Another strategy to explain away agape love, as the atheist must do in order to be an actual atheist, is to argue that all ethics are socially constructed. This is sometimes called the argument from cultural relativism. The idea is that human beings consciously or unconsciously adopt (or reject) the values of the culture in which they live. So whether positively or negatively, cultural values determine what an individual values.
J.L. Mackie, a cultural relativist a professed atheist, expresses the point this way in his book Inventing Right and Wrong: “Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect adherence to and participation in different ways of life” (94). That is to say, the mere existence of varying and/or conflicting ethical standards between cultures combined with the relatively high levels of agreement about ethical standards within cultures implies that an individual’s ethical standards are at least partly dependent upon the culture from which she comes. As Mackie puts it, this argument can be expressed in causal terms. He uses the example of the value of monogamy: “The casual connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy” (94-5).
This causal connection indeed seems true, but only trivially so. Consider the example of certain Mormon values, such as disdain for caffeine, that are prevalent in Utah but in no other state. From a statistical standpoint, it would be utterly astounding if nearly all of Americans who disapproved of caffeine-drinking on moral grounds coincidently all lived in Utah, were Mormon values were laudable and practiced. It is not much to infer that people who morally disapprove of caffeine-drinking do so because their culture made it customary and hence ordinary.
Mackie has merely pushed back the question one level: now we want to know if any cultures are superior to any others with respect to the values they have. To many, it seems arrogant to talk about one cultural as superior to another, but I don’t have any problem with this. It seems intuitive that societies that had slaves or contemporary societies that don’t extend rights to women are culturally inferior to cultures that don’t have slaves or respect women as equals. So yes, I agree with Mackie that my values are relative in the sense that my moral education from my family and culture determines my own values. I can freely admit, although with some shame, that if I were born in certain places in the Middle East, I would think of women as second-class citizens. But I don’t see how that implies that values are relative – many of us still have the intuition that some practices really are unjust. We can simply still insist that some cultures are morally superior to other cultures. We still are waiting for an argument from the atheist to show that the phenomenon of love is reducible to sociology or biology.
