Regarding Research on the Morality of Atheists

I do not myself believe that many people do things because they think they are the right thing to do . . . . I do not think that knowledge of what is morally right is motivational in any serious sense for anyone except a handful of saints. -- federal judge Richard Posner, referring to the power of social situations to compel behavior, moral or not, rational or not

Moral consequentialism (moral utilitarianism): morality is assessed by looking only at the consequences of an act or the state of the world that will result from what a person does; that absolutist attitude is persuasively criticized as not always the best way to do moral reasoning, but it is a reasonable way to include consideration of regarding moral dilemmas before arriving at a moral judgment

CONTEXT

An interesting research article, The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality, examines the stereotype that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. The paper looked at differences between believers and non-believers. The hypothesis was that social distrust of atheists was a major source of negative attitudes toward atheists and their perceived lack of morality. The research surveyed people in a religious country, the US, and a relatively non-believer country, Sweden. 

A 2019 survey generated data showing that 44% of Americans think that belief in God is necessary for morality. Many Americans believe that atheists are least in agreement with their vision of America compared to all other groups because they do not share their moral norms and values with 'normal' people. Some research has found that some atheists also believe that atheists are immoral, so there is solid evidence that this belief is common in most countries.

The results

The survey data indicated that compared to believers, disbelievers or atheists are less inclined to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion. By one hypothesis, those morals are socially binding moral foundations or values. Only minor differences were found in endorsement of other moral values referred to as individualizing moral foundations (care/harm and fairness/cheating morals) and epistemic rationality (something that some people do not believe is a moral value, but is the central moral value of pragmatic rationalism). The data also indicated that atheism correlated with cultural and demotivational antecedents (limited exposure to credibility-enhancing displays, low existential threat***) are associated with disbelief. Those moral beliefs correlated with weaker belief in binding moral foundations in both countries. The results also correlated disbelievers (vs. believers) with a more consequentialist source morality in both countries. Moral consequentialism was also correlated with analytic cognitive style, which is another hypothesized antecedent of disbelief.

*** Credibility enhancing displays (CREDS) were assessed by survey questions such as “Overall, to what extent did people in your community attend religious services or meetings?” (1 = to no extent at all, 7 = to an extreme extent). A low CREDS score is believed to constitute an antecedent or path to religious disbelief. Existential threat perceptions were assessed by questions such as “There are many dangerous people in our society who will attack someone out of pure meanness, for no reason at all”, and “Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All the signs are pointing to it” (1 = Completely disagree, 7 = Completely agree).

Commentary

As usual, the situation is complicated and data needs to be (i) considered with caution, and (ii) replicated to confirm and further explore the results. There multiple concepts discussed in this paper that I am not familiar with, e.g., measurement and interpretation of CREDS, antecedents to disbelief and analytic cognitive style. 

The authors speak of associations or correlations, not causal relationships. In addition, other research has shown that religiosity is positively related to some morally relevant behaviors, but unrelated or negatively related to others. Also, acting in a way that can be considered moral does not imply that the behavior was morally motivated. A behavior can arise from multiple motivations. For example, behavior is well-known to usually be variably, often strongly, influenced or even dominated by different social situations or contexts.

If the results hold up, they arguably point to a social and political weakness and strength in atheism and pragmatic rationalism. The weakness is the a mindset-ideology that is insufficient for good social cohesion and trust. The glue in the mindset-ideology may be too weak to sustain a liberal democracy, especially a racially diverse one. Although it's counterintuitive, that possible weakness suggests that atheism and pragmatic rationalism probably need to find some sort of spiritual component, e.g., Buddhism, that can afford some social glue. Atheists seem to be more like a herd of cats than any united kind of cohesive human group. If there are non-spiritual sources of pro-democracy social glue, they are not apparent to me. 

The strength is an analytic cognitive style that tends toward rationalism (epistemic rationality) as a moral value. Although I believe that mental trait is pro-democratic, anti-authoritarian, anti-corruption, anti-lies, etc., the paper points out that some people do not treat rationality as a moral value.**** The paper's authors comment that research on religious disbelief has also been linked to moralization of epistemic rationality. If that is true, both atheists and pragmatic rationalism may be fundamentally morally different from most significant political, religious and economic ideologies or moral frameworks that compete for influence, wealth and power today.

**** Humans did not evolve to be rational. We are intuitive, biased, social (~tribal) and arguably morally intolerant, unless one adopts tolerance as a moral value. According to psychologist Johnathan Haidt, we are designed by evolution to be “narrowly moralistic and intolerant.”[1] In other words, we evolved to be self-righteous little buggers.

