Tags
20th century, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, Kamehameha II, Ken Wilber
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I previously called the problem of good. Those who believe there is an ultimate goodness central to the universe face the problem of the universe’s imperfection and badness. The most obvious form of this problem is the Abrahamic problem of suffering; it’s also a problem for Advaita Vedānta, in which it’s hard to explain how ignorance can be possible. But for those who don’t believe in that ultimate goodness – which includes Theravāda Buddhists as well as naturalistically minded scientists – there is an alternate problem, of how we explain the existence of value in the first place.
This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything.
The analytical movement in early twentieth-century philosophy rejected not only “religion” but most forms of metaphysics, looking with deep suspicion on any claims about the universe that could not be demonstrated empirically. As a result, they came up with (highly implausible) theories about ethics and value that often dismissed them entirely. For A.J. Ayer, value claims are entirely meaningless; C.L. Stevenson argued that they mean nothing more than the expressions “boo” and “hurrah,” with no rational content. G.E. Moore wasn’t quite as dismissive – the word “good” did mean something real – but it was also something undefinable, like “yellow” (referring to the subjective perception of yellowness as a colour, not the way in which yellow objects happen to refract light). What this effectively meant was that it was impossible to argue rationally about what was good; you just knew. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who knew Moore well, witnessed firsthand the anti-intellectual bullying that resulted from such an approach in Moore’s social circle:
How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalyzable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue…. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method — greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity — Do you really mean that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility … Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. (Keynes, “My Early Beliefs”)
These various analytical attempts to analyze value judgements are all pretty clear failures, to my mind; in many cases they explain away value judgements rather than actually explaining them. But they all come within a shared context of rejecting metaphysics – and thereby rejecting any metaphysical status for goodness in the universe. It seems to me that the rejection of a metaphysics of goodness leaves them bereft of any ability to speak reasonably about what goodness actually is. Alasdair MacIntyre, with the Nietzschean wit that characterizes his early work, compares the analytic philosophers to Hawai’ian natives who would explain prohibitions by saying that they are taboo, but not be able to explain what taboo means – so that soon enough King Kamehameha II could abolish the taboos without any serious objections arising:
Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten…. But had the Polynesian culture enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number of ways. Taboo, it would have been said by one party, is clearly the name of a non-natural property; and precisely the same reasoning which led Moore to see good as the name of such a property and Prichard and Ross to see obligatory and right as the names of such properties would have been available to show that taboo is the name of such a property.
MacIntyre then compares Nietzsche to Kamehameha II, shattering the pretensions of those who claim “good” still means something in the absence of the “background beliefs” that make that meaning possible. It is not that Nietzsche wins the debate, that good means nothing; but that for us to see the meaning of good we must have the kind of underlying beliefs that the twentieth-century analytic philosophers did not.
What are those underlying beliefs? It seems to me that, at base, they require goodness to have a real, objective existence, beyond that which people happen to value at any particular place and time. Reality, the larger stage in which our lives take place, what Ken Wilber calls the Kosmos – what is most often called “the universe” or “the world” except that these terms usually limit themselves to the physical – it must somehow have value and goodness as a part of its nature, at least insofar as human beings exist within it. Seeing that goodness at the heart of the world is a lot easier if you take the next step and view that world as the creation of an omnibenevolent God. But then, of course, it winds up being a lot harder to explain the world’s observed badness.
I spent an hour this morning reading Menon’s article in IEP on Advaita. I’ve been reading this stuff for a long time and it had me confused.
Ordinary perceptual knowledge is only possible because of the unity of being. However it at the same time tends to prevents us from recognising this unity. It creates in us the natural disposition to become wrapped up in ‘me/mine’, self/other. It therefore even when veridical is paradoxically called ignorance. Full blown avidya only comes about with concomitant self-awareness of the human kind but it is essentially there simultaneous with creation. Is this a problem? Only if you view ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ as a genuine question.
Because the unity of being is natural the falling into it from time to time by individuals who surpass their disposition to a subject/object construction of reality is inevitable. In fact I would say that this is essential for wholeness and well-being. Abraham Maslow has written about this and of course the traditional wisdom, keep goggling Moore, is unanimous. Dharma – Wu-Wei – Nature(phusis) – Tao – Tzujan – Connaturality etc are some of the names of this condition which self-actualizing people are regularly in or experience or recognise. Any sort of self-actualizing person, not necessarily a Teacher/Guru can bring us to an understanding of this. To alter a saying – it’s the Kosmos stupid.
Haha! Atheist on the scene!
Actually, morality has always struck me as a relatively simple(if at times annoyingly circular) science – at least, since the development of Game Theory mathematics in the 1950’s.
