Where do atheists get their morality from?

[Angrboda]

I think most of the people here have argued that morality is subjective and has its origins with individual thinking and evolutionary predispositions. This isn't the result I expected with my OP. I believed most atheists felt that there are overriding moral principles that could be called objective.

I have trouble even writing this first question in a coherent way because the term "better" calls for a subjective judgement, but here it is. If morality is subjective how can one person's view or one group's views be better than another?

If our morality is in a large part defined by evolution, how can we trust ourselves to make a subjective moral judgement. Isn't moral judgement then just the reflexive neural response of an electromechanical ape-like meat machine?

How can anyone claim the right to pass judgement on anyone else, since all morality would seem to have an equal footing?

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Charles Napier, responds to complaints that British officials in India were not respecting the local custom of "suttee", ie the burning of widows:

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them.
Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours"

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This underscores the reason why I have chosen the formulation of, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," although I perhaps should have elaborated more on the social aspects of it. Certainly, there are social constraints on the expression of our psychological dispositions, but there is also a large political element which is part of the social, but which often gets glossed over. We are a species with moral intuitions, but we are also a species that uses our moral and other intuitions to shape how we behave as groups. Much of our behavior is likely modeled on the behavior of smaller units, like the family and the tribe, and I don't half know how this gets extended to ethnicities, nations and so on. But there is a fundamental part of the human that is deeply concerned about the behavior and management of the groups it belongs to. I'm fond of saying that political philosophy rests on the back of ethics. Without a theory of what is good and moral, it's well nigh impossible to describe how societies should be run. What would you base it on?

I keep coming across "explanations" of our moral intuitions that don't seem better than post hoc explanations. If morality and moral intuitions were accessible to introspection, rationally, we should be able to look inside and say, yes, murder is wrong because P, Q, and R. There's a well known moral quandary in which you can choose to throw a switch on the train tracks, averting the death of five innocent people at the cost of one. People have no problem throwing the switch. However, when the situation is changed, and saving the five requires pushing a man off a bridge to his death, people are reluctant. If our reasons for considering this or that moral were rationally inspectable, there should be no puzzle as to why this is. Either, "Because parents tell people it's not right to shove others," or, "it would be a violation of his free will" — but no such explanations are ever forthcoming. Why?

The philosopher G.E. Moore invented what he termed the naturalistic fallacy. This is often confused with Hume's is/ought distinction, that you can't derive ought from is, but it's properly Moore's. The naturalistic fallacy says that it is a mistake to identify a property that is associated with the moral, and conclude that that property is the moral. A quick analogy is helpful. Let's say an art professor has a fondness for small paintings. All of the paintings he likes are no more than 2 feet across. He's talking to a student one day and explaining that these paintings are the height of Western aesthetics. The student suggests that a certain large painting is surely the equal of many that he's been shown. The professor disagrees vehemently, and the student asks why. So the professor explains that all great art must be no more than two feet across. The professor is guilty of a sort of parallel naturalistic fallacy. He has identified the things he considers great art, identified a common property to all of them, and redefined the measure of great art as referring to that property. Many people make the same mistake with ethics. For example, Sam Harris notes that suffering, pain and harm to well being are often associated with immoral acts; so he defines the moral as that which works to avoid suffering and pain, and increases well being. Utilitarianism as a whole might also be said to be guilty of the same error. It's a common theme. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with maximizing well-being, I'm saying that, philosophically, it is a mistake to define it as the measure of what is moral. That's part of the reason for watching for the naturalistic fallacy. The other is that our moral intuition doesn't seem to follow such neat, mathematically precise models. The more we delve into human psychology, the more we find hidden pockets of weirdness that we didn't expect — often because we simply weren't looking, so convinced that we had already carved nature at her joints. However, the way evolution constructs, and the way the brain evolved, I suspect our moral intuition gerrymanders around a cluster of evolutionary goals, none of them singularly responsible for our ethical senses.

So the three big components in my view are, evolved moral intuitions, cognitively opaque morality, and the political element. I'm reminded of the recently discovered peculiarity about dogs and chimps. It's been demonstrated that while you can point to something and the dog will understand the gesture, if you repeat the experiment with a chimp, it won't understand the gesture at all. This is probably a useful analog for morality. If you point to something, and the person looks where you pointed, all has gone as expected. But if you ask them to explain their behavior, why they looked at the moon instead of your finger, they'll likely spin a bunch of ad hoc explanations until they end up cornered by their ignorance. We don't know "why" we look at the moon instead of the finger, we just feel that's what we "should" do it.

