How do agnostics live? (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, June 20, 2008, 11:28 (6001 days ago) @ Mark

Part 1: Mark (12 June at 17.06) put me in a situation in which I had to choose between torturing and killing an innocent child (and then dying myself) and allowing the world to come to an end. Mark would allow the world to end. - All the scenarios are, of course, absurd, but the others (fat man and medical research) have added complications (ditto the new rape scenario) and if I go into those, we will be sidetracked from our real issue, which is my interpretation of humanist ethics versus your interpretation of Christian ethics. - We need to clarify a few things. Firstly, you say that my decision to torture and kill the child "lets God off the hook". Whether it's God, Professor Moriarty or Goldfinger who has given me this ultimatum, he is responsible and he is the ultimate evil force whom I condemn with all my might. However, you only asked me for my decision, not for my judgment. I am the one on the hook. Secondly, let's be explicit about what is "wrong". In torturing and killing the child, I am doing wrong. In signing the death warrant of 6 billion people I am doing wrong. I can only choose between two wrongs, and I see torturing and killing the child as the lesser of the two evils. Why? The survival, welfare and happiness of 6 billion people, not to mention the continuance of the human race, is just about the biggest responsibility I can imagine. I don't want to torture the child, and it would take enormous courage and self-sacrifice to do so, and I would not want to live afterwards anyway ... but to cause the suffering and death of 6 billion people by not doing so would be an even worse crime. You said earlier that "any offence against my neighbour is directly an offence against God." You are about to offend against 6 billion of your neighbours. Does it ease your conscience to say: "It's God's fault, not mine"? - The Dostoyevsky scenario is different from yours, as the inducement is happiness, not survival, and the world knows the story. No-one could be happy knowing that this has only been made possible by the torture and slaughter of an innocent child. But let's face it, if it really happened, and as time went by, the torturer would go down in history as a Judas-type traitor to humanity, and the little girl would have churches erected in her name as a glorious, Jesus-type martyr (after all, Jesus did not nail himself to the Cross). I'm not saying it's all OK. I'm just pointing out that the church has its own way of coming to terms with God's apparent cruelty. - Part 2: In your post of 14 June you stated that "the motive to do good is not to achieve some personal gain in this life or the next". I challenged this by pointing out that you would not be happy ... which means personal gain ... if you did not do good, but your response is "our love for God is not what elicits God's love for us". I was not talking here about God's love for us. I was trying to find out why you do good. My own motive for doing good is that I feel unhappy if I do something wrong, I feel at ease with myself if I help others, and I enjoy the recognition that comes from them. Similarly, I could not live with myself if I tortured a child, and I could not live with myself if I condemned 6 billion people to death. It all boils down to my relations with myself and with other people. If God wants us to do good, who do we do good to? I can only measure good and bad in terms of the happiness, relief of suffering, welfare etc. of myself and my fellow creatures.
 
We began this discussion with a disagreement about the possibility of an objective moral code. I have the impression that you are measuring good and bad against a raft of written prescriptions that are wide open to interpretation and centre on what the interpreters think might be what God wants. This certainly explains the confusion that the church now finds itself in when confronted by the Archbishop of Canterbury's "moral conundrums": homosexuality, abortion, contraception, euthanasia, the erosion of civil liberties, the role of women, the role of multiculturalism etc. etc. You want to know how agnostics live. I can only answer for myself: by a humanist code that enables me to take decisions according to what seems to me most ethically beneficial to my fellow humans and myself. And to be honest, I find the church's position on some of these issues quite repugnant ... but so, I gather, do some members of the church. - I want to temper these remarks, though, because I realize that they must in part seem offensive. I have the utmost respect for those who hold genuine beliefs like your own, based on the principle of doing good for whatever reason, and I have to recognize that your criteria may be closer to the objective truth than my own. I'm only trying to untangle what seems to me like an unholy mess.