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.

WITHOUT GOD, ANYTHING IS PERMISSIBLE

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?” (Richard Weikart, "The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life")

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. He clearly understood that if morality is just something we invent, then everything is permissible.

The Horrible Impact of Evolution on Morality

What is the impact of evolution on morality? One evolutionist wrote me:

·       Rape has a good side evolutionarily speaking. A strong sex drive perpetuates the species but is countered by the woman choosing an enhancing male, not an abandoning one. Genocide is good in hindsight if it unites peoples and makes survivors stronger. Not good for the annihilated tribes.

According to the “wisdom” of evolution, the most heinous behaviors are justifiable. If “rape has a good side,” well, I’m sure that many would not need their arm twisted too far to perform this “good” public service. Any reservations we might have will easily be overcome by this assurance that, by raping or killing, we are doing the “good” thing.

This is not merely an academic or ephemeral issue. It impacts our every-day lives. Serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, talked about the impact of evolution on how it released him from the grip of his very necessary inhibitions:

·       “As far as we know, we only have one life and we share this planet with billions of other life-forms that have the exact same purpose as we do.”

If evolution is true, then we are just another animal to be used for the benefit of the powerful.  His case is not isolated. Many have documented the destructive role played by evolution in our two World Wars.

This, in itself, doesn’t negate Darwinism. However, a theory that carries such a high price-tag should be re-examined.

Compassion: Its Philosophical Basis

No matter how diverse our philosophies, everyone seems to believe in the need for compassion. However, while some base compassion on our instincts/feelings alone, others regard these as inadequate. Rather, we need to extend the circle of our compassion beyond the limited circle defined by our feelings, our affiliations.

Therefore, it is not enough to simply feel compassion; we need to also believe and think compassion! But what beliefs will promote compassionate behavior?

Several very popular worldviews deny that humanity is responsible for any wrongdoing. If this is so, then we can’t hold people responsible and therefore resent them for their misdeeds. Instead, compassionate becomes the most appropriate response.

According to one such worldview, we are exclusively the product of nurture and nature. Humanity is basically good and would do the good if we could. Why then do we do badly? Because we are irresistibly driven by these deterministic forces to act badly! Consequently, instead of punishing the wrongdoer, society needs to treat him and eliminate those factors that drove him to do badly.

Closely allied to this worldview is the denial of freewill. If we cannot act otherwise, then we should not be held responsible if we hurt others.

Both of these worldviews also tend to be pragmatic, recognizing that dangerous people must be restrained in prison. However, it is not because they deserve this but because society needs protection.

However, this gives a contradictory message:

• Society must punish you even though you do not deserve this harsh treatment. 

Hence, these worldviews eliminate any concept of justice. Justice is thereby reduced to expedience – what works for the majority. In other words, “We are merely punishing you for our own welfare!” However, this can only breed cynicism, division, and ultimately decay. There is nothing to prevent the outcast from then thinking:

• Well, if you are going to punish me because of your welfare, then there is no reason for me to not punish you for my welfare! 

Besides, without the concept of justice, there remains no way to win hearts and minds. What can we say to those who want to fight for ISIS? “You must not go and fight with ISIS because of our benefit?” When we sacrifice justice, we sacrifice any rationale to appeal to anything higher than base instinct.

These two worldviews also un-dignify humanity. They proclaim:

• You are not a free moral agent. You are not responsible for your actions. In essence, you are no more than a sophisticated bio-chemical machine, something that can easily be discarded if it fails to perform a designated function! 

This opens wide the door to abuse. To un-dignify humanity is also to deprive humanity of compassionate behavior. We might instinctively love animals, but we also eat and cage them. If humankind is just another animal, what then is to protect them from the way we treat other animals? Even the honorable Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr. admitted:

• When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.

However, we walk on grains of sand and use them in the production of concrete. So much for a philosophical basis for compassion!

Serial killers have also figured out that, if we are no more than animals, then the law of the animal kingdom prevails. Instead, of evolution providing a basis for compassion, Jeffrey Dahmer protested, “I would argue that understanding evolution has the opposite effect, let me explain”:

• As far as we know, we only have one life and we share this planet with billions of other life-forms that have the exact same purpose as we do. We're no better or no worse than any other individual, ESPECIALLY not other human individuals.”

