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You Will Obey

You’ve only been in Vietnam for a few weeks. It is hot and the air is heavy and you are nineteen years old and it is 1968. And now you’re on patrol, in the jungle, with your platoon. You are unfamiliar with the terrain, fearful of booby traps and mines, skittish about getting ambushed, anxious about fulfilling your obligations and not letting your comrades down, and you’re scared to die.

Fortunately, there’s Sergeant Rex. He’s already been in Vietnam for over two years. He’s a thick-skulled, chiseled-chested Midwesterner: sturdy, sharp, and seasoned. And he’s in charge of your platoon—which is a damn good thing because he knows what he’s doing, he handles stress like a boulder, he’s deft at making quick decisions, and he’s more than familiar with the ins and outs of your platoon’s mission. Recognizing that he is smarter than you, stronger than you, and more experienced than you, and given all that you have learned about conformity, teamwork, and duty while in basic training, you are ready and willing to submit to Sergeant Rex’s orders. Hell, you eagerly and happily acquiesce to his authority, and you find it deeply comforting to know that he’s in charge and that he’ll do everything in his power to protect you.

One day, while on patrol just south of Da Nang, Sergeant Rex gathers you and your platoon mates together and makes an announcement: “This afternoon we’re going to be going into a small village that needs our help. We’re going to deliver food supplies, bottled water, and first aid kits. We’re going to repair some huts and fix a well. The people in this village have been hit pretty hard lately, and we’re going to go in there and do what we can to help them. Got that?”

“Yes, sir!” you and your fellow soldiers obediently reply. And you subsequently do just what Sergeant Rex instructs: you go into that village and bring much-needed supplies and spend hours helping the people there. It’s an altruistic, feel-good day.

Two days later, while on patrol, Sergeant Rex gathers you all together again and declares the following: “This afternoon we’re going to be attacking a small village. Our enemies are there, and we must completely destroy them. And we can’t take any chances. So we’re going to go into that village and kill everything that moves or breathes—men, women, children, animals. Everything. And then we’re going to set fire to the place and burn it all down. Got that?”

“Yes, sir!” you and your fellow soldiers obediently reply. And you subsequently do just what Sergeant Rex ordered: you go into that village and kill everything—every man, woman, and child. It’s a bloody, murderous day.

This pattern just continues, day after day: whatever Sergeant Rex commands, you do. Whatever orders Sergeant Rex issues, involving this or that act or deed, you carry out. Willingly. Obediently. You do this because you have full faith in his wisdom and judgment, and you have granted him full authority, deciding to follow his orders. When he tells you to slit someone’s throat: “Yes, sir!” When he asks you to write a letter home on behalf of a comrade who’s been injured: “Yes, sir!” When he orders you to torture a captured villager: “Yes, sir!” When he tells you to clean some boots: “Yes, sir!” Whatever act it is—be it kind or sadistic, pain-relieving or pain-inducing, charitable or harsh—you do it.

Week after week, month after month: you commit violent or benevolent acts. And in doing so, you have proven yourself a reliable soldier, a dependable private of a well-functioning platoon, a dutiful citizen heeding your country’s call. You may certainly be all of these things—but there’s one thing that you most definitely are not: a moral agent.

By deciding to so completely obey Sergeant Rex, by totally resigning yourself to his discretion, by willingly submitting to his every command, you have fully and wholly abdicated your own personal role as an ethical being who makes his own decisions and choices predicated on his own conscience. In purposefully handing over all decision-making to Sergeant Rex, you have given up your role as a moral contemplator: someone who considers the consequences of his actions, who thinks about the pain or pleasure he is causing to others, who ponders and justifies the motivations and intentions prompting his decisions, who is aware of his position, power, and privilege in relation to others, and who wonders if what he is doing is ultimately making the world a worse or better place. You’ve given all of that ethical work and moral contemplation up. And by doing so, you have become functionally amoral, simply obeying the will of another, causing pain and suffering one day, joy and healing the next—and all through no decision or choice of your own, but merely as one who follows the orders of another. You have willingly opted to take your own inner moral compass and, while perhaps not completely smashing it to pieces, you have plastered a thick portrait of Sergeant Rex across its face, so that you can no longer read its inner needle’s ethical calibrations. All you now read is the will of Sergeant Rex. And that is not being moral.

In fact, it’s just the opposite.

