Beyond Atheism ep3, The Murky Depths of Moral Relativism

Morality is real, but not universal or eternal. Understanding and discussing the subjective nature of socially constructed norms is tricky…

This episode was a bit looser in that Nathan and I really did have a discussion that took us from one place to another logically without much reliance on empirics. This was mostly for a bit of philosophical self-defense and table setting.

I say self-defense because moral relativism is often used as a cudgel to attack atheists even though, as an objective descriptor, moral relativism only points out that different cultures have different notions of right and wrong, good and evil. Comparing the treatment of alcohol and caffeine consumption illustrates this pretty plainly. In Islam, consumption of alcohol is prohibited, but caffeine is permitted. In Mormonism both are prohibited. In Catholicism, the consumption of alcohol is practically a requirement. Of course, this problem exists in the secular world as well; different countries have different drinking ages, and cultures express different measures of what appropriate consumption is for alcohol. In Italy you might have wine at lunch; in the US we generally see 5 pm as the earliest time for a drink. For each of these your cultural background determines what you consider good or bad to do.

Of course, religious leaders love to make the claim that moral relativism is simply picking and choosing, and flip-flopping, moral standards on a whim. It can also be used to make the claim that by accepting the existence of moral relativism we need to accept the actions of others as fine because they are following their own moral code. These arguments are complete and utter bullshit for reasons that I think are sufficiently discussed in the podcast, mostly that all “eternal” moral codes are particular social constructs defined by the in-group.

In the podcast, we talked about how the awareness that all morality is socially constructed and atheists are free to determine morality socially in the absence of religious authorities. We did not, however, talk about how important it is to understand this in order for atheists to defend themselves from baseless charges of “moral relativism”. In a society that still believes one needs to be religious to be good it is necessary to be able to defend oneself from nonsense arguments.

Also in the discussion was a great point Nathan brought up but we didn’t really discuss much, but one I hope we are able to come back to in the future and in greater depth. I took for granted that moral codes are essentially human until Nathan mentioned that it might be inherited from earlier, social hominids and that it may have a genetic basis. It is both pretty wild and sensible since any social group would need some sense of order. I looked into it a little and found that the work of Frans de Waal largely backs up Nathan’s claim. De Waal’s examination of primates found that chimps have a pre-moral foundation of reciprocity and empathy. This was discovered empirically through numerous experiments and the work is all very clever and insightful. He argues from his experimental findings that primates may possess a sense of fairness — a notion of right and wrong. It is probably a leap to import this entirely onto humans, but it suggests that morality would have developed before religion and that religion is more of a superstructure resting on genetic and social inclinations. If that is the case, then religious morality of today owes a lot to our common ancestors who we share with primates. Perhaps DEVO was right to declare that “God made man, but a monkey supplied the glue.”