A Dialogue on Morality: Response to Guy Walker (Pt 3)
As regular readers will know, I am engaged in a debate concerning morality and whether, as humans, we are exceptional in comparison to the animal world or whether morality can be fully explained in the context of biological and natural evolution, without invoking some other mysterious unknown such as God or similar.
So far, I have set out that morality is an abstract object and does not exist outside of our minds, except in the properties of the actions we do. I then set out that morality is an emergent behaviour from evolution that sits on a spectrum in the animal world, one end at which we sit. Human morality could not have developed if the foundational traits and behaviours had not developed before us in our evolutionary line. Guy Walker replied to my first piece, and I rebutted that in Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The final part follows.
An inevitable objection to my view is that of moral relativism in the world. Not every culture has the same moral rules. This is absolutely true if you are talking about the superficial; things like sumptuary or hygiene laws which differ the world over. However, I’d argue that there is a deep Chomskian moral grammar that means the essentials (based on the life=good, death = bad equation) obtain the world over.
Of course, this is rather contextual. Hitler didn't wake up in the morning and decide to be evil. He thought he was doing good, the moral imperative, using his own moral value system. Death has existed in every culture since time immemorial. Interestingly, since we have become more secular and enlightened deaths in war have vastly reduced. When Guy talks about every culture, he might be meaning in a contemporary geographical sense, but this will need to also be considered over time, over 20,000 years or longer. Whilst I talk a lot about the biological and genetic grounding of morality, I cannot emphasise the importance of brain plasticity and the environment. We can see this in primates (the work that Sapolsky did on baboons where most of the males in a troupe were killed by TB and the troupe took on the "moral" behaviour of the females, including incoming males), and also in humans, culturally. As Sapolsky concludes in Behave:
Cognition and affect always interact. What’s interesting is when one dominates.
Genes have different effects in different environments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else—we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context....
Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization....
• We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.
And so on. The point being that whilst genetics is foundational, they only mean anything when interacting with the environment, whether that be immediate biology or larger cultural society. That moral grammar is our genetic code; the relative aspect being the context. Do unto others and the psychology of empathy are very pervasive.
Virtually everywhere, murder, rape, theft, violence, lying and cheating (the kind of things you find in the Ten Commandments and the things that emerge inevitably from proximity and competition in primitive societies or in ones with advanced economics) are anathematised. The deep Chomskian grammar is bound to arise from the situational things we have in common – the same appetites, the same Maszlovian needs, the same sexuality, the same mortality etc. God (or any lawmaker) codifies what he knew couldn’t help but emerge. In a sense this kind of moral universalism underpins the Voltairean Enlightenment stance that spoke in terms of a world community.
I seriously would not use the Ten Commandments as a guide. This, to me, just shows how little Guy knows of them. In freethought circles, they are routinely lambasted (and have their own genesis in the Code of Hammurabi). Only six of the Ten Commandments deal with an individual’s moral conduct, which comes as a surprise to most Christians. Essentially, the first four commandments say: 1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 2. Thou shalt not make thee any graven images or bow down to them, and if you do I’ll get you and your kids and their descendants. 3. Thou shalt not take the name of the lord in vain. 4. Keep the Sabbath holy.
The others can be seen in light of social cohesion, psychology, evolved moral behaviour and suchlike.
This leads me to the question of ontic ordering. In purely temporal terms humans emerge from Nature with a nature. This, in my view, is to adopt a bottom up approach. Where lower can one begin than in the nature on which we all depend for existence and the consciousness that enables me to make these observations? A human baby is a cluster of appetites, senses, and emotions. Reason and language will only emerge much later on. As the child grows and goes to school it will, sooner or later get involved in a competitive scrap over a ball or sweets and announce the immortal sentence – “It’s not fair!” before it punches the other child.
Reminder (does he watch these videos?):
A school teacher, in possession of the codified school rules, will intervene and adjudicate. Gradually the child will be acquainted with formalised morality. The morality arose out of the child’s competitive animal appetite followed swiftly by its instinct for justice first though.
The whole point of this is why we have codified morality, why that teacher thinks as they do, and why slavery was morally good in a different time and place. The theistic approach is an end to questioning, to science, and to seeking the answers to such questions. Theism, at its heart and in offering unsubstantiated answers, is anti-scientific. It's an investigative dead-end.
The same ontic ordering obtains in an adult. He will feel moral outrage in the form of emotion at an injustice inflicted on him by someone who scratches his car and absents himself from the scene. In civilised humans, this reaction will rise up through the ontic ordering, beyond a desire to punch the perpetrator to his reason and he will appeal to justice through the socially agreed means of calling the police. He will appeal to the social codifications of morality that are enshrined in laws.
Some "civilised" humans dehumanise others and put them into slavery or slaughter them in concentration camps. Again, the whole raison d'être of Behave is to understand good and bad behaviour in light of genes, biology (hormones, brain chemistry etc.) and larger environment.
Morality begins in implanted instinct. In a conscious self-aware creature like us it is impossible to imagine it not being there. It is not implanted by God (except in the sense, if you believe that is how it happened, he started the whole shooting match that led to the social and competitive situation) but by the social situation just as the fact of things being plural can’t not lead to mathematical truths and laws. It is one of the properties of self-awareness and consciousness. An omnipotent God could not have created a universe without it. An interesting paradox.
Genes, biology and environment. You would need to define "truth" here.
- Correspondence Theory
- Tarski's Semantic Theory
- Coherence Theories
- Pragmatic Theories
- Deflationary Theories
So on and so forth. I would argue that "moral truths" that emerge from evolution and environment would qualify for pragmatic and coherent theories at least. "[H]e started the whole shooting match that led to the social and competitive situation) but by the social situation just as the fact of things being plural can’t not lead to mathematical truths and laws" - of course, this is exactly the map/terrain analogy and the descriptive way that we understand the world. We invent the languages of maths and logic to navigate our way about the world that we have observed through our senses.
Conclusion
Over the course of these posts, it seems that Guy has at times inadvertently agreed or inadvertently found issues with theology. There is nothing of substance that comes close to challenging a naturalistic understanding of the world and morality.
If you fancy a debate on morality, check out my public debate at Southampton University:
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