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Many people automatically believe in the necessity of a divine being to establish a sense of morality in society, while others find their moral compass elsewhere. Some individuals believe that concepts such as love are nothing more than chemical reactions. Where do people who don’t believe in God get their morality? Is God a requirement for morality? Or is the belief in God a personal choice?
According to testimony, empathy, respect for life, understanding of the world, knowing what it’s like to suffer, and not wanting to cause suffering in others, are sources of morality. Suffering can be defined as:
- Pain
- Lack
- Loneliness
- Hunger
- Unfairness
It has been suggested that morality such as this cannot be legislated. To some, empathy that doesn’t allow room for error cannot be trusted to reduce suffering. Some believe retribution does not bring back the dead, and therefore, killing a killer solves nothing.
Another point of view is that morality comes from a combination of empathy, an intuitive sense of fairness, learned social consensus, disgust, fear of retribution, the desire to be seen as trustworthy, and the desire to behave according to logically coherent principles.
Reincarnation
Another reasoning behind morality is the understanding that moral systems are somewhat memetic. So, to some extent, you should act according to principles that you would prefer everyone to align with. If you assign any credence to things like reincarnation, and you’re not sure who or what you’re liable to be reincarnated as, then even without empathy, you should want the collective morality to be relatively impartial.
Consider a society with a morality entirely about maximizing the wellbeing of the rich at the expense of the poor. If you’re reborn into a poor family, you’ll wish it were different. Likewise, you could have a morality entirely focused on maximizing human wellbeing, but if reincarnation makes you into a cow or a shrimp, you’ll wish you had cared more about cow and shrimp welfare instead of exclusively human welfare. It may happen outside the constraints of time, so that you could be reborn as someone you interact with every day, your pet dog, or a bug that just crawled in through an open window.
A universally applied golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were them, because one day you might be.” If one had to choose one metaphysical belief on which to base a morality, reincarnation might be it.
God and Morality
When it comes to the religious perspective on morality, there are different takes on the subject. It has been suggested that if God is proven to exist and makes moral statements, these would still be mere opinions, God’s opinions, on ethical questions.
One argument is that a person who does deeds because they believe them to be the will of God isn’t necessarily more moral than a person who does good naturally. A person may just be trying to get favor from the gods.
The argument can be made that empathy has limits. Suppose you’re in a courtroom explaining why the death penalty is evil out of empathy, and the other side says it’s more empathetic to kill the murderer out of empathy for the victim. Who’s empathy wins and why? There must be a higher appeal than empathy alone. Some would argue that it cannot be God. Each individual would still have to decide for themselves if God’s words were true.
Some argue that without religion, you don’t have a compass on what is good or evil. There are those who acknowledge God exists, but their understanding of God is just not the same. Morality to them is Godly, just not in the same way others think. They may not call it an objective code.
One theory states that an omnipotent one would have the right to decide what is fact and what is opinion, as the ultimate shaper of reality.
Is morality what God decrees is good, or specifically what God decrees is good at any given instant? If God can alter morality, it implies that Goodness, in a way, is more about doing what God says and not about what’s actually viewed as good by the individual.
It has also been suggested that morality is a social species.
In the end, morality comes from self. Some believe they are sentient and can judge, just as God is sentient and can judge. They judge God just as He can judge them.
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