For most people, the question why be good--as distinguished from merely law abiding--is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. The vast majority of people derive their morality from religion.
This is not to say that all religious people are moral or of good character--far from it. But it is easy to understand why a person who believes in a God who rewards and punishes would want to try to conform his or her conduct to God’s commandments. A cost-benefit analysis should persuade any believer that the eternal costs of hell outweigh any earthly benefit to be derived by incurring the wrath of an omniscient and omnipotent God.
However, the basic question remains. Why is it more noble for a firm believer to do something because God has commanded it than because the king has, if to that person God is more powerful than any king? In general, submission to the will of a powerful person has not been regarded as especially praiseworthy, except, of course, by the powerful person. If a person had joined the genocidal Christian crusades in the 11th century just because God and the pope commanded it. Could we justly regard them as a good person?
Nor is this question applicable only to Christian believers. I have wondered why Jews praise Abraham for his willingness to murder his son when God commanded it. A true hero who believed in a God who rewards and punishes would have resisted that unjust command and risked God’s wrath, just as a true hero would have refused God’s order to murder “infidel” women and children during the barbaric crusades.
The true hero--the truly good person--is the believer who risks an eternity in hell by refusing an unjust demand by God. The great 18th-century rabbi, Levi Isaac, was such a hero. He brought a religious lawsuit against God, and told God that he would refuse to obey any divine commands that endangered the welfare of the Jewish people.
In challenging God, Levi Isaac was following the tradition of the heroic Abraham, who argued with God over His willingness to sacrifice the innocent along with the guilty of Sodom, rather than the example of the compliant Abraham, who willingly obeyed God’s unjust command to sacrifice the innocent Isaac or the ultimately compliant Job who apologizes to God for doubting His justice, after God had indeed acted unjustly by killing Job’s children just to prove a point to the devil.
This is not to argue that believing persons cannot be truly moral. They certainly can. Perhaps they would have acted morally without the promise of reward or the threat of punishment. This is to suggest, however, that to the extent conduct is determined by such promises and rewards, it is difficult to measure its inherent moral quality, as distinguished from its tactical component.
But what about atheists, agnostics, or other individuals who make moral decisions without regard to any God or any promise or threat of the hereafter? Why should such people be moral? Why should they develop a good character?
Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac because God told him to does not make Abraham moral; it merely shows that he was obedient.
Far too many people abdicate moral responsibility to God; as Abraham did. Accordingly, for purposes of discussing character and morality, I assume that there is no God who commands, rewards, punishes, or intervenes. Whether or not this is true--whatever true means in the context of faith--it is a useful heuristic device by which to assess character and morality. Just as Pascal argued that the most prudent wager is to put your eternal money on God, so too, it is a useful construct to assume God’s nonexistence when judging whether a human action should be deemed good.
There is a wonderful Hasidic story about a rabbi who was asked whether it is ever proper to act as if God did not exist. He responded, “Yes, when you are asked to give to charity, you should give as if there were no God to help the object of the charity.”
I think the same is true of morality and character: in deciding what course of action is moral, you should act as if there were no God. You should also act as if there were no threat of earthly punishment or reward. You should be a person of good character because it is right to be such a person.
Since the beginning of time, civilized humans have struggled to achieve that golden mean. The great Rabbi Hillel put it well when he said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am for myself alone, what am I?”
Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.
From the book, Letters to a Young Lawyer. © 2001 by Alan Dershowitz.