands or perfumes or
other adornments, sitting in high seats, and accepting gold or silver. Actually, the
list of Buddhist ethical regulations is much more extensive.
Jainism may have the most stringent morality of all. A religion related to
Hinduism and Buddhism, Jainism condemns all injuring of all living beings,
even insects and microbes-the concept of ahimsa or no-harm. This is why some
Jains can be seen wearing masks and drinking through a strainer lest they
swallow an insect, or sweeping the path ahead of them with a small broom lest
they trample one. Ajain must minimally be a vegetarian, but that is only the
beginning: they should eat only plants that are already dead, so as to avoid
injuring the plant. They cannot be farmers because farming harms living things;
they should not be blacksmiths because the hammering hurts the anvil and the
bench. They must also, like Buddhists, avoid attachment to life, whether this be
food, clothing, family members, or their own body. Jams who commit
themselves to a more rigorous religious life also renounce travel, owning
weapons, eating during night time, and contact with their spouse; they pledge to
meditate frequently during the day, live a monk's life as frilly as possible, and
ultimately become a complete ascetic by dwelling naked in the forest and dying
proudly of self-starvation.
These are only some of the major "world religions." Every ancient and tribal
religion included its own moral standards, some similar to Christianity, some
foreign to Christianity, some absurd to Christianity. And the feeling was mutual.
MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION
While religions have a lot-and a lot of different-moral compunctions, morality is
not limited to religion. If we understand morality properly, as one expression of
the human concern to organize one's (and others') behavior according to
standards of appraisal, then there are at least four other potential bases for moral
determination and moral evaluation: nature, reason, philosophy, and culture.
There are many people who assert that morality is "natural" or "real" or
"objective," and therefore independent of religion; in fact, they use (supposedly)
natural/real/objective standards to judge, and often to reject, religious "morality."
I am not, for reasons not manageable in this chapter but hopefully obvious in this
chapter, one of these people; morality is too diverse and contradictory to be
natural or real or objective, and the total lack of agreement on moral answers-or
even moral questionscontradicts the noti
on of a single "real" morality (as it does
the notion of a single "real" language). Nevertheless, for those who use nature or
reality as their standard of moral judgment, theirs is no more inadequate and no
more ridiculous than some religious standard.21
Related to the idea of real morality is the idea of rational morality, that is, that
one can determine the morality of one's and others' actions by reason and
analysis. By starting from the relevant facts, one applies logic and critical
thinking, possibly weighs the alternatives, and chooses the "moral" course of
action. To be sure, this begs the question of which are the relevant facts and of
how to weigh the alternatives. For instance, I asked a moral rationalist to explain
the morality of abortion to me, and he answered that a fetus does not have a
complete and functioning brain, that only beings with complete and functioning
brains are persons, and therefore that it was morally acceptable to terminate a
fetus. The problem with this manner of "reasoning" is that it stipulates the key
terms of the debate (is a complete and functioning brain the definition of
"personhood," and is lack of personhood a justification for killing?) and ignores
issues of interest and of value conflicts. Even so, this approach is not inferior to,
and is often superior to, religious brands of morality.
Philosophers since Socrates have struggled with the problem of "the good."
They have made little headway and will make no more so long as they insist on
finding the good way to act or live, but the exercise shows that one can
philosophize about ethics and morality without reference to religion. In fact, in
his dialogue entitled Euthyphro, Plato stalled on whether an action is good
because some god(s) ordain(s) it or whether the god(s) ordain(s) it because it is
good. The dilemma is crucial because if an action is good with or without god(s),
then we do not need god(s) to tell us what is good; we can philosophize it out for
ourselves. And if an action is good only because some god(s) say(s) that it is,
then the action is not good in itself; its goodness is purely arbitrary and
contingent on the whim of the god(s).
Since Plato's time, philosophers have offered a number of analyses of morality
or ethics. One popular approach to morality is personal interest or egoism:
people do, or should do, what is best for themselves; interestingly, early (and
some modern) theorists of capitalism see informed egoism as the principle on
which markets in particular and societies in general do and should operate.
(Others regard egoism as the very antithesis of morality.) Utilitarianism argues
that the best and most ethical course of action is the one that promises to produce
the most pleasure and the least pain, presumably for the most people (or else it is
just egoism again): humans thus become moral calculators, adding up pleasures,
subtracting pains, and arriving at the most congenial sums. The fact that moral
choices often cost pleasure and cause pain complicates this calculation, and of
course how one compares relative pleasures and pains (say, mine against yours)
is a problem.
Immanuel Kant argued that morality flows from the perception of duty, that
some actions are required of us simply because they are required of us. Moral
actions are "imperatives," he said, and "categorical" imperatives at that. A
hypothetical imperative is the sort of requirement that relates means to ends: if
you want to drive a nail into a board, it is a hypothetical imperative to use a
hammer. A categorical imperative is not a means to an end. In fact, Kant insists
that we should not treat other people as means at all; rather, we should think
about the maxim underlying our action-for example, the maxim underlying my
aversion to stealing is "you should not steal"-as if it were a universal rule. The
maxims of moral action are universal or universalizable rules.
