Ross Douthat writes
. . . much of today’s liberalism expects me to respect its moral fervor even as it denies the revelation that once justified that fervor in the first place. It insists that it is a purely secular and scientific enterprise even as it grounds its politics in metaphysical claims. (You will not find the principle of absolute human equality in evolutionary theory, or universal human rights anywhere in physics.) It complains that Christian teachings on homosexuality do violence to gay people’s equal dignity—but if the world is just matter in motion, whence comes this dignity? What justifies and sustains it? Why should I grant it such intense, almost supernatural respect?
This seems largely correct to me. A coherent secular morality is a tricky problem in and of itself. One that makes absolute claims even more so, and one that makes absolute claims absolutely seems well beyond our grasp. And, I say this as a secularist who is very much concerned with ethics or what, to make the point, I have often been forced to call the-ethics-game.
For example, the claim that slavery is fundamentally wrong in all cases is not controversial among secularists but it is far from clear how one justifies this except by asserting it. And, then of course what is one to say to people who deny it?
Intending no disrespect to the underlying issue, the argument seems to devolve into “na-na na-na boo-boo.” Which is to say, simply refusing to accept the denial as valid.
There are various claims which amount to saying the human faculty of reason endows us with certain inalienables. Not only does this strike me as blatant post hoc speciesism, but it seems to suggest that there is some mental threshold below which a person could fall in which not only enslaving them would be fine but also violating any of the other rights which are asserted to stem from self-ownership. In short treating the person as an animal.
Attempts to reconcile this problem back people into corners such as asserting that the well-being of an adult pig is as important as the well-being of a newborn baby.
At least some of the confusion over this comes from the assumption that lacking the same ethical grounding as Christians, secularists either will not behave morally or cannot make moral demands.
The first I think just misunderstands how people behave and gives too much credit to critical reasoning and justification. For the most part secularists behave morally for the same reason just about everyone else does, because they would feel bad if they did not.
The second I am increasingly tempted to say conflates cultural politics with the ethics-game. If you ask on what grounds do I accuse rapists of having done wrong, then the authentic answer is that a world with rape displeases me and this is a tool I can use to get society to impose sanctions against it.
That in my mind is quite different than the ethics-game. The ethics-game is an attempt to answer the question, what moral stance “should” I adopt. It is in the ethics-game that we pay careful attention to metaphysical coherence, consistency and an attempt to tease out what we really believe.
What Douthat appears to be saying is that the ethics-game is hard for secularists, and that is correct.
62 comments
Comments feed for this article
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:54 am
curtd59
Good post.
On my (Austrian) end, I would argue that emotions are reactions to changes in state. That changes in state are precognitive responses to changes in the individuals portfolio of property. That our perception of ethical action is our requirement that changes in property are voluntary. And where property consists of normative, but often widely varying allocations of utilitarian objects, resources and opportunities to several, shareholder and communal property. And therefore that ethical conflicts are conflicts over different perceptions of the allocation of several, shareholder and communal property.
From that perspective, it is entirely possible to develop a secular ethics. It is also entirely possible, and demonstrably so, that ethical responses are learned along with the portfolio of property definitions. (They vary too much between culture, and between economic models not to.)
We also know (See Kahneman) that people are at least twice as activated by perceived involuntary transfers of property, than they are by their own fulfillment. We also know that women and men have different mating strategies. That men vary widely and have different mating strategies because of it. And that men and women have different distributions of instinctual property definitions that are genetically determined.
The only solution that is both secular and rational is to make all transfers transparent and calculable, so that people have similar expectations about the construct of those normative property definitions. This eliminates fuzzy pseudo moralistic thinking.
But then, for the body politic, such secular things have a kind of complexity that requires both teleological and deontological reasoning. Whereas the mass of humanity is limited to using very simple rules from which complexity evolves, and virtue ethics in order to create positive emotional associations for those rules. Complex deontological, and infinitely complex teleological systems, like other methodological specializations, are up to philosophers to deal with.
And besides. The folks on your end will always be bothered by this because no matter what we do, as long as the lower classes breed faster than the upper classes, there will have to be redistribution in order to pay for them. And it’s primarily the middle and upper middle classes who will resent paying for it, because marginally the cost is higher to them in every possible dimension.
And then there is the ecology of norms, and the fact that norms in the west are ‘unnatural’ and unique, and that all our attempts to secularize them have resulted in the loss of them, as can be seen by the dissolution of the family, and the increase in spatial independence.
This is what comes from aggregate behavioral thinking not aggregate Smithian thinking.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 2:56 am
Mary Alden
The dense prose all over this site is a testament to little boys all over the world who model daddy’s suit in the mirror.
Prolix but lightweight, nonetheless.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:57 am
Jared Woodard (@jaredwoodard)
Why isn’t the ethics-game, per the Euthyphro dilemma, just as hard for religious people?
Divine command theory would have us following what might turn out to be the arbitrary rules of a evil being, and so is a non-starter; but the other horn of the dilemma, finding a rational ground for ethics, is just the same task facing secularists.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 10:07 am
Karl Smith
huh – good point. I have never been a theist and so my theology is not that refined. I have to admit I just didn’t think of that.
EDIT:
So obviously other people have worked with the paradox more but on first blush it seems to me that what you want to say is that God’s Command IS good and that this is known through revelation. The denial of revelation is not as thorny as the denial of an assertion of truth because revelation is an actual experience.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 4:00 pm
JayLJeffers
Jared and Karl,
While I agree with Jared from a “meta” point of view, (that religious justifications for morality are in the same boat as secular ones), I sympathize with Ross Douthat a tad because secular morality gets a free pass in public discourse. Now it seems like Ross is making too big a whoop of the limitations of secular morality, given the limitations of religious morality, admittedly.
