First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Failure to Attribute

The question of human consciousness is one that has occupied philosophers, and baffled the rest of us, since the earliest moments of recorded contemplation. From an evolutionary point of view, we are not particularly well equipped to think about how it is that we think; the survival value of such reflections being minimal – perhaps even counterproductive – we haven’t been selected over the long term for skills in this regard. Whenever we start to ask how we know what we think we know, or what it actually means to know something, or whether we really know anything at all, the process quickly arrives at a point of paradox so frustrating that most people give up in disgust, and solace themselves with something comfortably tangible, like a root beer float, or a stiff brandy. Religions have long exploited this self-referential muddle by inviting us, as soon as we get into any confusion, to drop the whole mess into the lap of theology, and respond cheerfully, "God did it!" to whatever riddles remain.

This invitation to let ourselves off the hook is one that the humanist cannot with integrity accept. We cannot derive either our epistemological assurances or our ethical imperatives from cosmic authority; we must begin with the nature of human nature and human thought. And we have, it seems to me, no defense against a thorough going nihilistic solipsism; I may be nothing but a character in the movie that is playing in your head, or, as various science fiction writers have proposed, a brain in a vat being elaborately jolted by pulses of electricity, and the effort to prove otherwise is doomed by the premise. Like Chuang Tzu’s apprehension that he may be only a butterfly’s dream, such propositions are irrefutable, and finally it seems to me, uninteresting. Whether my life be merely an insect’s fantasy, or a mad scientist’s, or Yahweh Lord of Hosts’, it is still the only available context in which my aspirations may be pursued, and thus my choices retain their full moral weight, even if any of these notions be granted, unproveable as they are. Whatever dream we may be in, our task is to figure out its rules, and how to have more abundant and satisfying lives here in this reality.

Essential to that enterprise is a moral compass, and for those of us who are not persuaded of divine creation or management of the universe, a moral compass is necessarily a function of our relationships to one another and the rest of the world. Indeed, I would argue that it has been the same evolutionary pressures that did not select for ease of self-analysis which have made us insistently moral beings, precisely because we are a social species. Those individuals who best maintain the network of mutuality in their communities thrive best themselves, and ultimately have the greatest reproductive success. Thus we are hard-wired for a sense of ethical awareness. However, as with many other attributes which serve our genetic advantage, this moral sense does not come fully formed when a human being is born. Like the innate capacity for language, its potential is there, awaiting the environmental and relational experiences that will give it form, and cause it to develop in certain particular ways. We are all born with the urgent ability to learn to speak, but we are not born knowing English or Chinese. In the same way, we are endowed with ethical sensibilities, but the specific content of right and wrong will be filled in by a social context. Educators and developmental psychologists have invested a great deal of time and energy observing exactly how the moral sense emerges and is formed in people as they grow; how it can be stunted or twisted, what it looks like at different stages along the way, and what are some of its cultural variations. Out of that exploration emerges one seemingly universal and rather mysterious process, which is what I want to consider today in reference to the potential morality or otherwise of atheists.

This most basic of premises for human morality I am calling the attribution of consciousness. It is the hypothesis, -- which seems obvious only until you really start to think about it, as the readings this morning suggest, -- that the universe contains other awarenesses just like one’s own. The idea that other people, and indeed other creatures, constitute individual centers of experience analogous to mine, is a kind of conceptual light switch which is not really a function of intellectual information. It is an emergent understanding that unfolds gradually, and if it works properly, becomes so basic to our perception of the world that we almost can’t really examine it, or conceive what the alternative belief would be. Most of us, as functional adults, take it for granted both that other people see and hear and feel much as we do, and conversely, that what we observe about them is likely to be true to a greater or lesser extent about ourselves. Most morality, certainly of the humanist variety, comes back to this principle, which is the foundation alike of the child’s crude ethical equation – "How would you like it if someone did that to you?" – and the loftiest formulation of universal imperatives or golden rules – "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

One traditional measure of moral maturity has been the width across which an individual is able to apply this principle. Beyond all sophistry about economic cost and benefits, or rights of property opposed to rights of liberty, slavery was self-apparently wrong because anyone could see from their own center of consciousness that they themselves would be miserable as a slave, and ought to be able to attribute that perception to other people who were enslaved. Torture is wrong, precisely because how would you like it if someone did that to you? The attribution of consciousness is the foundation of human moral understanding; without it, our guidance is theoretical, and our behavior may all too easily fall into the category that we term ‘inhuman’, which designates just that failure to ascribe to others our own reaction to pain.

