I've noticed recently how sure everyone seems to be that their worldview- and all necessary conclusions flowing from that worldview- are correct. And I've noticed that after a worldview makes a truth claim about reality, adherents of that worldview act as if this claim is unavoidable, inevitable, and unquestionable. They act- and worse, argue- as if this claim stands on its own, and is not derived from or dependant on their particular worldview.
I'm calling this phenomenon Interpretive Dissonance, because it's advocating that we take as an axiom a truth claim that was arrived at only after the facts had been looked at. It's a reversal of the proper order of reasoning- going from "I believe A, which implies B" to "B is axiomatically true, therefore A must be true because it implies B".
For example, I recently had a conversation with one of my fundamentalist evangelical friends where I asked her if she had ever considered Catholicism. She told me she could never be a Catholic because "Catholics don't see the relationship with Jesus as personal. They think you need to go through a priest and through Mary to get to God." Now, leaving aside the question of whether or not this is accurate to Catholic theology, what was really interesting to me was this presumption that the only conceivable God of the universe would be her specific conception of a personal, relational God with Jesus as the go-between. It struck me was that the question in her mind wasn't "is Catholicism true?", but rather "does Catholicism conform to my current beliefs?" She had this idea that God must be personal, and (her understanding of) Catholicism didn't fit that arc- so she rejected Catholicism out of hand, before even considering that it might actually be true.
Not too long ago, I got into a debate about gay marriage with an old Bible teacher of mine. I am happy to listen to arguments against gay marriage (or homosexuality in general), and there are some decent ones (mostly centered around the natural law and preserving same-sex friendship). His position, however, was that the old testament explicitly set up the idea of "traditional" marriage Christianity advocates for today. I pointed out that, in the Old Testament, Eve is created as an afterthought to Adam, only once no other suitable partner could be found, and further that pretty much the entirety of the Old Testament promotes polygamy (and, in many cases, keeping a harem of concubines) as the proper ordering of sexual relationships. But he had reached this conclusion- that heterosexual monogamous marriages are the proper expression of human sexuality- and flatly could not conceive of a reality where this was not true. He had interpreted the New Testament and modern Protestant teaching (both of which do give a legitimate basis for "traditional" marriage) and was convinced that the Old Testament must not only be compatible with, but actually advocate for this same teaching. He wasn't looking at evidence and arriving at a conclusion, he was starting from the conclusion and working his way back to how to interpret the evidence.
But I think the most obvious incarnation of Interpretive Dissonance is in the Christian idea of needing a savior. I've been told repeatedly that I need to "recognize my need for a savior", and that my rejection of Christianity is really just a prideful rejection of my need to be saved. But here's the thing- the conclusion of our need for a savior comes only after our conclusion on the character and nature of God. I freely admit that if the Christian worldview is true, I absolutely need a savior- I am a sinner more than most. But it's ludicrous to say that I need a savior a priori to deciding what I believe about God. It's crazy to say that our knowledge of reality is so precisely calibrated that the only conception of God that could possibly exist would be one that sent his son as a savior for mankind. I have no problem with people who find that theology the most compelling, but I have a huge problem with people who assume I secretly agree with them.
I think there's a really easy proof against this a-priori-savior concept. Consider the people who lived before Christ. These people lived in the same world as us, but there was no savior yet. The necessity of a physical, relational, personal savior can't be an ontological imperitive, unless you're claiming a rational human being in this period would arrive at the conclusion without divine revelation that a savior must be coming in the future. Other religions talk about needing to be saved/forgiven/recieve grace from God (notably Islam, which basically says it's God's volitional forgiveness that gets believers into heaven, since no human acts are good enough), and there's nothing about reality that inherently requires a physical human incarnation of God to act as our eternal savior. That may be the most compelling narrative- and it may in fact be true- but a claim that it is necessary is either a claim of divine revelation of its necessity, or a claim of a complete and unflawed understanding of the character, nature, and choices of God.
