The New York Times and the Times Online have published stories on primates and the origins of morality. They mention several primate experiments in which monkeys and chimps display prosocial behaviors such as helping others when there is no reward, sharing with companions, consoling companions, and remembering and repaying debts. These results add to a large and well fortified body of evidence suggesting that human morality is not unique in kind. That is, humans may have the most complex system of morality in the animal kingdom, but we do not have the only system of morality.
This conclusion should not come as a shock to anybody. A simple observation of the world demonstrates the truth of “animal morality.” Every social animal — by the very virtue of being social — has “rules” of interaction. There is only one queen in a beehive. If another female tries to be a queen, she is killed or banished. Some varieties of ants stage “political coups” in which one female gains enough supporters to overthrow the reigning queen and usurp her position. Vampire bats share blood with others, but only repeatedly share with those who reciprocate. Female swallows pretend at monogamy while “cheating” on the side and duping their “husbands” into raising another male’s child. “Morality” is all around us.
The thing that makes a lot of people cringe at this notion is the concept of self-consciousness and of agency. Put simply, we don’t “blame” the swallows for being cheaters, nor do we find fault with the vampire bats who choose not to reciprocate blood sharing. We just say they’re “doing what animals do.” The thing is, thats usually where the objection ends. It should be obvious that human morality is different, right? We have to be able to hold people accountable for their actions, or else society would fall apart. The concepts of blame and fault, we believe, are intrinsic and necessary for morality.
This is an interesting exercise in doublethink, as it turns out. Philosophers and theologians have spent thousands of years trying to work out the “problem of morality” when in reality, there has never been a problem in the first place! If I wanted to be particularly snarky, I could suggest that philosophers have an overinflated sense of self importance, as if their ability to work out a usable framework for thinking about morality is somehow an integral part of the process of keeping humanity from destroying itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Let’s return to the animal kingdom for a moment. In some primate societies, the alpha male gets exclusive mating rights with a harem of females. If a low ranking male tries to mate with one of the harem, he is roughly dispatched by the alpha, or sometimes by his gang of loyal compatriots. In some cases, females who have babies with the “wrong male” have their babies ripped from their arms and served up for dinner at the alpha banquet. This seems rather gruesome to us, of course, but what’s going on here? Put simply, the low ranking male and female have broken the “rules of society” and are being punished by the society. The same goes for bees who attempt to lay fertilized eggs of their own and ants who fail to usurp the queen.
Clearly, consciousness and self awareness are not necessary for morality to function. Perhaps the argument can be made that apes are self aware enough to have “consciences” like humans, but certainly it cannot be so for ants and bees, and they still regulate their own societies. What, then, is the real difference between human morality and bee morality? Most philosophers would suggest that the difference is our ability to alter our own moral beliefs and to act “against our nature” to do something we know is right.
Is this a valid statement? I think that from a certain perspective, it is. It is true that bees have never been observed to “decide” on the rules of the hive. They just obey the rules. In fact, we have a hard time calling them rules because we don’t imagine the bees to be intentionally following rules. They’re just doing what bees do, and the natural result is that their pattern of behavior ends up with every appearance of rules but not the agency necessary for the human concept of rules. I hope to demonstrate to you that the agency requirement is actually the thing that is out of place in this argument. It is not that agency is necessary for morality. It’s that humans commit an anthropomorphic fallacy and presume that agency is necessary when it’s not. It’s really just an interesting level of complexity.
Before we go on, let’s make sure we understand the concept of agency. When I say that the main issue with morality is agency, I mean that we humans presume that free willed intent is necessary for morality. Apes who kill and eat babies are not making the informed rational decision to kill and eat babies. They’re just following their instincts, but humans who decide to kill and eat babies are making an informed rational decision to do something wrong. Apes shouldn’t be punished for killing and eating babies, but humans should.
Before we accept this claim at face value, however, let’s look at things another way. In ape society, the low ranking males and females are breaking rules, and they are being punished. Killing and eating the baby is the punishment, not the crime. The crime is having a baby with the wrong male. We humans regard killing and eating babies as a crime, so we commit an anthropomorphic fallacy and impose our own species’ morality on the apes, and then feel as if we’ve accomplished something special.
Jeffrey Dahmer was a low ranking male who broke the rules of society. He killed at least seventeen people that he didn’t have the right to kill. A high ranking male sentenced him to the punishment of 957 years in prison. We should also note that another high ranking male felt that Dahmer had broken his society’s rules, and punished him by beating him to death.
Who makes the rules in ape society? Is it the genes or is it the alpha male? What about bee society? The worker bees enforce the rules. Did they make the rules?
Now, let’s ask the question that gets down to the heart of the matter: Who made the rule that the humans with the power get to make the rules that the humans without the power have to follow? The answer is that the genes made the rule, in exactly the same way that genes made the rules for bee society. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, humans still do what humans will do, just like bees do what bees will do. We form societies, and those societies impose rules upon themselves. When those rules are broken, the offenders are punished. Granted, humans have a very wide variety of societies with different methods of determining who has the power and who doesn’t, and how rules are decided and implemented, but in the end, the process is still the same.
