toby at work: comms
People have moral feelings. If any generalisation is indisputable, I suggest that one is.
And, because philosophers will be philosophers, hot on the heels of every true generalisation comes a question: Why?. Why should it be the case that people have moral feelings? Where do we get them from? Where, to use the philosopher’s phrase, do we locate our meta-ethic?
The history of philosophy is littered with the carcasses of meta-ethical theories, many of them picked clean after enduring the critical onslaughts of generations of philosophers. I have no intention of adding to this pile by trying to construct a new theory in this article. What I want to do instead is to argue that the reason meta-ethical theories do so badly is that question is forlorn, by which I mean that no answer can possibly satisfy.
My strategy will be to consider two plausible candidates for a satisfactory answer – one very old, one fairly new – and show why neither of them can do the job. I will then argue that the reason why the candidates fail must necessarily apply to any possible answer. Finally, I’ll briefly discuss the implications of this conclusion.
The concept of morality is universal in human experience. We don’t know of any society that hasn’t got some kind of moral code, explicit or otherwise.
This is very odd when you think about it. Why should there be this universal distinction between facts about the universe (‘the Earth orbits the Sun’) and moral judgements (‘telling a lie is morally wrong’)? What is this mysterious extra moral dimension? It doesn’t derive from any of the normal senses – you can’t see moral value, or smell it, or taste it. There are no physical moral particles (‘morons’?!) that emanate from a morally significant act to be picked up by the ‘morality detector’ organs of nearby people. On the contrary, moral judgements are in some sense automatic and internal; we just get a feeling that telling a lie is wrong. Yet morality, conscience and ethical judgement are all are universal. Why?
And it’s not just the plain existence of what Hume called our ‘moral sense’ that’s remarkable; it’s its content. By and large, my moral sense generally delivers similar verdicts to yours, and to any other human’s you care to choose. Murder is morally wrong, generosity is morally right. Perhaps our generalisation shouldn’t be just 'People have moral feelings' but 'People share the particular moral feelings X and Y', so our question becomes 'Why is it these particular moral feelings, X and Y, rather than Z, that people share?'.
In wondering about this question, we shouldn’t be distracted by the noticeably different moral outlooks that might be encountered among the inhabitants of, say, white middle-class Britain as opposed to the inhabitants of inner-city Los Angeles, a community of Muslim clerics or an isolated tribe in the Amazonian rainforest. No doubt these differences are interesting and significant; I’m not questioning the validity of comparative ethics or anthropology. But the fact remains that, however much Fred may disagree with Jim about particular ethical points, nevertheless there are certain values that people generally share. As a rule, all else being equal, it’s morally wrong to inflict pain knowingly on another person solely for your own pleasure. As a rule, all else being equal, it’s morally right to show loyalty to other members of your own society, group or sect. As a rule, all else being equal, it’s morally wrong to break a sincere promise solely to derive some petty benefit for yourself, e.g. to secure a marginally better seat at Saturday’s cricket match / baseball match / worship / tribal dance.
Nor should we be distracted by the fact that there are liars, thieves, murderers, tyrants and generally immoral and less moral people in probably every society in the world. It may be true that consciences sometimes get overruled by other desires, malfunction, or otherwise deliver incorrect verdicts. It may even perhaps be true that some people lack consciences altogether. But that doesn’t prevent us from investigating the general phenomenon of shared morality any more than the existence of colour-blind, short-sighted and completely blind people prevents us from investigating the general phenomenon of sight.
Perhaps morality is a system of rules, principles or laws laid down by a supreme Lawgiver. This is the answer offered by the theistic religions: the rules of morality are provided by God, who gave us our consciences so that we could become aware of right and wrong. Depending on the detail of the religious doctrine, God may also be responsible for directly informing us of his moral laws (e.g. in a holy book or through prophets) and for enforcing them (e.g. by a system of punishments and rewards, or by thwarting attempts to act wrongly and encouraging attempts to behave rightly).
But there are severe difficulties with this view, quite apart from the philosophically controversial ‘problem of evil’. For a start, what is it that makes God’s commands morally good? This sounds like a bizarre question, but it’s surprisingly difficult to answer. The usual reply is that God is good and therefore his commands are good. But what does ‘God is good’ mean? There are two possibilities – either (a) God decides the content of moral laws, or (b) God is just very good at observing those laws and passing them onto us.
