Peter Singer & John Hare - Moral Mammals: Why Do We Matter? - The Veritas Forum

welcome to the Veritas forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life thank you very much Eric for that introduction thank you all of you and thanks to the Veritas forum for this invitation and also for what you're trying to do in get these really deep and important issues raised in a setting which encourages skepticism and discussion but which I hope will be a serious and not overly polemical consideration of the issues so let's begin with a question that our student MC raised and that Dostoevsky famously raised is it the case that if there is no God everything is permitted why would any of us think that that is the case why would we think for example that whether or not some of the atrocities that we have seen committed around the world in recent years most recently say the terrorist attacks that we had in in Mumbai or perhaps even more recent ones in again in Iraq or go back to to 9/11 or think about the genocide in Darfur or the Nazi Holocaust why would we think that whether or not those things are permitted depends on our belief in a being who created the universe and has various other characteristics that we traditionally attribute to God well I suppose one reason you might say look if there isn't a God then who is there to prohibit them or for that matter to permit them and then you might sort of say well perhaps there's international law we have international laws against genocide and the question is where they're permitted by those things excuse me I mean talking a little too much the last few days and my throat is not great but of course we're talking about morality today we're not talking about law so I think we should we should set that aside now if you're a theist perhaps you can say these acts are prohibited by God and it's true that if you're an atheist you cannot say that but of course the fact that a theist can say these acts are prohibited by God doesn't make it true that they are prohibited by God if there is no God then obviously that statement can't be true and perhaps although it's not really our topic let me just take 30 seconds to say that I don't believe that there is a god I certainly don't believe that there is a God who meets the attributes traditionally given by Christians to God of being omnipotent omniscient and omni-benevolent as I view the world which has an immense amount of suffering in it and some of that suffering is I think impossible to reconcile even with Christian traditional views even if you accept traditional Christian views for example that human beings have free will and that therefore God must allow humans to inflict suffering on other humans that doesn't explain all the suffering in the world because there is obviously suffering caused by things that have nothing to do with human free will such as droughts or floods or fires whatever that might be and even if you're prepared to say that you follow the Christian tradition that human suffer because they bear the sin of Adam and Adams Eve's defiance of God which I have to say I think is a morally horrible doctrine that we should suffer because of what was done by our ancestors a long time ago but even if you hold that view it's impossible to explain why non-human animals who are not descended by Adam should suffer and yet they do suffer I think it's obvious that they suffer Descartes denied that they suffer and actually his denial of their suffering was in part to avoid this very problem of evil that I'm talking about but there are very few people who agree with Descartes now that animals can't suffer so if we agree that animals do suffer and we agree that again some of their suffering is not at the hands of humans with freewill but some of their suffering is caused by the fact that let's say there's a drought somewhere in the world say where I come from in Australia there have recently been terrible droughts and if say you know kangaroos die painfully of thirst because the water holes on which they depend dry up then this is neither something that you could attribute to human free will nor to inheriting Adam sinned and I can't understand how an all-powerful and all good and all-knowing God could possibly have Allah created a world in which that exists so that's why as I was saying it seems to me that there is no such God and that's why these questions are very real ones and if indeed therefore although it may be true that the theists can claim that without belief in God we can't say that these acts are wrong because God prohibited them that nevertheless seems to me the situation that we are just stuck with and we have to make the best of that situation that we can so although I am willing to admit maybe that in some ways there would be various things that you could say about the foundations of morality if you were a theist that you are not open to you if you're an atheist that just as I said it seems to be the way the world is and so we have to accept that that and understand the phenomenon of morality as best we can in that world without God does that mean though supposing as I say that there is no God does that mean that the Atheist can't say that some of the acts that I had mentioned before are morally wrong well let's ask why anyone would want to say that why anyone like Dostoevsky would want to say that if there is no God you can't say that some things are morally wrong I prefer that terms are prohibited because prohibited does have this notion of laws and a law Giver and that perhaps doesn't work well without a belief in God but why would anyone think that you can't say acts are morally wrong without the existence of God I'm gonna mention three distinct reasons three distinct grounds why some people some theorists have suggested that you can't say this the first claim is that the terms right and wrong are meaningless unless you believe in the existence of God and they said to be meaningless sometimes because something is right only because God wills it or commands it and wrong only because it's contrary to his will so the very meaning of the moral terms you might say is bound up with the idea of a God who gives meaning to these terms by his commands now the standard response to this is what is known as the Euthyphro argument coming from plato's dialogue of that name and I must admit I'm a little tentative about discussing the you throw with somebody who's written a commentary on it I am certainly and not a scholar of Plato or of the use of throw so I if I if I get some of what the actual argument was out of its context I'm ready to stand corrected but the important point the argument whether or not it's it's the exact argument that the plato was making seems to me to be this if you say that right and wrong are meaningless without God you have to say whether it's the case that something is right only because because God wills it and wrong only because it's contrary to his will and then whether this means that if God had willed something different then different things would be right and wrong so that if God had willed us to let's say torture babies then then it would be right for us to torture babies and if God had willed us not to help the weak and vulnerable then it would be wrong for us to help the weak and vulnerable now you might say of course well God is the God of love and and God could not have willed that that we torture babies and don't help the weak and vulnerable but that suggests that you already have a notion of what is good perhaps you're saying that love is good and that the loving act is the good act to to perform which is independent of what God wills so this is this is in a way the dilemma that you face either that there is no notion of right and wrong independent of God if you take that seriously then God could have willed us to do things differently and they would have been right or wrong and that produces an outcome that I think is hard to accept otherwise you say well God wills these things because they are good because they are perhaps the loving things to do and he's a God of love but then you have to have the idea that there is some notion of good independently of God so it doesn't seem to me that you can say the very terms meaningless without God at least not unless you're prepared to bite the bullet on this claim that God really was making an arbitrary decision in choosing to command to help the weak and vulnerable rather than in choosing us in choosing tirant command us to kick them when they're down let's say so I find it impossible to accept that kind of claim the second time might be okay so let's admit that the terms right and wrong would have some meaning even in an atheist universe we could understand what they meant we could talk about what was right and wrong but in some sense but we wouldn't really know what was right and wrong without God's guidance shown through revelation for the Christians shown through the the Gospels and perhaps to some extent through the Hebrew Scriptures as well and that's what tells us what is is right and