The Basis of My Ethical Philosophy
The other week, Andrew wrote an excellent comment on my post about Pascal’s wager, ending with this:
By the by, plonkee, I’ve searched your site and I’ve found some references to your ethical philosophy, but nothing justifying it. I mention this because I thought it would be interesting to see a post on the one thing atheists should be talking most about - not whether a god or gods exist, but the foundations of an atheist moral and ethical philosophy.
It certainly will be a challenge to write about the foundations of my ethical philosophy as I’m not entirely sure whether I really have any foundations.
Starting from the beginning, one of the things that lead to my realisation that I was atheist was my decision to live my life without reference to god or gods. That is, to do the right thing, regardless of the teachings of any given religion.
I’d like to say that my essential philosophy is the Wiccan creed:
An it harm none, do as you will.
I’d like to say it was that - I really think that things are wrong when they harm someone else. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to live without adversely affecting someone, somewhere. And it doesn’t really address some of the more difficult ethical problems which are all about the competing needs of different people.
In fact, my self-declared definition of a successful life is if the world is better when I leave than it was when I arrived. Better to me, currently means that people are happier, more alive, less persecuted, more knowledgeable, and the world is a fairer and more peaceful place. This sounds like a pretty tall order, I’ll settle for better on average.
How does this influence me? Well, it means that in a really broad sense, I am pro-life. That is that I am generally opposed to violence of all forms, and I think that people should be given every opportunity to live meaningful and ordinary lives. I tend to see people everywhere as broadly the same, with the same needs and desires, and empathise with them all.
In my personal life, like pretty much everyone, I try to be nice, and obey the golden rule - to treat people as I would like to be treated. Politically, I am certainly a social liberal. I would probably be described as an advocate of social justice, and I am a member of Amnesty International, and I support fair trade and campaigns to end poverty.
I don’t think my ethical philosophy has or needs much of a basis. I am nothing special, like everyone else, I do my best.
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13 Responses to “The Basis of My Ethical Philosophy”
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As long as you’re content with a world in which people who are vicious and cruel aren’t wrong, but merely have different tastes than you have, then morality needs no basis. (”I’m not saying that what you did was wrong, but personally I have a strong emotional preference against genocide and I do wish you’d stop slaughtering your neighbors.”)
Because so many people (including atheists) believe that atheism implies such a world is, I believe, the largest barrier to the acceptance of atheism. Atheism does not have to imply such a world. Ethics can easily be placed on a rational footing, as G.E. Moore did. I believe the metaphysical status of ethics is at least as sound as that of mathematics. Unfortunately, atheism has been held captive to the logical positivist agenda for decades and still is to this day even though the positivists are now, I believe, completely extinct (in philosophy - they have many children in the natural science world who haven’t gotten the memo yet that the verificationist criteria suffered ignominious collapse). I find this state of affairs very distressing. I am at least as embarrassed by Richard Dawkins as, I imagine, most thoughtful Christians are by Pat Robertson.
I’m not necessarily opposed to having an external basis for my or any ethical philosophy, but it would be untrue to say that I have actually ever thought that it was important to have one. Thoughtful people can and do have different morals to me, and I think that they are wrong, but only in the details, on the major points we seem to be in agreement, it’s as if we’ve evolved this way.
Normally, I find that atheism implies very little, merely that someone lacks a belief in god or gods. And sadly mathematics, although having a rational footing, isn’t exactly complete.
I think I’ve probably got some more semi-thoughts on the basis of ethics, but they haven’t really formed properly in my mind yet. I’ll leave them to percolate a little longer before I serve them up in public.
Mathematics isn’t complete? I’m not sure what you mean by that exactly.
I don’t think you can say, given the moral anti-realism you appear to be espousing, that people who disagree with you on morals are wrong. If I’m reading your first-order ethical theory right, there are no facts for them to be wrong about.
As I said, I disagree with this view. Moral realism is clearly defensible without the existence of a god. And I find moral realism vastly more plausible than moral anti-realism. The anti-realist philosophy’s knockdown argument is usually, “But it isn’t clear how moral realism accords with my materialist philosophy.” To which I respond, which is more plausible? That your materialist philosophy is false or that it’s not wrong to torture little children just for the fun of it? (I am not necessarily espousing a non-materialist worldview, though I’m certainly willing to go that far. E.g., it’s not clear to me that consciousness can be explained in a strictly materialist philosophy; nobody’s done it yet, though they might soon. I think it’s probably possible to reconcile moral realism, and mathematical realism, with a materialist philosophy, but I admit the ontology isn’t clear to me.)
Mathematics isn’t complete, in the sense that it is incomplete. Any system that can encode the natural numbers contains statements which cannot be proved, and since the whole point of mathematics is to prove things…
I sort of agree that for example ,some things are absolutely wrong, regardless of anyone’s personal morality but I’m not sure that can be justified.