Simply put, most aspects of morality derive from one basic decision that we must make over and over again each day – to Cooperate or Compete, or put in a broader social context – to Conform or Rebel.
It takes more complex form in questions such as: How much am I willing to risk or sacrifice in the hope of return, for me or my people? How severely shall I punish transgression to prevent rebellion and disunity? But these are mostly matters of degree and strategy layered upon the original question:
Compete or Cooperate?
Virtually every moral decision can be framed in this manner, and it is surprisingly easy to reduce many simple ‘moral’ questions to mathematical presumptions.
The reality of course is that there are so many of these systems and decisions, and their behavior so chaotic mathematically, that trying to use that math predicatively is generally futile. In most cases you can at best generalize.
However, it does intrude directly into the real world in more absolute scenarios. The most famous two would be the Prisoner’s Dilemma (used daily by prosecutors) and M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) which has kept the world from the edge of oblivion since the birth of the mathematics that defined it. See: War Games (1983) for a fun pop culture examination of M.A.D. and its theoretical moral and mathematical underpinnings – sans any theology.
These scenarios are core studies with which any student of philosophical morality should strive to be familiar – and they require absolutely no metaphysical underpinning to describe and explore in great detail and variation.
As for whether anything is Absolutely Good – I suspect the answer is, alas, No, though I know of no mathematical proof for that. The tenets of game theory suggest that morality, while following a number of relatively strict rules, is nevertheless highly reflective of situational reality, and under sufficient conditions or duress, virtually any behavior might potentially be construed as socially viable and ‘good’.
However, in studying the mathematical behavior of self-replicating entities, one can at least construe a few strong rules very quickly:
1) Us vs. Them – It is incredibly difficult to contemplate any moral system that does not include the concept of the ‘us’ and the ‘other’. By definition, a man alone on an island has no need for morality.
It is impossible to cooperate against nothing, for you have no basis for judging the benefit or outcome of doing so. The Other can become an intellectual or philosophical abstraction, or physical goal, rather than another band of competing entities – but it cannot be nothing.
2) Do Unto Others – The expectation of another entity or group to behave and judge in a manner similar to yourself is generally regarded as the most fundamental rule of Game Theory or Morality. The calculation of whether or not they are actually likely to do so is the most important part of most decision making.
If you kill, you expect that you may be killed, if you give, you hope that one day in return when you are in need you may receive.
In Game Theory, the equations and math that can be used to describe morality are deceptively simple and elegant. The outcomes however, are generally unstable and chaotic (mathematically Chaotic, that is), often shifting endlessly through an array of probabilities and meta-strategies, even when the underlying factors remain fixed – which in the real world they generally do not.
This results in a system that allows for the abstract mathematical study of morality, but is far too computationally expensive for use as a daily guide to personal behavior.
Into that gap strides philosophy and theology, which attempt to simplify and generalize, creating relatively arbitrary structures based off of some of the basic rules described in Game Theory, but fixed for a particular local set of conditions.
Unfortunately for theologians and philosophers, the real world has lately been changing the local conditions so quickly and capriciously that most of the existing treatises are hopelessly out of date and either irrelevant or self-destructive in the modern world.
“Atheist on the scene”
I prefer the term non-theist to atheist. Why define yourself by a set of beliefs that you do not hold? I suppose you can do it. It would be like calling a vegetarian an “anti-carnivore” — but I would be more interested in hearing about the positive qualities of vegetables.
Because that is the term that most people understand and recognize.
I could just as easily use ‘Humanist’, but the number of people who recognize that term drops to a small fraction.
Alternately, I could use ‘Logician’ or ‘Vulcan’ or just make up some amusing new label. The truth is I don’t care what label is applied, so long as it offers the average listener a reasonable representation of my belief structure and approach to life.
In my case I think Atheist is perhaps more appropriate than humanist, because I honestly don’t really like the belief structures presented in most religions!
I consider many of them to be inherently limiting and stifling in intellectual terms, usually due to the dogmatic rigidity with which they are presented, and the frequent contradictions and impossibilities they espouse.
Jim, I will take Jesse’s side on this one: “atheist” is a good, relatively precise label to describe someone who does not believe in god/s. The category is defined by an absence, so the concept should be too. In terms of accuracy, the term “atheist” is much better than “vegetarian.” After all, everybody eats vegetables, including those who eat meat; vegetarians eat plenty of things that are not vegetables, such as fruits and nuts – and for that matter eggs and dairy. (For those who don’t consume the latter are not vegetarian but “vegan.”) “Non-carnivore” would actually make a lot more sense. We’re pretty much stuck with both “atheist” and “vegetarian” since those are the common usages, but I’d rather be stuck with “atheist.”
