Our immoralist problem
A response to those obnoxious "morality is just made up, bro" people
I don’t know if you’ve seen this genre of writing. The one where the author comes out hard as a real tough-guy, maybe dropping an f-bomb somewhere in the title of the book or article, but he’s really a secret nice guy cutting through all the lies to give you the straight talk.
If someone is aggressive and swearing, you can be assured that you’re only getting straight talk. Certainly not emotional disorders or insecurities or attention-seeking, no way.
I was reminded of this the other day when a chance email recommendation sent me to a newsletter on this here Substack platform which ticked all the boxes. Puffed-up tough guy, edgy swear-word in the title, promising to tell it like it is and 100% backed up by The Science. It was all there.
The only reason I mention it is that our new friend turned his jaded eye to the hard topics of happiness, meaning, and my personal favorite, morality. Did you know that none of these are real, thanks to science? You may believe they are, but you’re a deluded fool. He swears in the title, that’s how you can tell it’s true.
This one prickles me more than most, I admit. Even without getting into the weeds of it, dealing with these jokers can feel like this:
But I guess I’m here to make arguments along with my sniping, so let’s get into it.
Since I’m more familiar than most with the history and content of moral theorizing and ethics, I feel inclined to respond when the scienticians start up with the “morals aren’t real, you ape!” talk.
In refined forms this position is called immoralism. Morality’s demands require reasons to justify them, but there are no such reasons (or none that survive scrutiny), says the immoralist.
We have no reasons to be moral or believe in morality.
From that follow certain consequences about the reality of morals (namely their lack-of), the meaning of moral words and beliefs, and the true nature of our motivations and behaviors.
It’s important to know that this is way of thinking is in no way new. And I mean that right down to the edgy tough-guy personality. The tough-talking no-nonsense persona arguing against morality shows up in at least three places in Plato’s dialogues, and that’s just the start. The ancient Chinese had their own version in Han Fei, and while I don’t know enough about the ancient Indian traditions to say, their traditions are rich enough that I’d wager you’ll find it there too.
In more recent times, Machiavelli is a constant presence in political thinking, and Nietzsche’s version of immoralism casts a long shadow over everything.
Tell you what I’m going to. I’ll keep this one on the shorter side, filling in a few gaps from one of Plato’s dialogues, and then pick up in Part II with some of the specific forms of lunacy that I found in my new friend’s writing.
Immoralism 1.0
SOCRATES: Do you not mean that the superior should take the property of the inferior by force; that the better should rule the worse, the noble have more than the mean? Am I not right in my recollection?
CALLICLES: Yes; that is what I was saying, and so I still aver.
The Greeks in the 5th century BC pulled no punches.
The reason Plato’s dialogues remain so fascinating is that they give us a glimpse into the very beginnings of what we take to be civilized life. We moderns are products of over two thousand years of the taming process which had barely begun in those days. We take a great deal for granted which no Athenian could assume during Socrates’s lifetime.
In those works we find a boundary zone between the ethical reality found in Homer and his ilk, and the coming of a more rational and intellectual way of understanding what is significant, worthwhile, and valuable in a life.
The ethic of Homer is an ethos of courageous and cunning warriors seeking the goods of fame, glory, wealth, and all the pleasures they bring. The model is handed to us in figures like Achilles and Odysseus, by turns clever, competent, and ruthless.
When Socrates begins to question this, he’s challenging more than simple statements of right and wrong. We’re taught to think of ethics today as collections of rules — Billy sees a runaway trolley heading at five men and he can pull the lever to send the trolley on to another track where it will only kill one man. What should Billy do? Ethics means to confront and resolve dilemmas.
Much more is happening here. When Plato challenged the Homeric ethos, he was questioning more than the rules. He called into question a whole way of life, a way of living and existing and the values that gave it purpose, and invited his readers to see another world.
In Plato’s Gorgias we find this conflict dramatized in an exchange between a fictionalized (?) Socrates and a mercenary teacher-for-hire, the sophist Callicles, who is a straight-dealing tough-talker:
For on what principle of justice did Xerxes invade Hellas, or his father the Scythians? (not to speak of numberless other examples). Nay, but these are the men who act according to nature; yes, by Heaven, and according to the law of nature: not, perhaps, according to that artificial law, which we invent and impose upon our fellows, of whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and tame them like young lions,—charming them with the sound of the voice, and saying to them, that with equality they must be content, and that the equal is the honourable and the just. But if there were a man who had sufficient force, he would shake off and break through, and escape from all this; he would trample under foot all our formulas and spells and charms, and all our laws which are against nature: the slave would rise in rebellion and be lord over us, and the light of natural justice would shine forth.
There’s a lot going on here. Here are the key points:
The conquerors of history don’t care about justice or morality. They’re strong by nature and like nature, they simply act. No principle need enter into it.
Morality, which means honor and justice in this example, understood by an artificial notion of equality of persons, contrasts with the natural order.
A man strong enough to ignore artificial creations of equality would do so, since nothing would bind him to morality.
The rule of the strong over the weak, or the superior over the inferior, is nature’s own justice. When the strong limit themselves to play fair, they needlessly waste their gifts and, furthermore, deny themselves the goods rightfully theirs. Not only can the strong act beyond good and evil, they should do so.
I want to draw attention to a couple of things here.
First, Callicles does not deny that justice exists. What he’s doing here is what Nietzsche would later call a revaluation of values. There is such a thing as justice, only you’ve been mislead as to its true nature. You thought that fairness was about equal apportioning, but in fact justice demands that the better and stronger get a larger share than the lesser and weaker.
This has a crucial significance for our hard-line moral skeptics, which I’ll revisit shortly.
Second, Callicles assumes (with many of the sophists) that he can draw a line between physis (nature) and nomos (custom). Morality is an artificial construction, whereas nature is what we observe out among the animals and the state of competition between nations.
