Disorganized Thoughts on Ethics/Morality

The following are some conclusions on ethics/morality that I’ve reached in the last year after a life-long conviction in moral realism. I present them in bullet-point format because I don’t yet have a fully coherent system that I can put down in good prose. But I want to put this out there to overcome my crippling procrastination. It’s easier for me to add/correct later, than letting this draft sit there, unpublished, because it’s not “perfect”. If and when I have a more coherent picture, I will re-write or add an addendum.

The theses

• There’s no objective good or evil and, therefore, no objective basis for morality: this is moral nihilism.
  • We human beings talk about morality amongst ourselves, so at the very least morality is inter-subjective.
  • But morality forms no part of the fabric of the universe.
• Morality is a human construct, a product of limited perception and understanding, reinforced by the spell of language.
  • We called something “good” because we perceived it as pleasing or as benefiting us in some way.
  • At first, “good” was the pleasing sensation provoked in us, but soon it became a quality in the thing itself.
  • Then a myriad of radically different things have this “good” quality.
  • We are told that by “abstraction”, we came up with the concept of “the good”; in fact, however, there was no abstraction: the adjective “good” was simply substantivized.
  • Now philosophers ask “what is the good for man?”, but so far have not arrived at a coherent answer that convinces everyone.
    • And no wonder, for the term “the good” points to nothing, except one’s own diverse sense of approval.
  • Not only philosophers fell into the trap: the ordinary person divides “the good” people from “the bad” people, which leads to interminable conflict.
• The only rules or laws governing nature are those discovered in the scientific enterprise.
  • This is why there is no justice in this world.
  • Nature tends to an equilibrium, this is true, but it does not move to compensate evil with good or to punish evil and reward good, because there is no good or evil.
  • And just like there is no justice, there is no karma either.
• Because there are no moral rules or laws governing nature, there’s no objective basis for “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts”.
• People often say that without morality, anything is permissible. But it is more the case that with morality, anything is justifiable.
  • With morality, one can designate the people one likes as “the good”, while the rest are “the evil ones” (or at least the “morally inferior ones”).
  • The latter are often half-way around the world, where the reach of one’s empathy is weakest.
  • If one’s moral indignation is strong enough, one might even try to justify the extermination of the “the evil ones”.
  • Study the greatest atrocities committed in history, and you’ll find that they were justified, one way or another, by invoking moral language.
• Someone might say that all human beings agree on a common core of moral principles over which there can’t be any dispute, so that it is not true that morality can justify anything and everything.
  • But these core principles are a fiction.
  • For every “basic” moral principle one can propose, another will dispute it or find a time or place where it isn’t considered a principle.
  • For a moral principle to be one, it has to be universal in time and place, like all other principles of nature.
    • A single historical counterexample is enough to reject it as a core principle.
    • It is incoherent to appeal to universality in one’s own parochial slice of space-time.
• Instead of morality, the rules for a well-behaved society (at least in the West) appear to be in civil law.
  • From the collective experience of Western society, social relations seem best managed by civil law.
    • Hat-tip to Hans-Georg Moeller for pointing this out.¹
  • With civil law, there is no pretense to universality of place: every society has their own particular laws.
  • When a law doesn’t work or ceases to work, it can be repealed, meaning that it is also not universal in time.
• Laws are not perfect, given that they are reached by compromise between extremely fallible beings.

Objections

• “The moral nihilist still uses moral language, still uses words like”good”, “better”, “should”, etc. Is this not a contradiction?”
  • It is true that moral words creep into daily discourse, and this is inevitable, seeing that all human beings are raised with a moral outlook on life.
  • However, not all uses of words like “good” or “bad” are inherently moral.
  • The moral nihilist uses them while acknowledging that they have no objective basis, that is, that they do not denote or refer to anything in the real, objective world.
• “We haven’t found a common core of moral principles, but that does not mean that they don’t exist. It could be that those core principles are like the grand unifying principle of physics that has eluded scientists for the past century. We might eventually find such core moral principles.”
  • The core principles of morality seem to have eluded us for the past few millenia, though. It doesn’t bode well.
  • Moreover, the idea that morality is “out there” creates more contradictions than it solves, and the more scientifically reasonable approach is to abandon a model of the world that introduces more incoherence the more data we collect.
• “These aren’t tight, logical arguments against the basis of morality.”
  • Agreed, they are not.
  • Reasoning in this area of philosophy can’t be as strict as in logic or mathematics.
  • The best that can be done is offer arguments in favor of a different model of human behavior that makes our interpretation of the world more coherent.
  • In a similar way, geocentrism wasn’t rejected because of one unassailable syllogism; it was gradually rejected when the heliocentric model of the world allowed for a simpler and more coherent explanation of the facts.