January 13, 2009 | Below is an abbreviated extract from Chapter 4 of James Fetzer’s latest book, Render Unto Darwin: Philosophical Aspects of the Christian Right's Crusade Against Science (2007).

In Chapter 4, “The Immorality of the Christian Right”, Fetzer explains that morality can be objectively validated independently of religion, and that only a deontological standard of ethics – requiring that we treat other persons with respect and never merely as means – passes the essential tests. He argues that since the treatment of stem cells, zygotes, embryos, or early-term fetuses as persons cannot be logically justified and thereby violates the ethics of belief, even religious persons who interfere with the right of others to abortion and stem-cell research – no matter how sincere their beliefs or moral their lives in other respects – are pursuing unethical policies.

James Fetzer is a leading philosopher and public intellectual. He is Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

“Biting assay of Darwinism’s latest clash with Biblical-fueled politics. Fetzer diagnoses a chilling facist beat in his homeland’s now-speak of fear, self-righteous conformity, and egoistic belligerence. Essential reading for all who care about science and genuine faith, and their alliance in defense of true liberty.”
—Charles J Lumsden
Co-author (with Edward O Wilson) of Genes, Mind, and Culture and Promethean Fire

Visit Open Court for more about the book.

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Render unto Darwin

Contents

• 4.1 Is Morality Without Religion Possible?
• 4.2 Abortion, Stem-Cells, and cloning
• 4.3 Consciousness and Personhood

• We rely on our beliefs to guide our actions
• We’re morally entitled to hold a belief only if we’re logically entitled to hold it
• Of eight commonly-held moral theories, only one, treating other persons as ends-in-themselves, is defensible
• Persons acquire rights in graduated stages; stem cell, zygotes, embryos, or early-term fetuses are not persons
• It’s immoral for religious persons to interfere politically with abortions, stem-cell research, or cloning

We act on our beliefs. When our beliefs are true, our actions are, in those respects, appropriately guided. When they are false, they are, in those respects, inappropriate and misguided. A pragmatic conception of truth maintains that beliefs are true to the extent to which they provide appropriate guidance for action (Fetzer, 1990). Truth, like directions themselves, is therefore amenable to degrees, where, relative to our objectives and goals, the more appropriate the guidance beliefs provide, the greater their truth. Truth may also be identical with correspondence to reality, or, more broadly, with the way things are, a far more traditional conception, which explains why truths, which correspond with reality, provide appropriate guidance for actions.

Because we act on our beliefs, beliefs have causal consequences in the world that go beyond their merely logical implications. If we believe that abortion is murder, for example, and that doctors who perform them are ‘baby killers’, we may be disposed to take matters into our own hands and kill the killers of the innocent unborn – in the name of ‘life’. Just as our actions must be moral to be worthy of praise rather than of condemnation, however, so too must our beliefs be worthy of acceptance rather than of rejection or – which for many may be far more difficult – suspension of belief. According to a principle known as the ethics of belief (Clifford 1879), we are morally entitled to hold a belief only when we are logically entitled to hold that belief. This principle sounds simple, but its effects can be profound.

An alternative approach known as the will to believe (James 1897) holds that in some cases a belief may be worthy of acceptance even if there is no empirical evidence in its support, especially when the causal consequences of adopting that belief are beneficial. Belief in God might be said to be justified because it makes a contribution to morality. The enormous differences in beliefs represented by the world’s religions, however, not to mention the diverse sects and creeds of varied faiths, suggests that ‘the will to believe’ can take many varied forms. It does not appear promising for resolving conflicts between members of diverse faiths.

[…]

4.1 Is Morality Without Religion Possible?

It will generate little controversy to suggest that religious beliefs can be loosely classified into the broad general categories of religious beliefs about God or gods, which are theological in kind, and religious beliefs about morality which are social or political in kind. That virtually every theological belief qualifies as an article of faith would not be widely contested. Most theologians and philosophers concede that the existence of God (in anything approximating traditional conceptions) can neither be proven nor disproven, and that every true believer can rest assured that, at the very least, their theological beliefs cannot be shown to be false. By the same token, they cannot be shown to be true.

