Technical Exercise

I had just come out of a purple patch when I hit the rough trot. The thing is, I had been giving 110% at work, really putting in the hard yards and all that, but I guess I just kind of drew the short straw. Or maybe my boss couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow. I don’t really know myself. I guess I’m pretty in the dark about it. All I really know is that I had a big fall from grace. I really hit the ground hard, and it was hard to pick myself back up. You know the story. They say you shouldn’t count the chickens before they hatch, and I guess I stuffed that up. I thought I was going great guns, juggling a lot of balls, but then this curveball came along and I derailed. I’ve really been dealt a bad hand, and I don’t exactly know how I’ll be able to brush it off.

You learn from these mistakes though. I guess if I’m ever coasting again, taking it real easy, and then I get stopped dead in my tracks by another hurdle like this one, I’ll be prepared. Maybe I’ll be ready to take evasive action. They say too many cooks spoil the broth, but also that many hands make light work. I think the last one is more accurate. I’m gambling on the last one. I think it’ll come up good if I stick by my mates. You know, sticking together – that’s the ideal. It’s funny how you can be on cloud nine one day, and then the next you’re totally in the dumps, really in the wars, so to speak. But every cloud has a silver lining, they say, so maybe she’ll be right in the end. At the end of the day, I guess I take solace from the fact that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.


*Editor's (/Superego's) Note: You missed out "axe to grind" and "up in arms", which would actually have been very easy to fit in. No doubt countless others, too. 

An Essay called "My New, Improved Theory of Morality"

My New, Improved Theory of Morality

The way many philosophers explore the question of what morality is is very odd. I began to realise this a while after I finished studying “ethics” as part of the first semester philosophy course at Sydney Uni called “Reality, Ethics and Beauty” and wrote my previous essay on the subject published on this blog. What one learns when they study the philosophy of morality is that there are about four basic philosophical positions on what morality is, or the “meta-ethics”.^[1] These are typically split into two groups: the cognitivist theories, which hold that moral utterances or judgements have “truth aptness” (meaning can be true or false), and the non-cognitivist theories, which hold that they don’t (meaning they are neither true nor false). Of the cognitive positions, the main ones are (arguably) Objective Moral Realism [certain moral principles are objectively, unquestionably true], Subjectivism [moral utterances and judgements are really reports of emotional states, and thus they can be true or false of a person but not generally true or false], and the hippest one, Error Theory [moral utterances and judgements are made as if they were objective propositions, but they must all be false because of facts about our universe]. The overview I have just given is, of course, pretty perfunctory. Something else I should definitely mention is that Objective Moral Realism and Error Theory contain notable subcategories. So, in the case of Moral Realism, it is not just the obvious religious evangelicals that subscribe to the theory, but also Kantian “rationalists” and atheistic moral naturalists^[2]. Likewise, some Error Theorists are supposedly complete Nihilists (though that is a practically untenable position) but most are what are called “Fictionalists”, who believe that morality is a good or useful fiction that we ought to uphold.^[3]

Any overview of non-cognitivist meta-ethical positions also depends on how one apportions the dogmas and what one chooses to omit, but for our purposes we will say that there is only one non-cognitivist position, namely, Emotivism. This theory, as propounded by the English philosopher and logical positivist A.J. Ayer, holds that what moral utterances really are are exclamations of some kind. An Emotivist claims that saying “That is good” can be roughly translated to “Hooray for that!”, and “That is wrong” can be roughly translated to “Boo!”.

When you study morality in philosophy, it’s easy to get ensconced in these positions, and to trick yourself into thinking that they’re your only options – that you have to choose one of them. But I don’t think that’s true. Indeed, I see major flaws with all of them.

I believe that most philosophers today would probably endorse moral Error Theory. This is because it is regarded as being most compatible with basic facts about human morality, and the near unanimous metaphysical view of our universe as solely material, which is the dogma often described as Metaphysical Naturalism or Materialism. The primary precept that distinguishes Error Theory from other relativist positions is that it holds that we do speak moral judgements as statements of fact. That is why our moral views tend to be immutable, and why we pick them up a certain set of moral principles in a similar way to any ideology, and why we are able to have moral arguments, and so on. Non-cognitivists retort to this elementary observation by twisting their theories in weird ways, and making claims like “But people don’t actually realise that we’re just expressing emotions even when we’re advancing arguments for moral positions”. Basically, though, very few people accept hard-line Emotivism and its unmentioned sisters nowadays. Likewise, Subjectivism is arguably self-refuting for similar reasons. If our moral judgements are true when they are sincere, as Subjectivism claims, that means two people with differing moral judgements must both be right. But that can’t possibly be true, ergo Subjectivism fails.^[4]

