The a-hole version: Penn Jillette, Sam Harris, and the moral argument for God
(This clickbait headline contains no implied insult to Mr. Jillette or Mr. Harris)
Among the theistic arguments I have long found most compelling is a version of what is sometimes called “the moral argument.” Perhaps I should say “a moral argument,” since many types of moral argument for God’s existence have been proposed, some more interesting and important than others. Mr. Jillette’s critique seems to presuppose a particularly poor version of the argument—but a version of the argument that is a) certainly out there and b) reflective of no small amount of practical moral reasoning on the part of many believers, so there’s no question of strawmanning by Jillette!
Two clarifications
Before I say anything about how I think a strong form of the moral argument works, I should clarify two things. First, the idea of God in view in any moral argument is what most of us think of as “capital-G God,” more or less convergent with the Neoplatonic idea of The One or The Good, as well as the idea, found in various forms in the Abrahamic religions, of God as absolute, necessary, perfect Being and the transcendent ground of all existence—a divine reality that, for Christians, is revealed in Jesus Christ.
Second, before exploring the argument that interests me, it may be helpful to set aside some arguments that I find less interesting, such as the following:
“If there’s no God, why shouldn’t we all be monsters?” (With or without belief in God, there are definitely good reasons to be guided by widely held norms of moral behavior.)
“Without the Bible, what is your standard of right and wrong?” (Moral truths are definitely knowable apart from special revelation.)
“If there are no eternal rewards or punishments, why bother to be good?”
“Moral laws imply a moral lawgiver.”
All human societies and nearly all human beings have meaningful knowledge of right and wrong. The fact that nonbelievers (like Jillette) recognize that ways of thinking and acting can be either praiseworthy or “damning” (metaphorically speaking, of course!)—and that most of us, believer and nonbeliever alike, are invested in being good people and try to be good most or a lot of the time—is crucial to the moral argument that interests me. Even without belief in God, there are excellent reasons to want to meet some meaningful standard of morality, and many nonbelievers do so, or try to (while many believers, alas, embrace immoral, even monstrous behavior). Bracketing metaphysical questions about the nature or foundations of morality, there are obvious, empirical grounds for positing that what is conventionally called goodness or virtue, or at least a big chunk of it, really is its own reward, or brings its own reward, and what is conventionally called evil or vice really is, or brings, its own punishment.
Goodness comes naturally to us—as does the other thing
Human beings are social creatures by nature. We flourish psychologically and emotionally as well as physically in mutually supportive communities. Healthy human beings naturally value prosocial traits like compassion, empathy, and cooperation both in themselves and in others. We enjoy the approval of others, and we enjoy the feelings of self-approval that follow from actions that we understand to be good for others as well as good for ourselves. All of this is equally true of believers and nonbelievers. It makes sense, too, to say that humanity’s moral instincts have been shaped by evolutiony pressures, through trial and error, in ways that help our species survive and thrive (and, indeed, at least proto-moral systems and behavior have been observed in nonhuman species as well).
All of this makes sense, again, as far as it goes—but is it a fully satisfying account of our conception of ourselves as moral beings?
For one thing, if evolution has given us our moral instincts, we must accept that evolution also has given us quite different and contrary instincts on which we all sometimes act—instincts that presumably also offer adaptive advantages, or they too would have been weeded out through trial and error. (These behaviors, too, have analogues among nonhuman species!) It’s all well and good to say with Jillette that we don’t do monstrous things because we don’t want to, but what about not exactly honorable or upright things that we do want to do?
The a-hole version
For context, here’s a slightly fuller version of Jillette’s remark, from a 2012 interview:
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
A certain version of the moral argument—a sub-argument, addressed to Jillette’s retort—might be couched in this way, as a reply to Jillette (along with anyone else who makes his riposte their own):
So you say the number of times you wanted to rape and murder people is zero. I’m glad to hear it! That happens to be my experience too. It’s a fair point, and I’m glad you made it. There’s just one question about this, though, that I’d like to ask you: Have you also acted like an a‑hole1 exactly as often as you wanted to? And is that amount also zero?
I’m not necessarily talking about a habitual way of life (being an a-hole). I mean particular occasions when you acted like an a-hole, or even just a jerk.2 When you ignored the feelings and concerns of others because your own feelings and concerns were what you cared about. When you put your desires ahead of what was fair because you could. When you allowed your feelings toward others to tip the scales, benefiting someone and short-changing someone else, and you know it. When you were unfairly selfish, or insensitive, or rude, and there is no legitimate excuse.
Have you done that sort of thing as often as you wanted to, and is that amount also zero?