The truth of morality ought to be virtually self-evident at this point. Human morality is a very complex, highly flexible, self-aware version of the exact same phenomenon that happens in all social animals. Natural selection imbues animals with the instinctual drive to self-regulate, and they do. Humans are no different. We have been self-regulating for as long as we’ve existed, and with or without the efforts of philosophers, we will continue to do so.
At this point, I need to throw philosophers a bone. I do not mean to imply that all inquiries into morality are meaningless or that they do not have practical benefit. The practical benefit comes from the plasticity of our social organization. We are not the only animal whose societal organization can change. Wolves, for instance, change their mating behaviors (who is allowed to mate with whom) based on the availability of resources. Even so, humans are certainly the most malleable of the social animals, and we are apparently the only ones capable of making abstract judgments about which societal arrangement would be in our best interests.
As an exercise, let’s do a thought experiment and pretend that we are alien surveyors, and we have stumbled upon earth for the first time. We have made extensive empirical observations of the planet, and we are compiling a report for the homeworld. For this thought experiment to work, we must make every effort to completely divorce ourselves from the notion that humans are important in any way whatsoever. They are interesting to us as the objects of scientific inquiry, but that is all they are. We shall assume that we also have something akin to the Prime Directive in Star Trek, whereby we are not allowed to interfere in any way with the planet, but only to observe, unseen.
We will begin by noting that there are billions of self-replicating discreet units of matter that cover nearly every part of the planet. They seem to be divided into relatively homogenous groups, many of which have very complex systems of interactions with each other. We decide to call the most lively of these objects “animals.” We note that some animals don’t interact with each other often, while other animals live in huge groups we will call “societies.” We notice that societies seem to regulate themselves. That is, they follow what appear to be mathematical rules in which positive and negative feedback create predictable patterns of behavior. We note that there seems to be a continuum of both complexity and plasticity. Some societies are far more adaptable than others.
Now, remember that we do not care for humans more than ants or bees. They are all just objects of scientific inquiry. We note in our report that one of the patterns in the animals we call “apes” is that powerful individuals destroy weak young individuals when a certain set of circumstances arise. In the animals we call “humans” we note that powerful individuals destroy weak individuals when a certain set of circumstances arise, but that they seldom destroy young individuals in the way apes do. On the other hand, apes very seldom kill older individuals, while it seems to be a regular practice of humans.
Perhaps we would note that the animals known as humans appear to have a far more complex set of positive and negative feedback for a much wider range of behaviors than other animals, and we would almost certainly note that their system of transmitting information between individuals is far more complex than that of any other animal, but would we really be able to tell a difference between “morality” and “instinct”? Would we even think to invent those two terms, or would we regard humans as a particularly complex set of organisms and nothing else?
This is admittedly a very difficult thought experiment, for it is remarkably hard for us to regard ourselves as anything other than supremely important. I hope that you can see, though, that our own conceptions of morality are largely illusionary. To be certain, the illusion is a functional one. We believe we have free will, and we believe that we are acting “good” by punishing “evil.” In reality, we are doing just what the other animals do. We are stratifying ourselves into the kinds of social organizations our genes programmed us for, and we are carrying out our genetic instructions just as reliably as any other animal. Our minds, our consciences, and our sense of right and wrong are very complicated mechanisms for social organization, but they are just that — natural mechanisms for social organization. We, just like the apes, and just like the bees, are doing what we do because that is the way we are designed. When we feel moral outrage at Jeffrey Dahmer, we are doing so because moral outrage is the naturally selected mechanism which produces predictable patterns of behavior in our species.
So you see, there is no “problem of morality.” We do not have to find ways to overcome our instincts. When we are forming committees on human rights, we are following our instincts! We are behaving as humans behave just as apes are behaving as apes when they form gangs to raid neighboring tribes. We don’t need a supernatural model of imposed morality, and we don’t need a philosophical justification to care about our neighbor’s well being. With or without abstract models, we do care about the suffering of others, and we do try to be good. We punish those who break the rules without the need to understand why we do it. The fact that we can understand it is a bonus for us. However, the fact that we can understand it doesn’t imply in any way that we need to understand it in order to be moral. The question of agency isn’t really an issue. It is an interesting scientific observation that we perceive agency, and that our system of self-regulation relies in large part on our evaluation of agency, but that is really as far as it goes. Our obsession with agency as a necessary part of morality is anthropomorphic, and only hinders us from seeing ourselves as we really are.
You seem to have confused ‘is’ with ‘ought’ at some point in this argument, then run with it. Your punishment for this oversight is a sound thrashing with a rotund Scotsman – to wit, David Hume:
Posted by G Felis | February 19, 2009, 1:43 amHmm. I admit that I don’t understand your point. My intention was to remove “ought” from “is.” Maybe I haven’t expressed myself well, because my primary point is that “is” and “ought” are illusionary, and there is just “is.”
