A Mostly Unoriginal Essay on Morality (that is totally shit and I now disown)
Should you always do what is morally right? Is there any reason for you to do so? Although these questions have been pondered by
atheists for more than a hundred years now, they still bear thinking about.
They are still absolutely relevant to our lives, and there is still no
definitive answer. This essay is an investigation of those answers that have been proposed.
The 19
th Century Scottish enlightenment
philosopher David Hume was arguably the father of all atheistic conceptions of
morality. He was a brilliant philosopher who inverted the assumptions that had
prevailed since the Ancient Greeks about human psychology and in doing so
profoundly destabilised conventional wisdom on morality. Funnily enough, he
essentially did this all with a single suggestion, expressed most pithily by a
famous sentence in his book
On Reason and
Passion: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”.
In
contrast to Plato and most prominent Western philosophers thereafter, Hume was
claiming that there was no difference between a good person and a bad person in
the extent to which reason was able to take control of or override the passions
– instead,
everyone, no matter how
bad or good, could never be motivated to any action but through passion.
While
once it had been accepted as unquestionable fact that man was moral because God
had bestowed upon him the faculty of reason to know that he should live
according to His ethical dictates, Hume, the perpetual sceptic, was suggesting
that it was “impossible, that the distinction betwixt moral good and evil,
[could] be made by reason”.
Throughout his life it appears that Hume did still cling limply to the
Christian paradigm of his age, and this is arguably why the ultimate
conclusions about morality that he draws from his ideas about human psychology
are still compatible with a modified vision of God’s role. Most notably, the
fact that Hume determined that all of us are born with certain positive natural
sentiments – namely, hedonism, “sympathy” (meaning the capacity to know what
others are feeling) and benevolence – that tend to lead us all on a path
towards a certain altruistic spirit and the pursuit of so-called “calm
passions” could certainly be seen as a reflection of some Christian belief.
Nevertheless, it is most certainly the case that Hume’s theory laid the
foundations for the emergence of certain rather radical and necessarily
unchristian non-cognitivist metaethical theories, like expressivism and
emotivism, and it is hard to argue that such Godless suggestions of the absence
of truth conditions in morality do not in fact inhere in Hume’s theory. After
all, it was Hume who said, “It is not pretended, that a judgement [that prompts
or directs a passion], either in its truth or falsehood, is attended with
virtue or vice”.
It
is important to note that, although one might intuit that the ultimate
consequence of the acceptance of Hume’s theory is that we would all
collectively succumb to our baser, more animalistic desires, and thus always
perform the wrong action as long as it gave us profit, Hume simply believed
that we were already acting on the basis of our desires, and our nature and
culture simply ensured that
most of
us almost had no choice whether to be good or bad in the Christian senses of
the word. In this way, Hume’s insight had nearly done away with the need of
prescribing right and wrong; instead, a person could only opt out of the game
of morality if he was deeply unusual in his nature, and there was nothing we
could do about such defective characters.
To me, this final implication of
his theory is deeply disturbing. That is, of course, not a basis for any kind
of refutation, however I do also believe that Hume and all his successors are
somewhat misguided. I do not accept that moral utterances have no
truth-conditions, just as I don’t accept that the only truth-conditions they
have rest on whether they are an accurate representation of a person’s
psychology. In other words, I reject all non-cognitivist and subjectivist
conceptions of morality. What follows is my attempt to justify this view.
The simplest argument for any kind of moral relativism (by which I mean to include “error theory”
as well as those metaethical theories aforementioned) is that views on morality
vary enormously both interculturally and intraculturally – even between two
individuals in the same family. A person trying to defend this argument need
only point to the atrocities of ISIS, or men who burn puppies, for clear
evidence that even what most people in the Western world see as medieval or
primitive moral behaviour, such as the brutal killing of innocent beings, is
not seen in that light by many people in the West, and even more outside it.
This is not to mention disagreements on all matters less extreme than those to
do with bloody murder, such as the rights of women and homosexuals, female
genital mutilation, the treatment of asylum seekers, and even totally mundane
matters like lying to a friend, cheating in a test, or hitting your kids.
Indeed, it is so obvious that people have different views on morality that it
is a truism to say it.
