Is a god your source of morality?

Is a god your source of morality --“originating morality and rewarding it and punishing its delinquency”?

You’d have a few questions to answer to make that even sound intelligible.

Which god?

Why that one?

What gives him or her the authority to make the rules, and to judge how you follow them?

And why those rules anyway? 

And how in any case do you choose between a god who says to kill your enemies, and another who says to offer them both cheeks to be flayed?

Between one who says give up your worldly goods, and another who says to rip them from your enemies?

And if you have some basis for choosing between gods, or even choosing between the rules made by your god, then why can’t you choose your own rules yourself based on something more rational than a list someone is supposed to have been given while spending a night up on a mountain, or in a trance under a banyan tree.

Choosing your own guidelines for living in the world  seems to make much more sense than using some questionable old deity’s hand-me-downs. For one thing, neither Allah, nor Zeus, nor Wotan, nor Yahweh has a worldwide monopoly on morality—and neither do these four  nor any of the other popular deities even seem to be what we would call moral.  Consider just the moral character of this last one, as “revealed” in the book written by his followers:

He routinely punishes people for the sins of others. He punishes all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth, for Eve’s sin. He punishes all human beings by condemning them to labor, for Adam’s sin (Gen. 3:16-18). He regrets his creation, and in a fit of pique, commits genocide and ecocide by flooding the earth (Gen. 6:7). He hardens Pharaoh’s heart against freeing the Israelites (Ex. 7:3), so as to provide the occasion for visiting plagues upon the Egyptians, who, as helpless subjects of a tyrant, had no part in Pharaoh’s decision. (So much for respecting free will, the standard justification for the existence of evil in the world.)”

And for another thing…

So how do we decide what’s nice and what’s nasty? And what are the consequences if we don’t? If your gods are dead, then is everything really permitted?

To answer that questions presupposes an even more fundamental question: Why do we even need morality at all?  And to answer that, I’m going to have to tell you a story involving beer.

Read on …

THE CRUCIAL FACT ABOUT human life that provides the starting point for thinking about morality is the conditional nature of life; the fact that living beings daily confront the ever-present alternative of life or death or, as we meet the alternative in our daily lives, of flourishing as opposed to bare survival. Act in this way and our life is sustained, and is good. Act in that way, and it isn't, and it's shit.

Life and happiness is far from automatic; it requires effort to sustain it, and reason to ascertain what leads towards death (which is bad), and what leads towards life (which is good).

What standard then provides the basis by which a rational morality judges what one ought to do, or ought not to do? The answer seems clear: Life itself. Life itself is the standard of morality. As Ayn Rand observed in her essay ‘The Objectivist Ethics,’

    “It is only the concept of "Life" that makes the concept of "Value" possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”

Or as another great thinker once said:

"Life's too short to drink bad beer."

You wouldn't think it would take centuries to work this out, but it did.  It took centuries because, despite Aristotle's good start 2300 years ago when he talked about the importance of happiness and The Good Life (what he called eudaimonism), after him we had centuries of various religionists infesting the field of morality while trying to make good beer.

It took Ayn Rand to eventually build on what Aristotle started. As Greg Salmieri and Alan Gotthelf point out:

    “Rand’s virtue-focused rational egoism differs from traditional [ie., Aristotelian] eudaimonism in that Rand regards ethics as an exact science. Rather than deriving her virtues from a vaguely defined human function, she takes “Man’s Life” – i.e. that which is required for the survival of a rational animal across its lifespan – as her standard of value. This accounts for the nobility she ascribes to production – “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (1966, p. 9). For Rand, reason is man’s means of survival, and even the most theoretical and spiritual functions – science, philosophy, art, love, and reverence for the human potential, among others – are for the sake of life-sustaining action. This, for her, does not demean the spiritual by “bringing it down” to the level of the material; rather, it elevates the material and grounds the spiritual.”

THE FACT THAT LIFE is conditional tells us what we ought to do: in the most basic sense, if we wish to sustain our life, then we ought to act in a certain way. This is the starting point for a rational, reality-based ethics: reality itself.