The question then becomes, just how widely are we to cast this net of attribution? And this is where, I want to suggest, the moral suspicion of atheism arises. For most of us recognize intuitively that a person who does not attribute consciousness to others is missing some crucial factor in what would make him or her a morally reliable participant in our networks of mutuality. Much of the analysis of sociopathic criminals notes their severely stunted capacity for empathy; they do not identify with the pain they cause; they fail to attribute to their victims feelings like their own. There is a logical progression which suggests that we move from attributing consciousness first to those nearest to us, whose reactions we experience up close; next to other people in circumstances like our own, with whom it is easy for us to identify; then to people like ourselves, and later to people in general, expanding the circle of attributed consciousness wider and wider as we go. Somewhere along the line, we may add non-human creatures to that list, recognizing that different as the consciousness of an animal might be from ours, we share some crucially relevant capacity for the experiences of suffering and well being that make them objects of moral consideration. It is not surprising, then, that multitudes of human beings have arrived at the conclusion that it is equally appropriate to ascribe to the universe as a whole, in its totality, the same sort of consciousness, and to perceive some set of moral obligations to that larger, universal consciousness, which still so much resembles our own. Thus arises the notion of an anthropomorphic god.

I suspect that it is this failure to attribute consciousness to the larger forces of cosmos that makes many people nervous about atheists. The old chestnut question, "How can you be moral, if you don’t believe in god?" is not always asking exactly what we tend to interpret it to mean. Those of us to whom such inquiries are addressed most often hear them as variations of either "How do you know what the ethical rules are supposed to be, if there is no god to tell you?", or more commonly, "If there is no authority who is going to reward you for keeping the rules, or punish you for breaking them, what motivation do you have to follow them?" When we respond with affirmations of the good for it’s own sake, or for human well being as a whole, the answer often doesn’t seem to satisfy the underlying question. We might come closer to the real issue if we heard the question as having to do with the attribution of consciousness, as parallel to something like, "If you don’t suppose that I have an awareness of pleasure and pain much like your own, how can I feel safe about the way you might decide to treat me?"

People who fail to attribute consciousness appropriately are dangerous, as can be easily seen in the case of non-human creatures. Why should Michael Vick not keep dogs hungry and in pain, so that they will fight each other viciously for the entertainment and wagering of people who like to watch them? It is only our attribution to these creatures of an awareness and a capacity for suffering somewhat like our own that makes us recoil from such a proceeding in disgust. Something is wrong with a person like that; some piece of the moral perceptive apparatus isn’t functioning properly, for him to be able to do those things. The very same failure was to be seen among some humanist advocates of the early scientific revolution in medicine, and can still be found to this day. The records of their experiments in vivisection upon a variety of living animals, and their collective responses to the agonized distress of those creatures, can only be described as utterly inhuman by those of us for whom it is intuitively unavoidable to ascribe morally relevant consciousness beyond homo sapiens. If someone tells me that animals do not have feelings that count, I am going to be most reluctant to entrust that person with the well being of my cat.

It is along these lines, I think, that popular opinion so distrusts the proclaimed atheist. Those of us who fall into that category, or close enough, are within our rights to feel impatient with the question of why we should be good if no one is keeping score; in my experience, few people if any actually conduct their moral lives on the basis of bribes and threats. Most of us want to be moral, because that is the better way to live; so do even most folks who accept the propositions of heaven and hell. But if there is no consciousness like our own beyond our own, how shall we love the world, and hold life itself in reverence? That, it seems to me is a fair question. It has any number of possible good answers, but it is a reasonable thing to ask.

One of the possible, and quite ancient, answers to that question is the tradition of spiritual practice that invites us to realize that our own consciousness is not exactly what we usually think of it as being. As D.E. Harding suggests, when you get over the notion that you must be very much like all the other human beings you see walking around, and stop thinking that you have an eight inch hairy ball with various holes on top of your shoulders just like them, then you can begin to realize how vast that perception is that you have, where everyone else has an ordinary head. It’s counter intuitive, but it’s a rather exhilarating exercise once you get the hang of it. Such a perspective invites us to realize the extent to which our normal consciousness is such a limited subset of the universe, that it would be silly to try to see the totality of everything as analogous to our rather puny awareness. Instead of imposing our experience on the cosmic scale, we should rather strive to realize how much of reality our perceptions constantly miss.

