The End of Faith (23 page)

Or consider the unreliable species of intuition that might be

summed up in the statement “Like breeds like”yielding sympa- thetic magic and other
obvious affronts to reason. Is it reasonable to believe, as many Chinese apparently do,
that tiger-bone wine leads to virility? No, it is not. Could it become reasonable? Indeed it could. We need only be confronted with a well-run, controlled study
yield- ing a significant correlation between tiger bones and human prowess. Would a
reasonable person expect to find such a correla- tion? It does not seem very likely. But
if it came, reason would be forced to yield its present position, which is that the
Chinese are destroying a wondrous species of animal for no reason at all.

But notice that the only manner in which we can criticize the intuitive content of magical
thinking is by resort to the intuitive content of rational thinking. “Controlled study”?
“Correlation”? Why do these criteria persuade us at all? Isn't it just “obvious” that if
one doesn't exclude other possible causes of increased potency the placebo effect,
delusion, environmental factors, differences in health among the subjects, etc.one will
have failed to isolate the variable of tiger bone's effects on the human body? Yes, it's
just as obvious as a poke in the eye. Why is it obvious? Once again, we hit bedrock. As
Wittgenstein said, “Our spade is turned.”

The fact that we must rely on certain intuitions to answer ethical questions does not in
the least suggest that there is anything insub- stantial, ambiguous, or culturally
contingent about ethical truth. As in any other field, there will be room for intelligent
dissent on ques- tions of right and wrong, but intelligent dissent has its limits. Peo-
ple who believe that the earth is flat are not dissenting geographers; people who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred are not dissent- ing historians; people who think that God created the universe in 4004 BC are not dissenting cosmologists; and we will see that people who practice barbarisms like “honor killing” are not
dissenting ethi- cists. The fact that good ideas are intuitively cashed does not make bad ideas any more
respectable.

Ethics, Moral Identity, and Self-interest

While our ethical concerns are necessarily bound up with the under- standing that others
experience happiness and suffering, there is more to ethics than the mere knowledge that
we are not alone in the world. For ethics to matter to us, the happiness and suffering of
oth- ers must matter to us. It does matter to us, but why?

Strict reductionism does not seem to offer us much hope of insight into ethics. The same,
of course, can be said of most higher- level phenomena. Economic behavior necessarily
supervenes upon the behavior of atoms, but we will not approach an understanding of
economics through particle physics. Fields like game theory and evo- lutionary biology,
for instance, have some plausible stories to tell about the roots of what is generally
called “altruistic behavior” in the scientific literature, but we should not make too much
of these stories. The finding that nature seems to have selected for our ethi- cal
intuitions is relevant only insofar as it gives the lie to the ubiq- uitous fallacy that
these intuitions are somehow the product of religion. But nature has selected for many
things that we would have done well to leave behind us in the jungles of Africa. The prac-
tice of rape may have once conferred an adaptive advantage on our speciesand rapists of
all shapes and sizes can indeed be found in the natural world (dolphins, orangutans,
chimpanzees, etc.). Does this mean that rape is any less objectionable in human society?
Even if we concede that some number of rapes are inevitable, given how human beings are
wired, how is this different from saying that some number of cancers are inevitable? We
will strive to cure cancer in any case.

To say that something is “natural,” or that it has conferred an adaptive advantage upon
our species, is not to say that it is “good” in the required sense of contributing to
human happiness in the pre- sent.24 Admittedly, the problem of adjudicating what counts as hap- piness, and which forms of
happiness should supersede others, is difficultbut so is every other problem worth
thinking about. We

need only admit that the happiness and suffering of sentient beings (including ourselves)
concerns us, and the domain of such concerns is the domain of ethics, to see the
possibility that much that is “nat- ural” in human nature will be at odds with what is
“good.” Appeals to genetics and natural selection can take us only so far, because nature
has not adapted us to do anything more than breed. From the point of view of evolution,
the best thing a person can do with his life is have as many children as possible. As
Stephen Pinker observes, if we really took a gene's eye view of the world “men would line
up outside sperm banks and women would pray to have their eggs harvested and given away to
infertile couples.”25 After all, from my genome's point of view, nothing could be more gratifying than the
knowledge that I have fathered thousands of children for whom I now bear no financial
responsibility. This, needless to say, is not how most of us seek happiness in this world.

Nor are most of us resolutely selfish, in the narrowest sense of the term. Our selfishness
extends to those with whom we are morally identified: to friends and family, to coworkers
and team- mates, andif we are in an expansive moodto humans and ani- mals in general. As
Jonathan Glover writes: “Our entanglements with people close to us erode simple
self-interest. Husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children and friends all blur the
boundaries of selfish concern. Francis Bacon rightly said that people with children have
given hostages to fortune. Inescapably, other forms of friendship and love hold us hostage
too. . . . Narrow self-interest is destabilized.”26

To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happi- ness and suffering. It
is, as Kant observed, to treat them as ends in themselves rather than as a means to some
further end. Many ethi- cal injunctions converge hereKant's categorical imperative, Jesus'
golden rulebut the basic facts are these: we experience happiness and suffering ourselves;
we encounter others in the world and rec- ognize that they experience happiness and
suffering as well; we soon discover that “love” is largely a matter of wishing that others

experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more
conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here
that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one
of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the
happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together.

