The End of Christianity (47 page)

THE FAILURE OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY

The claim that people can only be motivated to be moral by threats or promises of heaven or hell (or by any other unverifiable claim) actually undermines morality. Indeed, three times over. First, it allows false morals to be spread and adopted as if they were true, by attaching those false moralities to the same threats and promises. That's exactly what we observe. Supposedly only one moral system can be true, yet hundreds of moral systems are attached to these exact same promises.
¹²
Thus, as a matter of statistical fact, these same promises are far more often used to support false moralities than true ones. And that, as measures of success go, is the worst success any method could claim. Christianity is thus maximally
unsuccessful
at promoting the true morality. Only if we can verify the connection between a morality and its promised effects will we be able to discover the true morality. Christianity provides no reliable way of doing that.

Second, precisely because these promises cannot be verified to be true, they cannot really motivate anyone. And once again the evidence shows that in fact they do not, as believers are just as immoral as nonbelievers. There is no demonstrated advantage of Christianity's improvement of people over that of any other rational and humane philosophy. This might also be because of the third way Christianity undermines morality: by linking morality to unverifiable promises, moral progress becomes impossible, because people aren't learning the
real
reasons they should be moral, but are instead stalled on the
wrong
reasons to be moral—never learning the truth, because they never look for it, because they erroneously think they already have it (and as it happens, most secular philosophers have fallen into the very same trap). Christianity thus becomes more effective at promoting and sustaining various forms of immorality than of morality. The malignancy of the Nazi movement is the most famous example, which Hector Avalos has proved was undeniably a product of Christianity.
¹³
But the Christian support of the American slave system for over two hundred years is America's own nightmarish example.

Worse even than that, the naive forms of Christian moral motivation—bare threats of hell and the bribery of heaven—stunt moral growth by ensuring believers remain emotional children, never achieving the cognitive moral development of actual adults. Psychologists have established that mature adults are moral not because of bare threats and bribes (that stage of moral development typifies children, not adults), but because they care about the effects their behavior has on themselves and others, and who find their reward (and their punishment) in exactly that realization. In other words, mature adults are good
because they are good people
.
¹⁴
And being such, they don't need religion to convince them to be good. Being good is what they already want to be. In contrast, naive Christianity is a perfect vehicle for manipulating masses of people toward any wicked end for which a Christian purpose can be conceived. The Holocaust, the Inquisition, antebellum slavery, and the genocide of American Indians are the most notorious examples. But war (of any sort) is the most common example, as well as (presently) the use of Christianity to turn the American people against helping the poor and instead toward promoting the libertine policies of the rich (a more blatant perversion of the teachings of Christ can hardly be imagined, yet behold its success).
¹⁵

Christianity thus fails as a foundation for moral values, in both theory and practice.
¹⁶
That many secular philosophies have committed the very same errors only proves my point that we ought to stop making those errors and attend instead to the true facts of the world. True morality must be founded on empirically verifiable facts. And science alone provides the most reliable way to ascertain empirically verifiable facts.

THE LOGIC OF IMPERATIVE LANGUAGE

David Hume once complained that moralists had failed to define what logical relation is meant by the word
ought.
He never said it couldn't be derived from natural facts (that's a modern myth born of reading his words out of context).
¹⁷
But he correctly observed that the only way to verify whether any statement like “you ought to x” is true is if you first explain what exactly it is that “ought” is supposed to mean. It was subsequently demonstrated that the word usually means a hypothesized relation between desires and ends: the “hypothetical imperative” discussed above.
¹⁸
But this was thought inadequate to ground morality, as it entails morality can only ever be an exercise in self-interest. So an attempt was made to define a different kind of “ought” relation, commonly called the “categorical imperative.”

But the categorical imperative either has no motivating truth value or simply becomes another variety of hypothetical imperative. For example, Immanuel Kant argued that the only reason to obey his categorical imperatives is that doing so will bring us a greater sense of self-worth, that in fact we should “hold ourselves bound by certain laws in order to find solely in our own person a worth” that compensates us for every loss incurred by obeying, for “there is no one, not even the most hardened scoundrel who does not wish that he too might be a man of like spirit,” yet only through the moral life can he gain that “greater inner worth of his own person.” Thus Kant claimed a strong sense of self-worth is not possible for the immoral person, but a matter of course for the moral one, and yet everyone wants such a thing (more even than anything else), therefore everyone has sufficient reason to be moral.
¹⁹
He never noticed that he had thereby reduced his entire system of categorical imperatives to a single hypothetical imperative:

K
= Kant's proposed system of categorical imperatives

W
= Kant's proposed experience of a greater inner worth

1
. If you obey
K
,
W
will happen; and if you obey ~
K
,
~W
will happen.

2
. When rational and sufficiently informed, you will always want
W
more than
~W

3
. If when rational and fully informed you will always want
W
more than
~W
(and if and only if
K
, then
W
) then you ought to obey
K
.

4
. Therefore, you ought to obey
K
.

Premise 1 corresponds to Kant's declaration that we must “hold ourselves bound by certain laws in order to find solely in our own person [a sense of self-]worth,” and premise 2 corresponds to Kant's declaration that “there is no one, not even the most hardened scoundrel, who does not wish that he too might be a man of like spirit” (and that above all). And the conclusion only follows if we assume premise 3—which is simply a definition of the logical relation forming a hypothetical imperative, the only known way to validly derive his conclusion from those premises.

