As I just wrote on another brief blog entry, the dialogue on “Hitchens’s Second Question” has been continuing at a rapid pace for over a month now. It has now divided into two separate questions, and I’m opening up two new threads to deal with them separately.
The entry preceding this post is on whether there is grounding for morality outside of theism. This one is on whether such grounding really matters. Discussion on this thread should be focused on that topic.
To catch up on this discussion from the Hitchens thread, I suggest you begin here, and read at least three or four comments following that one.
Additional Explanation Added Tuesday Morning, per Charlie’s Advice:
The discussion here is not about moral behavior. Several of us worked hard in the earlier thread to keep that clear. It is also not about whether non-theists can live moral lives. That thread began (see the link above) with a strong affirmation that they can; in fact, some readers would consider it surprisingly strong. The discussion is about the grounding for moral duties and values, which I have defined loosely as
An answer to the question, “I don’t believe D moral duty or value applies to me, and I want you to tell me why I should. You might have some instrumental or pragmatic reasons for me to practice D, or you may tell me D is ‘what we customarily do in our culture,’ but I don’t know why D should be considered good in itself, or why I should take it on as a value or duty of my own.”
A proper ground for morals would be something that, if true and if understood by the subject (the questioner, in this case) to be true, would provide sufficient reason for the subject to change his or her mind about the goodness of the behavior, value, or duty in question. It would explain how said behavior, value or duty actually is good in itself; not merely instrumental, pragmatic, or customary.
It would do so by reference to some condition of reality that can bear the weight placed upon it. For example, if it is suggested that D is good because it contributes to reproductive fitness, then reproductive fitness’s goodness would have to be good in itself (or based on something else that is good in itself).
I apologize for being repetitious (this material was in the last blog entry), but I expect some readers to come to this blog entry without having read any others.
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Possibly related posts (automatically generated):
Hitchens asked the wrong question, anyway.
“Can you name any right action or moral thought, performed or uttered by a religious person, which could not have been performed or uttered by an unbeliever?”
Here is the question he should be asking (or should be asked):
“Can one truly find morality apart from an absolute being? And, what one right action or moral thought, performed or uttered by an unbeliever is not borrowed from the Judeo-Christian ethic which has God as its source?”
Then, I would ask, what one culture is there that has been influenced by the ethics of Scripture (i.e. God’s morality) and has had a majority of people who consistently lived these ethics that has not treated its women, children, and most vulnerable people with greater dignity than secular and pagan cultures?
I am going to offer that those arguing against the Christian perspective on the previous thread have advanced a position that accepts that morals are not grounded in the sense that Tom has been discussing it.
It has been admitted and agreed that the moral systems they are left with entail some kind of relative morality that we define for ourselves rather arbitrarily and in which there are no absolute oughts, where we create the relevant oughts for and by ourselves, and that nature does not possess these oughts. Further, morals are fluid in time and space, between cultures and subjects and individuals, and what commonality exists can be explained by our common evolutionary ancestry.
I would say this admits that morality is not grounded and demonstrates that such grounding does matter.
Tony said that atheists do not see their lack of belief in the existence of God as having any moral consequence whatsoever. The above admits one consequence in and of itself – the admission of relativism and arbitrary morality – and demonstrates the beginnings of the resulting consequences.
These dictate immediately a loss of a true and absolute right and wrong. They also destroy the concept of justice, replacing the idea of “deserve” with a utilitarian “reward/punishment” scheme. The very next step is that all one has to do to avoid the only consequence of disobeying the standard, that being his punishment, is to avoid detection. He might be foolish, as he would be walking perilously close to the ledge, but he s not wrong. Since he can be no more right or wrong than his potential punishers and he can avoid the only consequence, society’s punishment, then why not violate its standards?
Is this an argument from consequences? No. It does not follow from the failure of a relativistic morality that relativism is false. But the question on this thread is “does it matter?” Yes, it matters.
Charlie,
You wrote:
Sort of. But I don’t think arbitrary belongs in there, for one. I would say that what we call morals are predictable behaviors of social animals. I would say that morals are anything but arbitrary. They are contingent, explainable, and predictable.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by moral here. Do I think that morality as I understand it has moral consequences to it? Are you saying that I should not allow myself to understand something because it should not be so?
Well, as I said above I don’t believe what we call morals are arbitrary. But I think you’re broader question would be “How do we impose our morality holding what I believe to be true about the nature of morality?”
I think this question makes two bad assumptions: that morality as I understand it has no grounding, and that theistic morals are reliably grounded. But on a broader scale, I would come down on the side of saying that the question doesn’t really matter.
HI Tony,
So you didn’t agree with all of Adonais’ innocuous statements afterall. Okay, so we move on from here.
Not at all. I can’t quite see how you read that in but I guess it helps with the dismissiveness.
First of all, I quite explicitly said that unfavourable consequences do not argue against the truth of a proposition and, adding to that, I don’t advocate for willful ignorance of the truth.
I outlined one practical consequence of such an ungrounded morality.
But you still agree that morality is what we “define for ourselves and in which there are no absolute oughts, where we create the relevant oughts for and by ourselves, and that nature does not possess these oughts. Further, morals are fluid in time and space, between cultures and subjects and individuals, and what commonality exists can be explained by our common evolutionary ancestry.” So, after striking the word “arbitrary”, how do you respond?
No, it’s quite obvious how we impose our morality. We do so with persuasion sometimes and force, domination, laws and prisons at other times.
The question is, in the absence of absolute morality (and, therefore, justice), how do we justify it?
This question did not make these assumptions but uses these points as argued for in the previous thread. You don’t agree? There is a thread for your argument that you can ground morality without theism. I will gladly engage it there. This thread is the one that asks whether it matters that morality not be grounded in the manner described by Tom.
[...] or not an athiest can be moral, but is there any grounding for that morality. Tom Gilson, at Thinking Christian has been discussing that question in a couple of recent blog posts. I don’t think morality [...]
Hi Charlie,
You wrote:
I guess that somehow my previous qualifiers “it looks like” and “sort of” and “with the possible exception of” didn’t tip you off that I was NOT expressing 100% agreement with Adonais’s statements. Thanks for misrepresenting me.
Speaking of misrepresentation, Adonais wrote this:
which it appears you felt is best summed up like this:
Only those are your words above, not Adonais’s, despite the fact that you’re now representing your re-write as one of Adonais’s statements. (“So you didn’t agree with all of Adonais’ innocuous statements afterall.)
So, it looks like you’re accusing me of expressing 100% confidence when I in fact took pains to express my qualification, and that you also are accusing me of not agreeing with a statement of Adonis’s when in fact you wrote the statement, not Adonais.
Charlie, I imagine that you’re going to say that I’m fighting over technicalities instead of substance. But it’s impossible to argue substance with someone who mis-represents my words and those of others. (Also, Adonais is clearly better educated on this topic than me. Not only am I loathe to speak for someone else, but all I could contribute, what with Adonais being locked out of this discussion further, is my much poorer understanding of an argument that Adonais was best able to put forth and defend.)
I’ll look into the rest of your comments later and see if there’s anything I can add there that aids in the substance of this discussion. Now, instead of pursuing this nature of questioning, I think my time might be better spent going to see if I can re-locate a question Tom says he’s waiting for me to answer.
Hi Tony,
I didn’t misrepresent you. I asked you for your opinion and took your only statement on that as a position you held. If you chose to be vague until you needed some extra room then blame yourself. This the reason I continue these conversations and flesh out the ideas presented to me.
Where did I represent this is a rewrite of Adonais’ statement?
I am plainly quoting my summation that appears in my first comment here (the reason for the bolding will be apparent as you read Adonais’ own words).:
And am striking the term that you chose to dispute (for one) in an attempt to find out more of what you will dispute:
If you take this quote of me to be a quote of Adonais then that is your own faulty reading and you can shelve your claims of “misrepresentation” until you have mastered the medium
WHY do I refer you again to your agreement with Adonais’ statements? Because this summation of mine is derived from his direct statements, quoted to you in the previous thread, and with which you agreed. If you have further disagreement with them and you’d like your positions properly represented it might be helpful if you state what they are:
By the way, when I first presented that list and asked your opinion you said :
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/07/hitchens-second-question/#comment-8822
As you can see, I didn’t include number 1, your only possible exception, in this summation. I included everything that, to your eye, you agreed with. So far, noting that your perspective has changed, you have also disputed the word “arbitrary” – what else is discounted because you were only giving me a “sort of” answer in the first place? (note also that “sort of” comes not from your response to that list, which garnered what looked like your agreement, but from your response in this thread to the summation including the word “arbitrarily”:
===
This false accusation doesn’t rise to the level of a technicality – even a trivial one.
You’re not representing yourself very well and I can only engage the person you reveal with the words you write.
You put forth the argument yourself, you’ve agreed with positions yourself, you referred us to to at least one book on the subject (which I presume you’ve read) and you have your own opinion. Instead of defending your position on the Hitchen’s thread you contented yourself with an ill-conceived attempt to show that Tom’s argument was circular, and here you’ve denied the question, denied its premises and accused me of misrepresenting you.
The question on this thread is “does it matter if morality is not grounded?”
I will happily argue its grounding with you on the “is it grounded thread” but I will rebut your accusations anywhere.
I don’t know, but it sure looks to me like Charlie yielded on the word “arbitrary:”
So now I’m also wondering why you’re pushing on this so hard.
Charlie interpreted Adonais’ statements differently than you did. Since you pointed that out he has dropped the word that you put in contention. Why not answer his question? After striking the word “arbitrary,” how do you respond?
Edit at 1:48 pm: I loaded this page, started to write this answer, got interrupted for a bit, then finished–only to find that Charlie had already answered.
Tom and Charlie,
I have no problem saying that I agree to the statement morality is what we “define for ourselves and in which there are no absolute oughts, where we create the relevant oughts for and by ourselves. Further, morals are fluid in time and space, between cultures and subjects and individuals, and what commonality exists can be explained by our common evolutionary ancestry.”
I deleted “and that nature does not possess these oughts” because I don’t know if I understand what that means, and I imagine I might think differently if it was reworded to me differently.
I’m not resisting ascribing my agreement to a statement like this per se. If someone asks me a civil question I’m happy to respond civilly. Charlie, however, seems furious with my answers and responses, and I think he’s letting his anger get in the way of his reading comprehension. And if you think that’s a violation of the posting guidelines, what am I to do with Charlie’s statements to me like this? “If you take this quote of me to be a quote of Adonais then that is your own faulty reading and you can shelve your claims of “misrepresentation” until you have mastered the medium.” Hostile, and not true. And because it and so much of the rest of his comments are in the form of a taunt, he compels me to respond to extraneous arguments. If only they weren’t so long.
Charlie,
When you asked me, “You agree with Adonais that morality is an arbitrary and loosely defined set of behavours in which we determine our own oughts based upon our relativism,” you fired back in response to my reply, “So you didn’t agree with all of Adonais’ innocuous statements after all.”
Why “after all?” I mentioned before how guarded I am about agreeing to Adonais’ statements, as I am about anybody’s statements. That’s because other people’s statements are often part of a broader context and I sometimes don’t understand all the concepts.
Specifically, I wrote in response to your question to me:
By saying “it looks like” I am allowing that I could very well be wrong. I am stating that openly. This is, in my eyes, an expression of humility; I could be wrong about this. And yet, somehow, you get to insert the self-satisfied “after all” in your response to me. You take my admission that I may very well be wrong about what I think, and pawned it off shabbily as a trophy of my arrogance. You should be ashamed, but instead you take on an air of triumph. (This is particularly ironic in a discussion on the superiority of theistic morals.)
Secondly, you assert that, as a result of my reply to you, I now no longer agree with all of Adonais’s comments. But you didn’t offer me one of Adonais’s comments. You offered me your summary, and one that I think misrepresented Adonais’s arguments.
I’ll show you.
Adonais said:
“First of all, morality is something that we have defined ourselves, rather arbitrarily, as a loose collection of behavioral patterns that have something in common. It’s just a definition, and a vague one at that.”
