Atheistic Ethics and Discrete Categorization

Matt Yglesias has a really interesting post about the way that thinking about hell influences secular views of morality. The traditional view of hell in the Christian tradition was that a) it was a really awful place to wind up, and b) being sent there was the act of a just and moral god. One consequence of this view, he writes, is that the standards for being good enough to not go to hell had to be low enough that most people could meet them. Otherwise you've got a just and moral god sending 99% of humanity to the fiery pits where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, which doesn't seem very just and moral. The standard for how wicked you need to be before our supposedly benevolent god is willing to condemn you to an eternity of fiery torture should be reasonably high. But for we atheists, Yglesias argues, "there’s no reason to think of good and bad, right and wrong as a question of getting over some hurdle of minimum standard of conduct." Well, that's kind of true. But there's another feature of hell-less morality that changes the dynamic: you don't need to label people.

In the traditional Christian judgment story, some people die and go to heaven, some people die and go to hell. Maybe, if you're Catholic and haven't been around for the last few years, some of them go to purgatory. But in any event, there are at most three distinct outcomes for what happens when you die, and these are the categories of goodness. There are the Good People, who go to heaven, and the Bad People, who go to hell, and possibly also the In-Between People, who go to purgatory for some time at least. You need to draw lines. But when we take the judgment out of the equation, we don't need to draw any lines. A given act is somewhat good or somewhat bad or very good or very bad. Someone who does a lot of very good acts and very few bad acts is very good indeed. Someone who does a few fewer very good acts, maybe trading some of them in for mildly good acts and maybe the occasionally slightly bad act, is somewhat less good. Someone who does a whole lot of very bad acts and very few good acts, conversely, would be quite bad indeed. And the thing is, because we don't have to judge people (except vis-a-vis the question of sending some of them to secular prisons), we can say just that. If you have a person who does 23% Very Good Things, 56% Somewhat Good Things, 16% Somewhat Bad Things, and 5% Very Bad Things, well, okay, you've just described them. Is this a "good" person? Well, that both depends on how you define goodness and doesn't really matter. It's all a matter of semantics; nothing is riding on how we define the word "good" except what word we use to describe this person. Very good is better than somewhat good, which is better than bad. There's just no need to involve what Richard Dawkins calls the tyranny of the discontinuous mind. Morality is a continuum running from Hitler to MLK, or thereabouts, and we atheists get to just admit it.