If children defer to a more powerful and more experienced authority for moral guidance, that is all well and good, at least sometimes. Usually, they have no choice, either because they are too young, too inexperienced, or too vulnerable to do anything else. But as adults, if we simply defer to a higher, more powerful authority—be it a boss, a sergeant, a senator, a teacher, a parent, a judge, etc.—when navigating morally precarious situations, then we are irresponsibly relieving ourselves of doing the difficult work of moral deliberation. Taking such a deferential route is a negligent stymieing and snuffing out of the ethical ability that distinguishes human nature and culture. It’s a cowardly flight from figuring out for ourselves what we ought to do. And the consequences of such ethical abdication/moral cowardice can be devastating.

Charlie Company

Hundreds of thousands of nineteen-year-old Americans were in Vietnam in 1968, and some of them ended up in a unit of the Americal Division’s 11th Light Infantry Brigade named Charlie Company. And on March 16, 1968, the men of Charlie Company—who comprised a typical cross-section of American youth—attacked a civilian village and, in the course of about four hours, deliberately murdered around five hundred men, women, and children in cold blood. Many of the adults killed were elderly. Many of the victims—both adults and children—were raped before being shot. Many of the victims were maimed and tormented as well. In short, the American soldiers of Charlie Company engaged in the dictionary definition of immoral, unethical behavior: purposefully brutalizing, assaulting, raping, and killing innocent people.¹

Why did they do this? How could they do this? There were multiple background factors at play, to be sure. For instance, the young men of Charlie Company had been rigorously trained to kill; they had internalized ongoing racist tropes that painted the Vietnamese as less than human, they had heard rumors that the Viet Cong used women and children as booby traps, and they had been taught that Communism was an evil that was their job to eradicate. Additionally, in the weeks prior to March 16, the platoon had come under sporadic enemy fire, which resulted in wounded flesh and unnerved bones, and in the days immediately leading up to March 16, firefights with the Viet Cong had resulted in the death of five members of Charlie Company. So the men were on edge, to say the least.

Whether you wish to regard the above details as rationalizations, excuses, or simply explanatory, contextual information is up to you. But above and beyond such matters, and what is relevant for our discussion here, is the fact that the wanton slaughter at My Lai ensued after orders were given to kill. The young men who tortured and massacred entire families were directly ordered to kill by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina. As one member of Charlie Company recalled: “The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village . . . it was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners. The order that was given was to kill everyone in the village . . . it was quite clear that no one was to be spared in that village.”²

Twenty other members of Charlie Company recounted the same thing: that the night before March 16, Captain Medina had gathered them all together and was unambiguous in his commanded expectation: a full slaughter. As Private James Flynn remembered: “Someone asked, ‘Are we supposed to kill women and children?’ and Medina replied, ‘Kill everything that moves.’”³

The following day, the men of Charlie Company complied. They ruthlessly, savagely carried out Medina’s orders. Not all of them, however. A handful refused. For example, Michael Bernhardt, George Garza, and Harry Stanley chose not to participate in the killing; as Harry Stanley explained, “We had orders, but . . . ordering me to shoot down innocent people, that’s not an order—that’s craziness to me, you know. And so I don’t feel like I have to obey that.”⁴ But these men were the notable exceptions. The humane few. The heroically deviant. Most of the soldiers in Charlie Company killed. Or raped and then killed.

One of the hands-on ringleaders of the massacre at My Lai, Lieutenant William Calley, not only aggressively and repeatedly ordered those below him in rank to kill, but he participated in much of the killing himself; at one point during the hours of carnage, a soldier, Paul Meadlo, was guarding a few dozen cowering villagers when Lieutenant Calley approached him and ordered that he kill them all; when Meadlo hesitated, Calley began shooting the people himself, with Meadlo then joining in. Calley killed many more that day: babies, children, women, the elderly. At his trial, in 1970, Calley—who was pardoned for his crimes by President Nixon—put this forth in his defense:

I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, and children. They were all classified as the same, and that’s the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.⁵

What is so remarkable about Calley’s defense is that it stands in direct violation of Nuremberg Principle IV, which states: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” This ethical and legal principle—crafted some twenty years prior to the massacre at My Lai, during the post-Holocaust trials of Nazis who had participated in the systematic extermination of millions of Jews—makes clear that “I was just following orders” is not a valid or reasonable defense in the wake of committing any unlawful crime against humanity. These Nuremberg Principles, created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations, were promulgated not only to help define and hopefully prevent war crimes and crimes against humanity, but to clearly declare that as humans, we all have the ability and responsibility to determine what it means to cause unnecessary harm to innocent victims, and we all have the ability and responsibility to desist from such actions. In short, merely obeying the commands of an authority figure is no excuse for committing rape and murder. Not legally, and certainly not ethically.