Posted by hambydammit | February 19, 2009, 9:05 amThat’s kind of how you confused is and ought. Since your argument focuses entirely on the ‘is’ – the facts about how behavior we think of as “morality” could have evolved, the reproduction and survival purposes social structures and punishment and so on – you have no basis for making any statement or judgment whatsoever about the ‘ought’ side of things. You haven’t said a word about how people (or chimps, or whatever) ought to behave, only about how they do behave.
No one with their cranium outside their rectum argues against the common claim that what people call “moral” is largely a matter of social convention. Many will even agree that social convention serves very practical purposes that can often be explained in evolutionary terms: I agree on that point, although I think an actual science of such things is waaaaaay more complicated than your sketch above (on which point you’d probably agree). But the questions that drive ethical theory – and the reason philosophers aren’t in fact just wanking off when they address morality – are questions about which moral conventions are *actually* right/good, which are wrong/bad, and why. Why should any given person be morally obligated to follow or violate a given rule of conventional morality – not just motivated by fear of punishment or other practical consequence, but morally obligated? Do such moral obligations even exist? If so, why? If not, why not?
Effectively, your argument says there are no such obligations, just the illusion of them generated by the underlying drives and concerns of evolution. The problem is, that argument only speaks to the illusions which most reflective people have long thought are largely illusory – conventional morality. But even a perfectly justified conclusion that conventional morality is empty or flawed or just a product of our evolutionary and cultural heritage doesn’t of itself offer any justification whatsoever for concluding that there is no right and wrong, no good and evil, no ought and ought not – no standards or norms outside of/separate from conventional morality by which it might be judged. That conclusion requires a separate argument about the substance of morality, and conventional morality is only the appearance. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to argue that there simply IS no substance of morality, that it’s all appearance: I’m just saying that you can’t make that argument with claims that only address the appearance and never the substance.
Posted by G Felis | February 19, 2009, 3:50 pmGFelis wrote: “But the questions that drive ethical theory – and the reason philosophers aren’t in fact just wanking off when they address morality – are questions about which moral conventions are *actually* right/good, which are wrong/bad, and why.”
I hope I did an adequate job of making the point that philosophy of morality is not useless. You and I certainly are in agreement that there is substance to the discussion of which moral standards are 1) founded in reality, 2) genuinely directed towards the “good” and 3) parsimonious with evolutionary theory. I did not mean to imply otherwise. Perhaps you misunderstand my intention. I’m trying to demonstrate that morality is built from the ground up, so to speak, and any “substance” discussion must acknowledge that “macro-morality” (for lack of a better term) will exist without philosophy, god, or anything else. Humans, simply by virtue of being social animals, will behave “morally” in the sense that they will form self sustaining and self-regulating societies. To a removed observer, the empirical facts of our existence will be indistinguishable in kind from those of ants or bees. They regulate their societies, and we regulate ours. Human morality is not some new invention that became possible because of our ability to think in the abstract. It is the top layer of an onion that’s been growing for billions of years.
The point is not that human morality doesn’t involve real substantive issues within the paradigm of human perception, but rather that human perception is the rose colored glass through which we view ourselves. In other words, the removed alien observer would note with interest that our system of self regulation involves a very high degree of interest in protection of every newborn, while noting that social fish maintain their society without any interest in individual offspring whatsoever. “Protecting babies at all costs” is weighted heavily in human society, but there is no magic rule that says any moral agent in the universe will be concerned with protecting babies at all costs. We can imagine, for instance, a race of aliens with intelligence, agency, and a completely different system of reproduction in which protecting babies at all costs would seem absurd as a moral imperative.
So yes, there is substance to the moral philosophical debate, but the substance is also illusory in the sense that it only feels absolute to us because of what we are. Human morality is the uniquely human way of doing what every other social animal does in their own unique way.
Posted by hambydammit | February 19, 2009, 6:02 pmHmm. I guess I see more where you’re going now, but I think that path inevitably leads to some kind of serious is-ought confusion.
Here’s what I mean: If you look at human morality as evolved, you cannot just look at the “good” stuff – cooperative behavior, valuing infants/children and prioritizing their well-being, etc. You also have to look at the ugly behaviors that are equally the result of natural selection – a whole lot of fucked up war between the sexes stuff, all the violence rooted in in-group/out-group competition (without which there could be no group selection), selfish/cheating/deceptive behavior (and not just the cooperative/punishing/lie-detecting behavior that opposes it).
The evolution of altruism is not just a set event that happens and is done: Sociality is always an ongoing dynamic equilibrium between individual/selfish behavior and external controls on it – both of which are the product of natural selection and are under constant positive selection pressure. Cooperation leads to overall greater reproductive success on average for social organisms or it would not have evolved, but cheating still leads to some individual reproductive success at the expense of the individual’s society when the individual can get away with it: So cooperation and cheating, brutality and beneficence, fairness and injustice, and as many other dualities in human behavior as you care to name are all equally the products of evolution by natural selection.
