Do you need religion to be a moral person?

If asked what the most important social consequences of religion are, many people would say it is that religious beliefs make us act more morally. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2007 showed that in answer to the question ‘Do you need to believe in God to be moral?’, the overwhelming majority of people in countries outside Europe said yes.

But surprisingly, perhaps, scientists remain divided on the question. Part of the reason for this is that there are many gods and many moral systems, and it isn’t always clear what we mean when we refer to either religion or morality. Nevertheless, one might still ask whether morality is in some way integral to religiosity bias. Do our intuitive ideas about the afterlife, contagion, or intelligent design fundamentally alter our moral behavior? Socrates posed a similar question when he asked whether goodness is loved by the gods because it is good or whether goodness is good because it is loved by the gods.

The science of morality

Today, some of the best answers to this question come not from Greek philosophy but from scientific research. Studies led by my colleague Oliver Scott Curry have shown that much of human morality is rooted in a single preoccupation: cooperation. More specifically, seven principles of cooperation are judged to be morally good everywhere and form the bedrock of a universal moral compass. Those seven principles are: help your kin, be loyal to your group, reciprocate favors, be courageous, defer to superiors, share things fairly, and respect other people’s property.

This new idea was quite a big deal because up until then it seemed quite reasonable to assert – as cultural relativists have always done – that there are no moral universals, and each society has therefore had to come up with its own unique moral compass. As I will explain, this is not the case. Moreover, the same seven principles of cooperation on which these moral ideas are based are found in a wide range of social species and are not unique to human beings. These moral intuitions evolved because of their benefits for survival and reproduction. Genetic mutations favoring cooperative behaviors in the ancestors of social species, such as humans, conferred a reproductive advantage on the organisms adopting them, with the result that more copies of those genes survived and spread in ensuing generations. Take the principle that we should care for (and avoid harm to) members of our family. This moral imperative likely evolved via the mechanism of ‘kin selection’, which ensures that we behave in ways that increase the chances of our genes being passed on by endeavoring to help our close genetic relatives to stay alive and produce offspring. Loyalty to group, on the other hand, evolves in social species that do better when acting in a coordinated way rather than independently. Reciprocity (the idea that I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine) leads to benefits that selfish action alone cannot accomplish. And deference to superiors is another way of staying alive, in this case by allocating positions of dominance or submission in a coordinated fashion rather than both parties fighting to the death.

The source of right and wrong

The theory of ‘morality as cooperation’ proposes that these seven principles of cooperation together comprise the essence of moral thinking everywhere. Ultimately, every human action that prompts a moral judgment can be directly traced to a transgression against one or more of these cooperative principles. At least, that was the theory. But how could we possibly establish that these seven principles were indeed universal?

The answer lies in an unprecedented study of humans’ moral reasoning around the world. My colleagues and I assembled a sample of sixty societies that had been extensively studied by anthropologists and therefore provided rich data on prevailing moral norms in those cultural groups. To qualify for inclusion, each society had to have been the subject of at least 1,200 pages of descriptive data pertaining to its cultural system. It must also have been studied by at least one professionally trained anthropologist based on at least one year of immersive fieldwork utilizing a working knowledge of the language used locally. The sample of societies was selected to maximize diversity and minimize the likelihood that cultural groups had adopted their moral beliefs from one another. They were drawn from six major world regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Circum-Mediterranean, East Eurasia, Insular Pacific, North America, and South America.

The aim was to mine 400 documents describing the cultures of these sixty societies to establish whether or not the seven principles of cooperation were judged morally good or not, whenever they were mentioned as salient. We found 3,460 paragraphs of text that touched upon these cooperative principles. In each case, we wanted to know whether the type of cooperation described was characterized using words such as good, ethical, moral, right, virtuous, obligatory, dutiful, normative, or any other morally salient language. This produced 962 observed moral judgments of the seven types of cooperative behavior. In 961 of those instances (99.9 percent of all cases), the cooperative behavior was judged morally good. The only exception was on a remote island in Micronesia where stealing openly (rather than covertly) from others was morally endorsed. In this unusual case, however, it seemed to be because this type of stealing involved the (courageous) assertion of social dominance. So, even though this one instance seemed to contradict the rule that you should respect other people’s property, it did so by prioritizing the alternative cooperative principle of bravery. The main take-home here is that the seven cooperative principles appear to be judged morally good everywhere.

What’s religion got to do with it?

Does this necessarily have anything to do with religiosity, though? After all, there is no obvious reason to think we must have gods to believe in the seven moral principles. However, since so many people in the world seem to think there is a link between being religious and being good, this question clearly deserved close attention.

The answer turned out to be a little complicated. One element of the universal moral repertoire does seem to be intuitively connected with our religious instincts: one that takes us back to the early developing expectation that supernatural agents will be socially dominant. In the preceding section I described our research with babies, showing that even before they could talk, they expected agents with supernatural powers to win out in a power struggle with an agent lacking such powers. This suggests that our relationship with the spirit world is underwritten by a moral concern with deference to authority. The gods and ancestors will tend to be our masters and we will tend to be their servants: we will bow down to them and not they to us.

But what about the other moral domains – could they also be linked to our religious beliefs and behaviors? Are our religious intuitions – for example relating to supernatural beings and forces, life after death, or intelligent design in nature – linked to the seven moral rules we have also found to be universal?

The answer is yes – but in ways that are altogether less natural and intuitive. That is, the link between most of the features of intuitive religiosity and the universal moral repertoire is not itself natural but a product of the way religions as cultural systems have evolved as part of our unnatural history of civilization. As such, the links between intuitive morality and intuitive religion have changed dramatically over the course of human history. For example, as we will discover in later chapters of this book, our natural moral imperative to care for kin has been developed in many of the world’s religions into an obligation to take care of our ancestors, by dutifully carrying out a variety of behaviors expressing filial piety. The moral rule that we should reciprocate favors also features prominently in the logic of our interactions with the spirit world – and took a dark turn during the phase of religious history when human sacrifice became rampant. Much later still in the history of religions, we observe the emergence of beliefs in gods demanding that humans everywhere obey law-like commandments. Although both religion and morality are rooted in human nature, our intuitions about the two are not necessarily linked. Sometimes, our moral reasoning seeps into our religious beliefs; at other times, it does no such thing. It depends on the cultural tradition you happen to live in.

And so, we have at least a provisional answer to the question: do we need religion to be moral? The answer is no. Our intuitive religious beliefs would seem to have no necessary connection to our moral intuitions – barring perhaps the special case of deference to supernatural beings. It seems that we can answer Socrates at last. Goodness is not good because it is loved by the gods – rather, it is good whether or not the gods know or care. Unfortunately, this also suggests that most of the people surveyed by Pew on this topic have been misled, however unintentionally, by the religious leaders of the world.