Speak for Yourself: Letters to the Editor

Thanks for the fascinating interview with Larry Elder. What an upbeat, life-affirming champion of liberty! He should be challenging Barack Obama for the presidency! Obama wouldn’t stand a chance!

I do, however, want to take issue with a point that Elder made about religion and morality. He asked, “Why is there a sense of right and wrong? Why is there a sense of guilt? . . . How does that advance our interests if there is no God and it’s just evolution?”  
It advances our interests, because what is moral is (or should be) based on what is in our interests. The moral principle of rights is a case in point. Mutual predation is not in people’s interests; respecting their rights is. For confirmation, see the respective histories of communism and capitalism. Nor is guilt a mysterious emotion that can only be explained supernaturally; to the contrary, it serves one’s interests by discouraging a departure from one’s moral principles.

Moreover, as Socrates’ question to Euthyphro illustrates, God’s commandments can never be the basis of morality: “Are the commandments right, because the gods will them,” asked Socrates, “or do they will them because they are right?” If the former, then God’s commandments are right simply because He wills them—in which case, it was right for Moses to stone a man to death for working on the Sabbath, because (as the Bible tells us) God commanded it. But no civilized person today would consider such punishment moral.

On the other hand, if God issues His commandments because they are right, then there is a higher standard of morality to which even God must repair—in which case, His commandments are no longer the ultimate standard, even assuming that they are moral, which in many cases, they were not.

There is another reason that religion cannot be the basis of morality. Religion is based on faith in the supernatural. So, different religions cannot resolve their differing views of morality by appealing to reason or to the real needs of human beings, which means that they will forever be at odds with one another on what is morally right. A science of ethics can no more be based on religion than a science of medicine can be based on the incantations of a witch doctor. Both these sciences must be grounded in objective evidence and the survival needs of human beings.

William Dwyer
Dublin, California