wrong but in fact if we look at what Christians actually do when they develop a Christian morality they certainly don't simply take everything that is in the in the Gospels as the source of morality and and take it from there there are many things which Christians don't take very seriously as as Eric Gregory mentioned in introducing me I've just written a book about what our obligations are with regard to world poverty and it's a topic that I've written about on several occasions over the years and I think it's something that Christians you know it seems to me clear that in fact if you if you were to say what is the single most emphasized aspect of the teaching of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels it would be to help before it would be taking such things as as what he said to the rich man if you want to be perfect go and sell all your possessions and give to the poor that it's as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle that when we give feasts we should invite the poor the maimed the lame and the blind and so on that's constantly emphasized in the scriptures and yet it seems clearly not to be well followed Christian churches in this country generally do not say that if you're a rich and have a lot of possessions you are not being a good person they don't really even very much emphasize giving to the poor although some of them do a reasonably good job of that and others do a much less good job of it they're much more likely to emphasize as distinctly Christian morality things that are not really in the Gospels but Jesus says for example nothing really about abortion or homosexuality although they opposition to those seems to be a central part of what is considered Christian morality in this country Jesus did condemn divorce very clearly except perhaps in the case of adultery again most Christian churches accept divorce even in circumstances other than adultery you might say some people will say well the the remarks about homosexuality are not in the New Testament but in the Old Testament and some remarks about abortion can be found there as well but if we start to appeal to the Old Testament we get into a real morass of injunctions of various kinds including the idea that eating shrimp is an abomination to God something that Jews take seriously or Orthodox Jews take seriously but Christians generally don't and of course the chapter in numbers if you don't know the Book of Numbers chapter 31 take a look God here explicitly commands the Israelites to commit genocide and they do and that's in accordance with God's command as as portrayed in the Old Testament not something I think that we want to take as a moral lesson so in fact if the Scriptures whether all known you are supposed to be a source of knowledge about what's right or wrong we would be I think acting very differently from from what we do it's hard to know exactly how we would act but clearly what we're doing is using our reasoning our intelligence our thought to try and select from this enormous amount of different injunctions which are the ones that we endorse that we want to choose and sometimes we do that because some sometimes we reject them because they're uncomfortable to us such as the injunction to the rich man and sometimes we reject them because they just seem wrong to us not sort of things that are important so I don't think that we can use that argument that we need religion to work out what is right or wrong because I think we're doing that already by our own judgement a third claim that I want to consider is that even though the terms right and wrong make sense without God and even though we can use our intelligence and discernment to work out what is right and wrong nevertheless without God we wouldn't do it God provides the motivation for us to do this and in the traditional Christian view of course this motivation is linked up with immortality this motivation is the idea of reward or punishment in an afterlife it's an explicitly self-interested motivation some people don't like that some people think that in fact the motivation that religion brings should not be as naked Lee a self-interested one as we get in in the Gospels where it is pretty clearly repeatedly emphasized about our rewards and Punishment in the afterlife and they may say well rather we should follow the example of Jesus as a kind of inspiration but I think we can we can follow various examples as inspirational we don't need to regard Jesus as divine to be inspired by him if indeed that is what we wish to be inspired by or we could be inspired by many other morally virtuous people throughout the world some of whom have been religious and some of whom have not been religious for example we might be inspired by what Bill Gates is trying to do to reduce poverty in the world today certainly a pioneering example at least in the modern era followed by Warren Buffett who is supporting those efforts to to reduce poverty neither Gates nor Buffett is religious as so it seems clear that that you can have many examples of ethical behavior among people who are not religious it's also very clear that you can have many examples of unethical behavior among people who are religious we've had a lot of them recently a lot of scandals in various churches of various kinds among those who are religious we all know about them there doesn't really seem to be any good correlation between people being religious and people acting ethically in fact according to an article by Gregory Paul in the Journal of religion and society in 2005 if you look at things like murder rates abortion rates teenage pregnancy and suicide and compare prosperous SEC prosperous societies and grade them on whether they're religious or relatively secular you don't find any correlation favoring the religious societies in fact the United States which is more religious than almost any of the prosperous democracies in the world also has higher murder rates higher teenage pregnancy rates and so on so it doesn't really seem that in practice we need religion as a motivation for us now you might say okay I've suggested I've rejected a number of reasons why we might want to relate religion to morality or feel that a religion as one of these questions says that the Creator is is is foundational or is necessary for morality but you might say well but still you know it's still a bit of mystery isn't it where does morality come from what is it really well I would argue that morality firstly I would I would take an evolutionary view of our existence of where we come from that seems to me to be well grounded in the evidence I think that we clear it's clear that we are social mammals it's clear that both in humans and in some of those other social mammals to whom we are most closely connected you can find the development and evolution of forms of social behavior which are close to similar to parallels to some of our moral principles so you find things like practices of caring for one's kin caring for offspring among social mammals which we certainly regard as a moral obligation for parents to care for their offspring you also find reciprocity developing in other social mammals practices of cooperation and of repaying cooperation with further cooperation and conversely repaying a failure to cooperate with some kind of penalty or some kind of negative behavior you find this in many social mammals been well described in evolutionary psychology and in ethology and even notions of fairness that derive from it there's been research on the primates which show that they have basic notions of fairness that for instance if they and a another primate another companion in the same area are given similar tasks and the other one gets a much better reward for doing the task than when one primary gets the primate that gets the inferior reward is likely to become angry and reject it much as human children will do with that early sense of fairness that they develop so I think it's reasonable to say that a lot of a lot of our moral instincts come out of our evolution that's not to say that they are therefore right on the country I think we can be critical of our of instincts and sometimes we should be but that's where they come from now on top of that we evolved a capacity to reason a capacity to think we have all that no doubt because it had survival advantages and the conditions at which we were living but it gives us as well as those survival advisors it gives us capacities to see our place in the universe to empathize with other beings in the universe and to ask questions like would I what would I think if someone were to do that to me that's a very very basic question which I think is very important in taking reality beyond the stage of those instincts that I was talking about - something that we can talk about and reason about so I think because we have that capacity we put ourselves in the position of others and we get something that corresponds to what you may know of as the Golden Rule doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and you may think of that