The Good

'The Good': Is Morality still Needed? 

Do we have, or desire, or need a set of moral rules, or a moral compass?  My answer is "Yes!" We are social animals and need (and desire) a set of rules. But we do already have some guidance; partly in our instincts (the compass), partly acquired culturally (in our historic religions) and partly acquired individually (from parents and from 'life').

Can our historic religions provide? My answer is "No!"  Most have lost their authority by deploying  guesses, half-truths, myths, and arrogance.  Religion in the West, is today largely abandoned; devalued by its arrogance; recklessly challenging science, offering barmy claims, and making empty promises. (See my essay "The Rise and Fall of Christendom.") 

I am talking of Europe, and of now, in the twenty first century. So, I am also talking about Christianity (still the world's leading 'faith' system, apparently).  Science has, to a considerable extent, replaced religion; stolen its thunder and its arrogance; explained the motions of the planets, the weather, procreation, and (to some extent) disease. Science has expanded the universe a million-fold and relegated mankind and our little planet from the status of sovereign to be just another infinitesimal speck on an infinitesimal speck near the edge of the the universe.  

Very few people would argue that there is no difference between good and bad behaviour, nor would they deny that they prefer the good. It can be hard to decide for any one action whether it is good or bad; and people may vote either way. For example, on the assassination of Julius Caesar. That being the case, it is even harder to define what we mean in general by good and bad behaviour.  Most adults (though to varying extents) feel they know the difference. But, if you ask from whence we get that feeling, there is little agreement. Maybe partly from our genes, partly from our earliest childhood, and subsequent experience. There are plenty data, for acute and methodical observers to process; comparing people from different backgrounds, rich/poor households, large/small families, good/bad schools, provision/absence of religious instruction. But most simple experiments are unethical. For example, that of the Scottish king, Jame IV,  who put two new-borns on Inch Keith in the Firth of Forth with a dumb nurse. Or that of Japanese Emperors in the period of competing religions (1560 - 1614). 

The value to a society of having a clear exposition of what constitutes 'good' and 'bad' behaviour has been so great that every human civilisation (that we know anything about) seems to have created a set of moral rules and invented a religious myth to justify them. 

These sets of rules, these lists of 'to do' and 'to not-do', are interestingly similar, comparing one civilisation with another. (Tell the truth, honour the elderly, do not kill, do not steal.) Their corresponding religious myths, by contrast, are sufficiently different to occasion wars, and genocides. 

A different, and perhaps separate, question concerns the presence, or absence, of a mind, or a will, behind everything, guiding, planning, intending, and above all caring. Such a mind is to me both incredible on the one hand, as too obviously human, and showing too little evidence of supra-terrestial interests and concerns. And, on the other hand, the existence of such a mind seems contradicted by events: the Lisbon earthquake, the Malaysian tsunami of 2004.

But, to many people, both complex and simple people, the absence of such a mind is intolerable. 

What is to be done? We could [1] postulate such a mind; pretend it exists. If the claim is believed, it would give the believer purpose, and at the same time authorise the rules. But it is deceitful, and it would require extraordinary insight and consistency, or it would slide into [2]  a cloud of prevarications, obfuscations, hints and ambiguities. Or [3] we could try to generate such a mind collectively, to care for the needs of each other, using the collective wisdom of the best guides, past and present, continuously updating the rules by judging each new situation afresh; each participant telling only what is true for himself. This is essentially what Quakers do. (Perhaps an AI substitute for God?) 

I find repugnant the idea of telling a giant lie. Nor does obfuscation and prevarication sound any better. I advocate a deliberate system of mutual support, and caring; for those who want it, and want to provide it. 

There is a caveat. If the group is too small it can fall under the sway of a single charismatic leader (See my essay on 'Death Cults'.) Quakers have, so far, avoided this danger by linking local meetings together into area meetings, and these into yet larger 'Yearly' meetings.

(Fine)

Why I am a Quaker

Please read this very compact little essay again from the top. (Da capo al Fine) That will tell you why I am a Quaker. 

(Comments are welcome direct to: Cawstein@gmail.com)

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."