Nature's alleged immorality
Biological scienticians try to explain morals and debunk morals and it's all a confused mess.
This is a follow-up to last week's piece, "On our immoralist problem". You can read that here:
Anyone who has read Aristotle's Ethics and has also read modern moral philosophy must have been struck by the great contrasts between them. The concepts which are prominent among the moderns seem to be lacking, or at any rate buried or far in the background, in Aristotle. Most noticeably, the term "moral" itself, which we have by direct inheritance from Aristotle, just doesn't seem to fit, in its modern sense, into an account of Aristotelian ethics.
Elizabeth Anscombe
Last time on MP, I wrote about one of the many occasions wherein Socrates hands down a whoopin' to a tricksy shyster in Plato's dialogues.
We took a look at a section of the Gorgias, which takes a shiv to that tired old "morality isn't real" argument as set down by one sophist named Callicles. This argument is that old, and it hasn't gotten any more convincing.
This week I'm angling my jaundiced eye towards more recent arguments in this genre.
It's popular these days to draw on sciences, biology and psychology of special interest, to tell us why we're moral, or why we aren't, or why we can't be because morality is impossible.
These scientists either end up using science to cover up a bad moral argument, or repeat trivial truths that Aristotle already knew in 350 BC. Where they have anything interesting to tell us, it isn't new, and where it is new, it isn't interesting.
But these science-approved ideas are taken seriously and not just by the rabble. The rabble are more likely to resist such foolishness, to their immense credit. It's to the point now that slapping a "Science" label on any truckload of horse-puckey makes it officially true, and anything else is disinformation.
For reasons I'll get to, science has at best a limited scope for telling us anything about the what, why, and how of morality. The realities of science-as-really-done are far less flattering.
Yet from airport books to TED talks, you'll find credentialized scienticians telling you all about the Good and the Right as if their ideas have all the authority of Newton's laws of motion.
You may not believe in luck, or its more mature cousin synchronicity, but I tell you I'd been sketching an article like this when the following fell plum in my lap:
What a perfect opportunity. Let me dive right in with the straight punch to the gut:
What is “morality”? Intellectuals have pondered the question for millennia. As far as I can tell, their answers have converged on something like this:
Morality is about working together to serve the greater good. Our moral compass guides us to resolve our conflicts and treat each other with respect. Without morality, we would lie, steal, and kill. Morality makes us better people.
You hear that sound like a diesel freight train charging through a hurricane? That's my annoying philosopher hat racing to the scene. Everybody hang on tight.
After spending the better part of a decade up to my nose in works on ethics old and new, let me assure you that nobody agrees on nothing about morality.
I'm not talking about the polarization of Republicans and Democrats. If you think that today's politics are polarized, you don't want to see the state of moral philosophy. The intellectuals who think about this stuff are more divided on the key questions than Trump and a Marxist vanguard.
The idea that there is a convergence of answers made me fall out of my chair. Even the thought that morality is a product of consensus is one of the issues that has no consensus.
I’m already suspicious. I recommend reading this piece for key background, if you have a spare moment:
A key factor here is the tremendous gap between the way we moderns theorize about morals and the way that the ancient world understood these matters. The mere emphasis on theory is one trouble. We have lost something of vital importance in that change, despite some real gains of modern moral thinking.
Our new friend is likely to disagree. His article expresses that attitude that truth is about consensus rather than, well, truth. The true is the currently fashionable, so by definition older ideas are outdated and mistaken.
That's a bad mistake. Ignorance is rarely a flattering condition and on this topic is it is dangerous.
You may recall from last week that one of the major problems with the immoralism pushed by Callicles circled around his distinction between what is natural and what is artificial. Conventional morality sits on the artificial side, opposed to stark human nature. Socrates and Plato didn't buy it, and neither did Aristotle.
As Socrates asked, where exactly is this line, and who draws it? Sure, you can look to the conquerors of men and the predators among the beasts and draw some analogies. But then you have to contend with another natural fact: not a single one of us was born able to walk, talk, and feed ourselves.
Human nature is artificial from before your first breath.
This idea that morality is something alien to human life, somehow unlike our "natural" inclinations to eat, drink, and mate, rests on soft sand. Bear-nature and tiger-nature is solitary. Nature would make short work of the lonely human organism.
There's already a natural basis for sociality built into us. None of us acts out of mere self-interest because there is no such thing in us. Even the coldest psychopath finds his footing in a fundamentally shared social reality.
That gets us into one part of the problem. “Why be moral?” supposes that there’s an alternative, as if we're natural-born atoms that later become social molecules.
This deserves its own article, really, but this belief borrows a great deal from post-renaissance Protestantism and Romanticism. That Robinson Crusoe lyfe is not likely to be as satisfying as the brochures.