as something coming out of a religious tradition and maybe surprised that I'm basing ethics on it now but in fact it's not something that is specific to any religious tradition it's something that we find in a whole variety of developed cultures which have thought about ethics and have developed if you like philosophical traditions reflective traditions about the nature of ethics some of those are religious as the Jewish and Christian traditions and Islamic traditions are some of them are not like the Confucian tradition for example where you find this or the stoic tradition so I believe that this is just something that we come to as a result of thinking about the world and thinking about our position in it if we reflect enough on it and sometimes that you know within a religious culture that will be expressed religiously within a secular culture that will be expressed in a secular way and I think we get to think about what it is that we want to do in ethics by thinking about that kind of a tradition of that kasoori that kind of method of reflecting on what we do so if we want to know whether something's right or wrong we ought to put ourselves in the position of all of those affected by our action and asked is this what I would want to be done if I were in the position of all of those who are affected by our action and if we could say yes to that of course a very complicated question especially when we're talking about different beings some gaining some losing some of those beings not even being human beings perhaps non-human animals where we can experience imagine what it's like to be in this situation it's a very complicated question but insofar as we can answer it I think we have and the best answer we can give to questions such as what is right or wrong and it's an answer which does not need us to refer to the idea of a god or a creator thank you very much and I I too want to thank Veritas and thank Eric for agreeing to moderate this last time Peter Singer and I talked together in public it was at my father's memorial service at the University Church in Oxford and the family chose Peter because we thought that of all my father students he had done the most to keep alive my father's ethical theory of universal prescriptivism I'm not saying that Peter has taken over the theory hook line and sinker he's modified it in certain ways and I have to but there's nonetheless a common ground between us here we're not going to talk about our disagreements about let's say the infanticide of defective newborns we're going to talk about our disagreements about an initial choice that Peter Singer makes I quote to treat ethics has entirely independent of religion that's the question can we do that we're not going to disagree I think about the meaning of the term good roughly the good is what draws us and deserves to draw us we're not going to disagree about whether atheists can know the good I think gods revealed enough about good and bad to every human being so that every human being can be held accountable also I'm not going to say that atheists can't be morally good I think there are atheists whose moral lives put the lives of many theists to shame and I think Peter Singer might be one of those people but I am going to disagree about motivation and justification so I'm going to make three points the third point is about justification that's the question is why should I take the moral demand as a demand upon me the second point will be about motivation motivation is what actually gets us to lead a morally good life and the first point will be about the governance of the world or of the universe I want to say that God has organized the world in such a way that our morality and our happiness can belong together that they can be consistent with each other and the problem here as I see it is that morality is so demanding morality requires at least that every human need should count equally morally wherever it occurs and that makes it very difficult for example to go to a movie especially if it's not a very good movie if you consider that as we as we talk here as we have this discussion there are thousands of people in the world dying of starvation I'm a Christian so I think of it this way jesus said in as far as you do it to the least of these my brothers and sisters you do it to me and he's talking here about people who are hungry people who are naked don't have any clothes people who don't have a place to live and he says in as far as you do it to the least of these my brothers and sisters you do it to me so we could ask which would Jesus prefer that I go to the movie or that the life be saved that makes life the moral life very difficult if I'm concerned only with my happiness then I'll go to the movie I'll take a nice vacation I'll buy the down jacket how can i how can I trust that the moral life and my happiness can be consistent with each other so that I don't have to do what's morally wrong in order to be happy if I don't have that trust then the commitment to the moral life becomes rationally unstable because I think our experience of the world is one in which those two good things that is morality and Happiness come apart the most that we can justify by enlightened self-interest is being fairly good at least when other people are looking but morality requires unconditional commitment to the impartial point of view or the point of view of the universe some philosophers react to this difficulty by reducing the moral demand to make it easier but Peter Singer is admirable both in his writing and in his living in that he does not do that he's a utilitarian that is somebody roughly who believes that the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number and I think the greatest utilitarian was Henry Sidgwick and the the the argument I've just been making is from Henry Sidgwick he says there are two basic principles that reason gives us egoism that is to produce as much happiness as possible for me and the utilitarian principle which says I should do this for every sentient being but these these principles the egoist principle useless Aryan principle are in tension with each other and he proposed two solutions only one of which he thought worked one solution the one that doesn't work is to bring in psychology that is our sympathetic pleasures that we we get happy when we see other people happy so we get happy by making other people happy and see if we accept the problem with that is it's limited in its scope because we care most about the people who are closest to us our friends and our family and the problem is if we just take sympathetic pleasures into count all our caring will end up being used up by our friends and family so Citrix said the other solution is to bring in God God who cares both about our morality and our moral lives and about our happiness and he cares about the happiness of every sentient being and he holds us accountable to that standard and sidorak said I quote that is indispensable to the systemic coherence of our beliefs then Mill said very much the same thing that hope I'm quoting now from the from his essays on religion hope about the governance of the universe and life after death is philosophically defensible and without this hope we're kept down by the disastrous feeling of not worthwhile and he meant there the moral life is not worthwhile and the same thing can be found in my father's work who talks about the governance of the universe about people like Hitler coming to a bad end and he quotes in the end from the psalm which says where God says the earth is weak and all its inhabitants I bear up the pillars of it so this is a basic trust in the governance of the universe that I'm talking about that the good is more fundamental in it than the evil and that the good will in the end win or will prevail as Martin Luther King said I still believe that one day humankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed we shall overcome now singer brings up evil as he should if the good is so fundamental to the world why is there so much evil why would the good God allow it one possibility is there are good gods and bad gods fighting it out but for 3,000 years the Manas the monotheists religions who believe in one God have found ways to come to terms with the agonizing evil in their own experience in fact much of great religious art and literature has come out of this tension when I was writing about this last I met with a woman called Ava who had been in the concentration camps of World War two she said that her experience was that those people who went into the camps with a strong faith came out if they did come out with their faith stronger than when they went in that is their faith in God had been present with them Haylee we sell says even though he has no answer to the problem of evil he says he became closer to God through his protest so we're tempted to say looking at the Holocaust a good God couldn't allow that but then we need to take seriously and respectfully the witness of those people who were in those experiences and in those