Ethics and religion

A couple of days ago Chris Bertram set off an interesting discussion at Crooked Timber that has been followed up by Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels. I shall start by expressing, as Ophelia has, a measure of agreement with what Chris wrote, but I want also to raise a question about it.

Referring to Pasolini's great movie The Gospel According to St Matthew, Chris highlights this 'aspect of the Christian message':

that we all belong to a common humanity, that each person has moral worth and should be recognised as such, and that compassion is an appropriate attitude to the suffering of our fellow humans...

And he then goes on to say:

[F]or me... it is the most attractive feature of the religion. Not just attractive, of course, but morally and politically important and influential: the basic equality of humans posited by both Locke and Kant is strongly rooted in this Christian tradition...

One of the reasons I can't bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson, is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters.

I completely agree with Chris's sentiment towards, his validation of, the universalist content of religious - and specifically Christian - doctrine and teachings, where that is indeed the content of it. There are enough sources of division and violent hatred, including religiously inspired sources, that we can find better things to do than dismiss the impulses towards solidarity, compassion and respect for the moral worth of human beings in their generality which are contained in such doctrine and teachings. It is a matter of historical record, furthermore, that many people have been moved by just this - the hold of their religious convictions - to oppose injustice and cruelty, and to do it sometimes at grave risk to themselves. That is worth a lot more than any quick dismissal.

Where I have a serious doubt about what Chris says is in relation to the statement:

Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters.

As a matter of discursive convenience, I will focus, first, on the idea that we (humankind) are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters, being all of us the children of God; and, second, on the idea that it is precisely God, not just any old body, of whom we are the children - focus on them in turn, as providing the motivational crux here.

In so far as it is the former idea Chris is appealing to, what strikes me about it is that, for anyone of secular conviction, this just mobilizes a metaphor of quite mundane provenance in order to get people to think of their relationship to other people - including different and distant people - as part of one family. I cannot see, therefore, why secular versions of the same idea (the family of man etc) need be, or that they in fact are, any thinner than those contained in religious teaching. I'm sceptical, to put it otherwise, that the tradition of religious teaching and symbolism necessarily surpasses all the traditions potentially available to a secular culture - philosophical, historiographical, artistic, cultural, sentimental - in the capacity to disseminate the idea that there is a unity of humankind across all its manifold differences, and that each person is to be valued for himself or herself as a being of purposive depth, unique interiority and irreplaceable worth - exactly like your brother or your sister. (See here on a related point.)

If, on the other hand, it is not (or not only) the idea that we are all of 'one family' that is thought to be decisive, but the particular family that this is - we being not merely siblings but the children of God, and bound by that to behave towards one another in a certain way and not in other ways - then we are looking, it seems to me, at something we need to be a bit more qualified about. For whether it is the love or adoration, or the fear, of God which is supposed to thicken up the family idea, making it more potent as a motivational force, this kind of impulse, as we know too well, can also be exerted for other purposes than morally benign or admirable ones – a point alluded to by Ophelia Benson.

I have read that in the Nazi camps, those who did best at maintaining their moral bearings, at not going to pieces in face of the horrors they daily had to experience, were people of very firm and definite convictions: Jehovah's Witnesses, Jewish rabbis, hardened communist militants. On the other hand, intellectuals, liberal and professional people, sometimes suffered a precipitous moral collapse. I can't vouch for the truth of this observartion, though I have read it in more than one place. In any case, if it is true, it is perhaps not all that surprising. To have had to get used to conditions of life and death in places where there was no why would have been hard enough for anybody; but it may have been especially testing and cruel for those educated in the norms of a sceptical rationality.

Would we want to say, though, that the religious or quasi-religious forms of certainty which have helped to save some people in such conditions are, on that account, to be given an unqualified pass as ethical motivators, when we know what else, what horrors, such certainties can themselves lead to? Not that Chris Bertram has said this; let me be quite clear about it - he hasn't. I merely register what I see as a complexity in this issue, a difficulty which has no cleanly unilateral resolution.

People of quite secular outlook have fought bravely in the struggle against oppression and for humane ends, and I am loath to concede that the resources we have are thin gruel, since I think we have the entire history and culture of humankind to draw upon, not excluding even material from within the great religious traditions.