I've found Interpretive Dissonance to be really common among evangelicals, but this is by no means a flaw unique to protestants, or even unique to the religious. For example, I've been really disappointed with the response to Leah's conversion. Scant few of the comments I've read have been reasonable objections to her epistemology or challenges to specific Catholic beliefs. Mostly, it's been condescending Catholics playing the "a real search for truth always leads to Catholicism" card, and frighteningly dogmatic atheists railing against the stupidity of religion. Both groups (definitely not everyone involved, but a significant portion) are taking this position that the other side is absolutely nuts. They don't seem interested in looking at the evidence and seeing where it leads, but rather have decided where the evidence should lead, and are going to interpret the evidence in such a way, no matter what the evidence is.
And that's the real problem with Interpretive Dissonance. It stops asking the question "is this true?" and starts trying to conform evidence to the hypothesis. It's every bad scientific and statistical methodology rolled into one. Once we believe something to be true, we shouldn't be locked into it to the point where everything we see must support that conclusion. All that is is a recipe for believing in perpetuity the first thing that happens to clear our Bayesian threshold. It's OK to have conflicting evidence. In fact, any position that reasonable people disagree on should have conflicting evidence. If you legitimately don't see the conflicting evidence in the cases where reasonable people disagree (even within your own worldview), then you probably need to jettison your interpretive practice, because you're doing it wrong.
I do want to be clear that I'm not advocating that everyone "play nice and get along". These are important questions, and we should be trying to convince each other of what we think the truth is. But we need to do it by rationally weighing the evidence the other side presents and actually updating our priors when we find good evidence in either direction
Finally, in the interest of using actual scientific terminology, I should point out that the idea I'm trying to get at with Interpretive Dissonance is really some combination of anchoring bias, the backfire effect, confirmation bias, the observer-expectancy effect, and (most directly) belief bias.
Interesting post!
ReplyDeleteI've noticed this as well, but I suspect that when theists say that we need a saviour, it's because they fail to be able to conceive of not believing in God. Either that, or they've simply bought into someone else's dogma that this is how you go about converting people.
Since attempts to witness to me are just so bad, I wrote a blog post describing to theists how they should go about trying to convert me: http://etratio.blogspot.com/2011/11/basic-guide-to-converting-me.html
It's interesting you should mention natural law morality, since natural law morality has always struck me as interpretive dissonance of almost exactly the same sort as biblical inerrantism.
ReplyDeleteIf natural law morality is truly meant to be descriptive rather than normative, then why isn't any action that a person actually manages to do, by definition moral? This is certainly the attitude we take in the sciences -- if a "physical law" appears to have been violated, we either conclude that the "physical law" in question was only an approximation of the true law, or we conclude that what we thought we observed didn't actually happen.
Once you let natural law mean something other than simply a description of what people do, you end up making lots of arbitrary choices to make "natural law morality" fit your own moral preconceptions. So if you want to own slaves, you will say, as Aristotle did, that some people are natural born slaves. If you want to make homosexuality morally permissible, you will say, with significantly more evidence, that some people are naturally born homosexual (Of course, you should be careful reasoning along these lines, because some people are natural born sociopaths too.) Then you have the Catholics -- who think it's ok to invalidate a marriage based on one of the participants being too young to be fertile, the same gender as the other participant, or too closely related to the other participant, but not ok to invalidate a marriage because a participant is too old to be fertile, a different race from the other participant, a carrier of a genetic risk factor other than incest etc.
The fact of the matter is, moral terms, like the rest of language, are culturally defined. (That said, morality, insofar as it actually guides our actions, is not infinitely flexible. If morality is defined too strangely, we may discover that we are no longer motivated to act "morally.")But for some, that's not good enough, so they invent an elaborate framework for justifying what they were going to do anyway.
I get scared every time I read something you write, because it invariably makes a ton of sense, but leaves me feeling like I shouldn't even bother with life. It seems like your views are really well thought out and really internally consistent, but they generally totally abandon all the things I tend to think of as "human"- or rather, all of the things that I value without having an explanation for. Thanks for your thoughts Ray.