In my case atheist is fully appropriate because I actively dislike many of the concepts inherent in most religions, so the suggestion of opposition inherent in that title is appropriate in my case. ;)
If it does bother you, feel free to use Secular Humanist.
I don’t really care what labels people care to slap on me, so long as they are reasonably accurate.
Jesse, thanks for the many comments.
As a first point of response, I am not merely talking about morality (since that term is usually used to describe a relatively circumscribed area of human behaviour, typically focused on proper conduct in our relationships with others). I am talking about value judgements of all kinds. That includes ethics and virtue more broadly defined (the kind that are relevant on a desert island, as we discussed here); it also includes other kinds of value, such as aesthetic value. I don’t think these can be explained, even causally, with game theory.
But there’s a much bigger point at issue here, which I’m hoping to go into in more detail in another post. We get any sort of value, including morality, very wrong if we think that identifying the cause of their origin is the only explanation we need for them. Because that only tells us about what people actually happen to value, not about what they should value, what it is good to value – and that judgement of “good” or “should” is part of what it is to be a value judgement.
“it also includes other kinds of value, such as aesthetic value. I don’t think these can be explained, even causally, with game theory.”
Game theory is based fairly strictly on behavioral science. I doubt you could use it to make specific aesthetic judgements – but I *DO* assure you that it applies fully to certain forms of aesthetic behavior, such as those witnessed in the fashion industry.
The behaviors witnessed there (leading trends, herd behavior, individuality vs. conformity) are classic problems addressed in Game theory.
The one thing that Game Theory teaches you that applies to a great deal of social structure (esp religions, cults, governments, etc), is that strategically speaking any coherent structure, even a terrible one, is generally far more competitive than none.
For example, you can argue till you’re blue in the face whether Protestantism or Catholicism has a ‘superior’ set of moral values – but the reality is that the specific values are barely more relevant than whether every drives on the left side of the road or the right. The reality is that it is important that everyone drive on the SAME SIDE.
Now of course, the specific values do matter, they are just of secondary or tertiary importance to the simple point of sharing a set of values. Once everyone is organized into functioning coherent groups, then those secondary values can come to the fore as being competitively significant.
This however, is the main argument against assuming there is strong value to any particular belief set because it has worked in the past. The main value is in HAVING A BELIEF SET, regardless of its values – but competitively that belief set, though it has worked to date, can still prove to be substantially inferior to many others when compared directly against them.
As an interesting aside, while Game Theory is not technically about games – it being more about the mathematical study of behavior – it nevertheless is strongly expressed in most real competitive games.
Indeed, some of the most popular games are essentially ‘moral playgrounds’ that pit players with and against each other in various abstract simplifications of the moral situations we face in life. This relevance to our real lives and the training they provide doubtless explain the lasting appeal of games such as Poker, Truth-or-Dare, or Diplomacy.
Surely these games, and the mathematics upon which they are founded, have nothing whatsoever to do with Theology, despite the fact that they unquestionably explore questions of morality.
Theology, Philosophy (and indeed, Game Theory) are intruders on the abstract plane of Morality – albeit ones that can be very helpful for people struggling with a system far too complex for them to comprehend – but they should by no means claim to be the SOURCE of morality. That would be a grotesque overstepping of bounds.
Morality has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.
It seems to me that a significant part of the disagreement that you note results from an unspoken disagreement about how we come to know goodness (or reality for that matter).
The basic goodness that is recognized in Buddhism (including, I believe, Theravadin Buddhism) is non-dual. This means goodness that is not contrasted to evil. Because it is non-dual, it cannot be understood through logic. So philosophical schools that do not recognize any source of understanding except through intellect and logic are likely to be dismissive of this view as an unsupportable “belief”. But this is really missing the point. It is not based on belief but on direct experience.
It is possible to gain an intellectual understanding. The basic goodness that is talked about in Buddhism gives rise both to relative goodness and evil — so-called co-emergent wisdom. When the world is divided into concepts of this and that, then the relative relationships of this to that create relative good and bad. An earthquake or ALS is bad only in this relative sense.
Furthermore, human evil arises from ingrained instincts of self-preservation. In the Buddhist view self is a conceptual overlay on our experience. The self cannot be located (in other words, anything that can be identified as self is mutually conditioned on other) — that is emptiness. And yet emptiness is not a void (which would be another concept) there is still cognizance and appearance. The concept that there is a self and grasping to this concept and trying to preserve it at all costs in the midst of inexhorable change is what gives rise to evil — which by nature is always relative. The interesting thing is that the mind always sees basic goodness. It is just that in the mind of someone attached to a concept of self (which is most all of us most all of the time) — basic goodness manifests as doubt in the solidity of self — existential uncertainty, the perception of external threats from “other” and a life ruled by hope, fear and suffering. It is horrific.