It was this understanding that enabled him to kill and cannibalize others.

Moral relativism is another closely-related worldview. It too maintains that our concepts of justice, right and wrong are just human inventions, without any existence apart from our own thinking. We merely invented these concepts because they are useful.

Consequently, this worldview also degrades humanity, even our pursuit of virtue and compassion. After all, if virtue is just someone’s invention, why take it seriously – more seriously than my own inventions?

Serial killer Ted Bundy understood this:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong”…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

Clearly, moral relativism cannot serve as a basis for compassion. When feelings fail, this philosophy offers no resistance to our selfish instincts. However, these worldviews argue that if there is objective moral law and if we do have freewill, even in the midst of powerful deterministic force, then we re-establish a basis for moral contempt and undermine compassion.

However, the Reverend Martin Luther King argued that there is another solution. In a sermon entitled “the American Dream,” he stated:

• You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the… “Image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected… every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God… This is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.

For King, the image of God meant compassion for all. But doesn’t it also mean that some are moral outlaws who deserve punishment and not compassion?

When I was a probation officer, supervising offenders, I would always attempt to treat them with respect, although also with firmness. I knew that I had been forgiven a tremendous debt and was therefore required to treat others with the compassion with which God had treated me.

As any parent knows, compassion also requires correction, even punishment. To raise a child without correction is not compassion. Meanwhile, to reveal to the child your freewill-denying worldview is to teach your child wrongly. It is to say:

• Because you don’t have freewill and could not have done otherwise, I should not punish you. You do not deserve it. However, I must punish you to correct your impulses, which are neither right nor wrong but merely useful or un-useful. But of course, these assessments must change as society changes.

Instead, we need to know that there are considerations and values that are more important than our feelings. Consequently, maturity requires that we restrain the immoral expression of these feelings.

When I wrong my wife, I must take full responsibility and humble myself by confessing my wrong. A morally relativistic confession would not work. I could not say:

• I am truly sorry that I hurt you. However, I did not really commit a wrong, because there isn’t any objective right and wrong. However, you feel bad. Therefore, I am apologizing, even though I haven’t really done another wrong. 

Such an apology is as useful as the freewill-denying apology:

• I am really sorry that I hurt you, but I don’t have freewill and could not have done otherwise. Therefore, you have no right to be upset with me.

Compassion requires taking full responsibility for our actions. Instead, worldviews of mitigation or complete denial are only superficially compassionate. They may look compassionate, but they are unable to achieve the reconciliation required in meaningful relationships. If my wife loves me, her compassion will ask me to take full responsibility.

Serial Killer: “Evolution Kills”

After I posted this video about how serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, blamed evolution for his conduct, a Facebooker took issue. I responded:

You wrongly claim that evolution provides us with an adequate reason to act morally:

·       “I would argue that understanding evolution has the opposite effect, let me explain:

·       As far as we know, we only have one life and we share this planet with billions of other life-forms that have the exact same purpose as we do. We're no better or no worse than any other individual, ESPECIALLY not other human individuals.”

“Better” is a value judgment. Since evolution denies that life has a purpose, claiming that everything just happened without design or purpose, you have no basis to talk about “better.” Better for what?

You are claiming that humans are essentially equal. However, you have no basis for this claim either. When we look at humans through evolutionary eyes, we see commonalities but also differences – sexual, racial, physical, mental…  Evolution has no basis to say that some are not more evolved than others.

You also claimed that because humans are social, evolution has provided morality through this:

·       “We're a social species and couldn't have evolved as a species without a sense of morality. It is plain and obvious when you ACTUALLY study evolution. There's no way around this.”

However, the fact that we have certain inclinations or moral feelings does not mean that we should follow them. Morality requires some concept of “ought” or moral obligation. An evolutionary understanding cannot provide this. There can be no basis for an “ought” in a meaningless world, apart from an “ought” that we arbitrarily and meaninglessly create for ourselves to fill the void. In fact, we have many dangerous feelings – murder, hatred, jealousy, lust…  Why not follow these? What can evolution possibly have against these instincts?