There was a suggestion on twitter that atheists can’t be liberals, and I want to just put the record straight.

Am I an atheist?

No. I’m an agnostic, since I don’t believe there’s any evidence for or against the “God exists” hypothesis. The Dawkins position that God doesn’t exist is just as absurd as the theist position that he or she does.

Note, I don’t believe in God and I don’t not believe in God are both true for me. But that’s where I make a further distinction from the atheists – I don’t believe the question is relevant. There are far more pressing questions for humanity, which we can obtain answers to, and we should be looking at those instead of arguing over whether a beetle in a box exists just because we say it does (or doesn’t.)

Why do I care about the Moral Laws argument then?

Because the moral laws argument applies to all non-theist (atheist and secular) political theories.

So, why is there a contradiction?

Secular liberal philosophy isn’t morally relativist, that is it requires there to be acts which are universally thought to be wrong (crimes,) and this is what Wittgenstein was attacking when he said that without a God handing them down you can’t have Moral Laws because they have no origin.

I have argued before that there should be such a thing as International Law and that it should be enforced – what Wittgenstein (and Sam Bowman on twitter) are asking me is how do we decide what international (or indeed national) laws should be, and therefore how to human rights arise?

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The classic “Democrat” answer to this question is “Whatever a legislature elected by the people decides” – democracy is literally mob-rule, and the laws come out of some averaging of mob opinions. However, these are not permanent laws – the people can change their mind (as we’ve seen with laws on, for example, homosexuality over the years.)

I agree to an extent with the democrats, in the sense that I think the approval of laws should be done by elected representatives, although I do go further and argue for one theory to be put, very strongly, to the people for their approval. It is a theory which should win all arguments by having its basis in fact rather than opinion, and as such should be a possible set of universal moral laws, and it is the one espoused by the Utilitarians and Radicals in early 19th Century Britain.

I don’t believe in maximising human pleasure before you scowl at me for arguing for bestiality and all those other Bentham consequences; although David Cameron’s recent moves towards measuring happiness rather than growth are moving in a nearly-correct direction.

The quantity to be maximised may be happiness and may be something else (although it certainly isn’t growth since that is unsustainable,) but just like with the laws and conditions to maximise it it should be discovered by experiment.

This is where the liberal harm principal (a Radical idea from JS Mill in the 19th Century) comes into its own, since we can measure the “harm” on a person scientifically; economic, medical and psychological. From these data we can construct a moral theory which is, like our scientific understanding of the universe, a “best guess” at a set of moral laws; which is an objective source of such laws to satisfy Wittgenstein (and Sam.)

I thought this question was about Human Rights?

But, you see, we’ve now built a framework in which we can prove scientifically that a world with human rights is better (by some metric that must also be discovered) than a world without them; as such they must become part of our set of universal moral laws.

And, to pick an example, the simple manifestation of the “right to life” is a two-parter: firstly that there be a law against murder, and secondly that the state not execute people (both of which are fundamental consequences of the harm principal.) You can start to get picky about things like abortion, but you have to define who is covered by Human Rights, and if you define this to be separate, living humans (as opposed to biologically dependant and potential humans) then abortion does not break the murder law. Additionally, if you want more than just a definition, look at the wellbeing and status of women in societies with legal contraception and, often, abortion. Thus, even when a seemingly simple Human Right becomes complex, we can see that a pseudo-utilitarian calculus helps us resolve the problem and stumble across a “universal moral law”/a moral law derived from the universe.