I am certainly happy to say that we have evolved such that we all find some of the same actions basically immoral and I wouldn’t be astonished if that was an inevitable feature of evolution.
Oh, you’re just talking about Godel. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem isn’t that profound. All it says is that there’s at least one statement which is neither provable nor refutable within the system. Undecidability does not address the question of whether the truth value is well-defined or whether it can be determined by other means. In computer science, the generalized halting problem is undecidable. Nonetheless, for at least some given algorithms, it is certainly possible to prove that a Turing machine will halt on any input. Anyway, it certainly doesn’t have anything to say about mathematical realism. Godel himself wasn’t merely a mathematical realist, but a Platonist. In the end, all Godel ended up saying is that it’s possible to say “This statement is unprovable.” If the statement is false, then it’s true. But if it’s true, it’s unprovable. So the system is either inconsistent (if the statement is false) or incomplete (if it’s true). He just showed that an equivalent statement can be expressed in mathematics. This does have consequences in mathematics, but it’s not nearly as great as the average layman thinks.
One of the strangest things that occurred in the twentieth century was the co-opting of mathematics and physics in the assault on rationality and objectivity. Don’t be taken in by this. Einstein was a realist. Godel was a realist. It’s true that Bohr and Heisenberg probably weren’t, but I’ve spent most of my life dismissing the Copenhagen Interpretation as obviously false. I am gratified that the scientific establishment now seems to almost entirely agree with me. (Though I am disappointed that they seem to be embracing the Everett-Wheeler Many Worlds Hypothesis rather than some version of Bohmian mechanics, which I believe solves the problem more elegantly.)
Morality is the last stand. It is the one subject in which the assault on reason and objectivity still persists to a remarkable degree. People, like Dawkins, who do not sympathize with the assault anywhere else do sympathize with it when it’s on morality. I am confident that, given time, reason will reassert itself on morality as well.
I was speaking of the incompleteness theorem in the sense that mathematics is not as absolute as we might wish to think. And I’ve never felt that mathematics was materially real. It’s a lot more like a game with certain, probably consistent, rules.
I suppose you can consider morality to be the same sort of thing but I haven’t previously found that to be a helpful line of thought.
What would you like the basis of someone’s morality to be?
Godel, of course, thought it demonstrated the opposite of what you think it demonstrates. Godel believed that the Incompleteness Theorem proved that mathematics cannot be entirely formalized, that Hilbert’s dream of making mathematics a purely formal “game”, if you will, could not possibly be completed. Therefore, Godel concluded, realism. (I’m not saying I’m necessarily impressed with this argument, but it’s far more impressive than the claim that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that mathematics isn’t absolute.)
I believe there is huge pressure on the argument that mathematics is just a game. In fact, so much pressure, I don’t believe it can be sustained. This is for a couple of reasons: 1) it so obviously works - purely theoretical results can be shown to be true empirically over and over and over (see that wonderfully titled article, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”) and 2) unlike physics, where we can imagine a world in which the laws of physics do not operate like they do in our real world, it isn’t even possible to imagine a world in which the laws of mathematics are not true. As Godel believed, mathematical laws are necessary laws.
I agree that viewing morality like a game is not that useful. This is why I am not terribly impressed with utilitarianism, “ideal observer” theories, or Rawlsian theories of morality.
What would you like the basis of someone’s morality to be?
I don’t have any preference as to what people believe. I am simply fascinated that so many atheists give so little thought to moral philosophy. I’ve been an atheist since I was a small child and when I reached adulthood, I threw myself into the study of moral philosophy (after my juvenile delinquency period, a result of my lack of any moral philosophy at all). Morality is the most important subject there is. I am surprised at its neglect as a subject of study.
I am an ethical intuitionist. (In fact, one of my arguments against all other theories of morality is that they all begin with ethical intuition and then try to go beyond intuitionism by privileging one particular intuition above all others. I see no reason to go any further than intuitionism simple.) I believe we evolved to have an ethical intuition (because it was useful to survival) in the same way that we evolved to have mathematical intuitions (because those are useful) or color vision or hearing, etc. The fact that we evolved to perceive colors and sounds doesn’t mean that colors and sounds don’t exist. I believe there are self-evident moral truths. For example, “on the subject of whether or not there are moral truths, we ought to believe only what is true.” You will note that all people who disagree with my belief about self-evident moral truths nonetheless accept this statement as true. But there is no question that it’s a moral statement. (It is, as Hume would have said, prescriptive. It contains an ought.) In fact, we wouldn’t have any sort of debate if you didn’t accept it. It is so obvious, however, that you probably never actually sat down and said, “Yes. I agree with that.”