But I can see how Ross might want to point out how metaphysical our secular-liberal morality actually is, since that’s a very under-appreciated characteristic of beliefs about “universal human rights” and what not, while religion is explicitly asked to bear the burden of its metaphysical underpinnings.
Caveat: I realize the situation is sometimes reversed, and my feeling of which side our common rhetoric favors may be a function of the people I’m around most often, still I think the conceptual limitations of religious morality is often exposed for the world to see, while the common meta-ethical problems of moral beliefs in general almost never are. So, people don’t notice the problem when it comes to secular morality.
Caveat II: Ultimately, we may not need meta-ethics to govern, or to design political/economic systems, or to know how to act in our personal lives. But to the extent that meta-ethics matters, religious and secular morality are equally burdened.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 7:04 pm
Jared Woodard (@jaredwoodard)
Jay, I take your point that secular moral realists – defenders of universal human rights and so on – aren’t called upon to explain their metaphysics in the way that religious moral realists are.
I’ll say that secular moral realists aren’t so called upon because their cards are all on the table: because a meta-ethics relying on the categorical imperative or some other machinery, whether convincing or not, is after all just a set of rational arguments toward a conclusion. Rational argument is entirely public.
Religious meta-ethics, on the other hand, whether it relies on divine commands or on appeals to revelation, is essentially private in a problematic way. It might be appealing qua our rational intuition (divine command), or based on personal experience (revelation), but neither of these transmit epistemic justification in the way that a sound argument can.
My specialty is not ethics, but I am attracted to fictionalism as a solution to meta-ethical problems: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/staff/richard_joyce/acrobat/joyce_moral.fictionalism.pdf. Is there a way for a religious ethicist to appropriate fictionalism? I don’t see how.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 8:47 pm
JayLJeffers
Jared, (can only reply here or all the way down),
Thank you for your reply, but, do you see fictionalism as a way of preserving common sense moral instincts (religious or otherwise) about ethics? For whatever it’s worth, I do not. In other words, if you could get the average person to watch a documentary about genocide, get them all riled up about it how wrong it is, explain fictionalism to them, and then ask them if fictionalism does justice to their instincts about meta-morality, do you think they would be satisfied with fictionalism?
I’m not sure if we’re going to have the space (or time) to hash it all out here, but I do not think people are prepared to be so philosophical practical and unsentimental, fictionalism not being a literal form of realism and all.
If I’m right, then the difference between Douthat and secular (philosophical) laypeople is that Douthat realizes that moral realism imposes some kind of burden, such that an explanation is required (I suppose some sort of divine command theory or religious telos is what he would offer) and (many) secular people are unwitting moral realists who have yet to relaize there’s an epistemic issue at all.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:05 pm
JayLJeffers
To put it more succinctly, Jared, I think what secular morality often aims for, (to the extent that its aware of meta-ethics at all) is something that solves meta-ethical problems (in the way you believe fictionalism does) AND preserves common sense moral realist instincts. If, say, most secular people started openly declaring themselves fictionalist, I think they would take a social-political hit, (to the extent anyone actually understood what fictionalism is) but they would have my respect. Which is to say, fictionalism may solve meta-ethical problems much more efficiently than divine command theory or theistic-telos, but a fictionalist has to sacrifice realist instincts, and so with it some level of popular support. The problem is that (seemingly) most secular people want to have their cake and eat it too – to be blissfully realist and scoff at Douthat’s version of realism, all at the same time. So I respect a lot of what you’re saying, but my sympathy for Douthat remains, even though I don’t share his confidence in theistic meta-ethics.
(I guess I wasn’t so succinct this time either)
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:43 pm
JayLJeffers
Jared, since my efforts at being succinct have entirely failed, let me throw one more (probably unnecessary) clarification in before I have to turn in for the night:
When accompanied by fictionalism or something like constructivism (in the hands of Rawls, for example) meta-ethical issues are either deflated or avoided and intellectual virtue has been gained. But I don’t think this avoidance or deflation accompanies most attempts at giving moral reasons or everyday arguments from secular moralists. I think the Categorical Imperative, if thought to give overriding reasons, is just as arbitrary as divine command theory. I don’t know enough about Kant to say, but perhaps the Categorical Imperative was always constructivist (IIRC, there is some debate over this) but either way I don’t think most people would realize that, and secular people usually just appropriate secular-morality-talk into their common realist instinctual background, nonplussed, irritable, and incredulous when questioned on meta-ethical grounds. Of course most people are this way; I guess it just matters to me who puts the most pressure on themselves by the intellectual standards they claim, but I realize many people find this to be a provincial concern of mine.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 10:01 am
Jared Woodard (@jaredwoodard)
Jay, thanks for these comments. I agree that fictionalism is at odds with people’s implicit/naive meta-ethical realism. I also agree that it’s better for everyone to reflect on the rational grounds for their beliefs as much as possible.
As a side issue, I think the Kantian line is that we are bound by the categorical imperative insofar as we’re rational; you can’t deny the formula of universal law on pain of contradiction.
You said that it was a problem that secular realists want to be unreflective about their own beliefs while scoffing at Douthat’s realism at the same time. I’m not sure that it’s such a problem, since, in just about any conversation where neither party is a Kantian, the dialectic is pretty shallow: the religionist appeals to divine command or religious experience or some other conversation-stopper re metaethics, the secularist responds with some equally unenlightening appeal to rights as metaphysically basic or etc., and then we look to harm reduction plus good feelings (or some other utilitarian calculus) to get the policy right, just like we always do.