Thus, it seems to me that what you are trying to say when you talk about moral standards that are “genuinely directed towards the ‘good’” must rest on some sort of confusion. You seem to be saying that the “good” side of that prior list of dualities is the sum total of what constitutes morality. But in so saying, either (1) you are imposing some externally derived moral standard on your interpretations of our evolved ethical behavior, in which case your talk about ethics being “grounded in reality” and “parsimonious with evolutionary theory” is not actually justified; or (2) you are simply ignoring the fact that selfishness and brutality and sexism are just as much the products of natural selection (and/or cultural selection, which is still ultimately grounded in biology) as the behaviors which oppose them, and so evolutionary facts alone can offer no legitimate reason to prefer cooperation over selfishness, etc.
Note: I am not in any way saying that there is no interdependence between morality and our evolved nature. Although I consider the scenario unlikely for biological reasons, I think that an intelligent/social organism that evolved with a completely different breeding strategy – putting energy into producing thousands of young (high-R) as opposed to large investments in few young (high-K) – would have moral obligations to mates and young substantially different from ours. But the idea that morality is *dependent on* some kinds of biological facts does not equate to the idea that any coherent ethical stance can be *derived from* biological facts alone. If you think (as I do) that evolution produced (and is still producing) human inclinations and behaviors, that includes all of our mutually contradictory inclinations and behaviors: No coherent, self-consistent standards of moral conduct could possibly arise *solely* from examination of that inconsistent set of inclinations and behaviors, so morality must include some outside standard by which our various conflicting inclinations and behaviors can be judged.
The idea of an “outside standard” is not what is wrong with religiously grounded ethics. The problem is that the outside standard religions invoke is a non-existent magic sky-daddy who always just happens to hate all the same people and ideas that his believers do: Even if any of their fairy tale beings existed, the divine command theory of morality would be bankrupt on logical grounds that have been well understood (by people who aren’t self-deluding) for literally thousands of years – q.v. Plato’s Euthyphro. In contrast, I think reason alone is sufficient – and necessary ! – to provide that outside standard, which is actually what my dissertation is about. If you want to read it, the first complete draft is going to be done by the end of the month!
Posted by G Felis | February 19, 2009, 7:59 pmI don’t mean to ignore the bad stuff. There’s a reason I used scare quotes on “good.” I can’t think of which essay it’s in at the moment, but I spent some time discussing the existence of conflicting, opposing goals that can both be “good” and “bad.” War is bad, except when we go to war to protect our resources and children. When we are starving, it is good for us to acquire resources, and bad that the pesky people who have the resources we want are so prone to fight back when we try to take them.
We’re both aware that morality can be both subjective and objective in the sense that where we have a standard, say “allowing people to die is bad” we can say objectively that if I allow a person to die, I have done a bad thing. However, situations are highly variable, and we are often forced to choose between two or more things that are — in the abstract — viewed objectively as bad. Yet, when we choose one of the bad options, we have done a good thing.
What I am trying to say is that “good” and “bad” are not qualities, like “green” or “circular.” They are ad hoc categorizations which require agency. If we were to map out the entire algorithm used by John Doe to determine whether to tell his brother Jack that his wife is cheating on him, we’d have a virtually insurmountable mess of weighted variables, each of which exists as part of the dynamic incorporation of perceptions into the previous moment’s “state of existence.”
All of this is really interesting, and certainly worthy of study, but we must be careful to realize that cheating on your husband only has meaning if cheating has meaning, and if it important within the context of human interaction. If we can imagine a lekking species developing enough intelligence to possess agency, we would be shocked if they considered cheating on your husband to be a moral issue at all. If we had not evolved the tendency to jealously guard our mates (to ensure parentage, primarily) we should not be concerned with sexual morality. Fidelity is only important because we’re human, not because fidelity contains the property “good.”
So, I am not imposing an externally derived moral standard upon our evolved moral practices. I’m imposing an internally derived moral standard, and the only possible yardstick by which we could create such a thing is our own instincts, which are entirely evolutionarily based!
Oh, and yes, you must deliver to me a copy of your first draft immediately upon completion.
Posted by hambydammit | February 19, 2009, 8:55 pmAha! There’s the basis of our talking at cross purposes! You are using the language of ethics and morality and such, but actually you are taking a moral anti-realist position – that is, the position ethical claims are by nature not the kinds of claims that can possibly be evaluated as true or false. That’s certainly a plausible position with a long history – in fact, variations on that position dominated the literature in ethics for most of the 20th century (more’s the pity). However, I don’t think it’s possible to make an argument for any metaethical position about the character of moral claims – moral realism or anti-realism – based solely on analysis of evolution. In a sense, making such an argument just pushes the is-ought problem “up a level” into the discussion of metaethics – where you are still drawing a conclusion that the arguments you have given does not justify.
One of the things I point out in the first chapter of the dissertation is… well, screw re-explaining it, I’ll just quote it (citations removed for blog purposes):
In my prior comment, I was interpreting your position as having made exactly the sort of error I’m talking about here. Now I see that you were only intending to talk about the evolutionary origin of our moral beliefs, not the truth content of moral beliefs – because you don’t think moral beliefs have any truth content, we just evolved to have such beliefs.