Error Theory does also seem to be the strongest for more fundamental reasons. It is seen by most philosophers, I believe, as the most “scientific” because its proponents appear to have refuted Moral Realism with their metaphysical arguments. Perhaps the most significant of these arguments is the argument of the Australian-born philosopher J.L. Mackie (whose book in support of a moral error theory, Inventing Right and Wrong, is regarded as seminal) that moral properties couldn’t possibly exist in a material world due to their necessary “queerness”. This “argument from queerness” is very cogent and hard to deny. Generally speaking, most irreligious people today would agree that to believe that there might be moral properties floating around in our universe or in the noumenal realm (or whatever) is pure mysticism. To Error Theorists, that means the only answer is that all moral truths are really falsities – that killing is not right or wrong but that it must be false to say either. To them, the centrality of morality to human experience has no bearing on the truth of the position, because what matters is the “eye of the universe”. And in the “eye of the universe”, it appears that every moral proposition has to be false – equally so for both “Killing is good” and “Killing is bad”.^[5]

However, as soon as you leave the stifling world of philosophy and take a breath of fresh, unpolluted air, you realise that taking this view on morality is quite strange and leads to injurious distortions. What I call a more “pragmatic” view on the basis for morality, like Noam Chomsky’s (who steers clear of most contemporary philosophy), makes a hell of a lot more sense to me. Principally, Chomsky argues that we all have an innate moral sense, and that there are basic moral truisms and elementary principles of moral behaviour. This belief is undoubtedly related to what he believes about language and the infamous (but actually uncontroversial and almost self-evident) postulation of a “Universal Grammar”. Indeed, morality is just like language in one sense: it seems as if we can generate infinite judgements in various contexts from one recursive procedure in the brain. We seem to have a combinatorial grammar of morality, if you like. Possibly corollary to this is Chomsky’s second important component of morality: the principle that we should be non-contradictory in our moral behaviour, i.e. that we should apply our moral standards equally to all people (and possibly beyond). Again, he claims that everyone accepts this in the abstract; they just don’t apply it in practice. Incidentally, most of his polemics against US foreign policy are based on his belief that America never obeys this truistic principle of morality. In any case, the consequence of these facts for Chomsky seems to be that there are some objective moral truths. Like a lot of popular intellectuals – for example, the globetrotting physicist Lawrence Krauss – he has said more than once, without qualifications, that we made “moral progress” over the 20^th Century. I personally do not dispute this, and my own personal view is heavily influenced by this view of Chomsky, as well as late Wittgensteinian ideas (as per usual).

Like Chomsky, I believe that any form of moral relativism, like epistemological scepticism, can only be endorsed in the abstract, and is not a practically tenable position. Although it is true that moral codes differ all over the world, the evidence does suggest that all cultures do at least have some recognisable moral system. This points to an innate moral faculty of some kind, most likely involving both our altruistic emotions and, importantly, some moral beliefs or values.^[6] The fact that we seem to have innate moral beliefs is important because it allows us to extend our moral behaviour even to actions that have nothing to do with our emotions, or even contradict them. For example, we seem to all have the capacity to do moral things out of moral duty. This happens all the time.  People often do things like giving money or food to a hobo on the street, or donating to some African family in some rural region they have never heard of and will never visit. People who look to simple Darwinian, selectional reasons for the advent of morality claim that morality is ultimately about favouring our tribe and that’s why we give so much more care towards our own family and social groups than acquaintances and strangers. Yet even if this is roughly true (and it may well be), we are, as progressive citizens of the 21^st Century, able to see that it is irrational to only care about people with whom we are close. Instead, we can learn to extend morality beyond our own social environment or gender or race – in the end, to all human beings in need or strife, and other species too. When most of us proclaim that “killing is wrong”, nowadays, we undoubtedly intend the judgement to be universal. It is the same with rape and torture and stealing and fraud and all the other great evils human beings perpetrate. Sure, ISIS think that the proposition “Killing is wrong” is true only within their own sect. But most people in the West condemn the death penalty no matter who the person is or what crime they committed. Eye-for-an-eye retributive justice is now a historical relic in our legal system.

