Daniel Kuehn on Secular Morality

Ok, an answer in one simple example : Imagine yourself in a position where you do not know how you will be born onto the world. You do not know your sex, your wealth and most importantly, you do not know your beliefs and religion.

But what you can do is to create a set of rules of how the world should behave once you will be born onto it. Do you think that there is a set of rules that would be common to most people making such decision? If yes, that is what I would call “secular” moral system.

Does this example explain the whole multi-culti hurrah liberal pluralism?

As others have said, even if we all agreed on the Creator God’s existence and what it wanted, that’s still not a justification. Why is it “good” to follow God’s rules?

Justification is turtles all the way down.

On the other hand Delong is working from a flawed assumption when he says that since Paul doesn’t oppose slavery, Christianity doesn’t oppose slavery. The assertion frequently made by Christians that all of their religious beliefs proceed rationally and stfrom the text of scripture is demonstrably false.

Certainly the American abolitionist movenment pre-Civil-War contained many people who had come to believe that their Christianity demanded opposition to slavery. In the 20th Century Dr. King’s rhetoric about the civil rights struggle is overall, a Christian rhetoric, as makes sense for a Christian minister. These are authentic Christian voices. Gene Robinson is a Christian who speaks with an authentic Christian voice.

Do the thoughts of these Christians show influence from more secular thinkers? Certainly. But then, Paul’s Christianity was already showing the influence of Greek thinkers, who while not secular, were outside the Jewish and Early Christian context. Nor for that matter do secualr thinkers form ethics and morals without influence from thinkers who consider themselves religious, at least indirectly.

The core mistake here is thinking that morality is about autonomous individuals attempting to reason from justified grounds what morality outght to be. Like everything else in culture it is the product of humans living in a social context. Morals are individual yes, but they are produced in each individual largely by the interaction between that person and the society around them.

This is why Christians of 2011 have different morality than Paul, and why Secular thinkers of 2011 think differently than Hume. We exist in social contexts that shape our thinking.

A couple of unrelated points:

(1) Slavery as practised by the Romans and later by the slave trade was very different to slavery as preached in the Old Testament, which was more similar to medieval serfdom. In particular slaves in the OT have hte following rights: Kinship (i.e. right not to be separated from their families), right to marry, a maximum term of service of 6 years. They also were supposed to be treated on an equal footing to servants, and slaves had recourse to Justice from the town elders if their masters mistreated them. If their master should cause permanent injury, such as loss of a tooth, then they are to be freed. When a slave is freed the master is to provide gifts of grain, livestock and land. See for example exodus 21. Moreover, there were generally only two ways to become a slave, either as a prisoner of war, or by willingly entering into indentured servitude in order to settle ones debts.

All of this meant that early Christians were in a tricky position. If slaves were kept according to biblical principles, they were treated identically to servants. Moreover, it was relatively common that servants would be paid only in food and lodgings, and not in money as such, so indeed their circumstances would be identical. Slaves and servants both were `to be treated as part of the extended family’. So blanket condemnation of `slavery’ on these terms would have been also a condemnation of having servants. However, the practice of slavery often departed significantly from these norms, so many Christian leaders took the middle course of decrying the abuses of slavery without regarding it as necessarily evil. Nevertheless it was widely regarded that slavery was contrary to God’s original intention. Debate centred mainly around whether it was a necessary evil in a fallen world, and whether it was expressly prohibited by divine mandate.

Another way of framing this odd dichotomy is through what might be called the doctrine of perfection. A social institution can be considered immoral, if, and only if, it leads to abuses even when all participants are behaving with perfect tolerance, understanding and generosity. In the real world, people are far from perfect, and social institutions that give one person power over another normally lead to abuses, often fairly extreme abuses. This understanding effectively explains the actions of all the early Christians, who repeatedly condemned particular abuses, but with the understanding that people were to blame, rather than the institution.

As far as the catholic church goes, it had largely succeeded in wiping out slavery in europe by mid fifteenth century, and published a bunch of papal bulls condemning slavery generally from that point onwards, particularly the mass enslavement of non christians then going on in the americas.

(2) On the need for justification. Moral justification is needed because our moral intuitions are extremely fluid. As one of my friends cynically remarked: most men who kill their wives do not think they are the kind of person who would kill their wives. The reality is that the vast majority of people learn their moral intuitions by copying those people around them. A moral justification based on principles is the only hope to avoid this. Once moral absolutism is rejected, we are caught in a rabbithole where peoples morality is based mostly on intuitions that are copied from other peoples behaviour. A more scientific perspective can be founded on the famous experiment about a prison, where the volunteers were splint into inmates and guards, and the behaviour of the guards deteriorated rapidly.

It seems self evident to me that faith is one of the grounding factors that can prevent widespread deterioration of morality in poor circumstances. Obviously that is not to say all those who self label as christians have a particularly strong sense of faith, but it stands to reason that all those who are “closed minded” with respect to sexual politics, abortion and euthanasia, will be equally closed minded about gulags, concentration camps, and mass exterminations. History does seem to offer some support for this thesis, although the evidence is mixed. For example, Poland, the poster child for catholic countries, had virtually zero level of collaboration with the Holocaust. There were no polish prison guards, polish police refused to help round up Jews, and they are the largest national group recognised in the `Righteous Gentiles’ memorial in Israel. Similarly, Bavaria, the most catholic part of germany, provided by far the most systemic opposition to the Nazi party, largely through a popular archbishop. History is less kind to the catholic church in the case of the Spanish civil war.