A frequent component of the concern over moral relativism likely centers around the notion, already voiced, that if morality is relative, we have no justification for holding somebody morally responsible. I'm akin to ascribe the solution for this to the combination of the political and the natural. Yes, the bogeyman is scary, but the evolution of biology and social systems will likely keep the closet securely bolted. But there is an analogous situation where this concern arises, and that's the debate over free will and determinism. People suggest that if all our actions are determined, we have no justification for punishing them. But I point out that we don't need metaphysical justification for punishing someone, as societal interests serve quite satisfactorily. The question of moral responsibility, ultimately, devolves into who do we punish and why? Historically, the three goals of institutionalized punishment have been deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. Of these three, only retribution requires metaphysical moral responsibility, and it is probably the least defensible goal of punishment. Would we really lose anything in a society where punishment was based solely on the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation? I don't think so.

I think there is a great tendency, when talking about evolutionary psychology and morality, to confuse what is with what should be. Human behavior evolved in certain ways because doing so allowed that particular hominid to thrive in the environments that were open to it. This is a determinist process. Our morals evolved the way they did because that is what it means to evolve. To suggest that our moral senses "should" be other than what they are, or should be justified by some other fact is meaningless. The evolved sense of what should be is the only sense you can appeal to, even to complain that this explanation isn't the explanation we should use to justify it. You're essentially chasing your evolutionary tail.

Now as I said in the other thread, I haven't fully closed the loop between theory and evolution for myself, but looking elsewhere is, in my opinion, abandoning the tried path and stalking off into the bush. I suspect that many of these questions will be answered more fully once we have a more complete understanding of the brain and mind. (That's where my theories lead, but since they're very speculative ideas from the fringes of computational neuroscience, I won't waste your time with a digression.) I do however think that many of the answers we find will not necessarily be answers that we like, want, or need. We already notice this sort of quandary at the free will / determinism boundary, where many, regardless of its plausibility, are skittish of embracing determinism because they feel it would result in a complete loss of moral accountability, and they can't even contemplate such a world. Ethics in general is likely another frontier requiring us to face such hard choices. And Vinny is right in one regard, the absence of some sense of reliable guide to morality in our lives, and the idea of standard moral relativism, is very threatening to many. Yet no clear alternative to it has emerged.

One of the strange paradoxes of Vinny's contribution is that he is painting relativism as allowing the postulate of babies being raped and killed being moral. This is attempting to contrast what is with what might be. There are a great many things that might be that never will be. Probably a more relevant question is what are the likely boundaries of human morality, and what forces push it away from center. I'm not an ethicist nor familiar with the psychology of morality, so I have no knowledge on that score. However it's interesting to note that Vinny suggests that he has no alternative to moral relativism, yet he's appalled by the thought of baby raping becoming accepted as moral. Where is he getting the moral guidance to conclude that baby raping would be a bad thing if he has no other moral framework than relativism?

(There is a similar conundrum which crops up with respect to coherentist theories of truth. Coherentism postulates that the measure of whether a statement or proposisition is true is how consistent it is with the system of truths we currently have; i.e. how well the new fact 'coheres' with the old. Now Bertrand Russell's objection was that if you had a proposition, and its negation, and two coherent systems, it's possible that the proposition might cohere with one system, and its negation with the other. Russell found this inconsistency problematic. My answer to Russell is that there is no 'outside' the system from which to observe such a contradiction. If truth is what happens, consistency-wise, inside the system, there is no outside. Thus there is no place from which to observe such a contradiction, unless one includes the proposition and both systems in one's view. But then, there is an inconsistency in the overall system, which indicates that something is amiss truth-wise, just as coherentism predicts.)


[Any errors are mine. I didn't bother to proof this. Proofing is for the weak.]

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Oh, and I'll throw in a fascinating, but totally unrelated, example from the animal kingdom for Stimbo. They had trained several dolphins to recognize a symbol on a placard, and based on the symbol, perform a specific trick. Now one of the symbols was special, it indicated that the dolphin was supposed to improvise a trick. When shown that symbol, the dolphin would determine what to do. So they put two dolphins together and showed them the sign for improvising a trick. At first, they didn't seem to get it. So they were shown the sign again. The two dolphins submerged, and a short time later, both dolphins surfaced and did the same trick in tandem. (I believe this was from an episode titled, "How smart are animals?" I believe it was a Nova ScienceNOW episode, but am unsure.

Regarding the individual with the bone breaks, there's also a specimen from the Turkana site who was obviously suffering and in a lot of pain, likely unable to move, who was apparently cared for a long time in that condition. I don't know the age or species offhand.