Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Religious Character of Human Dignity | 391
standards believe in God too, ipso facto.
As Abraham Lincoln said of the Bible: “But for it we could not
know right from wrong.” 3
I’ve asserted that anyone who believes in absolute, compulsory
standards of behavior for all the world must believe in God. Again,
I’m not proposing a proof that God exists, which seems to me impossible
given the nature of the proposition. I’m only asserting that most
people in modern society believe that He does—probably a large majority,
including many who call themselves agnostics or atheists.
Here’s my argument. Let’s suppose you are a “reasonable person”;
being reasonable, you have “inner promptings” that provide you with
moral guidance. They tell you, for example, not to commit murder.
Accordingly you don’t. Even if you somehow found yourself in a position
where you could murder in cold blood a person you had every
right to hate, in such a way that no one would ever find out—you
still wouldn’t do it.
So far there’s no need to mention God. There might be all sorts of
purely rational or psychological grounds for this inner prompting.
But now suppose you come upon someone else who is about to
commit murder. (For concreteness, suppose the potential murderer
has pinned the intended victim underfoot and is about to smash in
his head with a sledgehammer.) Presumably you would see it as your
duty to compel the would-be murderer to desist. Whether you actually
do anything would probably depend on the presence or absence
of onlookers, the tools at hand, and your own bravery. But you’d
want to stop the murder, whether or not you are able to put this
desire into effect.
Now, what gives you the right to compel another person to obey
your own personal inner promptings?
You might answer that “my inner promptings tell me not only
that I personally must not murder but that I must compel all other
potential murderers to desist.” But remember: you’re a reasonable
person. As such, you can’t deny that the potential murderer has his
own inner promptings, which might tell him that murder (or at least
this particular murder) is good or even mandatory. If you insist that
your own behavior must be governed by your own inner promptings,
why shouldn’t this other person’s behavior be governed by his own inner
promptings?