Aware: Morals and values
Why not kill everyone?
Some time ago I was invited to give a talk at a college of theology and humanities. the topic of which resulted in my paper “Could God create Darwinian Accidents?” in Zygon, a leading theology and science academic journal. I gave it my secular best, having told the audience that I was an atheist and that I was using “God” here as a stress test of deterministic views. The answer I gave was neo-Leibnizian, for those who care.
Then the floor was open to questions. I expected some talk of whether or not contingency required randomness, but my first question was, “If you don’t believe in God, why don’t you rape and kill? Why act morally?” It took me a moment to reorient from metaphysics to metaethics, but I replied, “Because I’m an African Great Ape, and that is what apes do; they set and follow social norms”, as we were talking about evolution anyway…
But this is not a simple matter, and that is not the final answer.
There is a mythos regarding values that derives from a number of sources, and several aspects of this mythos reflect upon the notion of a monism of mind. It derives out of the assumption, fairly universally held until the modern period, that for morality to mean something, it has to be founded in some transcendental and absolute foundation, be it God, or rationality or spiritual beliefs that are beyond question. And it must be admitted that African Great Apes like us would have an easier time of it if such grounds for morality could be established, rather than having all kinds of power-bearing apes tell us what to do, which makes morality a whim. I’m including here the super-apes known as gods, and this is often called Divine Command Theory. As Plato’s Socrates argued in his dialogue Euthyphro, however, this is itself a problem. Is the right thing (the pious in Greek) right because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is pious? In short are the gods’ wills good because they are good, or could they change their minds (as Greek gods, and apparently the God of the New Testament, often did).
Now if the pious (often called “the Good” with a capital letter in philosophy) is good because Zeus, or YHWH, or Kṛṣṇa has decreed it, then we can ask Euthyphro’s question, and consider if maybe the supreme god is actually an evil being by our standards, a cosmic Hitler, for instance.[1] If the cosmic Hitler is right simply because they have the power to impose their values, the the deity’s might makes right, and morality could have been something else than it conventionally is. In the religion known as Zoroastrianism, Parsi or Mazdayasna, for example, there is a good deity (Ahura Mazda) and an evil deity (Ahriman),[2] and they predominate in differing ages, so if you happen to be in the latter’s reign, what was good under Ahura Mazda is now evil, and vice versa. I think of this view of morality as a Bully Moralism. Do as the god says is right or the god will smite you. All that makes the Good good, is greater power.
Now that’s not really acceptable for most dualists, and theologians tend to identify God with the Good as a matter of necessity or nature. The alternative for them is moral relativism, in which what is moral depends upon your culture, your choices or your worldview. This is contrasted to moral realism, in which the values that ground morality are objective facts of the universe. But moral facts are hardly physical things. They aren’t even that causal, as people can know these facts and act otherwise, sometimes rationally. So moral realism entails a dualist view of the universe, which, as a monist, I deny. So must a monist like me be a relativist? Could a fascist society make my moral values evil and be right about it?
Well I am a relativist, but I take my lead from the philosopher Hilary Putnam, who asked if we should use somebody else’s values. I prefer my moral values because, well, they are my moral values, and I prize them. Put me in a fascist country (coming soon at a regime near you), and they would remain, I hope now, my values nevertheless. How is that? If values are relative to one’s locale and imbibed worldview, why would I keep mine? Well the reason is that I am not my nation or my government or my religion (of which, in case you missed it, I have none). If the populations that surround me become selfish or murderous or callous and indifferent, that means I contrast to my cohort. My personal relativism is not necessarily that of my group’s. In the end, I am what my development has made me, and it seems to me that the moral lessons I learned before I matured (largely from my reading) is well-established in my personal value schema.
This distinction between values of the individual or small group and those of a larger group and social structures is significant in our context. Under what is sometimes called social determinist anthropologies and sociologies, we are actors in our larger networks only. We have the freedom to shuttle along the threads of an existing loom, but not to exceed it. But this is simplistic at best. We certainly gain habits of choice and action, but they are stochastic in nature, and given that we have literal learning machine neural networks running the show, we can act otherwise in environments that are causing us dissonance. While I am roughly a socioeconomic determinist at the group level, it seems to me that this doesn’t cause the individuals within the group to act only in one way. Populations occur in distributions. We vary.
