Darwin and the Golden Rule

I thought my students might be interested in this quotation from Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, chapter 4:

Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.   We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. They are also capable of some inherited improvement, as we see in the domestic dog compared with the wolf or jackal. If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, &c., were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the result of the continued use of a perfect language.

At what age does the new-born infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious, and reflect on its own existence? We cannot answer; nor can we answer in regard to the ascending organic scale. The half-art, half-instinct of language still bears the stamp of its gradual evolution. The ennobling belief in God is not universal with man; and the belief in spiritual agencies naturally follows from other mental powers. The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need say nothing on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to shew that the social instincts,- the prime principle of man's moral constitution* - with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise"; and this lies at the foundation of morality.

  * Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk. V, sect. 55.

The Euthyphro Dilemma...Still Going Strong After 2500 Years

I think this is always a good question to ask religious followers, including myself: is an act right because the gods say it is so, or is it right because it is right in itself?  This does make a person pursue the inquiry further.

If one says that there is no need to justify the command because the divinity is good, then one has to figure out how to justify whether the divinity is good.

All it does is push the question back one more step.

If another claims that there is rational justification for the command as good, then one could ground it in the rational justification and there would be no need for the command. 

*   *   *

Most Middle East monotheist apologists emphasize that the dilemma is a false dichotomy, and insofar as any dilemma may be a false dichotomy then that may be the case.  But, then again, it does not remove the dilemma entirely for the logic presented previously.

Long ago in an on-campus classroom, I remember one student pointed out that if the gods are intrinsically good then if they say something is so then one can presume reasonably that it is also good.  

As it turns out, this is the position of most Jewish or Christian apologists; i.e., the divinity would not command what is bad.

I thought that this is fine in itself, but I remarked then that it also means that one has to determine if the gods are good regardless of the divine recommendation.  And how does one do that?

This student also noted that maybe human beings need the divine recommendation so human beings know what is good.  That is something to consider too but then the problem becomes how is one sure that the recommendation is good or divine etc.

Later, an individual wrote to me claiming that monotheism takes care of the problem since, then, there are no gods or no competition among them. 

At first, that might be the case but then we still have the problem that we have to decide what the One Deity commands is good.

And while we do away with the burden of competition among gods and their various commands, we still need to consider the change over time.

For those following a Western religion the issue is one of a change over time.  Why was it good to command families to stone a rebellious child (Deut. 13, 21) and now very few people—Jews as well as Christians--would agree to that?

A Christian might say because now we are in the New Covenant it is different, but nothing in the NT speaks to this directly (though from the Sermon on the Mount one might infer that it would be unacceptable). 

Another Christian may claim that Jesus fulfilled the OT prophecies in his advent as the Messiah.

That's fine, but how is that relevant to particular commands of behavior?

A Jewish person might say that until the Temple is restored one cannot live by all 613 mitzvot (“commandments”), but does this mean that such a command would be good then?

And even in one covenant there are changes.  One example is Passover.  There are six, if not more, changes from Exodus to Deuteronomy as to how the Israelites were to observe it regarding the place, the food, the cooking method, when to offer it, whether it was separate from the feast of unleavened bread, and the participants.  

What was good for Passover in Exodus apparently was not good for Passover in Deuteronomy.  Naturally, one gives leeway to development in any religion as well as understanding that the religious community will work out a solution to this.  

To the proverbial Man from Mars, however, it does appear that there has been a change. 

The Euthyphro dilemma is still a weighty problem for any religious follower.