So the fact that the unreflective sexcularist gets the policy right without all the middlebrow history lessons looks like a net positive. Douthat’s claim that religionists (including prosperity gospel and new age people) have a “metaphysically coherent picture” while secularists do not is just wrong if everyone ends up making huge appeals to metaphysical primitives anyway.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 9:42 pm
JayLJeffers
Thanks Jared, good stuff there.
I agree with the ultimate point on Douhtat; he’s just wrong if we all resort to metaphysical primitives anyway. Whether the (unreflective) secularist method is a net positive (because it lacks the middlebrow history lessons) or whether we should be as (or more) annoyed with secularists who are even less meta-ethically sensitive than Douthat, is a disagreement that could get marginal pretty quickly. FWIW, I’ll drink to fewer middlebrow history lessons.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 1:50 pm
BSEconomist
Good post. Although I (think) curtd59 seriously misunderstands what you’re saying. Or I misunderstand what you’re saying. I think Jared Woodard has this right: nobody escapes this problem.
This distinction between the “ethics game” and “ethics” is an important one and its one that if my understanding of western philosophy is correct plays a key role in metaethics. I think yours is the more-or-less Kantian perspective as I understand it (which I don’t, really… this is meant as a big nod to the philosophers out there to help clear my own confusion). curtd59 seems to want to use this argument to play more of the ethics game.
On my end, I’ve thought a lot about morality in relation to standard choice theory. I can’t really go into details in a comment thread, but my thinking is that taking a bundle of “goods and behaviors” to be allocated between several people, that the problem is that my “utility” depends on… not your utility exactly, but on my projection of your utility. If the two things were the same, than the ethics game and ethics would be the same thing, but since my projection of your utiltiy is different than the real thing there is a conflict between the two–so we spend effort trying to convince each other to “reallocate” the basket of “goods and behaviors” in ways more ammenable to our own preferences. Incidently, there need not be any equilibrium in this “market”, but that’s a technical point.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 3:33 pm
BSEconomist
Arrgh! Look, someone (me) was wrong on the internet and practically begging for correction… could it be that xkcd lied and “someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet” doesn’t actually motivate people after all? All I wanted was someone to clear up my thinking… I had to read through wordy philosophy articles on Wikipedia to figure out where my thinking might have been coming from (and hope I read enough to get the idea!)
So tell me if THIS makes sense… Kant’s distinction between the thing-in-itself and our conception of that thing is basically the same as Karl’s distinction between “the ethics-game” (concept) and “ethics” (the thing-in-itself). This puts the distinction clearly in the skepticist camp, not the theist camp (so Euthyphro’s Dilemma doesn’t apply). Is that right or is it nonsense?
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Karl Smith
Not exactly. The issue is that ethics (full stop) is on the outside of rational discourse.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 2:30 pm
Judd Greenstein (@juddgreenstein)
It’s worth noting that the Euthyphro dilemma predates Christianity by hundreds of years.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Reid Kelley
It’s also probably worth noting that the Euthyphro Dilemma isn’t, by itself, the definitive refutation of Religious Morality that it is often claimed to be. It knocks down, at best, a simplistic version of Divine Command Theory. It certainly does not seriously threaten most Christian understandings of the underpinning of morality (or the ‘ethics-game’ in Dr Smith’s rendering). In fact all one needs to do to avoid the entire dilemma while defending Divine Command is to find some independent reason for asserting that God is in fact wholly Good, and then the arbitrariness disappears.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 3:47 pm
JayLJeffers
Reid Kelley,
If there is an independent reason for asserting that God is in fact wholly Good, then it’s not at all clear why a *personal* God is required to justify morality.
In other words, if part of the motivation of a personal God is that Divine Command Theory justifies morality, and avoiding the Euthyphro Dilemma is accomplished by finding a reason about God’s necessary qualities involving Goodness or what not, then we could have gone with an impersonal justification of morality to begin with. If God has the qualities of a person, (emotions, sentiments, humor, etc) and those qualities are what makes Goodness good, then we’re right on the horns of the dilemma. If the dilemma is avoided by placing Goodness someplace other than God’s personal qualities, then why don’t we go with Karma or Tillich’s “ground of all being” or something similar?
Now, I know what some are going to say is that God’s person is necessarily good, but in that scenario necessary qualities are playing a bigger role than anything, which is very abstract and dareIsay impersonal.
The take-home is that if God’s role in justifying morality turns out to be something God has no control over, then that something is governed by something that is conceptually similar to natural law, karma, or some such thing. Left over is why a personal God is being used to justify morality, if God’s personal nature isn’t absolutely necessary to the justification.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Kevin
I don’t think I understand the problem here.
It seems to me that Douthat is,in effect saying:
a) Our ideas about human equality are derived from the Christian tradition
b) We should therefore be Christian.
How does A follow from B? Even if A is true (which is, to be charitable, not at all clear), why then should I be a Christian? If we were bound to pay fealty to the whole genealogical history of our moral feelings through belief, wouldn’t we be bound to be both Christian and pagan at once?
I guess what I’m asking is this: Why can’t we with a good conscience say, “Yes, I have feelings of both disgust and aversion as well as desire and attraction, and certain notions such as slavery excite the former, while meritocratic democracy excites the latter. At the same time, I have the desire to be consistent and a faculty for reflective thought that demands I examine my beliefs and feelings in turn, and try my best to make them consistent with one another.”
