[This post was originally published on The Secular Outpost on October 21, 2011. It was republished here on November 8, 2021 with the date manually adjusted to reflect its original publication date.]
This is an old post by Alonzo Fyfe, but one not previously mentioned on The Secular Outpost, where he critiques atheists who have spoken about morality.
Allow me to step back a moment and put the posts of the last three weeks in a larger context.
This series of posts started with a complaint about a debate between Dan Barker and Dinesh D’Souza on the possibility of being good without God. Barker gave a definition of 'good' that left him unable to answer basic questions such as, "Why is this thing good and not something else?" and "How do you get people to actually be good?"
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We have spokesmen attempting to answer the question of how there can be morality without God who are substantially ignorant of 400 years of moral philosophy in which this topic was discussed.
They have obviously taken upon themselves to get a superficial understanding of the subject matter. They demonstrate this with casual references to “the naturalistic fallacy” and “the impossibility of deriving 'ought' from 'is'". However, they continue to make claims that moral philosophers have discussed for centuries without any clear indication that they understand the problems with those theories.
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Another cringe moment was listening to (I bought the audio book) Sam Harris give an act-utilitarian defense of torture in The End of Faith without acknowledging that moral philosophers had raised nearly 200 years’ worth of objections to act utilitarian theories.
If somebody is going to be a spokesperson for atheists, then that person should recognize that one of (if not the) core issues is the relationship between morality and religion and the relationship between immorality and atheism. They should recognize that moral philosophy should be something about which they have some significant understanding.