DeleteOh my. I certainly don't want to inspire you to give up on life. I suppose that never having been even remotely religious, I have no particular attachment to the religious model of human value, and I forget that for those who have been religious, it is difficult to separate the act of valuing a human from that model -- or at least I think that's what's going on. For the record I don't feel I have ever abandoned art, music, science, empathy, joy, or love in anything I've written. These things all exist and I value every one of them. Do you feel I have contradicted myself, or is there something else I'm missing?
Delete"I forget that for those who have been religious, it is difficult to separate the act of valuing a human from that model -- or at least I think that's what's going on."
DeleteYes, that's exactly what's going on. I've said before (somewhere on this blog...) that I think it's pretty easy to go from "humans have value" to a reasonable moral standard. It's the "humans have value" part that I have trouble getting to through Atheism.
"Do you feel I have contradicted myself, or is there something else I'm missing?"
I think valuing empathy and love is a contradiction in a materialistic worldview (depending what we mean by "valuing"). Valuing them as a subjective experience is one thing (love still feels like love, even if it's actually just a chemical reaction), but valuing them as normative to me goes to far. Ultimately, why should empathy matter? Are we just saying it matters because we're hoping other people reciprocate our empathy? This seems at the very least like a contradiction to observed human behavior (for example, the Tragedy of the Commons), and at worst wishful thinking (not to mention a sub-optimal survival strategy for me as an individual). Likewise, love is a powerful emotion, but once we recognize it as a simple hormonal and chemical reaction, it starts to seem like our bodies are trying to trick us into having babies. More to the point, if we're just after good-feeling chemical reactions that alter our physical and mental state, then I don't know why we should value love over marijuanna, for example.
It seems like the Atheist can make the arbitrary choice to value art, music, empathy, love, etc., but there's not much of a reason to. The Atheist ought to do whatever makes him happy, regardless of its effect on other people- he should only care about other people insomuch as it directly or indirectly affects his own happiness. If empathy and love make him happy, then go for it- but if not, then go ahead and be a selfish ingrate (so long as he doesn't alienate anyone who might be useful to you later). Interestingly, Atheists don't seem categorically "less moral" than theists- even though it seems to me that they should be.
There are a number of places where I disagree with you in reaching the conclusion that I have contradicted myself, by valuing the things I value.
DeleteFirst of all, I am not convinced that I have made a normative claim. And even if I had, I don't see how treating altruistic desires as normative is any more problematic than treating selfish desires as normative. I do not see how living according to an altruistic set of moral standards requires the supernatural any more than using a dictionary to check the validity of a move in a game of Scrabble.
Second of all, the notion that we are tricked into acting lovingly by our bodies seems hopelessly confused to me. To me, tricking requires there be two parties -- a tricker and a trickee, who desire different things. Further, the tricker must convince the trickee that an action will lead to outcome A, desired by the trickee, when the tricker actually knows said action will really lead to outcome B, desired by the tricker. So, who is this self distinct from the body, and what desires does he have apart from those desires that the body causes him to have? What incorrect impression does this self have about the likely outcome of loving actions?
That said, what I really want to challenge is the notion that "humans have value" or worse still "humans have objective value" is a good basis for a moral system. (And here I am being rather directly inspired by David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 years," which I am currently reading and which I strongly recommend adding to your reading list.) Think for a moment, what people generally think of as the ultimate measure of objective value -- and it's not very flattering to humans. The answer is GOLD (Just ask Ron Paul.) So if you really take the premise that humans are valuable literally, you are saying that humans may be bought, sold, or replaced (Like Job's original family in the famous Biblical folk tale.) This is the most dehumanizing ethics possible -- that of slavery. Likewise, treating human value as objective denies my ability to value my wife in a way that no other man does, without being an irrational fool who values this "commodity" far more than it is objectively worth. Thus, at least in the most literalistic sense, denying the subjectivity of the value of a human is in effect to deny our humanity and to reduce the human subject to an inanimate object.
