Kenan Malik’s The Quest for a Moral Compass surveys the changing ways in which people have viewed the relationship between fate and free will, reason and instinct, the individual and society, the relative and the universal, and explores the impact different perspectives on these matters have had on conceptions of what constitutes moral behaviour.
Malik’s analysis constantly encourages the reader to make both discriminations and connections between the different positions he outlines, in order to see the bigger picture. Thus Kant’s notion of the ‘categorical imperative’ clashes with Benthamite utilitarianism, whereas the ancient idea of a destiny mapped out by the fates is oddly echoed in theories of biological determinism.
One of the fault lines tracked in the book is the divide between those who see ethics as a matter of dealing with the world as we find it, probably through seeking personal fulfillment (in pleasure, an honourable death, salvation or nirvana perhaps) and those who strive to transform it. Thus the Stoic position, at one extreme, contrasts with philosophies such as Marxism which aim to change society rather than adapt to its constraints.
In the second chapter Malik introduces a conundrum which continues to reverberate throughout the book. This is the dilemma raised by Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro:
‘Is the pious’, he wonders, ‘being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?’ Unless the gods love something for no good reason, then they must love something as pious because it inherently possesses value. But if it inherently possesses value, then it does so independently of the gods’.
Malik goes on to chart the great variations within religious thinking, ranging from those who valued reason highly (such as Ibn Sinna and Aquinas) to those, such as Kierkegaard, who see faith as beyond reason. Again, religion and science seem oddly aligned in their orthogonal relationship with morality. If religion seems to dictate something immoral, should it be blindly accepted? If we learn that science appears to hardwire certain kinds of behaviour, should we go along with these even if they seem wrong?
Douglas Murray recently wrote:
“[A]fter discarding God, all the work of establishing morals is still before you … As Sacks pointed out, it is increasingly clear that, contra most atheists, ethics are self-evidently not self-evident.”
Ethics and morality are complex areas, requiring us to negotiate incompatible goods, and explore thorny issues (such as abortion) where there isn’t always one obviously right answer. But although religious texts have some good things to say on these topics, the best ideas are usually ones which atheists will readily accept, so it’s unclear what religion adds to the table. There are bits of religious moral teaching that atheists will tend to reject – but generally for good reason: prohibitions on homosexuality, the death penalty for apostasy and so on
Much of Malik’s book is concerned with explicating different thinkers’ definitions of what might be said to constitute a moral, or good, way of living, and the best ways of facilitating (or enforcing) such behaviour. Although this is a history of moral thought, it isn’t simply a neutral account. Malik offers very cogent arguments, for example, to counter Joshua Greene’s utilitarian approach to certain well known moral dilemmas. He also argues against the approach taken by New Atheist Sam Harris, who proposes that torture might in some cases be seen as an ethical necessity. Again this is an anti-utilitarian argument. (And, if your values happen to be different from those of Sam Harris, you could probably mount a utilitarian argument in favour of the death penalty for apostasy.)
Towards the end of the book, tensions between the individual and society come to the fore again, and here Malik proposes some possible reconciliation:
People now asked themselves not simply ‘What moral claims are rational given the social structure?’, but also ‘what social structures are rational?’ What kind of society, what types of social institutions, what forms of social relations, will best allow moral lives to flourish? … In thinking of neither isolated individuals, nor of fixed traditions, but of social transformation, we also avoid the polarization between the God’s-eye view and the worm’s-eye view, between morality as abstract and universal and morality as concrete and contingent.
His analysis often works against easy answers or judgments. Religion can both subvert and uphold authority. An adherence to rigid and absolute beliefs seems stultifying, but moral relativism isn’t a great alternative. Spinoza seems to be saying that we have to accept the world as it is ‘but’, Malik suggests, ‘in accepting that the world cannot be otherwise, we are demonstrating that it can’. (42%). Perhaps dispiritingly, Malik charts a recent movement away from optimism and a belief in our capacity to change our environment and society. Here he discusses the comfort of a ready-made moral map:
It is comforting because such a belief protects us from the responsibility, even terror, of truly having to make moral choices; choice becomes reducing to accepting or rejecting that which is already decided. Once we required such comfort because human societies were not sufficiently developed for us to imagine how we could create our own moral maps. Today we require such comfort because we have lost faith in our ability to be moral cartographers[.]
I found this a consistently lucid and illuminating book, and thoroughly recommend it.
