Theism, Collectivism and Moral Responsibility

In a recent post, P.Z. Myers published footage of Ayn Rand expressing her views about religion.  She saw theism as a form of moral evasion.  We have a moral responsibility to use our faculty of reason.  Religion goes against that.  This is similar to what Alonzo Fyfe said about the way that we assign blame and credit to the actions of others.

We can either have good reasons or bad reasons for the ways that we assign blame and credit.  When people invoke a god, they are refusing to come up with good reasons.  The reason why we are supposed to do certain things is because God supposedly wants us to.  This may even go so far as that we believe in God because He wants us to.  Some people have gone so far down this path that they are unable to see any other way to develop a system of moral and ethical values.  This is why they believe that without God there can be no morality.

Ayn Rand would say that the same argument, mutatis mutandis, would apply to collectivism.  Instead of thinking about moral assessments as coming from God, we could think of them as coming from the community, or we could think of virtue as that which promotes the greatest good for the greatest number.  In neither case have we given reasons why other people would want to share our moral assessments.  Just because everyone else does something doesn't make it a good idea.  We might take it as a form of evidence, but it isn't infallible.

More effort has to be put into dealing with the idea that moral assessments should be made to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.  We need to have moral and ethical values that evaluate other people's behavior.  An act reveals a tendency, but we cannot be sure exactly what the tendency is.  If we have moral assessments that are too narrow, we may fail to reward and punish the appropriate behavior because in the instances that we have observed, the actions have not effected people that we care about.

What Alonzo Fyfe has said on this is that we can encourage people to care about a wider number of people by conditioning, much like how Pavlov got his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell.  This is perhaps correct, but it is difficult to assess the concerns of others.  It may be that by assigning blame and credit we change other people's behavior because those people want to seek credit and avoid blame.  It may also be the case that by doing this we condition people to care about others.  In either case, we would want to encourage people to help others and discourage harming others.

My response to utilitarianism if someone wanted to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, then this might motivate them to do things that were beneficial to others and to avoid doing things that were harmful.  However, it might not.  They could always justify harming those that we care about in order to serve the greater good that is hard to define and even harder for the individual to observe.

What I have in mind here is likely the same thing that motivated Ayn Rand to reject altruism in the first place: the historical experience of Communism.  The rights of many people were sacrificed supposedly in order to serve the greater good.  People can have many different opinions about what constitutes the greater good.  However, it has become clear that Communism, at least as it has been implemented, isn't it.

The consequences of this philosophy for the Bolshevik leaders was the terror.  They put themselves at risk of murder, since any individual life could be sacrificed in order to serve the greater good, which they saw as being Communism.  This isn't to say that the murder of Communist leaders was the worst offense of Communism.  The mass murder of the Ukrainians was much more serious and effected people who were, on the whole, more innocent.  However, what it shows is that there are consequences, sometimes catastrophic, for adopting the wrong system of moral and ethical values.