Of course, the obvious relativist rebuttal to this would be the claim that human beings are still only ever moral deep-down because it makes us feel good, and that morality is still fundamentally emotional. Sociopaths and psychopaths are not moral, they might say, and the reason is that morality is not about innate beliefs or a specific innate faculty. As Peter Singer has claimed, however, even some of the most diabolical criminals – one of his most intriguing examples is the Australian crimelord Chopper Reed – still have moral codes of some kind. They still feel the need to justify their murders morally.^[7] And although you might think the existence of some psychopath who didn’t understand morality at all and had no moral intuitions would impugn the notion of an innate faculty, I submit that it would actually effectively confirm it. Assuming this hypothetical psychopath had been exposed to roughly the same cultural mores as other people who had developed a moral sense, it would prove that he possessed a slightly different neurophysiology.^[8] While it would be hard to prove this definitively, it certainly appears that some kind of moral belief-system seems to be about as innate to us as language is.

Of course, Error Theorists might also accept this. After all, as I explained, they accept that we treat moral judgements like they are truths, and agree that we do have moral beliefs, probably genetically endowed. But to believe that Error Theory is the only option once this has been assimilated is, I believe, erroneous. There are a number of very tenuous assumptions that that view relies on.

One important assumption that most Error Theorists almost certainly make (if only unconsciously) is that it doesn’t matter whether some moral principles and intuitions might be shared across all cultures and communities. Most Error Theorists almost certainly believe that the fact that all cultures seem to accept the same elementary moral truisms and very young children give the same answers as adults to “trolley problems” is irrelevant to the question of whether morality has an objective basis. In other words, most Error Theorists almost certainly reject universality as a basis for objectivity. If an Error Theorist does believe universality necessarily entails some kind of objectivity, I don’t think they can be sure of the truth of their position, given there is evidence of moral universality. Therefore, most Error Theorists must believe that even if everyone believes or tacitly accepts some fact, that doesn’t mean the fact is in the least bit true.  The proposition that “Killing a member of your own family is wrong, unless they are endangering you” is, I submit, one such universally held belief.^[9] So most Error Theorists presumably don’t dispute the universality of that specific belief, but claim its universality has no bearing on whether it is objectively right.

Unfortunately, I can’t decisively refute this position, but I can demonstrate that it is deeply unsatisfactory and possibly stretches language beyond sense. My main objection to it is rather Wittgensteinian and can be stated thus: one cannot meaningfully talk of morality without accepting moral truisms like “Killing is wrong” and “Caring about others is good” or the more specific proposition above. I contend that the phrases “morally right” and “morally wrong” are only meaningful insofar as such aforementioned truistic propositions are accepted as true. If you deny the moral wrongness of something that everyone on planet earth thinks is morally wrong (such as the “Killing a member […]” proposition), then you must, I believe, be going beyond the limits of language. You are not only contradicting yourself (because deep down you feel that it is true to say it is wrong) but you are perverting the words “moral” and “wrongness”. This objection is possibly quite confusing, but it should become clearer. The most important thing to point out is that when we are not engaging in the strange discourse of philosophy, we all intuitively know that morality, and rightness and wrongness, have limits. While it may be possible to argue that, for the Aztecs, human sacrifice was a moral duty – because they supposedly did it in order to keep the sun rising in the morning – it is not possible to argue that a serial killer is being moral by wantonly murdering people. His actions are amoral; they’re obviously morally wrong. Everyone would accept that, and if you deny it, I believe you cease to discuss morality. To say that he is being moral, or that it is simply false to say that he is being moral (as an Error Theorist would claim) is to lose sight of what ethical words even mean. The pragmatic fact of the matter is that, to all human beings, that serial killer is acting in a way that is completely morally wrong. That’s how we all think and those are the words we use. An Error Theorist says any moral judgement is ultimately false in the eye of the universe. But morality is not about the eye of the universe! Importantly, I think it is a mistake to treat it like you would a material phenomenon – to examine it from the universe’s point of view. To put this in a more Wittgensteinian fashion (albeit crudely), I think it is wrong to dissect morality within the scientific language-game.  We all know, intuitively, that to deny the truth of such statements as “Saving a drowning child is good” or that “Massacring innocent children is bad” is nonsensical. But in philosophy it is suddenly sensible. The question is, why should we call something a “fiction” when it is not a fiction in real life? How can that make sense? And if morality is bound up with the unique attributes of human beings, why should we regard it in a way that abstracts the phenomenon from human action altogether? And if everyone agrees on some moral universals, why should the universe’s perspective overrule us to make them objectively false?