That is why the route to understanding basic goodness is through understanding fear and doubt. Fear and doubt imply intelligence and a perception of emptiness. It is just that there is a habit of speed, of panic and not looking (avidya) that needs to be retrained. Training in relative virtue (putting others first — generosity, patience. etc.) is helpful in part because it allows the stability necessary to see emptiness directly without panic.
I believe that there are parallels to this view in other traditions as well — not to imply that Buddhism owns any of this.
“The basic goodness that is recognized in Buddhism (including, I believe, Theravadin Buddhism) is non-dual. This means goodness that is not contrasted to evil. Because it is non-dual, it cannot be understood through logic.”
Not to be flippant, but yeah, I agree, that statement isn’t even remotely logical.
You’re using the term ‘good’ in ways that I don’t remotely recognize, and have a hard time even guess at what you’re trying to say. Lets see if you can boil that all down to English again. While I enjoy my sojourns here, I’m not an Eastern Philosophies major.
Furthermore, while a philosopher might have the luxury of discarding fear and doubt from their mind while contemplating morality, a police officer (even a Buddist one) cannot.
The officer is not all-seeing, nor all-knowing, nor may they eternally contemplate the scene before them when trying to decide whether to act or not. They cannot know for certain who among the people standing before them are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, or even whether there is a ‘good’ path open to them at all. They can only take their best guess, and generally speaking, they’re going to have to do it in a hurry.
If a particular approach to morality cannot be applied outside of the terraced garden of the mind – the metaphorical equivalent of the desert island upon which there is no need for morality in the first place – then does it have value to anyone other than the philosopher?
Can it be called morality at all? I tend to think it could not. I think it risks regressing from a discussion of morality to purely internalized musing with no moral dimension at all.
The question remains what constitute good and evil (even in the realm of conventional truth), what makes them so – why, especially, we should seek the things claimed to be good and avoid those claimed to be evil. I think that, as Ethan says below and you seem to imply as well, it tends to come down to the point that we want to avoid suffering, find suffering “horrific.” I intend to be saying more about this point in my next couple posts.
I do tend to think that philosophers over-complicate things a bit.
We don’t like hunger, pain, embarrassment, and so on, very simply because we’re programmed to dislike and avoid these things, evolutionarily speaking.
I don’t think there’s much need to look for any deeper meaning there – you don’t like them because these responses mean you are DOING IT WRONG.
You have gotten stabbed, you have failed to find sufficient food, or you have made an ass of yourself in front of others who’s care and opinion you depend upon.
The basic ‘good’ things in life are likewise already well known to us, thanks to the wisdom of Conan, and for the same reasons. They mean we’ve basically done something right, survival or procreation-wise.
The Problem? Well, all those responses developed evolutionarily for an environment we no longer live in. Small bands of clever creatures living on the narrow fringe between savannah and forest.
We have built a world both fantastic and terrifying around ourselves, and our old instincts and responses can no longer be trusted, and so we adopted moral structures to guide us instead, because they could be changed to adapt, unlike our instincts.
Now the change comes too quickly for those old written strictures to follow, and we find ourselves entirely lost, free to suffer and struggle as individuals, frightened and alone alongside 7 billion others.
Ultimately, the problem is that you are looking for THE way to live. We had that, long ago. You’ve known it since you were born.
But that way was lost to us, not because we do not know it – but because it no longer can suffice. There is no one way to live. The world is too many different worlds, all changing too quickly for any one way to be relevant.
We are each now left to find our own way. Whether we like it or not.
Now, regarding one of the articles you referenced, I will freely admit that the Advaita Vedanta one is waaay too dense with abstract philosophical references for me to absorb in any meaningful way, but I did dig through far enough to run into some passages that bothered the hell out of me, such as this one:
‘Plurality is experienced because of error in judgments (mithya) and ignorance (avidya).’
Now, I’m not sure exactly what we mean by ‘plurality’ here, but I assume that’s shorthand for ‘difference of opinion’, or a sense of being separate from others rather than being ‘at-one’ with everyone else.
Starting from that basis, dissecting this sentence makes me rather distraught.
First the assumption that plurality is by any means avoidable, or even bad, is foreign to me. If everyone thought and behaved by absolutely identical moral guidelines, we’d be living in an beehive or Borg Cube by now – and while mono-cultures are highly organized and resilient, they are brittle. Once their tolerances are exceeded they tend to collapse in a horrific fashion, unable to adapt or survive in any fashion.
