Moral Choice: biology, philosophy or religion?

"Morality is best seen as a question of human biology, rather than one of philosophy; least of all one of religion."

Thomas Nagel raised an interesting question in the London Review of Books (3rd June 2021): how do we make moral choices. How do we reconcile ‘gut feelings’ with moral precepts, if they conflict? I do not think there is a real problem here, as I shall try to explain, though there are plenty of hypothetical problems. 

Nagel transfers to morality the concept of reflective equilibrium that John Rawls developed for the field of justice; a reflective equilibrium is the end-product of a reflective re-adjustment of one’s moral thoughts achieved by testing general principles against considered judgements about particular cases. The method itself could be called reflective equilibration (or simply reflection); it presumably involves successively tweaking the weightings given to the various relevant thoughts that come into one’s head until they cohere  into a consistent conclusion; one that is optimally concordant, or minimally discordant. It works if both the general principles and the particular judgements can be revised (tweaked). 

 

But Nagel’s main problem arises when there is a difference in kind between the various moral thoughts that have to be reconciled. He has been struggling for 40 years to reconcile two kinds of moral input. Some appear to come into the mind as rigid, clear-cut, laws telling us what is right, or wrong, (do not kill innocent people, do not tell lies); these he calls deontological. (They seem to be very like Kant’s categorical imperatives.)  Others actions, themselves neutral, have to be judged by their consequences as good or bad; these he calls consequential. A familiar form of consequentialism is Bentham’s Utilitarianism, seeking “the greatest good of the greatest number.” (See the very clear article on the Stanford Philosophy site: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/.)  

Nagel struggles a bit to define in general terms these two basic kinds of moral thought that present themselves to the conscious brain. He is not sure whence these intuitions come, and seems to be a little in awe of rules-based deontological morality; are these moral instructions hard-wired in our biology, or were we brain-washed by our parents? (To believe that one’s duties come direct from God does not solve the problem, except in so much as, by giving it a name, it allows the ‘religious believers’ to stop thinking about that particular problem.) Nagel is concerned to be even-handed between the two types of moral intuition but he is also concerned to allow morality to evolve, and admits that the rules-based thoughts offer more resistance to change than the ad hoc, utilitarian, type. Take homosexuality, for example; some people cannot overcome their instinctive taboo, but society as a whole is shifting its position. 

Some people are more inclined to be deontological; others to be consequential. I confess to being a deontologist, though an atheist; I don’t seem to mind too much if the rule is silly, or wrong, but I like to obey the rule nevertheless. For Nagel, the problem becomes: how can one do a reflective equilibration when some of the arguments are stubbornly inflexible? All the bending must be done by the consequential calculations.

And what about other people; must we equilibrate their intuitions also? Nagel concedes the problem but does not answer it:  “In some sense the moral point of view requires putting oneself in everyone else’s shoes…. The question" (he says) "is: how?” 

I deal with some of these issues in my recent book (West, I.C. (2019) “God for Atheists”, AuthorHouse, Bloomington.), though my conclusions are simpler than Nagel’s. Morality (I maintain) comes from the reflective equilibration, not of one mind only, but of all minds (or an adequate sample of minds). How is that done?.  Simply by asking questions, I suggest, and listening to the answers.

I described (in 2011) what I called at the time a “Philosophical Summing Junction”, roughly as follows: 

“We spent a happy hour or so, tossing around the question of who to save in the event of nuclear war; not because we anticipated needing a plan of action, but because Dr.X had challenged the claim that philosophy can clarify the mind and solve problems. I attempted to draw the exchange to a close by suggesting that in our 60 minutes of vigorous thought and discussion we had produced between us an almost complete answer to the question of how to proceed. Dr. X said he scored it "philosophy nil, chaos 100". So I tried to explain my contention again, at greater length.” (See https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2011/09/philosophical-summing-junction.html) 

I see the human mind as capable of liking to follow rules (on some occasions), of liking to save one's own daughter before that of someone else, liking to save the lives of strangers, even of dumb animals, baulking at the killing of innocents. I suspect that most people do not really mind if their actions are right or wrong in any philosophical sense, as long as they feel right. Furthermore, they like to be judged by people who come to the same conclusions as they do on these matters, people who know what is right, defined in this way.

I think this is the basis of the ‘Michael Sandel roadshow’. He steps onto the stage and asks a question, then takes comments from the audience for an hour. I think he has the correct approach to morality. 

