Some people could think that Jeffrey Dahmer was appealing to a silly excuse when he blaimed his atheism for not giving him any sense of moral responsability for his actions.
Think again: Was Dahmer inconsistent with his atheistic worldview when he decided to kill or rape other people? In order to answer this important question from a rigurously objective, serious, impartial viewpoint, we have examine carefully what contemporary atheism holds in these regards. And this can be done only by reading carefully what leading contemporary atheists thinkers and intellectuals say and argue regarding the relevant topics.
Contemporary atheism is materialistic, physicalistic, deterministic and impersonalistic (i.e it reduces everything what exists, including human beings, to the blind impersonal forces of physics, unguided evolution and in the case of humans also to the deterministic laws of brain funtioning and enviromental influence), and these factors seem to be at variance with free will, moral responsability, moral accountability and objective moral values (which are person-relative properties or features which are likely to exist objectively, that is, as part of the fabric of reality, in a worldview ultimately grounded on a powerful personal creator, like the theistic worldview, but that are extremely unlikely in a worldview based entirely on blind, mechanical, deterministic, unguided, unintentional, impersonal forces or energies like the atheistic-materialistic-naturalistic worldview), by the reasons explained by atheistic intellectuals themselves:
Tom Clark, who's the Director of the Center for Naturalism, in one article on liberty, commented:
In a deterministic universe, we understand that a criminal's career is not a matter of an unconditioned personal choice, but fully a function of a complex set of conditions, genetic and enviromental, that interact to produce the offender and his proclivities. Had we been in his shows in all respects, we too would have followed the same path, since there is no freely willing self that could have done otherwise as causality unfolds. There is no kernel of independent moral agency -- we are not, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, "moral levitators" that rise above circunstances in our choices, including choices to rob, rape, or kill"
For Clark, a criminal's career (e.g. the career of Jeffrey Dahmer) is not a matter of free personal choice, because in a deterministic universe "no kernel of independent moral agency" exists. According to naturalism, Dahmer's behaviour is fully determined by purely physical and blind causes which have nothing to do with "free will" or other etheric or intangible spiritual matters.
Was Dahmer's wrong in his own opinion that his atheism stole him any sense of moral responsability and ultimate moral accountability?
Richard Dawkins, the most influential metaphysical naturalist and world's leading defender of atheism, in his article for the Edge magazine entitled Let's all stop beating Basil's car, wrote (I quote him fully in order to avoid quote-mining or unintentional misrepresentations):
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'. Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software. Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes? Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me). But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car? Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment. (emphasis in blue added)
Again, on Dawkins' explicitly and extended argument, was Dahmer inconsistent with the atheistic worldview when he felt not responsible for his criminal actions? Wasn't Dahmer the foremost example of an "enlightened" man when he understood that moral responsability and "indeed evil and good" are, given atheism and evolution, pure "mental constructs" and "useful fictions", and therefore he felt free to make his own personal rules of behaviour?
Keep in mind that Dahmer blamed atheism AND evolution. Now, look what Richard Dawkins says regarding rape, morality and evolution:
Think again, was Dahmer inconsistent with his atheistic worldview when he committed his crimes?
Massimo Pligliucci, atheistic naturalist and evolutionist, in his debate with William Lane Craig, explicitly argued:
Finally, the problem of morality, which I'm sure we'll have more to say about--oh yeah, I agree with Dr. Craig when he cited Dr. Ruse, a philosopher of science. There is no such a thing as objective morality. We got that straightened out. Morality in human cultures has evolved and is still evolving, and what is moral for you might not be moral for the guy next door and certainly is not moral for the guy across the ocean, the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean, and so on. And what makes you think that your personal morality is the one and everybody else is wrong? Now a better way of putting this is that it is not the same as to say that anything goes; it is not at all the same. What goes is anything that works; there are things that work. Morality has to work. For example, one of the very good reasons we don't go around killing each other is because otherwise the entire society as we know it would collapse and we'd become a bunch of simple isolated animals. There are animals like those.
