Being good naturally
Why morality needs compassion, not divine commandments
Many people believe a god is the source of morality, and this god will judge them based on how they behave. Here, I’ll park the question of whether such a god exists. Instead I’ll ask what morality would look like if it came from a god, and what it looks like if it comes from sentient beings trying to live together.
What do I mean by morality? An outcome is objectively bad if it harms a sentient being. An action is wrong if a person knowingly and unjustly harms a sentient being, or knowingly allows such harm when they could reasonably prevent it.
In any given situation, it can be easy or hard to know what is right and wrong. Some of us try to figure it out for ourselves, using reason. Others rely on emotions, gut instinct, or guidance they are told comes from a god.
What if there was an all-knowing, all-perfect, all-good god, that is the source of morality and cares about us? Then, at a minimum, we would expect it to be able to give us all the same moral message. At different times and places, people would have broadly the same code of morality. But this is not what we see.
If there was no such god, then we would expect to see different sets of people, at different times and different places, evolving different codes of morality. We would see rival religions, scriptures, interpretations, and moral codes that reflect the cultures that produced them. And this is indeed what we do see.
A natural theory of morality
If such a god does not exist, how did morality evolve? Here is one plausible natural model. Morality has evolved in the brains of social animals, including humans, because both cooperation and competition help us to survive.
Here’s a good example. When parents look after their children, their children are more likely to grow up. When a tribe cooperates in gathering food, the tribe is more likely to survive. So genes for caring for children, and genes for cooperating, tend to be passed on from generation to generation, and become more common.
We see three phases of evolving morality among social animals. The first phase is empathy and compassion. The second phase is cooperation and reciprocity. The third phase is understanding fairness and justice. Many nonhuman animals exhibit these types of morality.
In one experiment, rats would refuse food if they saw another rat being electrocuted. Which as an aside says a lot about human morality: setting up an experiment like that. In another experiment, monkeys were given food if they put a token into a slot. Some monkeys couldn’t figure it out. Another monkey would take that monkey’s token, put it in the slot, and let the first monkey have the food.
Humans, and some other animals, can also develop more nuanced morality because we have a greater capacity for reason. We can know that something is wrong, because we can understand that it causes unjustified harm. If a tiger kills you, it hasn't done anything wrong. If I kill you, I probably have.
So our ability to reason gives us a special role in sharing our lives on this tiny planet, in because our behaviour has consequences for other living beings. That does not mean we have a special place in the universe. It means we have special responsibilities here, among the sentient beings our actions can affect.
I subscribe to a variation of John Rawls social contract theory of morality.
Essentially, Rawls asked: how would a perfectly rational set of people design principles of justice for a society, if we don’t know in advance what position we would hold in that society? That is, we don’t know if we will be rich or poor, male or female, healthy or sick. This veil of ignorance forces us to be impartial, and to develop universally just principles.
My personal addition to the theory is that we also should not know what species we would be.
I believe one of the greatest injustices in our world is how we treat nonhuman animals. Every year we kill ninety billion farmed animals, and up to a trillion fish. These sentient beings suffer unjustly for our convenience, and to me our slaughter of them is an ongoing moral atrocity.
What would happen if we rationally designed rules for a world in which we didn’t know whether we would be owner or owned, diner or dinner? We would come up with a very different code of morality.
How religion can corrupt morality
In any given circumstance, it is already hard enough to balance empathy, compassion, reciprocity, cooperation, fairness, and justice. But religion can corrupt this already-hard process by adding in supposedly supernatural commands that can contradict compassion, cooperation, and justice.
For example, Quran 24:2 commands believers to flog adulterers one hundred times, and specifically tells them not to let compassion prevent the punishment. That wording suggests that compassion was an obstacle to punishing adulterers in this way, and it had to be explicitly overridden.
In the Hebrew Bible, including Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel, the biblical god commands the Israelites to attack the cities of other tribes, to show them no compassion, and to completely destroy them, killing man, woman, child, and infant, and leaving nothing alive that breathes.
On an underlying basis, Plato coined the Euthyphro dilemma: does a god command things to be good for arbitrary reasons, or does it identify things as being good because they correspond to independent standards of goodness?
If it is the first, then morality would be arbitrary. The god might have, if it wished, commanded torturing babies for fun to be good. If it is the second, the god is not the source of morality. And we are all responsible for identifying what is good and bad, regardless of our beliefs about the source.
If you respond that the god’s nature is good, that does not escape the dilemma. We just return to square one: is the god’s nature good for arbitrary reasons, or is it good because it corresponds to independent standards of goodness?
What of the argument that an all-good god gave us free will so we can freely choose to be good? We can reverse this to defend an all-evil god, who gave us free will so we can freely choose to be evil. The world would look the same if that were true. Just as it looks if there is no god, and humans invented the idea of gods.
We don’t need to believe in a god to be moral. In fact, believing in a god can corrupt our rational search for morality. We are good naturally when we recognise that other sentient beings matter, and act on that. No alleged supernatural command should silence our compassion here on Earth.