Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

This blog was named Liberal Values back when the Republicans were the dominant political party and the media spoke of how they won based upon values issues. The blog was named to point out that liberals also vote upon values when we disagree with conservatives on the issues. Two areas of research which made the news last week show that, contrary to the view of many social conservatives, morality is not necessarily based upon religion. There’s even a silver lining for conservatives here. As many of them do not believe in science, they can easily ignore these findings.

Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at Harvard University, discussed how biology, not religion, has formed the roots of human morality:

Recent discoveries suggest that all humans, young and old, male and female, conservative and liberal, living in Sydney, San Francisco and Seoul, growing up as atheists, Buddhists, Catholics and Jews, with high school, university or professional degrees, are endowed with a gift from nature, a biological code for living a moral life.

This code, a universal moral grammar, provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong. It is an impartial, rational and unemotional capacity. It doesn’t dictate who we should help or who we are licensed to harm. Rather, it provides an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden. And it does so dispassionately and impartially.

While biology provides the core of a common human morality, religion is often abused as people attribute their personal beliefs to God to justify their views on controversial issues:

God may have created man in his image, but it seems we return the favour. Believers subconsciously endow God with their own beliefs on controversial issues…

“People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want,” the team write. “The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.”

“The experiments in which we manipulate people’s own beliefs are the most compelling evidence we have to show that people’s own beliefs influence what they think God believes more substantially than it influences what they think other people believe,” says Epley.

This becomes even more dangerous when politicians like George Bush and Sarah Palin use God to justify their political views and policies.