"First of all, I am not convinced that I have made a normative claim."
DeleteFair enough. If that's the case, are you saying that your choice to value these things is arbitrary? Not in the sense that you don't have a reason to value these things, but rather that you don't have a basis to challenge someone else who doesn't value these things? If not, that seems to me to qualify as normative.
"I don't see how treating altruistic desires as normative is any more problematic than treating selfish desires as normative"
I actually agree with this point. But my problem is not that I find atheism to necessitate the claim "people should be selfish". Rather, my problem is that I cannot find a way for atheism to necessitate the claim "people should not be selfish". My problem is that atheism doesn't seem to make any normative claims at all- it has nothing to say about the way we ought to live. I may well choose to value love and joy, but I may well also choose (if it is a choice) to be a sociopath. And sociopaths can't be stopped because they're wrong, but only because the rest of us recognize that it's in our best interest to stop them.
"I do not see how living according to an altruistic set of moral standards requires the supernatural any more than using a dictionary to check the validity of a move in a game of Scrabble"
Because we have to agree on what language we're playing Scrabble in before we can talk about the validity of a move. We have to establish why altruism is desirable before we use it as our standard. I understand why I might desire other people to have altruism, just not why I should desire for myself to have altruism.
"To me, tricking requires there be two parties -- a tricker and a trickee, who desire different things."
I would say evolution is the tricker here. Evolution doesn't desire things, it just rewards behavior that is advantageous to genetic propagation. It rewards the conviction that love is something beyond chemical and hormonal attraction, even if it's not (or at least for me personally, I'm a lot more likely to pursue love- and therefore genetic propagation- if I believe its motivated by something other than biology). If evolution is rewarding behavior or beliefs that are incorrect mappings onto reality, than I would argue it is tricking us.
"what I really want to challenge is the notion that "humans have value" or worse still "humans have objective value" is a good basis for a moral system."
DeleteWell, let me say that I wasn't trying to assign an economic value to a human (though interestingly, we as a society seem to do this all the time. Plenty of people starve or die of curable disease every day). What I really mean by "value" is that the human experience matters- it's the conviction that I should care about what another human is experiencing solely because another conscious being is experiencing it. I suppose if we want to play the game of assigning monetary value to human life, we could, but I don't know that the objective-human-value camp has any more trouble than the non-objective-human-value camp. You're saying (if I understand you correctly) that there's no conversion rate between "human" and "gold"- but how is that any different than saying "the objective value of a human is arbitrarily large"? I guess I'm saying I don't see an alternative here- do humans not have value?
"Likewise, treating human value as objective denies my ability to value my wife in a way that no other man does, without being an irrational fool who values this "commodity" far more than it is objectively worth."
Interesting. This is actually my problem with subjectively valuing humans- there's no reason to value one person at all, and valuing someone else seems to make me the "irrational fool who values another human far more than it's actually worth". To me, this problem is only exacerbated by saying that another human isn't actually worth anything to begin with other than the amount of worth we subjectively assign to it. Moreover, I think I'm going to argue that all value is objective value. I don't really understand what it would mean for something to be valuable only subjectively without it being irrational. Family heirlooms, perhaps, fit this description, but sentimental value does strike me as somewhat irrational.
Thanks for the book recommendation- I'll add it to my list!
"To me, this problem is only exacerbated by saying that another human isn't actually worth anything to begin with other than the amount of worth we subjectively assign to it."
DeleteI am not saying that the objective value of a human is $0. I am saying that "objective value" is an incoherent concept, or at least underspecified. (Even Gold has at best intersubjective value.) The idea that "the value of X is Y" implies a person (i.e. a subject) who is willing to sacrifice Y to obtain X -- if necessary. This confusion is like the following conversation: "How far away is Denver?" "There's no answer I can give you that doesn't depend on where you are." "Ah. So there is no objective distance from Denver. I must be in Denver right now."