You somehow took it upon yourself to summarize this as “…morality is an arbitrary and loosely defined set of behavours…”
But Adonais does not appear to be saying that morality itself is an arbitrary set of behaviors. He says that what we call morality has been defined arbitrarily by us. He is raising the issue that what we call morality may be an arbitrary distinction in our descriptions of our behavior, not that the formation of what we call moral behaviors itself is arbitrary. (That’s like saying that Evolution is due to chance, instead of natural selection; there is a difference.)
So, your rewrite of Adonais is not a fair summation of his statements, and thus your characterization of it as such is a misrepresentation. You have declared that, as a result of my response to your misrepresented summary (not Adonais’s), I do not actually agree with Adonais’s statements. False.
You wrote:
Here:
Charlie, “You agree with PERSON that…” means that you are summarizing that person’s argument. That’s what we call a representation of a statement. If I were to say “You agree with Tom that theism is the sole source of grounded morality,” I am representing what Tom says – that Tom says theism is the sole source of grounded morality.
Charlie, that’s just going through the top sixth of your last comment. As I look down the rest of this it’s a string of the same. As annoyed as I am, I just don’t have the energy right now to go over the rest of your comments similarly.
Tony, you are being very, very critical of Charlie’s interpretations of what you have written. But look at this:
Let’s look at your entire original comment. Charlie interpreted it as signaling your agreement with Adonais. You certainly did not disagree. For that interpretation, and for the discussion that followed, you have branded him as self-satisfied, shabbily pawning things off as a trophy with an air of triumph, for which he should be ashamed.
I think maybe you intended “it looks like” as an allowance that you might be wrong. I also think that’s ambiguous at best. “It looks like” means lots of things, and not all of them are so tentative. It looks like Tropical Storm Hanna is coming my way in a day or so. Based on the forecasts and computer models, there is no doubt about the fact, actually. Does that mean I’ve violated common usage by saying “it looks like”? No.
Tony, you are full of character accusations toward both Charlie and me: “Charlie should be ashamed of himself because, to start with, he did not interpret ‘it looks like’ the way I’m telling him I intended it.” (I’ll refrain from quoting your earlier accusations against me.) Well, maybe not. Maybe your interpretations of Charlie are as ungracious as you consider his interpretations of you to be.
I see irony working back the other direction, in other words.
Hi Tom,
Thank you very much for that comment.
====
Hi Tony,
I think you are projecting from your own annoyance.
Good. Let’s pursue this. I have outlined several times why this has moral consequences – why it matters.
However, I think it actually belongs on the other thread if you still reject the contention that this morality is ungrounded in the sense that Tom has discussed.
1) Your opinion about my emotional state is not germane and I see nothing in my comment denoting fury or anger.
2) You mischaracterize this exchange – your multiple accusation that I was engaging in misrepresentation – as though this was merely your “answers and responses”.
3) I have to cop to miscomprehension. I did not realize at first that you were quoting from the previous thread when you applied ellipsis to my question and I presumed it was a portion of one of the several iterations on this actual thread. That doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t misrepresenting either you or Adonais .
.
Did I “fire back”? How do you determine this, technically-speaking?
Technicalities aside, this question – “So you didn’t agree with all of Adonais’ innocuous statements after all” – did not represent my words as though they were his, but refers directly to our exchange on Adonais’ statements. For the record that exchange was limited to
. 1) My quoting him on morality and asking if you agreed.
. http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/07/hitchens-second-question/#comment-8779
. 2) Your response and question.
. http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/07/hitchens-second-question/#comment-8822
. 3) My response, quoted above, “You agree with Adonais that morality…”
. http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/07/hitchens-second-question/#comment-8836
. 4) Your bringing that quote to this thread to answer it with your referenced reply, “Sort of…”
. Note there is no reference to the fact that you thought I’d misstated his position in any way.
. http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/09/does-it-matter-if-morality-is-well-grounded/#comment-8863
5) My response “So you didn’t agree with all of Adonais’ innocuous statements afterall. Okay, so we move on from here.”
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/09/does-it-matter-if-morality-is-well-grounded/#comment-8866
6 And your charge that I was misrepresenting my words as his.
“Only those are your words above, not Adonais’s, despite the fact that you’re now representing your re-write as one of Adonais’s statements. (“So you didn’t agree with all of Adonais’ innocuous statements afterall.)”
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/09/does-it-matter-if-morality-is-well-grounded/#comment-8866
“After all”? Talk about innocuous.
Because it looked like you agreed with everything but after you expressed disagreement, first with the use of the word “arbitrary” and now with the point about nature possessing the oughts, it looks like you don’t agree with everything quoted there after all.
“In your eyes” this is an expression of humility. Therefore, it may not be an expression of humility and you are allowing that you could be wrong and you are stating so openly. In keeping with this allowance, I did not read it as a statement one way or another about humility and it didn’t look like that to my eyes. It looked like an agreement with the points presented.
Where you didn’t fully comprehend (point 1) you said so and said you wouldn’t admit agreement to it. When you say “it looks like” I certainly didn’t read that as a statement of humility, or that you could well be wrong about your own opinion, but rather that you felt “it appears as if”.
And this is your example that I so grievously misrepresented you that it needed multiple repetitions. It seems you expect a lot more of your interlocutors than you do yourself.
I don’t know about my self-satisfaction, or how you’ve determined that you are accurately representing me, but it certainly appeared that you had said you agreed with him, and that his statements were innocuous, but then, when pushed further, you saw that you didn’t agree with everything he had said after all.
Did I? I didn’t say (or think) anything about arrogance whatsoever. These representations of what I said (or, worse, felt) are not accurate.
And yet I’m not. Your moralizing is as ineffective as your clairvoyance.
1) I do see this comment dripping with irony, but not as you see it, I’m sure.
2) This is not a discussion about the superiority of theistic morals. This is a conversation about the grounding of morality.
Either you agree with all the statements or you don’t.
I think you’ve let this ship weigh anchor already. You already admitted you knew full-well that I was referring to a continuous line of exchanges based upon the original statements. If you disagreed with the formulation you could have said so and we could have actually discussed the issue instead of your multiple accusations after-the-fact.
Yes, do.
I “somehow”, took it upon myself, as though inexplicably, to pack a lot of the information into one grammatical sentence in attempting to ask a question, in one of at least four different comments, directly following the original quotations, in a manner that you don’t agree with. Not only have I used the exact original wording in three other comments but the very one you have taken issue with has a third sentence which will clarify, if the others don’t, the subject/predicate relationship.
In my query:
Note that as the comment continues it is made clear that it is morality itself (not the set of behaviours) that has been arbitrarily determined.
And if the statement was so obviously wrong why didn’t you say “wait a second, that’s not what I agreed to”? Wouldn’t that have been more civil?
Also notice that the question portion has never been answered, regardless of the iterations.
He doesn’t appear? It “looks like” he doesn’t? So you are openly stating that you could be wrong about your interpretation, and I could be wrong about mine. And yet you felt obligated to say again and again that I was dealing in misrepresentation in this one of several wordings while ignoring the times that the wording was explicitly what you had agreed to.
This loose collection (not the behaviours themselves) is determined in the mind of man, the arbiter, as is the commonality- thus, the set is arbitrary.
Actually, he says both that morality itself is a definition, just a definition, and that morality is a loose set of behaviours. But then, I too said that morality has been arbitrarily defined (in his/your opinion) in all my comments on this thread as well as when I said in the very comment you have disparaged that we have (in your view) arbitrarily determined what morality entails.
There is no question in either sentence about the formation of the behaviours. In my sentence the reference was to an arbitrary set of behaviours. The set is a mental construct and this is what would have been referred to as arbitrary and loosely defined. As the original allows that the (set) of behaviours is loose and makes use of a man-made collection it makes the same claim – about the set and not about the behaviours.
Let’s continue:
Morality is a collection of certain behaviours in both sentences.
In a strict reading of my sentence, ignoring the quote from which it is derived, the remainder of the comment in which it is found, and all the comments that followed it, morality is a set of behaviours which is arbitrary and loosely defined. In his, morality is a loose collection of behaviours. So far so good, no conflict.
In his, morality itself is defined arbitrarily to be that loose set (arbitrary) of behaviours.
I will admit that the sloppiness of my sentence here can cause an apparent conflict, however, a closer technical reading will continue to reveal that even the sloppiness (ignoring all other mitigating factors) does not make one the “misrepresentation” of the other.
In both cases morality is the set of behaviours (note that this is a restatement and not my belief as I do not equate morality to behaviours).
It may be that we chose arbitrarily to define morality as the loose set, or that the set (not the behaviours) is arbitrary and loosely defined and that this is what we call morality.
Whether morality is arbitrarily defined as that loose behaviour set , or whether morality is that arbitrary and loosely defined behaviour set, the substance is the same.
Either way, the word morality is applied to a man-made set and either it was arbitrary that we applied the word morality to one particular set or it was arbitrary that we created one particular set and called it morality – the result is the same and there is no misrepresentation.
You don’t like this technical reading – fine. Disagree with it. If we interpret it differently that doesn’t warrant your repetitious charge that I am misrepresenting this, that and the other.
It looks like it is to me.
No it isn’t.
I accept now that you don’t know whether or not you agree and you might be wrong if you say you do. I also accept what you have now clarified as your position.
So the question is, do you think this has consequences and do you think this is grounded?
I wish you a good night’s sleep and will have slept off your annoyance so that you can do a better job of addressing my comment than you have thus far.
Let me sum up.
What follows is my first comment to this thread, edited with what Tony says he accepts as an agreed upon position. After a rash of unfortunate exchanges, the rest has not been addressed as per the question asked in the OP and still stands. Here it is with the amendments:
I am going to offer that those arguing against the Christian perspective on the previous thread have advanced a position that accepts that morals are not grounded in the sense that Tom has been discussing it.
It has been admitted and agreed that the moral systems they are left with entail some kind of relative “morality [that] we “define for ourselves and in which there are no absolute oughts, where we create the relevant oughts for and by ourselves. Further, morals are fluid in time and space, between cultures and subjects and individuals, and what commonality exists can be explained by our common evolutionary ancestry.”
(Note that “rather arbitrarily”, as first formulated, and “and that nature does not possess these oughts” have been removed and this quote has been inserted as Tony reworked it.
Note: I did not remove “relative” as I believe that is a given and was agreed to earlier – Tony can state otherwise.)
I would say this admits that morality is not grounded and demonstrates that such grounding does matter.
Tony said that atheists do not see their lack of belief in the existence of God as having any moral consequence whatsoever. The above admits one consequence in and of itself – the admission of relativism and a fluid ( “arbitrary” replaced here as well for continuity) morality – and demonstrates the beginnings of the resulting consequences.
These dictate immediately a loss of a true and absolute right and wrong. They also destroy the concept of justice, replacing the idea of “deserve” with a utilitarian “reward/punishment” scheme. The very next step is that all one has to do to avoid the only consequence of disobeying the standard, that being his punishment, is to avoid detection. He might be foolish, as he would be if walking perilously close to a ledge [small grammatical improvement made], but he is not wrong. Since he can be no more right or wrong than his potential punishers and he can avoid the only consequence, society’s punishment, then why not violate its standards?
Is this an argument from consequences? No. It does not follow from the failure of a relativistic morality that relativism is false. But the question on this thread is “does it matter?” Yes, it matters.
And now it’s time to make this an attack-free zone again. Ideas may be attacked, yes. But no more aspersions or attacks on personal character.
Tony, if you want to make one more answer–if there’s something along that line you really want to say–you may do so (within the discussion policies, of course). I am declaring in advance that we will not respond to any insinuations or attacks made against either of us, nor will we make them. If we feel there’s something that absolutely needs an answer, we can just point back to this comment and say, “We could answer but we decided in advance not to.” (Charlie, I trust that will be okay with you.)
Hi Tom/Tony/Thinking Christian,
I’m sorry for my part in the above digression from civil discourse.
I think my share is large, not only for my language, but for my error in the beginning.