I think that (a) is incoherent. If God decides the content of moral laws, then moral laws are simply an expression of God’s will; that is, ‘morally good’ just means ‘what God wills’. But, in that case, what it means to say that God is morally good is simply that he acts in accordance with his own will – in other words, that he does what he wants. But so do I, and so do many people, and that doesn’t make us good. The fact that God wills us to behave in a certain way can only imply that we ought to behave in that way if to obey God is itself a good thing; but ‘good’ here can’t simply just mean ‘in accordance with God’s will’, or we’re back where we started, with no explanation of why God’s will is morally any better than anyone else’s.
There are two common replies to this conundrum, but neither of them makes any progress. The first reply is straightforward: ‘But he’s God! Obeying God’s will isn’t like obeying anyone else’s’. This is true, no doubt, and has the air of an appeal to common sense, but it’s also vacuous. The question is why God’s will is morally superior to anyone else’s. Simply repeating the same old assertion that God is God won’t help. The second reply is more substantial: ‘God is supremely powerful – he can enforce his will in a way that the rest of us can’t’. This does explain why God’s will is superior, but not in a moral way. It simply says that it would be in our interests to obey him because otherwise we’d be in trouble. This reduces the goodness of God to an exaggerated version of the goodness of Hitler or Stalin: God can do what he wants, and might is right, so you’d better do what he says. We’re uncomfortable with this because we have a feeling that morality isn’t just a matter of who shouts the loudest, or smites the hardest.
Another way to express the same difficulty is to ask how God decided what was to count as morally good and what was to count as morally bad. For instance, why did he single out ‘burning babies’ as morally bad, ‘helping the needy’ as morally good, and ‘playing the accordion’ as (probably) morally neutral? Did he simply happen to prefer some kinds of things over others – love over hate, compassion over cruelty, honesty over deceit? If he did, then the moral element has disappeared once again. Arbitrary preferences form no better a basis for morality than physical power.
That leaves us with option (b): that God is just very good at observing moral laws and passing them onto us. This makes coherent the claim that ‘God is good’ and explains, to an extent, why we should obey him: because we can be sure that his commands correspond to the objective moral laws that exist in the universe.
Unfortunately, not only does this contradict what most religious people believe, but it doesn’t really solve the problem either; it just pushes it one step further back. What are these objective moral laws? If they aren’t laid down by God, where do they come from – and, more to the point, why should we obey them? Because God recommends them, and God is good? No – this just takes us back to the first problem.
No satisfactory solution to these grave problems has been suggested, and I’m about to claim that this is because there can be no solution in principle. Before I generalise to make this argument, I want to consider a second possibility for the grounding of morality, and argue that it, too, can never do what it tries to do.
An interesting alternative to traditional religious views about morality has emerged from recent work in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science. The suggestion is that our consciences, like other physical and mental characteristics, are manifestations of our evolutionary past. Our sense of morality – including, importantly, the specific moral feelings that we all share – can be explained by pointing to selection pressures encountered by our ancestors, either as direct adaptations or as side-effects of other adaptations.
Now, morality has traditionally been difficult to explain with reference to evolution because it necessarily involves a degree of altruism: – sacrificing an aspect of your own interests in order to further someone else’s. This initially seems to be in direct conflict with the driving force behind natural selection, which is necessarily to do with furthering your own ends (or rather, those of your genes) at the expense, if necessary, of those around you.
But, in reality, the gap to be bridged is narrower than this caricature suggests. Despite the clamours of evolutionary critics, Nature isn’t entirely “red in tooth and claw”, to borrow Huxley’s much-abused phrase. For many species, the benefits of group co-operation to all concerned are obvious, and the benefits of all group members adopting a common ‘moral’ code (loyalty, honesty, reciprocation of favours) are equally obvious to keep those beneficient groups functioning. Given the right environmental conditions, there’s no reason in principle why natural selection shouldn’t find and settle on this optimum arrangement – in fact, we ought to be surprised if it didn’t.
The difficulty comes when you consider the more subtle point that, in any group or society built on this kind of self-interested quasi-morality, it’ll always be individually better to be a so-called ‘free-rider’ than a co-operator. From my point of view as an individual group member, it’ll always be better for me to secure a benefit from you (you scratch my back) and promise to return it later (I’ll scratch yours), but then renege on my promise when the appointed back-scratching time comes around. So natural selection ought to favour the evolution not just of co-operators, but also of liars who can convincingly imitate cooperators.