experiences they found God we can say also the Holocaust is chosen by humans not chosen by God and God respects our human freedom even to do the most terrible things Peter says what about tsunamis or droughts not caused by humans tsunamis are caused by I suppose shifts in plates and those are part of the regulation of the temperature of the earth which is one of the characteristics necessary for life the ions and antelopes when they meet the antelopes get eaten but I think natural selection though bloody is also to a surprising extent cooperative we should think of evolution as God's instrument but the truth is I often don't know what God's reason is for allowing something and rather than discussing those sorts of arguments that I've just mentioned I want to suggest a different one this is one particularly appropriate for somebody like Peter Singer and myself also people who believe in the rationality of morality because it's not just any evil that God couldn't have a reason for we can imagine even humans having a reason to allow some evil it must be the amount of evil how much evil would they have to be for us to say God couldn't possibly have a reason to allow that and in particular it would I think have to be so great that morality would not any longer be rational for us limited beings to pursue suppose it was the case for example that whenever we tried to do good what resulted was harm that would be I think enough evil for us to say probably the world is not run by a good god but by some evil demon who wants to make our moral lives absurd and indeed some philosophers do think our moral lives are absurd some of the existentialists thought that but Peter Steele and I both think our moral lives are rational so anyway that's my first point about the governance of the universe my second point is about moral motivation I think more of us will accept the claims of all sentient life upon us if we care about all sentient life and I don't mean just feelings of sympathy but the recognition of value the various ways this can go for those who believe in God God's told us not to take innocent human life and to be stewards of creation and we want to obey out of gratitude for our own creation or we want to please God and receive God's well done that's how Immanuel Kant the philosopher thought that it went he said morality has universal validity and I quote as such it must please the Supreme Being and this constitutes the strongest motive force being motivate motivated by by wanting to please God because you love God is not the same as self interestedly wanting to get into heaven or being afraid of hell or it might be you want to be like Jesus a model for human life who died for others cared for the marginalized in society or if we love God we will want to love what is like God what is in the image of God and in particular what has the freedom to live the moral life to will morally we should value morally the capacity to value morally now it's an empirical question whether animals other than humans have this capacity to live morally my own reading of the literature is we can find kin selection various forms of tit for tat but we don't find in non-human animals this taking of the position of the universe the point of view of the universe this completely impartial point of view which both Peter Singer and I think is constitutive of the moral point of view religious belief has the power to change people's lives those who are strongly involved for example in prison with religious programs it changes the rate of recidivism of their return to prison after they leave in 12-step programs religious belief has the power over addiction there's an inverse correlation between people who take part in religious activities and are involved in religious networks and criminality criminal behavior people who are strongly religious give more they're more generous peter says well compare the United States with say Sweden or some some non less some less religious prosperous country that seems to me the wrong comparison because there are all sorts of differences between the u.s. and Sweden the important question is whether in the US and in Sweden those who are more religious behave differently than those who are less and I think there's an increasing consensus that the data suggests a positive impact in the answer to that question why would you want to remove that power from people's lives or spread skepticism about it especially for a utilitarian a belief should be welcomed that makes people happy unless it can be shown to be false or is it self productive of harm why cannot Peter Singer accept religious believers who have the same goals as he does many of them accept them as allies and welcome the additional motivation that their faith gives to them this may be for singer Obama Christians rather than bush Christians although the labels are misleading but I have noticed recently he is starting to be more generous in his in his in his appreciation and I think that is to be to be welcomed as a very good thing I myself am pessimistic about the degree to which most of us are committed to our moral duty when we perceive this conflicts with our happiness I agree with Peter Singer about the strenuousness of the moral demand I think most of us have some sense of this and we suppress it because it's just too uncomfortable and this shows there's a gap between the moral demand on us and our natural inclinations the Christian picture is that God can help us change those inclinations I know that there are conspicuous Christians who have failed spectacularly but there are utilitarians who fail spectacularly - I don't think given the evidence that I've just given you about say increased levels of generosity and so on that we should we should cast-off religion tar it all with the same brush we should welcome it it's true that religious and religious motivation has also produced evil flying skyscrapers into flight flying airplanes into skyscrapers or Crusades I don't want to minimize that the desire to please God has produced great good and great evil perhaps in the 20th century the greatest evils were from regimes like Hitler's or Stalin's or Mars or Pol Pot's outside the world's great religions but I think it's hard to calculate that and I don't want to put too much weight on it I think the truth is human regimes bent on their own power can use any ideology for evil purposes utilitarianism itself has been abused for example in inner city urban renewal after world war 2 what Bernard Williams used to call government house utilitarianism the principle is that the corruption of the best is the worst and we shouldn't hold that corruption to the account of what has been corrupted we need ethical constraints on the use of any ideology whether religious or not for example if you wake up in the middle of the night and you think God is telling you to kill your roommate you should say to yourself that isn't God telling me to do that and I think that was the point of the story of Abraham and Isaac that is God wanted to show us that it's not the Divine Will that we should demonstrate our devotion to God by killing our children roughly the same is true with the passage from numbers that Peter talked about the genocide passages where told later on by the prophets that God does not want us to hold whole households accountable in this sort of way and Jesus tells us we should not merely not hate but we should love our enemies my neighbor whom I should love includes my enemy if you say that if we use ethical principles as a constraint then that shows all we need is the ethical principle that's a mistake because constraints do not produce original motivation they function to limit the exercise of motivation and in the case of the great religions the constraints such as the golden rule are internal to the faith which they constraint okay I want to go on to my last point about justification why should I take the moral demand at the demand upon me for example why should I reduce my standard of living in the face of the world's poverty some people think you can deduce this from the nature of reason or reflection but singer I think does not think that because he says there's nothing irrational irrational about preferring my own interest or the interest of my family we could try deducing the justification of morality from self-interest but as I've said before I think self-interest only gets us part of the way towards morality it doesn't take us to the whole moral demand or we could try membership in the community the community accepts moral standards so because we belong to the community we should also but the problem here is the community doesn't seem to have the right kind of authority to justify the demand since actual communities are so often morally suspect we could try saying it's just self-evident like the principle I should trust the evidence of my senses but I wake up in the morning I don't distrust my senses no it's not because I don't really understand the morality is telling me to get out I think the best bet for the non-theist