Atheism or Utilitarianism?

Pick one.

I’ve noticed a lot of atheists are also utilitarians. Politically or psychologically speaking, this is a combination that seems to go well; let’s be rational about things rather than resorting to crude authoritarian, black-and-white thinking about gods and moral absolutes. Right?

But lying beneath the surface are certain contradictions which call into question how rational it really is to be both atheist and utilitarian at the same time. In fact, it turns out there’s a moral system which pairs much more straightforwardly with atheism, and I’d like to tell you a little about it. Before I do, though, let’s just take a quick look at theism and atheism.

Theism

So there are many arguments about the subject—too many for us to discuss exhaustively here. But we can at least explore the atheist position as something arising from a certain reading of Occam’s Razor and a preference for simplicity. We could believe 1. the universe is what there is, or 2. what there is consists of the universe-and-also-God. Believing 2 opens a large can of worms about this God stuff: what’s God like? Or, how does God work as distinct from the rest of the universe? And so on.

Faced with the opportunity to believe in something complicated, atheism says “OK, so why should I believe in God, rather than the simpler and more elegant godless universe?”

Most theists are extremely happy to answer this question, because God is one of their very favorite things. So they immediately come up with all kinds of answers, about how there’s this holy book, or that prophet, or those miracles, and how people all over the world believe in Gods, and don’t you have this hole in your heart that yearns for a God?

And atheism says look, that’s just not good evidence. Those prophets and holy books don’t prove anything, and those miracles can be explained as unamazing. As for the prevalence of religious thinking across nations and throughout history, well, people all over the world are wrong about things. (In fact they never even agreed about religion; they all had totally incompatible religious ideas, and killed each other over those ideas all the time.) And whatever your personal intuitions about God, those aren’t my intuitions, and even if they were, they’re subjective, not objective—really, they only give a good explanation for why you believe in God when there’s no evidence.

Now the theists insist that there is evidence—just maybe not good enough to satisfy an atheist. More scientifically literate theists will point to a large body of experimental evidence in parapsychology which looks very much like evidence for the miraculous. Or they’ll point to the finely-tuned universe as evidence for a fine-tuner we could all agree is God.

Atheists would really rather not get dragged into the weeds here, so they check Wikipedia, which reassures them that any replicable findings in parapsychology are inadmissable and unconvincing. As for a finely-tuned universe, well of course our universe may look that way because we exist, but in a universe that wasn’t finely tuned to support conscious life, there’s nobody there to even pose the question. So there’s really nothing here that might count as a convincing argument, and that’s basically it.

People have a natural tendency to see things that aren’t necessarily there—to see patterns and meaning where none exists. But if you look at the onward march of progress, you can see how damaging religious thinking has been in stoking armed conflicts, in oppressing freedoms like drinking or abortion, or in simply preventing us from moving forward scientifically.

Obviously, people would rather believe in a loving God, in the idea that their individual lives have meaning, and that they’ll be reunited with their loved ones in heaven. But these are not things that make sense. So there we are, atheism: That’s what makes sense.

Utilitarianism

So here’s an unrelated topic: morality. As before, there is a huge body of argumentation, but we can basically work towards it in the same way that we did with theism. Specifically, we can ask, why believe in utilitarianism?

And boy, are utilitarians eager to explain. You’ll find out that there are plenty of people out there for whom utilitarianism seems like their very favorite thing. Now they’ll explain to you that very smart people out there like Jeremy Bentham figured out that all life seeks pleasure and avoids pain, and made the connection that this is what good and evil is all about. This is so important that Bentham called it the fundamental axiom: “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”

Now at this juncture we might point out that there are a lot of moral systems out there, like, say, Emmanual Kant’s system which says you should only act by that maxim you can will to be a moral law. Utilitarians kindof wonder why you’re distracting them with this stuff, and would rather get into the exciting details about act vs rule utilitarianism, and how to measure utility, and so on. But if you’re a bit skeptical you might want to put on the breaks, here.

Why is pleasure and happiness good? Why not, say, hitting people with hammers? Or baking crab apple pies? Or, making paper clips? Right? Like, “It is the strategy resulting in the greatest number of paper clips that is the measure of right and wrong.”

And the utilitarians at this point may object that you’re just being silly; I mean, who cares about paper clips? But if you insist, they’ll point to very obvious moral intuitions about how actions that make people unhappy feel bad, and actions that make people happy feel good. Do we have similar intuitions about paper clips?

The trouble here, of course, is that your intuitions don’t prove anything. Whatever your personal intuitions about morality, those aren’t my intuitions, and even if they were, they’re subjective, not objective—they really only give a good explanation for why you believe in morality when there’s no evidence.

Now at this point utilitarians may just stop talking to you for arguing in such obviously bad faith, so you really need to apologize and insist that you don’t mean to annoy them. You just want to understand as best you can about their moral system. So maybe they could talk about some of the details? Like, are there any thorny problems or complex issues to be worked out? And it turns out that there are.

