Can Atheists Be Good People?

CAN atheists be good people? Before I answer the question, I want you to notice what this question implies. Having honest doubts that not believing in God can turn someone into a bad person implies a particular understanding of morality, one that requires a “lender of last resort” that prevents a run on the bank of morals, to use a financial metaphor. If to be good is to follow a set of universally valid rules endorsed by the Almighty, then, atheism is indeed problematic. The issue, of course, is enforceability. Without recourse to an ultimate authority that enforces the moral rules (aka God) how can we be sure the atheists will behave? The point I want to make in this post is that, from a purely pragmatic standpoint, morality (conceived as described above) is an outdated criterion to establish what “good people” should be. As a benchmark, morality was indeed useful when we lived in uniform and relatively closed societies, but today it creates more problems than it solves.

Let me start by reformulating the problem in pragmatic terms. Given that we live in an increasingly globalized, plural, fast-paced, decentralized and multilayered society, what are the characteristics that people should exhibit to qualify as “good people”? Framing the question this way illustrates that I am not aiming at a new and improved metaphysical definition of what it means to be good. Rather, what I want to know, as a pragmatist, is how should we define “good people” in order to better cope with our current existential conditions.

I am willing to concede that, while we lived in relatively homogenous and closed societies, following a set of objective rules was good enough to qualify as a “good person”. But, of course, the world has changed. The type of “good people” we need today are not the God-fearing-rule-followers of the past; such an outlook will get you into a lot of trouble in the type of environment we live in today and instead of being ranked within the good guys, you might actually end up ranked alongside the fundamentalists or the conservative bigots. You might sincerely think you are being good because you are sticking to your moral commandments, but this commandments can now directly interfere with other people’s idea of the good or could simply be out of touch with new values even within your own community.

Instead, in the world that we live in today, the kind of “good people” that we desperately need are individuals with an ever expanding sensitivity towards completely alien ways of live and structures of beliefs. The good individuals of the digital era are those with the capacity to put their own beliefs in parenthesis when it comes to sympathizing with increasingly diverse world-views. In this sense, the new exigencies of goodness require us to be progressively flexible towards our own beliefs and cultural milieu and to be more and more open to converse with alien outlooks. To be good in a truly globalized world is to be able to relate with an increasingly diverse environment and to include this diversity as a parameter when determining our conduct.

So returning to the initial question, can atheists be good? Of course they can. As a matter of fact, the pendulum of goodness seems to have swung in their favor as, by definition, atheists can more easily distance themselves from universal and objective views of morality and hence are better equipped to cope with a world as the one I described above. If you ask me, the more interesting question these days is “can believers be good people?”. Very few people used to take this question seriously, but 9/11 exposed the extreme consequences of the hazardous blend between increasingly plural societies and fundamental beliefs. My personal opinion is that believers can indeed be “good people” in a world like ours, but they need to realize they have to surrender the connection between the deity and morality. As every other mortal, believers need to enter the world of “free floating values”, to borrow an image from economics, and listen more to their compassionate heart than to their unbending commandments.