Misconceptions: Atheists are amoral

Without God, anything is permitted.

One of the most common misconceptions about atheists and atheism that I have encountered is the idea that atheists are amoral: lacking morality or a moral system. For example, I have heard theists claim that, according to an atheist worldview, the concepts of “good” and “evil” are without meaning. Others claim that atheists do not believe in God because they want an immoral lifestyle to be permissible. Both of these claims are untrue and lead to the vilification of atheists as threats to society and conventional morality.

Good and evil without God?

It is possible for notions of good and evil to exist without a divine authority, and thus it is possible for an atheist to understand and to care about the terms.

The theistic idea that we can only know about the concept of “good” if there is a God to impart such wisdom is the basis of this misconception. The idea that morality must come from a God is open to many problems, including the Euthyphro dilemma outlined by Plato. Does God chose good because it is independently good, or is good “good” because God chooses it? Christian scholar Thomas Aquinas attempted to solve this dilemma by stating that goodness is an intrinsic attribute of God’s character, but if God is good because he has all of the properties of goodness then this means necessarily that the properties of goodness are definable independently; the first part of the dilemma is affirmed. To say that God is good, in the sense that his character is full of goodness, suggests that goodness exists outside of God and it is something which he conforms to. To say that God is, and therefore is good, affirms the second part of dilemma, that goodness is contingent upon the whim or definition of a deity. This means that if a God was a sadist, sadism would therefore be rendered “good.”

If goodness is not contingent upon the definition of a particular deity, if it is independent from God and the first part of the dilemma is correct, then it is clearly obvious that atheists could make a “good” moral decision just as readily as a Christian, even if Aquinas’s benevolent God is real.

To take this a step further, we have the fact that each religious person makes a decision to follow a particular God without a set moral basis. Before a person becomes, say, a Christian, they do not put faith in the Christian doctrine to help them make their conversion decision. The decision is made independently. The religion is evaluated and a moral decision is made; the religion is either deemed “good” or “bad.” If only theists (those who know the will of God) are capable of making “good” or moral decisions, then how would one explain each persons’ conversion decision? Even if morality can only come from God, a non-theist could be capable of making a “good” decision.

As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “If an angel comes to me, what proof is there that it’s an angel? And if I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell…If a voice addresses me, it is always for me to decide that this is the angel’s voice; if I consider that such an act is a good one, it is I who will chose to say that it is good rather than bad.”

Atheists just don’t care.

Aside from the philosophical, putting away the question of whether or not atheists are capable of understanding “good,” there is the issue of moral concern. Many theists assume that atheists either do not want to be good or do not care about goodness. We are often characterized as utterly selfish beings who are only looking out for our own skin. This is simply untrue. Atheists differ in the way that they form moral decisions, but we are still “good” law-abiding citizens who care about our fellow man.

Instead of basing a moral decision on religious writings or traditions, atheists use several different systems, including everything from the simple Golden Rule to Humanism to Existentialism. What these systems have in common is the basic concept of empathy: the recognition that personal actions can harm others and the desire to promote the well being of fellow men.

The Biblical Ten Commandments, the basis of morality for Christianity and Judaism, are often broken down into two categories: 1-4 are commandments relating to one’s relationship with God, and 4-10 are commandments relating to one’s relationship with other humans. The majority of the Ten Commandments are based on empathy. Atheists still value these sort of humanist commandments, we simply forgo the ones relating to the correct worship of God.

Moral relativism does not equal “Anything goes!”

As I mentioned above, atheists use several different system to help them make moral judgments, and no one system is valued above another. In this sense, atheists are moral relativists. We believe that morality is not a set of specific rules handed down from a God, but rather a socially constructed system which can vary from person to person and culture to culture. In the mind of a theist, moral relativism is often interpreted as an “Anything goes!” mentality, when in fact it is not.

Moral relativism is not equatable to anarchy. Atheists, in general, value their societies and see the purposefulness of laws and social regulations. We recognize the need for an agreed upon legal system that conforms with society’s moral values, and that above all else, as with empathy, promotes the well being of mankind.

I have been asked several times, since I am a moral relativist, if it is okay for a person to commit murder if they feel personally like committing murder is “good” or morally acceptable. The answer is simply: no. Murder, whether the person committing it thinks it is right or not, is a violation of humanism, of the empathetic idea that all people deserve to live.

From my materialistic worldview, there is a continuum of empathy, as with any other trait, like height or hair color. There are some people who are very tall, and some people who are very short, but most people fall somewhere comfortably in the middle. Likewise, your average person is  healthily empathetic, rather than so selfless that they starve to death by giving away all of their meals or so selfish that they are sociopathic.  Those of us who fall in the average middle can form societies and then form laws to protect our members. We can reach an agreement about the laws without the need for a God or religion because our drive toward empathy is a basic human trait. Those at the far end of the empathy continuum, such as a sociopath, have violated the will of society, even if they can defend their actions based on their personal concept of morality.

A better question to examine moral relativism might be whether it is morally acceptable for two people of the same gender to have a sexual relationship. To a Bible-believing Christian, the answer is clear cut: no, according to what is written in the Bible. In my personal life, I have chosen to be heterosexual (Or have I? That’s a topic for another day). Despite my personal decision, I can recognize the fact that another person in a different situation might make the opposite decision. Their actions, although they disagree with my own, do not violate the rights of another person or cause any other person direct harm, therefore it is a morally neutral decision.

“Man is Condemned to be free.”

Atheists are nor amoral. We care about right and wrong. “Good” and “evil” are terms that have value and meaning to us. In fact, many atheists spend more time worry about right and wrong than theists do. For theists it is simple; it is all written down in a book and taught on a weekly basis. For atheists, we have what Sartre termed the condemnation of freedom. We do not have a handy guidebook. We must make moral decisions on our own and shoulder the burden of the responsibility of our personal actions. Sartre calls this acute realization of personal responsibility man’s “anguish.” He writes, “the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a law-maker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, can not help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility…one should always ask himself, ‘What would happen if everybody looked at things that way?’” Sartre outlines the realization that most atheists make: we are the moral examples for our fellow man, and with every decision we make we must constantly ask ourselves if we are behaving as correct models of behavior. We do not believe that we are held morally accountable by God, but rather by our fellow man.

I will leave you with one last Sartre quote,

For every man, everything happens as if all mankind has its eyes fixed on him and were guiding itself by what he does. And every man ought to say to himself, “Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?”