I believe that some kind of “weak objectivity” does obtain in the kinds of moral judgements aforementioned. Moral truths may not be objective like the fact that gravity on Earth propels objects downwards at roughly 9.8 m/s2, but they’re objective to us humans, in the sense that everyone believes them. Surely that means it is insane, in a very literal sense of the word, to call them objectively false.^[10]

And past this obstacle,^[11] I believe that the question of how moral you should be is not a precise matter but can be roughly gauged through reason alone. Being logical is, as the second of Bertrand Rusell’s three fundamental laws of thought suggests, in large part to do with being non-contradictory. For Chomsky, the problem with American foreign policy (and indeed with all imperialist powers in history) has always been that consistency is never applied – that moral hypocrisy is rife. The governments always portray their agenda as moral, but they never prosecute the moral standards to which they hold their enemies on themselves. If the American government did follow consistent moral standards, Chomsky argues, they would see that they are by far the most powerful, most brutal and most nefarious terrorists in the world. I believe that the exact same principle applies to all of us. If you are caring and magnanimous to your family (as we all seem to be), if you believe in all-encompassing moral truisms (as we all seem to), then you ought, logically, to extend your moral behaviour to people you don’t know at all. You ought, logically, not to be discriminatory of people of different creeds, classes or races. You ought, logically, to try to extend your kindness as far as you can beyond your own family or close friends. You ought, logically, to give some of your money – if you can afford it – to charity. You ought, logically, to support some kind of feminist doctrine – to care about women as much as you care about men, and to rail against such current issues as domestic violence statistics and ubiquitous internet misogyny and the pernicious effect of gonzo internet pornography on adolescents. You ought, logically, to lament Australia’s racist colonial past and to decry continuing endemic racism towards Indigenous people in our society. Etc.^[12]

Although I don’t subscribe to any strict utilitarian model of morality like Peter Singer, I think his famous thought experiment from the 1971 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” illustrates brilliantly the irrational moral hypocrisy of most of us Westerners. Here is a simplified version of it.

Suppose you are walking through a park. On your feet are some expensive shoes that you recently purchased. A boy is playing next to a pond nearby. Suddenly, the boy trips. He falls into the pond. He cannot get up and seems to be drowning. You scan the environs, and there is no one else to save him. What do you do?

Unsurprisingly, Singer has claimed that everyone he has posed it to responds to this thought experiment by saying something to the effect of “Forget the shoes, I’d save the child”. But Singer’s great observation is that most of us can in fact save children’s lives all the time, just by spending a bit less of our income on unnecessary, material luxuries (like the shoes in the thought experiment). The only reason we don’t is because we don’t bother to think about these children – because we put them from our minds. Essentially, because we are selfish.  And our selfishness also entails irrationality. Because if we all agree on saving the boy we don’t know from drowning, why shouldn’t we all agree to saving other children and adults in a far off land? It would, I believe, be utterly irrational not to do so. Some moral philosophers dispute this. But I don’t think their intuitionist arguments have any basis. Admittedly, I couldn’t refute them, per se, but they rely on a strange view that we should trust our moral intuitions above all else – that they should be the final arbiters of what we ought to do. I believe this is silly. I share Singer’s disdain for illogical intuitions.  So what if these Africans are geographically thousands of kilometres away? So what if, intuitively, we feel less compelled to give to those thousands of kilometres away? There is no logical reason why that should lead us to ignore their plight and misery. 

You can now hopefully see why I do believe that it is in fact right to say that there are moral truths and things we should objectively all be doing. If everyone agrees on certain moral universals, and expanding your circle of care is simply a matter of logical consistency, doing such things as I enumerated before does seem to me to be in some way objectively right. That is why I think it is correct of Chomsky and Krauss to say we have made “moral progress”. What we have collectively done, over the course of the 20^th Century, is expanded our circle of moral decency to women, people of all races and gay people. And the simple fact is that it makes no logical sense not to care about women, people of all races and gay people. Even back in the 19^th Century and before, where pseudoscientific theories about the subhumanity of the black race and the intellectual inferiority of women to men carried great weight, it still didn’t make sense to oppress those two groups. Even the biggest bigots back then knew that black people and women could feel, could suffer, had thoughts, hopes and dreams. After all, if you pricked them, did they not bleed? 