Unfortunately, defending ethical intuitionism completely would take a book (or two). Here’s a paragraph from Michael Huemer, one of the modern proponents of the view (also an atheist):
“Intuitionism does no more than try to affirm common sense. Everybody, when he considers certain types of action, has the sense, the intellectual judgement or ‘intuition’, that they are right. Some of these judgements strike us prephilosophically as being as obvious as anything is. Intuitionism allows that such judgements are by themselves genuine items of knowledge, that they are exactly what they appear, and are not based on some hidden, unconscious reasonings or other hidden psychological processes. Intuitionism should not require to be proved but is the presumptive position that we should start with, the position of taking our experiences at face value, just as we ordinarily take our perceptions, memories, and other thoughts at face value. Unfortunately, modern-day skepticism — and not only in philosophy — is in the habit of assuming that only the strange and counter-intuitive can possibly be right, and accordingly almost every philosopher thinks intuitionism obviously ‘implausible’.”
I believe that ethical intuitionism (i.e. realism) is a better explanation for our intuitions than mere evolution. I have a powerful intuition that I should be willing to risk my life in order to save the life of a child, even if that child is a complete stranger to me, even if that child could only be very distantly related to me (a different skin color, perhaps). According to Dawkins, this is a “misfiring.” This sort of altruism evolved so that we would protect our own kin and it somehow got universalized so that it now applies to everybody. I find this implausible. This is a highly contra-survival trait and shouldn’t even exist in the gene pool and yet it appears to be nearly universal. I think that almost all of us share the intuition that evolution itself is unjust and immoral, “nature red in tooth and claw” and all that. It is extremely surprising that we have apparently evolved to consider the process which created us immoral. Moreover, it seems self-defeating. This makes our own evolution less likely to continue. Shouldn’t we have evolved to ruthlessly exterminate those who don’t share our genes? I’m not saying, by the way, that these objections don’t have answers; perhaps they do. So far, the only answer I have been given is “misfiring.” Well, perhaps.
In closing, one more long quote from Huemer on the subject of the supposed conflict between science and moral philosophy before I subside:
“It would be very difficult to actually argue that the discoveries of modern science show that there is no such subject as ethics. Exactly what experimental result does or could possibly lend support to such a conclusion is hard to say. It ought scarcely to be necessary to observe that the process of discovering a great deal of new information about one subject matter does not, in and of itself, subtract from our knowledge of another subject; the success of one intellectual pursuit does not refute the validity of others; and so, in particular, further discoveries about the nature of physical phenomena do not in and of themselves cast doubt on what we have previously known about other phenomena.
“Concerning the question about the causal powers of values, I only believe what I think is common sense. Values don’t in and of themselves have physical effects, but our beliefs about them certainly do (because they influence our overt behavior). Nor do I suppose that our beliefs are a result of causal interaction with values. Although some object that we can only know of something if we interact with it, and thus it has causal powers, I suppose that we know about values in the same way that we know about mathematics, or metaphysics. Not many people will be inclined to say that abstract (mathematical and other) objects have causal powers to alter the physical world, nor that we can’t know about them. And in case someone is, it can at least be noted, as a counter-example against the ‘causal theory of knowledge’, that it is possible to have knowledge of the future, which in this case certainly cannot be caused by its object. I know, for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow, even though I of course have not, as yet, interacted with or been influenced by that event.
“It therefore appears to me that there’s little to the supposed conflict of intuitionism with a scientific world-view, except for a purely emotional-level conflict. Those who are victims of scientism are prejudiced from the start against considering any entities or claims that aren’t discussed by natural science, only because it doesn’t fit with their attitude. And this, we can only lament, is deeply unscientific of them.”
Firstly, wow, you’ve written an essay. Which is fine.
It’s funny, I was thinking of Hilbert earlier, and I think that I mean that mathematics isn’t absolute in the sense that Hilbert turned out to be wrong - which is, of course, no discredit to him.
As you can probably tell, I’m one of those atheists who hasn’t given much thought to moral philosophy previously, for which I make no apologies, I’m sure there are many interesting subjects which I haven’t given much thought to.
Having said that, I think that I agree to the extent that we seem to have evolved an ethical intuition. Most (and I assume all) people believe that there are certain statements which are self-evidently morally true. I’m just not sure whether they are *actually* morally true, because I am not sure whether such a thing can exist. And the key words here, are not sure.
I guess/think your argument is something like, the existence of our ethical intuition is evidence for the existence of intrinsic moral truths. If I’ve misunderstood, please let me know.