According to the principle of the ethics of belief, we are morally entitled to hold a belief only if we are logically entitled to hold it. If we grant that we are logically entitled to hold beliefs about the world only when they are appropriately related by suitable inductive and deductive logical relations to available evidence on the basis of observations, measurements, and experiments, then the only conceptions of god that appear to be empirically testable are those that identify God with nature, as in the case of pantheism. We interact with the natural world in space and time, after all, unlike a transcendent world beyond space and time to which we have no access. Beliefs about God as an omniscient and omnipotent entity existing beyond space and time, therefore, are beliefs about the world that we are not entitled to hold.

That most theological beliefs about God or gods are not beliefs we are logically entitled to hold does not mean that alternative conceptions of God or gods are, on that account, beyond debate. The conception of God as the Creator suggests that it makes more sense to envision God as a woman than as man. Women, after all, can give birth, which is something no man can do. But we are no more logically entitled to believe in God as a woman than we are to believe in God as a man. What may be even more intriguing than the status of religious beliefs about God is the status of religious beliefs about morality. The principle of the ethics of belief entails we are likewise not morally entitled to hold beliefs about morality unless we are logically entitled to hold them. This implies that many religious beliefs about morality may also be immoral unless they qualify as beliefs that we are logically entitled to hold.

Speaking generally, we are logically entitled to hold beliefs about the world only when they satisfy appropriate logical standards. We tend to assume that beliefs we can justify on the basis of direct experience are therefore justifiable, which - in the case of those who are not color-blind, tone deaf, and the like - tends to suffice in our practical lives. We can characterize this as 'ordinary knowledge'. For the purpose of this chapter and to exemplify the kinds of standards that matter here, I shall assume that a more exact conception would be codified by the most defensible account of the logical structure of scientific reasoning, which is known as abductivism and which incorporates inference to the best explanation, as readers of the book can discover in the Appendix. The products of this process are characterized as 'scientific knowledge'.

[…]

An important question thus becomes whether there are criteria of adequacy that might be employed to evaluate moral theories akin to those of inference to the best explanation for empirical theories. There appear to be three, namely:

(CA-1) an acceptable theory of morality must not reduce to the corrupt principle that might makes right;
(CA-2) an acceptable theory must suitably classify pre-analytically clear cases of moral and immoral behaviors (where these behaviors have been virtually universally acknowledged within human societies as moral and immoral, respectively, including speaking the truth and keeping promises, on the one hand, and murder, robbery, and rape, on the other); and
(CA-3) an acceptable theory should shed light on the pre-analytically problematical cases as well, including today, for example, abortion, cloning, and stem-cell research.

Actions based upon beliefs we are not morally entitled to hold are themselves immoral unless they qualify as moral by a standard that we are logically entitled to accept. This principle harmonizes with the Roman Catholic conception of natural law, according to which we must exercise our reason to discover what God would have us do, which in turn emanates from the classic question, ‘Is an action right because God wills it or does God will it because it is right?’ There appears to be general agreement that the former alternative both denies the goodness of God and trivializes morality. Hence, we must exercise our reason to discover what is right in order to know what God would have us do. Here we are exercising our reason in order to know what is right, apart from any commitment to God at all.

Eight Moral Theories Evaluated

Let’s evaluate eight theories of morality, including four ‘traditional’ theories, which makes morality a (non-rational) matter of circumstance, such as who you are or what family, religion, or culture you were born into. Employing the method of counterexample, it should be possible to establish which of these eight theories qualifies as the most defensible based upon the exercise of reason. As will become apparent, none of these theories provides a suitable foundation for the conception of morality as a set of objective and universal principles that are capable of satisfying the criteria of adequacy adopted here – with exactly one exception. This argument will draw the conclusion that it is the most defensible. (More extensive discussion may be found in Rachels 1999 and Rachels 2003.)