is to say there is no justification for morality morality is not justified by anything outside itself it's just a primitive or an axiom or a starting point but the problem is if it is just a primitive that leaves us exposed without anything to appeal to when our will is weak when it would be good to have something more good because it's difficult to sustain the moral life without justification religion is so pervasive in human culture it suggests that we need something more than just morality itself because morality does not provide sufficient justification from its own resources this need may even be hardwired into us although the evidence on that is not yet clear so now let me just tie these three points together if there is this justification that God calls us to the moral life then this relation to God can give us motivation although the motivation question and the justification question are different if we care about our relation to God then we will care more about how God wants us to live but if there is this relation between God and morality then we can reconcile this care that we have for morality with the fact that we also care deeply about our own happiness God cares both about our justice and what the Scriptures call our peace or in Hebrew Shalom that is a state of complete well-being and delight and this means we can have the hope that in the end under the supervision of God's providence morality and Happiness come together or as the Sun puts it justice and peace embrace thank you so again the format now will be professor singer will have five minutes to to respond and then professor hair and then we'll have a sort of Charlie Rose style discussion sitting up here okay you might still also be able to flag someone with a green shirt during the responses okay professor singer well it's very hard to respond to something as as thoughtful and deep as John hares remarks in five minutes so I'm not really going to attempt to go over all of those three significant points that were made let me say that I do accept that there are problems caused by the fact that what John called the governance of the universe that is the fact that as I see it we cannot appeal to God in order to produce the reconciliation of morality and happiness and certainly I share his view that Henry Sidgwick was the greatest of the utilitarians in fact I would think that his work the methods of ethics is quite possibly the finest treatise on ethics that has ever been written and it's true that it ends with this this problem what's called the dualism of practical reason that Sidgwick thinks that it's on the one hand self-evident that we have reason to pursue our own interests and on the other also self-evident that we should take this impartial point of view this point of view of the universe from which we would give equal weight to the all of the beings in the universe and he sees no way of reconciling them unless we accept this hypothesis of religious belief and whether he does or does not accept that himself is something that sidwich scholars still discussed certainly in the methods of ethics he doesn't clearly come down and say therefore we should accept it in fact he's somewhat negative about the view that the existence of this dualism is itself a reason for believing in God he says rather perhaps it's a reason for hoping that there is a God about not a reason for believing in it but be that as it may I accept the problem of the reconciliation I accept that it would in a sense be nice if we could be sure that there is that harmony between the two I can't believe it for the reasons that I've already given you so nice as it might be I think we have to face the fact that we're in a world without that sort of harmony that certainly does give rise to the questions that Professor here mentioned at the end that is what is the justification not so much for deciding what's right and wrong which I think we agree we can discover by looking at what we would impartial II decide on if we take this point of view of the universe but rather is saying well why do i why do I do it when it becomes difficult when it becomes demanding I don't think that there's a single answer to that question I think we can find partial answers in some of the things that were mentioned we can find as soon to accept partial answers in the benevolent affections that we have that is the sympathy the compassion that we have for others but they very rarely lead us to act completely impartial II we can find a kind of a self-interested answer in terms of finding our lives fulfilling or rewarding what the ancients called the paradox of hedonism seems to me to be to go some way towards showing that it is in our interests broadly conceived to live ethically and if we live in a narrowly self-interested way pursuing our own happiness our own pleasures we're not actually likely to find it we're not likely to find that they bring the kind of deeper satisfaction or fulfillment that makes us regard our lives as as really good ones but that if we aim for larger purposes which may well be ethical purposes perhaps need not always be ethical purposes then we are more likely to find that kind of fulfillment so I think that there is something in that as well but I also I have to agree with with John that yes the non-theist might say that ultimately there is no answer to this question we make our choices we may decide to live ethically because that's what we want to do we want to we will feel better in ourselves more if you like we will feel that we've lived that lived up to our values that there's a kind of a harmony in our life we will be able to have a high level of self-esteem if we feel that even if we haven't perfectly lived up to our values even if we've slipped in various ways we've done a good job of living up to our values I see my time is already up those five minutes ago very fast so let me perhaps then just leave it at that well I'll say one remark why don't I as a utilitarian welcome a belief that makes people happy unless it can be shown professor here said to be false or does harm well the fact that it makes people happy may be a good thing but I think that actually religious belief does do quite a lot of harm in the world not necessarily of the sort that leads people to themselves do what is wrong but rather that makes us have conflicts between people of religious beliefs that are much harder to resolve than they would be if they were not so if we take for example the situation in the Middle East although no doubt there are non religious motives their battles over territory for example at stake I think questions about the status of Jerusalem for instance would clearly be easier to resolve if we did not have very entrenched religious beliefs that were part of that situation so that's a small example of the kind of problems that I think we can have when we get locked into religious beliefs and get locked into a position where we just take things on faith and reason an argument don't really take us very much further thank you well higher thank you thank you for agreeing with me as much as you did III wasn't expecting that so you you agree that there is this problem of reconciliation and on your view it would be nice to have an answer but we just don't and it would be nice to have a justification for morality but we just don't on my view we do but now how about the how about the question of conflict religion produces conflict this is truth what's the best way to get through the conflicts is it to abandon the religion is it to try to produce a public forum of discussion in which everybody leaves their religious views behind I don't think so I this is just a personal anecdote but at Yale we had a conference of Christians and Muslims between those who'd signed what was called the common word document based on the principle principle that you should love your neighbor as yourself and I discovered that the Ayatollah of Combe which is a sacred city in Iran had been reading my work and translating it into Farsi and teaching his students and he wants me to go to Iran and talk more and I think I'm going to do that that's the way I think we're going to understand each other data is by talking with each other as religious people as Christians as Muslims not by leading all of that as it were behind us because this is so large a part of so many people's lives throughout the world thank you okay well we do have a good 30 to 40 minutes now for a moderate Russian many of your questions are directed to either professor hair professors singer some of them to both and I think I'll just kind of go back and forth but feel free to intervene if you have any comments the first is for professor singer you mentioned that although Darwinian evolution explains our moral motivation but you also said that reason can be used to critique those motivations on what basis can we judge those desires given by purposeless Darwinian evolution you suggest using the golden rule but why choose to apply that so maybe this question brings out the larger question of how your