And what precisely is wrong with group relativism? If we are of the view that things are better now than they were in an earlier period, then we think that our moral values have evolved for the better (I’m talking culturally, not biologically). That is a relativism. Christendom slaughtered believers in other religions over its history, in acts of genocide[3] and coercion. Some Christians now think this is not acceptable. Their values have changed. The arguments presented against moral relativism tend to look at worse or more objectionable societies. Two things: first this assumes that some values are absolute, and is question begging. Basically it is an appeal to disgust based on our modern views. This is pitting fashion against history, and asserting our fashion is most sensible (barbarians do not wear modern suits). Second, there is a view available to relativists that while not justifying any specific set of moral values allows us to hope that the moral universe tends towards justice, as Martin Luther King said. This is something that is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics – eudaimonia. He held that the good was what contributed to the flourishing of a person or society. In a more modern view, we might think that societies that fail to nurture the young, the old and the disadvantaged will, over time, tend to be less successful, and hence will not flourish. Aristotle, of course, was no relativist, although he discusses something like it in his Ethics.[4] He grounds morality in a universal virtue (aretē), or what it is that makes human life best. Unsurprisingly, it is a Hellenistic conception of the contemplative life.[5] So, his absolutism is itself relative to his culture and worldview.[6] In my opinion, relativism in morality is inevitable, no matter the commitment to an absolutism some may profess.
My view is that a kind of cultural evolutionary process is in play; a Darwinian morality, so to speak. Certain social arrangements reduce flourishing. Consider a society that murders most of its children, or eliminates females, The flow-on effects will include a loss of later generations of workers, loss of funding for services, worse productivity and social troubles as work evaporates for younger people. Social disorder and loss of hope will lead to despair, and lack of resources will lead to gangs forming as self-protection societies, and so on. A society that murders ethic minorities may lose good faith with the countries of the origins of those ethnicities, and make them vulnerable to military actions. Social systems that do make citizens flourish will be more resilient, and productive that societies that don’t. This is not refuted by the return to fascist societies argument, although if they persist long enough there is clearly something else going on. However, I do not think that there is an innate or biological morality, merely a range of possible moralities our biology permits. Some moral systems, like libertarianism, make a fine moral foundation for non-social animals, but not us. In the end, we have more or less workable moral systems, and libertarianism or extreme utilitarianism, for example, are not really the right ones for a prosocial ape.
There is a nice scene in a television show After Life, starring Ricky Gervais, where he is asked, if there is no god, doesn’t he just go around murdering and raping as much as he likes? He replies “I do”. What I think those who fear a secular and relativistic morality worry about is that there is no hard barrier to monstrous morals. I fear that too. But the problem I have is that moral realism doesn’t prevent monstrosities like the Inquisition, the extermination of other religions or cultures, slavery, or fascist governments either. In fact, in history, absolutist moralities tend to underpin such monstrosities.
[1] What the great mathematician, Paul Erdős, called the Supreme Fascist. Erdős was of Jewish ancestry and grew up under an authoritarian regime in Hungary, so he knew of what he spoke,
[2] This appears to be a later medieval development. In the earlier form, Zoroastrianism was monotheistic. Parenthetically, the Mazda Motor Corporation took its name from Ahura Mazda. Virtuously, I drive one of their cars and not those manufactured by Ahriman Technologies.
[3] Look up the Cathars sometime, or the Iberian Marranos. Or the Crusades. Or the Thirty Years War… and like all such historical events, they were political.
[4] Nicomachean Ethics, 1095a15–22.
[5] When someone makes a statement about what is the natural state of humanity, check whether it turns out that state closely resembles their own society and position in it. If so, ignore them. They are special pleading on behalf of their vested interests in a status quo.
[6] I keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.