If we follow Douthat’s reasoning don’t we have to conclude that the impulses we have for clarity and modesty, which we owe to the Enlightenment and scientific revolution, compel us to seek a secularist morality along these lines?
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 1:00 am
maxutility
Doesn’t really touch on the broader (and more interesting discussion) here. But I think Kevin has it right in regards to Douthat. He says:
“Indeed, it’s completely obvious that absent the Christian faith, there would be no liberalism at all.”
This is not only not obvious, it is fairly obviously wrong. The fact that the Christian tradition was one of many diverse steps toward current thinking on broadly accepted moral standards does not imply any inherent “rightness” or necessity to our culture.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 4:07 pm
mwnl
Ethics doesn’t reduce to individual likes or individual appraisals without religion. There are many familiar variants of the view that what we ought to do can be discovered from the requirements for social life in common. In some of these reason is something higher that all can share. It is a capacity that helps to formulate and apply knowledge of the good. (Plato, Kant) But in others, reason is not the main human capacity that makes social life possible. For these others (for example, Rousseau) reasoning needs the prompting of empathy to direct it toward ethical ends.
So, slavery is ruled out by many (not all) such secular variants as is the fear that there is no lower bound below which mutual concern and respect is due to others without religion.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 4:17 pm
Jeffrey G. Johnson
This discussion seems to totally ignore the emotional and biological nature of our morality. Certain things disgust us, or make us angry, or win our approval emotionally. The strength of these emotions varies with how close or important the people involved are to us. It’s much different if a stranger is praised or rewarded, or if one’s child is praised or rewarded. It’s much different if a stranger is raped than if our wife is raped. That spectrum differs with locality; a rape in our neighborhood, vs one in our city, vs. one in our country, vs one in another part of the world.
This inherent emotional moral calculus is part of our biology, evolved in tribal units. The adaptation afforded by social cooperation is kind of obvious, and the adaptive value of rape and murder against competing tribes in an environment of scarcity is also kind of obvious.
Douthat either ignores or is unable to imagine that religion was created by humans, based on our innate evolved moral intuitions. To think that somehow humans need religion in order to have morality is totally backwards; humans only have religions because they evolved emotional moral intuitions, and narrative and reasoning capacities, so they invented religions.
It is obvious that quite a lot of work over many many centuries went into the developing of religious narratives and codes of ethics, which was nothing but a process of finding an abstract linguistic system to represent the kinds of emotional moral intuitions we are all born with by virtue of our human biology. Certainly then we can produce ethical systems that are not dependent upon the mythological narratives of religion, or the unfounded metaphysical claims of God, the soul, and the afterlife.
The idea of Universal equality is really just a fairly straightforward extrapolation from tribal or family bonds to larger and larger circles of inclusion. Logically it’s quite simple, emotionally it’s more difficult, but there is no reason to doubt that with our cultural evolution, our technological evolution, an our solutions to the problem of scarcity and competition for survival would lead to such broadening of inclusive cooperative behaviors and norms and the weakening of hostile and violent competitive behaviors and norms.
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 7:35 am
asdf
Our tribal bonds aren’t built to function with billions of other people. So to make them work you’ve got a lot of hand wringing about cultural evolution and widening of circles, but why? Why should people widen cicles?
To the extent one has something to gain, ok. But what if the Nash equilibrium doesn’t set up just right. It seems all this hand waving about cultural and technological evolution is about setting up institutions that diminish mans need for moral action, of making the Nash equilibriums work out even if we expect the worst. As they say in Brave New World,
“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that’s what soma is.”
The lack of moral action is assumed. You are nothing more then atoms. Your “decisions” have no moral content. To the extent you act “morally” its merely the fact that your brain chemistry dictates it, and your brain chemistry dictates it based on evolutionary triggers you hope society has found some kind of hack for. Because if the hack doesn’t work, if the people in charge don’t get it just right, you are not capable of genuine moral action based on something more then the makeup of the atoms in your brain.
Friday ~ June 1st, 2012 at 7:49 am
Keith Roban
Thank you Jeffrey. Your comments are clear, concise and understandable to an average Joe like me. A learned professor friend of mine posted this article on his Facebook page. I read the article and many of the comments. Your comment was one of the few that were comprehensible to me. As an uneducated but curious layman even the article was a bit of a slog. I wouldn’t want scholars to dumb down their discussions but it’s almost as if some academicians don’t want laypeople to participate in or understand their discussions about various subjects. If you publish articles or have a blog I’d be interested in reading more. Thanks again. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 4:28 pm
mwnl
Basing morality on biology (evolution) isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. There is no crime that has not been commited, to paraphrase deTocqueville. And many more have been added since he wrote. Humans share biology, but what people do differs. How people evaluate what they do differs.
The problem posed by Douthat is to show how ethics can rule out what some may prefer without falling back on a simple assertion of individual preference or running that out into a preference for some particular group whose preference one chooses to share.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 5:40 pm
Jeffrey G. Johnson
For me, the fact that religions (so very many of them) exist at all is evidence that there is a biological basis for morality. Examine Donald E. Brown’s human universals, which provides more evidence of our commonality independent of language and culture. This is evidence of biological determination.
I make the assumption that the idea of divine revelation is an absurdity with no real evidence in its favor (other than unreliable anecdotes).
The fact that individuals vary is just a result of the complexity of biology and the brain. There are very pronounced patterns and trends in what is “normal” or common behavior.
I’m not trying to say that deriving an abstract system of ethics from our biology is easy. I’m saying that religion is clearly no antidote for this problem, and that the existence of religion at all is evidence that developing rational systems of ethics is feasible. It is not much of a stretch to say that humans were motivated to create religions, and are able to recognize goodness in religion because of our biological endowments. This is a different kind of statement from saying it’s easy to create a systematic linguistic model that describes or represents human morality.
