by Ben Bayer
Ayn Rand Institute
Excerpts:
The scientifically minded should be skeptical of the popular morality of impartiality.
Debunking the Supernaturalism That Haunts Secular Ethics
“Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.”
This aphorism summarizes the line of thinking that leads Richard Dawkins to his atheism. Many like Dawkins who advocate scientific naturalism find no observations that require the explanation of a divine super mind; they question whether a miraculous deity could fit into a universe governed by natural law. They use this razor mercilessly to slash away anything they deem “spooky” from their worldview, from ectoplasm to élan vital.
But naturalists don’t use their razor consistently enough. They have a blind spot toward a whole swath of beliefs that deserves the same skepticism, beliefs that concern entities just as superfluous and spooky as ghosts and gods. What’s surprising is how commonplace these beliefs may seem: they are some of the most popular, allegedly secular beliefs about ethics.
Once we exorcise morality of these ghostly remnants of religion’s past, we’ll see this leaves more than enough room for new secular moral ideals to flourish.
The secular view of morality in question is shared by many and promulgated by respected philosophers. It may seem completely ordinary and non-spooky. It’s the idea that morality is about ignoring personal interests, about a quest to identify impartial reasons for action.
Introducing the idea as an essential foundation of his “humanist” morality, Steven Pinker even describes it in a way that portrays it as a rebellion against mystical “magic”:
Impartiality [is] the realization that there’s nothing magic about the pronouns I and me that could justify privileging my interests over yours or anyone else’s. If I object to being raped, maimed, starved, or killed, I can’t very well rape, maim, starve, or kill you. Impartiality underlies many attempts to construct morality on rational grounds: Spinoza’s viewpoint of eternity, Hobbes’s social contract, Kant’s categorical imperative, Rawls’s veil of ignorance, Nagel’s view from nowhere, Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal, and of course the Golden Rule and its precious-metallic variants, rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions.1
The impressive range of nominally secular philosophers Pinker cites here as having reached the same conclusion appears to lend it credibility, as though it’s an obvious fact they’ve all discovered independently. But digging deeper into the meaning of the idea will challenge the naturalistic respectability of a morality of impartiality.
Consider first Pinker’s reference to John Rawls, who revived political philosophy in academia in the 1970s. His theory of social justice left its mark by profoundly influencing today’s liberal-egalitarian consensus in favor of the welfare state.2 One would hope that an impact like this would have been powered by the most high-octane, empirically grounded, scientific philosophy.
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