The Foundations of Morality
32. Morality and Religion
1. “If There’s No God”—
Is religion necessary to the discovery of the specific moral rules that should guide us? And is a belief in the chief traditional doctrines of religion—such as the existence of a personal God, a life after death, a Heaven and a Hell—necessary in order to secure human observance of moral rules?
2. The Indictment
Perhaps we can best arrive at an answer to the two questions that led off this chapter by reviewing the principal arguments on both sides.
There is a real evil, too, in ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality. “That origin consecrates the whole of them, and protects them from being discussed or criticized.” The result is that the morality becomes “stereotyped”; it is not improved and perfected, and dubious precepts are preserved along with the noblest and most necessary.
Even the morality that men have achieved through the fear or the love of God, Mill maintains, can also be achieved by those of us who seek, not only the approbation of those whom we respect, but the imagined approbation of
all those, dead or living, whom we admire or venerate. . . . The thought that our dead parents or friends would have approved our conduct is a scarcely less powerful motive than the knowledge that our living ones do approve it: and the idea that Socrates, or Howard, or Washington, or Antoninus, or Christ, would have sympathized with us, or that we are attempting to do our part in the spirit in which they did theirs, has operated on the very best minds, as a strong incentive to act up to their highest feelings and convictions.
On the other hand,
the religions which deal in promises and threats regarding a future life . . . fasten down the thoughts to the person’s own posthumous interests; they tempt him to regard the performance of his duties to others mainly as a means to his own personal salvation; and are one of the most serious obstacles to the great purpose of moral culture, the strengthening of the unselfish and weakening of the selfish element in our nature. . . . The habit of expecting to be rewarded in another life for our conduct in this, makes even virtue itself no longer an exercise of the unselfish feelings.
Mill makes further remarks regarding what he considers the elements of positive immorality in the Judean and Christian religions, but an even more bitter and unqualified indictment is made by Morris R. Cohen:
The absolute character of religious morality has made it emphasize the sanctions of fear—the terrifying consequences of disobedience. I do not wish to ignore the fact that the greatest religious teachers have laid more stress on the love of the good for its own sake. But in the latter respect they have not been different from such great philosophers as Democritus, Aristotle, or Spinoza, who regarded morality as its own reward. . . .
Religion has made a virtue of cruelty. Bloody sacrifices of human beings to appease the gods fill the pages of history. In ancient Mexico we have the wholesale sacrifice of prisoners of war as a form of national cultus. In the ancient East we have the sacrifice of children to Moloch. Even the Greeks were not entirely free from this religious custom. Let us note that while the Old Testament prohibits the ancient Oriental sacrifice of the first-born, it does not deny its efficacy in the case of the King of Moab (II Kings 3:2) nor is there any revulsion at the readiness with which Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. In India it was the religious duty of the widow to be burned on the funeral pyre of her late husband. And while Christianity formally condemned human sacrifice, it revived it in fact under the guise of burning heretics. I pass over the many thousands burned by order of the Inquisition, and the record of the hundreds of people burned by rulers like Queen Mary for not believing in the Pope or in transubstantiation. The Protestant Calvin burned the scholarly Servetus for holding that Jesus was “the son of the eternal God” rather than “the eternal son of God.” And in our own Colonial America heresy was a capital offense.
Cruelty is a much more integral part of religion than most people nowadays realize. The Mosaic law commands the Israelites, whenever attacking a city, to kill all the males, and all females who have known men. The religious force of this is shown when Saul is cursed and his whole dynasty is destroyed for leaving one prisoner, King Agag, alive. Consider that tender psalm, “By the rivers of Babylon.” After voicing the pathetic cry “How can we sing the songs of Jehovah in a foreign land?” it goes on to curse Edom, and ends “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock.” Has there been any religious movement to expurgate this from the religious service of Jews and Christians? Something of the spirit of this intense hatred for the enemies of God (i.e., those not of our own religion) has invented and developed the terrors of Hell, and condemned almost all of mankind to suffer them eternally—all, that is, except a few members of our own particular religion. Worst of all, it has regarded these torments as adding to the beatitude of the saints. The doctrine of a loving and all-merciful God professed by Christianity or Islam has not prevented either one from preaching and practicing the duty to hate and persecute those who do not believe. Nay, it has not prevented fierce wars between diverse sects of these religions, such as the wars between Shiites, Sunnites, and Wahabites, between Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants.
The fierce spirit of war and hatred is not of course entirely due to religion. But religion has made a duty of hatred. It preached crusades against Mohammedans and forgave atrocious sins to encourage indiscriminate slaughter of Greek Orthodox as well as of Mohammedan populations. . . .