Obviously religion, while making enormous moral claims, does not really deliver on those claims. The varieties of behavior considered morally acceptable under religions in our world are widely divergent. Just look at the confusion and debate in the US alone over the death penalty, abortion, the justification for war, contraception, pre-marital sex, and many other issues for which there is no universal religious agreement.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 7:41 pm
mwnl
If religions are based on (arise from) biology but differ widely in the morality they support, it follows that (knowledge of) biology alone doesn’t provide a basis from which a standard for ethical judgement (morality) may be derived. Something more (not however more than human) needs to be added to biological knowledge to arrive at such a standard. In my opinion what needs to be added is knowledge about what is required for social life for relatively long run time perspective.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Jeffrey G. Johnson
mwnl,
no, biology alone is not sufficient, and I didn’t try to claim that. But the biological humans are the ones who created religion, using what was gifted them via evolution. We know more now than we did then, so we can create a better morality than did those who created religion. This doesn’t mean it is an easy task, or that a mathematically perfect system without ambiguity is possible.
Is there any set of axioms or propositions from which one can derive an entirely adequate morality? I don’t know. Is the morality that exists in religion today based on, founded upon, dependent upon the emotional inherent sense of justice in the species homo sapiens? Yes.
Was that religious morality so perfect that there could be no disagreement? No.
Perhaps to say that religions differ widely is not quite correct. The similarities are substantial, but points of difference clearly exist between religions, and within a religion over time. The divergence leads to clear distinctions, yet is narrow enough that one can see it falls within the boundaries of common human universals, which are 300 common traits found in every human culture ever studied by anthropologists. This is a kind of social-linguistic-emotional toolkit that is clearly more fundamental to humans than any specific religion, it is clearly biologically determined because of it’s consistency in all cultures. It is a fairly strong evidence that there is a biologically determined human nature, and it includes human capabilities and behaviors that clearly underly everything that can be found in religious belief and ritual.
http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 1:55 pm
mwnl
“It is a fairly strong evidence that there is a biologically determined human nature, and it includes human capabilities and behaviors that clearly underly everything that can be found in religious belief and ritual.”
I agree that there is enough in common between human cultures to recognize different cultures as cultures and (for the most part) different religions as religions —although the line between religious belief and other beliefs is not easy to draw. (If you can’t specify the dependent variable, you can’t identify an independent variable as a cause.)
I also agree that there is a biological basis for human capacities and that the capacities of other creature differ in many respects from those of humans. However it is not possible to state that a particular human capacity has a specific biological basis (gene 6 of chromosome 11, some long list of such data), and there is no reasonable prospect of identifying in this way the biological basis for religion.
More importantly religions may have a lot in common but as we know they differ on such moral issues such as who it is permissible to enslave or kill, as well as many finer points which have and may lead to future misery. So even if we can say what religions have in common as a biological foundation (which I doubt), this tells us nothing about what in a particular religion ought to be regarded as good or bad.
.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 4:38 pm
mwnl
“The issue is that ethics (full stop) is on the outside of rational discourse.”
I hope you don’t believe this as self-evident, simply because it is asserted. If you say, “For me, ethics is outside of rational discourse”, and that is a report of something your believe (hold true), that is quite a different matter from asserting that what you believe is true or ought to be held true by others.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Graham Nickel
Douthat’s point is that we are maybe being hasty as a civilization in tossing out what were once held as the bedrock of Western moral values. His point is that maybe this is one of those examples where we will, at some point, look back and realize, “Ah yes, those things were actually quite important.”
Here’s my shot at a modified parable: If a house has a brick foundation that the current owners did not build, and if they know nothing of architecture, they may discover a huge trove of bricks in the basement and suggest to rather use them to make a lovely flower bed out front. The bricks don’t seem to be doing anything useful downstairs so why not bring them out in the open? Someone takes out a brick and…nothing happens! Someone else takes another brick or two…still nothing. Many people dive in and soon much of the foundation is removed. There is a vague sense that probably all the bricks shouldn’t be taken out, but no one can really say why and it gets harder and harder to limit the process. Some small cracks in the plaster start to appear, but nobody associates them with the removal of bricks.
But maybe someone (like Ross D) thinks this rubs him the wrong way, and in his ruminating he finds an old book about architecture and reads about the importance builders used to place on foundations and maybe he talks to some people who say they knew someone who once knew a guy who passed through town one night and who claimed to have built the house and set the foundations himself and who attested to their importance. So Ross more or less believes the story of that guy and starts chatting people up as they continue to remove bricks and to encourage them to stop, or at least do some more thinking about what they are doing and whether it might do some long-term damage to the house they all live in. But everyone says, “Man, you’re so old fashioned. Everyone nowadays knows that houses were built on foundations just out of a misguided sense of restrictive tradition and blind habit. Plus, there are hundreds of guys who claim to have been builders and they can’t agree and they fight all the time so we’ve decided we’re just done with foundations—problem solved! Get with the times; and see? Now we have a nice flower planter, and the house looks exactly the same.”
Now, this goes on for years and even Ross himself begins to wonder if that book was out-of-date and that maybe he was a fool to have believed in the word of a friend of a friend of a friend and that maybe the house really was built in such a way that it has become self-supporting via the new internal cross-bracing that’s been put in place by the new owners. he reflects on the many examples of how it was certainly true that many building features once thought essential were strictly cosmetic after all or built in way that owed more to convention than necessity. But he still falls asleep looking at the cracks in the walls and swears they were not that big just a few months ago and he wonders if he should just move. But maybe there won’t be an earthquake or storm (or maybe storms and earthquakes are just legends anyways) and maybe the house will stand forever and be the envy of its neighbourhood with its striking brick planters and soon no one will have a house with a traditional foundation. And maybe that will be a very good thing.
