VIRTUE AND PRAGMATISM IN A WORLD WITHOUT GOD

Just ask the late serial killer and cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, about this:

“If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point in trying to modify your behavior to keep it in acceptable ranges?”

Well, I guess a professor of ethics could reason pragmatically:

"Well Jeffrey, you would live a more fulfilling life if you would only give up killing and cannibalizing your victims."

But I could imagine Dahmer responding, "Trust me! I know what I find fulfilling better than you do!"

Instead, I think that Dahmer had a more rational view of morality than the vast number of our university professors. We require more than just a clear-headed pragmatic assessments of the costs and benefits of our behaviors. In fact, such calculations have been the staple humanity throughout our history, and these have often led to abominations.

School-based moral training is seldom based upon objective moral truths. Yes, moral principles are appealed to, but these principles are pragmatically, as opposed to divinely derived.

Let me illustrate. The youth are taught the Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would want them to do to you,” not because it is God-given or even that it’s a moral to which we are constrained to conform (karma), but because it confers benefits when adhered to. They feel good about themselves and others will feel good about them and will reciprocate.

While living a virtuous life will provide benefits - and I don’t want to disparage these benefits - this pragmatic approach builds its house on unstable sand. It may look good for a while, but the storms will wash it away. Here’s why:

• Ultimately, pragmatically based morality does not teach virtue but selfishness. Ultimately, the youth are taught to live “virtuously” for the benefits they derive. Consequently, “virtue” is not virtue but a self-serving strategy. In fact, such virtue is no more than a human creation, a deceptive means to get what we want.

When, as a college student, I realized this, I felt hypocritical and disingenuous by trying to keep up a pretense of virtue, and I abandoned it.

• There are many times when our pragmatic assessments of what will pay us the highest dividends leads us to commit horrors. As Dahmer’s life had demonstrated, the pursuit of benefits can lead to highly immoral behaviors. Another serial killer, the late attorney Ted Buddy, had claimed that if humans are merely animals - and we eat animals - there is no rational reason to restrain our pleasure-seeking, even if it leads us to commit rape and murder.

• To live virtuously can also prove very costly and not beneficial.

Many had been killed trying to help others. The Nazis had executed entire families for harboring Jews. Pragmatism would have argued against virtue and in favor of not risking the welfare of one’s family. In fact, pragmatism always argues in favor of self-benefit.

How do the pundits of pragmatism and moral relativism defend their position in light of these problems? They often appeal to an “enlightened pragmatism,” even calling it “enlightened selfishness.” This is a principled pragmatism that looks to long range benefits. They will admit that, in the short run, virtue might not be beneficial. However, in the long run, society will benefit from the practice of virtue.

However, it doesn’t seem to be pragmatically enlightened to sacrifice our family for such a notion of “virtue.”

The pragmatist also argues that there is no viable alternative. However, it is like Dahmer had intuited: “If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point in trying to modify your behavior to keep it in acceptable ranges?”

However, it’s more than Dahmer had suspected, more than a fear-based obedience. It is also gratitude-based, grateful for our Savior who loves us so much that He died for our sins.