Moral Outsourcing

It all boils down to the unavoidable reality of choice. When someone tells us to do something, we always have a choice as to whether or not to comply. Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was emphatic on this point: while we generally do not get to choose the contextual circumstances of our lives—that is, the governments, institutions, people, culture, and laws that we must contend with—we all, nonetheless, are perpetually free, as individuals, to choose how we will respond to the immediate impositions of those contextual circumstances.⁶ We can say no, we can say yes—whatever our conscience dictates—and then act accordingly. Sure, there will inevitably be consequences to our choices; it’s not as if we are free to choose without repercussions. If we choose to disobey our parents, there will be consequences. If we choose to disobey our government, there will be consequences. If we choose to disobey our commanding officer in the jungles of Vietnam, there will be consequences. And some of those consequences can be quite costly, both emotionally and physically. No doubt. But we still have a choice, consequences notwithstanding. And to deny that we, as conscious individuals, always have a choice is to self-delude and self-dupe; it is to live, as Sartre said, in “bad faith.”⁷

Exercising our freedom of choice—to perform a given act or not—is what ultimately determines who and what we are. It is at the very heart of our distinctly human capacity for conscious, clear-eyed moral autonomy. And it comprises the underlying basis of our ethical lives: to choose how we will treat others. As British philosopher Mary Midgley asserts, individual conscience is central to morality.⁸ But deciding not to choose—to avowedly abstain from personally deciding how to act in given situations, to ignore one’s conscience, and to instead decide to merely follow the commandments of an authority figure—well, as I have argued above, that is a major abdication of ethical responsibility, a pusillanimous eschewal of moral obligation. As such, it is—in effect—a denial of both one’s humanity and the humanity of others.

According to Spanish American evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, humans are naturally endowed with three necessary conditions for morality: “anticipation of the consequences of one’s actions, the ability to make value judgments, and the ability to choose between alternative courses of action.”⁹ A strictly God-based ethical orientation ignores (at best) or utterly destroys (at worst) human morality—for it requires that we deny and denounce the very thing that makes us free, self-aware, and naturally endowed moral beings: our ability to choose for ourselves, in given situations, how to act; our capacity to choose, based on conscious reflection and inner deliberation, how we ought to treat others; our ability to freely act upon our moral values.

Instead, in a presumed God-ruled universe, we just faithfully take orders from above. And as American philosophers Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse make clear, such theistic morality is actually quite pernicious, since it is “rooted in an abdication of moral autonomy.”¹⁰ It is, indeed, the very worst form of moral outsourcing. And it is observably more prominent within religious culture; various social-psychological studies have found that increased religiosity is correlated with a moral orientation based on following rules and obeying authority, rather than one based on empathy, compassion, or reasoned principles.¹¹

Obedience Is Not Morality

You will recall that in an earlier chapter I argued that a fundamental flaw of any ethical or moral system based on God is that this supposed God is not only impossible to define, but this inexplicable deity’s very existence has never, ever been proven. So, to say “I get my morals from God” is to say nothing more compelling than “I get my morals from some unclear, ineffable, enigmatic entity that doesn’t even exist beyond my faith that he does.” And that’s a very shaky, shallow, and spurious foundation for ethics, to say the least.

But things get even worse for the God-believer. For even if we were to be open to the possibility that God (whatever that means) does exist (despite the lack of any empirical evidence)—even if we were to make that leap—moral problems do not recede upon such a possibility. Rather, they compound. Because, as discussed in the previous chapter, everyone interprets God’s commands differently, making theistic moral agreement impossible.

But things get worse still: even if we could all agree what God commands—especially if we agree—then all our moral deliberating and ethical considering suddenly all boils down to one simple matter: obedience. That is, if there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-creating Supreme Deity out there, whose divine will is crystal clear, then our immediate job appears to become that of obeying His grand authority. Which means—given such a traditional religious framework—that morality is suddenly reduced to following the commands of a Supreme Overlord—and nothing else. That’s what is meant by moral outsourcing: doing what someone else tells you to do rather than figuring it out for yourself based on your own moral reflection and personal conscience. With moral outsourcing, you hand the job of ethics over to someone else, like Sergeant Rex, or something else, like an invisible deity commonly referred to as God. And you obey.