Or maybe not.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 7:59 pm
mwnl
Ross is aware that there are other foundations on which to build a society (eg consent and the rule of law) he just prefers the kind based on religion because consent and the rule of law may not produce the kind of society he prefers or the kind he thinks his god wants.
Our moderator fears that consent just means personal preference of a majority and regards that as beyond rational discourse and sees nothing in it to assure that an outcome will be more than the will of the strongest (I guess that’s what he fears.)
I disagree with both Ross and our moderator. I believe that we can find others with whom to form a political society without agreeing in all matters of morality, provided we can find principles of justice that all can share which will limit harms as mutually defined and allow each to live according to divergent conceptions of the good.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 8:15 pm
bls
For the most part secularists behave morally for the same reason just about everyone else does, because they would feel bad if they did not.
No. Nobody felt bad for treating gay people (for instance) as subhuman until about 10 minutes ago. Likewise, lots of people didn’t feel bad at all for treating black people the same way (until about 20 minutes ago).
Some people felt bad about these things – but some (many? most?) didn’t even notice…..
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 3:23 pm
Left Outside
Ahem, “black” and “gay” are socially constructed. Racism and Homophobia are historically specific constructs too. Just saying.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:32 pm
bls
(As a matter of fact, I tend to trust religious moralities far more than I would any secular ones, if only because the religious ones are time-tested. And they’re in writing, too, rather than just leaving it all to the (rather undependable) good will of the individual. The good religious moralities – the ones that have been around awhile – have all strongly emphasized helping the helpless (a concept that can be extended in a variety of ways) and feeding the hungry.
From observation (and even in quite a bit of research) it appears that human beings will blindly and happily conform themselves to whatever their culture – or an immediate “authority” – tells them about morality. This may even be the single most glaringly obvious fact about human history; we are scarily conformist, for good (sometimes) and ill (often). )
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 6:43 pm
Sister Y
The time-testedness of religions is an important point – appeal to their allegedly ancient nature gives religion some authority. In reality, religious conceptions of morality morph to suit changing social morality; they just pretend to be never-changing. Each new movement of change claims to be the renewal of the old, original Christianity (or whatever). They tend to affirm normal human social morality, rather than impose something alien. And at first, new social movements/religions appeal to the helpless and hungry, because that’s where converts come from; as they become established, they sell out the poor and become the religion of the wealthy.
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 9:50 pm
Morgan Warstler
I think a clear distinction between should and ought helps.
In debate, Should is a statement of best policy choice defined by outcome. Ought speaks to the morality of a free choice – ought implies can, if you can’t do something, you have no moral obligation to do it.
Should assumes you can do anything – treat people as animals,etc. etc. and then asks what is the best policy effect of doing so.
This is where is gets fun, since what you should do is measured by if the policy works, the morality established and held by everyone else around you has great, GREAT weight.
As such, religious folks can argue that the morality they impose on the secularists are the only reason the god-less ever reach the right conclusion.
But in fact it runs the other way, Jesus stole Easter from the bunny.
To me this is proof, almost all religions diarized on a set of morality that just so happened to work in practice – don’t eat the rotten pork, god hates pigs, or breed a lot, whatever.
Which would indicate that what we should do as optimal policy is the foundation that we used to form our morality.
Morality changes to celebrate the best policy choices.
Take “absolute human equality in evolutionary theory”
I don’t know about the “absolute” part, but…
Evolution can totally accept that once you start taking care of the smallest, dumbest, and weakest and continue to have them breed, that evolution slows down or starts to track towards things like beauty – which favors mixed race marriages.
Why would that violate evolution?
And why isn’t rape wrong because if you do it, I will kill you? Why isn’t that policy fact the highest order, around which religions can go sell god?
Sunday ~ April 22nd, 2012 at 10:50 pm
twoshort
Everyone asserts ethics without justification. Secularists admit it.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 1:07 am
JayLJeffers
*Some* secularists admit it. The trend is for more and more secularists not to (e.g. New Atheism).
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 10:24 am
Corey Mutter
Aren’t you begging the question? You say rape is wrong because a world with rape displeases you. So… why does it displease you?
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 11:26 am
Jeffrey G. Johnson
If I raped your wife or your daughter or your mother, you wouldn’t need to ask that question. Then apply the categorical imperative (or the golden rule). It should be displeasing to anyone to think that painful experiences could happen at any time without need for justification, and without consequences to the actors. It’s pretty basic in my opinion.
It may be that some questions can not be answered with a priori propositions and a rigorous abstract logical framework. The same answers are not as hard to find in the context of empirical examination of what exists in reality, of what human emotions are and how they are tuned to react to various events.
I know this isn’t philosophically appealing, but I think honestly this is the source of religious moral values. In the pure abstract world of a priori logic, one can find ways to justify rape, murder, and other atrocities. The real and powerful range of human emotions, the realities of the human organism and its brain, should not be ignored or factored out for the sake of rational purity. Clearly it’s not adequate on its own, but it seems a useful foundation or starting point.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 12:06 pm
Morgan Warstler
I disagree here. The correct answer is because i will kill you.
