What is “moral equality”?

You present it two ways: first, as a narrow species of choice, limited to things like good and bad, right and wrong, or beautiful and ugly; and second, as respect for the individual will, which you call “human dignity” and a “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But I suspect that, really, the first sense is subsumed in the second, because it appears you are most concerned with the matter of individual liberty: “he has no right to decide how I should live my life.” And, really, without liberty to decide between them, there is not point in bothering with categories like good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, or ugly. Everything just is, and is valueless.

And what is “equality” that it requires a basis in anything other than your desire to be the master of your own destiny, or to decide for yourself, on the basis of your own perceptions and experience, or those shared collectively with your community or society, what is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, right or wrong? And I submit that, if you believe in a God whose purpose overarches, underlies, and penetrates everything, then the act of belief, of faith in that God, is fundamentally an act of giving up your individual liberty and putting yourself on par with every other human, no matter their expertise or position in the government, so that you, a mere man before God, have no right to decide how you should live your life. Your life is not even your own, but God’s.

I doubt that is where you intended your “moral equality” to take you, however, because I have a hunch that you don’t really pursue the freedom to place your life in the hands of your God, but the freedom to assert, perhaps even demand, that the rest of us place our lives in the hands of your God. I think—and you may certainly correct me—that you really prefer that we put away the idea, which probably arises in part from the kind of thoroughgoing individualism you assert as “moral equality,” that humans not only can make decisions about their own lives, but also learn facts and methods about human nature, be they psychological, social, or biological, that assist in more than just individual decision-making, but inform what we typically refer to as “public policy.”

My hunch arises from reflecting on the argument in your letter to the editor, that “religious foundations” are necessary for society, combined with your more recent comment that government officials should not make decisions for how you should live, and your rejection of the idea that ethics are useful for human society. You use the word “utilitarian,” which I avoid, because it brings a lot of unwanted baggage.

So I think, if you are going to be serious about your religious beliefs, you may want to re-think that aspect of your political beliefs.

You are right that there can be “bad law,” but you distort reality by immediately jumping to the infamous and ubiquitous fallacy, “Reductio ad Hitlerum” (a silly, but amusing, Latin-ish name for what I usually just call the “argument from Hitler”), followed in short order by a reference to Stalin. That Christians who want to talk about ethics cannot seem to see past Hitler and Stalin is more than just irksome—it demonstrates an absence of nuance in thought and argument that makes counter-arguments extremely difficult to frame in such a way that you are derailed from that particular line and pushed to see things freshly.

To say only that “[t]he poor deserve charity because they are God’s people” suffers from the same problems I suggested above regarding your original letter. Why bother with a theistic insertion? Why not “the poor deserve charity because they are fellow humans, with consciousness, will to live, and they participate in the creation of both society and their own individuality”?

You have a similar problem in saying only that “[t]o kill is to kill God’s handiwork.” But humans are not unique in killing. “God’s handiwork” regularly turns on itself and kills, without the psychological drama suffered by most humans when they do it. (And I assume you are only talking about killing other people because I doubt you are a Vegan, or are opposed to killing other organisms.) The important thing to note is that killing people creates psychological and social rifts that are destabilizing both for individuals and their families, but also for the community at large. Without laws proscribing murder and offering other, non-violent means of dispute resolution—such as that perennial favorite, the lawsuit—the potential for lethal danger posed by one’s neighbors and the possibility, even the likelihood of blood feuds, makes it much more likely that people must resort to an unending cycle of violence, and to seek protection from those who assert themselves with the most ferocious and efficient violence. Cooperative achievements that have only been possible when people have abhorred violence and worked toward a common goal would remain impossible, or at least highly unlikely and extremely difficult to carry out, without a prohibition on murder.

The argument in response to your statement about “oppress[ing] God’s people” should be easy to see from the two paragraphs above. It combines elements of each. People should not be oppressed both because they are fellow human beings and because, as should be abundantly clear in the modern world, freedom allows the enormous creativity and productivity of individuals and societies to blossom in ways that oppression can never do. When people are merely robots, made to do tedious labor for others, they have no incentive to innovate and devise better ways of doing things, higher standards of living, and other improvements to their condition.

