BY CLAY FARRIS NAFF AND ANDY NORMAN

ARTICLE

ARE GOOD AND EVIL IN SOME SENSE REAL? Or is one man’s merit another man’s poison? Such questions haunt many of us, and confusion on the subject buttresses influential appeals to religion. After all, if we can’t say what makes an act right or wrong, how can we deny that moral judgments are a matter of taste?

About a hundred generations ago, the philosopher Plato urged us to take a close look at the idea that morality originates in divine dictates. Does this idea really make sense? It turns out it doesn’t. For why would a deity command us to do this or not do that unless there were some underlying reason? If there is such a reason, then that’s what makes the act right or wrong, not the divine command itself. God, in this scenario, isn’t morality’s creator; he’s just a middleman or enforcer. So why not cut out the middleman? Why not grasp the underlying reasons ourselves? Sure, this involves eating from the tree of knowledge, but a deeper understanding of the nature of right and wrong can only help us, right?

Now consider the other possibility: that no good reason exists for telling the truth, or helping the unfortunate, apart from God’s telling us to. In this scenario, everything in the universe was a uniform shade of (amoral) gray until God commanded us to do some things and not do others—thereby making the former right and the latter wrong. This story appeals to some, for it gives God a leading role in the genesis of morality. But it has a fatal flaw: it makes morality arbitrary. God might just as well have prohibited smiling, picking daisies, or wearing a garment made of mixed cloth. (Oh wait: in Leviticus 19:19, he actually did prohibit the last of these. Though perhaps it was meant to prohibit the wearing of plaid, in which case it makes perfect sense.) Anyway, if this is your view, you’re saying that, if God commanded it, it would actually be moral to slaughter innocents. But that’s just nuts. Dangerously nuts.