At scale this means the founders of society who first hire a bunch of big guys to protect their stuff, as they form pacts to create first govt. one of the ways they convince regular folk to accept the proposed governance is extended protection – you don’t get raped without someone getting punished, even if you can’t kill them yourself.
This is not reasoned out morality, CI or otherwise, this is brass tacks how it gets done, then AFTER THE FACT, the moralists seeking a power base of their own, move in and attach philosophy to the reality the market delivered.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 5:48 pm
mwnl
Morgan, “At scale this means the founders of society who first hire a bunch of big guys to protect their stuff, as they form pacts to create first govt. one of the ways they convince regular folk to accept the proposed governance is extended protection ”
I recognize Nozick…,but his is just a variant of might makes right, an inferior variant because it leaves of what many others have added which is that without some standard that engenders duty, fear can lead as easily to war as peace. (If the big guys have the power to protect, they have the power to take the stuff and leave out the middle man paying them…people notice that and don’t feel protected…etc…Hobbes, Locke Kant, Rawls…)
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Morgan Warstler
You just described reality and complained about it. And???? Look, my point isn’t that life has to feel like it did the day the USSR fell. My point is THAT IS REALITY.
You can make all the ethics arguments you want, but those like econ policy and everything other soft science either argues for or against players in REALITY. It is all a bunch of self-interested hooey.
The innovation I’m bring to it is that IF you are interested in forming optimal policy you face a choice:
1. You can really accept the foundations for what they are, notice that policy improvements (lack of slavery, women voting, ending prohibition) have actually been rational extensions of simple brutal reality and then FORM POLICY COMPROMISES that don’t topple the apple cart too much.
2. You can be pissed off that the apple cart doesn’t tip on your whim and spend your life trying to turn any and all rhetorical opportunities (claims of any ethics that fit at that moment) into a cheap effort at victory that never comes.
Look, I’m a rapid supporter of small gvt. who’s cozy with granting citizens “rights” to a Guaranteed Income which is a policy compromise for both groups.
This puts real screws to conservatives, once they get to PROVE to the public who is lazy and who is not, they have to support the non-lazy the way liberals believe men should be treated..
Liberals eat the same half a loaf: everyone can gets covered, but the conservatives get to make being lazy incredibly hard.
Real freedom for the lazy only exists outside the safety net.Then everyone can argue back and forth about levels and terms etc.
Philosophically this is way past, “If the big guys have the power to protect, they have the power to take the stuff and leave out the middle man paying them…people notice that and don’t feel protected…”
It’s nowhere near that. In fact: removing the middle man (bidder / seller), is what increases capitalism – this is a high-tech version of Distributism. More capitalists fixes any problem with capitalism.
The brutal reality known to all small govt. conservatives is that Big Govt. = Big Biz. And they’d LOVE to make both eat it at the same time.
Example: progressives could quickly gain grass roots conservative support for tax policy which dramatically favored SMB over Fortune 1000.
Final note: during past decade while Big Gov and Big Biz grew, the top 1% (the B power) gained, bottom 80% (the C power) lost.
Guess who was left unscathed? The A power. The 80-99% the Main Street SMB capitalists who own all the guns and run every small town like Boss Hog in a little pond.
They are the Tea Party, and they did not lose over the past ten years. They have the VOTES and the $$$ to take down the 1%. They are 4-5x richer than the 1%.
But the left doesn’t THINK.
Any rational C power keeps the B power and A power fighting with each other and then switches sides A LOT (see China during cold war)
The C power only gains when the A and B power are locked in a death match. Does it look like the 1% and 80-99% are locked in a death match???
No. because the left, it is just coddles the blue state 1%, takes 60% of their political donations and NEVER sides with the A power.
And what happened? the B power gains, the C power loses, and the A power just gets more aggressive.
Accept reality, shelve the ethical cheer-leading and get down to brass tacks man, how much for the ape?
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 7:27 am
mwnl
Morgan, “You just described reality and complained about it. And???? ”
You really need to take into account the broader range of political experience –not just post WWII US politics –to see how far the US is now from the the war of every man against every man, which is where pure strategic self-interested individualism leads.
Now, you may be right in claiming that Hobbesian state as the next stop (I doubt it, but it is possible) but the point is not to just fight your way to the first car on that train. In my opinion, contra Douthat, religion is not going to do more to change directions than it has in the past, but that politics based on liberal democratic equality can if people are willing to accept the limits it implies. They may not be willing, in which case the alternatives are oligarchy (the US is most of the way there) or turmoil.
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 9:54 am
Morgan Warstler
mwml,
“ou really need to take into account the broader range of political experience –not just post WWII US politics –to see how far the US is now from the the war of every man against every man, which is where pure strategic self-interested individualism leads.
Now, you may be right in claiming that Hobbesian state as the next stop (I doubt it, but it is possible) but the point is not to just fight your way to the first car on that train.”
No. I’m saying the FIRST STOP – the foundations of the US, like the foundations of Russia after USSR fell…. the first state – that’s reality.
Period. The End.
After that there were more stops, like ending slavery, etc. Those next stops have the same DNA as the first.
My point, which you;ll likely just skip over, is that NONE of that has anything to do with ethics, ALL of it happened following the same drum beat… not tipping over the apple cart. the Civil War was about the ethics of slavery? C’mon.
So, let’s drop the guile, you aren’t going to score any points.
INSTEAD if you want progress, the left should ADMIT the 80-99% (cal them the Tea Party so it is REALLY hard to do and you still do it) are the A power go to them, and GIVE TO THEM your support such that they will go kick the shit out of the 1% oligarchs.
The biggest winner in the first fight will not be the C power (your team), it’ll be the Tea Party, but the LOSER will be the 1%, as power shifts from B to A.