While denying the existence of any objective morality, Pligliucci appeals to a pragmatic defense of morality, i.e. morality has to work!. But obviously, something "works" only in connection with the purposes of an agent (e.g. rape "works" to produce pleasure in the rapist; and atomic bombs "work" to kill people and win battles; and medicines "work" to cure diseases). The pragmatic notion of "working" is a relational property which always refers (implicitly or explicitly) to one or several ends or purposes in regards to which the means in question "work" (i.e. are effective).
If your subjective purpose is avoiding the collapse of society, then Pigliucci is right that we have "good reasons" to avoid killing each other. But what happens if your subjective purposes have nothing to do with the collapse of society? Or worst, what would happen if your subjective purpose is precisely to destroy the social order? Then in these cases, killing and raping other people is a fine and effective instrument which "works" to your purpose (i.e. destroy the social order).
Since for naturalistic atheism, there is not objective purpose in the universe, the only purposes that exist are subjective purposes (i.e. individual-relative purposes). In words of Richard Dawkins: "In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference... DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music". (River Out Of Eden, p.133)
See also the debate between Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer and other atheistic naturalists in one hand, and William Lane Craig, Douglas Geivett and other theists in the other hand:
See also the debate between Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer and other atheistic naturalists in one hand, and William Lane Craig, Douglas Geivett and other theists in the other hand:
Again, was Dahmer inconsistent with his atheistic worldview?
I think the answer is obvious, and keep in mind that I've quoted exclusively leading representatives of the naturalistic-atheistic worldview, not their critics.
I've provided more evidence for the moral implications of metaphysical naturalism and atheism in this section of my blog.
For more philosophically minded readers, keep in mind that the above considerations about worldviews and morality have a counterfactual character which is often misunderstood (as I've explained in this post). The discussion is not whether atheists are bad or good, or whether theists are bad or good (obviously, there are exist good and bad people in all human groups).
Rather, the question is whether given the basic and essential premises of the atheistic worldview, we WOULD expect objective morality to exist. As proved above, consistent naturalists who understand this question clearly say NO. According to naturalistic-atheistic philosopher Keith Augustine:
It seems to me that all ethical codes must ultimately be man-made, and thus there could be no objective criteria for determining if human actions are right or wrong. Admitting that moral laws are man-made is equivalent to acknowledging that ethical rules are arbitrary and therefore human beings are not obligated to follow them... If objective moral laws are part of the natural universe (not part of some supernatural realm), then the universe cannot be unconscious--it must be, in some unknown sense, sentient. Few naturalists would want to accept such a nonscientific pantheistic conclusion... But given that moral subjectivism is just as logically viable as moral objectivism and that moral objectivism is implausible if a scientific naturalism is true, I think that there is a good case for the nonexistence of objective moral values.
Like Clark, Pigliucci, Dawkins and many other atheists, Augustine (who is a trained philosopher) correctly understand the implications of (and counterfactual questions related to) metaphysical naturalism.
As Keith comments, if naturalism is true, then plausibly the ethical rules are ARBITRARY. Therefore, human beings are not obligated to follow them. Such ethical rules are useful human inventions which don't come from any ultimate or senior moral authority which is legitimate to impose such rules upon us.
Dahmer understood this, and consistent with such view, he felt free to commit whatever crimes or immoral acts he wished. Being man-made and arbitrary, no ethical rule was obligatory to him. He made his own rules.
In this brief video, an atheist asked William Lane Craig about moral values and atheism (notice carefully the formulation of the question by the atheist: it actuallys confirms the subjectivity and ego-centered morality implied by atheism):
Atheist philosopher of science and biology Alex Rosenberg confirms all of these contentions and summarizes them:
One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours)... Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. Alex Rosenberg, in his article "The Disenchanted Naturalistic Guide to Reality". Emphasis in blue added
Rosenberg defends in detail the atheistic-nihilist position on morality in his book The Atheist's Guide To Reality:
Ask yourself with absolute objectivity: Does the atheistic worldview provide firm, ontologically solid foundations for the existence of an objective moral realm (i.e. a realm which is a essential part of the fabric of reality, not a mere projection of our minds, desires, emotions or opinions), normative and authoritative ethical rules, free will, moral responsability and ultimate moral accountability for our actions?
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