But what about the market price (leaving aside for the momement the fact that a market is just a collection of many subjects.) Isn't it irrational to value something for more than its market price? No. It may be irrational to pay more (although that's still dependent upon what you're trying to accomplish. If you're trying to help the seller out, it's not irrational to pay extra.) But this is only because the presence of the market gives you the option of still getting the thing you value, and also having some extra money. In fact, it is ONLY rational to purchase something if its subjective value exceeds its market value -- otherwise, you aren't any better off after the transaction than when you started, and you wasted a few moments of your time making the trade.
I guess the point I'm trying to illustrate above is that rationality is a standard of belief, not a standard of action. It only becomes a standard of action, if you assume something about the agent's basic desires (i.e. those that are not desired as a means to a separate end.) Hence when a sociopath acts wrongly, it is not because he falls short of the standard of "rationality", but because he falls short of a standard of action which it is customary to refer to as "morality."
"Because we have to agree on what language we're playing Scrabble in before we can talk about the validity of a move. We have to establish why altruism is desirable before we use it as our standard."
It seems like you're holding these two normative systems to different standards. You don't say we have to agree *WHY* we're playing scrabble in the language we are playing it in. Why do you need the extra step to make altruism normative?
"I'm a lot more likely to pursue love- and therefore genetic propagation- if I believe it's motivated by something other than biology"
Well, I suppose I can't call this desire irrational, as that would be contradicting myself, but it seems rather odd to me. It sounds like you're saying you have a basic desire to *minimize* your evolutionary fitness. Does this desire also tempt you to refrain from eating? ("I'm less likely to pursue tasty food if I believe that my REAL motivation is keeping my body alive long enough to pass along my genes?"
I guess I'm not entirely satisfied with my previous comment. I don't think I disagree with anything I said there, but it seems kind of unfocussed. As such, maybe it's better to go back to why I brought up the book.
DeleteSo, one of the theses of Graeber's book is that all the major philosophies and religions of antiquity (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam) emerged in the wake of the invention of coinage, and that they were more or less directly inspired by the novel experience of the money economy. So much so that almost all of our moral terminology derives from economic terms, especially debt (If you doubt this, take a look at the parables of Jesus and count how many directly concern money or debt.) At the same time, though, the money economy of antiquity was almost unimaginably brutal, bringing with it slavery and military conquest on an unprecedented scale (The governments minted coins to pay soldiers and extracted taxes from conquered peoples in coin to encourage the conquered peoples to provision the soldiers, in return for the coins needed to pay their taxes. Those who couldn't pay were sold into slavery to pay off their debts, and of course captured soldiers were sold immediately, since they owed the captors their lives). Therefore, the philosophies of the time were also an attempt to protest against the money economy, and the result is often very confused.
Anyway, at least to me, your quest for "the objective value of a human" strikes me as just this sort of confusion. Your first attempt to define what you wanted from a moral system sounded suspiciously like the gold standard. Your second attempt "humans matter," is, at least etymologically, a reference to material gain (matter, materialism, get it.) Your third attempt (I should care, because ...) is less obvious, but I think the word "because" gives it away. It's as if you're trying to sell the action of caring for that which is on the other side of the "because".
In short, I think you're trying to come up with a justification for wanting what you want in terms of the logic of the market. However, as I pointed out in my last post, the logic of the market relies on you wanting something in the first place (and wanting it more than what the market asks in return), so it cannot be the ultimate justification for your desires.
"The idea that "the value of X is Y" implies a person (i.e. a subject) who is willing to sacrifice Y to obtain X -- if necessary."
DeleteFor the sake of argument, I'm going to that this is a pretty good approximation of love. The more you love someone, the more you would sacrifice for them. When I say I love my family more than I love a stranger, I'm saying that I'm willing to sacrifice more for the wellbeing of my family than I am for a stranger.
