I advocate logic & reason as the exclusive method to arrive at beliefs which have any chance of being objectively correct. Love & laughter are not beliefs; they are experiences. They should be enjoyed without worrying if such enjoyment is rational, like you would enjoy a good steak, or a piece of art. What makes you happy is a personal choice. We must simply recognize that it is not a way to discover objective truths.I'd like to expand on that a bit. Specifically, I want to talk about values, and where they come from. When I say "values," I mean things that are good, regardless of context. For instance, most people do not value "money" on its own. They value it for its ability to buy things. The ability to buy things is good because they can keep us alive, make us happier, keep order, etc. You can always keep asking "why is that good" until you get to an ultimate value. These ultimate values are what I'm talking about. The ones that are good without reference to their utility.
For a person who believes in a god, this question is easy: our values come from god. God defines what is good & bad. Our personal choices and feelings do not enter into the equation. But for the faithless, how do we know what to value? If there is nobody greater than ourselves to dictate morality, where does it come from?
For those of us who do not believe in a higher intelligence, ultimate values must come from ourselves. The problem with this is that it is completely subjective. People can value anything they choose, and the choice is arbitrary. There is no logical reason why any one value is better than any other. People can value family, life, perpetuation of the species, material wealth, status, opinion, feeling, order, chaos, or anything else. If there is no intelligence higher than us, there is nobody to say which value is better.
The logical conclusion here is that there is no such thing as "good" or "evil," merely personal preference. Philosophers call this moral relativism or individual ethical subjectivism. It's a scary idea, because it means that our instinctive revulsion of a person or idea is merely our personal preference, and has no real rational support. Certain things intuitively seem right or wrong, but I would argue that these are merely a product of our own individual tastes.
This doesn't mean, of course, that we should be tolerant of values in opposition to our own. It just means that we should refrain from getting too high & mighty about our own morality, and take a more utilitarian, less retributionist view of how to handle people who do things that we consider "wrong."
It's easy to say "Hitler was evil." It's a lot less satisfying to say "Hitler had different values from me." But I believe that the latter is all we can reasonably say.
If you subscribe to the belief that there is no god, then moral values had to be a development from evolution. Evolution favors traits that do one of two things: promote the passing on of an individual's genes, or promoting the perpetuation of the group. How you define "the group" would cause a lot of variation in morals. If the group is the entire species, then murder would be considered wrong at all times, unless an individual presents a net loss to the perpetuation of the species. If you consider "the group" do be your country, or your religion, then war becomes more morally acceptable.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, Hitler had different values than me, but to me he was also wrong, and if I were alive at that time than it may have been my moral obligation to stop him. However, he defined his group differently, so to him he wasn't doing anything wrong. Most people don't do things they would consider wrong unless they are necessary for the survival of the individual and the individual's offspring.
So maybe "evil" has no meaning with this definition of morality, unless the person in question repeatedly does things that they view as morally wrong without regret (serial killers for example).
This isn't to say that all or even most morals come from evolution, because we all know people who would say "Don't give that serial killer the death penalty, he's insane and therefore doesn't know what he was doing". That clearly is societally induced because there would be no reason for the individual or the group to keep this serial killer alive or let him go. But some morals carry across all religions and nationalities, and there has to be a reason for it. My argument is the reason is evolutionary.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I think a lot of our conventional ideas about morality came from evolution in the sense that we value the things that produce(d) stability in a society. Stability = survival, so through natural selection, the societies who valued these things survived, and the values perpetuated.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with this post.
ReplyDeleteThis - as well as Brian's post - is one of the major reasons I believe that separation between Church and State is vital to the survival of a multi-cultural democracy. While religiously-based values may have at once point reflected the "evolution of morals" of the culture, reglious values do not tend to evolve in the same way as cultural ones. In the present day we must update, pass. and uphold laws that represent an areligious, moral, modern interpretation of the Constitution.