The GOD Delusion (34 page)

Pushing
the fat man off the bridge is reminiscent of another dilemma considered
by Hauser. Five patients in a hospital are dying, each with a different
organ failing. Each would be saved if a donor could be found for their
particular faulty organ, but none is available. Then the surgeon
notices that there is a healthy man in the waiting-room, all five of
whose organs are in good working order and suitable for transplanting.
In this case, almost nobody can be found who is prepared to say that
the moral act is to kill the one to save the five.

As
with the fat man on the bridge, the intuition that most of us share is
that an innocent bystander should not suddenly be dragged into a bad
situation and used for the sake of others without his consent. Immanuel
Kant famously articulated the principle that a rational being should
never be used as merely an unconsenting means to an end, even the end
of benefiting others. This seems to provide the crucial difference
between the case of the fat man on the bridge (or the man in the
hospital waiting-room) and the man on Denise's siding. The fat man on
the bridge is being positively used as the means to stop the runaway
trolley. This clearly violates the Kantian principle. The person on the
siding is not being used to save the lives of the five people on the
line. It is the siding that is being used, and he just has the bad luck
to be standing on it. But, when you put the distinction like that, why
does it satisfy us? For Kant, it was a moral absolute. For Hauser it is
built into us by our evolution.

The
hypothetical situations involving the runaway trolley become
increasingly ingenious, and the moral dilemmas correspondingly
tortuous. Hauser contrasts the dilemmas faced by hypothetical
individuals called Ned and Oscar. Ned is standing by the railway track.
Unlike Denise, who could divert the trolley onto a siding, Ned's switch
diverts it onto a side loop which joins the main track again just
before the five people. Simply switching the points doesn't help: the
trolley will plough into the five anyway when the diversion rejoins the
main track. However, as it happens, there is an extremely fat man on
the diversionary track who is heavy
enough to stop the trolley. Should Ned change the points and divert the
train? Most people's intuition is that he should not. But what is the
difference between Ned's dilemma, and Denise's? Presumably people are
intuitively applying Kant's principle. Denise diverts the trolley from
ploughing into the five people, and the unfortunate casualty on the
siding is 'collateral damage', to use the charmingly Rumsfeldian
phrase. He is not being used by Denise to save the others. Ned is
actually
using
the fat man to stop the trolley,
and most people (perhaps unthinkingly), along with Kant (thinking it
out in great detail), see this as a crucial difference.

The
difference is brought out again by the dilemma of Oscar. Oscar's
situation is identical to Ned's, except that there is a large iron
weight on the diversionary loop of track, heavy enough to stop the
trolley. Clearly Oscar should have no problem deciding to pull the
points and divert the trolley. Except that there happens to be a hiker
walking in front of the iron weight. He will certainly be killed if
Oscar pulls the switch, just as surely as Ned's fat man. The difference
is that Oscar's hiker is not being used to stop the trolley: he is
collateral damage, as in Denise's dilemma. Like Hauser, and like most
of Hauser's experimental subjects, I feel that Oscar is permitted to
throw the switch but Ned is not. But I also find it quite hard to
justify my intuition. Hauser's point is that such moral intuitions are
often not well thought out but that we feel them strongly anyway,
because of our evolutionary heritage.

In
an intriguing venture into anthropology, Hauser and his colleagues
adapted their moral experiments to the Kuna, a small Central American
tribe with little contact with Westerners and no formal religion. The
researchers changed the 'trolley on a line' thought experiment to
locally suitable equivalents, such as crocodiles swimming towards
canoes. With corresponding minor differences, the Kuna show the same
moral judgements as the rest of us.

Of
particular interest for this book, Hauser also wondered whether
religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions.
Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ. But
it seems that they don't. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher
Peter Singer,
⁸⁷
focused on three hypothetical
dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious
people.

In
each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical
action is morally 'obligatory', 'permissible' or 'forbidden'. The three
dilemmas were:

1. 
Denise's dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was permissible to
divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.

2. 
You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help in sight.
You can save the child, but your trousers will be ruined in the
process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child
(amazingly, 3 per cent apparently would prefer to save their trousers).

3. 
The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven per cent of
subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize the healthy
person in the waiting-room and kill him for his organs, thereby saving
five other people.

The
main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no
statistically significant difference between atheists and religious
believers in making these judgements. This seems compatible with the
view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to
be good - or evil.