Second point, stating that Ignorance (or I suspect, a difference in knowledge) is a cause of plurality. Ignorance is an absence of knowledge, and I’m sorry, while I’m all for educating the masses, omniscience is not within reach of most of us. Regardless of how long we live or study, 99.99999999% of the knowledge of reality will remain forever beyond our grasp. That’s a lot of ignorance.
Finally, Judgement. Assuming omniscience – the data – is the easy part, then Judgement is the processing power of the mind or spirit. Absolute judgement of the past, present, and future on an infinite volume of data would further require infinite processing power and/or an infinite amount of time.
It seems to me that the concept is not calling for us to learn everything and understand everything about everything – but instead to limit our worldview to a incredibly tightly constrained set of predefined concepts, assuming everything beyond that philosophically walled garden to be irrelevant and meaningless to the human condition.
Among those things, they must pile in such meaningless concepts as ‘hunger’ or ‘desire’, because when you are in a place with food for less than half the population to survive on, then as the saying goes, ‘shit gets real’ and the pre-packaged concepts of morality we are comfortable with tend to go bye bye for a while.
Of course, in a large society where periodic mass starvation might be an unavoidable calamity, there’s quite a bit of value in a strict moral system that tells you that the right thing to do when starving is to go die quietly in a corner while contemplating eternity, as opposed to raiding the local potentate’s storehouse… Hmm…
Whoops, terminology fix:
“and while mono-cultures are highly organized and resilient, they are brittle.”
“and while mono-cultures are highly organized and EFFICIENT, they are brittle.”
Saying something is resilient and brittle in the same sentence really wasn’t quite what I was going for there. ;P
I suspect the IEP entry may not have been the best link for an intro to Advaita Vedānta. It might be easier to follow one of my own posts on the subject, which is on a topic related to this one: here.
Yup. That was a good bit clearer, though I have trouble with the core precept of ignorance as a ‘thing’.
It’s like suggesting that cold is the opposite of heat – it isn’t really, because the scale doesn’t go from -Infinity to Infinity, it must remain in the realm of Real Numbers, and thus goes from Zero to Infinity. There aren’t really that many truly opposing forces in physical reality.
Cold is thus the absence of Heat, Darkness is the absence of Light, Ignorance is similarly the absence of Knowledge – and the natural state of things is for us to enter the world with very little knowledge at all – and no means whatsoever by which we might reasonably achieve infinite knowledge, thus some level of Ignorance is provably an inherent and unavoidable state of being, only its degree can be altered.
Indeed, information theory suggests that you cannot know the entire state of a system without BEING that system – and that even then no closed system can ever know its own entire state.
For example, a computer only ‘knows’ the state of its bits and how to manipulate them, it does not know how those bits are held in a silicon matrix, or where the power comes from to operate, or any of the exa-bytes of information that go into describing the rest of the physical ‘state’ of the computer itself – an amount of information that vastly outweighs the data the computer itself is constructed to handle! Even the most efficient imaginable system would require more data to operate than it could operate ON – the universe itself being the largest and ?presumably? most efficient processor of all, and yet it is still doomed by thermodynamic law.
True Oneness thus seems forever closed to us by intractable physical law.
Now back to Amod’s point regarding whether there is an ultimate ‘Good’, I basically disagree – at least until we get down to an absolutely primordial level of pure existence, a bare step above raw mathematics.
Down there amongst the numbers that describe the self-replicating entity, whether it be a simple protein chain, a complex social human being, or an informational meme composed of nothing but societal data, we see one single point, one unmitigated ‘Good’.
– To Continue –
Not to be confused with permanence, not to exist indefinitely, nor to aid, help, harm – but simply to continue, to proceed onwards with the march of time either as a being or through one’s conceptual or physical offspring.
Everything we are, everything we came from, and everything we portend to become, comes from this one conceptual goal. Continuity throughout the swirling chaos of existence, as individuals, as families, as nations, religions, corporations and sciences. All strive to continue regardless of whatever else they desire to be.
We see that even hopelessly flawed beings and concepts strive to continue, broken and desperate, such as the Flat Earth meme, or the Shakers, who, while they would not have children, did proselytize in a bid for continuity, albeit a failing one.
From this one most basic goal, for better or worse, all other morality appears to derive.
Honestly, I don’t see the conflicts of analytical philosophy you described above. I find it more than adequate to create a relatively stable structure from which I can study moral questions without having to create any initial, arbitrary ‘red line’ positions of what might be Good or Evil, and still end up with moral positions that (roughly) equate to those extant in the society around me without undue conceptual friction.