     Consider, for example, that brown glass on the left.  Is this perhaps a beer which we see before us?  Or something else?  Is it a good beer, or just a Tui? The fact of what  it is determines it’s value--and it's questions like thesethat can only be answered when you have a rational standard by whch to measure them

    If that glass of brown liquid in front before us is dangerously toxic, then if life is your standard one ought not drink it. That would be bad. If, however, it is a glass of Epic Pale Ale, Limburg Czechmate or Stonecutter Renaissance Scotch Ale, then all things being equal one ought to consume it -- and with gusto. That would be good.

    So much for the 'is-ought problem'--or what some philospophers call the "fact and value chasm.'  What provides the basic level of guidance as to what one ought to do or ought not do is the fact that reality is constituted in a certain way--and that every living being confronts the fundamental existential alternative of life or death is .

This fundamental alternative highlights an immutable fact of nature, which is that everything that is alive must either act in some certain ways or it will die. A lion must hunt or starve. A deer must run from the hunter or be eaten. Man must obtain food and shelter, or perish.  We ought to seek out good beer or else sentence ourselves to a lifetime of drinking Tui.
The pursuit of morality, and the very contents of our fridge,  is that important.
The fact that we exist possessing a specific nature and that reality is constituted the way it is tells us what we ought to do.  Right there, just like that: that's the basic and only rational source of morality.

So to any living being alert enough to notice it, facts are not inherently value-free, they are value-laden – some facts are harmful and we should act to avoid them; others are likely to be so pleasant that we should act to embrace them --  but all facts we should seek to understand, and in this context we should understand that all facts are potentially of either value or disvalue to us.   Facts are inherently value-laden.
Contemplating the delightful reality of a glass of Limburg Czechmate, for example, demonstrates that some facts can be very desirable indeed, and are very much worth embracing. The point here is that it is not the facts themselves that make them valuable, it is our own relationship to those facts: how those facts impinge upon and affect our lives for either good or ill. It is up to us to discover and to make the most of these values. Leonard Peikoff makes the point in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand: 

    “Sunlight, tidal waves, the law of gravity, et al. are not good or bad; they simply are; such facts constitute reality and are thus the basis of all value-judgments. This does not, however, alter the principle that every "is" implies an "ought." The reason is that every fact of reality which we discover has, directly or indirectly, an implication for man's self-preservation and thus for his proper course of action. In relation to the goal of staying alive, the fact demands specific kinds of actions and prohibits others; i.e., it entails a definite set of evaluations.
    “For instance, sunlight is a fact of metaphysical reality; but once its effects are discovered by man and integrated to his goals, a long series of evaluations follows: the sun is a good thing (an essential of life as we know it); i.e., within the appropriate limits, its light and heat are good, good for us; other things being equal, therefore, we ought to plant our crops in certain locations, build our homes in a certain way (with windows), and so forth; beyond the appropriate limits, however, sunlight is not good (it causes burns or skin cancer); etc. All these evaluations are demanded by the cognitions involved -- if one pursues knowledge in order to guide one's actions. Similarly, tidal waves are bad, even though natural; they are bad for us if we get caught in one, and we ought to do whatever we can to avoid such a fate. Even the knowledge of the law of gravity, which represents a somewhat different kind of example, entails a host of evaluations --among the most obvious of which are: using a parachute in midair is good, and jumping out of a plane without one is bad, bad for a man's life.”

But this is (or should be) basic stuff.

NOW, IN SEEING MORALITY in this way it becomes clear that morality is not primarily about duty (ie., we must do thar because we're told to) but about causality (we must do this if we want that). That's the natural result of our reality focus, and it throws out all the duty-based ethics that are still lying around as a result of too many religionists cluttering up talk about ethics.

But what also becomes clear is that the primary beneficiary of our good actions is not others, but ourselves--and our primary responsibility is not to others, but fundamentally our responsibility to ourselves. Without first understanding our responsibility for sustaining our own life, no other responsibilities or obligations are even possible. (This might help explain to interested readers why it's no accident that Ayn Rand named her own work on ethics: The Virtue of Selfishness.)