But let it be made clear that I
do not believe this makes it a sound argument against objectivism. My objection
to this next step in the argument is very simple: when we acquire knowledge
normally, we do not base it on the views of people around us. We do not say the
fact that some people still believe the Earth is flat or that around half of
Americans don’t believe in man-induced climate change means that we cannot know
whether the scientific consensus is true. Or to give an example of an
intellectual dispute more analogous to that about ethics, we do not say the
fact that physicists, clerics and laymen cannot agree on the exact nature of
the birth of our universe means that either all interpretations are true, or
that they’re all neither true nor false. Now you may, of course, question
whether ethical knowledge is at all like the kind found in almost any other
intellectual domain, and, if not, whether this precludes its objectivity. This
would be the second line of argument. Without this, the first is useless, but
with it the first becomes a further support. For emotivists, it is quite clear
that moral utterances are totally unlike statements such as “The Earth is
round”. Their justification for this was perhaps advanced most famously by the
British philosopher A.J. Ayer in his landmark book
Language, Truth and Logic. In chapter six of this book, “Critique
of Ethics and Theology”, Ayer concentrates on one class of the “ordinary system
of ethics”, moral judgements, and argues since these cannot be translated into
non-ethical, empirical terms they cannot be verified.
As
Ayer puts it, "we find that argument is possible on moral questions only
if some system of values is presupposed."
This
is an argument quite similar to the is-ought gap first proposed by Hume, except
that instead of saying it is never deductively valid to progress from
description to prescription, Ayer is suggesting that there is no way of
reducing right and wrong to states of affairs.
Ayer
therefore concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts"
and claims that when one expresses a moral judgement what one is really doing
is expressing a “moral sentiment”.
Since they cannot be understood as propositions, Ayer argues that moral
judgements have no truth-value.
Subjectivists, such as the late
20
th Century philosopher Gilbert Harman, tend to agree with such an
argument, but their conclusion differs ever so subtly: they claim that moral
utterances
are truth-apt since they
can only be one of two things: an accurate reflection of a person’s psychology
or an inaccurate one. Of course, the congruence of the two theories on Ayer’s
argument does not mean that Ayer’s argument is the primary one for both. On the
contrary, Harman himself advances another rather simple argument for both based
on the so-called Principle of Parsimony (a principle which tells you that you should
assume that something doesn’t exist if it isn’t needed to explain anything).
Harman begins with the sensible premise that everyone on the planet could
easily have arrived at his or her moral instincts and beliefs by a combination
of innate psychology, enculturation and inculcation.
Given this fact, he claims we don’t need to postulate the existence of ethical
facts to explain any observations. Thus, he argues, according to the principle,
we should assume that ethical facts don’t exist.
Harman states this non-requirement of extra-human explanation is what makes
ethical propositions totally unlike unobservable things in science, like
protons, neutrons, dark matter and genes, the existence of all of which is
borne out by a mass of data and the systematic testing of a series of models.
Although both of these theories
(emotivism and subjectivism) may sound very convincing, there are a few
interrelated objections that apply to both of them, all of which rest
essentially on the notion that the emotivists and subjectivists lack
imagination. It is for this reason that I am not quite convinced by either
theory. Perhaps the most obvious objection attacks the first premise of
Harman’s Principle of Parsimony argument, and it does so by drawing attention
to the fact that many of our moral utterances
are clearly both spoken (or written) as if they were utterances of
fact, plus interpreted that way by others. A particularly obvious demonstration
of the truth of this objection is when someone changes their opinion on a moral
matter: if someone holds a certain ethical view, say, that homosexuality is
wrong, or that cheating is ok, but then changes it, it goes without saying that
she will normally aver that the reason she changed her view was that she simply
saw the facts of the matter. Granted, Harman and no doubt most subjectivists
(but probably fewer emotivists) acknowledge this,
yet they argue that this observation still fits well within their view of
ethics as basically constructed, because lots of people thinking their moral
utterances are truth-apt doesn’t mean they are. Nevertheless, the contemporary
Swedish philosopher and moral realist Torbjorn Tannsjo argues with some force
that it is at least very
unlikely
that so many people are deluded. As he says, “There are also cases where people
do intend their moral judgements to capture a moral reality that is seen by
them as sui generis. This is certainly how Sidgwick and Moore conceived of
their own moral judgements […] and this is how contemporary moral realists such
as Parfit and myself [sic] conceive of our own moral judgments and
disagreements. And even if it is possible that we delude ourselves, even if it
is possible that we are mistaken in our understanding of our own words, this
possibility is far-fetched, considering the way at least we moral realists
conceive of the subject-matter of morality.”
As Tannsjo himself later points out, this argument is also put forward by error
theorists, most notably Mackie, some of whose claims Tansjo’s article
subsequently attempts to refute. Despite this parallel, let us keep our focus
on the subjectivists and the emotivists for the moment; I will get to the
debate between moral realists and error theorists in good time.
