Mr. Zindell’s argument loses a great deal of credibility if he is merely arguing that only those human behaviors that are biologically instinctive (but not behaviors conditioned by societal upbringing, nor determined by reason and education) form the basis for an atheist moral code.
Or perhaps not. Mr. Zindler here says that the ability to teach and learn “evolved”, which means, I assume, a non-deliberate natural process brought it about teaching and learning. Did it bring about a moral code at the same time? Did it bring about religion at the same time? Did evolution wipe out all the atheists of One Million B.C.? If so, there is an innate survival drawback to atheism. If not, why is atheism a rare and eccentric behavior in every age and nation?
By transmission of culture – passing on the sum total of the learned behaviors common to a population – we can do what Darwinian genetic selection would not allow: we can inherit acquired characteristics. The wheel once having been invented, its manufacture and use can be passed down through the generations. Culture can adapt to change much faster than genes can, and this provides for finely tuned responses to environmental disturbances and upheavals. By means of cultural transmission, those behaviors which have proven useful in the past can be taught quickly to the young, so that adaptation to life – say on the Greenland ice cap – can be assured.
This account overlooks the fact that religious sentiment is the primary mechanism for cultural transmission.
The White man transmitted monogamy to the American Indian through missionary work and through conquest, primarily for religious motivations. Mothers in general place a high priority on teaching their children the doctrines of religion.
If so, then safeguarding religion from criticism is crucial to safeguard the evolutionary process which (according to this account) creates our moral code. This account implies, in other words, that absent the religious cultural transmission of the “meme” of moral code, the moral code will fail. Thus, according to this account, without religion, even if religion is false, there is no moral imperative (and few strong reasons of any kind) to teach one’s moral code or cultural traditions to the young.
If we accept that morality evolved through a natural process of cultural evolution, we must therefore conclude that religion is the primary transmitter and driving force behind morality: which is the opposite of what Mr. Zindell set out to prove.
Even so, cultural transmission tends to be rigid: it took over one hundred thousand years to advance to chipping both sides of the hand-ax! Cultural mutations, like genetic mutations, tend more often than not to be harmful, and both are resisted – the former by cultural conservatism, the latter by natural selection. But changes do creep in faster than the rate of genetic change, and cultures slowly evolve. Even that cultural dinosaur known as the Catholic Church – despite its claim to be the unchanging repository of truth and “correct” behavior – has changed greatly since its beginning.
Talk to a Catholic to find out, please, what our claims are. We do not claim the Church has not changed, but we do say the later developments were implicit in the originals. Whether you think that this claim is true or false, it behooves an honest man to accurately represent the claim.
Incidentally, it is at this hand-ax stage of behavioral evolution at which most of the religions of today are still stuck. Our inflexible, absolutist moral codes also are fixated at this stage. The Ten Commandments are the moral counterpart of the “here’s-how-you-rub-the-sticks-together” phase of technological evolution. If the only type of fire you want is one to heat your cave and cook your clams, the stick-rubbing method suffices. But if you want a fire to propel your jet-plane, some changes have to be made.
This is contemptible. I am not sure what the writer regards as properly complex and modern. I personally regard the moral changes peculiar to the modern age with horror and disgust: The modern so-called moral code our times allows for such abominations as partial birth abortion, when a perfectly healthy baby has a fork stuck into his skull and the brain is vacuumed out, the baby dismembered, and the body parts fished of the bloody womb one little limb at a time. Other vile acts, such as the murder of Terri Schiavo, the widespread abuse or recreational drugs, a shamelessness of a pornography culture, are routinely excused, explained away, and lauded by the so-called modernism of the so-called modern moral code.
In contrast, the eternal moral code “Do not Kill” “Honor your father and mother” “Do as you would be done by” is something recognized by all races and all lands in all times. The literate cultures of India and China have a formulation of the Golden Rule indistinguishable from the Christian formulation. The natural moral law is as obvious as the principles of mathematics, and discernable to the reason.
