Morality is Reasonable

 

Another one of my “not sure where this is going or if I’ll finish it posts”. Probably multi-parts. It started by being reminded of this thread on CFI, and the associated blog from Richard Carrier. Carrier always puts many links in his blogs, so this will weave in a few of them. I will add some of what I think Carrier does not address. Some of that might be implied in the works I cover, but I will do my best to be explicit.

I WILL START WITH THE GOAL, THE CONCLUSION:

To determine our path forward in building a moral world, we can learn from our past. This goes all the way back to our early Hominid beginnings and to the rhythms of the planet itself. I won’t offer a perfect solution. It is one of the lessons from the planet that we are not perfect, and nature does not direct anything toward a goal.

To judge the data that we observe, we can apply three metrics; how societies go well or poorly, how human lives go well or poorly, and how human individuals’ inner quest for satisfaction goes well or poorly. “Satisfaction” includes happiness but extends it to reflecting on who we are as compared to who we were. Are we happy not only with our own pleasures and achievements, but has life around us done well, and did our actions along with others acting together with us contribute to the whole? The reflection is selfish only in the sense that we are judging what leads to the satisfaction of others using our own desires and senses as a basis.

I will posit (I’m not sure I will provide a complete defense) that including the needs and desires of others, including non-human life, and non-living things that support life, are helpful to the three metrics.

From the imperfect and incomplete system we have, we can extrapolate and come up with experiments and envision frontiers to discover and that will lead to solutions to the challenges before us. The same system that got us where we are can be used to see what we need because that system is based on finding what is true in his world.

TRUTH, IS THAT IT?

It seemed too simple to me at first and led me think of all the problems with determining what is true, but, yes, that’s it.

Note that we don’t need to find the truth before we can decide what is moral, we only need to set that as the goal. Carrier’s themes are mostly about showing how religion doesn’t work, and while doing that, he compares it to what does work. Religion sometimes contains good ideas, but it fills in what it doesn’t know with false beliefs in an attempt to create a moral system. It fails when it gets away from the pursuit of finding what truly does work. I’m speculating, but it could be that those early gurus set out to speak the truth then found it harder than they thought it would be, so they made up an ultimate truth and mysterious ways to find it. This is pretty much admitted by Plato in his “Myth of the Metals”.

Religion (and we can include failed philosophies of other types) fail because they provide an untrue basis for what is moral and build a stack of immoral rules on that basis. Rules like; the strongest warrior is also the smartest, or an arbitrary boundary can’t be crossed without punishment. A moral system includes; women voting, abolition of slavery, democracy, animal rights, equality, sexual freedom, and spiritual freedom. It does not include burning people for witchcraft. Even a claim of a temporary system, one that uses violence as a means, is always found to be untrue when power is gained over a large area, but the violence continues, and life does not improve for individuals or society.

Included in this reflection on ourselves is the violence we have done to the earth. We now know that large areas of the Americas, including rain forests, were managed and nurtured millennia ago with future generations in mind. It didn’t look like the European cities that were built using technology that extracted resources, so it wasn’t recognized as human achievement, or if recognized it was not considered better because it was not fast enough or didn’t prioritize enough short-term creature comforts over long-term stability.

In the few centuries when we were discovering the full size of the globe and thus the limits of our expansion, we could have spent some of our resources learning how to live within those limits. Instead, we brought slavery and ideas of constant growth into a world with ever increasing means to enforce them but not increased reflecting on their destructive nature. Ironically, those means created a class of people who had more time to reflect on how those same means were immoral. New technology created ways to document and disseminate those reflections. We broadened the discussion of morality across cultures while simultaneously acting immorally toward those cultures. We increased our ability to pursue what is true but continued to hold on to false beliefs as guides.

WHERE DID WE GO WRONG?

My brief history above could be expanded upon in many ways, maybe I will link to some of it later. We could look at how Muslims first spent some of their resources gathering knowledge from around the world while they were expanding their empire but were then diverted by the fundamentalist ideals of Al-Ghazali. We could critique the British Empire and colonialism and point out that to this day their museums are full of artifacts they acquired by force while spreading the good word of peace. The many alliances with Christianity and military power are too easy to point at, right up to the Third Reich.

My answer then to “where we went wrong” is there is no point in history when that happened. We didn’t “go wrong”, rather, “we aren’t perfect.” This could be a cause of despair. Psychology recognizes that for some people the thought that we can’t know everything is debilitating. They are unable to make any decision because they are overwhelmed with the need to consider all possibilities and the knowledge that they can’t do that.

Some can find comfort in an easy, pre-packaged answer, a moral system that comes with a community that believes in it. Many mistake the sense of community as evidence that the moral system is functioning. They stop questioning it, which puts an end to one of the keys to creating a moral system that is functioning. Instead they turn to defending the system as a replacement for strengthening it. It may feel like that defense is making the system better because it is helping to bond the community, but the bonding is not a replacement for reflection.

We have the ability to reason and to reflect, we should use it. We can gather data and test our hypotheses. This is demonstrated in laboratories with biology and the chemicals that comprise living things, and the same principles can be applied to the emergent properties of those living things. David Hume said we can’t figure out what we “ought” to do based on what “is”. He understood what a hypothetical imperatives is, but he argued that reason could not provide us with unconditional imperatives.

An example of a hypothetical imperative:

In the mid-20^th century, famine cycles were a real problem. We wanted to increase how much food we could grow and avoid blights, we used the hypothetical imperative, “if you want X, you do Y”, and created genetically modified crops. Or, the “is” form of these statements is something to the effect of “when you want X, know Y best achieves it, and seek the best means to achieve your goals, you will do Y.” I use this example because this solution did not solve the problem completely and created new problems. I will refer back to it later.

But what makes it a moral imperative?

If I said, “if you don’t want a beating, then obey me”, that’s a moral command from an authority, not a universal moral imperative. A moral imperative is an imperative that supersedes all others, which implies they are true and testable. They maximize the chances of our own personal satisfaction through our actions that create the better society and the better world we live in.

A moral imperative maintains “self-interest”, not “selfishness”. Self-interest warrants generosity and concern for others. Moral imperatives usually involve long-term payoffs, which might explain why people don’t like grappling with them.

The logical proof of how all moral systems break down into hypothetical imperatives can be found by following a couple of links that are in the John Davidson post and often are used by Richard.

·         The Real Basis of a Moral World

·         All your moral systems are the same

·         Or skip straight to the source he sites, Phillipa Foot

o   Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

I won’t try to recreate them. In a sentence it’s something like all of moral systems are consequentialism in some form but to really work, they need to be based on reason so you can truly be convinced that X is the right thing to do to achieve a Y that meets the three metrics, universally.

Some questions that come up, might be, “if we can do this, and have done this, why hasn’t it worked so far?” Or more simply, “Now what?”