My favorite atheist is Guenter Lewy. I have never looked into his beliefs about ethics in general; it’s not that. What interests me about him is his confession, in a little book he wrote some years ago called Why America Needs Religion, that he envies his religious friends their moral resources. Lacking the model of the love of God, he says, many people on his side love “humanity,” but far fewer love “individual human beings with all their failings and shortcomings.” They may do good works, but they are “not likely to produce a Dorothy Day or a Mother Teresa.”
One of the curious things about the proponents of so called evolutionary ethics is that although they wave the banner of science, their ethics are actually arbitrary. Take for example Robert Wright, who proposes utilitarianism. Since you can’t derive utilitarianism just from belief in natural selection, how does he get there? He argues like this:
One of the hottest fads in social science is “evolutionary psychology,” also known as “evolutionary ethics.” The story line is that by considering how we came to be, we will learn more about how we are. According to this view, Darwinism reveals the universal, persistent features of human nature.
“‘Moreover,’ added Arcade, ‘I freely acknowledge that it is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.’” -- Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels
Readers:
So you thought metaphysics doesn’t influence politics? Think again.
Sometimes people try to defend evils by drawing a false analogy with the natural sciences.
“Lots of things in science are counter-intuitive,” they may say. “For example, you might think the sun is only a little higher than the clouds, but in reality it’s so far from us that its light takes more than eight minutes to get here. Well, lots of things in ethics are counter-intuitive too. You might think no one should ever have an abortion, but in reality it’s often a necessary evil.”
By the lights of the popular culture, the weeks up to Christmas are “the Christmas season” when everyone is supposed to be jolly. Those who cannot rouse themselves to hilarity are often despondent. They think there is something wrong with them.