Another, somewhat more complicated response, is to affirm the moral relevance of beauty and order in the cosmos, without needing to ascribe a personal awareness to it. Our sense of moral obligation may rest upon the foundation of attributed consciousness, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily has to end there; it may expand to include even that which is much more unlike ourselves. The slowly emerging sense of humanity’s ecological impact as a collective ethical concern is one example of this kind of structural expansion of our moral categories. Alice Walker’s familiar quote from "The Color Purple" when she realizes her spiritual connections so deeply that "I knew if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed," illustrates such a perception at work.

Yet another possible answer suggests that human relationships, perhaps extended also to animals, provide ample guidance for our present moral needs. If we could ever truly come to the point of ascribing full consciousness to our individual fellow creatures, human and non-human; if we could consistently treat them all as we ourselves would prefer to be treated, it would be sufficient. So doing would surely represent vast progress over the common run of current human behavior, and that would be time enough to worry about our obligations to anything more cosmic.

All three of these points are intelligent responses to the riddle of how an atheist can be a moral person, and it certainly becomes each of us to ponder how we might reply thoughtfully as individuals to such a challenge. Yet in the end perhaps the most important answer that any of us can make is to live and behave and treat other people in such a manner that our ability to attribute consciousness to others, and to respect in them the feelings that we know from our own experience, is clearly demonstrated. Our minds are constructed in such a way that I can never prove my thoughts and feelings to be like yours; I cannot actually see with your eyes, feel what is in your heart, walk in your shoes. We take that commonality finally on faith – we have to – that some important part of what it means to me to be a human being is very like what it means to you; that the pain and joy you feel is significantly similar to my own experiences.

Perhaps we really are all part of the butterfly’s dream; there’s no way to tell. But even so, the needs and hopes and sufferings that we share are still the source of the good we know. It makes sense that all people want to be assured that we can trust one another at least to try to imagine the impact of our actions by what it would be like to be on the receiving end of them; to know that we all have that essential basis of moral perception, the attribution of consciousness to others. For me, it is enough to suppose that my mirror is in you; I do not need to find it writ large in the personality of the universe, and I do not believe that it is to be found there. But I understand why for some people that act of moral imagination seems important, even perhaps essential. My most pressing task is not to try to talk them out it, but only to show, through my own steadfast commitment to a life of ethical insight and behavior, that even without attributing consciousness to the universe in the person of God, it is still possible to be good. If only we might resolve all our competing ideologies on the basis of who among their advocates leads the most admirable life! Let’s make sure, shall we, that by such a measure, our lives, here in the community of skeptics and free minds, would do our convictions credit. For it is only when minds are free and hearts are kind that we begin to realize the promise of humanism at its best, and become the people we have always known we ought to be together.

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Opening Words:

Welcome, this morning, to this gathering of the community of memory and promise,

where there shall come yet again, and we shall pass through,

the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,

and our thoughts turn once more to the suffering and sacrifice of war,

and the solemn duties of peace.

On this day of honor for the veterans of our nation,

Let us ponder with gratitude the heroism of those who have indeed

willing given their lives that freedom might be defended.

And let us remember also the irretrievable loss of those who have died unwitting

for the sake of greed, power, and pride among people entrusted to be our leaders.

The world has many times observed these solemn hours of armistice

In the hopes that at last our race might be done with the age old scourge of war.

Today we renew that hope and determination.

Let us renounce violence as a tool for resolving differences,

And force as an instrument of diplomacy.

Let us call again upon the better angels of our nature,

And make sacred the memory of those who have suffered

And those who have perished

In the only way that is worthy of them,

By building a world in which no more lives need be destroyed like theirs.

May this time of gathering renew our dedication to the ideals of justice and peace,

And may this community nourish our lives in strength and courage

To make those ideals fruitful in the world we share.

We kindle this chalice in honor and remembrance,

Affirming the imperishable hope that together we shall find a greater wholeness,

Until Earth shall be fair, and all its people one.