I can from there derive why I might treat my neighbor kindly and my business partner fairly without any regard to a holy writ or any other pre-conceived notion of morality. Just as importantly, I can explore conditions under which I might NOT treat someone well, and then perhaps take steps to avoid such conditions or mitigate my own ‘immoral’ behaviors in the future.
Also, analytical morality leaves one with no confusion whatsoever about why ‘bad’ things happen. You are not beholden to the idea of autocratic benevolence, and so you are free to view such things as they appear to be – unfortunate circumstance to be avoided as one may.
I think one of the biggest problems in moral reasoning is that many people fall victim to the following false dichotomy: EITHER morality has a solid basis in something Absolute, Divine, Metaphysical, Cosmological, Rational or some other portentous Capitalized Noun OR it is merely an entirely relative whim of an individual or group that is either made true just by people thinking it or not even subject to truth conditions at all. I see this dichotomy in a lot of student papers, but also in a lot of existentialists (both religious and irreligious), some postmodernism, and even in some analytic stuff, such as the emotivists Amod discussed.
This false dichotomy causes all sorts of trouble in moral thinking, but I also think the dichotomy is false (I also suspect both options are individually false, but that’s another story). There are more than two options here, although I admit that I’m not entirely sure what those options are.
Jesse’s option of thinking of morality as a kind of game theory might work, although I find that game theory and related thinking often presuppose a model of self-interested rationality. This may be true, but the job of philosophers is to dig a little deeper to investigate that claim, especially since many of our moral intuitions rely on altruism with no obvious personal benefit. One thing about the Prisoner’s Dilemma that has always puzzled me, for example, is that if both prisoners don’t talk there is less prison time overall. If the prisoners were more altruistic (say they were really good Buddhists) they would want less prison time overall regardless of whose prison time it is. I’m not saying game theory isn’t extremely useful, especially in real life situations, but that it relies on philosophical presuppositions that philosophers ought to look into.
Another option is provided by James Rachels, who points out that given the sort of creatures we are, human societies just wouldn’t last very long if we didn’t have some basic moral guidelines (he suggests that we must be predisposed to care for helpless human infants and generally avoid lying and murder). This presupposes that it is a good thing for the human race to survive, but it does at least explain more about human sociality. A lot of recent work in the evolution of morality is related here, too.
Maybe one way to avoid the false dichotomy is to start with the kind of creatures we are, a basic sort of naturalism as found in Aristotle, Hume or Mill. I tend to think Buddhist ethics is naturalist in the sense of being ultimately based on the fact that sentient beings don’t like suffering. We can (and should) ask what’s so good about what people want or don’t want, but such answers may be very hard to find. You could just say, “that’s how it is” and move on from there. This may not satisfy Kantians, Divine Command theorists, or heroic, morality-creating existentialists, but maybe it’s the best we can do. Maybe there is a middle way between the thirst for portentous Capitalized Nouns and the intellectual laziness of relativism. I’m not sure what that middle way is, but I think it’s what philosophers specializing in ethics should be looking for.
Ethan:
I don’t think the disjunction is as marked between Dharma (or dharma if you will), and the naturalistic evolutionary approach as is often claimed. In actual practice dharma is really linked to the question ‘What makes a good x’, the sort of practical question that Plato or Aristotle would have recognised. It avoids the philosophical minuet that begins with ‘what is the good of good, or what makes good good etc? We all have an idea of what makes a good banker, that rara avis, a good soldier, a good captain, a good father and so on. Long acquaintance with such types and their stories give us a sort of template to be going on with. Value is embodied in this approach to ethical behavior. What the good man takes to be good is good says Aristotle.
The fair of fair may be an ignis fatuus and golden rules useless in the heat of the moment. This reluctant conservative says training and tradition is what will stand to you then
I think the dichotomy is a bit of an illusion created by the simple value of arbitrary social cohesion.
Relative morality left untended can leave societies potentially ungrounded, unable to behave in a reasonably comfortable, coherent fashion.
‘Divine’ moralities are arbitrary, but they tend to line people up and point them in the same direction, and so they serve a real function (thus their success).
In terms of literal truth however, Relative morality appears to be the correct answer, and Divine (or any form of Absolute) morality is based on a falsehood.
The proof of this is the simple fact that there are multiple divine moralities, AND MANY OF THEM WORK. According to most of their various manifestos, this shouldn’t be possible. One of them should be absolute and correct, and the others should all fail.
That isn’t what happens, of course, only the most poorly thought out ones and the ones unable to achieve a popular critical mass fail. Thus the divine moralities themselves prove the truth of relative morality.