Nowadays we are also increasingly coming to realise that it makes no logical sense to be completely anthropocentric: a human chauvinist, as it is amusingly known. Just because us homo sapiens appear to have superior cognitive powers to other creatures doesn’t mean we should have absolute control over them. Just because a lot of us savour the taste of meat doesn’t give us a logical claim over the life of an animal. Of course it doesn’t. To insist otherwise, as a normally moral person, knowing that animals must suffer in some fashion, is simply to be logically inconsistent. That’s fine, but I assure you there is no way to defend eating meat on ethical grounds. Health grounds, perhaps – but not ethical ones. Some people say that we ought to be able to eat meat because we have evolved to do so and that is the way of nature – dog eat dog and so forth. But we certainly don’t get our moral compass from the natural world in any other circumstance. Indeed, that is the last place we want to look for moral direction. Hitler did (the idea of “Social Darwinism”), Ayn Rand did, but these were not good people!^[13]

I hope you can see, too, why I believe it is ultimately trivial that moral facts are not like scientific facts. If morality is intrinsic to human nature, it seems deeply strange to say that, on the basis of science, all moral judgements are false, and that morality is a mere fiction. Furthermore, it seems a matter of simple reason to recognise that it makes little sense only to be moral to your own family or friends or a neighbour’s drowning child, when you could be helping so many others. Of course, this isn’t an ironclad argument against the claims of Error Theory, but I also don’t believe there’s any more plausible way to view this thing we call “morality”. It seems to me that morality is central to human nature and that we ought, if nothing but for the sake of logical consistency, to take our commitment to it as far as we can bring ourselves to.

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[1] I should say that few people would agree with my claim that there are “four”, but that’s inconsequential.

[2] Moral naturalism is a very broad term that I am meaning to refer to people who believe that we somehow (through a series of evolutionary mechanisms) have access to indisputable moral truths.

[3] Funny I should use the word “ought” there, given that it implies the Fictionalists have a duty to uphold the fiction. Not entirely sure how a Fictionalist would react to that.

[4] Which is not really a decisive refutation unless you’re being very rigid-minded, but let’s move on. 

[5] Yes, the consequences of this are a bit counterintuitive: according to the theory, Killing is both not bad and not good, and not anything in between either. But you’re meant to be able to just accept that.

[6] This is not to suggest that moral deliberations occur in only one part of the brain or anything like that, merely that we are programmed to develop some kind of moral system.

[7] You know, like “He insulted the gang” or something.

[8] Even if, as is quite likely, the source of this neurophysiological difference was actually environmental, originally – say, he was a neglected or abused baby – that wouldn’t impugn the notion of an innate moral faculty either. The environmental trauma would have just stunted the development of the moral faculty, in the same way that a lack of exposure to any language in the first few months of a child’s life causes her to have severely constrained linguistic capacities. In fact, speaking of language, there is a big misconception about the Chomskyan idea of Universal Grammar and the “poverty of stimulus” argument related to this: people seem to think that UG means that a baby would begin talking fluently with no stimulus. Well, all I can say is that you’d have to be extremely stupid to think that. The only explanatory alternative to Universal Grammar is a general learning mechanism (given the blank slate position is incoherent, obviously), but no one has come up with a convincing proposal for such a mechanism that could explain language. So, really, the shit that gets published about Universal Grammar being wrong on the internet is complete nonsense.

[9] It is true that some people kill their own family members, but that is irrelevant because we are talking about avowed beliefs here. I don’t believe that anyone (except a wilful Error Theorist or some other liar) would deny the truth of that sentence. I have no evidence for it, but I am willing to wager a lot of money that even men who kill their wives hold such beliefs – they have just failed to practise them at all times. 

[10] Insanity is not a knockdown objection, but it’s the best I’ve got.

[11] Which you don’t even have to entertain anyway, given that, as I have argued, we are all unavoidably moral regardless of doubts about the ontological status of moral properties.

[12] I don’t mean you should literally do exactly those things, but I am saying that you should do something close to them.

[13] Though even they had moral codes, however perverted, which buttresses my postulation of an innate moral faculty of some kind.