One of the central problems in Utilitarianism is the Repugnant Conclusion. In brief, it goes like this: Say you have 100 very happy people. Wouldn’t it be better to add 100 more slightly happy people? And then, wouldn’t it be better to even out everyone’s happiness? Now we have 200 somewhat happy people. Keep doing this until you have a zillion people whose lives are barely worth living, and this is clearly “better” than what we started with, a world of 100 very happy people.

So what’s the problem, here? Well we can avoid this by insisting that calculating the happiness for people who don’t exist is out of bounds. Or we could insist that average utility rather than total utility is what matters—although this rapidly seems to suggest that going around killing lonely, sad people whom no one will miss is the morally right thing to do, and this violates all kinds of other moral intuitions.

But it really looks like what happened is that utilitarians just made up a moral system and justified it with intuitive feelings—because, you know, feelings are the way we learn anything about reality—and then explored it with their feelings, and then those intuitive feelings were violated, which was, wow, pretty confusing for them. (I am not the first person to notice that Utilitarianism is essentially a Train to Crazy Town. My advice: Do not get on the train.)

So when atheists argue that people have a natural tendency to see things that aren’t necessarily there—to see patterns and meaning where none exists—it strikes me as very, very hard to miss the obvious corollary with moral systems like utilitarianism. And if you look at the onward march of progress, you can see how damaging moral thinking has been in stoking armed conflicts, in oppressing freedoms like free speech, or in simply preventing us from moving forward scientifically.

So here we are: rather than just dogmatically clinging to random, unsupported beliefs we never had any evidence for in the first place, I’d like to introduce you to a much more elegant solution to the question of morality.

Moral Nihilism

If you’re going to default to the assumption that things aren’t there unless there is clear evidence for their existence, this is the moral philosophy for you: Moral Nihilism. Also sometimes called Error Theory, it very simply and straightforwardly asserts that there is no morality. Just as our intuitions might occasionally lapse into thinking of a conscious agent who makes things happen behind the scenes, our intuitions might lapse into thinking some actions or people are “good” or “bad.” But this is an error, because according to moral nihilism, morality itself doesn’t exist.

Of course, we may all prefer to live in a world where we can get a judgmental thrill out of pointing fingers at outgroup members who violate our moral sensibilities. Or, it might give us a much richer sense of satisfaction to do things, and then tell ourselves how those things were the right things to do. But these are not thoughts that make sense. So there we are, moral nihilism: That’s what makes sense—at least, if we reason like atheists.

Or You Could Just Be Agnostic

Cards on the table: I’m not an atheist. And it isn’t even because I don’t feel like biting the bullet about moral nihilism. Rather, I am an agnostic because I don’t reason the same way that atheists do. Ultimately, I really don’t find any of the arguments for theism or atheism even remotely convincing. From where I sit, the existence of God or gods is clearly wide open—partly because there are so many, many possible ways for God to exist.

For example, are you sure we aren’t living in a simulation? If so, wouldn’t the guy running the simulation be God? Or, how do you know our universe wasn’t created by a blind, mad Lovecraftian being like Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan? Are you sure the universe’ constants weren’t flung into being by an incomprehensible 12th-dimensional intelligence at the instant of the Big Bang to give rise to all that we see around us in the universe? Are you even sure we shouldn’t take a kind of pantheistic stance and refer to the whims of Natural Selection as the All-Mother Who Gave Birth To Us All?

Not only do I have trouble dismissing the evidence of parapsychologists, or the arguments about a finely-tuned universe, I just don’t agree at all that there’s an asymmetry between belief in something and belief in nothing. That kind of skepticism strikes me as frequentist thinking, which I never liked; unless p is below some arbitrary value, we default to the null? So no, I’m seriously not an atheist.

Now, I do see that people can take this atheistic stance, this way of reasoning that privileges belief in nothing over belief in something, and that they can stick to this stance in a way that’s very consistent. It’s just that, being consistent about this entails more than just rejecting theism—it entails rejecting utilitarianism. The only arguments in favor of utilitarianism are rooted in intuitions about right and wrong—intuitions which are then violated when you follow utilitarianism through to its natural conclusions; those are the kinds of arguments atheists soundly reject when they’re made in favor of God.

Granted, there are other moral systems, like Aristotle’s virtue ethics, or Confucianism, that might have some chance of being better grounded, and force fewer repugnant conclusions, than utilitarianism. Perhaps some new ethical system might even be discovered within the findings of cosmology, or based on the writings of Sun Tzu. Still, the fact that moral philosophers do disagree so strongly about numerous actions (e.g. abortion) does call the existence of morality itself into question.

Maybe atheists can really show why morality has to exist in the general case, or, maybe they can prove that a specific moral system is true. But absent such proofs, atheists should be careful: the arguments they so readily deploy against God work just as well against morality. Ultimately, if moral philosophers ever were to definitively establish that morality did exist, the ethical system to emerge from this wouldn’t be something arbitrary, or based on sheer intuition—and it would probably look very, very different from utilitarianism.