Yesterday, just before going to bed, I ran across this essay by ethicist Joel Marks on the New York Times called "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist". I found it to be a refreshing look at the moral implications of atheism, and I commented on Facebook that it was nice to read a "serious" atheist. A friend took exception to my comment and wrote:
What exactly do you find 'serious' about this? If anything, I find it almost exactly not serious. This guy sounds like an atheist who at some level wishes he just could be a believer and make all the tricky stuff go away. I think teh kidz call this a faithiest.
I wrote a reply in which I tried to express the logical reasons of this particular atheist's choice of moral relativism and why it was important to understand it.
I doubt that I am unique here, but it often feels as if morals are real, i.e., that there is an objective right and wrong. When someone has wronged me, it feels as though his action was not just wrong for me but for him as well. And I would like to think that, at times, I am truly justified in my anger toward someone else. So if I feel so strongly about a moral reality, then why?
One answer, I suppose, is that morals do not exist as we would feel they should. Instead of morals, the argument goes, each of us merely has preferences. Morals themselves are an illusion or, at best, are an emergent property formed out of the complex interactions of our subjective preferences. Either way, morals do not have real authority.
Regardless of whether that particular argument is true, Prof. Marks is convinced that his atheism demands that it is true. He explains why here:
"A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset […] But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? […] Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?"
As a humanist, he finds truth in the inward feeling of beauty one sees in a sunset (what his friend calls God). But it is the experience between man and sunset that he finds transcendent, not the sunset itself. As an atheist, he knows this is not really God, but like his friend he did "adamantly affirm the objectivity of right and wrong". Yet at his "anti-epiphany", he realizes that there is a duality between his friend's belief in God and his belief in morals. As man is to sunset, man is also to lie. He supposes that he should be as amoral as he is atheist. And in that case, morals do not exist any more than God does.
What is so "serious" about this atheist is that once he realizes that his philosophy demands that he give up an important aspect of his life -- morality is important to an ethicist -- he does so without question. Moreover, I find it commendable that he focuses on the questions of atheist morality instead of the more worn out question of whether atheists are moral. I find the notion of a relative morality absolutely fascinating because it raises a huge list of questions. Prof. Marks covers some in his essay: Are any acts not permissible? How does one deal with disagreement? How does one escape moral nihilism? What are the societial implications of such a philosophy? How can we rely on an instinctual morality when it is so unreliable? Each of these is a hard question, and hence I don't agree that it as an easy way out.
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