The other two premises are claims to fact, and as such are empirically testable by science: we can empirically confirm whether obeying
K
does in fact cause
W
(and if it doesn't, then Kant's moral theory, that we “ought to obey
K
” is false, as even Kant himself recognized by declaring this the only reason anyone had to obey
K
); and we can empirically confirm whether
W
is in fact what “no one, not even the most hardened scoundrel, does not wish” to have, and in fact wish to have
so dearly
that achieving it even compensates for every loss incurred by obeying
K
. And if
that's
not true, if
W
is not what everyone wants most—if people are content to go on without
W
if they can have something else instead, and they would continue to think so even when fully informed of all the consequences of either outcome (so ignorance is no longer an excuse and thus they cannot be said to be in error)—then Kant's moral theory is again false. Because if we have no sufficient reason to care about
W
, then even if
K
achieves
W
we have no sufficient reason to care about
K
. In fact we will have no more sufficient reason to obey
K
than ~
K
or anything else. Unless, of course, there is some
other
goal obtained by obeying
K
that in fact we
do
want more than anything else instead. But such an alternate goal is not likely to just “by coincidence” be best achieved by
K
. More likely it will be best achieved by some other moral system
M
(whatever it is that science empirically discovers as actually having that result). And since then we will have a sufficient motivating reason to obey
M
, and no sufficient motivating reason to obey
K
, there will be no relevant sense in which “you ought to obey
K
” is true. But “you ought to obey
M
” will not only be true, it will be empirically, verifiably true. In fact it will then be the only demonstrably true moral system.
²⁰

Just like Kant, all moral philosophers attempt to support their various moral systems with fact-claims that are scientifically testable. Yet rarely do philosophers bother testing them—even at all, much less scientifically. Thus at the very least they must assent to a scientific research program that tests the actual claims to fact that they make. It would be as irrational to oppose this as to oppose a scientific inquiry into the causes of disease merely because you prefer your own theory of disease to any that science might discover is actually true. But we must conclude even more than this. For there are only two kinds of moral theory, whether in philosophy or religion: those whose conclusion (that their moral system is “true” in the sense that it is, in actual fact, what we ought to do) validly follows from demonstrably true premises, and those whose conclusion does not. All the latter are false (or at any rate have no legitimate claim to being true). That leaves the former. But there is no known way to validly derive such a conclusion (about what
in actual fact
we ought to do) than by some premise establishing that moral system as a hypothetical imperative, combined with all the premises of motives and consequences required thereby, which are
all
empirical facts discoverable by science.
²¹
What we really want most, and what will really obtain that, are matters of fact that cannot truly be answered from the armchair. Empirical methods must be deployed to ascertain and verify them. Only science has the best tools to do this.

This brings us back to the question at first set aside: whether moral imperatives really are just hypothetical imperatives of a particular kind. Many philosophers have resisted that conclusion and still do. But none have ever presented any other identifiable logical relation that can ever be meant by “ought” (or any other term or phrase semantically equivalent to it) that produces any actual claim on our obedience. If anyone still wishes to insist there is some other, which allows imperative propositions to be verified as relevantly true, let them demonstrate it. But even that won't be sufficient: they will
also
have to demonstrate that at least one imperative proposition having that new sense is not only
capable
of being true but actually
is
true, and further, that it's not only true but overrides
M
; that is, that we will be sufficiently motivated to obey this new imperative even when it contradicts
M
.
²²
Otherwise it will have no more claim on our interest than anything else we care less about than
M.
It will thus have no relevant claim to being the “true” morality—or even morality at all—rather than just one more mundane imperative, since an imperative does not become a moral imperative merely because you say it is. If that were the case, then anything and everything would be moral merely by our pronouncing it so. There is only one universally acceptable definition of “moral imperative,” and that's an imperative that supersedes all other imperatives. And that can only ever be
M.

All attempts at building so-called externalist moral systems are therefore just exercises in fiction, none being any more compelling than any other picked at random from a hat. Only “internalist” moral systems come with sufficient motives to care about them and thus to prefer obeying them to other competing moral systems (because that's what distinguishes internalism from externalism in the first place: an intrinsic motive to obey). And only one such system can be true. Because if
M
obtains what we most want, there is then
by definition
no other system that we will have sufficient motivating reason to prefer to
M
.

All other systems (which do not provide a sufficiently motivating reason to care about them) are equally uncompelling: none that contradicts
M
has any greater claim on our obedience than any other, and as such they cancel each other out, leaving
M
as the only thing that we in
actual fact
ought to do. And this is not a novel conclusion. Bernard Williams has already proven that externalism must either be incoherent or just a disguised redux of internalism or simply false in the sense that it provides no sufficient motive to be moral and is thus overrun by any system that
does
provide such motive.
²³
In effect, moralists might want to “call” their externalist systems “the true morality,” but such a claim is vacuous because we will still have a better reason to do something else instead.
²⁴

This does entail that morality can only ever be an exercise in self-interest (and moral values only ever really exist in the minds of the people who hold them), but contrary to popular worry, that fact does not make an inadequate ground for morality. To the contrary, no other ground for morality is even logically possible—once you define “the true morality” as a moral system, we have a sufficient motivating reason to obey. And since, as a matter of actual physical fact, we will never obey any other (unless we are irrational or uninformed, but even then upon
becoming
rational and informed we will obey no other), there is no other kind of “morality” that matters.
²⁵
In other words, to argue that by “morality” you mean something we ought to do but that we have no sufficient motivating reason to prefer doing to something else, is simply to avoid the question of what
in actual fact
we ought to do.