Posed
like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious
person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate
temptation is to issue the following challenge: 'Do you really mean to
tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval
and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not
morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your
shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still
small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your
every base thought.' As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because
they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot
indeed.' Michael Shermer,
in
The Science of Good and Evil,
calls it a debate
stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit
robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person,
'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If,
on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good
person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally
undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I
suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what
motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those
faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.

It
seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should
belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become
callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no
generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness. It is
widely believed that Dostoevsky was of that opinion, presumably because
of some remarks he put into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov:

[Ivan]
solemnly observed that there was absolutely no law of nature to make
man love humanity, and that if love did exist and had existed at all in
the world up to now, then it was not by virtue of the natural law, but
entirely because man believed in his own immortality. He added as an
aside that it was precisely that which constituted the natural law,
namely, that once man's faith in his own immortality was destroyed, not
only would his capacity for love be exhausted, but so would the vital
forces that sustained life on this earth. And furthermore, nothing
would be immoral then, everything would be permitted, even
anthropophagy. And finally, as though all this were not enough, he
declared that for every individual, such as you and me, for example,
who does not believe either in God or in his own immortality, the
natural law is bound immediately to become the complete opposite of the
religion-based law that preceded it, and that egoism, even extending to
the perpetration of crime, would not only be permissible but would be
recognized as the essential, the most rational, and even the noblest
raison
d'etre
of the human condition.
⁸⁸

Perhaps
naively, I have inclined towards a less cynical view of human nature
than Ivan Karamazov. Do we really need policing -whether by God or by
each other - in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and
criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such
surveillance - and nor, dear reader, do you. On the other hand, just to
weaken our confidence, listen to Steven Pinker's disillusioning
experience of a police strike in Montreal, which he describes in
The
Blank Slate:

As a
young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I
was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents'
argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would
break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00
A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By
11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had
closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned
down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for
airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer,
rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a
burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been
robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set,
forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million
dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities
had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.
This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters . . .

Perhaps
I, too, am a Pollyanna to believe that people would remain good when
unobserved and unpoliced by God. On the other hand, the majority of the
population of Montreal presumably believed in God. Why didn't the fear
of God restrain them when earthly policemen were temporarily removed
from the scene? Wasn't the Montreal strike a pretty good natural
experiment to test the hypothesis that belief in God makes us good? Or
did the cynic H. L. Mencken get it right when he tartly observed:
'People say we
need religion when what they really mean is we need police.' Obviously,
not everybody in Montreal behaved badly as soon as the police were off
the scene. It would be interesting to know whether there was any
statistical tendency, however slight, for religious believers to loot
and destroy less than unbelievers. My uninformed prediction would have
been opposite. It is often cynically said that there are no atheists in
foxholes. I'm inclined to suspect (with some evidence, although it may
be simplistic to draw conclusions from it) that there are very few
atheists in prisons. I am not necessarily claiming that atheism
increases morality, although humanism - the ethical system that often
goes with atheism -probably does. Another good possibility is that
atheism is correlated with some third factor, such as higher education,
intelligence or reflectiveness, which might counteract criminal
impulses. Such research evidence as there is certainly doesn't support
the common view that religiosity is positively correlated with
morality. Correlational evidence is never conclusive, but the following
data, described by Sam Harris in his
Letter to a Christian
Nation,
are nevertheless striking.

While
political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect
indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the 'red [Republican]
states' are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence
of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between
Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some
sign of it in red-state America. We don't. Of the twenty-five cities
with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in 'blue'
[Democrat] states, and 38 percent are in 'red' [Republican] states. Of
the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states,
and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most
dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the pious state of Texas. The
twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four
of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of
the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are
red. *

*
Note that these colour conventions in America are exactly the opposite
of those in Britain, where blue is the colour of the Conservative
Party, and red, as in the rest of the world, is the colour
traditionally associated with the political left.

Systematic
research if anything tends to support such correlational data. Dan
Dennett, in
Breaking the Spell,
sardonically
comments, not on Harris's book in particular, but on such studies
generally:

Needless
to say, these results strike so hard at the standard claims of greater
moral virtue among the religious that there has been a considerable
surge of further research initiated by religious organizations
attempting to refute them . . . one thing we can be sure of is that
if
there is a significant positive relationship between moral
behaviour and religious affiliation, practice, or belief, it will soon
be discovered, since so many religious organizations are eager to
confirm their traditional beliefs about this scientifically. (They are
quite impressed with the truth-finding power of science when it
supports what they already believe.) Every month that passes without
such a demonstration underlines the suspicion that it just isn't so.