Utilitarianism and Atheism
Utilitarianism claims that in ethics, what matters is not rules so much as doing
whatever makes the most people the happiest: the greatest happiness of the
greatest number.
The action does not matter, only the results matter.
The nice thing about Utilitarianism is that it tells us that there is no God or
that he does not matter. If all are meant to be happy like it says, then God
does not exist for we suffer. It is useful for sowing prejudice against the God
hypothesis. It paves the way for the great light of unholy atheistic science to
arrive and take over.
You may object, "What if it is God who tells us to put the biggest happiness of the biggest number first?" But then do we care about the greatest happiness of most or do we just care about God commanding it? If being commanded is all that matters then it is contradictory to say that greatest happiness matters at all never mind most of all.
Utilitarianism has its dangers. What morality
doesn't? It makes it too easy to command something dreadful while claiming
you have personal and secret - maybe even psychic - knowledge of why it is for
the best. It is best then to try and stick with situations where you can
see the reasons on the table. Listening to Gods or prophets or people who
claim to know what you do not know defeats the purpose of Utilitarianism.
How? Because if the greatest happiness of most is what matters then they
cannot really matter or be enjoyed much if the reasons for what is done are not
known. A Utilitarian God will not lay out his reasons but just give
commands and that means you could kill babies at his behest and realise you have
made things worse and the babies died for nothing. It opens the door for
unscrupulous people who pretend to know what God wants.
Another nice thing about it is that it opposes Jesus who plainly indicated that
Utilitarianism is wrong. In Mark 14 he objected when people said that a woman
who put expensive ointment on his feet should have sold it for the poor. And
that was in the earliest gospel too!
The predominant moral view in the world is utilitarianism. This is a hard
philosophy to apply in life. It is made impossible if you introduce the idea
that the greatest good is giving people the opportunity to find God and have
their hearts changed by him.
The notion of God goes hand in hand with the notion that he has the right to let
us suffer and die so horribly. Utilitarianism tends to be atheistic because it
says we should all be happy and that is a direct attack on God.
Utilitarianism says we should not have to make sacrifices for others but because
the world is so imperfect we have to. This leaves it open to the attack, “If
there is no God then how can persons or their happiness be important when they
are the products of chance?” But what has that got to do with anything? It is a
kind of racism to say that a person who was made by chance would not be as
important as one who was made by God. This is really saying that the person who
was made by God is not important at all for it is only God having made him that
makes him important so it is really God that is important and not the person.
Yet the attack is voiced in Runaway World (page 52). Also, religion does not
seem to think that the existence of God means that the existence of chance is
ruled out. They think he can step back and let things take care of themselves.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number rule that the Utilitarian system
espouses is undeniably right. The Church says it is unworkable. But that is not
the reason it rejects it. The unworkability is not the problem it has with it.
If there is a God it ought to be very workable for he can maximise happiness by
changing our programming so that we are more easily satisfied. He hasn’t done
so. If God runs the universe, he can ensure that our deeds will produce the
happiest results. But God makes it hard to be a good person or a person who
finds happiness. Some people are made so that if they find a dream wonderful
person who loves them they are still not happy. To say that Utilitarianism is
true, is to say there is no God. All you have to do is look around you to see
it.
So God can reward our Utilitarian attempts to bring about the best by making
sure our efforts work with his supernatural help as long as our intentions are
good. He can make Utilitarianism workable or more workable. The Church cannot
accept the Utilitarian philosophy for the Bible and Jesus laid down laws that
cannot be broken whatever the cost. So if you believe in the Bible or in Jesus
you are deadening your heart to human suffering. You are diminishing your
compassion by approving of the mess God has left. You are saying that human
welfare has nothing to do with morality. The Church cannot tolerate the
possibility that there will be times it serves the Utilitarian end to abandon
God and religion. It is God’s happiness not man’s that religion cares about
though it is supposed to make man happy as if it were a side-effect. Overall,
the point I want to make is that Utilitarianism even if unworkable but it is
still a good principle and so belief in God or deities is bad for it denies the
validity and the goodness of the principle. God is anti-human.
It seems terrible to say that only happiness matters as if people don't. People
benefiting from Utilitarianism would be a mere side effect for it is about
benefiting happiness. But if we say that God matters and people don't in
comparison are we any better? No - we are worse.
Is Utilitarianism the default view if there is no
God?
Sam Harris claimed that morality just means wellbeing so we can learn how to me
moral from science. For Harris, morality is real and objective. The
principles are as good as laws from a God though there is no God.
Christians sometimes say that if there is no God then all
we can make do with for a morality is some form of Utilitarianism. So some
Christians would agree with Harris in principle - a form of objective morality
without God is possible. They only complaint they have is that Utilitarianism is
too hard to calculate and rules become difficult and too fluid but they have to
admit that the problematic result of Utilitarianism being right does not make it
wrong. In fact it would be worse without it. Those who say that there is no
objective morality without God usually think that Utilitarianism is not
morality. But it is if is the best we can come up with.
