Atheism and morality (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 04, 2010, 12:55 (5110 days ago) @ David Turell

Tony and I have finally reached agreement, apart from one tiny caveat, but David has drawn our attention to the views of Philippa Foot concerning 'natural goodness'. Despite being an atheist, she was apparently driven by: "a life-long quest to show that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. Throughout her academic life, she was passionately opposed to subjectivism in ethics."-It would be unfair to judge her reasoning by the tiny extracts that the article offers, but it tells us that she regarded vice as a "natural defect", which in itself presupposes that virtue is the natural norm. On the assumption that ethics concerns the manner in which we behave towards another, I would suggest that the criterion for ethical behaviour is the degree to which our conduct either helps others (positive) or at least does not impinge on others (negative) in their efforts to achieve happiness. Since individuals and groups have different ideas of how to achieve happiness, how can there possibly be anything but subjectivity in ethics? Tony reserves the claim of objectivity exclusively for a UI, but no-one can know what a UI thinks or wants, so we are stuck with human interpretations, and the very fact that they vary across an enormous range is in itself proof that humans cannot avoid subjectivism in ethics.-I would go one step further. No-one is going to achieve happiness in this life unless they survive, and the survival instinct is not in the first instance based on furthering or protecting the happiness of others. Philippa Foot's examples from Nature completely ignore the fact that survival in many cases has to be at the expense of others. This includes the plants she takes as one of her examples. The strong ones will grab the water, and the weak ones will die. Her owls will survive by eating little Minnie Mouse. Humans have learned to a degree to channel these instincts, so that under normal circumstances we allow for the feelings and needs of our fellow humans (though not necessarily those of our fellow animals). A baby does not make such allowances. It has to be taught. And so this suggests to me that the unselfishness which lies at the root of ethical behaviour is not the natural norm at all, any more than vice is a natural defect. Behaviour will always depend on individual circumstances and individual attributes, whether innate or developed, and judgement will depend on the criteria held by the judge. The most we can hope for is a general social consensus. -Interestingly, the killer punch comes right at the end of the article. The author writes: "I should add that while Foot insisted that some moral norms were grounded in human nature, she also recognized that other norms were culture-relative." Since human nature varies from one subject to another, and culture from one group to another, what chance objectivity?