Morality can no more change and evolve than the Pythagorean Theorem.
Indeed, a moral standard that evolves and changes is not a moral standard. All real moral evolution in the West has been the correct application of principles implicit since the beginning to additional groups: the rights once applied only to aristocrats were extended, due to religious sentiment, to the poor man, the woman, the slave.
Change is not necessarily for the better. If the morals and manners of a once-decent people degenerates, it does us no good to say the moral code itself changed. If we say the standard changed, we have no standard by which to judge whether the change was a degeneration or an improvement. Only if the standard does not change can we see where and when the current generation exceeds their ancestors, or falls short of them.
So, too, with the transmission of moral behavior. If we are to live lives which are as complex socially as jet-planes are complex technologically, we need something more than the Ten Commandments.
Something like the Catechism of the Catholic Church? The canon law? The Anglo-American Common Law? The Torah and the Mishnah? The Koran and the Hadith?
The complexity of the books of religious moral law and interpretation of all the Abrahamic religions should be something a writer is aware-of before he takes up a pen to criticize them, lest he be open to the charge of ignorance. You can say a lot of things, good and bad, about the SUMMA THEOLOGICA, but you cannot say it is not complex. Christian doctrine treats with all aspects of human life.
We cannot base our moral code upon arbitrary and capricious fiats reported to us by persons claiming to be privy to the intentions of the denizens of Sinai or Olympus. Our ethics can be based neither upon fictions concerning the nature of humankind nor upon fake reports concerning the desires of the deities. Our ethics must be firmly planted in the soil of scientific self-knowledge. They must be improvable and adaptable.
Obviously, this statement assumes the deities are fictional. But even if so, the moral reasoning based on natural law, where it overlaps with theological reason, is not necessarily invalidated or outdated. Christians, for example, hold Justice, Temperance, Moderation, and Courage to be virtues, because these are the classical virtues from Aristotle and other pagan philosophers. We hold Faith, Hope and Love to be virtues also, but these are specifically Christian virtues. If a theologian deduces that recklessness and cowardice are immortal extremes of a temperate courage, this deduction is valid, even if made by a Christian theologian. He would agree with a pagan here.
Improving and adapting ethics is futile. All that happens, once you admit that the ethic rules of Monday are not necessarily valid on Tuesday, is that by Wednesday people are excusing their crimes under the rhetoric that the rules for right and wrong have expired. And Wednesday’s child is full of woe.
The best one can do is deduce how to apply various competing moral principles to novel situations. This is what honest judges do, every time they interpret the law in a novel law case. An honest judge does not invent new laws.
And what judges do is not evolution, not improvement: it is merely change, involving some gain and some loss.
Where then, and with what, shall we begin?
Back to Ethics
Plato showed long ago, in his dialogue Euthyphro, that we cannot depend upon the moral fiats of a deity.
Er, no. That is not what Euthyphro showed.
Plato asked if the commandments of a god were “good” simply because a god had commanded them or because the god recognized what was good and commanded the action accordingly. If something is good simply because a god has commanded it, anything could be considered good. There would be no way of predicting what in particular the god might desire next, and it would be entirely meaningless to assert that “God is good.” Bashing babies with rocks would be just as likely to be “good” as would the principle “Love your enemies.” (It would appear that the “goodness” of the god of the Old Testament is entirely of this sort.)
On the other hand, if a god’s commandments are based on a knowledge of the inherent goodness of an act, we are faced with the realization that there is a standard of goodness independent of the god and we must admit that he cannot be the source of morality. In our quest for the good, we can bypass the god and go to his source!
And what do we say about the third case, where God is Love, the source and goal of loving, God is Just, the fountainhead and end-goal of all acts of justice?
By this same argument, if a father tells a bratty child to clean his room, should the child clean the room because it is good to clean the room, or should he clean the room because it is good to obey one’s father? If the father’s command is based on an inherent goodness of the act of cleaning the room, we are faced with the knowledge that the father is not the source of morality! Does this mean I don’t have to clean my room?
