Ethics and the Secular Life (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post examined an argument frequently made by secular folk that a person need not believe in God in order to be good. I'd like to continue that examination in today's post with a look at some comments made by another atheist, Robert Tracinski, who, in an otherwise fine discussion at The Federalist of the thought of philosopher Ayn Rand, makes a couple of missteps.

He begins by explicitly acknowledging, rightly, that most thoughtful atheists, at least those on the left, embrace moral subjectivism. He writes:

Probably the most important category [Rand] defied is captured in the expression, “If God is dead, all things are permitted.” Which means: if there is no religious basis for morality, then everything is subjective. The cultural left basically accepts this alternative and sides with subjectivism (when they’re not overcompensating by careening back toward their own neo-Puritan code of political correctness).

This is mostly correct except that I'd quibble with his use of the term "religious basis."

Morality doesn't require a religious basis, it requires a basis that's rooted in an objectively existing moral authority - personal, transcendent and capable of holding human beings responsible for their choices. The existence and will of such a being - God - may or may not be an essential element of a particular religion, and the belief that such a God exists and has imposed moral duties upon us is certainly a metaphysical belief, but it's not necessarily religious.

Tracinski, then claims that:

The religious right responds by saying that the only way to stem the tide of “anything goes” is to return to that old time religion.

This, too, is wide of the mark. It's not necessarily a return to "old time religion," or any religion, for that matter, which is needful for eliminating the subjectivity of moral judgments. It's a return to a belief that the world is the product of a morally perfect being who has established His moral will in the human heart and who insists that we follow it, i.e. that we treat others with justice and compassion.

Those beliefs may be augmented by a belief in special revelation and by the whole edifice of the Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) tradition, but the core belief in the existence of the God of classical theism is not by itself "religious" at all. Furthermore, that core belief may not by itself be a sufficient condition for an objective morality but it is absolutely necessary for it.

Which is why people ask the question Susan Jacoby found so insulting in yesterday's post. Put a different way, it's the question of how an atheist can avoid making right and wrong merely a matter of personal taste.

If that sort of subjectivity is what the secular life entails, and it does, then its votaries really have nothing much to say, or at least nothing much worth listening to, about matters of right and wrong.