Recently, a friend asked my opinion about a moral dilemma he was dealing with. Obviously, it would be ethically crappy of me to relate his personal story here, but my conversation with him got me thinking about my whole view of morality now. Have I learned anything since starting this blog? What can I say about the question in the subtitle? How big of a role does religion play in morality?
The gist of my conversation about the dilemma was that, in my opinion, moral obligations are few and far between. To illustrate what I'm talking about, I'll use as an example a situation that happened to me recently. I walked up to a cafe counter with a friend. Ordered a drink. I meandered away from the counter to look at a pastry, and when I came back my friend had already paid and the drinks were being made. I picked up my order, and since no one asked me to pay, I assumed my friend had treated me to a doppio. After we left the cafe, my friend said he hadn't paid for my drink. So the question would be, do I have a moral obligation to go back and pay for the drink?
My example is simple and somewhat trivial, but illustrates a situation where I would actually say, no, I don't have an obligation to go back and pay for my drink. In my view, obligation is a serious concept, and it refers to a very small set of moral rules that we (normal/competent members of human civilization) would all agree on. You are obliged to not murder. You are obliged to not cause gratuitous pain in another human being (or sensate animals). You are obliged to keep your promises (in most cases). There are probably a few more, but the point is, I am not obliged to go back and pay for a drink because the barista made a mistake and forgot to charge me.
What I would say (and did say to my friend) is that this sort of dilemma is actually less about the question of moral obligations and more about making the sort of choices that define you as a person. The question is more like, "What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of person that goes back and pays for a double espresso that I was accidentally given for free?" And in a way, this is more important from an ethical point of view than the simpler moral obligation situations. Should I murder the barista because he put hazelnut instead of vanilla in my latte? [There are actually interesting moral dilemmas about the sort of situations I would say reach the obligation level--the trolley problem being the most famous.]
And this is how I would sum up my over-all view at this point, as a result of reading the books I've catalogued in Goodreads and writing this blog:
Morality has evolved as a useful set of rules about interactions between members of a social species that uses language to communicate. I'm pretty much on board with the story of how morality evolved that Richard Joyce tells in The Evolution of Morality, although I don't draw the same conclusions that he does.
As a result of our evolutionary history, our brains are hardwired to have these very few moral-obligation-type beliefs about what is acceptable behavior. The rest of the moral rules that an individual holds is usually the product of the culture that the individual grows up in. Marc Hauser explains how this works in Moral Minds.
These non-obligation-level rules actually come into play more often than the obligation-level rules. As a result, when we talk about morality and ethical choices, they are usually culturally-dependant opinions that often conflict with each other. This gives the sense that all of morality is relative. So, to be clear, I'm saying that most moral beliefs are basically relative in this sense but not all of them. The most important ones are not relative (in the way relative is commonly used).
The history of ethical theory, as told by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, is a story of philosophers trying to come up with one way of explaining how morality works. Plato says the Good, Aristotle says virtue and the mean, Hume says emotivism, Kant says the categorical imperative, Mill says the utilitarianism. My opinion is that most of these theories are useful ways of understanding and talking about the different aspects of what I've been calling obligation-level and non-obligation level morality. Kant's categorical imperative would be about moral obligations. Plato's The Good too, but in a less precise and a somewhat weird way (although I think reading Plato is one of the best ways to spend your time--that and baking a pizza from scratch with fresh mozzarella...gotta use fresh mozzarella). Aristotle's virtue and the mean can help us try to make sense of the non-obligation-level minutia that we deal with every day, where the choice we make isn't so much the one clearly "right" choice, but our best attempt at making a choice among several possible "good" options. Mill's utilitarianism is also helpful in this way.
And I think reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations has provided me with a helpful way of looking at the big picture here. These conflicting ways of looking at morality could be seen as different "language games" where ultimately the conflict is more about different ways of talking about morality and ethics and virtue, and not so much an issue about getting at the true nature of morality. Aristotelian virtue ethics might lead you to a different conclusion than Mill's utilitarianism, but that's because the two are different games with different goals and different rules, et cetera.
So where does religion fit into all of this? Well this post is already too long, so I'll have to try a short summary, and maybe spell it out more in another post. Basically, as I understand it, morality evolved prior to religion, so religion is not the historical source of morality. And since I don't believe in the existence of a god, I obviously don't believe that morality has some kind of metaphysical origin in a god or religion. I won't try to say how or why religion exists and evolved in the way it did (I was pretty underwhelmed with Robert Wright's attempt at this in The Evolution of God), but it seems that religion has often turned out to be, or provide, the culturally specific moral precepts for many (perhaps even most) human societies over the past several thousand years, at least. But since religion does not always fill this moral law-giving role (we know of examples of this from anthropologists) there's no reason to think that living your life today, in 21st century western culture, requires religion if you want to live a decent, meaningful life.
However, I would say that the study of religions provides us with many examples of different ways to live a decent, meaningful life. Religion just isn't a necessity for that.
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