It seems like you're trying to turn me saying "humans have objective value" into me saying "I think you should be able to own someone for the right price". That's not what I'm saying at all. But I am saying that there is some amount I would be willing to sacrifice for the wellbeing of someone else- even if I've never met them.
"This confusion is like the following conversation: "How far away is Denver?" "There's no answer I can give you that doesn't depend on where you are." "Ah. So there is no objective distance from Denver. I must be in Denver right now.""
I don't want to get too sidetracked here, since it's obviously just an analogy, but I think you've got it the wrong way around. Just because our distance from Denver is dependent on external facts doesn't mean there's that objective distance isn't a real thing. We are still some distance away from Denver, even if we don't know that distance, and even if that distance depends on where we are right now.
I'm on board will all the points you made about the economic marketplace.
"I guess the point I'm trying to illustrate above is that rationality is a standard of belief, not a standard of action. It only becomes a standard of action, if you assume something about the agent's basic desires (i.e. those that are not desired as a means to a separate end.) Hence when a sociopath acts wrongly, it is not because he falls short of the standard of "rationality", but because he falls short of a standard of action which it is customary to refer to as "morality.""
Yep. On board here as well. But I don't think this answers our question of where morality comes from. Specifically, we talk about "the agent's basic desires", but morality is trying to tell us what those desires should be. I'm not saying I need my morality to work like my economy, just that I need my morality to have some objective basis
"You don't say we have to agree *WHY* we're playing scrabble in the language we are playing it in. Why do you need the extra step to make altruism normative?"
...but I would demand we talk about why we're playing scrabble in a particular language if you made the normative claim that "Scrabble must only be played in language X." It seems to me that any normative claim we make needs justification. If that justification is utilitarianism (as is the justification for most of our laws), then so be it- but I care a lot less about utilitarian laws than I do about morality. Perhaps that is a shortcoming of mine. Or perhaps it's a shortcoming of utilitarian morality.
"Well, I suppose I can't call this desire irrational, as that would be contradicting myself, but it seems rather odd to me. It sounds like you're saying you have a basic desire to *minimize* your evolutionary fitness."
It's not so much that I want to minimize evolutionary fitness, it's more that I just don't give a rip about evolutionary fitness. Why should I? Evolution is great at producing one thing: organisms that effectively reproduce. Why should I care? I'm not going to be around after I die- so why should I care if my progeny is? (I realize that you and most other atheists don't share this view, and this is a super complicated topic. But FWIW, that's my reasoning)
"Does this desire also tempt you to refrain from eating? ("I'm less likely to pursue tasty food if I believe that my REAL motivation is keeping my body alive long enough to pass along my genes?""
DeleteSort of, actually. I eat because it causes me discomfort not to. I eat good food because it gives me pleasure. But I don't value good food the way I value morality. I don't consider it normative to like chocolate. And I don't want to disincentivize myself or other people from not liking chocolate.
"all the major philosophies and religions of antiquity (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam) emerged in the wake of the invention of coinage, and that they were more or less directly inspired by the novel experience of the money economy... Therefore, the philosophies of the time were also an attempt to protest against the money economy, and the result is often very confused."
Interesting. I've never heard this argument before, and I definitely have a knee-jerk reaction against the cause/effect relationship of money and religion, but I look forward to (someday) reading it for a fully fleshed-out argument
"Anyway, at least to me, your quest for "the objective value of a human" strikes me as just this sort of confusion. "
This may well be true- I have on numerous occasions been accused of thinking of everything in economic terms. That said, I don't understand what it would mean to try to talk about value in any other terminology. The reason we have currency is that it's liquid- we can turn gold into anything else that has value, because we have an exchange rate between "gold" and "Asset X". How do you weight the relative moral value of two things? How do you make moral decisions when there isn't a clear winner? Suppose you had to choose between saving a child and an adult? Or a child and two adults? Or a family member and a stranger? Or a family member and ten strangers? We still need a liquid something if we're going to make decisions with more than one free variable. I'm fine if you want to use a different word than "value", since "value" sort of implies an exchange rate between the moral and the physical, but I don't understand what kind of system you could possible be using that doesn't depend of fungible assets of some kind.
