HE LOVED SOMEBODY BUT IT WASN’T ME: A bit more on whether there are secular reasons. This post is fairly tentative.

Camassia replies to me and Fish and Steven Smith here. I will concur in part and dissent in part!

First, Fish and Smith are both using a philosophically sketchy definition of “religion.” They seem to be influenced by the (Rawlsian??? is he to blame for this??) notion that all “comprehensive doctrines” are suspect in the public sphere. They’re also talking about a fairly specific kind of religion–I don’t think this discussion would make much sense if you assumed that “religion” referred to vodoun, or the Greek pantheon, or (maybe?) Shintoism.

I do think they’re right to say you can’t get teleology from undirected nature–you need a Creator–and that most moral arguments do rely on teleology. Most moral arguments rely on an account of human nature which is about what humans should be, not what humans demonstrably are. In fact I’m not sure how you’d get a moral, “should” argument from a bare evidentiary “are” claim.

And so I’m not fully on board with Camassia’s proposed knot-cutting:

This experience of looking at yourself as if you were someone else, and liking or disliking what you see — in other words, having a conscience — is essentially a brute fact for nearly all people. They have varying explanations of why it exists, or they may have no explanation, but still it’s there. And this experience compels at least a rudimentary morality; if you like people who are good to you, then you must be good to them, if you are going to like yourself. By the same token, if you respect people who don’t take crap from you, you’re going to be uncompromising towards others if you want to respect yourself. I didn’t say this was all warm and fuzzy. But it’s also why I don’t entirely agree with Fish’s claim that ideas like justice and equality are totally empty without God. The ability to see yourself as a person among persons, to put yourself in another’s place, implies a certain equality, or at least similarity. There’s a certain justice that comes when you dislike yourself in proportion to the cause you’ve given someone to dislike you. And — this is the less obvious point — this identification with others also means that you assume other people have that capacity, and can therefore make claims on them. I think this is why these words have meaning for people, even if they can’t agree on precisely what they mean or how to apply them to a given situation.

Because I agree that we are able to see ourselves in another’s place… sometimes. We are able to extend empathy, and derive “should”s, morality, from that empathy.

But within this human-scale morality, can we ever say you should love someone you don’t? Can we say to the Spartan citizen that he should see himself in the face of the helot?

So yeah: Justice and equality are not totally empty without (a specific conception of) God. But I do think they’re importantly empty.

As I understand it, both Judaism and Christianity cut the knot by identifying the source and summit of morality with a Person, thus a possible object of our love. God is not an abstraction but a powerful dude working in history; God is not just a big goon, but the essence of goodness. God is simultaneously (among many other things!) a specific beloved, and that-which-is-to-be-loved. So to say, “Why should I love God?” is a question which–if you are actually talking about this God, and not denying that He exists or that He is what Jews and Christians say He is–simply unravels.

Obviously none of that is an argument for the existence of this God. Which may be why this kind of argument rarely plays a role in conversion! But I think possibly this line of thinking influences Fish and Smith when they say that morality doesn’t really get off the ground without some smuggled incense in the balloon.

(…Hmm, I think that metaphor probably fails at physics. Heh.)

[edited: I think perhaps the next place to go is the Birthday Cake of Existence: What do we do when our moral claims appear to conflict with our metaphysical beliefs? There’s more than one option!]