Given, then, that gods a priori cannot be the source of ethical principles,
This does not follow from the argument given. Euthyphro only argues that either moral principles exist independently of the gods, or that, if dependent, what we call good depends solely on the fiat of the gods, and will change when they change their minds. Obviously, if we postulate an eternal and unremovable God, something like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, or the Ideal of the Good of Plato, Euthyphro’s paradox does not obtain.
we must seek such principles in the world in which we have evolved.
Just as a matter of logic, this does not follow. Merely because the gods cannot be the source of ethical principles, it does not mean that we must seek such principles in the world, unless we first establish that “the gods” and “the world” exhaust the cases, and unless we establish that we must seek ethical principles.
We must find the sublime in the mundane. What precept might we adopt?
The principle of “enlightened self-interest” is an excellent first approximation to an ethical principle which is both consistent with what we know of human nature and is relevant to the problems of life in a complex society.
Until your house is on fire. Then you damn well better have an unselfish and unenlightened fireman willing to risk his life and limb to haul your children out of a flaming inferno.
Let us examine this principle.
First we must distinguish between “enlightened” and “unenlightened” self-interest. Let’s take an extreme example for illustration. Suppose you lived a totally selfish life of immediate gratification of every desire. Suppose that whenever someone else had something you wanted, you took it for yourself.
It wouldn’t be long at all before everyone would be up in arms against you, and you would have to spend all your waking hours fending off reprisals. Depending upon how outrageous your activity had been, you might very well lose your life in an orgy of neighborly revenge. The life of total but unenlightened self-interest might be exciting and pleasant as long as it lasts – but it is not likely to last long.
The person who practices “enlightened” self-interest, by contrast, is the person whose behavioral strategy simultaneously maximizes both the intensity and duration of personal gratification.
An enlightened strategy will be one which, when practiced over a long span of time, will generate ever greater amounts and varieties of pleasures and satisfactions.
Why prefer remote gratification to immediate gratification? And what do I do in situations where the happiness of another being is mutually exclusive with mine, and he is in no position to object: a wife in a coma, a baby in the womb, a Jew in the concentration camp?
If I am in circumstances where evil is rewarded and goodness is punished (and such circumstances are commonplace: think of an army officer under Stalin) my long-term self-interest would prudently suggest cooperating with evil.
How is this to be done?
It is obvious that more is to be gained by cooperating with others than by acts of isolated egoism. One man with a rock cannot kill a buffalo for dinner. But a group of men or women, with lots of rocks, can drive the beast off a cliff and – even after dividing the meat up among them – will still have more to eat than they would have had without cooperation.
It is equally obvious that, by ganging up with a group of pirates, you can kill people and take their stuff. It is “obvious” that a black man in a remote continent living a happy life in isolation is of no benefit to me here on my plantation. The benefit to me if I enslave him is obvious.
No, something more is required here than mere prudent consultation of one’s enlightened self-interest. You at least have to talk about opportunity costs, or raise human dignity to the level of a moral principle, or to say all men are brothers, or something.
If nothing else, you have to say that it is immoral to betray one’s enlightened self-interest. You have to condemn, AS IMMORAL, self-destructive acts, the Potlatch of the Indians, the suicide of Cato of Utica. Now, since a suicide places himself instantly beyond all human retribution, we have to suppose something other than fear of human retribution will be the motivation here.
But cooperation is a two-way street. If you cooperate with several others to kill buffaloes, and each time they drive you away from the kill and eat it themselves, you will quickly take your services elsewhere, and you will leave the ingrates to stumble along without the Paleolithic equivalent of a fourth-for-bridge. Cooperation implies reciprocity.
Justice has its roots in the problem of determining fairness and reciprocity in cooperation. If I cooperate with you in tilling your field of corn, how much of the corn is due me at harvest time? When there is justice, cooperation operates at maximal efficiency, and the fruits of cooperation become ever more desirable. Thus, enlightened self-interest entails a desire for justice. With justice and with cooperation, we can have symphonies. Without it, we haven’t even a song.
