Happy travels, Dawkins, and moral thoughts

The contrast between United Airlines and JetBlue is amazing. Right now I’m sitting in a leather seat, with plenty of legroom, at 30,000 feet, watching Popeye cartoons and eating complimentary Terra Blue chips. The aircraft we were to be on pulled into the gate at Logan at 8:40 AM, and we boarded and pulled away from the gate by 9:00, right on schedule.

Anyway, I thought now would be as good a time as ever to recap some of my notes from The God Delusion, a controversial book by Richard Dawkins. Since my notes are incredibly disjointed and cover about eleventy jillion different concepts, I’ll just focus on my notes from Dawkins’ discussion of the roots of morality.

A popular belief is that morality descends directly from religious beliefs, an extremely disturbing idea at face value. In essence, this is the “Big Brother” principle – people only act good because someone (God) is watching. Luckily, the Big Brother principle doesn’t work logically – humans have a real, experimentally verified sense of altruism that doesn’t seem to vary much across religions or the lack thereof.

To illustrate this, Dawkins lists a variety of fascinating moral dilemmas tested by Harvard biologist Marc Hauser. Imagine a runaway car on a railway line that is headed for five people ahead. Our protagonist, Denise, has an opportunity to throw a switch that will send the train onto a siding, on which only one person is trapped. Almost everyone agrees that it is permissible, if not obligatory, for Denise to throw the switch and sacrifice one to save five. However, this doesn’t seem to be consistent. In a logically congruent situation, if the train is headed for five people but the only way to save them is to push a fat man off a bridge into the path of the train, stopping it, most people view pushing the fatso as immoral – declining to sacrifice one to save five.

Another analogous situation could be presented to a doctor. Imagine he has five patients dying, each with a different organ failing, and there is a healthy man in the waiting room with five healthy organs. Is it permissible to cut him open and take his organs to save five others? Of course not! But this is the same situation. It seems that the distinction is as follows: it is morally impermissible to drag innocent bystanders into a bad situation and used for the sake of others without their consent. However, in the initial situation with Denise, the individual on the siding is not being used to save the five people – they just have the bad luck to be on the siding which saves the five people, and can be considered collateral damage, which seems to be OK. This is further confirmed by a variety of more intricate train-based situations.

A little later, Dawkins clarifies that he isn’t saying we shouldn’t get our morals from scripture, although that is also his belief – he simply makes the case that we don’t. For example, if we did, we would (for example) execute people who work on Sundays, non-virgin brides, and disobedient children.

Further on, to clarify what Dawkins calls “the changing moral Zeitgeist,” Dawkins mentions a set of “New Ten Commandments” that both reflect moral consensus and give us an aspirational moral target, as follows:

1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness, and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
6. Always seek to be learning something new.
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything.

I was originally going to pick out my favorite “commandment” or two, but I can’t. I think this is an excellent summary of how we should live our lives. More than anything, I think these commandments are startlingly applicable and relevant to modern life. If only everyone thought this way…