Sam Harris on Whether Atheists are Evil

In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes:

If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)

Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists ". . . are at least as well behaved as the general population." (Ibid.) Harris' enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry:

1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.

2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.

Therefore

3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.

The problem with this argument lies in its first premise. It simply doesn't follow that if religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than theists. This blatant non sequitur trades on a confusion of two questions which it is essential to distinguish.

Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?

The answer to this question is No. But even if the answer is Yes, I am willing to concede arguendo to Harris that it is No. In any case (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as part of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though it is of interest sociologically. Now contrast (Q1) with

Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?

The agreed-upon code is one that most or many atheists and theists would accept. Thus don't we all object to child molestation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft,  lying, and the swindling of  scum like Bernard Madoff? And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. Just imagine some minimal objectively binding code that all or most of us, theists and atheists alike, accept.

What (Q2) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices. Here you can read the transcript of a debate between Richard Taylor and William Lane Craig on this topic. I incline toward the side ably defended by Craig. Although I respect Taylor very much as a philosopher and have learned from his work, he seems to me to come across in this debate as something of a sophist and a smart-ass.

But the point of this post is not to take sides on the question of the basis of morality, but simply to point out that Sam Harris has confused two quite obviously distinct questions. For if he had kept them distinct, he would have seen that the question whether morality requires a basis in religion is logically independent of the question whether theists are more moral than atheists. He would have seen that invoking the platitude that atheists can be as morally decent as theists has no tendency to show that morality does not require a supernatural foundation. He would have seen that (1) is false.

See Is Religion the Problem? for further criticism of Sam Harris.

Comments

[Edward]

Bill, would you say that consistency is the most important aspect in this situation? This is to say that an atheist can be as moral as a theist, but, if you grant that morals must at least eventually rest upon a metaphysical foundation, the atheist is being inconsistent in adhering to morality as if it was objectively valid.

This, to me, has always been the crux of the moral argument, practically speaking. I know of now prominent theist philosophers who have actually argued that atheists are in fact less moral as a people than theists. Harris, along with all of the other anti-theists, is responding to a straw-man.

[Matt Hart]

For my part, I think it's got to be true that atheists are on the whole less moral than atheists. (In other words, that the answer tt Q1 is yes.) Certainly, if I were than atheist then my attitube would be: do good for the most part until there arises a dark opportunity with a suitably large payoff and an appropriately slight risk of detection.

[Chris]

Comments like the second one, I think, tell us more about the author's attitudes than anything else.

[Chris]

Oops, I meant to also ask why it is the case that an atheist cannot have metaphysical foundations for morality? Are you saying that in order to have metaphysical foundations for morality they must be theistic foundations? It seems to me a non-believer can still be a neo-Kantian or a neo-Aristotlian about morality without being inconsistent.

[Matt Hart]

Chris,

My remarks do indeed tell you something about my attitudes. But you fail to mention what, if anything, is illigetimate or wrong-headed about my expressed attitudes.

[Edward]

How can atheism have a metaphysical foundation for anything? To my mind, at least, popular atheism entails naturalism and materialism.

[John Cassidy]

Edward, that's what atheists get out of a content-less definition, that Bill blogged about just a few days ago.

Atheism, as a designation for those that lack a faith in God, does not say anything about any other metaphysical system.

However, how that applies to Harris is a little problematical. Let's say atheist Al believes in a metaphysical Good, and is dutifully skeptical of most other "soft" ideas. Let's say we have atheist Bob, a pure materialist and naturalist. Well, Bob just believes in "one less" metaphysical system than Al. Harris is known to use the "one less God" argument, and the "one less" metaphysic argument is roughly equivalent.

If we start to argue about the applicability of the "one less" argument, then we throw some doubt on whether, even if it has validity (which I am not convinced) it was applied right in either case.

Harris is a mystic, though. However, he's bewildered by the ridicule he receives from the non-believing side over his buy-in to meditation and mysticism. He doesn't seem to understand how this relates to the "one less" argument. And he has not realized this yet as far as I can see.

I think that Harris would try to argue that he has the right balance of belief and skepticism. However, that would cut against all "one less" arguments.

Materialists are just subscribers to "one less" substance. Naturalists to "one less" class of events....

[Chris]

Matt,

For an old or ancient take on what's wrong with it see Plato's "ring of Gyges".

[djr]

I've never been quite sure how theism is supposed to succeed where any form of atheism fails at giving foundations for morality. Exactly what does God add to the picture, and how? Matt's attitude seems to suggest that what theism adds to the picture is that God will punish you if you don't "do good." But there are two problems here: 1) The attitude seems to concede that we can give plenty of content to "doing good" without theism; 2) the attitude seems to justify "doing good" on the grounds that you'll be punished if you don't. 2 arguably doesn't justify *moral* action at all, since its motivation is basely self-interested. If we concede that genuinely moral action can be justified by appeal to its benefit for the agent, then atheists have plenty of appeals to make, many of which will at least be more noble and genuinely other-regarding than the "God will burn you in Hell" justification. Worse still, if 1 is right, then it's not clear that we're defending the original claim at all -- that claim was, remember, that morality requires a theistic foundation. If we concede that we can make sense of "doing good" without theism, then why are we saying that we need theism as a foundation for morality?

Perhaps Matt is confusing questions about *morality* with questions about *the rationality of morality*. It is by no means obvious that morality must, as a conceptual matter, be rationally justified. If it must, then it must involve a contradiction to say that a) theft is unjust and b) some conceivable rational agents might have sufficient reason to steal. We could multiply the examples, but you take the point. Some philosophers *do* think that there is a necessary conceptual relationship between morality and rationality, but anyone who even considers taking immoralism seriously implicitly rejects that position. To be clear, rejecting the necessarily rational character of morality is not to say that morality is not rationally justified; it is not even to deny that morality is *always* rationally justified or that acting immorally is always rationally unjustified. It is simply to say that the rational justifiability of morality is not a conceptually necessary matter.

It is arguable that theism could supply extra reasons for being moral, but it isn't obvious that they would be very important reasons, reasons that would actually motivate a genuinely moral character, or reasons that add much to the overall justification available to atheists.

[David Parker]

Another debate that may be of interest:

Daniel Dennett vs. Alvin Plantinga, Science and Religion, Are They Compatible? (mp3)

In case links don't work: http://www.brianauten.com/Apologetics/Plantinga-Dennett-Debate.mp3

The audio quality is inferior, but of course hearing Plantinga dismantle Dennett is a sufficient compensation.

[ECO]

[Sam Harris:] "If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should... "

Then atheists should what? According to Sam Harris, atheism is not a system of beliefs nor a world-view nor even a "thing." So it is about as relevant to morality as bricklaying or (more correctly) the absence of bricklaying. He says: "Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such." (Harris, The Problem with Atheism).

[Sam Harris:] "... are at least as well behaved as the general population."

In the preface to Leonhard Euler's classic text on arithmetic, Euler's biographer assures the reader that Euler considered atheists "to be among the most pernicious enemies of mankind." Surely there is a reason for this. A man may pay his taxes and even be faithful to his wife and seem to adhere to the moral codes of the people around him, but is that all there is to morality? What if he is spreading pernicious ideas? The effect of this is not immediately evident. It is easy to claim he is as moral as the next guy, behaviorally. But ideas have consequences. I think this should be factored in when evaluating the atheist's claim of being 'as moral as the next guy.'

[Ben]

I can't seem to post my full comment, but FWI, it has been reposted here.

[Ben]

And by "here" I mean to click on my name for the link. I guess it's some kind of anti-spam filter.

Ben