The other possible objections to
both metaethical theories are, it must be said, rather non-positivist and rely
on a fairly good imagination, but I am satisfied that they are strong enough to
at least preserve the
possibility that
there could be some kind of objective ethical facts. The first is an objection
to the way the is-ought argument is used to dismiss the possibility of an
objective morality, and it is very simple. As stated by Elliot Sober in his
book
Core Questions in Philosophy, it
is that “To reach the subjectivist conclusion, you need to assume that if
ethical facts exist, they must be deducible from is-statements”.
Although such an objection would, it seems, be anathema to most logical
positivists
,
it seems to me logically reasonable. Sober also provides another very similarly
imaginative objection to the conclusion of Harman’s Principle of Parsimony
argument. While he concedes that ethical facts aren’t needed to explain why we
have the beliefs we do, Sober simply says he needs an extra assumption to go
from that to “Ethical facts don’t exist”.
He is thus not rejecting the Principle of Parsimony, per se, but questioning
whether our non-requirement of ethical facts to explain our
beliefs means that they couldn’t exist
at all. Sober poses the question, “Why should the reality of ethical facts
stand or fall on their role in psychological explanation?”
I
submit that this is itself a pretty outlandish suggestion, since it seems to
imply that ethics could be fundamentally extra-human, and I think that an
extraordinarily unlikely and fairly mystical idea. Nevertheless, it still does
strike me as a logically valid query to make.
In response to some of the
arguments put forward by the error theorist John Mackie, Tansbjorn makes
similarly imaginative objections to claims of the impossibility of ethical
truth. As part of his “argument from queerness”, Mackie propounds that the fact
that objective moral properties are supposedly “consequential” or
“supervenient” is one of the major things that makes them queer.
Tansbjorn says the natural response from the moral realist to Mackie’s argument
would be, not a denial of supervenience, but a denial of the claim that
supervenience as such is any strange phenomenon.
Another response that Tansbjorn does not mention would of course be the basic
observation that the fact of an entity’s being something fundamentally
different from what we normally experience — and therefore presumably outside
our sphere of experience — doesn’t give us prima facie reason to either doubt
or affirm its existence. Despite these two possibilities, Tansbjorn himself
opts, very creatively, to question the notion that moral properties can’t be
both
sui generis and supervenient on
natural properties. Indeed, he suggests that “The view that moral properties
are both sui generis and supervenient upon natural properties can be upheld, if
we adopt a fairly weak view of supervenience, according to which a certain
natural property brings with it a corresponding moral property only in all
possible worlds that are sufficiently like ours”.
He
follows this with the bizarre speculation that there could in fact be worlds
where different laws of nature and morality obtain, like worlds where
Kantianism is true or worlds where moral nihilism is true.
Putting aside the strangeness, I do once again find this logic to be sound.
Sadly, Tannsbjorn ultimately ends the chapter by acknowledging that he does not
“pretend to give any knock-down argument […] for the thesis that moral
arguments or facts exist, independently of our thoughts and actions”.
Notwithstanding the hype surrounding the moral realist and Oxford philosophy
Derek Parfit’s publication in 2011 of a weighty tome purporting to have
“climbed the mountain” that has supposedly always existed behind the views of
the best versions of Kantian deontology, consequentialism and contractualism, I
do feel that it is highly unlikely that anyone will be able to give a
knock-down argument in favour of moral realism. Yet I don’t know if its
proponents will ever disappear either.
Of course, way back in 1785,
Immanuel Kant did think that he had basically ‘solved morality’ with his
rationalist account of ethics in the groundbreaking philosophical work known
often (but not always) as The Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals, and there are neo-Kantians who think he’s
right to this day. The deep unusualness of Kant’s theory is that it simply
commands you to obey it, and once you are in its thrall you are supposedly
logically bound to it. Thus, in Kant’s mind, it would not be so much deplorable
as irrational (or wrong based on the
grounds of reason) to profit, say, by lying – one of the vices he argues we
have a “perfect duty” to never commit.
In order to understand how Kant
came to this view, let us first look at his differences to Hume. Although not
directly reacting against Hume’s theory, Kant found one of the primary
implications of Hume’s work – namely, that when we are acting morally we are
merely slaves or automatons to our desires – quite unpalatable. Kant also held
the deontological conviction that the moral worth of an action should never be
measured by its consequences, indeed that “everything empirical […] is highly
prejudicial to the purity of moral practices themselves”.