Of course, one need not ascribe to any form of divinity or the supernatural to gain the benefits of a coherent moral structure – one simply needs to build a strong set of secular laws and social mores to which members of a society of required to adhere, and this obviously works as well, throughout much of the modern world.
Indeed, it is theoretically possible to build a much larger social baseline using such systems, as they have the flexibility to adapt to each other and compromise between societies to some degree to avoid conflict, a point that many religions have difficulty with.
The drawback to secular moral systems is that they tend not to incorporate ‘hard lines’ and may prove to flexible to provide a sense of true social coherence. Note for example that even the US constitution is open to continuous attack and redefinition. Religions undergo the process of change by fracturing instead of changing, but the end result is similar.
“Jesse’s option of thinking of morality as a kind of game theory might work, although I find that game theory and related thinking often presuppose a model of self-interested rationality.”
And this is where much ideology regarding the self-interest of individuals and markets runs afoul of the harsh rocks of reality.
People DO operate in self-interested manners, but there are a couple points which many people often fail to recognize:
Here are the two primary fallacies:
The first is usually made by people critical of Game-theory, and it is that self interest must be limited to the personal self.
Self interest is by no means limited to the self! Individuals may, and very often do choose to extrapolate that ‘self-interest’ to a much wider group than their own personal self! We are capable of personal sacrifice to support a family, clan or country. The breadth of this ‘US’ recognition often varies wildly from subject to subject even for a single individual.
The second fallacy is generally made by people too blindly enamored of applying this sort of theory of self-interest as a magical balancing force for economic and social behavior without the need for any form of intelligent guidance or intervention (ie, free market capitalists):
These people keep inserting the word ‘Rational’ next to the term ‘Self-interest’ when discussing Game Theory and Markets. This couldn’t be more wrong. It doesn’t mean anything, except to make it sound like the individuals are always acting from some sort of informed and reasoned position, which is bullshit.
Out of necessity, people act far more often from very poorly informed positions, relying mostly on intuition and personal instinct to determine what action they will take. If we waited to act only from ‘fully informed’ and well thought out positions, we would all have been devoured by saber-tooth tigers long ago.
The actual result is that people often make irrational and fairly random decisions, and lots of people follow whoever jumps first, believing that individual knows something they do not. The truth of the matter is far more often that the first mover is frequently an idiot – the most ill-informed and irrational risk taker in the crowd.
A real understanding of Game Theory needs to take this into account, and that is incredibly important, because that randomness of result accounts for why such a wide breadth of strategies are generally needed to approach what appear to be simple problems.
It explains why something like M.A.D. requires such a horrifically terrifying end-result (the guaranteed end of human civilization) to ensure proper behavior by all its participants.
It had to be so bad that even a highly irrational actor would be forced to recognize that the result was certain to be unacceptable – more importantly, all the rational actors had to convince *each other* that none of them could recognize a nuclear exchange as a rational strategy under even the most advantageous scenarios.
This describes why societies often find themselves inexorably pulled to war even though the vast majority of individuals on both sides generally recognize the negative sum error in such a strategy.
Each side knows that there is always a non-zero chance that the person across the table from the will act in a manner that appears IRRATIONAL, whether from a different subset of information, viewed with different value judgements, or from pure random idiocy – and that in acting in the obvious rational manner, you might leave yourself vulnerable to attack or betrayal.
Thus the impetus to respond in a like ‘irrational’ fashion increases to the point where it finally appears becomes the rational response – and the war is on.
That, in a nutshell is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and though it seems a curious little mathematical abstraction that few people are even aware of, it is in fact THE defining concept behind almost all human (and even evolutionary) decision making.
This is the E=MC^2 of social morality.
People DO operate in self-interested manners, but there are a couple points which many people often fail to recognize:
It’s certainly true, the modern understanding of human behavior is much more nuanced than “rationally self-interested action”. The field generally known as neuroeconomics has demonstrated that the problems don’t just arise from lack of knowledge, but from biases and “irrational” preferences inherent to the human mind.
The philosophical upshot, I think, is much akin to the end of any argument about evolutionary biology: because of our lack of understanding about the human brain (and human evolutionary history), it’s easy to produce “just so” stories to fit any new evidence. Did we not behave according to last week’s prediction? Okay, new prediction!
To be clear, I think that’s a sign of a useful and developing science; it’s not mature yet, but someday it will be. But in the end, it means that the science leaves too many questions open to fully cede philosophical questions to it. Especially when philosophy strives to ask not just what we do, but what we should do.
…Mutually Assured Destruction) which has kept the world from the edge of oblivion since the birth of the mathematics that defined it.