The other matter falls out of two phrases we find in the quote above, "greater good" and "better people". To that is joined some happy-sappy thoughts about cooperation and the respect for persons and the avoidance of anti-social behaviors.
If you read last week's piece, you might see where this is going. Cooperation and respect for others must be deemed good and right in order for them to qualify as morals. The value judgment is unavoidable, and furthermore irreducible to any mere facts of bare nature. (What’s the value of a natural fact?)
Yes, humans are social creatures with needs that are as much cultural as organic. But what of it? Why shouldn't Alcibiades level the cities while Patrick Bateman murders at his leisure? There has to be a reason to be moral.
Once we're talking about values and rationality, we're out in the wild fields beyond The Science.
There are acts that we should (and should not) do, and there are purposes and goals for the sake of which those acts ought (not) be done. Morality is what commands us and obliges us in these matters.
Let's get dirty.
The quote from Miss Anscombe up in the opening is from her most famous paper, in which she lays out a kill-stroke against modern ways of doing ethics.
Morals, she argued, are not about our choices or decisions. Nobody decides moral goodness. There are facts about good/bad and right/wrong in much the same way as we determine facts about trees, chairs, and other physical things.
The problem is that we've gotten ourselves in a tar-pit where the word "ought" has some special moral meaning for us. "Ought" comes up in a lot of places, but only in moral philosophy does it take on a special connection with your actions.
It's pretty hard to trade in a system of "Thou shalt (not)" rules without a Lawgiver to cement the command. Meanwhile, the philosophers and scientists are all secular atheists. They want to hang on to the moral force of "ought" while rejecting the whole vision of a higher divine order that gave it meaning.
All that's left is a bunch of empty rules that supposedly hand us obligations and commands to act in certain ways.
There's been various ways of replacing God in that formula. Kant tried to do it with the law of pure reason. Others followed Hume’s footsteps by looking to our natural inclinations and emotions, arguing that we're built to respond to certain behaviors with positive ("good") or negative ("evil") feelings, or to view the world as "colored" by moral properties the way you’d see red if you looked through a red filter.
None of these quite get there.
The same scientific outlook that made it impossible for most to truly believe in the Unseen took a knife to rationality with the horsepower Kant gave it.
If you want to argue that we're built with certain natural dispositions to judge, feel, and act in "moral" ways, you have to find some way to say who and what are your normal cases. This is much harder than it sounds like when you consider the vast range of biological and cultural differences across the great sweep of the human world.
You're left trying to derive value judgments from biological and psychological (etc.) facts, but observation of facts doesn't get you there unless there's already a value judgment hidden in the background. It won't surprise you that David Hume's morality looks a lot like the esteemed life of a well-heeled 18th century Scotsman.
All of this is to say that modern thinking on morals has a major problem. Anscombe's solution was simple if radical. Philosophers should shut up and stop doing ethics until they can sort out their nonsense. We don't have any good idea of what virtue is, of what "good" means, what counts as a moral reason, not even what it means to flourish or live well as a human being.
You can talk about your moral obligations and "better worlds" all day long and it means squat until we can talk about what's really excellent and worthy in human existence.
None of our brave scientists has had the first thought about this. They blindly accept the rough ethos handed to them by their peer-groups and the TV and proceed as if this is a perennial feature of human life. Get the right theory and you can explain morals — these morals — like a particle physicist explains electrons.
Here’s another head-scratcher:
In fact, morality can’t be nice—there has to be a mean part—because otherwise, it could not have evolved. Natural selection favors genes when they have higher fitness than alternative genes.
Why would you expect morality to be nice? What is this modern obsession with niceness?
Justice, a central plank of morality if there ever was one, certainly has no claim to warm cuddles. Promise keeping, debts, and duties have little to do with feel-goods.
Let’s say morality did evolve. There’s likely some partial truth to that, though we must consider two further details.
One, we are discussing irreducibly normative and evaluative ideals — standards, not facts. You may as well argue, and by the exact same basis, that mathematics evolved and therefore isn’t real. Nobody thinks twice about the objectivity of “2 + 2 =4” even though, if we take this story at face value, mathematical facts must have evolved.
Two, however popular and robust the scientific consensus, you ought to look twice and then a third time at this conviction that every trait evolved for evolution’s purpose, which is reproduction.
If morality is "made up", then looking at biological evolution for the "why?" is not going to get far. If it were a bare fact about our behaviors, why be skeptical about it?
If morality is optional for us, independent from the naturally-evolved animal natures which truly motivate our behaviors, then its genesis in evolutionary processes need not play any part in its present meaning or function.