Human ethical systems are corroded, not bolstered, by such religious theism.¹² For obedience is most definitely not morality—nor ought we ever mistake it as such. “No one is good,” Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse explain, “in virtue of rote obedience to commands, even if those commands come from God.”¹³ Obedience is merely acting out of fear, or despondency, or weakness, or resignation, or training, or all five combined. What obedience is not is morally sound or ethically responsible.¹⁴

To be a moral agent, according to American philosopher David Brink, is to be responsible, and a responsible moral agent “must be able to distinguish between the intensity and authority of his or her desires, deliberate about the appropriateness of his or her desires, and regulate his or her actions in accordance with his or her deliberations.”¹⁵ And yet, pure theistic morality destroys all of that. For if our sole obligation is to dutifully obey God’s commands, then we are no longer acting as autonomous moral agents who look inward, using our own hearts and minds as our guides. We are no longer acting as the existentially free human beings that we are, beings who deliberate about the appropriateness of our desires, weigh options, consider alternatives, examine motivations, assess potential harm or flourishing that might result from our actions, ponder our situations and those of others, accept responsibility, learn from mistakes, adhere to principles, seek to embody values, reflect on our own experiences, check our intuitions and gut feelings, contemplate the implications of our choices for ourselves and those around us and the greater social context—no. For the staunchly religious, none of that matters. It is all for naught. Instead, under the demand of dogmatic theistic morality, we crumple up our existential freedom—and the moral obligation it entails—and toss it away. We then look outward and upward, to a supposed Higher Authority, to tell us what to do and how to act. And just like the young American private in the jungles of Vietnam who does whatever Sergeant Rex says, we become bipedal peons, doing whatever God says. We become functionally amoral at best, willfully immoral at worst. And ethically bankrupt, either way.

It is for these reasons that post-Enlightenment visionary John Stuart Mill deemed any attempt to base our ethics on God as “the greatest enemy of morality.”¹⁶

God’s Murderous Commands

There’s a relevant biblical story worth mentioning here—a story that reveals just how morally crippling obedience to a deity can be.

It’s the tale of Abraham dutifully, willingly obeying God’s command to murder his own son, Isaac. As you may recall, according to this Mediterranean gem of grim folklore written over twenty-five hundred years ago, Abraham was a Jew—indeed, the presumed first Jew—who came to believe in the One True God of the Israelites. In order to test Abraham’s fealty to and faith in him, this almighty God commands Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and tie him up and kill him. And what does Abraham do? He faithfully obeys. He takes Isaac up onto a hill, binds him, and goes to murder him. But—alas—just in the nick of time, God sends an angel down to intervene. Isaac is not killed. God then heaps loads of praise upon Abraham for passing the ultimate test: obeying the divine command to slit Isaac’s throat.

Despite endless spin and sophistry by centuries of rabbis, priests, and theologians trying their best to squeeze some potentially positive meaning from this dark tale, the underlying message of the narrative is clear: if you really believe in God, you will do whatever He commands—even if He commands cold-blooded murder.¹⁷ Indeed, such was eminent Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s ultimate takeaway from this biblical story: that true faith is based upon “infinite resignation” to God’s will. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham acted correctly in his willingness to kill his son, for he so believed in God and was such a “knight of faith” that by raising the knife to saw into his own son’s neck, he was being truly, unabashedly submissive in a way that is exactly what God wants and expects, and such obedient resignation is the highest ideal of human action based on devout theism.¹⁸

Kierkegaard was right in this respect: obedience is, indeed, the highest ideal based on devout theism. But it is simultaneously the lowest ideal based on human experience and interaction. Such blindly obedient resignation, even to a deity, is a vile denigration of our ethical responsibilities. As American philosopher Edwin Curley writes, concerning the story of God’s commandment that Abraham kill his son:

If there is a God who is liable to command anything, and if our highest loyalty must be to this God, there is no act—save disobedience to God—that we can safely say is out of bounds, no act of a kind that simply must not be done . . . if we believed God had commanded it. If this God exists and we must obey him unconditionally, then anything whatever might turn out to be permissible. This view is destructive of morality.¹⁹

Put yourself in Abraham’s shoes: Would you obediently kill your child if you were sure God wanted you to? Would you kill someone else’s child? What if God commanded you to smash one hundred babies’ heads with a mallet—would you do it? Sorry to broach such a gruesome image, but that’s what the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac forces us to confront: the contours and limits of our own personal ability to commit wanton violence—if simply ordered to do so from on high. As Elizabeth Anderson has accurately pointed out, “if we take the evidence for theism with utmost seriousness, we will find ourselves committed to the proposition that the most heinous acts are permitted.”²⁰

“But God would never command us to do any wantonly violent, heinous acts!”

