Morality, why can't we get there?

 Susan Sontag said, “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.” She did not do sociological research to back up the numbers, but the numbers are not important, no one fits neatly into those three categories. It’s up to us to observe what is true in the relationships we have and within ourselves.

There is data on what she says, see Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind for example. When Robert Sapolsky studied Bonobos, he chronicled what you would expect, a male hierarchy dominated through violence and intimidation. When most of those males died from eating human garbage, the females imposed a new order. They welcomed new young males into the group, but only if they followed the rules of mercy and compassion. Cruelty and mercy were in the minds of all of them in varying degrees and environmental pressures helped one or the other manifest.

There is a Cherokee story of two wolves that live within a person. First, they should get that checked out, that is way too many wolves living in you. One wolf is evil, anger, envy, regret, the other is good, joy, peace, humility, compassion. They fight, and this fight is going on within every person on earth. The question of which will win is answered with, “The one you feed.” Unlike Hollywood movies, the story doesn’t end with one wolf winning. The wolves are always there and always wanting to be fed.

Another version of the story ends with, “If you feed them right, they both win.” If you are familiar with the Star Trek character Captain Kirk, you might remember a few episodes where he spoke well of his evil side and how it motivated him. In a transporter accident, he was split into two people, with one of “wolves” in each. The evil wolf was easily identified and subdued and quarantined. The good wolf was able to hide his thoughts for a while but was unable to make difficult decisions or be a strong leader.

Richard Carrier refers to this as the bell curve of our tendencies, “I claim every human being possesses both potentials, but not to any universally fixed degree. I would claim some are born with less or more of an innate tendency either way (probably matching a bell curve pattern within the population as a whole), but that every human can cultivate one potential more than another well beyond their biological tendencies (provided they actually do so, and by a method that actually works: and there are methods that work, and methods that don't--and working methods include the active, i.e. self-development, and passive, i.e. parental and societal influence and upbringing).”

Any of this would be difficult or impossible to study in an ethical manner. Malidoma Some, who was born into a tribal society in Africa in the middle of the 20th century and was educated at the Sorbonne in France, told me that he knew of tribes that had lost most of their men to wars and it took a generation or more to reinstate a culture of proper development for the youth. We couldn’t design a study to track that. In the current Western culture, language about the deficiencies of certain ethnic groups has been purged from academia, but data is collected and presented that claims to show how much better people do when raised with a mother and father in the household. I find these to be coded in a way to put a veil of scientific reasoning over the prejudice. It also demonstrates that there are underlying values that we share, despite our differences about how to pass on those values and encourage them in others.

From some of what I’ve said here, one might think there is a system, something that we would have discovered by now to put in a book, create a curriculum, or maybe a funny meme on facebook. I’m not leading up to that, or avoiding presenting it, because I don’t know of one. What I have is a system that will help us improve the system. I can’t say that work will ever be completed.

One of the barriers is the lure of easy answers. They are easy to write-up, easy to make them appealing, easy to swallow, comforting to join with others who agree with them, easy. They can persist for centuries, paradoxically enforced by violence while claiming it’s necessary to keep the peace. Recent studies have shown that it is the community support that is more important than the book or philosophy that them together, that is, an atheist with a strong group of friends thrives as well as a member of church.

I think a big part of why this system for creating a moral system is not taught is the way we teach history, and this includes Sunday School. We teach dates and names for great people, usually men who come along with something new and lead others into the new world they create. There are really geniuses and breakthroughs, but they only come from what came before. Great ideas don’t spring into a mind spontaneously, they are nurtured from the fertile soil of a healthy community. We have yet to come up with one big list of what is right, and the list will change as nature changes, and we are part of nature.

The belief that there is an end, a singularity we are all moving toward, a cosmic truth that will one day be revealed, keeps us fighting over who has the best version of it. We spend more time fighting over the latest list rather than reflecting on how to improve the lists. The list gives us something to rally around and distracts us from keeping our minds open to what others are saying or doing.

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics

Morality, where do we see it?

Francis Schaeffer is sometimes considered the progenitor of the Evangelical movement in the second half of the 20^th century. In his seminal work “How Then Shall We Live”, he begins by looking at failed civilizations and philosophies over thousands of years. Without very much background or logical connection, something Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers might call “unencumbered by the thought process”, he concludes therefore, that there must be an ultimate truth, a source of wisdom beyond human ability and that must be the God of the Christian Bible.

This offer of an answer to the questions of how to live, to me, is not different than the offerings of a populist leader who does not acknowledge the input of the people they are leading. They are the opposite of the leader who says, “it was a team effort”, when asked how they succeeded. Examples of that form of cooperative leadership at high levels are hard to find. Democracy is an attempt to formalize it at a national level but we’re still experimenting. Mythology passed down to Indigenous cultures might contain lessons.

One of those is the Seventh Generation Principle. It comes to the modern Western world from the Iroquois Confederacy of tribes around what is now Lake Ontario in pre-Columbian North America. Some of their ideas inspired the United States Constitution but the idea of considering the impact of decisions on future generations was dumped, overridden by the culture of Capitalism and short-term gains.

Early diaries of European explorers of North American speak of settled areas that had been abandoned. Germ theory had not yet been discovered, so we can forgive them for not understanding where everyone went. Later however, this was forgotten or more likely changed to the story of how those Europeans “tamed” the wilderness. The practices of forest management and hunting that preserved species didn’t result in walled cities and wide roads, so for centuries European methods have been considered superior. The impending failure of those methods is finally drawing that consideration into question.

Spiritual practices are difficult to understand from the outside, so I hesitate to comment on them. I will stick to less controversial statements. Connection to the land and a reverence for nature is easily recognized in writing and stories. Some tribes use the term “two-spirit” or something similar to describe a person with masculine and feminine gender identities. This is something that is rarely honored in other cultures the way N.A. culture has. Also, in my recent interactions with American Natives alive today, I have heard expressions of belief that are unlike other beliefs that have a hierarchical system, with the most powerful gods leading and demanding worship. There seems to be more of a recognition that the stories are symbolic, but this could be just my interpretation.

Overall, my estimation is these ideas and practices were lost and subjugated when Empires with more effective weapons and battle techniques took control of large areas of the map. That changed not only who was in control but how values of how best to survive were passed on. Reflecting on how much better off we are than the previous generation or our younger selves was replaced by what general could best the previous ones or what innovator could create technology to make last year’s model obsolete.

These ideas are not exclusive to Native American but I am most familiar with them. I’m sure similar ideas could be found in other parts of the world and in more philosophies. Now that we have connected the globe and have a better vision of history, including pre-written history, it is time we incorporate all that knowledge and experience into a global sense of morality. Religions that have been at war with each other for as long as they have existed now gesture and speak in platitudes of how we are all praying to the same God or that their God points to the same beliefs as the others. There is even recognition lately of moral systems that have nothing to do with Gods at all. Is it possible to bring all this together and at least talk about the common ground?

This is a bit a tangent from the main theme of how to create a moral system, but I sometimes feel Carrier spends too much time critiquing the people who call themselves moral leaders and not so much on where we could be looking for real leadership.

 

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?”