However, an argument for the evolutionary origin of our moral beliefs – both our capacity to form moral beliefs and the substance of those beliefs – does not in and of itself support the conclusion that moral beliefs have no truth content. After all, it is surely the case that our capacity to form factual beliefs about the world and the substance of those beliefs are the products of evolution, yet I don’t think anyone would conclude on that basis that our factual beliefs have no truth content!
There are other arguments for a moral anti-realist position out there. (See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for an outline of the most popular versions, if you really want to delve into the crazy world of metaethics.) I don’t think any of those arguments are very persuasive, but they do raise challenges that anyone advocating a moral realist position needs to be able to answer. On the other hand, moral realist arguments pose challenges to the anti-realists as well – including the matter of why all the ways we think about and express moral beliefs are so thoroughly and completely rooted in moral realism and inconsistent with anti-realism. I think that an argument like yours, which explains the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs, would constitute a good answer to that sort of challenge for a moral anti-realist to adopt: But such an argument is not itself an argument for moral anti-realism, just a possible response to one class of objection that can be (and has been) made against moral anti-realism.
Posted by G Felis | February 19, 2009, 10:09 pmGFelis wrote: “In my prior comment, I was interpreting your position as having made exactly the sort of error I’m talking about here. Now I see that you were only intending to talk about the evolutionary origin of our moral beliefs, not the truth content of moral beliefs – because you don’t think moral beliefs have any truth content, we just evolved to have such beliefs.”
Right…. conditionally. You’ll get to it in a second.
GFelis wrote: “I think that an argument like yours, which explains the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs, would constitute a good answer to that sort of challenge for a moral anti-realist to adopt: But such an argument is not itself an argument for moral anti-realism, just a possible response to one class of objection that can be (and has been) made against moral anti-realism.”
Exactly. I do not mean to implicitly espouse moral anti-realism. This essay is a foundation, not a complete argument. I believe I am establishing that moral value statements are ad hoc categorizations without absolute truth value, but I also believe that the absence of absolute value does not prove the absence of real value. What I mean to say is that by beginning with a blank slate and providing empirical descriptions of human behavior along with working predictive theories to explain that behavior, we can build a strong case for *local* real value. That is, we can say that based on the empirical evidence that humans do X, Y, and Z, and these actions produce results A, B, and C, which produce feelings L, M, and O in the affected population, we can state that IF we are to have the best chance of producing results that are consistent with A and L, we ought to do X.
While this admittedly doesn’t provide an answer to a certain class of philosophical questions, it effectively bypasses the need for the answers based on pure old pragmatism. Science says human happiness is X. Science says humans want happiness. Science says doing A produces X. If we want to be happy, we ought to do A.
Obviously, this can get circular because I can say that we ought to want happiness and you can say we ought to want fairness (in the prescriptive sense) and we’re right back to where we started — observing normative data and scratching our heads. The way out of this, I believe, is the acknowledgment that human morality is an adaptable template, and there can be multiple valid answers to the question, “Which choice is the moral one?” Just as sexual selection is seen as producing ultimately successful offspring through an apparently arbitrary process (Why do peahens prefer tails and not combs?) we can imagine that human morality produces ultimate success (functional society) through a somewhat arbitrary process (we didn’t have to value fidelity, but we do) which is flexible within real limits. (For example, we can’t decide to form a functional society in which people randomly bludgeon small children to death and are viewed as cultural heroes. This is beyond our natural limits for morality, and can be said to have an absolute truth value of false.)
One could also return to the objection that happiness or fairness can’t be established as the correct measure for morality. This is a valid objection, of course. We can both create realistic examples where our moral sense would clearly view both the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of fairness as wrong in a particular instance. This, I believe, is because our evolutionarily designed moral sense is NOT a well constructed philosophy. It’s a hodge podge of often conflicting genetic “goals.” Reproduce at all costs, but try to survive at all costs. Love and protect your mate, but abandon her and take the better mate if the opportunity arises. Invest in your offspring, but abandon them if the odds of their survival are great enough that you can divert resources into the creation of a new offspring with a new mate, leaving the previous mother to invest more than her “fair share” and still ensure survival.
In short (yeah, right…) I believe attempting to create a realistic philosophical “true morality” is doomed to failure because we are not designed as “truly moral.” We are designed functionally moral enough to perpetuate society while feeling like we’re moral.
By the way, thanks for taking so much time with this conversation. This is fascinating!
Posted by hambydammit | February 19, 2009, 10:53 pmActually, taking time for this conversation is effectively part of my work: These issues are at the heart of my dissertation, and discussing them with an intelligent person who isn’t a professional philosopher really helps me clarify both the ideas and how to present them.
That said…
I think your take on the relationship between normative claims (values) and prescriptive claims (obligations) – i.e. the good and the right – is spot on. “If you value a state of affairs S and are faced with circumstances C, then do action A to bring about S,” is a useful way to look at the relationship between normative claim premises and prescriptive claim conclusions, i.e. what we want and what we should do to get it.