Aha! A point of agreement. Enlightened self-interest is meaningless without Justice! Now, all Mr. Zindler needs to do, is to show how an eternal principle like Justice can be deduced, or why, in a world of constant evolution, flux, and change, this principle has universal application.
So far, all he has shown is that is it in my self-interest to act justly in situations where I mean to cooperate with repeat customers over the long term. In situations where I come across a random stranger, let us say, a comely yet unarmed virgin with a sack of gold, so far Mr. Zindler has not shown that treating her with justice is in my long term self-interest, and no motive for preferring my long term self interest to my short term, and no reason to prefer justice to self-interest when the two might be in conflict.
The hypothetical becomes more doubtful in cases where I have no long-term interests on earth to pursue: suppose I am Roy Batty in BLADE RUNNER, and my biological programming will kill me in a week, no matter what.
Even if justice is in my long-term self-interest, why is it not in my short-term self interest to treat the virgin the same way a baboon in heat, or an ape, would treat a female of his species? Animals do not have a wedding custom, nor a marriage sacrament, nor vows, nor a rule of chastity, nor any Commandments (remember those things that Mr. Zindler finds so risible and so outdated?) against fornication, adultery, assault, or rapine.
I am curious to see how, once he establishes a case for the practicality of “pirate justice” (the principle of obeying the code with your shipmates) Mr. Zindler can extend this to a general or universal principle. Alas he never addresses this point.
I am curious to see how he can justify, for example, the principle that even torturing a ruthless, dishonorable and unprincipled enemy who schemes to kill you at any cost, and is undeterred by threats of death, is an act that morality forbids in all cases. I can certainly think of an argument grounded on religion. I can think of not one grounded on self-interest.
Let us bring this essay back to the point of our departure. Because we have the nervous systems of social animals, we are generally happier in the company of our fellow creatures than alone. Because we are emotionally suggestible, as we practice enlightened self-interest we usually will be wise to choose behaviors which will make others happy and willing to cooperate and accept us – for their happiness will reflect back upon us and intensify our own happiness.
This simply does not follow from what has been established in the argument. It might make us happy, if we are emotionally imitative beings, to create happiness in those around us, so as to bask in the reflected happiness, but that neither makes it in our self-interest, nor makes it wise, nor makes it moral. It may be, but it may not be. A comedian in a room full of bigots will make them happy and bask in their reflected happiness if he tells anti-Semitic jokes. The Romans will bask in the reflected happiness of Imperator Nero as the Christians are mauled by lions. Sir Thomas Moore, on the other hand, reflected no happiness from Parliament or from his King when he decided not to sign an Oath of Loyalty violating his principles.
On the other hand, actions which harm others and make them unhappy – even if they do not trigger overt retaliation which decreases our happiness – will create an emotional milieu which, because of our suggestibility, will make us less happy.
By this same argument, when the Spanish Inquisition calls on a Sephardic Jew to confess the Christian religion, it will create an emotional milieu, which, because of our emotional suggestibility, will make him and all the surrounding Spaniards more happy.
This argument proposes that the ground of moral behavior is mere conformity. That is almost too silly an argument to refute. What if the group is wrong or wicked, Inquisitors, Aztecs, or pirates?
I am still waiting for some argument, strong or weak, to show why the pirate’s code of justice should be extended to a universal principle. So far, all Mr. Zindell has argued is that I should be just and fair to my repeat customers, the members of my group, or tribe, or band. Or, in other words, if my fellow cutthroats are cutting throats, we should divide the swag according to the pirate articles we signed back in Tortuga. No one outside of my small band makes any personal or emotional difference to me.
Because our nervous systems are imprintable, we are able not only to fall in love at first sight, we are able to love objects and ideals as well as people, and we are able to love with variable intensities.
This does not follow. It is not that case that our ability to love at various intensities, or fall in love at first sight, or love an ideal, is cause by our being subject to ‘imprinting’. Not only has Mr. Zindler not proved that love at first sight is like the imprinting behavior of a duck, he did not even argue that point. All he said was that is was highly likely that love at first sight is an imprinted behavior.