But not only should it be apparent to us, as conscious beings, that cooperation and mutual respect for human life is beneficial to everyone, there is even a good argument for why such a state arose at all—and it does not rely on the insertion of a God with the particular characteristics of yours or anyone else’s. One of the more interesting bits of modern science is sociobiology, under which one can make the (in my opinion very convincing) argument that cooperation confers an evolutionary benefit on the organisms who practice it. It would make sense, then, that we have an innate sense of cooperation and non-oppression as “good,” while tyranny and torture are “bad.” (Darwin himself suggested something like this in his book The Descent of Man.)

At any rate, you asked a very good question: How do we determine whether a law is just or unjust? You might turn as far back as Aristotle to answer that question. His Nicomachean Ethics propounded the theory that everything we do should tend toward eudaimonia, which most modern translators render “happiness,” which he defined as “a being-at-work of the soul in accordance with reason, or not without reason.” He suggested that what makes humans unique is their ability to “articulate speech,” “to be persuaded by reason,” and “to think things through.” When we maximize those characteristics, we fulfill our humanity to the utmost. One could perhaps conclude, then, that a just law is one that works to maximize those characteristics, while an unjust law does not.

Indeed, Aristotle laid the groundwork for that kind of analysis in another of his works, Politics. Here is an excerpt:

[M]an is by nature a political animal. Hence [men] strive to live together even when they have no need of assistance from one another, though it is also the case that the common advantage brings them together, to the extent that it falls to each to live finely. It is this above all, then, which is the end for all both in common and separately; but they also join together, and maintain the political partnership, for the sake of living itself.

I find that view far more satisfying and far more persuasive than a theological one because we are all familiar with what it feels like to be human, we all know our own needs, and we all recognize what it feels like to live in a human society that fails, in one way or another, to help us reach our full potential. We understand dissatisfaction, but we also have a good idea what we need. People like Aristotle, and many after him, have spent countless years of their lives contemplating these problems and devising thoroughly reasoned arguments, which can be (and have been) tested. We have seen, for example, that the communism of Russia and China of the 20th century was a failure, that the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany was a failure, and so on. History is littered with the lessons of failed civilizations. We can discuss the problems, we can work on them, we can strive to improve them.

A theological perspective, on the other hand, relies on something that is beyond the reach of anything we can discuss: revelation. Even assuming there is a God with the characteristics that most Christians attribute to him, there is the usually-ignored problem of how exactly that God communicates with us. We are left with little more than this idea of “revelation,” which, for most people, means assenting to the proposition, without any solid basis whatsoever, that the Bible, or some other ancient (or modern, in the case of the Mormons) scripture is the “Word of God.”

But what is God? Isn’t God, by definition, transcendent, beyond human understanding, beyond human reason? How can one ever know that the thoughts occurring in one’s head are communication from something transcendent, which is beyond reason, and not simply one’s imagination? And furthermore, how can one verify them? And what happens if someone else experiences a contradictory “revelation”? You can offer the easy answer that one must consult the Bible, but that only pushes the question into history: how can anyone know that the Bible is a revelation of the Word of God?

I have suggested before, and will recapitulate here, that in order to know that what we experience is an actual revelation, then two elements must be satisfied:

(1) What we perceive must have some intelligible, informational content. A “revelation” that does not present a message explainable in human language is worthless, except as a private, individualized experience of wonder or awe—which is an excellent experience that every person has, religious or not, though we all construe it differently.

(2) What we perceive must not have any feasible human or natural explanation. Even if you perceive intelligible, informational content, if it may have a human or other natural explanation, then there is no way to say for certain that it is in fact a “revelation” from something transcendent, like God.

I have never experienced anything for which both of those elements are satisfied, and I am almost completely certain that you haven’t either.

It’s one thing to say that individuals can have some kind of radical experience that relates to their perception of ultimacy, the ground of being, being-in-itself, the substance of reality, the meaning of life, the vastness of the universe, or whatever you want to call it. You can even call it God. There is no denying that kind of individual experience. But to move from there to making specific assertions about either the nature of the subject of that experience or about how it should impact on the conduct of other people is not warranted.

In other words, the better, more satisfying derivation of human morals and ethics is in looking to the problem ourselves, as ourselves, between ourselves, in some amalgam of what is pragmatic, what is beneficial, what promotes the ends of being human, and so on.

Ultimately, all of these things—morality, ethics, equality, humanity—are accessible to everyone simply by virtue of their being alive. We can discuss them, we can argue them, we can work to explain them, we can persuade each other, and we are in a better position when we can do that than if we can’t. What religion does is it takes those things outside the boundaries of what we can discuss, puts them into a zone of otherness, leaves them in control of a few people, most of them already dead, and closes the door to further discussion, development, and learning.