In summary:  "Morality is best seen as a question of human biology, rather than one of philosophy; least of all one of religion."

David Chapman and Meaningness

Meaningness and Eternalism

For years David Chapman has been grappling with, and  developing online, his views on the age-old problems of morality and the 'meaning of existence'; problems that have dogged mankind for thousands of years, and which, until the last few hundred years, were solved by religion (in its widest sense). In the last few centuries the proportion of the human population that feel bound to reject religion has been growing, leaving more and more people nagged by the worrying possibility that our lives are pointless.  Chapman talks about purpose, ethics, and selfhood, but in a manner that he believes is neither religious nor philosophical, for he thinks of himself as anti-religious, and anti-philosophical.

His rejection of religion has centred on the concept of 'eternalism'.  Eternalism, according to Wikipedia, is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all points in time are equally real, as opposed to the 'presentist' idea that only the present is real and the 'growing block universe' theory of time in which the past and present are real while the future is not. Chapman clearly has in mind faith-systems like Christianity, Islam, communism; systems that provide believers with answers to the otherwise insoluble problems of ethics, metaphysics, and politics. He sees (I suppose) a common feature in that the answers provided are unchallengeable precisely because they are not contingent on time and place; they provide answers for all time; so he calls them 'eternalist'. Chapman rejects 'eternalism', and its false promises. I see the common feature of these religious (and perhaps also political) systems to lie in the way they are propagated, held, and justified. I call them 'faith-based', as I see that the propositions are supported not by observation, experience, or logic, but by hearsay, authority, and wishful-thinking. And I reject them on those grounds. (Communism does not fit neatly here, and needs another paragraph.)

But I agree that they are 'eternalist', so far as that goes. And agree that they are attractive to their devotees in their comprehensiveness, and in providing a feeling of certainty; a feeling that is seductive, but illusory. Chapman goes on to explore the way we love to feel we understand things even when we do not. Few people can tell us exactly how a tin-opener works, or a bicycle, or the tides; though most of us are happy with out sketchy level of understanding. I confess to having a great love of certainty (even siding with Einstein in the Born-Einstein debate about 'God playing dice'). And confess to finding it unexpectedly hard to explain tides if we go at it at all thoroughly. However, I avoid the mistake of thinking that I can explain tides, because I have several times tried, and know the difficulty (E.g. why two tides per day. Why two equal tides, if the density of water and earth are different.) On the other hand, I was not too rattled to find I did not know (until I thought about it) which leg of the tin-opener had the cog, which the cutting wheel. It is after all sufficient to know 'how to use it'.

This is interesting, but I suggest it is not relevant to his central problem, which is to find a way of answering the recurring question of  'the meaning of existence' that is not simply an unsupported, eternalist statement of faith.

In order to search for and find this elusive quality, David Chapman felt he had to name it and, as no name currently existed, he invented the word 'Meaningness'. (It is possible that the word 'meaningfulness' might have sufficed, but was already in use and could not be 'patented'.) Perhaps we could look at it this way: we spend 2 hours of our life watching a film and, depending on the film, we feel benefited, or we feel we have wasted our time. We are, in this, discussing the 'meaningness' of the film; not the 'meaning' of the film, which is a quite different question. Or we could ask, as perhaps David Chapman does, 'what is the meaning of our life?' How much or how little does it have of the quality of 'meaningness'? 

But in the very act of asking that question he is, I believe, creating his problem, for to ask the question seems to imply that there is an answer; that there is a 'purpose'; that there is someone (or some thing) that can harbour an intention, and has the ability to arrange things thus, or differently. Those are implications we have already rejected. (Vide supra.) If you deny all possible answers, then you should not ask the question.

It seems to me that David Chapman has not yet achieved his goal, for much of his online Meaningness hypertext consists of 'place-holders' labelled "work in progress". But I think he is working on the right lines. His work is almost a Baconian Novum Organum of Meaningness, for he treads his way round the topic, testing each vision in his mind for its meaningness. He is building up a list of reactions to situations using his own 'feeling' of meaningness.

To my way of thinking this quest is indeed philosophical, and I suspect Chapman only declared himself anti-philosophical so that he did not have to read up all the myriad words that preceding philosophers have written on the subject. I believe the 'answer' will be a sort of objective subjectivity, for I see the possibility of a 'natural history of the human mind', where the subject matter lies inside the brain of the investigator, but the objectivity arises from the existence of similar brains. I believe morals are generated by the individual mind, but tested and verified by society, as I have blogged elsewhere.