Even if this were proved, it would be irrelevant. Merely because love at first sight might be an imprinted behavior, it does not follow that love of an abstract ideal is an imprinted behavior.
Indeed, common sense suggests that love of an ideal cannot be an imprinted behavior. A duckling might follow a toy train, but it has to see the train with its eye for the imprinting to take place. A baby human cannot see an ideal with its eye, or even understand the words involved in explaining it.
In any case, since people have been known to convert from one ideal to another, or even convert from atheism to Catholicism, merely saying that ideals are imprinted tells us nothing about the wisdom or morality of such conversions. Should I remain loyal to whatever ideal I was imprinted on back when I was young? If that question does not have a simple yes or no answer, then the fact that I imprinted on atheism when I was young does not tell me anything, anything at all, about whether it was wise or moral of me to break with my imprinting rather than continue with it.
Like the gosling attracted to the toy train, we are pulled forward by the desire for love. Unlike the gosling’s “love,” however, our love is to a considerable extent shapeable by experience and is capable of being educated. A major aim of enlightened self-interest, surely, is to give and receive love, both sexual and nonsexual.
This does not follow from the argument. It is a gratuitous assertion. It may be the case that many people prefer love to loneliness, but nothing established so far in the argument says that my enlightened self-interest might not, in some or even most cases, tell me to avoid love and seek personal profit. Why should Miss Bennett marry poor-but-honest Samwise the Gardener when her mother wants her to marry the dashing but cruel Lord Darcy? He is worth ten thousands pounds a year!
The general problem with this whole line of argument is that when love and self-interest combine (such as when you and your bride both want to make the other happy) there are no moral conflicts, no agonizing decisions, and no need of moral rules or principles.
Indeed, it is only in cases where one’s long term self-interest is in conflict with one’s loves, passions, temptations, or even with one’s short term self interest, that we need moral reasoning, and must contemplate, weigh and balance competing claims of moral obligations.
As a general – though not absolute – rule, we must choose those behaviors which will be likely to bring us love and acceptance, and we must eschew those behaviors which will not.
If the rule is not absolute, we should next be looking into the exceptions and how to behave toward them. If a man smites you on the right cheek, that is an exceptional behavior. Is it moral to offer him your left? Or is it moral to strike out the eye of one who struck out your eye? Nothing in this article so far shows Mr. Zindler is even aware of what moral reasoning is about.
Another aim of enlightened self-interest is to seek beauty in all its forms, to preserve and prolong its resonance between the world outside and that within. Beauty and love are but different facets of the same jewel: love is beautiful, and we love beauty.
This seems to be introducing a whole new topic, utterly unrelated to anything. It is simply not the case that it is in our enlightened self-interest to preserve beauty. It might be wise, or moral, or noble, but nothing so far has been offered in evidence. The statement, as it stands, is no more and no less gratuitous than a Turkish corsair saying it is in our long term self-interest to kidnap beautiful girls to sell to the harem of the Sultan. It might be true or it might be false, but, in a logical argument, you have to show the connection between the ideas involved.
By the logic in this essay, one could with equal justice say: “it is in our long term self interest to practice the Christian religion, because it creates happiness in the Christian community around us, and it preserves the beauty of Christian cathedrals, renaissance paintings, and choir music by Bach and Handel”. Would anyone not already persuaded of the point be convinced by a mere gratuitous assertion?
The experience of love and beauty, however, is a passive function of the mind. How much greater is the joy which comes from creating beauty. How delicious it is to exercise actively our creative powers to engender that which can be loved. Paints and pianos are not necessarily prerequisites for the exercise of creativity: Whenever we transform the raw materials of existence in such a way that we leave them better than they were when we found them, we have been creative.
We interrupt this program for an ode to creativity.
