Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide by Richard Dawkins

Author:Richard Dawkins [Dawkins, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984853912
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

You can carry on the argument between Abby and Connie yourself. I hope I’ve taken it far enough to show you the kind of way moral philosophers argue. You’ve probably guessed that absolutists are often religious, although it’s not a hard and fast rule. The Ten Commandments are clearly absolutist. So, usually, is the very idea of living by a set of rules.

It’s possible for non-religious philosophers to devise rule-based moralities, however. Various schools of moral philosophers, called deontologists, believe you can justify rules on grounds other than simply looking up statements in a holy book. For example, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated a rule called the Categorical Imperative: ‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’ The key word here is ‘universal’. A rule encouraging stealing is ruled out, for example, because if it were universally adopted, that is, if everybody stole, no one would benefit: thieves prosper only in a society dominated by honest victims. If everybody told lies all the time, lying would cease to have meaning because there wouldn’t be any reliable truth to compare it with. A modern deontological theory proposes that we should devise our moral rules behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. Pretend you don’t know whether you are rich or poor, gifted or untalented, beautiful or ugly. Those facts lie concealed behind the imagined ‘veil of ignorance’. Now devise the system of values you’d like to live under, given that you can’t know whether you will be at the top of the heap or the bottom. Deontology is interesting, but I’ll say no more about it here in a book about religion.

The argument about when, in the womb, a ‘person’ begins is very much a religious argument. Many religious traditions see the immortal soul as entering the body at some definite moment. Roman Catholics think it’s the moment of conception. The Catholic Doctrine of the Faith entitled Donum Vitae is very clear on the point:

From the time that the ovum is fertilized, a new life is begun which is neither that of the father nor of the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already…Right from fertilization is begun the adventure of a human life.

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