I did not read the blockquotes carefully and didn’t realize where the problem lay. I knew what I was saying on this thread and presumed, without double-checking, that the quote came from here.
I thought the solution was very obvious. I was wrong about that and wrong to speak the way I did.
My apologies, Tony, and to the rest of this community.
I had edited my comments to make sure I was only saying what I wanted to and I see that I had wanted the wrong thing.
I hope to do better and ask that you guys forgive me.
Charlie,
I have to say that I am touched by your apology.
To the extent that I projected my own anger onto you, and assumed that your responses were intended to provoke or “score points” when that was not your intention I sincerely apologize.
On the plus side, I can’t imagine anybody was paying attention (to what quickly became a picayune battle) besides perhaps two of us.
I hope not.
Tom and Charlie,
Starting from Charlie\’s construction of arguments from Adonais I have built this as my definition of morality: “Morality is a system of prescribed and proscribed behaviors that are understood by individuals in a group and are enforced by the group. Morality is a behavioral system in which individuals among social species derive greater combined benefits from collaboration than they would acting strictly in self-interest. Although morality is fluid because it is dependent on the inherited characteristics of the group and the environment the group inhabits, there may be constant or absolute behaviors that are common to life in social groups. (I just don’t know about the last one, and can’t rule it out.)”
That, anyway, is the statement I think I still owe Charlie.
Regarding the over-riding question in this post, and looking at what my statement entails, I have to say I don\’t think it matters whether or not morality is well grounded.
But I don’t think not-well grounded necessarily = arbitrary. I think there is a logic to morality that makes it predictable — given this about this group, and that about that environment, morality will more or less conform to those circumstances.
As I’ve said before, I’m not entirely sure what the logical consequences of my position are, so anybody want to let me know why I’m wrong about morality needing to be well grounded, then have at.
Aargh. I did lose it.
Let’s see if I can do it again…
Hi Tony (so far so good),
I’m not sure whether this comment appropriately answers yours because I think I am arguing what you already seem to be admitting- that the sense of morality you are defending is not grounded.
But I think I ought to do this because it seems necessary in order to show that there are consequence to such a situation and because I think part of your comment denies that lack of grounding.
Regardless, if you don’t agree that a commitment to relativism itself is a consequence, as I do, and you don’t agree with my previous comments about justice, for instance, I will proceed.
By the inclusion of prescription here you seem to be allowing that these behaviours are not merely reflexive, but are also considered normative. In other words, that any rational person in a given situation would agree with the prescription but would also be face some kind of obligation to accept it.
But wouldn’t you also agree that a rational person raised in a foreign culture could enter a society and not agree with the behaviours prescribed therein?
Likewise, could a rational person not disagree because of some inherited quality and yet be rational?
I think you accept these as you continue on …
Unfortunately, this doesn’t really seem to be a description of morality as I see it.
For one, there seems to be an element, especially as you contemplate an absolute behaviour, of determinism here.
But we have behaviours determined by biology and shaped by the environment that are not considered moral at all, such as flinching when hearing a bang, ducking from a projectile, sneezing from inhaling pollen, etc.. Of course, none of these is considered a question of morality and nobody would be considered bad if their biology somehow didn’t cause these behaviours.
These reflexive, absolute(?) behaviours fail your definition, of course, because there is no sense of societal enforcement. So this raises the question, what does society bring to bear on the issue, beyond deterministic biological reactions, in order to determine the “oughtness” of a behaviour?
I think I have lost some nuance in the logic here, in trying to reproduce this comment, so I might have skipped a step that will become necessary later.
Hi Charlie,
I appreciate your staying with this one.
I think that in certain cultures the non-reflexive behaviors you list above could be considered moral. For instance, where it is considered either cowardly or un-leaderlike for a military commander to flinch in the face of battle danger you’d have a morality that includes the ability to contain your reflexive flinching at loud banging. Battlefield commanders throughout history have been highly regarded for this ability – it’s basically what separates a good 1st Lieutenant from a bad one. The same with ducking from a projectile. The impulse might be reflexive, but you can train yourself to remain still – think of children who are afraid of a Frisbee tossed at them but will, with coaching and encouragement, learn to control their fear of being hit well enough to catch. I would say that both of these behaviors could, given the right circumstances, fall under the purview of morality (control your fear because only then can we maintain the unity of purpose that will enable us to survive and win, and control your fear because you need to learn how to use your body to grow and become a useful adult, etc.), while sneezing from inhaling pollen is, I believe, entirely reflexive. (I would not consider purely reflexive behaviors moral.)
I think the most problematic issue with a moral system like mine is that, as you and Tom point out, it fails to provide a satisfying, over-arching “why” to behaviors in a way that’s consistent with how we feel about our prescribed normative behaviors. I seem to “know” that loving my children is good in the same way I know that I love eating when I’m hungry.
I think that if it’s possible to assign a priori grounding to “my life [where life is really shorthand for “the material in my germ line replicators”] is good” (this would seem to be the single unifying principle of behavior among all living organisms), then I could say that my moral beliefs are grounded. And in the sense that it helps us understand and predict behaviors, I would say that it does matter.
Hi Tony,
I like your paragraph explaining how you think that reflexive behaviours might be controlled and that this control could be considered moral. This tells us several things that I contend in this discussion. The first being that morality is not merely a behaviour but that the term includes a judgment about the behaviour. Second you’ve indicated that an a-moral act, flinching or not, requires an actual moral component to lend it the oughtness it requires – it indicates the presence or absence of bravery. This, of course, flirts with the issue of objectivity in true morality.
Third, and most important here, is that you demonstrate that morality is NOT, in fact, a biological reflex but that it is (or at least can be) trained and habituated. This goes to my reason for further exploring the idea that morality (not behaviour) is a biological reaction. Even while setting up the morality of the (in)action as culturally and situationally dependent you realize that a mere biological reaction is NOT moral. It is not moral, even in your imagined scenarios, to do what our biological mechanisms do naturally. You didn’t consider it moral to flinch naturally at loud sounds, but to train yourself not to flinch (in service of yet higher moral principles, in fact). You didn’t say it was moral to react as a biological mechanism in response to the environmental stimuli of the approach of a Frizbee brand flying disc. You made the morality contingent upon the trained and willful control of fear. Like William James, Schwartz, Aristotle, the Apostle Paul, and Jesus Christ you seem to think that morality includes the intention of the mind, control over so-called “natural impulses” and training in what is good.
Other than the fact that morality is expressed within an environment and is judged by biological creatures (humans, as far as our discussion goes) I don’t see where it is determined, as by your statement, that morality depends upon biology and environment.
I think your examples of how animal behaviours can be turned into moral behaviours belie the sufficiency of that contention.
Do I understand you correctly? You agreed that grounding does matter?
Then this question remains one of “is relative morality grounded?” not “does grounding matter?”
On the other hand, your line of reasoning undermines the grounding you will seek.
If the material in your germ line is the “good” the the biological reaction of flinching, ducking and sneezing are also good. Training against them would not be moral, but would rather be, prima facie, immoral. Now, yes, I know that you will refer to kin selection, group selection, etc. (which, as selection processes are empirically very questionable) but to do so is a salve. Your genes are, of course, the MOST like your genes, so they should be the ones most worthy of saving – fleeing and flinching, avoiding battle to stay home and procreate and saving your exact genes should be the greatest goal of those genes. But people (and even animals) do not do only this. They risk their genes for other genes. So the theory says that those other genes are similar enough to theirs that the sacrifice of one set of genes actually selects FOR those genes because they are present in greater numbers in the survivors. Even given the fact that the math never quite works out (think bees and ants) and genes don’t actually recognize themselves in others the fact is self-sacrifice and endangerment is never limited to those genes most like the martyrs – outgroup altruism is common as well as existing across species lines. Also, in mutational genetics it seems far more likely that the aberrant self-sacrificer arise in a population, sacrifice itself and disappear long before the mutation can become fixed among his kin – the line of sacrificers dies at one – or few. In addition, this does nothing to explain moral concern for other tribes and distantly related peoples. In fact, Hitler ought to become a moral inspiration. He did exactly what one ought to do in selfish gene theory. He attempted to eliminate genes which were (he contended) unlike his own, superior genes, and he tried to increase the resources for the propagation for his genes and their closest kin. If the good of his germline is considered the grounding then he was acting morally. Killing the offspring of rivals should be considered good, while killing our own offspring should be considered bad – but that is not the case.
The final question in this grounding by the “my life is good” maxim is that of the actual impulse itself. Whence its arising? Why would nature/evolution not have just programmed us to behave in the appropriate manner rather than have this thought “I ought to?” Why would it waste time with programming us to judge an act and to take the time to train our minds and bodies against the natural act that evolution has actually programmed us for? If traits are selectable for the behaviours they instill then an evolutionary theory ought to account for the behaviour without the thoughts “this is good”. It seems you guys recognize this as your statements so often try to stay at the level of “morality is this set of behaviours” but it is shown to be untrue as we dig deeper and find that everyone knows (as in your training examples above) that morality is not about what behaviours we engage in, but is about what behaviours we ought to engage in. Do monkeys have oughts? Does evolution create the propensity to think in terms of “oughts”? And, if so, why?
As Ruse says, it must be an illusion. Nobody actually thinks “I must save several of my kin that they might procreate and ensure the survival of similar genetic material”. Rather, they say “I have a duty to do right”. Prior to that “I have a duty, it is right, that I determine what is right”. And in so determining one is mistaken, genetically-speaking. He doesn’t say “I should save my brother but not my neighbor, and my neighbor but not the foreigner”.
But again, in your examples above, it seems you’ve rejected the straight biological reaction aspect of morality anyway. So if the capacity to think “I ought to X” is a biological adaptation then it is not moral but merely reflexive.
Hi Charlie,
There’s a lot in your last comment so I’ll probably break this into at least two replies.
You wrote:
What I was trying to say is that given a set biology (in my examples, human) the morality that arises depends upon the environment. This isn’t the same thing as saying that morality is reflexive, and, of course, it admits to relativism. (I reject the logical conclusion that naturalism leads to determinism and destroys free will, but that’s another whole discussion – for our purposes, let’s see if you can just go with me here.)
Do I understand you correctly? You agreed that grounding does matter?
Then this question remains one of “is relative morality grounded?” not “does grounding matter?”
Well, as I said before I’m not totally sure if I know what it means for morality to be “well grounded.” I think this means that morality would have fixed and absolute standards that are not subject to variation from things like biology and the environment – that good is good, not good is dependent on the situation. But it also seems that there is another component to the notion, that to be well-grounded means that morality must aspire to a level of justification — to convince us to subscribe with a reason for an action’s oughtness. (Ugh. Sorry about the wording.)
I do think that grounding matters if it is to be justified, but not for the reasons maybe you think I do. I think that a moral notion, in order for it to flourish, must be grounded to the situation as it exists in order for it to be accepted. The moral notion that it is a good idea to never cooperate with another human will not flourish, because cooperating with other humans benefits my germ replicator line over the notion to not cooperate. (Human cooperation is a huge advantage over other species and also other human groups who do not cooperate so well.) So I do think that it’s necessary that morality be grounded to the circumstances to some degree (what I was calling non-abritrary earlier).
I think the crux of a discussion like this is, “How can morality that does not ascribe to an absolute standard explain altruism?” Please give me a little more time and I’d like to talk about that and the other part of your comments in my next reply.
Hi Tony, thanks fort he start to your reply.
While I await the rest (and go attend to work) I want to quickly explore another aspect of what you might consider a grounding for your morality.
If life is shorthand for “the material in my germline replicators” then this has, to me, many implications for morality.
Is the key term there “material”? Is the preservation of this material the moral good?
Or is it a combination of the material the information encoded in the material? If the information, then is it not better that your information (and material) not degrade as it does in replication? Then perhaps it would be moral to end procreation altogether, take the material in our germlines and preserve it either in vitro or even by freezing. Wouldn’t morality then allow for, if not demand, the destruction of the human race?
Or is the morality in your phrase grounded in the term “replicator”? By this I mean, does morality entail replication? If so, wouldn’t the greatest good be cloning? And not even cloning of organisms, but merely of their germlines.