This is just a sketch, but it suggests a clear link between ethics and positive human
emotions. The fact that we want the people we love to be happy, and are made happy by love
in turn, is an empirical observation. But such observations are the stuff of nascent
science. What about people who do not love others, who see no value in it, and yet claim
to be perfectly happy? Do such people even exist? Per- haps they do. Does this play havoc
with a realistic account of ethics? No more so than an inability to understand the special
theory of rel- ativity would cast doubt upon modern physics. Some people can't make heads
or tails of the assertion that the passage of time might be relative to one's frame of
reference. This prevents them from tak- ing part in any serious discussion of physics.
People who can see no link between love and happiness may find themselves in the same
position with respect to ethics. Differences of opinion do not pose a problem for ethical
realism.

C O N S I D E R the practice of “honor killing” that persists throughout much of Africa, the Middle East,
and Southeast Asia. We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by
their male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretionsranging from merely speaking to a
man without permission to falling victim of rape. Coverage of these atrocities in the
Western media generally refers to them as a “tribal” practice, although they almost
invariably occur in a Muslim context. Whether we call the beliefs that inspire this
behavior “tribal” or “religious” is immaterial; the problem is clearly a product of what
men in these societies believe about shame

and honor, about the role of women, and about female sexuality. One consequence of these
beliefs has been to promote rape as a weapon of war. No doubt there are more creaturely, and less calcu-
lating, motives for soldiers to commit rape on a massive scale, but it cannot be denied
that male beliefs about “honor” have made it a brilliant instrument of psychological and
cultural oppression. Rape has become a means through which the taboos of a community can
be used to rend it from within. Consider the Bosnian women sys- tematically raped by
Serbs: one might have thought that since many of their male relatives could not escape
getting killed, it would be only reasonable to concede that the women themselves could not
escape getting raped. But such flights of ethical intelligence cannot be made with a
sufficient payload of unjustified beliefin this case, belief in the intrinsic sinfulness
of women, in the importance of vir- ginity prior to marriage, and in the shamefulness of
being raped. Needless to say, similar failures of compassion have a venerable pedigree in
the Christian West. Augustine, for instance, when con- sidering the moral stature of
virgins who had been raped by the Goths, wondered whether they had not been “unduly puffed
up by [their] integrity, continence and chastity.” Perhaps they suffered “some lurking
infirmity which might have betrayed them into proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not
been subjected to the humiliation that befell them.”27 Perhaps, in other words, they

deserved it.28

Given the requisite beliefs about “honor,” a man will be desper- ate to kill his daughter
upon learning that she was raped. The same angel of compassion can be expected to visit
her brothers as well. Such killings are not at all uncommon in places like Jordan, Egypt,
Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.29 In these parts of the world, a girl of any age who gets raped has brought shame upon her
family. Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood.
The subsequent ritual is inevitably a low-tech affair, as none of these societies have
devised a system for administering lethal injections for the crime of bringing

A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL l89

shame upon one's family. The girl either has her throat cut, or she is dowsed with
gasoline and set on fire, or she is shot. The jail sentences for these men, if they are
prosecuted at all, are invariably short. Many are considered heroes in their communities.

What can we say about this behavior? Can we say that Middle Eastern men who are
murderously obsessed with female sexual purity actually love their wives, daughters, and
sisters less than American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly incredible about
the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts.

Where's the proof that these men are less capable of love than the rest of us? Well, where
would the proof be if a person behaved this way in our own society? Where's the proof that
the person who shot JFK didn't really love him? All the proof we need came from the book
depository. We know how the word “love” functions in our dis- course. We have all felt
love, have failed to feel it, and have occa- sionally felt its antithesis. Even if we
don't harbor the slightest sympathy for their notion of “honor,” we know what these honor
killers are up toand it is not a matter of expressing their love for the women in their
lives. Of course, honor killing is merely one facet in that terrible kaleidoscope that is
the untutored, male imagination: dowry deaths and bride burnings, female infanticide, acid
attacks, female genital mutilation, sexual slaverythese and other joys await unlucky women
throughout much of the world. There is no doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with
love, and this notion of “honor” is among them.

What is love? Few of us will be tempted to consult a dictionary on the subject. We know
that we want those we love to be happy. We feel compassion for their suffering. When love
is really effective that is, really felt, rather than merely imaginedwe cannot help sharing in the joy of those we love, and in
their anguish as well. The disposition of love entails the loss, at least to some degree,
of our utter self-absorptionand this is surely one of the clues as to why this state of
mind is so pleasurable. Most of us will find that cutting

a little girl's head off after she has been raped just doesn't capture these sentiments
very well.

At this point, many anthropologists will want to argue for the importance of cultural
context. These murderers are not murderers in the usual sense. They are ordinary, even
loving gentlemen who have become the pawns of tribal custom. Taken to its logical conclu-
sion, this view suggests that any behavior is compatible with any mental state. Perhaps
there is a culture in which you are expected to flay your firstborn child alive as an
expression of “love.” But unless everyone in such a culture wants to be flayed alive, this
behavior is simply incompatible with love as we know it. The Golden Rule really does
capture many of our intuitions here. We treat those we love more or less the way we would
like to be treated ourselves. Honor killers do not seem to be in the habit of asking
others to drench them in gasoline and immolate them in turn.

Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls, rather than comfort them, is a
culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course,
regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other thingslike how to read. Not learning
how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see oth- ers as ends in themselves is not another style
of ethics. It is a failure of ethics.