I am skeptical of arguments that MAD was a good plan. It worked, but there’s no way to know whether that’s because it was a good game, or we just got lucky.
And lastly: at least thus far I’ve taken a pass on the big question, the “question of good.” Just haven’t had the time this week to wrestle with it properly, alas!
Oh, one other drawback of secular law (as it is currently practiced in most of the world), is that it tends to follow a ‘letter of the law’ approach, rather than a ‘spirit of the law’, which you generally see more of with divine moralities.
Frankly I consider this to be a large scale error in judgement on the part of secular society – letter of the law us useful, but it must be combined with more generalized dictates to be fully effective.
Spirit of the law is a very important concept that allows for much simpler rules and dictates, with a greater degree of social flexibility for individual circumstance. It allows individuals to make the small, relative moral judgements necessary for them to get on with life, while keeping the overall dictates absolute and encouraging large-scale conformity.
Of course, enforcement is the problem. A lot of the spirit of the law concepts used in divine morality is enforced by the big-sky-guy-analog who is, as a rule, omniscient.
Really by stating that the judge is omniscient, you’ve tricked the individual into judging themselves preemptively, which is an awesome psychological trick. Secularists haven’t figured out how to do this effectively yet. Worth researching. ;)
Actually, I think that’s only true of certain divine moralities. Spirit vs. letter is a very Christian concept, one that has much of its roots in Paul’s critique of Judaism. It’s very common, as I understand it, for Jews to look for loopholes in Talmudic law. Islam is somewhere in between, but closer to the letter side, since both Judaism and Islam (in contrast to Christianity) tend to emphasize correct practice over correct belief. (The flip side of this being that traditionally they have considerably more tolerance for opposing points of view, especially in Judaism.)
In Oliver Wendell Holmes’ view, the law has little or nothing to do with morality. Instead, a good system of law is measured by how easily results can be predicted — allowing people to conform behavior to the law. There is a wonderful quote in Holmes’ The Path of the Law:
“The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts. The means of the study are a body of reports, of treatises, and of statutes, in this country and in England, extending back for six hundred years, and now increasing annually by hundreds. In these sibylline leaves are gathered the scattered prophecies of the past upon the cases in which the axe must fall. These are what are called the oracles of the law. Far and the most important and pretty nearly the whole meaning of every new effort of legal thought is to make these prophecies more precise, and to generalize them into a thoroughly connected system.”
When laws are vague and don’t permit easy prediction as to outcomes, it is often intentional — as in areas where the government wants actors to stay far back of the line of illegality. Insider trading laws and laws related to exercise of fiduciary duties are examples. Where laws are precise is where society is more tolerant of actions close to the edge of illegality — or where a sense of fairness dictates that actors have a bright line test for when an action crosses the line.
“In Oliver Wendell Holmes’ view, the law has little or nothing to do with morality. Instead, a good system of law is measured by how easily results can be predicted — allowing people to conform behavior to the law.”
I’m not clear on how this description of law wouldn’t relate directly to concepts of morality?
Most of the point of morality is to encourage conformation of behavior in a relatively predictable manner so that people aren’t constantly butting heads over every little detail of life.
I normally think of morality as having an ethical component.
Ha ha, yes, Judaism is certainly renowned for its letter strict interpretations and the systemic gaming of those rules that its followers engage in.
I think that has required them to be more outwardly flexible in order to interact with other cultures and survive. If they tried to apply letter-strict interpretation like that on other societies, they’d be in a state of continuous warfare. The lack of a mandate to proselytize and no apparent urge to write their beliefs into secular law help inoculate them from the worst forms of conflict that would create.
That deadly combination, alas, is where Sharia Law appears to be placing substantial proportions of the Islamic world today, unfortunately – in endless conflict with all the cultures bordering or within it.
“The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything.”
I want to get back to this point as a matter of interest.
I know quite well why I perceive some things as good or bad, and why I should think that things have positive and negative connotations of that sort.
I may be WRONG about whether something is good or bad, but that’s either my own error in judgment or lack of proper information – it has nothing to do with my fundamental philosophy.
What I’m not clear on, is why you feel I *should* be confused about such things, as an atheist.
The science behind behavioral responses to positive or negative stimulus (or the fear/anticipation of such) is relatively well understood, and fits quite neatly with what one would expect given the evolutionary impetus for survival and continuity.
Difficulties certainly arise in cases of complex judgment where the observer must try to predict the likeliest outcome of future events with insufficient data and time to consider – but that suggests no confusion about WHY choices (or things) might be good or bad, that is confusion about WHETHER choices are good or bad, because we lack certainty of outcome.
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