While this is not a direct rejection of any Humean ideas, since Hume didn’t
formulate any kind of proto-utilitarian philosophy, it seems clear to me that
if you accept the idea that good and bad moral actions are both ultimately acts
of desire-gratification, then you must only be able to evaluate the goodness of
the action on its effects.
So how did Kant’s ingenious
derivation of impregnable moral obligations from pure reason actually work?
Well, it is begun on the supposedly rock-solid basis that morality does (and
must) consist of “categorical imperatives” rather than hypothetical ones. In
other words, that morality consists of straight commands and conditional
commands, but never ones based on desires. All of the commands generated by
Humean practical reasoning would, of course, be hypothetical, and this means
that, in Kant’s eyes, what Hume is talking about when he says morality is
something else entirely. The way Kant saw it is that if you are not performing
a moral action
out of duty, which he
perceived as acting out of reverence for a law, (as opposed to merely acting
in accordance with a moral law, probably
in submission to your desires) then that action simply cannot be called morally
worthy. Significantly, Kant believed that you could rationally derive a single,
unquestionable and all-important categorical imperative simply from these
truths. This law is “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the
same time will that it should become a universal law”.
Here, the fact of your actions having to fit into a “universal law” obviously
follows on from his conviction of the necessary impersonality of morality. And
due to the way he thought of the “maxim” and what he meant by “will”
,
he claimed any rational person could rationally derive a whole series of both
perfect and imperfect duties from this imperative. The logical fashion in which
you would carry out this derivation would be to first think of the most general
manner of phrasing the maxim you were following when performing any kind of
action – say, promising your friend to repay the loan she has given you, even
though you know you will never be able to. Kant includes a case very similar to
this and says the maxim in that case would be “Make a promise even though you
intend to break it”. Obviously, the next
step is to “will that it should be universalised”, which, in the Kantian sense,
essentially means imagine a world where everyone followed that maxim and decide
whether this world could either logically be conceived of (i.e. whether it
would be a paradoxical world) or whether you can will it psychologically (i.e.
whether it would be too bleak to fathom). Kant believes a world where everyone
followed the aforementioned maxim to do with promising is logically
inconceivable, since everybody would eventually come to regard promises as
worthless and hence stop making them. Crucially, Kant says it is our
perfect duty not to follow all those
maxims which don’t pass this first test, known as the “Contradiction in
Conception Test”. In this way, he claims that it is also our perfect duty not
to kill, lie and even commit suicide, along with a whole host of other actions
that generally align with Christian morality (to which he was a subscriber).
Similarly, he says that it is our
imperfect
duty not to follow all those maxims that pass the Contradiction in
Conception Test but don’t pass the second one, known as the Contradiction in
the Will Test. These imperfect duties supposedly bind you in all circumstances
except those in which a perfect duty would have to be violated to carry them
out. Some examples of imperfect duties that one can derive from Kant’s system
are to nurture one’s talents, or to help someone in a desperate situation.
Kant does, of course, also claim
that one can derive another “formulation” of the same basic categorical
imperative from the first formulation of it, and then a third from the second.
This second formulation, namely “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in
your own person or in that of another, always as an ends and never as a means
only”, is actually preferred by many modern Kantians and is generally seen as
less dubious than the first. The third is easily derivable from the second, and
is simply “Act as if you live in a Kingdom of Ends” (i.e. in a world in which
all rational agents are respected as ends in themselves). This tends to be
ignored.
Although Kant was very confident
that he had made a momentous achievement in supposedly rationally ‘figuring
out’ the duties that everyone is bound to follow, one must make clear first of
all, even leaving aside any flaws in his logic, that Kant does not in fact give
anyone who does not wish to be moral any reason to be. As the great English
philosopher Bernard Williams puts it in
his book
Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy, within the “Kantian framework […] there can be no reason for
being moral, and morality presents itself as an unmediated demand, a
categorical imperative”.
Thus, although it is said by many that Kant presents morality as a game you
can’t opt out of, this is not strictly true. Kant, just like any other thinker,
cannot justify actually being moral, in its most basic form, without resorting
to moral presuppositions. So despite his claims, this still strikes me as an
insurmountable obstacle for all philosophers. You may say you should always do
what is morally right, but you can never validly say
why anyone should.
Another very questionable aspect
of Kant’s ethical beliefs is his conviction that morality must be absolutely
separate from desire. Again, I agree with Bernard Williams here, who wrote (in
the same book) that Kant’s view that “morality is uniquely exempted from
psychological hedonism […] is certainly wrong”.
On top of this, there are, as I intimated, obvious weaknesses in Kant’s logic.