More interesting that a mere digression about the nature of creating beauty as opposed to admiring beauty, and more to the point, would be some discussion of the role of religious sentiment in creating and preserving beauty even in difficult circumstances, or the relationship of religion to art. Also interesting would be a discussion of the role of Christianity in history preserving even the beautiful things of pagan cultures. The gratuitous destruction by the paynim makes an interesting contrast. The Mohammedan spread by conquest, and the Christians (with few exceptions) by conversion: therefore an admiration for classical models was preserved in Christianity, and it is absent in Islam. In everything from BEOWULF to THE DIVINE COMEDY Christian artists paid great reverence and respect to their pagan forefathers. Indeed, the preservation of the ancient Greco-Roman world depended entirely on the role of the Catholic Church as the communicator of culture in the Dark Ages: the evolution of the West would have been stopped, and our cultural genes obliterated, had it not been for that.
The task of moral education, then, is not to inculcate by rote great lists of do’s and don’ts, but rather to help people to predict the consequences of actions being considered. What are the long-term as well as immediate rewards and draw-backs of the acts? Will an act increase or decrease one’s chances of experiencing the hedonic triad of love, beauty, and creativity?
This does not follow from anything that has been said before. Indeed, what has been said before was, in effect, that we should compile our list of do’s and don’t’s from consulting our enlightened self-interest and the imitative pack-animal behaviors we inherited from ape troops. That morality is primarily or should primarily be concerned with the consequences or utility of behaviors is a new and separate topic.
So far, Mr. Zindler has not even made the argument in favor of hedonism. He seems to assume in this last sentence that love and beauty are valuable because they please us.
Thus it happens, when the Atheist approaches the problem of finding natural grounds for human morals and establishing a nonsuperstitious basis for behavior, that it appears as though nature has already solved the problem to a great extent.
This is both a run-on sentence and a piece of arrant nonsense. The atheist approaching the problem of discover the nonsuperstitious basis of moral behavior (what I called natural prudence) discovers that nature has equipped men to be aggressive, cowardly, violent, selfish, and filled with lawless lusts. To ignore this basic fact is breathtakingly naïve. One need only read a newspaper or history book to see it confirmed.
Indeed, it appears as though the problem of establishing a natural, humanistic basis for ethical behavior is not much of a problem at all.
Mere insolence. All the pondering of all the philosophers and moralists of history is here airily dismissed.
It is in our natures to desire love, to seek beauty, and to thrill at the act of creation.
Let us consult that respected philosopher, Conan the Barbarian on this point. Mr. Barbarian, what is best in life? “To crush your enemies see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.”
It is also in human nature for Paris to abduct Helen, for Cain to murder Abel, for Solomon the wise to erect temples to Baal and Moloch where children are sacrificed, and for Merlin to tell his secrets to comely Nimue, and wake up trapped in a cave.
The deep questions of the origins of morality is not solved, nor even addressed, by saying that, as a general rule, some people from time to time have a sentimental attachment to love and beauty and pride of workmanship in creative effort.
Indeed, this has nothing to do with the argument at all. It is merely an inaccurate and one-sided and very rosy-hued view of human nature. Civilized men in peacetime, who have been born and raised in a culture heavily influenced by Christian and classical values might place a high priority on love and beauty and creative work. The same cannot be said for a tribesman whose every waking moment is surrounded by dreadful taboos; he has little or no opportunity for creative work. The same cannot be said for the bold Spartan; he has no use for love and beauty, since he craves death in battle above all things. The same cannot be said for the grisly Toltec or Aztec; ugliness, malproportionate and ghastly, informs all his works of art and architecture, and he delights to hear the screams of little girls flayed to death whose tears bring rains from the demon-gods. The same cannot be said of the loyal Maoist: he yearns for the bloody uprising of the peasants and proletarians. It is not creative work he respects and desires, but war.
The labyrinthine complexity we see when we examine traditional moral codes does not arise of necessity: it is largely the result of vain attempts to accommodate human needs and nature to the whimsical totems and taboos of the demons and deities who emerged with us from our cave-dwellings at the end of the Paleolithic Era – and have haunted our houses ever since.