Not doing bad things that we don’t want to do is great as far as it goes, but you’d have to set the bar pretty low—say, not killing or raping people—to comfortably equate not being immoral with “doing bad things exactly as often as you want to, that amount being zero.” (Not, to be clear, that Jillette proposed such an equation! One pithy remark in an interview, however frequently quoted, is not a moral theory of everything. In illuminating what it does, though, the remark usefully casts into relief questions that still need answers.)
Anyone who aspires to be a moral person, believer or nonbeliever, must have the honesty and self-knowledge to realize that they are capable of falling significantly short of the goal—and that sometimes they do. (Yes, believers too: I’m certainly not going to argue that belief in God is important because believers don’t act like a-holes!) Anyone who maintains with a straight face that the number of times they have wanted to act like a selfish jerk is zero must be considered lacking in honesty or self-knowledge or both.
For those who admit, then, that the amount is not zero, a follow-up question: How do you feel about that, and why? On these occasions, did you act the way you wanted to act? If not, why not? If so, do you see that as a problem? What kind of problem? And what do you believe you should do the next time that being unfairly selfish is something you kind of want to do?
Moral behavior vs. moral obligation
Nearly everyone wants to be a good person; at least, we want to think of ourselves as good and to be so considered by others. What we don’t always want, in every specific situation, is to act like a good person. More precisely, our desire to act like a good person is sometimes pitted against contrary desires—desires that we sometimes resist and sometimes act on; that we sometimes rationalize and sometimes see clearly despite our rationalizations.
Up to a point, this isn’t much different from other types of conflicting desires. Nearly everyone wants to be healthy, but our desire to make healthy choices about eating and exercise conflicts with our desire to indulge in our favorite foods and not face the cost in time and effort of regular exercising. Nearly everyone wants to avoid spiraling debt, but our desire to live within our means conflicts with our desires for all the things we want to spend money on. Success, and happiness, require some measure of prioritizing and self-discipline. No mystery there.
On the other hand, a person who makes healthy eating and exercise choices as a rule can justifiably allow themselves occasional indulgences, “cheat days,” etc. A person who budgets their money carefully enough as a rule can occasionally splurge on some well-chosen extravagance. There is nothing inconsistent or untenable about this; a sound rule can be useful without being absolute or exceptionless. Sometimes people consciously or subconsciously apply a similar dynamic to the moral realm: a phenomenon called moral licensing by which people give themselves permission to act badly on occasion based on prior good behavior. Every morally serious person knows, of course, that this is an unjustifiable fallacy. No amount of habitually selfless or generous behavior can ever justify even occasional a-holish behavior, any more than any amount of loving care toward one’s spouse can justify occasional infidelity. It is not enough to be a good person as a rule; we are morally obliged to try to be good all the time.
We know this. But what is it that we know? Our reflections on Jillette’s remark have shed some light on the rationality of many forms of moral behavior, but the idea of moral obligation is beyond the scope of our considerations so far.
What does it mean to say that we “ought” to heed our moral instincts and resist our selfish ones whenever they conflict? If “ought to” merely reflects the feelings of our moral instincts, then we are only saying that our moral instincts tell us to follow our moral instincts, which is obviously true, but not worth saying. Our selfish impulses, when and where they conflict with moral instincts, likewise tell us to follow our selfish impulses!
Both sets of impulses reflect evolutionary adaptations, and both are capable, in varying circumstances, of making us happy in very different ways. Why should we always choose the “moral” kind of happiness over the more selfish kind of happiness? Or supppose that I consistently choose “moral” happiness out of a high-level commitment to an idea of myself as a “good person,” while another person often chooses a-holish behavior whenever they see it as in their best interests. Let’s suppose that we are both reasonably successful in achieving the goals we set ourselves, and we are both fairly happy. Is there any meaningful sense in which the other person’s behavior is somehow deficient compared to mine? Or are we just following different strategies to not altogether different goals? Different ways, so to speak, to bake a cake?
A bigger moral landscape
No one has done more in our day to make the case that morality makes empirical sense without God than Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Harris’s argument is carefully developed and worth taking seriously—and, unlike Jillette’s quip, it’s not the kind of thing I can do any kind of justice to in a few paragraphs.