But curiously, the author here retreats to the claim that morality did evolve through the usual means of some connection with fitness-enhancing traits. That entails that it isn't just BS, but has some tangible connection to desirable characteristics.
Which is it? Did we evolve to be moral and therefore it has a real purpose, or is morality just an invention with only a weak connection to our evolutionary history?
What he’s trying to say is that our moral responses do not act as we believe. Like other evolved traits, those moral intuitions we all have about not stomping on babies and pushing old ladies down the stairs do or did play some part. The explanations we give in defense of them don't track the real causes or motivations inside us.
Our stories about moral beliefs and behaviors aren't much but made up BS that makes us feel good.
We saw how far that argument got Callicles.
In After Virtue, Alastair MacIntyre took Anscombe's argument a few steps further. He argued that, in the wreckage of our secular, post-religious culture, we've effectively replaced ethics and morality with complicated systems of technical management based in scientific knowledge.
We're ruled over by character types that he called "Managers" and "Therapists" who use technical expertise to transform previously "moral" issues into social and psychological problems. They use techniques for adjusting minds and social behaviors, falling entirely outside the scope of genuine ethical and moral thinking.
We are indeed beyond good and evil.
This looks like paradise to people in love with science and machines and think that these amount to blind progress. Only thing is, that is not ethics — although progress supposes a standard by which progress can be judged. As we saw with Callicles last week, the neutral stance of the theory, borrowing the ideal of science, supposes a hidden field of value judgments and normative claims when imported into human concerns.
To understand this, I leave you with a question:
What is the value of science and technology in the course of your human existence? What makes it worth caring about?
Science as an ideal is a fine system for discovering and explaining the causes of observable phenomena. Our technology has brought us many undeniable gifts.
My question is not about a laundry list of this or that particular benefit.
My question is about the value placed on science as a way of seeing and valuing our lives.
How does this show us ideal standards by which we evaluate character and judge actions?
There are no "oughts" or "goods" found by science. Any that show up there are put there by scientists and interpreters of science. But if science is meant to give us our ultimate value-system, while being unable to talk about values, where does that bit of confusion leave us?
Nietzsche, as he often did, knew the answer:
What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.
What's left when our highest source of values and purpose has nothing to say about value?
Our highest values devalue themselves. Nothing means anything—not even the belief in nothing.
There's more on this in a piece I wrote about Heidegger and cybernetics:
When we put morals “downstream” of knowledge, we lose the morals. But the morals are always there, looking over your shoulder, whether you notice them or not.
There is nothing in a human life that is not measured against standards.
Even when The Science blinds you to your commitments.
Such untidy facts make it altogether strange that my new friend here tells us that a watered-down mode of self-devaluing nihilism is the best we can hope for:
So the next time you see a thinkpiece bewailing our increasingly globalized, polarized, socially mediated world, consider the fact that we’re living in the most peaceful time in human history. The features of our society that make us anomic and angsty—the endless superficial relationships, the lack of fierce loyalty, the feeling that we’re constantly being watched and judged—might be the very same features that keep us from killing each other. Existential malaise—the feeling that everything is bullshit—might be the price of peace.
I think it’s a price worth paying.
People really will put up with Hell itself if it makes them feel safe.
He says it himself: a price worth paying. He is as clear as a Baptist preacher on Sunday morning that there is a right way to live. Where’s that value judgment in the neo-Darwinian synthesis?
You know my response to this by now: What makes this life worth living? Why care?1
If it’s good, what makes it so? If the opposite is bad, why?
The answer is not self-evident. Pleasure and absence of pain may be goods, but there are many goods.
Imagine you take a young tiger cub out of its natural habitat, put it in a tiny concrete cage, feed it, give it the best medical care, and support it with a life long past any it would have in the wild. You've done nothing but extend a life empty of everything that makes a good life for a tiger. Quality isn’t quantity.
I'm reminded of a thought I heard from Philippa Foot: Sometimes doing what is to a person's benefit is no benefit to them. A life locked in a padded room strapped to a gurney while fed through IV might be long and peaceful. I expect many of us in that situation would very much wish it were neither.
Next time, I'm going to dive into the philosopher that could, perhaps, solve these problems for us. Anscombe and MacIntyre, like most anyone with sense, believed his ideas might be the only solution to nihilism.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to use your mind for activities that don't involve infinite scrolling, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.
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There's an extra layer of funny to this. Steven Pinker, whose book The Better Angels of Our Nature is cited in that quote as support for "progress", once said that the laws of nature show us a purpose in the universe. I’d expect that from a believer in the transcendent. Coming from an avowed atheist who is committed to the rejection of any fundamental teleology in nature, it’s a little suspicious. This more than anything convinced me that this set is not only confused, but their confusion is a direct result of their ignorance of this subject.