Would you agree that it would be moral to destroy people and protect germlines?
I think selfish genes would like this.
Interesting line of questions, Charlie. I wonder who or what will be responding to them – the material in a specific set of germline replicators, or Tony the free agent with the ability to understand and reason.
Charlie,
You wrote:
I think that your making a mistake in concluding that behavioral responses that are reflexive, like “ducking,” are always good from a natural selection perspective. But they are not all that exists in our makeup – we also have willful control over these reflexive responses with which we can override the default behavior. One could make an assumption that the ability to willfully control reflexive responses is an adaptation that benefits the organism with this phenotype. The natural reflex to duck PLUS the ability to make value judgments about ducking and control this response is, on balance, better selected than the natural reflex alone. In other words, the human ability to make moral based decisions is an inherited ability that affects behavior and is naturally selected (as is the behavior that it leads to).
I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of gene theory and the idea behind “the selfish gene,” which was a convenient shorthand for something far more complicated. Germ line replicators, for one, aren’t capable of planning into the future, or of truly manipulating us in the way that the theory might imply. Genes don’t have an over-arching “plan” for their own survival – they have achieved a kind of success that unfolds logically but genes do not possess consciousness or foresight. (Among other things, gene theory has moved past the idea of the Selfish Gene pretty quickly. Dawkins book following his most famous one takes pains to talk about genetic competition as more precisely being defined by phenotypes and competition for locus on DNA against a particular gene’s alleles – the point being that selfish gene idea was being seen as incorrectly associated with the whole genetic makeup of an individual organism, where it should more correctly be viewed at the level of competition of phenotypes.) What I’m trying to say is that I think that gene theory isn’t compatible with what you’ve outlined above.
I don’t know what you mean by the math never quite working out here and was curious.
Among other things, the selfish gene idea is an explanation, not a prescription for how we should behave. Also, even if your version of selfish gene theory were correct, Hitler’s justification would still be an application to the natural fallacy. Also, apart from any other objectsions, I’m not sure I understand your last sentence above.
But you raise a good question – if my absolute moral grounding were that my own germ line replicators were good, then what would stop me from adopting a moral code that sought to eradicate genes that I saw as competing with, rather than aiding, my own? This is a separate question, and I think it can be answered, but it is probably left for another discussion. (Very quickly, so that you think I’m not dodging the question, I’d say that eradication of competing genes is not what gene theory is about – it’s about propagation of DNA at specific locations on the gene, and not about destruction of competitive alleles and even less about destruction of whole genetic material at the individual level of the organism. Cloning, of course, is a terrible idea because parasites and viruses would destroy the cloned DNA that much more quickly – it’s largely the shifting landscape of genetic information that keeps inter-species genetic competition at bay. Etc.)
Running out of time for now. I still have to address the last stuff in your comment, then on to your one after that. Let me catch up, will you man!
PS. SteveK. Saw your comment. I agree – there’s just something funny, like the word weasel or snout, about saying “germline replicators.” Sometimes, I admit, it’s hard to even type it with a straight face.
I confess I haven’t really followed this thread lately, so apologies if this is an irrelevant comment.
What you describe are instincts or fixed action patterns, and it is argued by evolutionary biology that the roots of morality may indeed be instinctive in a similar sense. This is a statement of “is” rather than “ought.” Your statement that training against them would be immoral is a non sequitur, or the naturalistic fallacy.
I too am curious what you mean by the math does not work out. Hamilton’s Rule appears to be observed even by eusocial insects.
Hi Tony,
I said:
You’ve responded to this by saying you do not believe in determinism and the destruction by naturalism of free will, but you haven’t said what the role of biology is here. Previously you made morality seem like a biological reaction. I can no longer tell. Is it or isn’t it? Is it a matter of will instead? Please don’t say that ‘will’ is a matter of biology in that it is also likewise correlated with the biological brain. I am trying to get to more here. What is the role of biology? Does it or does it not determine one’s morality? If so, does one’s biological make-up not make him impervious to the moral claims of another?
You seem to be using the word “moral” in all kinds of different ways. This makes it seem like we are talking about morality when we may not be. In your latest here, what is “moral”? The notion or the behaviour/action of cooperating? The question about grounding would rather be is it actually good that we cooperate? The answer must demonstrate the goodness. To say the idea flourishes, or survives, because it is held by those who survive reduces it to a Rusean illusion. The notion could be fooling you, or it could be acausally attached to a more adaptive gene, like increased gamete production, and so flourish. What if a person finds he flourishes quite well with only a facade of cooperation and believes his germ line will get along just fine even if he is often uncooperative? Other than force, how do you demonstrate to him that he is wrong?
I know you have more coming, but don’t forget the conclusion of that line of reason:
===
Good stuff. I agree. So we can have biologically determined reactions to our environment, which are presumably, on the whole, selectively advantageous, but we can choose to act against these reactions.
This does little to support the idea that morality describes a collection of biologically determined reactions to our environment. Rather, it makes willful choosing the key characteristic in describing morality. I think we agreed to this earlier, but I just want to be sure.
But you are getting ahead of the grounding you have offered. You have defended the grounding of morals on the basis that they are behaviours which aid in our survival. But we can name adaptive behaviours all day, discuss why these themselves are or are not moral, talk about how the moral considerations are actually those overriding the adaptive behaviours, call the overriding morality an adaptive behaviour, etc. but we are never getting any nearer to grounding the morals as behavioural adaptations.
Of course they don’t. My point makes no such assumption but rather highlights the error in such formulations.
Then I will watch that Selfish Genery is not used in this argument.
What do you mean then, that your life itself is merely shorthand for your germline replicators?
This would make sense since what I’ve outlined doesn’t seem to be consistent with reality. But I am trying to argue from implications that I see from your points. If these are not the logical implications then you can correct the way I see your points and we can move forward.
So we’ve seen several ways that Selfish Genery doesn’t explain morality. Can you show us the way in which it does? I mentioned infanticide, very vaguely, and lost you so I will expand the thought and you can tell me how the Selfish Gene, or germline replication, or any other naturalistic theory, can explain it away.
First, let me take for granted that we will agree that killing healthy babies is immoral.
But we have seen this phenomena arise throughout history and throughout the animal kingdom. Why is this behaviour adaptive? On one hand we can argue that a selfish gene would not kill its own progeny – in fact, it makes absolutely no sense that it would do so. On the other, we can concoct a story in which killing that progeny somehow ensures even more success for the spread, under different conditions, of that germ line. This means that the flukey, and generally unselectable behaviour occurred at a time and place where it was adaptive, and somehow continued on without eliminating itself from the gene pool.
Either way, the theory flexes to fit the data. But never does it explain why we would call the one good and the other bad. If the trait survived it obviously has some kind of survival value, so we ought to call it good. But so does its opposite have survival value, so we ought to call that good. So where is the grounding for morality.
Of course the naturalist will now say that this is the naturalistic fallacy, that you can’t get an ought from an is, that a description is not a prescription. But he always comes up short then in telling me whence the prescription. If ises don’t equal oughts where do the oughts come from? As you’ve said, genes don’t have foresight, they can’t predict what will be necessary, they don’t know how to manipulate their meat puppets. Nature can’t prescribe. So, with only nature to appeal to, but with no prescriptions in nature, where do the prescriptions come from?
Gene theory need not be about this, but your moral grounding does nothing to disallow this. I don’t think this is best left to another discussion because I think this is the discussion. You said:
What beyond the protection of your germ line, then, can be considered good? How does this ground any morality other than said protection?
So it’s merely a matter of technology? If we could perfectly clone DNA we would be morally justified in wiping out the humans who had once carried that DNA? Do we actually need to be able to replicate it in order for killing humans to be moral? Could we just preserve the DNA and kill the people?
====
Hi Adonais,
I can’t follow this comment.
What statement, in particular, is a statement of an ‘is’ rather than an ‘ought’ here?
What do you mean that morality can be instinctive? Are you reducing morality to behaviours here, rather than oughts? If morality is a collection of instinctive behaviours then we have the exact problem I brought to Tony at the beginning of this instinct thread. I said we wouldn’t call instinctive behaviours or reflexes moral behaviours and he told me a way that we could (even though he agreed that purely instinctive behaviours are not moral behavours). He said if we train ourselves to override them we could be acting morally. But if that training behaviour is an instinctive behaviour how is it any different from the instinctive behaviour it is overriding and why would we call it “moral”?
If ducking instinctively is not moral then why is instinctively practicing not ducking?
As asked Tony in response to his formulation of morality:
He seems to have disavowed determinism and said that purely deterministic behaviours are not moral but has also defended these deterministic, instinctive behaviours as moral. So the question remains, what does society bring to bear to determine the oughtness?
Finally, we have this to Tony:
On kin selection.
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2006/03/26/lstrongglemgdarwinian_fairy_tales_l_emg_3
No, my source is not O’Leary but Stove.
Sorry, I lost the first link somehow.
http://creationsafaris.com/crev200709.htm#20070930a
Charlie,
You wrote:
I think it’s probable that we arrive with a set of reflexive biological behaviors AND the ability to form thought patterns that modify those behaviors. Our big brains do more than catalogue reflexive behaviors, they enable us to create a customizable set of behaviors that take fuller advantage of our species ability to cooperate – behaviors that, for lack of a better word, we could call morality.
I think it’s at least conceivable that our ability to form fluid morality, which guides our behaviours, is an adaptive ability that gives us greater survivability. Rather than waiting for extinction or natural selection to occur when an environmental changes occurs, social creatures with the ability to form new moral systems in reaction to the environment would appear to have a huge advantage over other species. So, we form oughts because our brains are wired to receive and form these beliefs – beliefs that help us survive. That’s a possibility, anyway. (Now that Adonais is back I defer to him on explanations because he has a much better handle on evolutionary biology and pure science than I do.)
Regarding your references to the demise of kin selection theory I read both of the articles you rerefenced.
The first article you reference does not actually demonstrate that kin selection does not occur, but disputes how the mechanism could work and offers a solution.
From the second article you reference there is this quote:
This sentence demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of gene theory and kin selection. Now I’m not a biologist and I’m not a philosopher, but I think I can tell you why the paragraph above misunderstands the topic it is trying to disprove.
Social insects that appear to behave altruistically do not behave so because they share more genetic information with each other than they do with their mother. They appear to behave altruistically because they are sterile (there is no way they can pass on their own genes directly) – the germ line replicator for each worker is possessed by the queen, not themselves. Whether the workers die or not is completely separate from the fate of their germ line replicator. The workers in this example are not much different than the shell of a snail or the detachable tail of a lizard or the outside wall of a termite dwelling. In other words, anyone who says that kin selection is about shared genetic information misses the fundamental point – that kin selection is about extending germ line replicators into the next generation, not blindly favoring or making copies of oneself.
Charlie,
One thing I want to mention as we move forward is this. I am trying to make an argument that we can understand the basis for our morality by understanding evolutionary biology. I am not making an argument that we should behave as other animals do, or our ancestors have, and certainly not that we obey what we understand to be the \”goal\” of our genetic material. I am trying to say \”this is probably where we came from, it can probably help us understand why we do some of the things we do, and maybe it can help us as to agree on a morality that benefits us all.\”
I think that the facts of evolutionary biology demonstrate that human beings have benefited more from cooperation than we have from competition. This fact, at least for me, makes my understanding of our origins seem less dark and cruel than I think it is often made out to be.
I’ve been on some other projects nearly full-time since Friday, so it’s catch-up time again.
I’m going to open myself up to the charge of being dense here. The naturalistic fallacy has been brought up more than once, and apparently Adonais is saying that Charlie was walking into it. Charlie has asked Adonais for a clarification on that, which would be helpful, since I may be misinterpreting him on that.
What I cannot understand (and maybe it’s my own denseness) is how these three can exist in one world:
A. Moral oughts
B. Philosophical naturalism as a true description of reality
C. The naturalistic fallacy
If moral oughts exist, they came from somewhere. If philosophical naturalism (PN) is a true description of reality, then (by my understanding of PN), nothing exists but matter, energy, and their interactions according to fixed law and to chance. The history of the cosmos until a very recent epoch was nothing but “is,” just the kind of “is” that cannot produce an “ought.”