What I can say is this: On the one hand, Harris’s contention that moral actions aim at “maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures” largely converges with the traditional first moral axiom of natural law moral theory that “The good is to be done and pursued and the bad is be avoided.” (In this context, “the good” means not moral good but intelligible good, i.e., that which makes for well-being.) Morality is all about pursuing and maximizing well-being.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced that Harris’s account of well-being, or any materialistic account of well-being, can withstand cross-examination when the stakes are high enough. “Maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures” is all well and good, but when you need a job that another candidate is applying for, the well-being can only go to one of you—and the other candidate will be equally out of a job whether you win on the merits or use some sort of unscrupulous means to win, from inflating your credentials to sabotaging the other candidate.
Grant, for the sake of argument, Harris’s claim that science can “determine our values”; is it clear that science can make a case for always following them? The empirical case for not following our values sometimes seems not insignificant. Rich people are disproportionately jerks, and the dynamic may go both ways: Being rich can make you a jerk, but being a jerk can also be useful in amassing wealth. Callous, ruthless people are also disproportionately represented in power positions in corporations and governments. CEOs are disproportionately psychopaths, though that correlation has been exaggerated; in fact, a certain level of psychopathic tendencies may play a role in effective leadership. “Avarice, anger, pride and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice and thought,” Robert Bolt’s Thomas More tells his daughter Margaret in A Man for All Seasons. That’s far from the whole story, but it’s definitely part of the story.
There’s much more to be said about this … but it’s mid-September, and I have lessons to plan and assignments to grade. I’ll close by cutting to the chase and offering a succinct answer to the question “If God exists, what does his existence have to do with moral obligations?” People sometimes say “You can’t get an ought from an is.” If God exists, that’s certainly an immense and fundamental is (in keeping with one name given to him in the Judeo-Christian tradition, “I AM”). But how does that get us to ought?
A larger moral landscape
My answer, which is quite traditional, is grounded neither in the idea of God’s normative will (some form of divine command theory) nor in the idea of divine rewards and punishments. I agree with Harris that the goal of moral behavior is “maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures” (or, again, as St. Thomas and others have put it, “the good”—that which makes for well-being—“is to be done and pursued and the bad is be avoided”). At some point, though, one must confront the question “What is well-being?” Harris admits frankly:
Many readers might wonder how can we base our values on something as difficult to define as “well-being”? It seems to me, however, that the concept of well-being is like the concept of physical health: it resists precise definition, and yet it is indepensible.3
This isn’t wrong—but I think my idea of “well-being” is more expansive and definite than Harris’s. I believe that absolute, necessary, perfect Being exists and is the transcendent ground for all existence. As a Catholic Christian, I believe that God is revealed to humanity in Jesus, and that in Jesus we have come to know that God is love, and has created us in love and for love. Our well-being is ultimately found in right relation to God, which is to say, in loving God above all and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Not because of what God says (divine command theory) or what he does (rewards and punishments), but simply because of who he is, we find our well-being in loving God and loving our neighbor—not unlike green plants finding their well-being in turning their leaves toward the sun.
This gives me a firm place to stand when my moral instincts and my selfish impulses struggle with one another (something I experience with nonzero frequency). A‑holish behavior, even when ostensibly successful, is not just another way to bake a cake; whatever is at odds with God’s nature is ultimately harmful to us, regardless of the short-term benefits. This doesn’t answer all the questions, of course! Knotty moral problems remain knotty, and our moral blind spots and capacity for rationalization will continue to lead us astray. Christian leaders rationalized slavery for centuries. I’m not saying that believers necessarily know better or do better than nonbelievers. I am saying that things we all know to be true make more sense in light of faith than they do without it. Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), wrote:
Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
“A new horizon and a decisive direction” is exactly correct. What Christian faith offers is precisely an infinitely larger and more definite moral landscape.
I can’t say I’m conflicted about the use in this context of this vulgarity, which I take to be, not a mere insult or term of abuse, but a descriptive term with a fairly precise sense (see note 2), and one notably without any similarly vivid and forceful English synonym. The argument can be made without this word, but not, in my opinion, with quite the same power! I am somewhat conflicted about the typographical delicacy of using a hyphen to partially elide the first syllable (especially when I wouldn’t bother with the same word root in “badass,” another usefully specific word with no adequate synonym either as a noun or as an adjective). Being a deacon, though, sometimes means being extra cautious regarding other people’s sensitivities. That said, I will not scruple at a direct quotation from a relevant source (again, see note 2).
“Someone can act like an asshole—in a particular situation or over a particular day or week—without really, ultimately, being an asshole. When the assholish behavior doesn’t reflect the kind of person someone generally is, stably, in his life, he is better classified as a jerk, a boor, a cad, a schmuck, or a mere ass.” (Aaron James, Assholes: A Theory, Kindle Edition, p. 8.)
Harris, Sam, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 11.