Look at parliamentary UK or France right now, the far right power is the C power. Sarkozy was the A power, the socialists were the B.
Suddenly the Socialists are the A, and Sarkozy must partner with the C in order to regain A status.
——
There is nothing new here EXCEPT that this is NOT how you view how to get your goals accomplished, instead you want to argue ethics.
The policy process is simple: Offer the Main Street capitalists direct specific tax and regulation advantages over the Fortune 1000. Make it almost impossible for the Fortune 1000 to win. The best and the brightest will respond to incentives and go become Main Street capitalists.
This is called Distributism, it spreads the power and money out amongst a far greater number of folks the 1% lose and the 80-99% gain.
In real terms this means a deeper broader base of consumers for service and goods provided by your team – the C power.
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 1:33 pm
mwnl
Morgan, I really do take the principles of democracy and the rule of law seriously and don’t think might makes right. I have both moral and prudential grounds for my beliefs. I am also familiar with the history of political oppression and conflict in pursuit of power alone and power plus ideals. For these reasons, I think your advice is both morally wrong and foolish. Foolish because it is based on an imaginary (or no) conception of the political process and also because it neglects the generally understood basis for human conduct: people are not waiting for your advice as to how to conduct their lives.
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 2:13 pm
Morgan Warstler
rule of law. sure. Democracy. the jury is still out. Republics work.
None of that matters to our conversation:
I say Ethical arguments don’t reach policy conclusions, so instead focus on the minimax strategy and cut a deal.
You say you want to keep making ethical arguments – I assume that deep down is because you don’t think you can cut a deal you’ll like.
I’m trying to get you to understand you can get a deal that’s acceptable, you just haven;t figured out who to partner with and what to sacrifice. Strategy is not your sides strong suit.
As soon as you REALLY want to topple the 1%, you’ll partner with the Tea Party to do it.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 11:35 am
Barton
Sam Harris makes an interesting case in The Moral Landscape that neuroscience is on the cusp of being able to help us define morality in terms of mental and physical health. If you can agree that a world of maximum misery is worse than maximum happiness, then all that is left to determine is what helps create those states.
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 12:04 pm
Sister Y
“Health” is a concept at least as shadowy and subject to disagreement as morality; common-sense notions of health, like principles of folk ethics, often come into conflict with each other. Suicide, birth control, abortion, and even recreational drug use may promote or hinder “health,” according to one’s commitments.
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Barton
Sure it is. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth studying or valuing. Would you say that someone with late stage small pox is healthy? To paraphrase Harris, good health has something to do with not being about to die and not vomiting all of the time. Just because something is murky doesn’t make it unworthy of study. In fact, some of the murkiest things, like economics and quantum physics, are of tremendous value. And the study of something murky can illuminate it over time.
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 6:45 pm
Sister Y
Worth studying yes; solve problems of morality, nope. <3
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Johnnie Linn
How can speciesism be anything other than post-hoc? Other species don’t make arguments for how they behave, why should we?
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 4:49 pm
r.d.
This dilemma is not as tough as some suppose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma#False-dilemma_response
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 5:39 pm
A good horn section makes a good song great « Copacabana
[...] Fascinating. It is absolutely true that some of the larger, more complex, ethical questions actually do not occur organically in nature. No, these are mysterious “rational thought” exercises that are arguably only the purview of man. [...]
Monday ~ April 23rd, 2012 at 7:14 pm
Benny Lava
Douthat’s criticism is superficial. Christian theologians and philosophers have, for centuries, tried to answer that same a priori question. Is saying “God said so” really such an intellectually respectable position? At least Kant and Neitzsche had trouble with a priori. Would Ross be happier if the explanation were “because of the will”?
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 12:53 pm
In Defence of Secular Morality « Left Outside
[...] Karl and others have been discussing secular morality, with Ross Douthat denying it can make any strong moral claims at all and Karl himself saying… …a coherent secular morality is a tricky problem in and of itself. One that makes absolute claims even more so, and one that makes absolute claims absolutely seems well beyond our grasp. And, I say this as a secularist who is very much concerned with ethics or what, to make the point, I have often been forced to call the-ethics-game… [...]
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 2:26 pm
The Claptrap Behind Religious Morality « Progenies of a Dark Apocalypse
[...] Smith pines on the subject and struggles with the questions here. Brad DeLong responds here, and Julian Sanchez practically mirrors DeLong’s sentiments that Karl [...]
Tuesday ~ April 24th, 2012 at 4:28 pm
dumdedumdum
Looking at the different posts here (not the comments, the posts by Karl, Adam and Niklas), it looks like people on the web vote with their comments.
Wednesday ~ April 25th, 2012 at 2:21 pm
Secular Morality | Economic Thought
[...] Smith (1, 3) and Daniel Kuehn (2, 4) debate over secular morality, its justification, and pluralistic [...]
Sunday ~ April 29th, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Douthat on Secular Morality | Brucetheeconomist's Blog
[...] Douthat on Secular Morality. Share this:EmailFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in [...]
Tuesday ~ May 22nd, 2012 at 8:12 am
What Has Jerusalem To Do With Athens? - NYTimes.com
[...] at Modeled Behavior, Karl Smith basically agreed with my point: “A coherent secular morality is a tricky problem in and of itself,” he wrote, [...]
Monday ~ August 27th, 2012 at 3:27 am
Moralità Laica at Ideas Have Consequences
[...] Smith (1, 3) e Daniel Kuehn (2, 4) si confrontano su moralità laica, sulla sua ratio, e sul [...]