But now we seem to have moral oughts, or at least we behave as if we do. What happened? Did something happen to the “is,” somewhere along the way, that gave it the capability to produce an “ought?” Not likely; the naturalistic fallacy really does seem to exist in this world, and actually to be fallacious. So it seems to me the existence of either (A) or (B) is called into question. Either (A) there are no oughts, and Ruse was right in calling oughts illusory, or (B) philosophical naturalism is not a true description of the universe.
Am I missing something here?
Tom,
Good summary.
The only response I can manage is, the ‘is’ somehow managed to give way to ‘ought’ in recent times just like the ‘is’ managed to give way to the ‘is’ of conscious beings. In other words, the newly discovered ‘ought’ is just another instance of the ‘is’ of reality. But, as I state below, this poses another problem regarding subjective perceptions.
I don’t think you are but maybe *I* am missing something too. Either ‘ought’ is part of the ‘is’ of reality – and thus not an illusion when you perceive it subjectively – or it’s not part of reality. In a naturalistic universe I suppose there is no requirement that the ‘is’ (reality itself) give way to the same ‘ought’ for each individual instance of the human ‘is’. Given how orderly the universe is, this seems unlikely. I hope you can make sense of all the ises and oughts.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for your continued work here.
Notice here that you think the entire moral system, and not just some behaviours within it, is fluid and dependent upon the environment. This allows, of course, that populations of differing geographies will have different moral systems. In fact, no two creatures share the same environment, so each will have its own morality. You might argue that this is exactly the case that we observe today, and I would agree, with one exception. We each not only think that we are right, but that others ought to agree with us as well – thus, the prescriptive part of your moral system. But, as you can see, the prescriptive part is unwarranted as our moralities are all equally valid, as having been shaped by our own environments … and biology.
But again, this is not morality. Thinking that we know that we have a jealousy impulse because female chimps are promiscuous is one thing, and a very interesting thing, but it tells us nothing about whether we ought to be promiscuous, or whether we ought to become stalkers. You are agreeing when you say that we shouldn’t necessarily take any of the above as prescriptive. To do so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy, to derive and is from and ought, etc. And I agree. But if oughts don’t come from nature, if you aren’t saying anything about shoulds then you are erasing the grounding for your morality. Morality is exactly about what we should do. If none of these examples which might tell us what we do, or why we do it, cannot tell us what we should do (and we agree, they do not) then they do not ground morality.
If we are left with agreeing on a morality that benefits us all then you have shifted the grounding to reason, based upon our agreement, and upon the moral good being of benefit to us all.
Of course, very few behaviours will benefit usall and we will all differ in our rational abilities and perspectives. Almost all behaviours will have to be weighed by how they benefit some and not others. And, of course, many will disagree on whether benefits exist, what they are, and their relative strength. Slavers might not think it benefits us all to treat foreign races as our equals and may think it benefits us all much more to exploit their labour. Pro-lifers might disagree that abortions benefit us all more that respecting the life of the fetus. Environmentalists will surely disagree with Big Oil on the comparative benefits of fossil fuels v. restrictions.
These are all disputes between people and they must, therefore, be dependent upon biology and environment. When we disagree there is no appeal and no reason to take one word over the other regarding which ought is the actual ought . The logical consequence here is not just a general relativism existing between distant cultures, but a specific one existing between all rational creatures of biology and existing in environments.
On kin selection, I will leave the matter here unless you guys want to further make your points. The research and typing are beyond my immediate interests. Repeatedly I see such articles from science journals questioning Hamilton’s theory and saying it is not supported by empirical study. If we continue I will quote at length David Stove’s book, referenced above, Darwinian Fairy Tales. We may continue to disagree but I don’t think that everyone who opposes your opinion demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the relevant data.
Ran out of editing time…
Given how orderly the universe is, this seems unlikely especially when you consider most humans subjectively percieve the same ‘oughts’.
Tom,
You wrote “Am I missing something” about this discussion? If I understand you correctly, what I think you’re missing is allowing the possibility that free will can coexist with naturalism.
I thought Adonais did a good job of outlining this concept in another post:
an.net/2008/09/grounding-for-morality-outside-of-theism/#comment-9161
Ditto Tom and Steve.
Tony,
Continuing in line with my previous comments and to summarize what you are saying here (correct me if I’m wrong): The ‘is of reality produced the ‘is’ of free will which produced the ‘is’ of ‘ought’. In addition, each ‘ought’ is real and unique to the individual and is only perceivable by the individual. Call this personal convictions.
Tony,
That’s an interesting topic, and I know I need to respond to Adonais on it, but it doesn’t have much to do with the naturalistic fallacy. Free will seems, for many (including me), to be a necessary condition for genuine oughts, but I don’t think anyone considers it a sufficient condition. So even if the free will issue were solved it would not solve the question of oughts.
Charlie:
Sorry, I haven’t actually read the article you linked yet, that whole web site looked like a bit of mess to be honest
But regarding kin selection, the evidence is pretty heavily in favor of it: Altruism in social insects is a family affair. Also read The Group Delusion.
The suggestion from evolutionary biology that the roots of some behaviors that we today think of in terms of morality may have an evolutionary origin. If true, then that’s just what it is by evolutionary heritage, which says nothing about how we ought to behave in today’s modern society which has far outpaced out ancestral environment for which our genes are adapted.
Probably a better word than instinctive is “innate” in the sense I just described above.
No. Didn’t you read the “Moral Instinct” article and the one that I wrote “On Moral Grounds”? Oh wait, I guess I didn’t inform you of that one yet, my bad: On Moral Grounds. Tom and I was going to debate this separately, but I didn’t get around to writing up my opening statement yet….it’s in the works.
Well to sum it up as simply as possible: from the evolutionary perspective what we call morality today appears to be a blend of innate behaviors and sentiments that we all share and culturally contingent behaviors and sentiments that not all of us share. The difference between these two categories appear to be their origin: biological evolution in the first case, cultural evolution in the second. So in reply to your question, no: morality is not just innate behaviors, and nor is it just cultural oughts, it’s both. It isn’t either-or.
You’re asking by what mechanism society determines oughts? Lots of different ones, I don’t know half of it probably. Justice systems, education, ethical norms: most advanced countries today take ethical theory quite seriously in many applied areas; business ethics, environmental ethics, science ethics and so on. I’m sure contract theory and egalitarian principles lies at the heart of the formulation of common law and social welfare systems, but this is advanced social engineering, not something I know much about.
Hi Adonais,
Fair enough.
And whether those roots are evolutionary or not has nothing to do with whether or not we will call said behaviours good or bad, correct?
All agreed?
We may be able to observe in animals supposed to be similar to our ancestors behaviours that we would refer to as”good” if observed in humans, as well as those we would call”bad”, as well as those we would not consider in moral terms.
So we have an argument that behaviours may be evolved and inherited, but nothing about oughts – yet.
I still have the same question here as before. Are you saying that the behaviours are innate, or that morality is innate? Have we really inherited our sense of oughtness about certain behaviours?
In your summation it seems you are saying the sentiment is also innate, and therefore traced back from evolutionary origins.
Is there evidence that you know of that shows that our putative ancestors or closest relatives have moral sentiments?
Justice systems enforce a set of oughts, education transmits them and I don’t know how “ethical norms” is a mechanism rather than another label for the thing we are discussing.
Nothing you’ve mentioned describes how society determines/discovers/creates oughts beyond its either inheriting them or thinking about them. Are these oughts innate? Are they reasoned to? If they are reasoned to then all of my previous questions to Tony remain. On what basis are behaviours determined to be “good” and how do we justify saying that those who reason differently are “wrong”?
Further , how do we justify the very concept of saying that somebody is “wrong” or “bad” rather than “different” or “in the minority”?
Yo Charlie:
You’re not seeing the issue clearly if you’re trying to seal off oughts from behavior or vice versa; sometimes they go hand in hand. If we consult only ethics we might come to think that we have the power to control behavior by ethical theory, but if we consult evolutionary psychology we find that much behavior and some moral sentiment is to some extent innate, and to controlling it requires an understanding of it, not ignoring it. Some of that innate behavior may include behaviors that you today consider to be an “ought” although this concept emerged long after the behavior, or the “instinct.” “Thou shalt not kill (another member of your clan)” is an ought, but one that may have deep evolutionary roots. Rather than forcefully trying to separate is and ought for reasons of philosophical purity you should ponder what the connection between them might be.
Probably, yes. But you need to stop thinking in such binary terms (at least, if you want to understand this argument): our “sense of oughtness” is not monolithic, it may be the result of different driving forces (biological, cultural, intellectual, presumably in that order).
Again, probably some of it is, but clearly not all of it. When I use the phrase “cultural evolution” as in that quote you’re commenting on, I am referring to social changes on shorter time scales than those on which our genome can be significantly altered by biological evolution. You have to get past this idea that it must be either-or, when it is (in the evolutionary the theory that we’re discussing) both, to varying degrees.
I don’t know what you mean by putative ancestors, australopithecus? Archeology of that time has little chance of showing us that they were either moral or immoral or amoral beings, there just isn’t enough information. But it would be strange if they had possessed no moral sentiments or a sense of altruism, since we observe it in our common ancestors of primates and even old world monkeys. See for instance Frans de Waal’s “Primates and Philosophers” (2006), or this article.
Who says that it has to beyond inheriting and thinking? It sounds to me like you want to define morality as something that can not be obtained by heritage or thinking, instead of investigating what it actually is. Of course I’m not blind to your reasons for doing this, but you will never be in a position to discuss the evolutionary understanding of morality and behavior if you take this approach.
Both. (see above)
I don’t know how you justify “wrongness,” but I was raised by my parents and educated by my local community and then the world community (yay globalization) to have an idea of what is considered right and wrong in my family, in my community, and in the world. Yes, this is indeed moral relativism, but no, that doesn’t mean that all of it is arbitrary, as we have very good reasons to believe that some of our fundamental moral sentiments have deep evolutionary origins that are far from arbitrary.
But I don’t personally need to have this understanding of evolutionary psychology in order to be a good and moral person. It works even if I don’t have the faintest idea how it works — in fact, and this is a point I meant to bring up before, from nature’s “perspective” it probably works the best if I don’t understand it or try to interfere with it. But that’s from nature’s perspective, which is no longer society’s perspective, and it is our civil duty to ward off the naturalistic fallacy and make sure that the new science which explains these things does not make people take nature’s perspective over society’s perspective (or the cosmos’s perspective, as these clowns apparently did).
Or, as may be the case in some of these debates, to use nature’s perspective in order to argue against society’s perspective in favor of God’s perspective.
The worldview divide was never more evident than it is right here:
It’s evident, that is, if I have interpreted this correctly. Adonais, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) you would agree that ethics and behaviour (that was for Charlie) can be conceptually distinguished. For purposes of discussion and analysis, we can separate them. The discussion of ethics may include behavior (including thinking/mentation), but it can be strictly about the oughtness of behavior, or about its rightness or wrongness It can also be one small step removed from behavior as we consider moral duties and values.
If I’m right, you would agree ethics can be conceptually distinguished from behavior. You would say, however, that practically speaking that’s meaningless, unhelpful, perhaps naive with respect to what ethics really represent or where ethical thinking comes from, and ultimately not useful or (as you’ve hinted here) positively misleading or dangerous.
And all of that is very plausible (likely, even) if ethics and humanity grew up together, siblings as it were, in the course of natural history.
If, however, there is a God, then rightness and wrongness exist as normative categories apart from how humans handle them; and they are worth discussing as distinct normative categories because of what they tell us about the nature of God and about how humans actually ought to live.
But I can see how, for an atheist or a strong skeptic, that would almost read like Greek; it’s very unfamiliar cognitive territory and may not even make sense. To think there could be any profit at all in discussing ethics apart from human behavior is probably very hard even to imagine. It’s because it requires seeing the world very differently than you have any experience in doing.
