Faith without God

Does society depend on faith in God, or faith in moral truth? Can it survive without either?
Fri 2 Oct 2009 11.03 EDT

At the Tony Blair Faith foundation talk on Wednesday the most memorable moment came when John Reynolds, the chairman of the Church of England's Ethical Advisory Group, described protectionist policies towards Africa as "a fucking disgrace". But that's hardly news. It is the view of almost everyone who cares about development and poverty.

Tariq Ramadan, who should have been interesting, spoke with great force and passion, but when I tried to write down his main points, the only one I could fix was the need to co-operate with all faiths, with atheists and agnostics too, in bringing ethics to the market. "They may not talk about god, but they talk about the same values as us", he said.

But there was a great deal of talk about the need for faith in markets and I wondered whether it would be possible to recast this in ways that made sense for people who do not share this faith. Start with Ken Costa's point that the credit crunch was caused by a breakdown of trust. Now this is quite literally true: the crunch was in fact a display of collapsing trust. At the height of the crisis banks decided they could no longer trust one another to repay loans, and so would lend no money. Almost all the "assets" which have since disappeared were constituted by the willingness of other people to believe that they existed: that a promise to pay would be honoured, and could be traded. This is after all the original trick behind paper money. This promise is sometimes rational to believe and sometimes not. But what makes it ever rational, and what in turn makes the whole modern economy possible, is trust. When that goes, the castles all melt into air.

So what are the qualities that make people trustworthy? Only a fool would argue that atheists or agnostics are intrinsically less trustworthy than believers; and Ken Costa is certainly not a fool. Nor for that matter are the other panellists. No doubt all of them have been cheated by their co-religionists, too. So what might the link be between trustworthiness and faith?

One answer is that there is clearly a link between trustworthiness and a belief in objective morality. It's complicated: you might believe that it was objectively moral to cheat members of an out-group, for example; or you might feel that morality was an individual choice, but that you yourself chose to behave in trustworthy and loving ways. None the less, and with these caveats, it is possible to argue that the belief that morality is purely subjective and a matter for individual choice will lead, over time, to a society where trust diminishes.

There is a lot of solid psychological research to show that people do live up, and down, to the expectations of the group around them. In particular, they behave better when they feel they are being watched. Also, trusting behaviour spreads by example (though it is maintained by policing of cheats) and shrinks when when everyone around seems to be cheating unpunished.

Policing is important here, and one corollary of treating morality as purely subjective is that there can't be any inner policeman for moral decisions. No one has the right to watch you, because your decisions are purely private. You may have a norm that says it is wrong to cheat or to renege on agreements, but that is a private choice, not binding on anyone else; nor are their norms binding on you. Not everyone in such a society will immediately start cheating and robbing. But I do think that over time, cheating and robbing must become more common.

Here's why. Suppose a population emerges into this kind of freedom from the hoods and shackles of objective morality. Naturally they will vary in the moral codes they adopt for themselves. Some will be as upright and thoughtful as Mary Warnock, and others will have the morals of the unregenerate Jonathan Aitken. When a Warnock does business with a Warnock (or marries one), their levels of trust are preserved. Similarly, when an Aitken transacts with an Aitken neither feels they must revise their estimate of human nature upwards. But after transactions between a Warnock and an Aitken, the level of trust in society generally must diminish. The Warnock must either withdraw from the group or retaliate in kind. Either way, the norm for the group will become worse; and, since most people in the middle follow the norm, a vicious circle is set up.

There is some evidence that something like this is what has happened in the business world in the last fifty years. To quote a recent paper from the behavioural economist Herbert Gintis:

Current models of economic relationships teach students that managerial and employee contracts cannot be based to any significant degree on trust or trustworthiness. This view, in turn, sets in motion a self-reinforcing cycle in which students come to see opportunistic behaviour, including lying and cheating, as unavoidable and hence as morally acceptable.

Neoclassical economics ... encourages an ethic of greedy materialism in which managers are expected to care only about personal financial reward, and in which such human character virtues as honesty and decency are deployed only contingently in the interests of personal material reward.

Gintis is an atheist, by the way, so it's safe for atheists to believe him.

Intrinsic in Gintis's prescription, though, is the view that honesty, decency, trustworthiness, and hard work are objective moral qualities. If someone decides not to value them, they are not making a lifestyle choice. They are wrong. Obviously, if you are religious, you will see all these virtues as proceeding from God, and you will see this origin as an objective fact about the world, whether or not other people agree.

This isn't a claim that only believers can be moral. Nor is it a claim that no one could choose to be highly moral yet disbelieve in objective morality: "Warnocks", are obviously possible. But I think Costa's argument is, at the least, that only societies which believe in objective morality can maintain their standards of trustworthiness. That doesn't say anything about the existence of god, either way. But it does say that if belief in honesty and trustworthiness becomes optional then honesty and trustworthiness themselves will be eroded too. Is that something people might agree about while bracketing out the question of where the morals come from?

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