Note here that he condemns the traditional moral codes of suffering “labyrinthine complexity”; and without a blush he earlier condemned them as being as simple as a stone-age hand axe, and said we needed complexity to deal with the modern world. I am curious how he will distinguish the cases and resolve the seeming paradox. Alas, he never returns to this point.
Wait, was that supposed to be his closing paragraph? What happened to the topic of the discussion? The essay consists of a string of more or less unrelated gratuitous assumptions, a lot of irrelevance, and then just breaks off.
Mr. Zindler promised that he would prove that religion has nothing at all to do with ethical behavior. Every time he made a gratuitous assertion, I took that as an implied promise he would later return to the point and set forth his proof and evidence. All those promises were broken.
(I am still curious about the first point he never got back to: I wonder why he believes religious people are not motivated by what we say we are motivated by. In effect, he told me Christians do not really fear hellfire. I am wondering why he mocks us for fearing demons if indeed he says we don’t. He mocks us for being coward, but says we are not really afraid.)
In fact, all he addressed was the idea that some ethical behavior has some roots in a pursuit of one’s enlightened self-interest, when dealing with repeat customers, when and if that self-interest happened to coincide with our natural desire for love and beauty. This does not show, nay, it does not even address, the topic question, which was to prove that religious sentiment was not necessary for ethical thinking, and indeed has nothing whatsoever to do with ethical behavior.
A very basic principle of logic is violated here, called the principle of the excluded middle. Let us condense this rambling and illogical account to the basic syllogism:
- Some ethical behavior is caused by pursuit of self-interest
- Self-interest does not require religious sentiment in all cases
- Ergo, no ethical behavior ever requires religious sentiment in any case.
True, false, or indifferent, the third statement does not follow from the first.
Let us look at the cases. Of the set “ethical behaviors” I can think of cases where no religious sentiment is necessary for me to understand right from wrong, or to be obligated to do the right. These cases fill the subset called “Times when the right thing to do is also pleasant and rewarding”. The duty to be fruitful and multiply is certainly a pleasure to carry out if one has a lovely and beloved bride. Call it case A.
Next, I can think of cases where the right thing to do is rewarding but not pleasant: a soldier slogging through mud, bayoneting his fellow man, may indeed, if he lives, be rewarded with a tickertape parade, and by knowing in his conscience that serving his king and country is worthwhile. He may look for days of peace when the invader is gone, but the duties of a soldier are simply not pleasant. Call this case B.
Next, I can think of cases where doing the right thing is not rewarded in this life at all. Call this case C, the case of self-sacrifice. If there is no reward in the next life, there is no worldly reason to do them. That is the case this essay promises the reader it would address: it did not.
Here is a real world example of that case:
On Dec. 4, 2006, Private Cedric McGinnis (19) was manning the turret in the last Humvee of a six-vehicle patrol in northeast Baghdad when an enemy threw a grenade from the roof of a nearby building.
As he stood up to get ready to jump out of the vehicle as he had been trained to do, McGinnis realized the other four soldiers in the vehicle did not know where the grenade had landed and did not have enough time to escape.
He threw his back against the radio mount and smothered the explosive with his body. McGinnis was killed instantly while the other four men survived.
This man, a true hero, was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. No one can argue that his actions were done for the sake of that worthless bit of medal. It is an honor that we, the living, bestow because we do not have the power to raise the dead and usher the deserving into glory.
No human has that power.
Only if the hopes of religion are correct, is there any possibility that this young man will receive the blessed reward we would all like to give him, and which natural justice says he is owed. If that hope is false, he is merely dust now, and it matters nothing at all to him (for there is no ‘him’ left) whether he died bravely or cravenly, and all his aspirations were in vain.
If the atheists are correct, there is no true justice in the world or the next, and moral decisions are based, if on anything, on natural prudence. While an argument can be made that natural prudence justifies moral behavior, Mr. Zindel does not here make that argument.