That is, in fact, precisely my argument. (But more than that, I also think it’s the rational starting point. I.e. we should assume it is true until proven otherwise. Certain ethical intuitions appear so obvious that they undergird the entire scientific edifice which is being used to attack them, while science is still standing on them. This doesn’t prove they’re true, of course, but it does make bare the lie that science has refuted them.)
You’ve actually grasped it perfectly and I now have no objections to your view. I could have written far, far more. The usual objection to ethical intuitionism (and the only serious one) is the argument from disagreement. I have not dealt with it, though I believe it’s easily refuted. I also have not mentioned that I do not regard ethical intuitions as infallible. I believe that they are prima facie justified, but ultimately defeasible (usually by appeal to more certain ethical intuitions).
I do not regard my arguments for ethical intuitionism as a proof, but simply the best explanation. It is, I concede, possible that there are no moral facts after all. But in that case, it doesn’t matter what we believe. We might as well all commit suicide. There is no factual justification for arguing that we should or shouldn’t do anything.
Hilbert was a brilliant man. There is a tendency in our society to stigmatize people for intellectual error (as anybody who reads on the Internet is very well aware). I believe this is a serious moral mistake. There is no shame in being wrong; I’ve been wrong more times than I can count. The reason I disparage Dawkins (as I have done above) is not because I think he’s wrong, but because of his utter lack of intellectual curiosity on the issue, despite having written whole books on subjects about which moral philosophy has a great deal to say. (He has a similar disinterest in and ignorance of theology, greatly handicapping him when he makes theological arguments, and he does.) But Dawkins has made an a priori judgement that moral philosophers cannot possibly have anything interesting to say to him. And it is that which makes him culpable. He is in exactly the same position as the priest railing against evolution from the pulpit while knowing almost nothing about the subject.
Sounds like you have some wiccan friends, no? Though not official, I heard that is the basic creed most Wiccans follow.
I have to ask, though, what you mean when you say that this is your ethics. Do you hold others to this same system? Why? Why should they follow your system? Don’t worry, I’m not about to argue that morality can’t exist without God.
Shaun, what I have described is a first-order ethical system. It says absolutely nothing about what, particularly, one should or should not do. One self-evident moral truth is the tautological and obvious proposition, “You ought to do what you ought to do.” Ethical truths which we intuit then tell us what we ought to do. (E.g. it is wrong to torture little children just for the fun of it, no matter how fun you might find it.) Whether people believe or don’t believe in my first-order ethical system, I don’t particularly care about. However, I actually can, with complete consistency, judge people who act immorally. So, yes, I do hold others to ethical truths. If you kill somebody in an unprovoked attack, I’m going to say you did wrong.
The good news about my system is it allows you to keep your common sense moral knowledge, which I believe is knowledge (not infallible or incorrigible knowledge, but knowledge nonetheless). The bad news is that it does not provide you with any sort of rule or algorithm which will solve all your ethical dilemmas. Some people object to this. They believe an ethical system, like utilitarianism, should provide us with a ready-made solution to all problems. I don’t know whether such an algorithm is possible (I personally doubt it), but I certainly don’t have one to offer. However, ethical intuitionism has the advantage of being true. When we observe people arguing about moral issues, we see them putting together rational arguments from foundational moral principles we all agree with (ideally - of course, many people simply assert a controversial position and proceed from there). We do not observe them doing utility calculations or trying to figure out what Kant’s categorical imperative tells them to do or figuring out how things would look to an “ideal observer” or anything similar.
Another quote from Huemer to mull over:
“Perhaps the main motivation for relativism among contemporary intellectuals is the appeal to the virtue of tolerance. In essence, the argument is this: objectivism leads to intolerance because it makes us think that we are right and other people who disagree with us are wrong. This causes conflict, chauvinism, and subjugation of some people by others, which is bad. The only way to ensure a desirable attitude of toleration on our part is to posit relativism as a moral postulate, which will reconcile us to the equal legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of all value systems and thereby enable people with different values to live in harmony, provided they accept the postulate.
“The first obvious reply to this political argument is that it is a non sequitur - that is, even if true, all it shows is that it would be advantageous to somehow convince people to believe relativism; but it does not show that relativism is actually true.
“Second, since this kind of argument would only move people who believe in the value of toleration anyway, it would seem at least as reasonable to simply postulate tolerance as an objective value, as to postulate general subjectivism, if we are interested in promoting tolerance.”
In fact, may I add, only with moral objectivity can you actually consistently argue for tolerance. After all, it is very far from obvious that subjective morality should lead us to be tolerant (though for some reason, people find the above argument extremely persuasive - I blame this on the lack of philosophy in our nation’s schools). If morality is subjective, we can be as intolerant as we like and who’s to say that we’re wrong?
Of course, it only now occurs to me that Shaun was almost certainly directing his question at Plonkee and now I’m embarrassed by my egocentricity (not for the first time).