It’s the kind of question that is liable to get the irreligious rending their garments in righteous indignation. “Of course you don’t need God to be good.”
But that isn’t the question. No-one (sane) believes that all atheists are wicked just as no-one (sane) believes that religion poisons everything. The issue is whether morality – our sense of a non-negotiable right and wrong that exists beyond human manipulation – can exist without some similarly ‘set apart’ being/ mind/ God (call it what you will) also existing. For if the former does depend on the latter, all godless morality will slip inexorably towards relativism, no matter how many saintly atheists there are to protest otherwise.
This was the question I put to Baroness Warnock, when I interviewed her about her recent book Dishonest to God: On keeping religion out of politics. Her view was that religious dogmatists care only about divinely-ordained principle, whereas reasonable, secular-minded ones, weigh the consequences of policies and legislate accordingly.
The first part of this seems to me to be almost entirely wrong. Of course religious people (and not just dogmatists) found their ethics on principles but they also worry (some would say obsess) about the consequences for society of ignoring those principles. To claim that the religious are indifferent to consequential reasoning is woefully wide of the mark.
But it is the second part that is more troubling. Such ‘consequentialist’ reasoning sounds eminently reasonable, but without some principle to peg it in place, is it not simply a leaf to every cultural wind that blows. Isn’t godless morality irredeemably relativistic?
No, the Baroness told me, emphatically. It is not. But then, towards the end of our hour together, as we attempted to ground our conversation in the concrete, the light shone and revealed something ugly lurking in the corner of the consequentialist argument. We were talking about the consequences, such as they can be calculated, of legalising euthanasia. Was not the rise in abortions since 1967 highly suggestive of the likely consequences of passing legislation permitting assisted dying, I asked.
“But one wants to find out whether there’s been anything wrong with the number of abortions,” Baroness Warnock replied. “I want to know whether the increase in abortions has been among people for whom an abortion was actually a benefit, a good.” Familiar with the argument that abortion was a necessary evil, I was unprepared for one that it was “actually…a good” for some people. So I probed.
“There are thousands of girls who become pregnant and wouldn’t think of having an abortion because they’re not interested. They’ve got no future anyway and a future with a baby is to them better than a future without a baby. They’ve got someone to love, they’ve got someone who’ll love them.”
“Is that not a good thing?” I asked. “No, I think it’s a terrible thing,” she replied. “The joy of having a baby may wear off after it’s not a baby but is a yobbish teenager, and we’ve all got to look after these persons. The social consequences are awful.”
Quite a few people – thankfully most Britons – disagree with the idea that the social consequences of allowing such would-be yobbish babies to live are “awful”. The fact that someone as intelligent, articulate and influential as Baroness Warnock thinks otherwise is deeply concerning.
But our conversation was revelatory not just of the Baroness’ own prejudices but of the wider moral position she was attempting to defend. Perceived social consequences have a habit of moulding themselves around our existing concepts of the good. That was why other cultures – many not so distant from our own – not only permitted but encouraged behaviour that we now consider unsustainably wicked.
Why did Romans “expose” infants (especially girls)? Why did educated Britons oppose the factory acts? Why did influential Britons, Germans and Americans campaign for the sterilisation of the “feeble-minded”? The answer in each case is because each believed that the “consequences” of “unwanted” or “feeble-minded” babies or of interfering with free trade would be deleterious for society. In each case, the consequentialist ethics were so malleable as to be almost whimsical. As Chinese historian Jung Chang once wrote, “If you have no God then your moral code is that of society. If society is turned upside down, so is your moral code.”
The obvious counter-argument to this – that many of the religiously-minded also supported such ‘policies’ – is a serious but not insurmountable one. Its strength lies in pointing out how easy it is to slip the moral anchor that God provides, not in implying that there is no point in having one in the first place.
Towards the end of his magisterial book Humanity: a moral history of the twentieth century, philosopher Jonathan Glover wrote, “the evils of religious intolerance, religious persecution and religious wards are well known, but it is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have also come from principled religious commitment… Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading.”
Glover, certainly no apologist for religious ethics, goes on to remark that if the decline of religions means the loss of the moral anchor that held Bishop George Bell, Elizabeth Anscombe, Bishop von Galen, Pastor Braune, Bernard Lichtenberg, André and Magda Trocmé, the villagers of Le Chambon, and the other Christian figures who populate his history, “then Jung Chang’s worrying thought, that if you have no God your moral code is that of society, might be true.”
Or in the more succinct and no less provocative words of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos.
Nick's interview with Baroness Warnock can be read here.