understanding of Darwinian evolution relates to morality right and that is quite a large question yeah we have some more concrete specific ones coming right right why so really why use the golden rule if I do think evolution is is purposeless that's true it's it's blind in that sense excuse me but it's created beings who have desires preferences needs means who are capable of suffering or are capable of enjoying their life and I think value comes into the universe when you have beings with consciousness with awareness with preferences so that their lives can go well or badly for them and I think it's our capacity to reason that enables us to see that not simply to act from the the instincts that we have but to reflect on them to see that and also to see that there are other beings like us who have similar preferences and needs so again I agree with John heroin when he said that although non-human animals may have things like rest prosody be able to you know follow kind of tit-for-tat sort of rules they don't take this impartial point of view the point of view of the universe and I think that's true they're not capable of it because they don't have high enough cognitive abilities when we get those cognitive abilities we can understand that and we can see that that is a kind of a larger perspective now so so we become capable of taking that perspective if the question is but why do we use that perspective then we get it back into the question of justification which which is not easy to answer beyond saying well that's the largest perspective you can take that's something which takes into account all the relevant knowledge you have about what the world is like and it's also something that we can discuss with others and expect them to agree with us from that perspective if we agree on the facts and if we agree on that approach whereas if we just starting to say well this is what I want and you say yeah but this is what I want then we may have difficulty in reaching agreement about what we ought to do but if we say look let's put ourselves in the position of everyone affected and we really do that then at least in theory we ought to be able to agree on on what we ought to do this is for professor hare how can you conclude from the correlation that there's an increased charitable giving among religious people that the causal factor for that giving is religious belief aren't there other factors that influence charitable giving such as social pressure to give as well as increased opportunities to give within religious settings well I I do think religious belief is part of a whole package it includes the social pressure it includes the community that you belong to it's one of the things that's very helpful and for Christians in giving is to belong to a church that itself spreads from the local to the global so you can be linked up with the church in in Zambia shall we say and then the village there becomes your village as it were by it by extension so there's a there's a lot more than just belief going on but it is associated with the life of the church here and I'm not surprised to find that people who are strongly associated with churches give more maybe I'll intervene here and ask fazer singer your response to Professor hares suggestion that some of your recent work either in the life you can save or in the way we eat seems to have toned down the criticism of religion that characterized perhaps some of your earlier work on animal liberation in fact you seem to acknowledge at some points the value of Christianity for motivating concern for poverty people like Jim Wallace or Rick Warren despite whatever criticisms you might have for them emphasizing the power of personal motivation rather than structural efforts to address poverty but can religion be a force for good at least in some of the struggles for against poverty or for other issues and social justice that you're concerned about not just in the US but globally if you think about Christian activity and in Africa and Asia and Latin America I'm sure I can I wouldn't deny that and perhaps what you see is a softening of my criticisms of religion does relate to the topics that I'm writing on so I think on this question of aid for the global poor Christianity has has certainly been an important force for good even though as I mentioned the two greatest philanthropists of our time for that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are not religious but you know you can't draw much from such a small sample on the other hand with the example of animals I think actually the Christian tradition has been a highly negative one it has separated us from the animals and very often people have justified brutal exploitation of animals by saying that God gave us dominion over them and therefore we can do what we like with them now I'm aware that there is an alternative interpretation of the Dominion idea of God that it is a stewardship but historically at least mainstream Christianity has taken the idea which you can find in in Paul's Duff God care for oxen remark and you can find quite strongly in August and and in Aquinas that we don't have any duties to animals and it doesn't really matter if we're cruel to them or at least it doesn't matter the animals if it matters at all it's only because it might lead us to be cruel to our fellow humans the animals don't really can so certainly we know when I write Animal Liberation I was highly critical of the Christian tradition because I I think it historically has had that very negative influence mmm-hmm there's a number of questions that talk about the shared demandingness of both of your views of morality so maybe I'll just ask a question for both of you to what extent are either of your ethical theories or for that matter what Jesus commands are what one might think Jesus has commanded actually livable does it matter or are they just ID and what a life that is fully lived according to your principles be a life well-lived given concern for things other than being moral all the time you know me to go first well I suppose one of the things that I do in in the recent book is to both put forward an argument that has very demanding implications and then to suggest that because it is so demanding and because so few people do seem to be prepared to try seriously to live up to it we might have lower public standards we might have public standards that set a much lower limit on what we ought to do and we might praise and blame people for meeting that lower standard even though it's certainly not as much as I think we really could if we follow the arguments feel that we ought to do so I think yes at least at the level of public morality we ought to have standards that are realistic and it's there's there some discomfort if you like in that idea that we have to accept a different sort of public standards but if what we try to do is to achieve the best outcome then maybe that's that's really the way to do it yeah I think it's not just an ideal in something utopian as it were that we don't actually have to regard as an obligation I think we do have these very high demands from morality on how we ought to live but if you're a theist if you believe in God and you think that God is requiring this of you you also think God will not require of you more than you can bear and that your your your your moral life and your happiness can in the end come together that you can flourish and that's something I think that's available to a theist that probably is not available if you're not maybe I'll pick up on that professor singer how do you deal with the problem of falling short of the demandingness in the way that professor hare might say or or we might just say the problem of moral failure either in theory or if you don't mind an example in your own life professor hare has praised you for shaming Christians given your behavior visa the the global poor but given your commitments you've admitted that you don't do all that you should do even if that does not contradict the claim that it is what you should do how do you understand knowing that you do not do what you should do is there a secular analogy of Providence grace forgiveness or an understanding a weakness of will that Christians call sin that you have well okay so let's say I accept the way Eric stated the facts I certainly think that I would be a better person if I gave more to the global poor lived more simply than I do even though it's probably true that I give more than most people who consider themselves Christians at least most certainly most Americans who consider themselves Christians do I feel this is weakness of will no I couldn't say I mean that would suggest there's like a constant struggle that when I do go to the movies despite the fact that the price of the movie ticket could go to Oxfam that somehow I'm struggling to say no you know I shouldn't go to the movies and I should donate this well it's not like that the feeling of it is not like that am i tortured with guilt for going to the movies now I'm also not tortured with guilt so