Socrates claps back
Socrates roughs him up good for this argument with three responses:
Callicles doesn’t tell us the difference between the superior, the better, and the stronger. It’s all the same to him. But Socrates points out that the majority are stronger than the individual, and the majority believe in conventional morals. So who is really stronger? Callicles does not have in mind a gathering of slave rabble.
The physician is wiser in matters of food and health than others at their gathering, so why should he not have a greater share of the food and drink? Callicles hasn’t clarified why the doctor’s superiority doesn’t net him a second steak, or why the shoe-maker doesn’t deserve more shoes.
Who gets what share when a man rules over himself? Socrates is pointing out that an intemperate and incontinent man who indulges his every base pleasure is hardly superior. We have to talk about self-discipline or self-mastery, which is the the virtue of sophrosyne (translated as “temperance” or “moderation”).
On that third point Callicles fires back that a strong man doesn’t have any need for moderation. If he can indulge in his love of food and drink and women, then by all means he ought to do so. Moderation of one’s appetites, with no compelling reason to do so, is a form of stupidity.
SOCRATES: Then those who want nothing are not truly said to be happy?
CALLICLES: No indeed, for then stones and dead men would be the happiest of all.
Callicles sees nothing admirable in self-discipline. This provokes one of Socrates’s (and presumably Plato’s) most fascinating arguments against this aggressive but weakly-willed image of the “strong man”:
Such a one is the friend neither of God nor man, for he is incapable of communion, and he who is incapable of communion is also incapable of friendship. And philosophers tell us, Callicles, that communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heaven and earth and gods and men, and that this universe is therefore called Cosmos or order, not disorder or misrule, my friend.
This is a killer reply and it’s worth spending a minute on it.
When we look to the natural order, we don’t see pure chaos. There is violence and struggle, yes, but there is also a deeper order in things. As I’m fond of saying around here, there is no "nature" that is not already structured through the “artificial” lens of our human ways of seeing and thinking.
Callicles sees the harsh world of bronze-age statecraft and nature's predators and calls that “nature”, while ignoring that he's a member of a highly social species whose individuals could not survive without complex relations of dependence on one another.
What makes this so interesting is that Callicles himself already has his own list of moral virtues which aren't about hard self-interest.
Earlier in the dialogue he tells us that cunning intelligence and courage, the Homeric virtues of the warrior, are top of his list of admirable traits. And in a way this is obvious. Aggressive dimwits, who lack both courage and intelligence, may be loud and obnoxious and occasionally dangerous, but they are rarely winners at anything. You need only spend a little time with a gluttonous, licentious drunk to see how the unrestrained pursuit of appetites leads to uncourageous and stupid behavior, or even benefits from them.
(HINT: The virtue of courage has two defects. Cowardice, the lack of proper fortitude, is the most well-known. Brainless aggression is an improper excess of fortitude, standing your ground against all reason, and therefore a defect of character.)
How do you square these admirable virtues of character with the pursuit of immediate interest? Callicles has no good answer. Socrates bloodies his nose for that.
This means that even the randy skeptic of morality has a problem.
He can’t say why cunning and bravery are worthy and admirable traits worth caring about. He’s no better off than the moralist who endorses conventional justice.
Why be moral? Socrates flips the question back. Why be cunning and brave when I can go get sloppy drunk with the temple courtesans?
Long story short, despite his attacks on morality, Callicles sets out his own standards of right and wrong, what is admirable and worthy and what is not, and a set of values that stand as due north on his moral compass.
The important part of this is that Callicles’s skeptical argument against morality has not gotten rid of all value distinctions and normative judgments.
He first calls into our reasons for believing in conventional morals, and then offers a revised meaning of the concept of justice. It is no longer about equality, but about giving to the strong what is their and the weak what is left.
Callicles has a different vision of what makes up a well-lived life and its goods.
But it remains a vision of goodness and excellence in the conduct of a human life. And that’s a problem for anyone telling you “morality doesn’t exist, it’s all nature”.
Why does this matter?
I’ve more than once written here that we aren’t always careful enough with our words when we get off into topics that we aren’t so comfortable with. There’s a certain sloppiness in the way we think about words that aren’t natural fits for our scientific and practical culture.
Part of that is ignorance of the history of the ideas. Some of it is willful blindness, since “we’ve got science now so I don’t need to read that old stuff”. Which is why they blunder into obvious mistakes and subtle traps with all the finesse of the proverbial bull in the china shop.
“Consciousness” is one that I’ve had fun with in recent months. “Morality” is another. In popular discussions, the word’s meaning waffles between specific claims that oblige one to act for equality or altruistic kindness (rarely bothering to distinguish the two), and more general ideas about values, norms, rules, principles, and such in themselves.
Immoralism is often picked up as the second thing, denying that there is any real “mind independent reality” with such things as values, norms, or principles that can guide action.
The real sting of moral skepticism comes in questioning what reasons we have to obey any kind of normative claim — any language that makes use of “ought” and “should”. It’s entirely possible to believe in the reality moral goodness and hold that nobody has any reason to pursue it. Why should you care?
One last thing before we slip into defeatism. This challenge applies to any claims about ought and should.
When Callicles tells the audience that the warrior’s life of fame and glory is best, he means it. This life and its goods are the best way for a human to live.
Reader, his perspective is as steeped in normative language and value judgments as any conventional morality ever was.
As well see next time, things have not changed so much in the last 2400 years. Many of our finest believers in The Science tell us that morality doesn’t real because there’s only physics and evolution.
They do this without a hint of irony as they happily endorse their own vision of what is good, noble, excellent, worthy, and right in our ways of living and being.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
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Extremely interesting, Matt. Well-reasoned and well-written.