- Free newsletter
- The Latest
- Topics
-
About
Sauntering beyond good and evil
“The religious
fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are
incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is
no morality.”
This startling syllogism comes from Joel Marks, a
retired professor at the University of New Haven and a scholar at the Interdisciplinary
Center for Bioethics at Yale University. Last week he wrote a column in the New York Times blog for philosophers, The Stone. At
the Times, they like edgy topics like does truth matter, is religion relevant, and
can we have morals without God? In Professor Marks – someone who answers No to
all three -- they found the edgiest theory of all – that there is no difference
between right and wrong.
Does anyone at the Times appreciate how dangerous this theory
is?
Running a death camp, discriminating against homosexuals,
and raising battery hens are not right, says Professor Marks. But they are not wrong,
either. Moral viewpoints are fundamentally just preferences, expressions of how
we would like the world to be. It is impossible to argue that killing chickens (a
favourite ethical conundrum for Professor Marks) is either immoral or moral. He
simply doesn’t like it.
Amoralism takes the decline of moral thinking a step
further than moral relativism. A moral relativist asserts that his moral
preferences can be justified by some standard, however weak. For the amoralist
(Professor Marks’s word, not mine), there is no standard at all.
Professor Marks is not alone. His soul mate is Richard T. Garner, an emeritus professor at Ohio State
University, who has also abandoned “the trackless jungle of morality”. He is the
author of a book called Beyond Morality. Reassuringly, both
men believe that the bonds of custom and habit are enough to build and maintain
a harmonious society. My hunch is that there are a lot of amateur amoralists out there waiting for a philosopher to put their intuitions into words. Perhaps his op-ed will give the theory a push ahead.
Amoralism is a fairly recent development in Professor Marks's thought. As
an atheist, he used to defend a Kantian view of morality to distinguish between
right and wrong. However, a few years ago he had an “anti-epiphany” in which he
realised that believing in morality was just as unreasonable as believing in a divinity:
“It
was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose
ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least
had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.”
So,
should we lock Joel Marks up before he does a Columbine?
No.
Professor Marks is a cool, humorous, laid-back sort of guy. He wants less violence, not an excuse to run amok. Realising that
right and wrong are irrelevant will lead people to be less aggressive when
their preferences conflict, he thinks.
But
how do we reach agreement without the pole star of morality? Professor Marks is
an optimist. While rational argument will probably prove fruitless for parties
who do not share common principles, there are other ways in a democratic
society. His point of view could be imposed “by sheer force of numbers”, he
says in a column in Philosophy Now. Or he could use “advertising
campaigns and celebrity endorsements”.
“I retain my strong preference for honest
dialectical dealings in a context of mutual respect. It’s just that I am no longer
giving premises in moral arguments; rather, I am offering considerations to help
us figure out what to do. I am not attempting to justify anything; I am trying to
motivate informed and reflective choices…. But this won’t be because a god, a supernatural
law or even my conscience told me I must, I ought, I have an obligation. Instead
I will be moved by my head and my heart. Morality has nothing to do with it.”
What
he doesn’t take into account is the human capacity for evil – although it’s not
clear what he would call it. He
assumes that people’s choices will generally coincide with what we deem
“moral”. But this is far from being the case, as one chilling paragraph from
his Philosophy Now column suggests:
“Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’
come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do
not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in
the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious
superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I
now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.
Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover
plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating
certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the
molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to
put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.”
In other words, the only thing which prevents child
sex abuse is social consensus. If that changed, paedophilia could become legal.
Preposterous?
Not
quite. A recent symposium in Baltimore brought together a number
of eminent psychiatrists and psychologists to redress the marginalisation and
stigmatisation of paedophiles. The keynote speaker, Fred Berlin, of Johns Hopkins University, argued in favour
of acceptance of and compassion for “minor-attracted persons” -- while at the same time rejecting adult-minor sexual activity. An expert
from the University of Texas argued that diagnostic criteria for mental
disorders should not be based on concepts of vice since such concepts are
subject to shifting social attitudes and doing so diverts mental-health
professionals from their role as healers.
The
aim of the symposium was to pressure the American Psychiatric Association into changing its standards on
paedophiles in the new edition of its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. If they
succeed, the odds on the legalisation (with due safeguards) of paedophilia will
shorten.
It is to Professor Marks’s credit that he is completely honest about his
conversion to amoralism. In his theory the consequences of a world set adrift
from religion are laid bare. Didn’t Dostoevsky write, “If God did not exist, everything would
be permitted"?
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Join Mercator today for free and get our latest news and analysis
Buck internet censorship and get the news you may not get anywhere else, delivered right to your inbox. It's free and your info is safe with us, we will never share or sell your personal data.
Have your say!
Join Mercator and post your comments.