However, you seem to be failing to distinguish between universal prescriptive claims (like a moral rule or general principle) and specific prescriptive claims (a moral command or recommendation about what to do in a particular situation). A specific prescription is almost always derived from a universal prescription rather than directly from a normative claim or claims. For example, someone who believes that Kantian ethics are the best basis for making moral decisions would attempt to figure out how to apply the categorical imperative to a particular moral choice, not attempt to suss out what to do from scratch based on recognizing the absolute value of the rational will.
You seem to be saying that failure to generate specific prescriptive claims in all situations indicates a failure in establishing a sound universal prescriptive claim, or that it indicates a failure in identifying true normative claims – and I don’t think you’re right about that. But that’s awfully vague, so lemme ‘splain.
Ethical theory, speaking very broadly, is an attempt to accomplish at least these three basic tasks. (You knew the “three things” thing was comin’ eventually in this discussion, didn’t you?):
One, ethical theories attempt to establish some foundational value claim or claims to be true. Utilitarians argue for the universal value of pleasure, Kantians argue for the absolute value of the rational will, etc. I am taking your agenda to be some attempt to empirically determine what humans do value. This is dangerous territory, though, and you must be careful to distinguish between what humans place value on and what is actually valuable: That is, you need to be clear on the distinction between what we merely believe is valuable to us (individually or collectively) and what is valuable to us as a matter of fact rather than mere belief (whether we recognize that value or not). Sometimes I can’t tell whether you fail to make this distinction or if you just fail to be clear about it, but either way that’s something to keep an eye on as you continue to develop these arguments.
In any event, I will certainly grant that understanding human evolution is a fruitful approach to establishing facts about what is valuable to us in a straightforward functional/survival/reproduction sense: Working out the details of such a naturalized account of value is the central argument of my dissertation. (You’re thinking like I’m thinking, so you must be right! Philosophy is not a sport for the humble, folks…)
Two, ethical theories generate a universal prescriptive claim or claims – generally a single overarching ethical principle, such as the Principle of Utility or the Categorical Imperative. In your version, I see this idea played out in the talk about giving an empirical account of what we value in order to figure out generalizations about what we should do (in order to bring about the things we value).
Three, ethical theories attempt to establish some process for reliably applying those overarching moral principle to the thorny actuality of specific situations in the world to figure out where one’s moral duty lies in a given situation.
You correctly point out just how difficult that third task can be, but I think you draw too broad a conclusion from that difficulty. An ethical theory that fails in the first or second task – as I think both Utilitarianism and Kantian deontology do, for very different reasons – is a failure as an ethical theory, period. However, I think it is unreasonable and unwarranted to set the standards too high for this third task.
Ultimately, the third task is about how we go from general principles to specific recommended actions. Sometimes, as in your example where the values of fairness and happiness seem to lead to different prescriptive claims, genuine ethical conundrums where there is no single clear right thing to do are the result. But I don’t think the values at the heart of a given ethical theory or the universal principle(s) based on those values are exposed as fundamentally flawed when we run into an insoluble moral conundrum. As a useful illustrative analogy, does encountering a specific insoluble engineering problem expose that our engineering principles are flawed, or that the laws of physics underpinning those principles are flawed? I think not – or at least, not necessarily. Just as the universe sometimes presents us with a physical limit on our ability to solve certain specific practical problems, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that some situations create “moral impossibilities” where matters of genuine value are at odds with each other and no action is available which will not violate one important value or another. At best, better ethical theories may provide a way to prioritize values which can resolve many such problems; but there is no reason to assume that it is even remotely possible to resolve every such problem. It’s a messy universe full of messy human lives, and I see no reason to assume in advance that there is always one best solution to every conceivable concrete moral choice situation. In fact, I find it overwhelmingly easier to believe that sometimes we’re fucked no matter what we do.
Thus, the inability to provide a clear answer in every moral choice situation is not the indictment of ethical theory you *seem* to imply it is (and I emphasize the ‘seem’ because I admit I may be reading too much into your argument). The possibility of real moral conundrums does nothing to show that “moral value statements are ad hoc categorizations without absolute truth value…” And I’m not sure how anything else you’ve said shows that either, especially given that you do acknowledge the distinction between what we merely think is valuable and what is of genuine value to us with the very next clause: “…but I also believe that the absence of absolute value does not prove the absence of real value.”
I think that maybe some of this problem lies in unclear terminology: I’m not sure I know what you mean when you talk about ‘absolute value’ vs. ‘real value,’ although I *think* I get the gist. FSM knows that finding the right vocabulary to frame these issues without getting bogged down in jargon and constantly defining terms has been a constant struggle in my dissertation…
Posted by G Felis | February 20, 2009, 2:24 amG Felis wrote: “That is, you need to be clear on the distinction between what we merely believe is valuable to us (individually or collectively) and what is valuable to us as a matter of fact rather than mere belief (whether we recognize that value or not).”
