Moral People Defending Immoral Things

"With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." --Steven Weinberg

One of the most popular quotes on morality, this quote is widely publicized and criticized, and shows how polarizing the subject of religion and its effect on morality can be. We know that, statistically speaking, religious people are in jail for crimes at a rate that is orders of magnitude higher than non-religious people, and that the more religious the person claims to be, the more heinous their crimes. It would seem from the data that religious people are more likely to be immoral. This could be because the number of religious people is, globally speaking, greater than the number of non-religious people, but even in countries where this is not true, the trends stay the same.

But why would it be that a religious person might be more likely to defend or do something something that is evil? Before I give my answer to that question, allow me to take you through a thought experiment.

Let's say you're a security guard on the job. You are holding a taser. You see two men running towards you. The man closest to you is clearly trying to evade the person pursuing him, who is firing a gun at him. Which of the men do you fire the taser at (let's assume you're a good shot and both men are in range), the man who is clearly running for his life, or the man who is shooting at him? Now suppose that the man with the gun is a uniformed police officer. 

Nothing changed between the two scenarios besides the clothing the person with the gun was wearing, and yet it completely reverses your actions, because you instinctively trust that the police officer, an authority figure, is shooting because it is necessary. If you apply a moment's thought to this, you realize it is not always the case and you adjust your answer, but your instinct tells you to trust the authority figure.

The Milgram Experiment, although later charged with being unethical, showed that the majority of people will comply with what an authority figure says, even though they have reservations and are distressed by the harm they are doing. The Milgram Experiment did not test the role of religiosity in susceptibility to obeying orders, and this is a hotly debated topic. 

It is impossible to repeat the Milgram Experiment to discover the effect of religiosity on the experiment because the experiment is unethical and it is too well known to gauge the accuracy of any results. After learning the true nature of the experiment, even the original participants changed their behaviors, so it would be impossible to separate the effect of religiosity and the effect of even a passing or unconscious knowledge of the true nature of the experiment.

But in the above thought experiment, it is possible to see the same effect on a smaller scale. The instinct to trust an authority figure overrides your conscious brain and your morality. So perhaps the reason a religious person might be more open to doing something immoral has to do with their belief that an authority figure (such as God, a self-styled prophet, or a cult leader) wants them to do what they did. If so, this is not an aberration of normal human behavior, merely an example of why we should not put anyone in a position of supreme authority, no matter what they claim their credentials or motives to be.

This can also explain why a good person, who would otherwise understand and accept that what is being discussed is wrong, would support, condone, or do a demonstrably harmful thing. For example, a person may believe that genocide is wrong, but will claim that genocide committed by a prophet or guru of their faith is not wrong because he had reasons for doing it. When pressed, sometimes they will say that they do not know the reason, or sometimes they will give a historically unsound or apologetic explanation, but they believe that there was a good reason. This is not because they think that genocide is moral; they believe that the authority figure who committed the genocide was moral, and therefore the action was justified, even if they do not know why.

It is very hard to know how to effectively combat this type of thinking. In doing so you will invariably call into question whether the authority figure is always inherently moral, and when people feel their beliefs are being challenged most people react defensively and become more determined that their beliefs are correct. Perhaps an appeal to the person's own morality and an affirmation of the notion that they can make correct moral choices without relying on an authority figure may be helpful. The person must themselves question the morality of the authority figure if they are ever to reject the actions of the authority figure as immoral. 

Some day, we may all understand the message of the not-quite-divine not-quite-messiah Brian.