“But a moral system based on the will of God has enforcement built into it. What motivation do people have for doing the morally right thing? If they don’t, they will be displeasing God, and there will be, as we say, hell to pay.
“Cass Seltzer is an atheist with a soul, who feels sympathy for all sentient beings and thinks that others ought to, too. Lovely sentiments. But what if they don’t feel as he feels, and what if they don’t want to? What means does he have of compelling them to do the right thing?
“For him there’s no immortality. Death is the end, and everyone ends up exactly the same. It doesn’t make any difference whether you live as a Hitler or a Mother Teresa. There’s no relationship between the moral quality of your life and your ultimate fate. Death is final, over and out, and, given its finality, what reason could there be for consistently living the moral life rather than living only for one’s self?
“My last question to you, Professor Seltzer, is, what motivation for adopting the moral point of view can you possibly offer without a belief in God and immortality?”
Fidley’s tone of belligerent confidence has returned with this last speechifying question. The line about a morality with muscle is, clearly, something he really believes. Roz is sitting on the edge of her seat- literally, as she would say-and her hands are clasped in front of her almost in supplication, and he can’t help smiling at the sight of her. She’s a good friend, but she’s also distracting him.
“Professor Fidley worries that, without a belief in God, people will act only for reasons of self-interest instead of behaving morally. But then what does he offer as the only persuasion to adopt the moral point of view? Concern for one’s self, in this life and the next. Without this, he says, there’s no reason to act morally. In the end, it’s Professor Fidley who reduces morality to self-interest.
“And it’s no wonder that in the end he has to fall back on self-interest as the ultimate motivation for morality. He can’t see what can be morally compelling about morality, in and of itself. If he did see that, he wouldn’t think that he needs God to magically inject the morality into morality. And since, according to him, there’s nothing compelling about morality in itself, he also thinks morality requires some lash to punish us in an afterlife if we don’t comply. So, in the end, all that he can appeal to are motivations of self-interest. In the end, all that he can offer people as a reason to act morally is for them to act in their self-interest, currying favor with an authority that can dole out rewards and mete out punishments.
“But if the moral point of view is something that we humans can, with a great deal of effort, reason our way into, then morality itself provides the motivation to be moral. The reason to do the moral thing is that it’s the moral thing to do; to do anything else is to make a shambles of our thinking, of our values, of our mattering. Our seeing for ourselves why it’s the moral thing to do is what compels us.
“When we’re trying to teach a child why it’s wrong to pick on another child, do we say, ‘It’s wrong because if I catch you doing it again you’ll be spanked,’ or do we, rather, say, ‘How would you feel if someone did that to you?’ And when we’re wrestling with our own conscience, trying to resist a temptation we know is wrong, do we think to ourselves, ‘If I do it, then I’ll be flambéed in hell’s fires,’ or do we think, ‘Would I want everyone in the world to behave this way? Wouldn’t I feel moral outrage if I learned of someone else doing this?’
“There is a point of view that’s available to all of us. The philosopher Thomas Nagel called it the ‘View from Nowhere.’ It’s the source of so much of our philosophical reasoning, including our moral reasoning. When you view the fact that you happen to be the particular person that you are from the vantage point of the View from Nowhere, that fact shrivels into insignificance. Of course, we don’t live our life from the perspective of the View from Nowhere. We live inside our lives, where it’s impossible not to feel one’s self to matter. But, still, that View from Nowhere is always available to us, reminding us that there’s nothing inherently special or uniquely deserving about any of us, that it’s just an accident that one happens to be who one happens to be. And the consequence of these reflections is this: if we can’t live coherently without believing ourselves to matter, then we can’t live coherently without extending that same mattering to everyone else.
“The work of ethics is the work of getting one’s self to this vantage point and keeping it relevant to how one sees the world and acts. There are truths to discover in that process, and they’re the truths that make us change our behavior. To assert that there has been no cumulative progress in discovering moral truths is as grossly false as to say there’s been no cumulative progress made in science. We’ve discovered that slavery is wrong, we’ve discovered that burning heretics in autos-da-fé is wrong, we’ve discovered that depriving people of rights on the basis of race or religion is wrong, we’ve discovered that the legal ownership of women is wrong.
“Religious impulses and emotions are varied. There are expansive, life-affirming emotions that can find a natural expression in the context of religion, which is why I can never offer a wholesale condemnation of religion, even though Professor Fidley seems to think I do. But when religion encourages what I can only describe as a moral childishness that blocks the development of true moral thinking, then I do condemn it. When religion tells us that there is nothing more we can say about morality than that we can’t see the reasons for it, but do it if you know what’s good for you, then I do condemn it. We can do better than that. We can become moral grown-ups. And if there were a God, surely he would approve.”
Cass stops speaking, not because he has found the perfect parting shot, but because he is spent. His opening statement had been shorter than Fidley’s by half, so he had felt it only fair to help himself to as much time as he wanted at the end, when the words just kept coming. There’s a silence for several long moments, an uncanny silence considering how many people are crowding Memorial Church, and Cass wonders whether he went on too long and too emotionally, and whether he has embarrassed himself and everyone here. Then the hall erupts. Lenny stands at the lectern beside Cass, waiting for the applause to die down so he can say the few words that he’s been saving for the end, including the best of the agnostic jokes. But he doesn’t get the chance, because when the applause dies down the crowd surges forward, and Cass is surrounded.
XXXV The Argument from Solemn Emotions
It’s only when Cass is settling himself into his car that he realizes that he’s euphoric. He hasn’t had the time to observe the state of his mind, or maybe the euphoria has descended on him right at this moment. I’m drunk, he thinks, pushing the Start button of his Prius and silently steering onto Massachusetts Avenue.
William James, cataloguing the varieties of rapture that can seize hold of a person, hadn’t scorned to include intoxication: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.”
Yes, Cass thinks, making a left onto Bow Street, driving past the Harvard river dorms. He feels as if he hardly has a need to breathe, as if he’s holding his breath as the Yes function is pumping, and that for as long as he can sustain this breathless Yes he is in perfect harmony with the world, no matter the wildness and pang of life. All the irreconcilabilities are melded sweetly together, the pulling-apartness that shreds the human heart is stilled in the yesness that’s resounding, and all manner of things shall be well.