In my mind, I have not been unclear, but rather, I have been silent. My path is to establish that humans do value things, and this is the foundation for morality. Subsequent investigation could certainly separate our beliefs from differing reality. An easy example that pops to mind is that we believe ourselves to be more altruistic than we are. We apparently have an ingrained selective memory that causes us to remember our acts of generosity with much more clarity and regularity than our acts of selfishness. We say that we value generosity, but when someone displays what *ought to be* admirable levels of self sacrifice, we chide them for not looking out for themselves enough.
Clearly, we are mistaken as to what our precise values are with regard to altruism. Science can and has helped us illuminate the empirical reality.
The real question, and it is one that I have not satisfactorily answered for myself, is what role our faulty beliefs might play in the real working out of the macro function of morality — forming cohesive society. In other words, are our misconceptions effective tools for accomplishing the real “evolutionary purpose” of morality, in the same way that our ingrained sense that “growing up” is equivalent to “starting a family” is certainly conducive to our species’ survival? If this is the case, what would be the effect of advocating a system of morality that effectively bypasses evolutionary mandates? Would it be practical or even remotely workable?
In another essay, I asked the rhetorical question of whether we can redefine our own morality such that we bypass our innate drive towards conspicuous consumption, effectively calling a ceasefire in the evolutionary arms race (at least in our little corner of the tree). I suppose I’m asking a similar question here. Is it possible for humans to rationally approach questions of morality, and where our strong emotional drives are found to be misguided towards our own ends, to choose to act against them — en masse?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I suspect that framing questions of morality as matters of local reality is at the very least the pragmatic way to go about finding the answer. (I know… definitions. I’m going to get there once I get my thoughts down.)
GFelis wrote: “In your version, I see this idea played out in the talk about giving an empirical account of what we value in order to figure out generalizations about what we should do (in order to bring about the things we value).”
Yes. The overarching principle would be something like evolutionarily derived pragmatism (although, definitions be damned… I don’t like some of the implications in that…) That is, that which is right is that which is empirically probable to lead to the practical achievement of that which we genuinely value, regardless of our subjective beliefs regarding those values.
I do need to be careful to stress again that I think it foolhardy to attempt to create an ethical model by which there is *a* correct answer in all cases. As I mentioned before, I believe our value system can be properly described as a bloody mess (in the British sense of the word.) We value things which are often inherently contradictory in certain circumstances. The existence of multiple valued goals which cannot be simultaneously achieved is, I think, the empirical proof that morality is subjective. That is, two humans could be well within our genetic “boundaries” when they reach different valid conclusions about an identical situation.
Just to make things more complicated, I believe we have a moral sense about things which are not always properly described as “moral” within the system I’m proposing. I can imagine a situation in which I would feel some emotion about an act, whether guilt or pride, that would ultimately be misplaced, as the act itself had no practical (real?) moral value. After the plague wipes out everyone in town, it cannot be considered wrong to take food from the grocery store without paying, but some people would undoubtedly feel guilt anyway.
Just as in any other system, our instincts (read: emotions) can only be trusted so far. Rather than appeal to utility or (gasp) a categorical imperative (doesn’t it seem like my idea would be the exact opposite of a categorical imperative?!) it seems that the truth of human morality is that utility, ingrained emotional states, social acceptance, and a handful of other conflicting factors create a far less cohesive model.
For comparison, when we speak of something like human vision, we speak of it in functional, if not completely accurate, generalities. We think of our vision as a detailed picture, and the reality is that the only detail we really see is right in front of us, and our brains are filling in the details in our periphery based on good guesses, memory, and recent input. Our eyes have all sorts of problems, from blind spots to our inability to see ultraviolet light (which would be damn helpful in a lot of situations). Yet, we think of and speak of our vision in broad generalizations that are technically wrong, but functional on a practical level.
In the same way that it would be wrong to try to reduce human visual perception to a single bumper sticker slogan, I believe it’s wrong to try to sum up human morality with a categorical imperative or to demand that we produce *THE* principle guiding all our moral decisions. I think that like the eye, morality is the culmination of millions of evolutionary steps, and (like I said) it wasn’t designed by God or a philosopher, but random, bumbling, sidestepping, pack rat natural selection.
GFelis wrote: “But I don’t think the values at the heart of a given ethical theory or the universal principle(s) based on those values are exposed as fundamentally flawed when we run into an insoluble moral conundrum.”
Nor do I. To carry your engineering analogy a little further, I think an accurate model of morality would be to suggest to the engineer that he has a truckload of standard building supplies, a computer, and a pile of cargo that needs to be in Hoboken by Thursday. With the pile, he could conceivably make a number of different vehicles, from a boat to a plane, and all would get the supplies to Hoboken by Thursday. The field of engineering provides us enough design tools that there is no correct answer, but there is a physical limit to what is possible.
In morality, the same could be said. Given a certain moral quandary, we have a number of values, each of which has its own merit, and we can tailor our moral decision to any of them and be within the acceptable bounds of “real morality.”