But, of course, if you know that some of the apparent co-operators around you are likely to be liars in disguise, you’re less likely to trust anyone, and the ensuing widespread distrust would be to the disadvantage of all group members – unless, of course, you can reliably discriminate between liars and co-operators, in which case you obviously ought to trust co-operators and not liars-in-disguise. What we’d end up with would be a group of organisms engaged in a kind of evolutionary arms race: increasingly convincing liars-in-disguise and increasingly sophisticated liar-detectors. Perhaps this scenario is in fact realised somewhere in the world, but it seems to be a far cry from the genuine, altruistic morality that we humans know and love.
How, then, could self-interested creatures ever have evolved what we think of as ‘genuine’ morality? The beginnings of an answer were provided by decision theorists who were independently investigating variants on the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma. Repeated simulations highlighted an important principle: the best way to convince other people that you are a genuine co-operator is to genuinely be a co-operator, and then put yourself beyond temptation; in other words, to make it difficult for yourself to fail to return favours, and to make this difficulty obvious to those around you. I can insist till I’m blue in the face that I really will scratch your back later if you scratch mine now, but in this tough old world of ever-more-sophisticated liars and ever-more-sophisticated liar-detectors, the only way for me to really convince you is to erect my own psychological barriers to deter me from breaking my promise, and then advertise these barriers to you. In other words, what I really need to evolve is a conscience. If we generally had consciences, and we could generally rely on one another having consciences, then group co-operation would be onto a real winner. Society needs organisms who wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Could this story tell us the origin of morality, then? Perhaps. This is really only a very simple sketch of a complex and increasingly well-researched theory, but that’s all we need at the moment. The point I want to make is not that this alluring view is the correct one (though I suspect that something like it will eventually turn out to be), but that even if it is, it doesn’t provide us with our much sought-after metaethic.
One of the most eloquent defenders of the evolutionary explanation for morality is the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who included towards the end of his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea two chapters entitled, respectively, ‘Ethics Naturalized’ and ‘In Praise of Biodiversity’. The latter is a stirringly-written call to arms in defence of tolerance, respect and secular moral pragmatism – no doubt entirely commendable. But what are these confident moral assertions based on? Given Dennett’s insistence that his own moral sense, like everything else about him, can be naturalistically explained (‘Ethics Naturalized’), what can his hymn ‘In Praise of Biodiversity’ really amount to? By his own admission, when any of us endorses something (e.g. biodiversity) as morally valuable, all we’re really doing is articulating the endorsement of our moral sense, whose values are owed to the evolutionary circumstances in which our ancestors happened to find themselves. No doubt Dennett is a highly moral person; but this only means that he is equipped with an effective conscience endowed to him by his evolutionary ancestors, with all the peculiar, contingent and ethically arbitrary preferences that entails.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins runs into similar difficulties when he describes the distinction between academic endorsement of a theory and moral rejection of it:
At the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs… If you seem to smell inconsistency or even contradiction, you are mistaken. There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being; any more than there is inconsistency in explaining cancer as an academic doctor while fighting it as a practising one. (Dawkins, 2003, pp.10-11)
So far, so good; no inconsistency there. Natural selection may be the truth, but ya don’t gotta like it; sometimes the truth hurts. The problem comes because we’re forced to wonder why Dawkins feels so strongly that social, political and ethical Darwinism, for instance, are bad. Why would he rather we helped a severely disabled person to live a worthwhile life than left them to die? No doubt because, like Dennett, he’s a highly moral person. But it’s natural selection itself that has given him “the gift of revulsion against its implications” (p.12), and that revulsion has no moral foundation, just an evolutionary one. What’s so bad about murder? The evolutionary answer is that murder isn’t conducive to the good of individuals operating in a co-operative society. No doubt this is true, and if evolutionary answers are the right kinds of answers, this explains why we happen to judge murder as bad. But as for the question of why we shouldn’t murder people, the best an evolutionary analysis can offer is the observation that to be inclined towards murder isn’t in our own interests.
The same goes for all our moral feelings: if they can be wholly explained by referring to contingent facts about what occurred in our species’s evolutionary history, then how can they possibly have moral authority?
I’ve discussed only two possible answers to the question of why people have moral feelings. There are many more: perhaps we derive our sense of morality from our environment (societal pressures, peer pressures, indoctrination, education), or from some deep-seated psychological conflict, as Freud would perhaps prefer.
