Morality Play

Why be moral? Because doing otherwise doesn't make sense. Doing otherwise doesn't work well in the long run. Doing otherwise will result in shooting yourself (and others) in the metaphorical foot. In a nutshell, not being moral is shortsightedly stupid.

I'm not talking about why just [insert group here] should be moral, here, I'm talking about why anyone should be moral, and that's because the reasons that immorality doesn't work have nothing to do with supernatural entities. Whether the universe is blamed on Brahma, Yahweh, Allah, The Force, or nothing at all, there are certain aspects that couldn't have been put together any differently (at least, not without having a meaningless, completely self-contradictory undifferentiated mass in which everything that exists does not exist, and vice versa). There are some constraints on how a natural world could be which can't be violated by the most super of supernatural forces, and morality arises from those constraints.

Concisely: Morality, coming from a source beyond any supernatural entity, and being a property of every natural system, is relevant to everyone, whether they add supernatural entities to their worldview or not.

One concern many theists have seen is that many atheists seem to think that the morality of theists is somehow inferior. At this point, perhaps it's clear why. If someone said to you (I'm temporarily assuming the reader is a theist) that morality didn't come from your god, but rather came from, say... following laws... you'd be rightly concerned. There's a misattribution going on, and worse yet there's the risk that if people run around thinking "Morality equals lawfulness" and some jerk puts a bad law on the books, people will think that following the bad law is moral. Ack! Worse yet, since the law is open to various degrees of interpretation, someone with the authority to decide on how the law is interpreted might attribute the wrong spirit to the letter, and so now everyone is compelled to follow a law ("be moral") even if it is what you know to be immoral! Double ack! You could even have people saying "Well, without the law, there'd be no reason to be moral... might as well drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die!" when you know full well there are more important reasons than the law to be moral. Triple ack! And on top of it all, you're painted as immoral for worrying about higher levels of morality than that dictated by the law. Quad overkill ack!

That's the kind of misattribution that many atheists go "Quad overkill ack!" over when they hear people claiming that morality comes from supernatural sources. There's a misattribution, there's the ability to subject morality to various biased interpretations, the bad interpretations can be handed down in some cases from a priviledged few and thus spread alarmingly quickly, people start saying things like "Sure you could be moral, but why?", and brights in general are often suspected of having an inferior class of morality simply because they're trying to get their morality from the proper source.

When atheists are saying that morality without gods is superior to a morality dictated by gods, it often comes from a similar concern to a theist saying that morality dictated by gods is superior to a morality dictated by human laws. Sure, you might get lucky and manage to keep in line with the true source, but there's far too much room for human bungling and misattribution of why things are important.

Then again, sometimes it's coming from a common combination of bitterness and pompousness. Every group has people like that, too.

There's also something similar to misattribution that's a concern, though it's not quite the same. I'm thinking of an experiment that was done at a daycare center. In a nutshell, there were often a few parents every week who picked their kids up late, which wasn't so great for the daycare workers that had to stay to watch the not-gone-yet kids. The center started charging a 'late pick-up fee', and... late pickups went up! What was a matter of being inconsiderate before was now merely a matter of a very small fee for a very convenient service. Worse yet, when the center dropped the late fee, the late pickups didn't go down. Hey, they're doing the extra service for free now! No conscience pangs AND no hit on the wallet, how great is that?

By misattributing an issue from the realm of morality to the realm of externally enforced consequences (in this case, by adding a penalty fee) people were led to ignore the moral aspect and think only of the inflicted consequences aspect and, worse yet, when the consequences were taken away, they didn't revert to moral behavior, but acted as if the action were now just fine!

Whenever I hear someone say "Sure, you could be a moral atheist, but why?" I worry that here is someone who wouldn't be moral if they weren't essentially being told to, and it's scary and sad. Perhaps there are people who couldn't be moral if they weren't told to, in which case it's a good thing someone's telling them to... but I suspect there are a lot of people who could once have been moral simply because it doesn't make sense not to, but who've been led to misattribute the source of morality and, in so doing, have lost their capacity to actually be moral, and only retain the ability to act morally.

It's also possible that there are people who believe in supernatural forces but don't mistakenly label those things as sources of morality... people who are fundamentally moral, and simply add a layer of religious decoration on top of it without mistaking the decoration for the real thing. I have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever met anyone or heard of anyone who fit this description, so it certainly seems unlikely to me, but perhaps that is more an upshot of how pervasive modern religious piekories have to be in order to survive, and less a property of religious piekories in general.