The clearest relate to the arbitrariness of the method by which you are meant
to derive duties from the first formulation of the categorical imperative. Not
only could you easily claim that the universalising of a maxim like “Commit
suicide when you are tired of life” would not lead to an impossible world,
contrary to what Kant says, but the system of basing the duties on maxims is
fraught with arbitrariness to begin with. For example, to use the action from a
few paragraphs before, many very moral people in our world do break promises,
but you’d have to think that most of them are not following the maxim Kant
gives when doing so. Instead, most of them would be abiding by a more
complicated maxim like “Don’t break a promise unless you intend to keep it,
unless you are in a situation where much is at stake and your intention to
break the promise wouldn’t be evident to others”.
Universalising this maxim would lead you to imagine a world very much like our
own, and thus, paradoxically, you would be unable to justify calling it a
perfect duty not to break promises – and with Kant’s own logic. Thus, clearly,
Kant’s theory is imperfect.
So, if I don’t accept Humean ethical
theory and its descendants, subjectivism and emotivism
,
and don’t fully accept any kind of objectivism yet am unwilling to put away the
possibility that there could be objective ethical facts (which places me at
odds with error theory), where have I got to go? I could call myself a
fictionalist, despite that being a part of error theory, but the problem is
that I find it extremely hard to stomach the idea that the values I hold close
to my heart are fictions. I truly and sincerely believe that altruism is good,
that kindness is good, that humility is good, that decency is good, that
bravery is good, and that duty and honour are more than just words. Equally, I
believe that selfishness is bad, that greed is bad, that cheating is bad, and I
am happy to call murder, rape, torture not just bad but
evil. For all intents and purposes, I see these things as
objectively so, even though on a hyper-intellectual level, as an empiricist, I
know that they almost certainly aren’t.
But, at the same time as this, I am most definitely with Derek Parfit
(and against Bertrand Russell and Bernard Williams) on his insistence that
there is something
deeply disturbing
about the idea that all moral utterances are either meaningless or wrong.
The way I see it is that it doesn’t matter that our innate neurochemistry and
the messages of our culture will ensure that people will tend to do things we
used to call good – what matters is
whether these things
are good. If
they’re not, then our emotions are the only things motivating us. How can this
not be profoundly unsettling? Nietzsche understood the momentousness of the
loss of belief in objective morality, even if he himself was a total nihilist:
“How shall we comfort ourselves,
the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the
world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this
blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”
The fact is a fictionalist has no
justification for why he should make any conscious effort to abide by any moral
law at all. A fictionalist cannot decry war crimes or atrocities, inveigh
against the abject horrors of ISIS, or admire the compassion of a politician
without a heart tainted by insincerity. A fictionalist cannot continue to thank
his grandma when she pours him a cup of tea without knowing, in his heart of
hearts, that he is blindly worshipping a trivial custom. A fictionalist may
choose to follow his feelings and instincts to look for direction on how to
ethically evaluate certain actions – he may feel enraged at the Draconian
policies of a politician, he may feel sick to the stomach when reports emerge
of the man who burned multiple puppies to death, he may feel inspired and moved
by tales of wartime sacrifice – but he cannot trust these feelings. He does not
believe the age-old virtues of fairness, compassion, duty, honour; he does not
believe right and wrong. And thus, unless he is some kind of inhuman creature
who never makes judgements in those terms, on some level he doesn’t believe
himself. Is this not a profoundly meaningless life?
So, despite not being religious
and being unable to trust the rationalist justifications for ethical facts,
perhaps it is best I still call myself an objectivist. You may think me still a
fictionalist, but, if so, only one with a profound case of cognitive
dissonance.
What this all means is that I
don’t have the answers. I believe you should always do what is morally right
but I can’t prove it to you. After all, even before I reached the blood and
bones of the task, I would, of course, first have to define what is right, and
then prove the validity of that definition. And obviously, as I’ve made clear,
you
can opt out of morality if you
want. It’s really up to you whether you choose to lead a moral life. As turns
out, though, it is impossible for any normal human being to live either a
completely moral life or a completely amoral one without being deeply unhappy.
So, perhaps I do have a valid
objectivist view after all. Yes, I have decided that my experience should be
used as a basis for a single true categorical imperative: live in awareness of
the knowledge that all moral propositions are almost certainly false but also
that the ones you can’t help thinking are true are indeed objectively so.
Contradict yourself. I believe every logical person will, through reason,
conclude that this paradoxical universal law is the absolute truth.
Is this not the objective answer
ethical philosophy has been looking for all along? Both reductivist and
anti-reductivist, relativist and objectivist, positivist and sceptical, how can
any law be more perfect?