If I’ve understood you correctly, that is.
Tom,
Your conclusion above is what I was trying to get at earlier in my references to circularity. What I was trying to say is that yes, morality’s being well-grounded would matter if God exists, but it does not (except as Adonais has framed and I have tried to) if the reference (God) for that assumed grounding does not exist.
Which isn’t to say the question is fruitless. For me, it does raise the question of how do you justify morality to those in a population that demand ultimate, objective grounding. Clearly, there are those like yourself who cannot imagine how morality could exist otherwise.
Hi Adonais,
You can discuss oughts and behaviours without comment on my vision.
Perhaps oughts and behaviours go hand in hand but you have to demonstrate that.
There is no ought in the behaviour of a storm cloud.
Is there an ought in a lion’s felling of a wildebeest?
Ought a monkey steal a neighbor’s baby or ought it refrain?
At what point do oughts and behaviours start to go hand in hand?
What do you mean “ethical theory” here? Newton’s theories do not control planetray motion. How would ethical theory control behaviour?
Have we really found by consulting evolutionary biology that we have inherited from our ancestors moral sentiment? When have our ancestors thought in terms of right and wrong and from what did this evolve?
That is the question – whence the emergence of the “ought”? And, given that it emerges, whence its “grounding” and authority?
Thou shalt not kill has roots and so does thou shalt kill. You should ponder the connection between killing and its oughtness and you may see it as a moral imperative as much as you do not killing. Killing is innate, as is justifying it and I’m sure you can come up with a rational why it would be okay. In fact, we have lots of reasons why it is okay already.
To which one do we owe our allegiance and to which do we appeal in a disagreement? Which one makes offenders wrong and justifies punishments? In other words, how is it grounded?
I want to know which one bestows the oughtness and which one grounds it. If two cultures evolve side by side and one says it is wrong to marry a minor and the other says it is good, which culture is right?
There are several steps skipped here. 1) Correct. Neither archaeology nor paleontology can tell us whether the pithicenes, habilis, erectus, etc. actually had a moral sense or not. Sow e don’t know that we inherited morality from any of them.
2) You are calling existing primates our common ancestors, which of course, they are not.
3) You are discussing them as though we can observe moral sentiments. Do they know right from wrong? Ought they do one thing and not another, in their opinion?
Anyone who wants to ground it. People whose sense of reason and whose genome differs from those who wrote the ethical theory then, are not bound by it. How can we justify enforcing a code against those to whom it does not apply?
1) What if it were all arbitrary?
2) What is the significance of separating this into arbitrary and not?
3) You seem to be now admitting that the grounding is in biology itself. I submit we can ignore culture then, as it offers the arbitrary side of relative morality, and look at biology.
4) But is doesn’t equal ought. It seems like the naturalistic fallacy.
We have a duty? What is a civil duty and to whom does it apply?
Why is society superseding our biological grounding here?
Hi Tony,
How about when you want to justify it to the man behind bars who says “who is society to judge me?”
Who is society to judge him? Just the mighty majority? Who says they are right, rather than merely more powerful?
Charlie,
Like I said, I think justifying morality is a problem to the extent that individuals demand an over-arching or objective basis for that morality. I think that the issue is one of the great archetypes in human existence – the individual who rebels against a society’s morality, who challenges the might of the group and willingly martyrs himself for an ideal.
I have no problem with the group justifying its imprisonment of an individual who has committed a crime in our society and is behind bars: “We are social creatures who rely on cooperation to survive. Cooperation falls apart, and the group loses its advantage in a dangerous and competitive world, when individuals seek personal advantages that violate the principles of group fairness (basically the golden rule). Because we must punish violations to ensure compliance in the cooperation that necessitates the continued survival of ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren, you are to remain behind bars until the group has determined that you are no longer a threat and that the example of your punishment is a sufficient deterrence.” Or something like that.
My rationalization above works well enough, I think, virtually all of the time. But I presume that we agree that it’s worth taking for a logical extension test drive.
Imagine that you were born into a tribe in the South Pacific approximately 500 years ago. There the paucity of resources, chiefly reliable protein, are what anthropologists speculate led to the frequency of cannibalism. So, without a well-grounded morality, you might say, my rationalization allows for cannibalism – the group works together to look out for their shared interests above individual and other group interests. And my rationalization does accommodate for this – I’m not going to beat around the bush here.
I also presume to agree that cannibalism is a recourse I imagine we would rather martyr ourselves over rather than practice. It is terrible and revolting to even contemplate.
But here I ask this: what difference is an acknowledgement of relative morality as a result of group interest in a changing (and sometime extreme) environment to those who ascribe to an attested well-grounded morality? You don’t have to go too far to find examples of Christians practicing, of necessity, cannibalism. From the sinking of the Essex to soccer players crashing in the Andes, humans (even those with well-grounded moral systems) do what they need to do to survive. I imagine that whether we call our morality well-grounded or admit that it’s relative to our circumstance, the outcome tends toward the same.
Charlie and others, I dashed this together and I don’t mean to offend (although I’m sure I have). But those are the thoughts that ran through my mind in response to your question and I thought it would be better to throw them out there instead of waiting a couple of days – I’m going to be busy at work and I didn’t want to leave everything hanging too long.
Charlie:
This must be my last reply to you here.
I can. How about you; can you discuss without misrepresenting everything I say?
Look at what you did here. I made a statement that oughts and behavior can *sometimes* be closely related by an evolutionary inclusive fitness advantage that in modern times has turned into a moral sentiment that is not just innate, but also formalized in moral code. This was merely an observational inference, not a statement about a law. First you ditch the “sometimes” qualifier (has this happened before?) and then ask “At what point do oughts and behaviours start to go hand in hand?” Which of course is a straw man without the qualifier, and furthermore it makes the assumption that there is an underlying principle or driving force that would make this happen so that I could give an answer to your question. But I never claimed that there must be any such law, so of course I can not answer your question, which is a straw man.
In almost every reply you write to me, you do this kind of re-interpretation of my statements, and it is getting very, very tiresome for me to continually correct you on points that you misconstrue or misrepresent like this.
For cryin out loud… So in one sentence I used the word “control” as meaning constrain, or guide, or instruct – was it really possible to interpret this as control by physical force??? Another straw man.
*sigh*
You keep asking the same questions as if no answer has been given, even though we have been over it a dozen times.
We have certainly found that evolutionary biology predicts that this is what should happen. If you read the de Waal article you would have seen him suggest that some form of voluntary constraints on behavior, some minimal set of basic rules, appear to be necessary for stable group living.
I suppose with questions like “When have our ancestors thought in terms of right and wrong” you’re going for the unanswerable question tactic. I have absolutely no idea when, between our single-celled common ancestor and the modern human, thoughts of right and wrong first appeared. That’s in interesting question, but I haven’t the faintest idea. I hope I do not need to explain to you why my ignorance on this is absolutely irrelevant to the question of moral grounding.
There you go again, asking questions that are either obvious or which have been given answers many times over. There’s no point in sustaining this.
I’m having a hard time understanding how you at this point apparently still don’t know what my answer to questions like this would be. Frankly I think you’re pulling my leg. I can not think of any other explanation than that it is your preconceived notion that one of them must be absolutely right and the other absolutely wrong that you keep asking questions like these, seemingly oblivious to all the arguments and material about moral relativism and biological and cultural evolution that has been presented to you. It sounds impossible, but it almost looks like you have made no progress at all in understanding mine or Tony’s viewpoint since the start of the debate. I’m baffled.
Why don’t you read the de Waal, it’s only three pages. I’m getting tired of repeating myself.
This says it all really. Your rationale for an absolute moral grounding is that you want it to be beyond inheriting and thinking.
This is ridiculous, you’re making straw men out of everything I say. I just can’t be bothered to correct you on everything now…
This is….I don’t know what to call it. You know the very obvious answers to these questions, you have an upbringing and an education, your family and community has helped you know what the rules are in your society, which may be different from a society on the other side of the planet. Yet you ask as if you wouldn’t have a clue about these things, as if you suddenly would become morally rudderless, if morality is not found to be grounded in God.
See de Waal’s article. This is interesting question, but it is one that we can investigate without needing to presuppose that moral sentiments are grounded in God.
Tom:
You omitted a few assumptions, what you’re really saying is that: IF 1) there is a God and 2) he is exactly as you have imagined him, THEN x, y and z follows. Those are two big and very momentous IFs, in my view, and they need to be commensurately supported if we are to grant them.
The only way that I as a skeptic can consider this possibility in the competition with other possibilities is if I were to observe evidence or support for it, and you are all welcome to present those findings. But we never see this so much evidenced or argued for, as just assumed to be true and taken on faith. Faith becomes an argument in itself, but it is not one the skeptic can take very seriously.
Hmm well. If it reads like Greek that may be because much of it was written in Greek
There is a certain asymmetry in how most religious apologists tend to become super-critical skeptics when examining scientific claims, but defenestrates all that when it comes to God and are happy to take such momentous claims on faith. Look at Charlie’s latest reply to me: what would happen if he applied that level of skepticism to the claims of his own belief system, and required such standards of evidence for God? I suspect neither of you are even capable of attempting it, as this is equally unfamiliar cognitive territory for you.
adonais
I’d like to think I’m pretty even handed when it comes to all claims. I’ve certainly put a lot of religious claims to the test. In reality, I’m likely not as even handed as I think, but I do my best to think this stuff through by revisiting these claims again and again.
It’s not that we are overly skeptical of scientific claims. If I may be so bold to say this, it’s that we (or I) think skeptics like yourself sometimes give scientific data more explanitory power than it rightfully deserves. What happens too often is that scientific data is used to support an unscientific or philosophical position. The data is repackaged and presented to the uncritial eye as a fact with language like “science has shown that…”. We all do this now and again so I’m not pinning this on just you. Some, however, are way more guilty than others.
The next time I hear “science has shown that you and I are just matter and energy” or “science has shown that free will is an illusion” I will probably tear what little hair I have left out of my head. So give my hairline a much needed break and don’t say stuff like this.
adonais, come on now,
Really? Not even argued for? This is, forgive me, very shockingly unaware, if you meant it the way it appears here.
See the category “evidences” on this blog. Go to the legacy archive link there in the sidebar and see the same category there. Do that and you’ll find lots of arguing, yet still far less than 1/1000 of 1% of the arguing that you say has never happened.
See Pascal. See Plantinga. See Habermas. See Swinburne and Polkinghorne. See Craig and Moreland. See Lewis. See Augustine. See Aquinas. See Origen. See Paul (the apostle)–yes he presented arguments and evidence too. See Jesus himself.
And again,
I think Charlie and Steve are well qualified to answer for themselves, so I won’t do them the disservice of trying to speak on their behalf.
But I think that was issued in my direction as well. Do you suggest that I am in unfamiliar cognitive territory when it comes to questioning my own beliefs? Do you realize my beliefs get questioned every day here? Do you realize I do this because I welcome the questions and want to grapple with them?
(Anyone who posts frequently here could say the same. But then I said I wasn’t going to speak for them, didn’t I?)
Yeah come on
I suppose I was unclear: I wasn’t referring to Christian apologia in toto, but to what has been presented and argued by the theists in this thread. Has this discussion been characterized by theists arguing for their case? Not really. One might even say, quite the opposite. Tony and I are the ones doing all the hard work of presenting a coherent picture of the evolution of morality with numerous references and scientific results invoked for the argument, while you and Charlie appear to be resting on the laurels of Christian apologia. How convenient.
Don’t you think I could do the same? I could just refer you guys to the sum total of scientific knowledge and achievement, point you to all the instances in history where religion and the Bible has been demonstrably wrong and science had it right, and tell you to read the latest research, and then we don’t need to have any discussion at all!
Speaking of latest research, here’s a new paper by de Waal that I came across today: Giving is self-rewarding for monkeys. Oh and, also a new paper by Nowak in the works (not published yet) relevant to abiogenesis and molecular evolution before the era of biology: Prevolution.
That makes more sense. Thanks.
