Marks misses

I recently became aware (perhaps you have been for a long time) of philosopher Joel Marks’ “conversion” to amorality, which he wrote about two years ago in Philosophy Now. It is an interesting turnaround: from atheistic moralist to proponent of amorality, conceding that “the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality.” Dostoevsky too, actually.

But at the end of the day it is not amusing, nor stimulating, but rather sad and scary. Marks concludes Part I with these words:

I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.) A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

To my mind, this terrifyingly pathetic argument against child-molesting (what the rest of us call bulls**t) shows precisely how wrong this position is, about atheism as well as about morality.