Tibor Machan, for example, once observed that this fact is recognised even in airline travel, when the instruction is always given that if oxygen masks drop from the ceiling you should put your own on first before trying to help others. Basically, this is a recognition that if you don't look after yourself first then you're dead, and of no use either to anyone else or to yourself.

This makes more sense than the basic conundrum of all altruist ethics -- i.e., if we all have a duty to others, than what are all the others here for? But it does mean that in talking about selfishness we recognise that it means thinking about our long-term rational self-interest (not just short-term pleasures); and we realise that other folk are themselves a potential value to ourselves, and our loved ones so valuable that we wouldn't be able to live without them at all. So being selfish about our values means being selfish about their value as well.



SO MORALITY IS ABOUT thinking long term. That has impications too. Unless you're a university philosophy professor (or David Hume) you don't simply sit there looking wide-eyed at the world, acting only on the basis of what appears in front of you on the bar. As Aristotle pointed out, if we want the good then our actions should be goal-directed.  A rational man acts with purpose: that is, he acts in pursuit of his values. If our purpose is the enjoyment of more glasses of Limburg Czechmate, for example, (something even David Hume would agree is a value) then we must act in a way that allows us to acquire more drinking vouchers with which to buy them, a fridge in which to keep them, and the means by which to sustain our health, wealth and happiness so that we might enjoy them for many more years in the future.
We should act in this way or in that way, in other words, in order to bring into reality certain facts that our (rationally-derived) values tell us are good. Acting in this way is itself good. We might even call it “virtuous” – virtues being the means by which we acquire our values.
 The fact that many men and women before us exercised their own virtues to produce the fridges, pharmaceuticals and entertainments that both extend our lives and makes them worth living gives us grounds for much thanks--and it also gives us powerful  evidence of the survival value of goal-direct skull sweat.
And more than just survival value: this is the means by which we flourish. We don’t want life; we want  “the Good Life.”

    “In psychological terms, the issue of man's survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of "life or death," but as an issue of "happiness or suffering." Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the signal of failure, of death...
Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values...
    “But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”

The purpose of morality is to teach you not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.  Such is the nature of a rational morality:

• The fact that the world is constituted as it is means we must take goal-directed action to stay alive;
• This means we must make reality our source of morality;
• The fact that life itself is conditional on our actions means that life must be our standard for our actions -- my life, here on this earth;
•  if we wish to achieve happiness we ought to act upon values derived from a rational morality focused upon life here on this earth.

    What the hell else could ever be more important?
Let me say it again on conclusion: the source of morality -- the only rational source -- is not obedience to what your god says or your neighbour says bout his god; it's not doing what your priest or your pastor or your Imam says; it's not subscribing to the same standards as your teachers or your peers or the folks who live next door; it's not listening to what your own "inner voice" seems to say, or what your mother or your father or your Great Grandfather Stonebender used to say.  Not if it defies reason.
The rational source is Reality, and the rational standard is Life, our life, and the lives of those we love. The immediate beneficiary of our actions is not others; it's ourself, and the purpose of such a standard is not to suffer and die, but to enjoy ourselves and live. 

TO TURN DESCARTES ON his head (which is no less than the silly French philosopher deserves), the basic ethical principle is this:

"I am, therefore I'll think!"

Because if we don't think clearly there'll soon be no "I" around to think about.
I hope you think about that.

PS: For your homework, if you're thinking want to know more about Objectivist morality (which is what I've been talking about here, or trying to) then you might want to act on that thought ...

• 'The Objectivist Ethics,' by Ayn Rand, in her book The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism.
• Audiobook excerpt from the introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness.
• Religion and Morality - a free talk by Onkar Ghate at the Ayn Rand Institute web page.
• Is-Ought? Not a Problem - Not PC
• Why Morality at All? - Not PC
• Does Evil Exist? - Not PC
• Cue Card Libertarianism: Morality - Not PC