Footnote:

1. The paper refers to morality in the context of Haidt's moral foundations theory. I do not know to what extent researchers have adopted this mental framework for morality research. Morality research is in its infancy. It is fraught with complexity, confounding factors, human biases, p-hacking, raging controversy and general messiness, including skepticism that morality research can ever rise to the level of a respectable scientific discipline. Despite the mess, morality research might reveal ways for humans to tame their innate tendencies to bigotry, hate and self-destructiveness enough that we avoid destroying civilization on a good day or maybe even avoid species self-annihilation on a bad day.

But isn't morality sometimes absent when spirituality is present?

Maybe morality is always necessary, unless it's bad morality

Why can't morality be a kind of spirituality?

Bipartisanship is Dead

The New York Times writes:

President Biden ran for the White House as an apostle of bipartisanship, but the bitter fight over the $1.9 trillion pandemic measure that squeaked through the Senate on Saturday made clear that the differences between the two warring parties were too wide to be bridged by Mr. Biden’s good intentions.

Not a single Republican in Congress voted for the rescue package now headed for final approval in the House and a signature from Mr. Biden, as they angrily denounced the legislation and the way in which it was assembled. Other marquee Democratic measures to protect and expand voting rights, tackle police bias and misconduct and more are also drawing scant to zero Republican backing.

The supposed honeymoon period of a new president would typically provide a moment for lawmakers to come together, particularly as the nation enters its second year of a crushing health and economic crisis. Instead, the tense showdown over the stimulus legislation showed that lawmakers were pulling apart, and poised for more ugly clashes ahead.

Mr. Biden, a six-term veteran of the Senate, had trumpeted his deep Capitol Hill experience as one of his top selling points, telling voters that he was the singular man able to unite the fractious Congress and even come to terms with his old bargaining partner, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader.

Congressional Democrats want far more than Republicans are willing to accept. Anticipating the Republican recalcitrance to come, Democrats are increasingly coalescing around the idea of weakening or destroying the filibuster to deny Republicans their best weapon for thwarting the Democratic agenda. Democrats believe their control of the House, Senate and White House entitles them to push for all they can get, not settle for less out of a sense of obligation to an outdated concept of bipartisanship that does not reflect the reality of today’s polarized politics. 

But the internal Democratic disagreement that stalled passage of the stimulus bill for hours late into Friday night illustrated both the precariousness of the thinnest possible Democratic majority and the hurdles to eliminating the filibuster, a step that can happen only if moderates now deeply opposed agree to do so.

Some observations

Biden was right to tout bipartisanship and to try to engage in it. He would be right to keep talking about it and trying. But he is also right to go ahead and not let republicans slow him down in the two precious years he has before voters put the fascist GOP back in control of the House and/or Senate. That would be return to gridlock. Gridlock favors the fascists and harms democracy. Time is grinding democracy and the rule of law down. It is also grinding down social comity, trust and respect. Trust and respect are mostly gone. Lies, corruption, gross incompetence and crackpot motivated reasoning, e.g., 'the election was stolen' and 'the democrats are pedophilic communists', are now normalized among mainstream majority conservatives. 

Maybe the democrats can modify the filibuster to allow passage of laws that protect democracy and voting. But maybe not. It looks like the next two years could amount to three laws passed by the budget resolution process without a single republican vote, two in 2021 (pandemic relief, infrastructure) and one in 2022 (?). And that would be it. That could easily be nearly the entire Biden legislative legacy. Everything else would have to come from executive power alone.

Despite a growing majority support for key democratic policy goals, the defenses of democracy and the rule of law look to be still slowly crumbling. Time is grinding the American experiment down to an end marked by fascism, corruption, rank bigotry and gross incompetence. At least, that is how it looks now. Maybe by the 2022 elections, things will have significantly improved. Maybe.

The Origin of Republican Authoritarianism: Race?

GERMAINE’S DELISH TOXIC STEW

Ingredients:

1 mendacious, narcissistic cult leader (~330 lb)

1 corrupt, enraged republican party in existential crisis

2 buttloads (metric) lies, slanders and crackpot conspiracy 

theories (Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Qanon, etc.)

1 society in social and racial flux

½ buttload out-group bigotry

Seasoning: weak public education, 4 buttloads of 

special interest money in politics, a pandemic, lots of grumpy,

misinformed voters, lots of angry White supremacist groups, 1 weird guy with a funny hat

Washington Post editorialist Dana Milbank opines:

On the conservative Bulwark podcast this week, two admirable never-Trumpers marveled at what has become of the Republican Party since President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.

“I am a little amazed by the willingness to go just authoritarian, to really go anti-democratic,” Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol said.

Columnist Mona Charen was likewise puzzled. “The attraction of authoritarianism, I don’t know, Bill,” she said. “I’m really at a loss.”

And I’m at a loss to understand their confusion. The Republican Party’s dalliance with authoritarianism can be explained in one word: race.

Trump’s overt racism turned the GOP into, essentially, a white-nationalist party, in which racial animus is the main motivator of Republican votes. But in an increasingly multicultural America, such people don’t form a majority. The only route to power for a white-nationalist party, then, is to become anti-democratic: to keep non-White people from voting and to discredit elections themselves. In short, democracy is working against Republicans — and so Republicans are working against democracy.