"In short, I think you're trying to come up with a justification for wanting what you want in terms of the logic of the market. However, as I pointed out in my last post, the logic of the market relies on you wanting something in the first place (and wanting it more than what the market asks in return), so it cannot be the ultimate justification for your desires."
I see what you're saying, and perhaps my terminology is unnecessarily conflated with economics, but I'm not shooting for a justification of wanting what I want in a market framework. I'm looking for a justification of the normative claim that I should value/care about/want something in the first place.
Truth be told, I don't understand the alternative you're offering up. You're pointing out- fairly- that I tend to use market terminology to get at this idea that I should care about humans, but I don't see what you're pointing to as a better way. You seem to agree with me in principle that there are some normative claims we can/should be making about humanity and how we ought to treat each other, but I don't see what basis you're using to make this claim.
Also, sorry for my habitual massive delay between comment responses XD I find that I have to put a few hours into thinking about things to write a semi-coherent response, and finding chunks of contiguous time to sit down and write them is depressingly difficult
DeleteIf I seem like I'm not offering an alternative to "objective morality," that is because it has not really been my intent here. I think we are roughly agreed as far as how morality works in practice.
DeleteMy intent is rather to question if you really know what you're asking for when you say you want morality to be "objective" and whether, if you nailed down what you were asking for, you would want it.
Alternatively, you may discover that morality is objective in the sense you're looking for. e.g. "killing people for fun is morally wrong" is probably no more nor less an objective statement than "stop signs are red." Note that the latter statement depends on the definition of the word "red," and there is no absolute agreement regarding where red stops and pink, brown, orange, and purple start, and in neither case is believing the statement inconsistent with any particular course of action, unless you assume something about the desires of the person who holds the belief.
I suppose I should illustrate, why I don't think you know what you're asking for, so here's an example:
"morality is trying to tell us what those desires should be."
This is problematic for a number of reasons:
1) In general it's a bad sign if your definition of morality contains the word should. "Should" is usually used in the construction -- "you should do X if you want Y". If you drop the second part, it's usually because the Y is clear from context. In the case of proposed definitions of morality, the implicit intent is usually "you should do X if you want to be moral" -- which renders the whole thing circular.
2)Unless you are like Leah and think morality is a person, it's not morality that's trying to tell us what our desires should be, it's whoever is making statements using moral terminology. On the bright side, this helps us fill in the "Y" without being circular (the goals that would be accomplished by doing what we "should" are of course those of the person making the moral statement -- or at least some subset that the moralizer thinks (often correctly) that we share.)
On the other hand. Here is a statement of your moral principles that does not seem to rely on external standard of morality at all, and it seems quite satisfying:
"there is some amount I would be willing to sacrifice for the wellbeing of someone else- even if I've never met them."
Here is a statement that can be true, whether or not anyone else is willing to make the same sacrifice -- and, as we noted before, rationality does not militate against your willingness any more than it would militate for the willingness of someone else. Further, it may be correct to say that you would not be a moral person without that willingness -- you can certainly define the word "moral" that way without inconsistency, and in doing so you would be consistent with how other people use the word -- and that's really about all you can ask of terminology that isn't standardized for use in mathematics and the natural sciences.
Anyway, hopefully I've at least helped you be somewhat more comfortable with the way you've concluded the world works. In any event, we should probably wrap this thread up, since I really shouldn't be taking over your blog so much.
You've certainly given me some things to think about. Thanks Ray.
DeleteLest you think I'm only ever argumentative I'll say "Guilty as charged!". If our discussion regarding morality has taught me anything it's that I cannot assume that we are working from the same basic beliefs (i.e. moral duties exist). It seems that the question of morality comes down to which you hold with more surety, the metaphysical system or the ethics. I realize that this is something that Leah has covered and which I do a grave injustice. Thanks for putting up with me.