Cruel persecution and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims. So long as each religion claims to have absolute, supernaturally revealed truth, all other religions are sinful errors. . . . There is no drearier chapter in the history of human misery than the unusually bloody internecine religious or sectarian wars which have drenched in blood so much of Europe, Northern Africa, and Western Asia. . . .
3. The Defense
In the face of such sweeping indictments, what have the defenders of religion as an indispensable basis of morality had to say? Rather strangely, it is not easy to find among recent writers on ethics uncompromising and powerful exponents of this traditional view. If we turn, for example, to the Reverend Hastings Rashdall, where we might expect to find such a view, we are surprised at the modesty of his claims. His ideas are presented at length in his well-known two-volume work, The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), in the two chapters on “Metaphysics and Morality” and “Religion and Morality.” But in a little volume of less than a hundred pages, written a few years later, which he describes in a preface as “necessarily little more than a condensation of my Theory of Good and Evil,” he has himself formally summarized his views on the subject. It seems to me best to quote his own summary almost in full:
1. Morality cannot be based upon or deduced from any metaphysical or theological proposition whatever. The moral judgment is ultimate and immediate. Putting this into more popular language, the immediate recognition that I ought to act in a certain way supplies a sufficient reason for so acting entirely apart from anything else that I may believe about the ultimate nature of things.
2. But the recognition of the validity of Moral Obligation in general or of any particular moral judgment logically implies the belief in a permanent spiritual self which is really the cause of its own actions. Such a belief is in the strictest sense a postulate of Morality.
3. The belief in God is not a postulate of Morality in such a sense that the rejection of it involves a denial of all meaning or validity to our moral judgments, but the acceptance or rejection of this belief does materially affect the sense which we give to the idea of obligation. The belief in the objectivity of moral judgments implies that the moral law is recognized as no merely accidental element in the construction of the human mind, but as an ultimate fact about the Universe. This rational demand cannot be met by any merely materialistic or naturalistic Metaphysic, and is best satisfied by a theory which explains the world as an expression of an intrinsically righteous rational Will, and the moral consciousness as an imperfect revelation of the ideal towards which that will is directed. The belief in God may be described as a postulate of Morality in a less strict or secondary sense.
4. So far from Ethics being based upon or deduced from Theology, a rational Theology is largely based upon Ethics: since the moral Consciousness supplies us with all the knowledge we possess as to the action, character, and direction of the supreme Will, and forms an important element in the argument for the existence of such a Will.
5. We must peremptorily reject the view that the obligation of Morality depends upon sanctions, i.e. reward and punishment, in this life or any other. But, as the belief in an objective moral law naturally leads up to and requires for its full justification the idea of God, so the idea of God involves the belief in Immortality if the present life seems an inadequate fulfillment of the moral ideal. In ways which need not be recapitulated, we have seen that it is practically a belief eminently favorable to the maximum influence of the moral ideal on life.
4. Ethics of the Old Testament
After this brief glance at some of the conflicting arguments, what should our own answer be to the two questions with which this chapter began? Let us begin with the first.
It is hard to see how religious beliefs by themselves can give any guidance to the specific moral rules that should guide us. We are brought back to the old theologic problem: Religion tells us that we ought to act in accordance with the will of God. But is an action right simply because God wills it? Or does God will it because it is right? We cannot conceive of God’s arbitrarily commanding us to do anything but the Right, or forbidding us to do anything but the Wrong. Are actions moral because God wills them, or does God will them because they are moral? Which, logically or temporally, comes first: God’s will, or morality?
There is a further theologic problem. If God is omnipotent, how can his will fail to be realized, whether we do right or wrong?
Then there is the practical ethical problem. Assuming that it is our duty to follow God’s will, how can we know what God does will, either in general or in any particular case? Who is privy to God’s will? Who is presumptuous enough to assume that he knows the will of God? How do we determine God’s will? By intuition? By special revelation? By reason? In the latter case, are we to assume that God desires the happiness of men? Then we are brought back to the position of utilitarianism. Are we to assume that he desires the “perfection” of men, or their “self-realization,” or that they live “according to nature”? Then we are brought back to one of these traditional ethical philosophies—but purely by our own assumptions, and not by direct or unmistakable knowledge of God’s will.
Broadly speaking, the ethical precepts of the Old and New Testaments are not only in contradiction with each other in detail, but even in their general spirit. The Old Testament commands obedience to God through fear; the New Testament pleads for obedience to God through love.
