What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

was emphatic on this point: while we generally do not get to choose the contextual circumstances of our lives—that is, the governments, institutions, people, culture, and laws that we must contend with—we all, nonetheless, are perpetually free, as individuals, to choose how we will respond to the immediate impositions of those contextual circumstances.⁶ We can say no, we can say yes—whatever our conscience dictates—and then act accordingly. Sure, there will inevitably be consequences to our choices; it’s not as if we are free to choose without repercussions. If we choose to disobey our parents, there will be consequences. If we choose to disobey our government, there will be consequences. If we choose to disobey our commanding officer in the jungles of Vietnam, there will be consequences. And some of those consequences can be quite costly, both emotionally and physically. No doubt. But we still have a choice, consequences notwithstanding. And to deny that we, as conscious individuals, always have a choice is to self-delude and self-dupe; it is to live, as Sartre said, in “bad faith.”⁷

      Exercising our freedom of choice—to perform a given act or not—is what ultimately determines who and what we are. It is at the very heart of our distinctly human capacity for conscious, clear-eyed moral autonomy. And it comprises the underlying basis of our ethical lives: to choose how we will treat others. As British philosopher Mary Midgley asserts, individual conscience is central to morality.⁸ But deciding not to choose—to avowedly abstain from personally deciding how to act in given situations, to ignore one’s conscience, and to instead decide to merely follow the commandments of an authority figure—well, as I have argued above, that is a major abdication of ethical responsibility, a pusillanimous eschewal of moral obligation. As such, it is—in effect—a denial of both one’s humanity and the humanity of others.

      According to Spanish American evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, humans are naturally endowed with three necessary conditions for morality: “anticipation of the consequences of one’s actions, the ability to make value judgments, and the ability to choose between alternative courses of action.”⁹ A strictly God-based ethical orientation ignores (at best) or utterly destroys (at worst) human morality—for it requires that we deny and denounce the very thing that makes us free, self-aware, and naturally endowed moral beings: our ability to choose for ourselves, in given situations, how to act; our capacity to choose, based on conscious reflection and inner deliberation, how we ought to treat others; our ability to freely act upon our moral values.

      Instead, in a presumed God-ruled universe, we just faithfully take orders from above. And as American philosophers Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse make clear, such theistic morality is actually quite pernicious, since it is “rooted in an abdication of moral autonomy.”¹⁰ It is, indeed, the very worst form of moral outsourcing. And it is observably more prominent within religious culture; various social-psychological studies have found that increased religiosity is correlated with a moral orientation based on following rules and obeying authority, rather than one based on empathy, compassion, or reasoned principles.¹¹

       Obedience Is Not Morality

      You will recall that in an earlier chapter I argued that a fundamental flaw of any ethical or moral system based on God is that this supposed God is not only impossible to define, but this inexplicable deity’s very existence has never, ever been proven. So, to say “I get my morals from God” is to say nothing more compelling than “I get my morals from some unclear, ineffable, enigmatic entity that doesn’t even exist beyond my faith that he does.” And that’s a very shaky, shallow, and spurious foundation for ethics, to say the least.

      But things get even worse for the God-believer. For even if we were to be open to the possibility that God (whatever that means) does exist (despite the lack of any empirical evidence)—even if we were to make that leap—moral problems do not recede upon such a possibility. Rather, they compound. Because, as discussed in the previous chapter, everyone interprets God’s commands differently, making theistic moral agreement impossible.

      But things get worse still: even if we could all agree what God commands—especially if we agree—then all our moral deliberating and ethical considering suddenly all boils down to one simple matter: obedience. That is, if there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-creating Supreme Deity out there, whose divine will is crystal clear, then our immediate job appears to become that of obeying His grand authority. Which means—given such a traditional religious framework—that morality is suddenly reduced to following the commands of a Supreme Overlord—and nothing else. That’s what is meant by moral outsourcing: doing what someone else tells you to do rather than figuring it out for yourself based on your own moral reflection and personal conscience. With moral outsourcing, you hand the job of ethics over to someone else, like Sergeant Rex, or something else, like an invisible deity commonly referred to as God. And you obey.

      Human ethical systems are corroded, not bolstered, by such religious theism.¹² For obedience is most definitely not morality—nor ought we ever mistake it as such. “No one is good,” Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse explain, “in virtue of rote obedience to commands, even if those commands come from God.”¹³ Obedience is merely acting out of fear, or despondency, or weakness, or resignation, or training, or all five combined. What obedience is not is morally sound or ethically responsible.¹⁴

      To be a moral agent, according to American philosopher David Brink, is to be responsible, and a responsible moral agent “must be able to distinguish between the intensity and authority of his or her desires, deliberate about the appropriateness of his or her desires, and regulate his or her actions in accordance with his or her deliberations.”¹⁵ And yet, pure theistic morality destroys all of that. For if our sole obligation is to dutifully obey God’s commands, then we are no longer acting as autonomous moral agents who look inward, using our own hearts and minds as our guides. We are no longer acting as the existentially free human beings that we are, beings who deliberate about the appropriateness of our desires, weigh options, consider alternatives, examine motivations, assess potential harm or flourishing that might result from our actions, ponder our situations and those of others, accept responsibility, learn from mistakes, adhere to principles, seek to embody values, reflect on our own experiences, check our intuitions and gut feelings, contemplate the implications of our choices for ourselves and those around us and the greater social context—no. For the staunchly religious, none of that matters. It is all for naught. Instead, under the demand of dogmatic theistic morality, we crumple up our existential freedom—and the moral obligation it entails—and toss it away. We then look outward and upward, to a supposed Higher Authority, to tell us what to do and how to act. And just like the young American private in the jungles of Vietnam who does whatever Sergeant Rex says, we become bipedal peons, doing whatever God says. We become functionally amoral at best, willfully immoral at worst. And ethically bankrupt, either way.

      It is for these reasons that post-Enlightenment visionary John Stuart Mill deemed any attempt to base our ethics on God as “the greatest enemy of morality.”¹⁶

       God’s Murderous Commands

      There’s a relevant biblical story worth mentioning here—a story that reveals just how morally crippling obedience to a deity can be.

      It’s the tale of Abraham dutifully, willingly obeying God’s command to murder his own son, Isaac. As you may recall, according to this Mediterranean gem of grim folklore written over twenty-five hundred years ago, Abraham was a Jew—indeed, the presumed first Jew—who came to believe in the One True God of the Israelites. In order to test Abraham’s fealty to and faith in him, this almighty God commands Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and tie him up and kill him. And what does Abraham do? He faithfully obeys. He takes Isaac up onto a hill, binds him, and goes to murder him. But—alas—just in the nick of time, God sends an angel down to intervene. Isaac is not killed. God then heaps loads of praise upon Abraham for passing the ultimate test: obeying the divine command to slit Isaac’s throat.

      Despite