Continuing from a previous post, * They “didn’t believe in much of anything” Timothy Keller wrote of:
The Concept of Moral Obligation
It is common to hear people say, “No one should impost their moral views on others, because everyone has the right to find truth inside him or herself.” This leaves the speaker open to a series of very uncomfortable questions. Aren’t there people in the world who are doing things you believe are wrong—things that they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior? If you do (and everyone does!), doesn’t that mean there is some kind of moral standard that people should abide by regardless of their individual convictions? This raises a question. Why is it impossible (in practice) for anyone to be a consistent moral relativist even when they claim that they are? The answer is that we all have a pervasive, powerful, and unavoidable belief not only in moral values but in moral obligation. Socialist Christian Smith puts it like this:
“Moral” . . . is an orientation towards understandings about what is right and wrong, just and unjust, that are not established by our own actual desires or preferences but instead are believed to exist apart from them, providing standards by which our desires and preferences can themselves be judged.2
All human beings have moral feelings. We call it a conscience. When considering doing something that we feel would be wrong, we tend to refrain. Our moral sense does not stop there however. We also believe that there are standards “that exist apart from us” by which we evaluate moral feelings. Moral obligation is a belief that some things ought not to be regardless how a person feels within herself, regardless of what the rest of her community and culture says, and regardless of whether it is in her self-interest or not. The young couple had no doubts that people in other cultures should honor women’s rights, for example.
Though we have been taught all moral values are relative to individuals and cultures, we can’t live like that. In actual practice we inevitably treat some principles as absolute standards by which we judge the behavior of those who don’t share our values. What gives us the right to do that, if all moral beliefs are relative? Nothing gives us the right. Yet we can’t stop it. People who laugh at the claim that there is a transcendent moral order do not think that racial genocide is just as impractical or self defeating, but they are wrong. The Nazis who exterminated Jews may have claimed that they didn’t feel that it was immoral at all. We don’t care. We don’t care if they sincerely felt that they were doing a service to humanity. They ought not to have done it.
We do not only have moral feelings, but we also have an ineradicable belief that moral standards exist, outside of us, by which our eternal moral feelings are evaluated. Why? Why do we think those moral standards exist?
The Evolutionary Theory of Moral Obligation
A common answer today comes from what I called in the last chapter the “clue killer,” sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. This view holds that altruistic genes were passed down to us and now the great majority of us feel that unselfish behavior is “right.”
There are, however, many flaws in this theory, and it has been given some devastating critiques.3 An individual’s self-sacrificing, altruistic behavior towards his or her blood kin might result in a greater survival rate for the individual’s family or extended clan, and therefore result in a greater number of descendants with the person’s genetic material. For evolutionary purposes, however, the opposite response—hostility to all people outside one’s group—should be just as widely considered as moral and right behavior. Yet today that sacrificing time, money, emotion, and even life—especially for someone “not of our kind” or tribe—is right. If we see a total stranger fall onto the river we jump in after him, of feel guilty for not doing so. In fact, most people feel the obligation to do so even if the person in the water is an enemy. How could that trait have come down by process of natural selection? Such people would have been less likely to survive and pass on their genes. On the basis of strict evolutionary naturalism (the belief that everything about us is here because of process of natural selection) that kind of altruism should have died out of the race long ago. Instead it’s stronger than ever.
Other arguments to demonstrate the reproductive benefits of altruism have also run into trouble. Some contend that altruistic behavior brings many indirect reciprocal benefits to the practioner from others, but this can’t account for our motivation to practice such acts when no one knows about them. Others have contended that sacrificial behavior benefits an entire group or society to pass on its genetic code. However, there is consensus that natural selection does not work on whole populations.4
Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we believe that there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated. 5 ~Timothy Keller, The Reason For God (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2016, 2018). 151-54 (again. . . .continued)
* (Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