I suppose it's it's it's an acceptance that I'm not perfect that I yes I it's true that I still think I should do more I sort of have been increasing over the years the amount that I give so you could say I'm getting some what better but I'm still not at the point where I'm making though really severe sacrifices that might be made if I were to give a lot more so I suppose in the end you could say it's an acceptance that I am at least partially a selfish creature that that I don't live fully ethically because my selfish desires play a greater you have greater weight than they would in someone who was acting in a fully ethical way and professor here is this an element of rational instability I think it is because I think if they really care about a moral commitment then you will feel guilty when you break it and if you don't then you weren't really committed to it and so we do have to have a way of dealing with this sense of failure we have to have some way of being forgiving and that's a deep feature over of a religious point of view professor singer there's another question about evolution if ethics is an evolutionary product if it is Advent Advent Aegis to help raise a neighbor's offspring because they would reciprocate to help me raise mine would it not be even more beneficial for me to cheat would not selection for individuals who pretended to help others only to take advantage of others help yet I think generally we would agree that this is morally wrong how does evolution explain this phenomena well yeah the the premises are right clearly you get the the the theory is you get selection for cooperation because you get rewarded you know reciprocity that's beneficial for you as we suggested on the other hand if you can get the benefits and cheat and not repay you do better still so we see evidence we see examples of this but of course as you get selection for cheating then you also get selection for detection of cheating and punishment of cheats so it's like a kind of an arms race if you like it goes on well you know they develop the missiles and we develop the anti-missile anti-ballistic missile system and they develop the things that will evade our anti-ballistic missiles and and so on so but it may be it's still quite possible that in fact because cheats can be detected often that to be a genuinely cooperative genuine cooperator a genuine reciprocate err is actually a good strategy because you'll be trusted so in other words what you want to do is to be trusted now okay if it could be trusted and still cheat so they develop the missiles and redevelop the anti-missile anti-ballistic missile system and they develop the things that will evade our anti-ballistic missiles and and so on so but it may be it's still quite possible that in fact because cheats can be detected often that to be a genuinely cooperative genuine cooperator a genuine reciprocate err is actually a good strategy because you'll be trusted so other words what you want to do is to be trusted now okay if you could be trusted and still cheat that might be better for you but if in fact simulated trust is often detected then the best way to enlist good cooperation is to be a bona fide eco operator and to show that you can be trusted and you know that at least happens some of the time and we will get these parasitical cheats who sort of are there on float around on this and sometimes benefit from it but the theory is they will be kept down to small numbers by the development of the those who were good at detecting cheats I when I was surfing the internet on topics like this I often see a quotation from a Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin so I thought this might be a good place to see if you agree with this he said quote it is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the world but on the contrary we are forced by our a priori at hoardin adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of Investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanation no matter how counterintuitive materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door no I don't agree with that actually and I don't quite know why Lewontin thought that I mean if there were things that were inexplicable in material causes but could be explained in other ways I think we would be able to accept them I don't I mean Henry Sidgwick who both John and I spoke highly of I spent a lot of time you engage in psychic research he believed that perhaps a psychic research was a way to discover the answer to whether there was life after death and so on spent a lot of time in it didn't really find anything that fully convinced him but had an open mind about it I think that's a perfectly possible scientific approach another quote that you often see is from the president of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Ingrid Newkirk a rat is a pig as a dog is a boy do you agree with that statement it's in fact a partial quote it's very often cited against Ingrid by her enemies if you look at the full sentence in which she said it it's something like when it comes to feeling pain a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy and I think that's much more defensible in other words all of these beings are capable of feeling pain and when we take this point of view of the universe that that we've been talking about here if they're capable of feeling pain in similar ways and some of those pains I think will be similar others might be different then we should give equal weight to the pain of a rat or a pig or a dog or a boy just in itself pain is pain and equally bad whatever the race sex or species of the being that is feeling pain it doesn't mean that for example to kill a boy is as bad as or no worse than to kill a rat because it may well be that when we come to things like the value of life that a boy is capable of all kinds of things or you know having plans and hopes and anticipations for the future which will be cut off if you kill him and the rat perhaps doesn't look to the future in the same way and doesn't have a capacity of developing and having achievements in the future so I think that there are clearly ethically significant differences in the value of life of those beings but I would agree with the full quotient as it is actually you know was really said ok professor hare someone asked if the witness from the Holocaust found God stronger after the experience but at the cost of millions of others is God a utilitarian car well as a matter of fact I have offended people by saying I think God is a kind of consequentialist I say I offended some of my natural allies but I I don't want to say that Ava's finding God in the midst of her experience itself justifies the suffering of all of those people it doesn't I'm just saying that we ought to take her witness seriously that she found God in that place so I'm not actually myself a util to utilitarian all the way down I think it covers some parts of morality but not the whole and I disagree with Peter Singer here and that I don't think all value is constituted by preference satisfaction can I just lean on this exam because I was going to in my five-minute response but ran out of time I'm not clear whether with the example of the woman who found God in the Holocaust with it this is something that you know it's enough for you if if some people do or if it's a claim that that most people did because I can tell a personal anecdote here which which goes the other way one of my grandparents my mother's mother survived the Holocaust into raising stock before the war she was an observing do that if she kept a kosher household my parents got out of Europe and came to Australia before the war she didn't when she came to us in 1946 I'm told of course that my parents said to her well we'll get some kosher food for you and she said no if God could do those things including the death of my husband my my grandfather I'm not going to follow his laws anymore I'm not gonna say that she was an atheist I don't know that that's true but certainly her commitment to following the rules she'd followed before we shed by the Holocaust yeah III don't think we're going to solve on the basis of two anecdotes whether most people's experience was one way or the other I I think there are a number of people who had Ava's type of experience but it may be that there are a number of people who had your grandmother's type and that would just have to be done empirically by looking at the other stories there's a number of questions about the life and teachings of Jesus and some suggest that the debate about theism or atheism is too abstract what difference does it make essentially to think about God as the biblical God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob or the life and teaching of Jesus for human morality it's hard to summarize each of these but one might maybe we'll ask professor hare to say something more concretely about the life and teachings of Jesus with professor singer referred to helping the poor what how else do you understand that not just theism or