Aristotle, on the other hand, appraised behavior in terms of virtue, which is
part of the character of persons. Living and acting virtuously was, as they say, its
own reward-the cause and the effect of moral choices. A person who lived in the
condition of eudaimonia (wellbeing, happiness, flourishing) behaved in ways to
express and perpetuate this healthy state; of course, the person had to be
educated and trained to be virtuous in the first place. Among the virtues were the
eight "moral virtues" of prudence, justice, fortitude, courage, liberality,
magnificence, magnanimity, and temperance. Further, a virtue was always the
middle way between two vices (in the case of courage, the vices would be
cowardice and foolhardiness).
Other philosophical grounds for morality have been proposed, including
justice and fairness and human rights. All of these really amount to little more
than synonyms for morality and to formalizations of a particular form or view of
morals or ethics. But Aristotle's observation about the training of virtue raises
the point about the cultural basis of morality. Culture, of which religion is
inevitably a part, is a source of behavioral expectations and behavioral appraisal
far beyond the part contributed by religion. Any culture provides all kinds of
norms for human comportment, from what clothes to wear to how to eat at the
dinner table to how to treat other people. Some of these norms are influenced by
or derived from a culture's religion, and some have no relation to the religion at
all. Indeed, "moral" reactions often take the form more of cultural disdain than
supernatural disapproval-it is more a matter of "what we do or don't do around
here" than "what the supernatural beings want."
MORALITY WITHOUT HUMANITY
Humans-especially but not exclusively religious humans-have a tendency to
imagine that morality is some unique human gift, sublime, ethereal, even
"spiritual" or "supernatural." This is one reason why many (like C. S. Lewis)
have been inclined to attribute "the moral sense," the very possibility of having
morality or being a moral species along with the details of any specific moral
system, to some source outside of humanity. Morality seems to them
unprecedented in the natural world, transcendent and inexplicable.
This attitude is a combination of hubris, ignorance of the world around us, and
more than a small dose of Christian exclusivism-the suggestion that humans are
unlike anything else in existence. But humans are not unlike anything else in
existence; we are natural beings too, a species that developed historically and
continuously from nonhuman precursors. And just as we can find traces (clear
and strong traces) of our physical characteristics in other species, so we can find
traces of our psychological and even moral characteristics in them as well.
The question that is generally not asked in the discussion of morality, but that
should be asked, is not "what is the basis of morality?" and certainly not "what is
the true morality?" and not, as some well-intentioned thinkers have done, "why
be moral?" Asking "why be moral?" is no more sensible than asking "why be
linguistic?" or "why be bipedal?" Rather, the correct question is why are humans
a moral speci
es? That is, what is it about us that makes us the kind of beings who
are capable of "morality," who have "moral" interests and invent "moral"
systems?
A great deal of literature has accumulated over the last couple of decades to
address this question, although Darwin predicted it more than 130 years ago. In
his The Descent of Man, first published in 1871, he mused that morality was not
really such a mystery at all but rather that "any animal whatever, endowed with
well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here
included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience."22 If this is so,
then we should expect to find rudiments, evolutionary traces, or "building
blocks" of "morality" in the nonhuman natural world. And of course we do.
The details of the research into the evolution of morality are too vast and too
varied to explore in depth here. All we need to establish is that some ancestral
precursors to morality can be found in nonhuman species. Since Darwin, an
accelerating line of investigation has developed, as early as Edward
Westermarck's 1908 The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas and
reaching critical mass with E. O. Wilson's 1975 Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis. Since then, the effort has yielded conceptual and empirical studies
like Peter Singer's 1981 The Expanding Circle, Robert Wright's 1994 The Moral
Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Marc Hawser's 2000
Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think, and his 2006 Moral Minds: How
Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, Michael Shermer's
aforementioned The Science of Good and Evil, Richard Joyce's 2006 The
Evolution of Morality, and the many works of primatologist Frans de Waal,
including Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved.
The core of this research is that "morality" is not utterly unique to humans but
has its historical/ evolutionary antecedents and its biological bases. "Morality"
does not appear suddenly out of nowhere in humans but emerges gradually with
the emergence of certain kinds of beings living certain kinds of lives. This is not
to assert that animals have frill-blown "morality" any more than they have full-
blown language. It is to assert that, just as some prehuman beings have
"linguistic" capacities, some prehuman beings also have "moral" capacities.
The key to the evolutionary theory of morality is that social beings tend
reasonably to develop interests in the behavior of others and capacities to
determine and to influence that behavior. This might start most obviously with
offspring: parents of many species show concern for their offspring,
disadvantage themselves for their offspring (for instance, by spending time
feeding them), and put their own lives at risk for their offspring (the notorious
problem of "altruism"). Some species exhibit these same behaviors toward adult
members of the "family," or toward adult members of the larger social group, or
ultimately, in humans, to all members of the species and perhaps to other species
as well. In this regard, human "morality" is an extension of more "short-range"
helping behaviors.
With such costly but prosocial behaviors, we have taken a long step toward
"morality." Or, as Shermer puts it, the capacity and tendency to have "moral
sentiments" or moral concerns evolved out of the "premoral" feelings and
tendencies of prehuman species. Frans de Waal and other animal watchers have
accordingly gathered an enormous amount of data on prehuman "morality,"
including sharing, indications of "fairness," gratitude, self-sacrifice, sympathy
and comforting, and many more. O'Connell has been able to catalogue hundreds
of reported cases of "empathy" and "moral" behavior in chimps,23 and it has
Why Faith Fails The Christian Delusion Page 47