At the end of the day, however, I think that any answer will be problematic. As I said at the start of this article, the question itself is forlorn. You simply can’t find a satisfactory meta-ethic – in principle, there can be no such thing.
Considering the religious explanation for morality, we found that no satisfactory ethical answer could be given to the question ‘Why should we do what God wants?’. Considering the evolutionary explanation for morality, we found that no satisfactory ethical answer could be given to the question ‘Why should we do what our evolutionary history has instilled in us?’. We have a meta-ethic, all right: at least, we have a factual underpinning for our ethical feelings. But it seems that what we need is some ethical underpinning for that meta-ethic, explaining in ethical terms why we should go along with it. We need a meta-meta-ethic.
In fact, this pattern will emerge in any meta-ethical discussion. The argument goes something like this:
1 We have ethical feelings.
2 We wonder why we should obey our ethical feelings; what gives them moral clout?
3 We feel that we need some kind of factual underpinning for ethics in order to answer this question.
4 We consider a meta-ethical answer that gives us the factual underpinning we need (God, evolution, whatever).
5 We feel dissatisfied with the answer because we immediately feel that a merely contingent fact can’t in itself give rise to ethical requirements; just because our consciences can be causally explained doesn’t show why we should obey our consciences.
What we need now, apparently, is something to reassure us that the factual underpinning we’ve found is in fact enough to give our consciences ethical weight; we need a meta-meta-ethic. And, before we know it, we’ve entered an infinite regress. Why is X a good thing to do? Because X is dictated by our consciences (that’s ethics). Why is obeying our consciences a good thing to do? Because our consciences reflect such-and-such a state of affairs (that’s meta-ethics). But how can ‘reflecting such-and-such a state of affairs’ confer ethical weight? Because that a state of affairs must be good (that’s meta-meta-ethics). But why should it be good?…
And so on. How can we escape the infinite regress? I think there are two options, both of which are difficult.
The first, which I hinted at earlier, is simply to stipulate morality as a fundamental fact about the universe. Perhaps it’s just true that lying is wrong in the same way as it’s just true that the Earth orbits the Sun. This solution doesn’t eliminate the nagging feeling that a contingent fact simply can’t have normative force: you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. But, let’s face it, all chains of explanation have to stop somewhere; perhaps we may as well draw the line here, say that this is just how things are, and there’s no further explanation to be had. Perhaps we ought simply to do X, and that’s that.
The second option is to give up the search altogether, and just admit that the idea of anything having normative force is absurd. With this option, morality goes out of the window. There are facts and facts and facts, but none of them can give rise to any real ethical requirement. There will, of course, be an explanation for why we think there are ethical requirements – God, evolution, whatever – but we come to recognise that our consciences are just taking us for a ride.
The problem with this solution is that the suggested conclusion seems pretty unpalatable; it implies that there’s strictly no moral problem with murder, rape, burning babies, or anything else, because at the end of the day there are no moral problems at all. We can explain why we find this unpalatable, of course (it’s another implication of our deceptive consciences), so there are no explanatory loose ends, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.
Many people will no doubt prefer to accept the ‘fundamental fact’ theory rather than give up ethics altogether. After all, denying morality might be taking a rather large step onto the slippery slope to nihilism. But, without any good argument supporting the idea that ethics is just a fundamental fact, this is just an optimistic preference, not a rational conclusion.
Then again, if everyone came to believe that morality was meaningless, wouldn’t this have really bad consequences – widespread immorality, the collapse of society and so on?
Well, perhaps it would, though in this context it’s not at all clear what ‘bad’ could mean. Nevertheless, in the interests of avoiding that ‘bad’ result, I’d like to finish by suggesting two non-moral reasons to act morally:
1 Self-interest: if you don’t act morally, unpleasant things will happen to you. (God will strike you down, or people will be nasty to you, or you’ll go to prison.) While there’s nothing (morally) bad about unpleasant things happening to you, but it goes against your self-preservation instincts, so you should avoid it.
2 Insurance: even if you believe me when I suggest that there’s no real morality, we might both be wrong. My argument might be flawed: there might be a sound foundation for ethics after all. In the interests of avoiding immorality in that case, it would be rational to err on the side of caution for now and behave as if there was such a thing as morality. Nothing (moral) will be lost by doing so.
These considerations are a rather anaemic substitute for genuine morality, but other than an infinite regress or an undefended optimism, they seem to be all we have left.
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