When we take the Ten Commandments simply by themselves, we find that, if it were not for their supposed sacred origin, we would regard them as a rather strange and unbalanced assortment of moral rules. Working on the sabbath day, if we judge by the relative emphasis given to it (94 words), is regarded as a much more serious sin or crime than committing murder (four words). Nor is there any indication, for that matter, that adultery, stealing, or bearing false witness is any less serious a sin or crime than murder. It is apparently no greater sin to steal something than merely to covet it; and the reason it is a sin to covet your neighbor’s wife is apparently because she is, like his house, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox or his ass, part of your neighbor’s property. Finally, the God of the Ten Commandments is not only, by his own confession, “a jealous God,” but an incredibly vindictive one, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
5. Ethics of the New Testament
In the New Testament we find a strikingly different ethic. In place of the God of vengeance, to be feared, we find the God of Mercy, to be loved. The new commandment, “that ye love one another,” and the example of the personal life and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, have had a more profound influence on our moral aspirations and ideals than any other rule or Person in history.
But the ethical doctrines of Jesus present serious difficulties. We can, in large part, command our actions; but we cannot command our feelings. We cannot love all our fellow men simply because we think we ought to. Love for a few (usually members of our immediate family), affection and friendship for some, initial goodwill toward a wider circle, and the attempt constantly to discourage and suppress within ourselves incipient anger, resentment, jealousy, envy, or hatred, are the most that all but a very small number of us seem able to achieve. We may give lip-service to turning the other cheek, to loving our enemies, blessing those that curse us, doing good to those that hate us, but we cannot bring ourselves, except on the rarest occasions, to take these injunctions literally. (I am speaking here not of our duty to be just, or even outwardly kind, toward all, but of our ability to command our inner feelings toward all.)
Notwithstanding Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” all modern nations have policemen, courts, and judges. Most of us, whether or not we occasionally consider the beam in our own eye, cannot refrain from pointing out the mote in our brother’s eye. The overwhelming majority of us are no more capable than the rich young man who came to Jesus (Matthew 19:20-22) of trying to be perfect by selling all that we have and giving the proceeds to the poor. Though it is all but impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24-25) most of us try to become as rich as we can and hope for the best hereafter. In spite of Matthew 6:25-28, we do take thought of our life, what we shall eat, what we shall drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed. We do sow and reap and gather into barns, we do work and save, we do take care of ourselves in the hope of adding to our span of life.
The problem is not merely that we are incapable of reaching moral perfection. That we cannot achieve perfection is no reason why we should not set our conception of it before us as a shining ideal. The question goes deeper than this. Are some of the ideals of Jesus’ teaching practicable? Would the life of the individual, or would the lives of the mass of mankind, be more satisfactory or less satisfactory if we tried literally to follow some of these precepts?
6. Conclusion
We must come, then, to this conclusion. Ethics is autonomous. It is not dependent upon any specific religious doctrine. And the great body of ethical rules, even those laid down by the Fathers of the Church, have no necessary connection with any religious premises. We need merely point, in illustration, to the great ethical system of Thomas Aquinas. As Henry Sidgwick tells us,
Let us return now to the second question with which this chapter opened. Even if religion cannot tell us anything about what the specific moral rules ought to be, is it necessary in order to secure observance of the moral code? The best answer we can make, I think, is that while religious faith is not indispensable to such observance, it must be recognized in the present state of civilization as a powerful force in securing the observance that exists. I am not speaking primarily of the effect of a belief in a future life, in a Heaven or a Hell, though this is by no means unimportant. Doing good deeds in the hope of reward in a future life, or refraining from evil in the fear of punishment in such a future life, has been shrewdly called religious utilitarianism; but though the motive is purely self-regarding, the result may be so far beneficent, like the result of what Bentham calls extra-regarding prudence.
The most powerful religious belief supporting morality, however, seems to me of a much different nature. This is the belief in a God who sees and knows our every action, our every impulse and our every thought, who judges us with exact justice, and who, whether or not He rewards us for our good deeds and punishes us for our evil ones, approves of our good deeds and disapproves of our evil ones. Perhaps, as Mill suggests, for this conception of God as the all-seeing and all-judging Witness there can be effectively substituted, as there is in many agnostics, an almost equally effective thought of what our parents or friends, or some great human figure, living or dead, whom we deeply admire or revere, would think of our action or secret thought if they or he knew of it. Still, the belief in an all-knowing and all-judging God remains a tremendous force in ethical conduct today.