ReplyDeleteI understand where you're going with your "ethics is more certain than metaphysics" line of reasoning (Trying to inspire metaphysical backsliding as it were.) I however see it as a reason not to ground ethics in metaphysics in the first place. Metaphysics is grossly uncertain. There is no cross cultural agreement on metaphysics and there never has been (Certainly not if you consider the number of gods and the identities of their human messengers to be metaphysical questions.) Thinkers as diverse as Al Ghazali, Wittgenstein, and Lao Tzu have offered strong arguments that can be read as implying that the entire enterprise of metaphysics is futile. And yet, all around the world people continue to choose to be kind to strangers, and to sit on juries that lock up murderers and set the falsely accused free. Do you really think that all this happens because people secretly agree on the ontological status of moral duties?
DeleteHi Ray, Jake and I have been having a discussion on morality centering on infanticide. While I hold certain that it is never ethical for any society to murder babies despite acceptance among some, ancient Rome for example, Jake (as I understand him) holds more certain that morality is relative and in societies that generally accept infanticide, it can be ethical. Perhaps metaphysics was a bad word choice, maybe ethical framework would be better, because I'm not sure how our disagreement actually relates to your statement about metaphysics.
DeleteHi Jennifer. I guess the question is what is your goal in your discussion with Jake. If it is to recruit him to the cause of ending any existing infanticide in the modern world, whether or not it occurs within a culture that accepts infanticide, then I suspect you've already won (at least assuming said infanticide can be ended without excessive state violence.)
DeleteWhy do I suspect this? There are two kinds of moral relativism: Normative and Descriptive. Normative moral relativism says that we are morally obligated not to interfere with the ethical systems of foreign cultures, whether those ethical systems agree with our own or not. Descriptive moral relativism, on the other hand, limits its scope to pointing out that when Plato or Aristotle advocates that people act "ethically," he does not mean to advocate against infanticide or slavery, nor does anything he means to advocate logically entail ending slavery or infanticide. It would thus be misleading to translate Plato or Aristotle's word "Ethics" in such a way that infanticide or slavery must be unethical.
I suspect that Jake is a descriptive moral relativist and not a normative moral relativist. If this is the case, nothing prevents Jake from acting according to an ethical framework that forbids infanticide, or even judging the ancient Greeks by such a framework. Descriptive moral relativism would only prevent Jake from claiming that this ethical framework was the one by which the ancient Greeks judged themselves.
On the other hand, if your goal is to make Jake believe in your god, which seems like what you were going for in your first comment, then my point about metaphysics is entirely relevant. Your argument, if I get you, is as follows: If ethical statements are really cryptic references to the nature of the one true God, then everyone who claims to want to be "ethical," really wants the same thing. This is nice because there is no longer a possibility of ethical persuasion failing due to conflicting goals -- only bad reasoning.
There are two very big practical problems with this though.
1) As different as ethical systems have been and continue to be, religions are even more variable. It just looks a lot easier to get people agree not to kill infants than it does to get people to agree to monotheism and divine command theory. (For another example, the British did a pretty good job of ending Sati and weakening the Caste system, but didn't even make a dent in the more abstract Hindu beliefs.) Worse still, there's loads of evidence that many people who use ethical terminology do not mean it as a reference to divine nature. Plato comes pretty close to explicitly denying it in his dialogue Euthyphro.
2)Even granting the premise that ethics comes from God, people don't seem to be able to reason consistently from it. Indeed, if you think the one true god is the God of the Bible, the combination of Matthew 5:18 and Deuteronomy 20, at least in its most straightforward reading, seems to imply that all sorts of awful things are ethical, including infanticide (provided that the infants in question are gentiles in the land of Israel.)
"I suspect that Jake is a descriptive moral relativist and not a normative moral relativist."
DeleteBingo. This.