[…]

4.2 Abortion, Stem-Cells, and cloning

As students of political science are well aware, the principle of majority rule must be supplemented by principles of minority rights, lest the noble concept of democratic rule degenerate into no more than the tyranny of the mob.

A more defensible approach toward understanding morality, (T8), is a deontological theory, according to which an action A is right when it involves treating other persons as ends and never merely as means. Treating others ‘as ends’ means treating them as valuable in and of themselves, which may be encapsulated in the notion of always treating other persons with respect. Persons are thus entities with interests that are entitled to due consideration. If this is the most defensible conception of morality, as I shall contend, then it also demonstrates that some religious maxims, such as ‘the Golden Rule’ of doing unto others as you would have then do unto you, are correct, not because they are religious maxims but because they are logically justifiable.

(T8) does not mean that persons should never treat others as means but that persons should never treat others merely as means. We all treat one another as means all the time. Employers treat their employees as means to run a business and make a profit, while employees treat their employers as means to earn an income and make a living. As long as they are not treating each other with disrespect – by employers, for example, offering substandard wages, excess hours of employment, or unsafe work conditions; by employees clocking in for work not performed, stealing from their employer, or failing to perform the tasks for which they were hired – these can be moral relationships. Similarly for doctors and patients, lawyers and clients, students and teachers.

[…]

Only deontological theory appears capable of satisfying (CA-1) and (CA-2), while explaining why practices that are virtually condemned, such as murder, robbery, and rape, are immoral practices, and why practices that are virtually endorsed, such as keeping promises and speaking the truth, are moral practices. The former involve treating other persons merely as means, while the latter involve treating other persons with respect. There are situations, however, in which speaking the truth or promise keeping might conflict with morality. A spy caught behind enemy lines, for example, should not reveal the network of agents with whom she has been working because it would be wrong not to speak the truth. There are circumstances in which the right thing to do would be to remain silent or to deliberately misinform others.

[…]

Persons as persons have moral rights and incur obligations to treat others with respect, but not when others are violating those rights and not fulfilling their own obligations. Hence, there is no moral obligation to cooperate with those who violate morality. Interestingly, however, there might nevertheless be legal obligations to cooperate with those who violate morality, as with the whistleblower who abrogates contractual obligations to his company in order to expose crime and corruption. These are bona fide acts of supererogation, which all too often led to the punishment of those who sacrifice themselves for the sake of the common good, a conception that, in this time in history, almost appears quaint. But it reflects one more example of the possibility that the moral and the legal need not coincide, which is of primary concern.

So there can be conflicts between rules of thumb and exceptions to those rules. Even murder might be justifiable under special conditions. Some writers have speculated that, if attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin had been successful, many lives might have been spared. Since murder involved the deliberate killing of a person that is illegal, however, there is clearly room for debate over whether killing Hitler or Stalin would have been wrong. A tyrant who massively violates deontological principles by treating others with severe disrespect deserves to be punished, where the extent, duration, and intensity of their crimes may dictate extreme measures. Yet there’s a virtually universal consensus on the fundamental importance of due process for those accused of crimes, prisoners of war, and even unlawful combatants.

The contrast case, of course, is that of taking the life, not of a tyrant, such as Hitler or Stalin, but of an innocent, as in the case of abortion. The capacity to deal with cases like abortion, stem-cell research, and cloning is a crucial test of a theory relative to pre-analytically problematical cases. The slogan, ‘Abortion is murder’ raises the crucial questions of whether (a) the developing entity properly qualifies as a person and (b) whether killing the developing entity properly qualifies as wrongful. Since abortion is legal under Roe v. Wade (1973), question (b) is not whether killing the developing entity is legally wrong, which is not, but whether it is morally wrong. It’s morally wrong if it involves treating a person without respect and merely as a means. This is in turn implies that the crucial question about abortion is whether the entity under consideration properly qualifies as a person. So the key question is (a).

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