Tag Archives: survival ethics

Atheism, Morality, Philosophy

Why Ought I Act Morally? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This week I’ve been listening to a debate between Matt Slick (Christian) and Dan Barker (atheist) on whether humans can be good without God.  Barker’s argument during the debate struck me as illogical, and here’s why.

Barker explained that moral values are merely natural inclinations that are built into human beings due to the long process of evolution.  These inclinations vary from person to person across a statistical distribution.  Some people feel a strong inclination to help the poor and some don’t.  Some people are strongly opposed to rape and some are not.

For every natural, moral inclination there is a statistical bell curve across humanity.  Evolution has bequeathed moral inclinations to humans, but to varying degrees.  At one point, Barker even said that it may be evolutionarily necessary for this bell curve to exist.  To give an example, it may be that if everyone was strongly opposed to murdering the innocent, this may not best advance the survival of the human race.  We can’t have everyone acting like Mother Theresa or else our species might die out.  The converse is also true: a world full of Hitler’s would also kill off the human race.

I agree with Barker that some people have stronger moral inclinations than others and that some of this variation may be genetic.  What I don’t understand is the next move he made in the debate.

He then offered his definition of behaving morally: do less harm.  For Barker, this phrase neatly encapsulates the diverse natural instincts that evolution has given us.  In essence, Barker is saying, “Nature has caused us to have these inclinations and if I had to come up with a phrase to describe what these inclinations are telling us to do, it is ‘do less harm.'”  Barker is acting as Nature’s ambassador and explaining to us in a command what she actually wants from us.  From then on, Barker repeatedly stated that humans ought to do less harm, with the situation determining how that plays out.

In the next post, I will explain why Dan Barker’s approach does not work.  See you then.

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 7

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In the previous post, we found significant problems with survival ethics, the ethical theory which claims that “morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.”  But there are more problems.

Survival ethics are merely descriptive, not prescriptive.  They describe the behaviors of the past that led to survival of the human species.  I may be thankful that people followed these rules in the past, but how am I to decide whether I ought to follow these rules in the future? 

As Francis Beckwith explains, “After all, some people in the past raped, stole, and murdered. And I know of many people today who have feelings to rape, steal, and murder. Perhaps these behaviors are just as important for my existence and the preservation of the species as the ‘good’ behaviors.”  Unless there is an objective moral law that is over and above survival ethics, there is absolutely no possible way to determine which behaviors that have been produced by evolution are the good ones and which are the bad ones.

One response available to evolutionists is that those societies that have allowed atrocities, such as Nazi Germany, have not survived, and so evolution did indeed cull them out.  This response fails for two reasons.  First, brutal and tyrannical regimes have existed since the dawn of mankind and they continue to exist today.  People of the nineteenth century were basking in the afterglow of the Enlightenment and were confident that mankind’s scientific discoveries and progress were leading them to a golden age.  Yet within the first half of the twentieth century two world wars were fought when brutal regimes rose to power.  To argue that we are now reaching some sort of evolutionary nirvana where corrupt governments can no longer arise seems incredibly naïve, to say the least.  History is replete with dictators and despots and there is no end in sight, unless you are a Christian theist who knows that Christ himself will usher in the end of times. 

Second, if the evolutionist uses the failure of brutal regimes as evidence they are morally wrong, then this indicates that any brutal regimes that do survive are proved morally right.  In other words, only survival is a criterion for rightness, but this lands the survival ethicist right back in social Darwinism, which survival ethicists decry.

A second possible response to the point that evolution has produced those who rape, murder, and steal is to say that we should only rationally obey moral feelings that the majority of people hold.  A few bad apples are not to be heeded.  Here again, there are numerous counter examples that can be given. 

The majority of Europe was under Nazi rule during World War II, so by this criterion Europeans should have adopted the majority view of German nationalism. 

During the heyday of the Soviet Union, millions lived under its brutal hegemony, so it would have been impossible for anyone in that nation to hold the view that their government was behaving immorally. 

Slave ownership was an almost worldwide phenomenon just a few hundred years ago, so how could a person living during that time claim that owning slaves was morally abhorrent?  They could not unless there was an objective and universal moral law that was true for all people at all times; survival ethicists deny this view, however. 

More examples could be given, but neither moral truth nor any other truth is determined by a vote.  If everyone in the world believed that two plus two equals five, then everyone in the world would be wrong.  No philosophical theory can overcome the laws of mathematics or our intuitive knowledge of right and wrong, so we should always be cautious when we are told that whatever the majority says must be right.

Conclusion

Evolutionary ethical systems suffer from numerous problems that are not easily resolvable.  In stark contrast stands the ethics of Christian theism.  Christian theism holds that the universe was created to glorify God, that history has a purpose and that it is moving toward a climax where good will defeat evil once and for all. 