But really, every discussion has its purpose, and demonstrating the existence of God is not the purpose this time. We started out by asking whether it matters if morality is well grounded. My thought–though I didn’t express it at the time–was that it seemed rather odd how you were switching the subject all of a sudden.
On the point you quoted from me (“If, however, there is a God…”) you may have thought I was changing the subject myself. It was intended as parenthetical, though if you thought I was actually changing the subject I can see why you might have thought that.
Let me explain further.
There are two ways one could argue for the importance of morality being grounded. One would be to show where it is grounded, and to demonstrate that this locus is a significant one. Another would be to discuss what happens to morality if it is not grounded. We have been doing the second of those all through this thread.
When I took that parenthetical excursion I was not resorting to the first version of the argument. (I would be happy to go there on another discussion, but it would confuse our purposes here if I did that.) Instead I was pointing out that there is a worldview divide, which seemed to be illustrated in your comment that I quoted, that makes it difficult even to see what we theists are saying—it’s as if it’s in Greek to you. (If you want to say the same back at us theists, and if you can illustrate it, please feel free.) That’s an observation, not an argument, and if we leave it at that it’s fine with me.
So coming in last night to see a comment that ended with the warning that the offense likely given wasn’t intended and another accusing me of misrepresentation I decided not to read them and see if I could get a good night sleep instead.
Let’s have a look-see now.
Hi Tony,
This is exactly what I am talking about. You are “punishing” violations. But these violations are violations of biology and the environment’s impact on these. As I’ve asked others, would you “punish” a man for the colour of his skin? Or male-pattern baldness? Or sterility?
This man has done nothing wrong. Neither has the man who, due to his environment and biology, does not reason to the same conclusions as the mass. But yet the mass takes it upon itself to force compliance.
As C.S. Lewis has said, what can be more unjust than catching a person who has done no wrong and imprisoning him, or worse, making him undergo treatment to stop this behaviour which is not wrong?
Yes, it seems to be at work on the surface, but it must work at its root.
Possibly so. But I think not. When morality is grounded it has a corrective for aberrations. As we have discussed, you can look to history if you want to see the over-arching effects of a grounded morality, as opposed to looking at the behaviours of some fallen individuals.
What about my questions about eradicating races but preserving their germ lines?
Is there anything in your system, where the grounding of morality is the preservation of germ lines, that speaks against this?
===
Adonais,
So far so good.
I’m sorry you see these quests for clarification as misrepresentations. When you say “sometimes this…” I want to know “well when” and “to what effect”. If it is not part of your argument or evidence, and is merely an observational inference then that is good to know. It is not erecting a strawman to question this and find out what it is saying, if anything about the issue at hand – grounding morality.
I realize you are being non-commital when you say “some” and “may”. But by referencing what sometimes may happen you are not addressing morality.
I don’t think I’ve been unfair, misrepresentative or the least bit unclear about my interpretation of Tom’s question or how I don’t think your answers are approaching it.
As I said:
Let me amend that so as to conform to your concerns:
There is no difference and the requirement continues to be the same. No strawman exists nor was any thrashed.
It does no such thing. It asks when has such a thing happened, how does it happen and when does it become normative. It asks for and assumes no driving force or underlying principle – it asks for grounding.
This process is tiring for everybody and we can all characterize each others’ remarks and efforts.
No strawman, a clarfication pointed out succinctly with the pertinent question as to grounding offset – “How would ethical theory control behaviour?”
I didn’t say anything about a physical force and I asked you specifically what you meant, alluding, via Newton, to the obvious fact that you didn’t refer to a physical force.
Good, this. Amid your cries of “strawman” you answer the question.
So neither archeology, nor paleontology, nor, even, the predictions of evolutionary biology or psychology have shown or found that we inherited our moral sense, that it is innate, or that it is evolved. We have not “found” this. Rather , it is a necessary presupposition of the naturalistic viewpoint. What these fields have found is that some behaviours we consider moral in our species exist in those we consider our closest relatives and, by inference, in our ancestors. They also speculate, and even demonstrate, selective advantages of these behaviours. They even speculate about the motivational aspects of these behaviours, but that is all it is, the problem of consciousness being so intractable in our own species it is hard to justify attributing morality to other species and extinct ancestors.
We simply do not know, and can not know, if they have any sense of ought whatsoever and it is false for one to say that we inherited this sense. You may presume it, but science does not show it.
And yet you can complain about the obviousness of the question without answering it. The answer is, nothing you have pojnted to makes the offender wrong and morality is ungrounded in your presentations.
Not only do I think I understand your viewpoint, but I think I’ve argued for it myself in a more convincing fashion in my past.
This practice of adding the word “absolute” to change the point does not provide an out. If morality, oughtness, is to be grounded it has to apply to individuals of different cultures – especially at the point of co-mingling. If it doesn’t, it does not prescribe oughts at all, and is, obviously, not grounded.
Talking about where behaviours come from, and even where a sense of their guides comes from, does not answer, or seek to answer, Tom’s question about grounding.
If I have time I might check to see if de Waal claims that primates have moral sentiments , know right from wrong, and choose to do what they know they ought to do. But, in all honesty and without a single straw, I don’t recall you answering this once.
Not at all. I have shown in argument why it has to be beyond these in order to be grounded. Not everyone thinks the same way, or comes to the same conclusions, and yet we lock them up anyway. Not everyone has the same parents and the same environments and yet we appeal to concepts like justice.
Here we a re closing in on the truth. It IS very obvious. And this is the reason that the naturalistic thinker is so sure of his position and believes it is so self-explanatory. We obviously KNOW that there is right and wrong, and we have a very good sense of what that IS, in most cases and at least generally. But the naturalist can not justify this at its root, as we have seen throughout and is living off the borrowed capital of theism. Yes, we learn codes of conduct from our families, schools, media, courts, peers, etc..
But none of this creates what it is supposed to – hence, Ruse’s appeals to illusion.
It is not that you would not have a clue, or become morally rudderless if morality were not grounded in God, it is that morality does not exist without God. But we seem to think it does exist. This means that either it is grounded in God or it is an illusion.
We think about and answer questions like this everyday. That sense that so many prominent atheists had between the ages of 12-16 that lead them to abandon belief is not foreign to those of us who did not abandon belief, or who came to it later in life. God provides the best answer not only to this question, but to a myriad of others. God is the single unifying answer to questions that each spin-off their own unsatisfying ad hoc answers from naturalism.
But you are right, there is a different standard. When you pose a challenge to the existence of God for my standards all I need is a plausible answer to assuage my concerns. Against the weight of the evidence for God, a defeater only needs be defeated, it does not have to have convincing power to the skeptic.
Against my disbelief in the ability of morality to be grounded without God I need more than what the true naturalistic believer will find sufficiently plausible, I need something that will compel. There is absolutely nothing compelling in the arguments I’ve read in these past several threads that shows that morality can be, or actually is, grounded without God.
And, as per this thread, I contend that it matters and have argued why that is.
I think that the allusions to our obvious beliefs and feelings about morality demonstrate that, if the grounding were to disappear, anyone can see that it matters.
Adonais,
i must echo Charlie’s objection to this, a huge distortion that amounts to a personal attack. Your first example of misrepresentation was,
He asked a question. You object that he left out the qualifier. As I read it, he wasn’t denying the qualifier, he was handing you a courteous, golden invitation to clarify the qualifier. Is that misrepresentation? You object that he ought to have known you couldn’t answer it. Since when is that a misrepresentation? All you had to do was answer with whatever answer you had, like “I don’t have a principle by which I could answer.”
Continuing:
You are exasperated at Charlie’s not “getting it;” the continual need to repeat your position. It’s not that he doesn’t understand, it’s that he doesn’t think you’ve succeeded in justifying your position.
Simply and succinctly put, you have not yet answered this:
You’ve explained that we have a moral sense; you’ve explained that our putative evolutionary precursors exhibit precursors to morality; you’ve explained that societies have a group-level moral sense that they apply within their group; you’ve pointed to the innateness of the moral sense.
You still haven’t answered the question, though. What if the person in my question looks at what you have to say and says, “well, then, so what? Who says I’m wrong, and where do they get that from?”
None of your answers have got us there yet. Nor have they answered my other short question:
We also asked what difference it makes if you can answer a challenge like that satisfactorily. Here’s my answer: if you can’t tell a guy he’s wrong, then for pete’s sake why do we keep on doing it? But we do. And that signals a huge confusion in the way we understand the world—unless, of course, there really is a grounding for morality.
Tom:
This has certainly been answered, on several occasions. Moral relativism says that they both simply have to follow the law of their society, whether this be a modern human democracy or a chimpanzee autocracy. They may privately entertain whatever fancy notions of absolute wrongness or rightness as they like, but if such notions cause them to go against the law, the justice system will inform them of this, and perhaps they’ll drop their notions of philosophical purity and absolute rightness in favor of social acceptance and a good life.
There is no contradiction between these in moral relativism. You’re presenting a false dilemma. Even you appear to forget the original question of your thread, whether morality really needs to be grounded in God. The naturalistic explanatory framework shows that it does not.
Tom:
I think you have lost all semblance of objectivity. I think I have been more than forthcoming in presenting information, arguments, references and other material, and to correct Charlie on his many misunderstanding or misconstructions. But there’s a limit also to my patience and forbearance. I strongly disagree with your assessment that Charlie has understood the argument and is merely skeptical of it. If he showed any signs of understanding the argument I wouldn’t mind staying in the debate, but all he’s doing lately is to keep asking redundant, irrelevant or misguided questions, which suggests he hasn’t understood the issue at all. I have no inclination to sustain a discussion under such conditions.
Look at his latest reply, he says:
Even after my explanation he does not understand that “when” is only a relevant question if there is a law behind it, which I never suggested, and “to what effect” has nothing to do with the reason that I brought up the issue in the first place. Which was of course to point out that when separating behavior from ethics and oughts, as we often like to do, this is sometimes inconsistent with reality, when a moral sentiment, an ethical idea and an innate behavioral pattern can sometimes have a common origin and only represent different aspects of the same trait. If they have such common origins, you run the risk of deceiving yourself if you choose to philosophize about the ethic or “oughtness” disconnected from the moral sense or behavior itself. So he took my statement off on a tangent and started to (and continue to!) attack issues that are completely irrelevant.
And look here:
Where the hades did I say that it was a normative process??? Nowhere. This is how Charlie perpetuates his debates, by continually inventing positions for his opponent and attack straw men. I have a pretty good idea why he seems so incapable of accessing the naturalistic explanation without distorting it:
And yet the topic of this thread is whether morality NEEDS to be grounded (in God or otherwise). Charlie does not even consider the question, he knows already that the answer is Yes because God says so. Unsurprisingly, with such a preconceived notion he can not engage in a serious discussion of the naturalistic argument.
In other words, whatever I don’t understand, God is the explanation for it, and thereby I understand. After spending thousands of words on inventing straw men against naturalism, the argument on your side is simply “God explains it all.” This is not an explanation, nor an answer that settles any interesting debate. This is your preferred reality that you hope will turn out to be true. It’s not even an argument, and it offers no understanding whatsoever. All this does is to replace one unknown by a different and vastly more mysterious unknown. By no stretch of the imagination can this be considered “explaining” or providing “understanding.”
And regarding the material that Tony and I have been presenting here Charlie calls is “unsatisfying ad hoc answers from naturalism.” Unsatisfying to Charlie I’m sure, but there’s absolutely nothing ad hoc about it. It is a perfectly consistent naturalistic explanatory framework based on a consilience of scientific knowledge, including anthropology, archeology, ethology, biology, genetics, psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and so on.
Suggesting that God has impregnated us with absolute notions of right and wrong based on an unsupported idea that we must possess such absolute standards, that is ad hoc.
I have nothing more to say on this, my position was made clear here: On Moral Grounds.
Hi Adonais,
You quoted Tom and answered:
This doesn’t answer the question at all. Sure, society has laws,rules, norms, expectations, etc., but the question, directly above was “who says I’m wrong and where do they get that from?”