Such is the constant, desperate refrain from every well-meaning theist that I have ever debated these issues with. They always say the same thing: God would never ask us to commit murder.

Really? Are you sure about that?

Only someone who has never actually read the Bible could be so ignorant of the types of immoral, unethical things God has commanded of his followers.²¹ In Deuteronomy 20, God commands the people of Israel to lay siege to various cities and commit genocide: “Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.” In Numbers 31, God commands his followers to “kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath not known man by lying with him.” In 1 Samuel 15, the Lord Almighty commands to his people to “attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

Captain Medina of Charlie Company would feel right at home engaging in such military maneuvers, no doubt.

There’s even more on the murderous front: in Leviticus 20, God commands us to murder anyone who has sex with someone who isn’t their spouse, or any man who has sex with another man, or anyone who fashions him or herself to be a medium or a spiritualist. In Exodus 22, God commands that female sorceresses be murdered. In Deuteronomy 21, God commands that stubborn or rebellious sons shall be put to death. In Deuteronomy 22, God commands that any woman who is not a virgin upon marriage shall be executed. In Leviticus 24, God commands us to murder blasphemers. In Exodus 35, God commands us to murder anyone who works on the Sabbath. In Numbers 15, the Lord makes it clear that such people should be stoned to death.

There are many more instances in the Bible wherein God commands that humans engage in wanton, savage violence—but others have charted these bloody waters,²² and a detailed account is beyond our discussion here. And the takeaway point should be obvious: when we decide to simply obey an authority, especially a magical, cosmic, all-powerful authority like the God of the Israelites, we immediately snuff out our capacity for moral reflection. We betray our obligation to act ethically.

It is always immoral to needlessly kill innocent people—be it children in a Vietnamese village, or your own child, or every single man, woman, and child of the Jebusite or Hittite nations, and it is always unethical to murder anyone for having sex with someone who isn’t their spouse, or for working on the Sabbath, or for being homosexual, and it doesn’t matter if anyone or anything here on Earth or up in the heavens orders you to commit such violent, savage acts. It should go without saying that to commit such atrocities is to cause unwanted pain and suffering, and therefore must never, ever be done. Abraham and Kierkegaard got it wrong. The authors of the Nuremberg Principles got it right.

Might Does Not Make Right

But if God is not the source of morality—or more accurately, if God doesn’t exist—then doesn’t that mean that “anything goes” down here on Earth, morally speaking? If there is no all-powerful deity overhead, then who can ultimately say what is wrong and what is right? It’ll just be every man for himself, acting on his own desires, determining his own subjective morality, and this will result in people just being selfish and doing what is in their own immediate interests, and life will thus be nothing more than people doing whatever they want and whatever they can get away with—unless someone more powerful can stop them. And in such a world, might would make right, and human ethics would all be for naught—which is a terrible prospect for human flourishing.

Well, to begin with: might does not make right. Ever. In a world where strong thugs and merciless brutes can run amok, taking whatever they want and doing whatever they want to people, simply because they have the power to do so certainly does indicate that they have “might.” But it most definitely does not mean that they have “right.” The men of Charlie Company had the might to murder innocent men, women, and children—but no one, save perhaps the most heartless or savage among us, would ever suggest that they had the right to. Might never means right.

But here’s the deal: it is not the secular, atheist approach to ethics that inevitably results in a “might makes right” situation. Rather, it is the explicitly religious-theistic approach to ethics that does; it is the religious worldview predicated on faith in and obedience to God that immediately turns ethics into nothing more than a “might makes right” reality. For if all morality hinges on God, and we are thus in a situation wherein we must obey God, then whatever God commands is the right thing to do. And that immediately raises the question: Why? The only possible answer: because he’s God. But that’s not a compelling reason to obey his commands, especially when it comes to questions of wrong and right, harm and help, justice and injustice.

After all, what exactly is it about him being God that means we ought to obey his commands? Because he makes rainbows? Because he’s so smart? Because he makes solar systems? Because he commands all of heaven and hell? Because he magically created life? Because he is all-powerful? In short—because of how mighty he is? That’s correct. And voilà: might suddenly makes right.

Except—to repeat—that it doesn’t.

