Nicky Cheese

People familiar with this blog know that I’m very much influenced by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. So you can imagine how tickled pink I was when, through Myspace’s targeted advertising, I saw an ad for a free issue of The Objectivist Standard, a philosophical journal “of culture and politics” with a heavy Randian perspective.

I got it in the mail a couple weeks ago and, on my trip to DC last weekend, had a chance to go through all the articles. My overall impression is quite positive, especially the articles that have more abstract, pure-philosophy content, one of which I’ll comment on briefly.

Glancing at the abstract, as you can guess, I was immediately attracted to “The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists” by Alan Germani, a moral dissection of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others that, within the last few years, have helped push atheism into the pseudo-intellectual mainstream.

Now, call me reactionary but I’ve always been less than impressed with this bunch. That’s not to dismiss their intellectual contributions – they’ve launched a movement, and, in doing so, have gotten people to question their beliefs and adopt mindsets more receptive to critical thinking. All very good stuff. But, come on, it’s not like they’re real, heavy hitting philosophers. They – at least in the genre in question – tackle the easy questions: faith, religion, the supernatural, evidence, science, etc. It’s like being in Philo 101.

So what about morality and the human condition? As Germani reveals, their skepticism is limited to naturalistic empiricism. But, in the rare instance that they go beyond the causal explanation of our the moral impulse, moving past the anthropological is for the philosophical ought - New Atheists hardly do… – the answer almost inevitably turns out to have as much rational footing as they dogma they so vehemently contest. Morality guided by an “innate conscience”, “intuition”, and a “moral Zeitgeist”? These are the foundations for moral behavior within the New Atheist paradigm?

Behind the obfuscating titles that pass for moral compasses these days, however, is mere subjectivism, a wish-washy, arbitrary, non-objective consensus (that – not to get into it – ends up pushing altruism and self-sacrifice when all is said and done).

Focusing on the last compass mentioned but applicable to all, Germani gives the following thoughts, which for me get to the heart of the matter: 

But Dawkins’s theory of the “moral Zeitgeist” clearly does not solve the problem of how to validate moral ideas by reference to reality; it just treats collective opinion as though it were objective fact. That a changing moral consensus exists and that most people unthinkingly absorb their moral views through social osmosis does not mean that the consensus is correct or that people should acquire their moral views this way. Although Dawkins acknowledges that we can and must judge the contents of the Bible by reference to an independent moral standard, he fails to recognize that we can and must judge the social consensus by reference to the same.

Any attempt to ground morality in social consensus—whether of Dennett’s “we democratically agree on it” variety or of Dawkins’s “mysteriously shifting” variety—is hopelessly non-objective. Either the consensus is always right, or it can be wrong. If it is always right, then morality is subjective and simple: Morality equals popular opinion, whatever that happens to be at the time. If this is the case, there are no objective moral principles; there are only ever-changing social policies. If this is the case, the New Atheists have no grounds on which to condemn the inhuman religiosity of the Middle Ages, for its crimes were moral by the standards of the then-contemporary “Zeitgeist.”

For an objective moral code, one should take a look at… Yeah, you know where I’m going with this, so I’ll spare you. But, really, get your copy of the journal today. It’s free.