Then, on Wednesday, House Republicans mounted lockstep opposition to H.R.1, a bill by Democrats attempting to expand voting rights. The bill would, among other things, create automatic voter registration, set minimum standards for early voting and end the practice of partisan gerrymandering.

In the House debate, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), sounding like Trump, made unfounded claims of “voter fraud” and asserted that the law would mean “future voters could be dead or illegal immigrants or maybe even registered two to three times.”

“This,” McCarthy said, “is an unparalleled political power grab.”

So, in the twisted reasoning of this white-nationalist incarnation of the Republican Party, laws that make it easier for all citizens to vote are a power grab by Democrats.

The toxic stew

Milbank's explanation is arguably somewhat off. It's more than race that has turned the GOP into an authoritarian personality cult. Race is one of the core drivers of the irrational fear, but it's not the only factor. Other significant factors include blind loyalty to the cult leader and widespread belief in his main lies about stolen elections and a satanic, socialist-communist democratic party. And there is a perceived existential threat that the republican party will become, or already is, a long-term or maybe permanent minority. 

But the factors overlap. The republican lust for power drives widespread voter suppression efforts in the anti-democratic but innocent-sounding name of "election integrity." Part of that is indeed aimed at racial minorities. But part of it is also aimed at democrats, the LGBQT community and other out-groups the republicans love to hate and slander. Another part is what Erich Fromm called the urge to escape from freedom due to an unsettling and changing society. The psychological burdens of freedom are more than some people can bear. They want to escape from freedom to authoritarianism, even if a fascist personality cult is the only escape route.

When one tosses all those ingredients into the cauldron, the stew gets pretty toxic. Some way to soften the fears, prejudices and susceptibility to the dark free speech would be helpful to say the least. This is where Mona Charen’s comment “I’m really at a loss” is appropriate.

Funny hat guy’s mug shot

Quote after his arrest: “I was wrong. Period.”

Trump’s Kryptonite…

 I'm still waiting to stumble upon it.

Just as Trump barely WON the presidency in 2016 by merely a handful of popular votes in critical “electoral-votes” states, he barely LOST the presidency in 2020 by that same critical handful.  But in that interim, between 2016 and 2020, we all got an up-close-and-personal look, indeed on a daily basis, at who Trump the man was and continues to be.

So let’s look at what HASN’T been his kryptonite so far.  Over these last 5-ish years, we’ve seen and/or heard about:

• Pu$$y grabbing and rape accusations
• Porn star payoffs
• 500K+ deaths from a botched virus containment
• 30k+ lies and misleading statements, per WaPo
• Staff turnovers dropping like flies in winter (due to scandal and/or disgust)
• Nepotism-ing his administration with blatant overriding of FBI security rules/checks
• Used ethnic and/or other slurs (Pocahontas, Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, etc) on his opponents
• Advocated separating migrant children from their families at the southern border
• Trying to bribe a desperate Ukrainian ally
• Withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement
• Throwing paper towels at a hurricane ravaged country
• Mocked a disabled reporter
• Has no problem calling women he doesn’t like “pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals”
• The hiding of his financials
• Palling around with dictators (Kim, Putin, Erdogan, etc)
• “Sharpie-gating” weather maps
• Proclaiming John McCain was not a war hero
• Called the military “suckers and losers”
• Called white supremacist “very fine people”           
• Told the Proud Boys to “stand by”
• Betrayed our Kurdish allies
• Suggested injecting bleach and/or light into the body
• Accused President Obama of spying on him
• With rare exceptions, refused to wear a mask, not setting a good example
• Two failed impeachment trials
• The pardoning of traitors
• A bloody and deadly D.C. insurrection in his name (“You’re very special, we love you”)
• Heretofore secret Covid shots for him and Melania in January
• A media who can’t quit him
• A GOP who can’t quit him

And hell, I’ve just touched on the more blatant shenanigans that immediately come to mind.  We have been here and historically witnessed, firsthand, all of this and so much more.

So other than his physical demise itself (likely attributable to too many Big Macs and KFC Buckets), I’m truly baffled at what on earth Trump’s Kryptonite could possibly be.  Truth hasn’t been able to do it.  His bad behavior hasn’t been able to do it.  His incompetence hasn’t been able to do it.

Question: Is there anything, anything known to humankind, that can finally “inactivate” Trump?  Any Ideas??

Myself, the only thing I can think of is if it is “proven” that he has paid for an abortion.  And even that will be iffy, since “proven” has become something in “the eye of the beholder,” it seems.  Time and distance, like with many (all?) things, could be another cure.  But we can’t seem to get away from him.  They won’t let us (she said, as she posted this OP 🤯).  So, I’m out of ideas. :/

Thanks for helping me out here.