Notice as well, at the risk of misrepresentation, that “morality” has now been reduced to “obeying laws”. What about disobeying laws when no one is watching?
Adonais says to Tom:
We all have to guard against our loss of objectivity. Anyone who says Tom has lost all semblance of objectivity not the least.
A:
The questions are perfectly valid challenges and they are unanswered.
False.
First, let’s explore the line of “misrepresentations”:
Who said there had to be a law and why do we need to accept your completely unfounded assertion that to ask “when” requires that there be a law?
You said that sometimes behaviours and oughts go hand in hand. You have since added that there is no principle or law to describe when this happens – or at least that you don’t claim that there is. Fine, use empiricism. Show when it happened. Or show that it happened.
You repeat that sometimes oughts and behaviours are closely innately connected. When are they? In which cases? which oughts and which behaviours? Where are they? What oughts have ever been seen or found to be evolved? You say its an “observational inference” so describe the observation.
You say, and repeat:
How does asking when and where this connection has been made and how it has been observed say anything whatsoever about this alleged assumption of a law or principle?
Further:
Sometimes implies a “when”. When has an ethical idea ever been shown to have a common origin with a behaviour? If they are different aspects of the same trait show which trait and ethical idea you are talking about and show how they have been observed to have had the same origin. How do you determine that they “can” if there is no principle, no law and no observation to support this?
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How can you discuss morality and oughts, even if they are innate and inherited without talking about “normativity”? I didn’t mean to say that the process of linking oughts to behaviours was normative – what would that even mean? I asked how a behaviour becomes normative – how does it happen that a behavour becomes linked to an ought? You said the instinctive behaviour later becomes an ought – I asked how the instinctive behaviour becomes normative. What does it matter if you used the word “normative”? That is plainly what we are talking about when we talk about oughts, and in Tony’s formulation, “prescription”.
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If you aren’t talking about oughts and prescriptions then you aren’t talking about morality. But of course you are, because you said not only the behaviours, but the oughts, are inherited, that sometimes they go hand in hand, and that you can’t always separate them. It’s not misrepresentative to use the actual words that apply to the argument.
.
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That’s not what that says, is it?
Not at all. There are arguments for each of the things I have in mind: starting here with morality, moving to the question of why is there something rather than nothing, to the fine-tuning argument, to the argument from reason, to the argument from abstract objects, to the intelligibility of the universe, the problem of consciousness, the problem of free will, etc., etc.. This can not be waved away as God of the Gaps reasoning, nor do any of these stand without solid arguments. In fact, as I said, God is the best conclusion of all these problems whereas naturalism has a separate, ad hoc answer for each.
Kin selection, for instance, is exactly proposed to deal with the very problem of altruism. It is not an inference from data nor a logical extension of evolutionary theory, but a band-aid to try to explain what is obvious.
We do not have absolute notions of right and wrong, we have notions of absolute right and wrong.
Adonais,
Let’s highlight just a few words here: “Moral relativism says they have to follow….” I don’t think I’m violating the context at all if I suggest that this sounds like an oxymoron.
This was presented as an answer to the question (summarized here), “what do you say to the person who disagrees with the culture’s morals?” And the suggested answer is: “If you don’t agree, then moral relativism says you simply have to follow the law of our society.”
Something there smells a little non-relativist to me. You allow, of course, for the possibility that the person disagrees:
What about the person who privately entertains no notions, “fancy” or otherwise, about absolute rightness or wrongness, but still disagrees with the culture’s morality? What about the person, for example, who thinks it’s just fine to rape little girls, because he wants to and not because he thinks in terms of absolutes? (I find it almost odd that you thought my question referred to absolutists, when all I referred to was someone who does not think “moral value or duty D applies to me.”)
What you have to offer that person is “the justice system” as a force that may persuade him to change his ways. It’s the application of societal power upon the person. I have very strong reservations against considering force and power as an answer to moral disagreements—unless said power is constrained by something higher. HIstory shows what happens otherwise.
By “these” I assume your are referring to my question how these can all exist:
You’ve presented quite an argument in response. (Did I miss one earlier?) You have explained that they are not contradictory. Thanks.
It would be rather interesting, however, to hear just how the naturalistic explanatory framework shows they are not. If I missed an earlier answer—which is quite possible, given the kind of week this has been—maybe you would be kind enough to point me toward the answer you gave.
Tom,
You asked Adonais how can these all coexist?
My questions back to you are:
1. Would you accept any explanation for a moral ought that isn’t the same as “because God says so?” Because if you would, there are plenty of reasons to obey a moral ought. I gave one as “…to ensure compliance in the cooperation that necessitates the continued survival of ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.” An even easier one would be “If I do obey I shall survive, and if I don’t obey society will kill me,” which is a crude but working example of a moral ought. (If you won’t accept something like that as a justification for a moral ought then I don’t think further discussion on this topic is going to get out of the gate no matter how much running around we do.)
2. Are you willing to accept, for purposes of argument, that B above might be true?
3. By the naturalistic fallacy do you mean the fallacy argued by Moore (which appears to present the same challenge to a supernatural or metaphysical explanation of good as it would for a natural one), or the is-ought fallacy? Because if it’s the latter, then I think that Adonais’ earlier arguments (you said you read them and owed Adonais a reply) for compatibilism take care of that problem as well.
1. If you offered something that really answered the question, I would certainly accept it. The options you’ve listed here do not address the incompatibility of the three statements A, B, and C, and they do not seem at all to answer the opening question in the original post. They answer a lot of important questions, and as far as they go they are valid and useful ways of thinking, so I’m not saying there’s anything lacking in them, except for this: they don’t answer the questions I asked to start with. As far as I can tell, that is, they do not.
For example, you suggest the continued survival of the species would be persuasive. But is the continued survival of the species a good? If so (and I think it is) what kind of good is it? It’s a moral good, I think. There are people out there who don’t care about it at all, however. “Why should I care about the continued survival of the species?” “Because it’s good for the continued survival of the species!” “Well, I don’t care…” and then you’re stuck.
What about “if I don’t comply I’ll get killed”? It’s not “a crude but working example of a moral ought” at all. It’s a personal preservation/power game. Are you really going to say personal preservation and power should rule the way persons deal with each other? It’s been tried, and the results have not been pretty.
2. Yes, for purposes of argument, I would be most willing to consider the implications if B is true. I’m asking you to treat it that way and show how it could work.
3. The naturalistic fallacy to which I’m referring is the is/ought problem. The compatibilism issue is irrelevant, as I’ve already said above.
Moral relativism’s appeal to the current legal system as the moral ‘ought’ gets my contradiction meter going for some reason. Maybe its because so many people were required to ignore this moral duty, and behave in an immoral manner (according to relativism), in order to improve the legal system.
On the one hand they are immoral, but on the other hand they made it better. But wait! A better moral system means the old system fell short. This can’t be because the old system was the standard by which everthing was to be measured.
Anyone else see this problem or is it just me?
Or maybe it’s because you believe in God and moral absolutes.
You are creating the problem yourself by thinking that moral sentiments and moral systems can be “better” (and worse) in an absolute sense, and that there is only one “true” ethic. This is a cognitive illusion.
Long before Christianity, Protagoras regarded man as the measure of all things. But the times they are a-changing, and man and the measure of man will change along with it. Look into history, and look around the world: there is no doubt whatsoever about the fact that moral relativism is de facto how morality is played out in human societies, over the eons, across the globe. You will judge anyone you meet by the moral standards of your Christian belief, and a clansman of an amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe will judge you by the norms of his experience and community.
You have a theory that there is an absolute standard for right and wrong, and that there is a fixed ethic that is the ultimate ethic for live a good (Christian) life. Another theory based on empirical observation says that we don’t need any such objective basis in order to construct ethical societies. Of course we can strive to construct better ethical systems by practical and pragmatical criteria, that are more successful in enabling the good life for its citizens, but we can do this entirely without such ethics needing to be “better” in any absolute meta-ethical sense.
If you want to be fair and intellectually honest in your discourse you should read the longer explanation (On Moral Grounds), rather than addressing statements made in response to infantile bickering at a conference of straw men.
SteveK,
If you can find me a moral relativist making the claim that a legal system is the standard by which everything should be measured, let alone that said legal system is perfect, then maybe I’d understand your point.
Tom,
You wrote:
Give me an argument for the oughtness of Christian morals. I have billions of people who would reply, “I don’t care.” Are you stuck? If not, then why am I?
I guess that I don’t understand your appeal to the naturalistic fallacy with regards to incompatibility in your 3 item list. Can you please write a very brief explanation of why the three things in your list are incompatible?
Lastly, can you explain to me what you mean by this sentence?
Sorry to backtrack — I had been meaning to ask for this and some other clarifications in your original post but thing’s just got rolling and I think we all got sidetracked.
adonais, what Steve was getting at is the reformer’s dilemma. You said,
Did Martin Luther King Jr.’s efforts result in any moral improvement in society? Not on your account of the matter. How about the abolitionists? They didn’t improve a thing. The people advocating for abortion rights and the ones opposed; the gay rights activists and the defenders of traditional marriage, all stand on equal moral ground. The Islamist terrorist sleeper cells, convinced that America should be an Islamist state, are in violation of today’s cultural/moral standards, so they are immoral in our terms, but they’re in approximately the same moral position that Martin Luther King Jr. was in back in the 1950s. So King in the 1950s was as immoral as the Islamist sleeper groups are today, for all we can tell.
Define “the good life.” Think of it in terms of sexual relationships, for example. Marriage: is the “good life” one in which two people live with strong, faithful gorwing commitment to each other for life? Or is it one in which the individual’s freedom rules even while married? For the unmarried: is the “good life” one in which persons are free to hook up with a different person every week, or one in which discipline and character strength lead to the ability to enter into a marriage unsullied by memories of dozens of encounters? Is the “good life” one in which marriage is between a man and a womon, or is the “good life” one in which marriage has no gender connotations whatsoever?
I could go on and on. Is the “good life” one in which pepole are strengthened in their relationships, their physical and social health, their contributions to their community, and so on through following Jesus Christ? (Note that I didn’t even mention that this is good in God’s eyees, though I could have; I’ve kept it purely on a human plane.) Or is the “good life” one in which all this is eschewed?
I don’t know how you could answer this without knowing what it is on which your ethical theory is grounded.
Tony, you asked,
I thought I had. Was it too brief?
Tom,
I guess my confusion if over your objections to arguments for compatibility for A, B, and C then. I referred to Adonais argument for compatibilism because I thought you were making an argument for determinism based on B and C.
Adonais wrote:
This is basically an explanation for how a system for deriving oughts would arise. It is compatible with B, of course, and because it generates its own reasons (it takes its environment into account, but that is not the same thing as being driven by one’s environment).
I understand is-ought to say that we should not justify our behaviors based on what occurs in nature. (Animals kill, therefore I must kill, e.g.) That is not the same thing, however, as saying “Anything derived from nature can have no connection to our behaviors.”
PS. Does anybody else find it almost impossible to remember to type in the anti-spam word before submitting? Man oh man have I had to take out a lot of “/” in my comments…
Quick hint: you can register for the blog, and never have to type in the anti-spam word again.
Please let me know if that doesn’t work the way it’s advertised.
Tony
Getting back to the grounding issue, this says nothing about the grounding of the system *itself* – why the system is good in and of itself. I could be wrong, but the only way for this to occur would be if the system had no possibility of being otherwise. In other words, the reason why its a morally good system is there is no way for it to be a morally bad one. I *think* this is referred to as necessary grounding. Anyway, I don’t see this system as being necessary.
Contrast this with the system of logic. That system is grounded as far as I can tell. The system is logical in and of itself, and can not be otherwise.
Another way to say what I said above it so say all truths about reality are truths in and of themselves. They are NOT true *because* of any system of reason, or system that justifies their truth, and they could not be false.
I don’t know everything about the Eurythro dilemma, but my exposure to it says this is the most reasonable and logically satisfying solution – that moral goodness is good, not because God justified it through reason or other methods, but that it could not be otherwise. This is grounding in my view.