G Felis wrote: “Thus, the inability to provide a clear answer in every moral choice situation is not the indictment of ethical theory you *seem* to imply it is (and I emphasize the ’seem’ because I admit I may be reading too much into your argument).”
Yep. You’re thinking like a professional philosopher, not a guy writing “Morality for Dummies.”
Ok. Some attempts at clearer meanings:
When I say that moral judgments are ad hoc categorizations, I mean that we can only address a moral issue *after* we understand the significance of the act. This gets into sketchy territory because we can change reality by observing it, and because our own conceptions of “good” are hazy at best. It’s “good” that he skipped work because it worked out that he was able to perform CPR on an auto crash victim, but he wasn’t “good” for skipping work, but he’s a “good” person for performing CPR even though he got on the news and his boss saw that he wasn’t at home sick… etc, etc… So, was it a good or a bad thing to skip work? It was both, and it depends on our own ad hoc rationalization.
Essentially, I’m pointing out that attempts to preemptively label an act as good or bad miss the whole point that morality is about the ends, not the means. (Yeah, I know. I haven’t addressed intent yet.)
When I say “absolute” “real” and “local” value, I mean the following: A thing has absolute value when there is no way to objectively make a case for anything else. I hold that absolute value is not applicable to human morality. We can say that a thing is absolutely “green” because it empirically reflects light in way that falls within the scientific definition of “green” that we’ve established. We cannot say that a thing is absolutely “right” because there is no universally demonstrable scale by which we can make such a measure.
A thing has real value if there is a quality which is subjective yet empirically verifiable. The taste of broccoli can be either good or bad, and each quality is real, for broccoli does affect our tastebuds and olfactory receptors, and it does create a sensory perception which is perceived by humans as having value.
A thing has local value if it conforms to a situationally applicable scale. Slicing through the leg meat of a dead camel has no absolute value, but doing so in order to give the meat to your starving friend has local value. Within the local paradigm of feeding your starving friend, it has the value “good.” To the owner of the camel who cares not a whit for you or your friend, but only his loss of transport, it has the local value of “bad.” Both of these local values are real, for we can examine the consequences of the action with regard to two separate paradigms, and verify that they do or do not correspond to things which humans value.
Posted by hambydammit | February 20, 2009, 4:48 amActually, this misconstrues the distinction I intend to make. While it may be possible to distinguish between people *think* they value and what they actually *do* place value on, that’s not what I care about. What people individually or collectively place value on via their will or desire or instinct or whatever is largely arbitrary and idiosyncratic, probably too much so for any intelligible or useful results to follow from empirical investigation. After all, think how many billions of people intensely value the opinions of non-existent deities: If you’re really going to base your approach to morality on empirical evidence about what people value, you have to take all these conflicting fantasies into account… which, I suspect you’d agree, would not lead anywhere productive or useful.
In contrast, what I am interested in is what is genuinely valuable to people – whether or not they know it, whether or not they place value on it (consciously or subconsciously doesn’t matter). In other words, I am distinguishing between the noun value and the verb value – and I don’t care about the verb.
All value is value to some valuing entity. All good is good for some end to some creature whose end it is. There have been many attempts to establish conceptions of inherent good that do not depend on being good for someone, and they are all incoherent gibberish in my opinion. (Note: I am not saying that ‘intrinsic’ good is nonsense, only ‘inherent’ good. To say that something is intrinsically good/valuable just means that it is valuable for its own properties rather than for its contributions to some other valuable thing.) However, that doesn’t mean that value is dependent on beliefs or attitudes or consciousness in any way. There is a perfectly intelligible sense in which it is good for a paramecium to secure nutrition for itself and bad for it to be secured as nutrition by some other microorganism – an account of evolved value. That’s why the title of my dissertation is “Evolved Value and the Foundations of Ethical Theory.”
If I’m right that there is a difference between what people happen to value (verb) – whether that mental state of valuing is conscious or subconscious, whether its rooted in objective selective events or idiosyncratic personal/cultural backgrounds – and what is actually of value (noun) to people, making that distinction might help you sort through a lot of the ambiguities, confusions and hard issues you have been discussing here.
Posted by G Felis | February 20, 2009, 8:37 pmGFelis wrote: “In contrast, what I am interested in is what is genuinely valuable to people – whether or not they know it, whether or not they place value on it (consciously or subconsciously doesn’t matter). In other words, I am distinguishing between the noun value and the verb value – and I don’t care about the verb.”
That’s what I’m trying to say as well. Apparently I’m not doing a good job of it, though.
Will you finish your dissertation, for crying out loud?
Posted by hambydammit | February 20, 2009, 9:24 pmHeh. I’m hoping to finish my fourth and final chapter this weekend. Chapters 1-3 are finished and edited and re-edited, so Ch. 4 is the home stretch. If I don’t have a complete draft by the end of Monday, then I’ll be finishing up next weekend – but I’ll definitely have a complete, defense-ready draft by the end of Feb/beginning of March.
Posted by G Felis | February 20, 2009, 11:01 pm