atheism but the role of Jesus Christ and his life and teachings for an understanding of morality in 30 seconds please hear so Jesus is a model for me of how human life should be of giving his life for others and reaching out to to the weakest but if it's just a model then and this is Kierkegaard's point it produces despair because I don't seem to be able to live that way by my own resources so it's important to me that with the model with the example comes power to live that way God actually helps us to live the way God asked to live and God forgives us when we don't those two things are very important the power and the forgiveness so taking Jesus's life and teachings I would have to add in his death and his resurrection and then then that's what I would say and if this is all now within the life of the church so as I said before I think the life of the church is very helpful because it's a community in which one can be held accountable to the standards that that Jesus showed for us as a singer there are a number of people interested in what it would take for you to become a Christian so maybe I will invite you to say maybe a little bit more about who you think Jesus Christ is or was or how you understand his life and teachings and maybe just reflect more generally as you've mentioned some aspects of Christian belief that you find particularly offensive other aspects of Christianity that you either are attracted to or find less offensive but in particular how you understand say a little bit more about the life and teachings of Jesus right well I mean obviously from what I've said one of the things it would take for me to become a Christian would be to have a plausible answer to the problem of evil which I don't but even if I did I think I could not see myself becoming a Christian and partly I guess this leads into the answer to that question I don't think that the life of Jesus is the most admirable one can imagine I wouldn't really want to take it as a model there are some things in it that I admire in particularly in particular the emphasis on the poor as as we've been talking about and on helping the poor but there's some rather strange things in it too if sometimes else we've quoted a couple of incidents that I find difficult to understand one is from the point of view of someone concerned about animals the incident of the gadarene swine when Jesus took out devils and cast them into a herd of swine and the swine then ran down the hill and drowned themselves why did he do that you know if you could take cast out Devils why couldn't he make them vanish into thin air rather than drowning the poor pigs not to mention the people who presumably owned the pigs and were now bereft of of a means of a livelihood difficult to interpret and then there's the incident of the fig tree when he wanted he saw a fig tree and asked for some figs and was told that the there were no figs and at least one of I think there's a couple of Gospel accounts we if I remember rightly one of them says because the time of figs was not so you know it wasn't like it was a useless fig tree it just was a fig tree and it wasn't the season for figs and Jesus cursed it and the next day they come past it and and look it's died that seems a really petulant act I have to say realize you're a literalist reading of the Bible I'm not you in jerry falwell share much in common you see the question is if we if we if we don't take these as true accounts then what do we take right how do then we're in the business of distilling the essential message while leaving out the little stories and and it's hard then to work out what exactly the essential message is I mean one of them certainly is that the world is coming to an end pretty soon and you know some of you listening to me are still going to be around when that happens so seems not to be in a very accurate profit either and that's another problem I guess now you know if we if we're going to talk about some version which doesn't deal with these details we obviously need a lengthy discussion as to what we do take from it and I'm not even really quite sure where we would begin there me maybe I will turn the table because there are a few questions including one that says professor hair is religion or I assume in this case your belief in Christianity a convenient tool to moderate an understanding of happiness in morality if you discovered a better method or a better theory would you still be religious and I guess this is what would it take for you to be an atheist I don't think it's a tool I think it it's that my religion helps me to make sense of my experience of the moral life and my moral failure it's not that I'm RELIGIOUS because I want to get into heaven or something like that where it would be just instrumental just just a tool what would it take for me to become an atheist as I might I suppose not be a Christian any longer if somebody could prove to me the Christ didn't rise from the dead that would be a pretty hard thing to do but if somebody were to be able to prove that then that would stop me believing that Christ did church is that that is an empirical question right and it's conceivable at least that we could find contemporary documents written by the disciples or something about how we we got rid of Jesus's body and put it in concrete and dumped it into the sea something like that and if and if you were convinced those documents were authentic then then I wouldn't believe in the resurrection any faster sooner do you think human beings are good or bad by Nature well a bit of both I think is the answer to that I mean clearly as I've been saying we have cooperative instincts we have instincts to care for our offspring I think we have some kind of compassion or empathy for at least identifiable individuals there's something I talk about in the recent book so we would rescue an identifiable individual a a child drowning in a pond in front of us but those instincts don't extend to strangers in Bangladesh or wherever they might be to the same extent but but we do have some good instincts but obviously also we are the descendants of many many generations of beings who were competing with other beings in various ways to survive and to reproduce and to have their offspring survive so there have to be some self-interested instincts in us as well and some of those I think involve gaining power and status which help us to have surviving offspring so I think we have those less desirable instincts as well okay we are coming down to our final minutes so maybe I'll just close with a broader question that each of you can answer as you wish there are a number of questions that are along the lines of why does moral philosophy matter so much to you do we need a share theory of morality but I might just broaden this maybe a little bit more to ask you why doing these sorts of things and asking these sorts of questions are important and and how you see the future of a kind of constructive discussion between theists and atheists on religion and morality playing out given what's happening in our world today and 45 seconds well there's many different things certainly you know I agree that we need to have more tolerance and understanding across different beliefs whether they're Christian and Islam or theist and and atheist so that's one of the things why it's good to do this I also feel you know I'm interested in ethics in moral philosophy because I'm interested in thinking about how we ought to live I can't see that anything could be more important than that and so that's really what I'm trying to do and I see lots of ways in which we do live that lead to or allow to continue unnecessary suffering in the world so I'm interested in trying to alert people to that and change our ways of thinking about how we ought to live so that we reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering in the world thank you professor here moral philosophy is about ideas ideas matter hi i am i worked for a bit in the House of Representatives on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and I saw ideas having impact on policy it matters how we think because that changes what we do and I care about moral philosophy because it's a way of being clear about what we think well join me in thanking two very clear thinkers I know we have one final announcement and I know I also I'm not sure if this is what you're going to mention but two clear thinkers also have books available upstairs but I also would encourage you given some of the discussion today about religion often by people who may not know much about religion that it might be a good thing to read at least about in this case if you're interested in Christianity I think there are copies of the Bible some of you might actually open it and read it and see what Jesus said for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

Channel: The Veritas Forum

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Keywords: veritas forum

Id: UU7sqi8iBBI

Length: 96min 59sec (5819 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2010