Chicago Studies Summer 2018

for Kitcher, more than sending donations to faraway victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, epidemics, and other disasters. It means that the world’s privileged must proactively redistribute material resources and social services to ensure that everyone on the planet possesses an equal opportunity for wellbeing.

If human beings are asked to do these things, they will, given the demands involved, have to hear really good and strong reasons clearly justifying them. 34 Yet our atheist moralists have none to offer that a reasonable skeptic cannot easily shrug off. They simply make assertions as if an inclusive, egalitarian universalism is the obvious next step in shared human progress, in “service to our highest ideals,” the “uncomplicated” and inexorable outcome of the dutiful exercise of Kantian practical reason. But this is just wishful thinking, an evasion of reason.

What ought we conclude on this point about being “good without God?” I think that atheists are rationally justified in being morally good, if that means a modest goodness focused primarily on people who might affect them and with a view to practical consequences in terms of “enlightened self-interest.” “Good,” however, has no good reason to involve universal moral obligations. Atheists who wish to promote being “good without God,” if they are intellectually honest, need to scale back their ambitions and propose something more defensible, forthright, and realistic than what most of these moralists seem to want. A more modest goodness may or may not suffice for functional human societies and happy life, but—unless our atheist moralists have so far missed a big reason yet to be unveiled—that is all it seems atheism can rationally support.

The Problem of the “Sensible Knave” The second problem in the arguments of our atheistic moralists is that none of them successfully explains why rational persons in an atheistic universe should not uphold a culture’s moral norms only most of the time. Why not be good when it serves one’s enlightened self-interest but strategically choose to break a moral norm at opportune moments, when violation has a nice payoff and there is little chance of being caught?

You may be familiar with the history of this question. It is known as “Glaucon’s challenge” to Socrates, recorded in Plato’s Republic, and it is the problem of David Hume’s “sensible knave,” addressed in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. 35 (Today we might call Hume’s sensible knave a “shrewd opportunist.”) Neither Socrates nor Hume successfully resolved this problem, and neither do today’s atheist moralists. In fact, only one of the latter even confronts the challenge directly. The others either raise the question briefly and brush it aside, as if it is trivial; or else float some version of Socrates and Hume’s (unsuccessful) answers and then hurriedly move on.

In the end, Glaucon’s challenge and Hume’s “sensible knave” continue to stare all of their claims in the face, waiting for a more convincing answer. One will not be forthcoming, because there is not a more convincing answer to bring forward.

Recall our atheistic situation. There is no objective, external source of moral order, such as God or a natural law. Humans invent morality through learning and social contract to make society function better—to benefit themselves. People are motivated to follow their culture’s moral norms because breaking them will lead to punishment in the short run and unhappiness and reduced wellbeing in the longer run. This kind of enlightened self-interest should produce societies of people who are morally good without God. But the fact is that, if this is indeed our situation, there is no good reason for a perceptive and intelligent person not to act as Hume’s sensible knave, if they so desire. In fact, the more intelligent such a person is, the more they will want other people to follow all of the moral codes consistently, while they themselves opt to violate them when it is in their enlightened self-interest to do so. Let everyone else, who is not so clever, do the work of upholding the moral norms. To use the economist’s language, many perceptive people in an atheist universe will be tempted on occasion to “free ride”— 23