That is really the single most troublesome aspect of religion, for those of us who practice none: religious people want to dictate morality without bother to offer an explanation, to let us participate in determining what that morality would be, and to simply base it on an unverifiable “revelation” from a God whose existence cannot be proven.

We could go on for days, years, maybe forever, discussing this stuff, and that would be great—it needs to be a part of the public and political discourse, too—but I’m afraid that what I see from Christians and other religious people is a refusal to even start the conversation. All you religious people ever want to talk about is that the conversation is not possible, because we need God to have ethics and morality, and then once we have God, you say we don’t need to talk about it anymore—the rules are established and fixed. That’s what I meant when I said above that I suspect you really just want to dictate to others how they ought to live their lives. And, as I said above, you’re free to correct that as a misperception on my part.

I have to admit, the position of religious people on this subject is supremely irritating to me. It takes enormous effort for me not to bare my rhetorical teeth, so to speak, as I recently did in another forum. (And I am not convinced, as some others are, that baring the rhetorical teeth is always a bad thing. I think sometimes it’s necessary, because it invokes an emotional response that attaches to the subject and, at least for me, forces further contemplation. But, as I’ve also pointed out elsewhere, my perspective is as someone trained in an American law school, where learning through the shame of feeling like an idiot is an important part of the process. You can disagree.)

At any rate, I’ve gone on long enough for now.

I have only recently come accross your post about my letter to the Fresno Bee some months ago. Thank you for taking the time to provide a thoughtful response. I hope I can provide an equally thoughtful response to your response.

You are correct to note that my definition of equality was lacking specificity. What the declaration was referring to is a moral equality, namely the ability to decide good and bad, right from wrong and beautiful or ugly. In addition, we are inherently equal in our human dignity and right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is not our physical or intellectual differences that are important, rather it is our sameness as moral beings that is important.

Steven Hawkins may be smarter than me, by he has no right to decide how I should live my life. By the same token, nor should a government official make decisions for me either.

Government has the responsibility to protect us from evil by threatening a fine, jail or death if someone takes a life, or steals, or injures or speeds. As a citizen, I decide if I wish to follow the law passed by the legislature or pay the fine or do the time. A law does not instill a morality, it can only reflect it imperfectly and often unjustly. He who can pay the best lawyer wins is oftn the case.

Your argument in response is basically that equality is good because it works, a very utilitarian answer. My question is what is the secular philosophical foundations for equality? Why is equality good? In the secular world view, Darwinism naturally leads to viewing some people are more evolved (smarter or wiser) than others. The social darwinists of both left and right justified their class struggle or race superiority with survival of the fittest and designating themselves as the fittest.

The christian world view is different. All people are created equal as moral beings. The poor deserve charity because they are God’s people, as we all are. To kill is to kill God’s handiwork. To oppress is to oppress God’s people.

To simply say that we are equal under the law does not deal with the notion of a bad law. Slavery was bad, and it was law. Germany legally passed laws taking the property of jews. It was a law and it was equally applied. Stalin passed laws regarding political speech, and sent thousands to psychiatric hospitals for adjustment to right thinking in the class struggle. It was a law, it was equally applied and it was wrong.

I would enjoy continuing this conversation. Equality as a premise is a key to the success and future of our country. Please let me know if you would like to meet.

Paul Deffebach

Paul Deffebach was doubly mistaken when he wrote that secularists and atheists have no philosophical foundation for equality and referred to Darwinian evolution in support of his argument.

First, the notion that all people are “created equal,” as our society uses it, has nothing to do with biological variation. No one can fail to see that we are not all biologically equal. For instance, some are prone to athleticism, some are predisposed to particular diseases, and some are born without arms or legs.

Most people are quick to differentiate themselves based on their different or “unequal” characteristics. Injustice often follows. We give our notion of equality the force of law not despite, but because of our innate differences.

Second, secularists and atheists do have a philosophical foundation for equality. Like anyone else, they can see that a society where the rights of all are protected equally will be more livable and resilient than one where rights are given only to the “more” equal.

History demonstrates that no one, no matter how strong or wise, rules long and peacefully to the satisfaction of many, probably because the weaker will always outnumber the strongest. Equality wards off revolution and breeds social stability.

It seems that my letter was accepted for publication.