God created human beings to have intimate relationships with him.  Out of God’s perfect moral nature flow his ethical commands to love him and to love one another.  He is the transmitter of moral laws; he has the authority, as the ultimate standard of good, to demand obedience; he has placed an innate knowledge of morality in us; our conscience seers us when we disobey his laws; he knows our motives and intent even when other humans do not; he is spirit and has created immaterial souls and values for his creatures.  Every single moral intuition we have is explained logically by God’s existence.  In fact, if there is even one objective and absolute moral law, God must exist.

The nineteenth century German atheist Frederick Nietzsche pronounced that God is dead and he predicted that the twentieth century would be the bloodiest on record.  He understood that any ethic without God as its source would lead to moral chaos.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, the famous Russian novelist, has said that if God does not exist, then all things are permissible.  It was obvious to these men that without God, ethics have no foundation.  A house with no foundation collapses into rubble and morality is no different.  How can a perfectly holy, just, and righteous God be replaced with a mindless, irrational process such as evolution without devastating consequences?

The contemporary western world is unaware of the danger of evolutionary ethics because it is living on the borrowed foundation and capital of Christian theism.  Evolutionary ethicists maintain a following only because  their theories cloak themselves with a veneer of Judeo-Christian morality.  Take away that veneer and their ethical systems collpase.  Our only hope is to hold tight to the one who made us, the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of all things, the Lord Jesus Christ.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 6

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Have you ever heard someone say the following?  “Morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.”  If so, read on because this post will evaluate this position to see whether it can really explain morality.  If you would like to understand a little more about the theory before reading the critique below, read the previous post first.

There are several objections that can be leveled against the theory.  First, we have an intuitive moral duty to help the weak, the elderly, and the disabled.  This would seem odd since weaker individuals would tend to be eliminated by evolution.   If anything, evolution should have caused feelings of hatred or contempt for those who are biologically unfit.  Moral feelings which cause us to help these people are exactly the opposite of what we expect to find. 

When confronted with this challenge, some evolutionists offer that helping the weak must somehow be worthwhile and that our ancestors found value in it.  In other words, our ancestors decided that evolution did not provide adequate answers for morality and so their rational minds began to work out morality at an individual and societal level.  It seems, however, that at this point human beings discovered an objective moral law – it is morally virtuous to help the weak and disabled – but this moral law is now referring to something universal and absolute that exists outside of survival ethics.  They are referring to a transcendent moral law that has no ground, which is an admission that survival ethics is inadequate. 

The other common answer to the challenge is that helping the disabled must somehow help us to survive, but we just do not know how it helps yet.  This view at least attempts to salvage survival ethics, but it is a circular argument.  We are asking how certain behaviors evolved, so to assume that a behavior did evolve when answering the question is circular reasoning.  

There is another serious problem with this explanation.  Francis Beckwith asks:

Because it is clear that not every human being has a moral sense that he or she has a duty and incumbency to help those less fortunate, on what grounds could the evolutionist say that these human beings are mistaken in their moral viewpoint?  After all, people who lack this moral sense have existed all over the globe for generations, and if they too are the products of evolution, perhaps having such people in our population is necessary for the preservation of the species.

The only escape for the survival ethicist is to claim that those who feel no compulsion to help the weak are morally unfit.  But again, a morality outside of evolution is being invoked which demonstrates that survival ethics does not have adequate explanatory power.

More to come on survival ethics tomorrow.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 5

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The final ethical system we will analyze is known as the immanent purpose view.  This view holds that “there is no reason why something rather than nothing exists, that there is no purpose for human history, that there is no life after death, and that humans are the result of a blind process of evolution.”   The major difference between immanent purpose and optimistic humanism is that immanent purpose seems to hold to objective moral virtues.  Within life, there is objective good to be attained and total moral relativism is false.

The objective good, however, is not what Christian theists would consider to be the objective good.  Some proponents of this view believe that values exist and are part of the “furniture” of the universe, but these values are floating and unattached to any deity.  Others propose that the objective moral good can be “defined by or reduced to natural, scientific properties which are biological, psychological, sociological, or physical in nature.”   The following discussion will focus on a particular view within the immanent purpose umbrella which I call survival ethics.  

Followers of survival ethics claim that what is morally right is what furthers human survival; it is a utilitarian ethic which places the end (as in ends and means) of survival in the seat of absolutism.  Whichever behaviors contribute to human survival are considered virtuous and whichever behaviors do not are morally repugnant.  They argue that every person wills life and not death and that survival is therefore foundational to the human animal.  Since all types of animals naturally reproduce and populate the earth, this behavior must be the cause of morality. 

Why be moral?  If we are moral, then we will survive and survival as a goal is wired into humans and all other animals.  Journalist Robert Wright explains that “if within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population.  The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.”  

According to survival ethicists, morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.  Although this view sounds almost identical to social Darwinism, followers of this view, such as Robert Wright, tend to recoil in horror if they are compared to social Darwinists.  They claim that even though evolution caused morals to develop, a person has a moral duty to rise above the brutality of nature and follow a more virtuous path.

In our next post, we will examine whether immanent purpose, and in particular, survival ethics, can explain what we know about morality.

[quotation references can be provided on request]