Shocking Immorality

Think about one of the most famous—or infamous—studies in the history of social science: Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority.²³ Dr. Milgram was a professor of psychology at Yale University who, in the 1960s, wanted to see just how easily—and to what degree—people would follow the commands of someone in a position of authority, even if such commands meant directly causing an innocent victim to feel extreme pain, or even worse.

Here’s what he did: He found individuals from the local community willing to participate as subjects in an experiment. When an individual subject came in to the lab, he or she was greeted by a smart-looking, scientist-type individual—the “experimenter”—and then (falsely) told that the experiment about to be conducted concerned the mechanisms of learning. The individual was then told that another volunteer—who they met upon arrival—had been randomly selected to play the role of “learner” while they themselves had been randomly selected to play the role of “teacher.” They then watched as the “learner”—who was actually an accomplice of the study—was taken to an adjacent room, where he was strapped into a seat resembling an electric chair and hooked up to wires and nodes that could deliver an electric shock. The subject (“teacher”) was then instructed to go back to the original room and sit in front of a large machine that would produce electrical shocks every time the “learner” got an answer wrong in a test of memorized word patterns. During this entire time, the “experimenter” in charge of the experiment—dressed in a white coat and holding a clipboard—gave out continuous instructions to the “teacher” on how everything was to proceed.

And then the experiment would begin. And every time the “learner” would get an answer wrong, the “teacher” was instructed by the “experimenter” to administer a shock. And with each wrong answer, the voltage of the shock was to increase. Now, after receiving a shock, the “learner” would express feelings of pain and discomfort: he would yell, or groan, or scream, and, as the voltage increased, beg to be let out of the room. The “learner,” of course, wasn’t really getting such shocks—it was all faked. But the subject in the role of “teacher” didn’t know that.

And on it would go: the “experimenter” would sternly insist that the experiment continue, commanding the “teacher” to continue giving shocks with each wrong answer, no matter how loud the “learner” screamed or pleaded to be let free.

How many subjects did as they were told, obeying the authoritative commands of the white-coated “experimenter” by administering ever-increasingly painful shocks to another human being? Most complied. Indeed, 65 percent of subjects (twenty-six individuals out of forty) administered the full dose of a 450-volt shock—repeatedly—even though the “learner” screamed in agony, complained of a heart condition, and eventually went silent, presumably dead or unconscious from the shocks. Why did these subjects do it? Because the man in a position of authority—a Yale professor running an experiment—told them to do so.

Now, here’s the thing: most people would agree that it is manifestly wrong to shock an innocent person. Why? Simple: because it causes them unnecessary pain and suffering. End of story. And it does not matter that the command to administer such a shock comes from a person in a position of authority; the command remains immoral because it causes senseless harm. Most God-believers would agree to all of this. And most would agree that to administer painful or deadly shocks to an innocent person is flagrantly immoral, no matter if the command to do so comes from someone in a position of power.

Oh, wait.

Unless it is God.

In that case, the command to cause pain and suffering to an innocent person suddenly becomes moral. Why? Because the command comes from God. And why does that automatically make it moral? Because God is so mighty. And again, there you have it: might makes right. Such is the potential moral paucity of theistic ethics.

From a secular perspective, we know that no matter how strong a person (or deity) is, no matter how creative or powerful, no matter how magnificent or awesome, this incredible might does not automatically translate into moral righteousness. Yet this is exactly what religious theism teaches: that because God created everything, he must know more than us about how to be moral; because God knows and sees everything, we ought to just obey his commands and trust that he knows best. This approach to morality is, in the words of British philosopher Peter Geach, ultimately nothing more than power worship.²⁴ It is a form of extreme moral outsourcing, as I’ve argued in this chapter, that is manifestly immoral.

As Elizabeth Anderson explains:

Far from bolstering the authority of morality, appeals to divine authority can undermine it. For divine command theories of morality may make believers feel entitled to look only to their idea of God to determine what they are justified in doing. It is all too easy under such a system to ignore the complaints of those injured by one’s actions, since they are not acknowledged as moral authorities in their own right. But to ignore the complaints of others is to deprive oneself of the main source of information one needs to improve one’s conduct. Appealing to God rather than those affected by one’s actions amounts to an attempt to escape accountability to one’s fellow human beings.²⁵

And finally, to say that something is moral just because God commands it opens up a whole can of worms regarding the very ontological basis of God’s relationship to morality. It’s a can of worms that was ripped open in ancient Greece some twenty-four hundred years ago, and no theist has ever successfully managed to get those worms back in the can.