For the Sake of Science

One of the things that has always bothered me about morality debates with Christians is their common inability to distinguish between normative and descriptive claims. (Really, the issue extends beyond Christians, but it seems especially prevalent within that group.) It’s always possible to quickly identify someone who does not understand the distinction when a question is raised about the morality of a group or individual that has committed great atrocities. For example, “What makes the morality of the Nazis wrong if there is no god?” Oh, no! My worldview has been shattered and the Christians win! Please.

There are two obvious problems with this. First, it’s an annoying argument from consequence. It is being implied that an argument for subjective morality must be wrong because it leads to bad things. Second, and this is the real kicker, the whole point of this post, it confuses value claims and factual claims. Mike at The A-Unicornist has it covered:

Although it is in our nature to desire fairness and to feel compassion, we must reconcile those feelings with objective information about the natural world. So in forming rational moral judgments, it becomes absolutely vital that the information to which we have access is accurate.

And that, quite simply, forms a solid foundation upon which to reject “Nazi morality”: the beliefs underpinning the Nazi’s attempt at global domination and extermination of Jewish people are false. The German people were not a genetically superior “race” of people, but were every bit as human as the Jews they so villainized. The notion that the Jews were partly, if not entirely, responsible for Germany’s economic woes was similarly pure nonsense. That’s how you get Nazi morality: you have people who passionately believe information that is patently false. It’s quite plausible that many Nazis, if not most, took no delight in the suffering of other people; but, by adopting the false belief that Jews were not actually people, they were able to overcome their natural human empathy, to the point that great atrocities were committed.

So the Christian really has asked a non-question. It is trivially resolvable – X group was factually incorrect – and nothing has even been said to advance the discussion. There are far more interesting ways to dig into the question of morality (presuming the theist can avoid begging the question with the assumption that morality is objective), but it takes the right sort of person to ask the right sorts of questions. Someone who may have a background in theology and religious ‘philosophy’ is going to ask shallow, remedial questions, and is far from the right sort of person. That’s why, even though this stuff is not that hard, Christians tend to be more of a detriment than a help in these kind of talks.

Filed under: Philosophy | Tagged: Descriptive, morality, Normative, The A-Unicornist |