William Lane Craig praises Harris for holding that goodness is objectively real
and not just a matter of opinion. Now how can Craig or any Christian praise
Harris for that? What is the problem?
The alternative is to hold that right and wrong are just opinions and have no
factual basis (relativism). But Craig says you need to bring in the idea of a
moral God who commands moral goodness otherwise talk about what is objectively
good makes no sense. In that case then how can Craig praise Harris? To have the
wrong kind of objective morality is far worse than having an unabashedly
relativist one! It will have consequences and threaten real morality. At least
the relativist is never sure her moral code is right! So there is hope!
Plus if God is the ground of objective morality it is objectively moral to
recognise that and it is a basic duty. So the atheist is not a fan of objective
morality but cherry-picking objective moral rules which amounts to making a mess
of it.
The answer to Craig that it is better to sense that goodness is objectively real
even if you don't know why. If a gun were put to your head and you had to decide
between just believing morality was real or real because a God decrees it is you
know which one would be the most important. The importance given to God is
counter-moral.
Proof that whatever Grounds Objective Morality it is not God
Religion argues that God sending earthquakes to kill people is good so in
reality religion thinks natural evil like that is not bad it is good so that
means the only evil there is is moral evil - that which human beings do.
Assessing evil as moral evil means you declare you have the right to assess
actions as morally evil even if they are not. Not taking the risk of being wrong
is itself seen as immoral. This does not mean you can call somebody a murderer
if there is a chance that they didn't intentionally kill the person and if the
evidence says to consider such a chance. It means that you are saying murder is
always wrong even though there is a risk, perhaps small, perhaps nonetheless
significant, that it is not always wrong. So the way religion will not apply the
moral code about risk to God is immoral. Man alone is accused when God should be
included in that accusation. This is neither loving, fair or honest. It proves
God cannot ground morality.
The argument that God is all good and never makes evil claims that evil is not a
power - it is simply a good thing in the wrong place and the wrong time. This if
you look carefully is denying that evildoing and sin are real. If it is not
about the action but about where and when it was done then can you call that
morality? No. It is evil to punish people as if their actions are the problem
when they are not. God cannot give us or teach us morality. God can only give us
a "morality" that is counterfeit and evil.
Think of it this way. You will consider it bad to hate somebody just because of
their race or beliefs. The hate hurts you, it makes you see things in a
distorted way and it risks you hurting the other person and it gives bad example
to others. The ingredients then are: self-hurt, misperception, risk to another
person and hateful views spread to others. To say that each of these individual
things is good but is just in the wrong place and time makes no sense and shows
no idea of what goodness means. See what is happening? It is not about the
action - it's not action its actions. There is no such thing, strictly speaking
as an action ever. It is not too hard to see an action as an absence of good but
when you see that the action is just a sum of several individual actions it
becomes impossible. To say that your deed is just in the wrong time and place is
to try and pretend you are looking at the wood not the trees. It is based
fundamentally on a lie. Morality then is only objective if there is no
God.
Moral contradictions arise when you try to base morality on God or on what God
commands. The end result may do a good job at looking moral but it is in fact
anti-moral.
The Utilitarian is better off then than the believer for
at least then it is a reasonable attempt to ground morality firmly and declare
that morality is just simply the truth, the unchangeable truth! It can be
applied differently to circumstances but what it is does not change.
BOOKS CONSULTED
A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, VOL 6, PART II, KANT, Frederick Copleston SJ,
Doubleday/Image, New York, 1964
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Fellowship Inc, Minneapolis, 1973
ETHICS, A C Ewing, Teach Yourself Books, English Universities Press Ltd, London,
1964
ETHICS IN A PERMISSIVE SOCIETY, William Barclay, Collins and Fontana, Glasgow,
1971
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Green and Co, London, 1912
MORALITY, Bernard Williams, Pelican/Penguin, Middlesex, 1972
MORTAL QUESTIONS Thomas Nagel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, London,
1979
NEW CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA, The Catholic University of America and the
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994
RUNAWAY WORLD, Michael Green, IVP, London, 1974
SITUATION ETHICS, Joseph Fletcher, SCM Press, London, 1966
SUMMA THEOLOGICA OF ST THOMAS AQUINAS, Part II, Second Number, Thomas Baker,
London, 1918
THE PROBLEM OF RIGHT CONDUCT, Peter Green MA, Longmans Green and Co, London,
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The WEB
Roman Catholic Ethics: Three Approaches by Brian Berry
www.mcgill.pvt.k12.al.us/jerryd/ligouri/berry.htm
