In Defense of a Non-Natural Moral Order

[John 6IX Breezy]

I mean exactly what I say. There’s nothing specific about our capacity for reasoning. The brain is capable of handling abstraction and manipulating symbols.

This makes it suitable for a wide range of problem solving, and the fact that some things fall in that range is completely unsurprising.

Some things would. OFC we would have preferences within that range.

There’s nothing, at all, in any of your reference material that supports the content of your posts. Only the observation that within that range, some types of moral problems conform to the framework of human contemplation better than others, in some cohort.

Again, ofc they would, but.....,.?

We can agree that the brain is capable of solving a wide range of problems, as long as it's understood that it solves some better, and more effortlessly, than others, even when the problems are synonyms of each other (you only swap a word or two to turn a deontic conditional into an indicative conditional)

[John 6IX Breezy]

Tooby and Cosmides (2005) also argue that we can reject the hypothesis that the mind is equipped for good conditional reasoning across all domains. Instead we are good at detecting violations to conditionals based on their specific content, for example, if they relate to social exchange. This does not imply that you are unable to reason through an abstract and descriptive conditional, but you will struggle in ways you otherwise wouldn't.


Reference: Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2005). Neurocognitive adaptations designed for social exchange. In D. M. Buss (ed.),The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 584–627.

[Objectivist]

We're born perceiving the world and ourselves through our mind. 

Somethings we recognize as existing solely in our mind: the dinner I'm imagining having, my preferences in clothes and music, things we recognize as subjective. Then there are things we recognize as existing independently of our minds, the table in my room, the sun outside the window, the color of my wife's dress, the two red apples in the fruit basket, things we recognize as objective. 

Where does moral goodness and badness fit in? We (or atleast those like myself) seem to acknowledge that they appear as objective. They don't appear to us as matters of our personal taste and preference. The wrongness of the holocaust, isn't merely because I don't like it. It doesn't seem to be wrong because society says so either. The wrongness appears to exist independently of my subjective preferences, as well as societies opinion of it. It would appear to us as wrong, regardless of what society thought of it. Societies, like that of German society seem to incorporate some collective delusion to deny this, like a society deluded into believing in a moon landing conspiracy, rather than as a society with different taste in fashion. 

When I tell my daughter she did something morally wrong, I'm not telling her it's wrong because I said it is, or wrong because I don't like it, nor am I telling her it's wrong because society, and others say it is. It's wrong in and of itself. (Some might chime in and suggest it's wrong because it's determinental to well being, but this just pushes the question back one step further, to the wrongness of doing things determinental to well being).

Good and bad appear to us (minds like mine) to exist objectively, outside of our mind, not as some construct purely within them. More like the table in my room, the sun outside my window, or the two apples in the fruit basket, than my taste in music, or some subjective desire, or aim I assigned to myself, or society imposed on me. It also seem to difficult to define, like an object we can see in front of us, but can't seem to properly describe, where the words fail to carry the entirety of it's meaning. 

Yet, this objectiveness is peculiar, because it doesn't appear to be reducible to any set of natural (scientific of historical facts). We're not going to be able to dissect the holocaust into all its material facts, and find a property called badness among it. 

Goodness and Badness appear objective, but non-natural/immaterial, exist in the way one might say of Plato's Form of the Good. As part of some sort of transcendent moral order. 

This moral order appears to have a weight to it as well, like the pressure and tension one senses when touching or moving a table, or picking up a dumbbell. There seems to be a freedom to goodness, and imprisonment to badness. The Nazi's appear imprisoned, while Bonhoeffer appears to be free. 

When we do things that are bad, this tension, appears like a rebelling, a violation of some primordial principle, rather than a committing of some social faux pas, it produces guilt, resentment, defiance, a desire to justify ourselves through lies and delusions, a weight on our shoulders. Where goodness, seems to exist as liberating in a way that badness is not, along side honesty and truth, a clear conscious, etc...

The goodness of the civil rights movement, abolitionism, that badness of the lynching trees, of the holocaust, seem so profoundly real, in a way that seems more real than anything else, including you or I. It seems easier for me to deny your existence, than the existness of the goodness and badness here. 

I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this?

(Just to be clear, this isn't an argument for God, or some sky wizard, but just for a transcendent moral order, a belief in which doesn't require you to believe in God. Attempts to make it about a God would likely to be dismissed or ignored)

Hello Acrobat,

I actually signed up to answer your question.  My answer is informed by Objectivist principles so it will probably be very different from other answers you've gotten in the past.  Good and bad or good and evil are value judgments and as such, I don't think they exist outside the mind-reality relationship or the subject-object relationship. The subject is the conscious knower and the object is the thing that the knower is aware of. 

The concept "value" presupposes the answer to two questions:  of value to whom and for what? The who is a living being, the what is the life of that being.  Morality in my view is a code of values and principles to guide one's actions and choices for the purpose of living.  Every living being faces the alternative of life vs. death and every living thing must act in order to live.  Every living thing has a specific identity and specific conditions must be met in order for it to not take a dirt nap.  Some things and actions are bad, harm its life, and other things are good, further its life.  If it takes no action or the wrong action it dies.  If it takes the right action it lives.  So right there you can see that good and bad are inextricably tied to life.  It's only to a living thing that things can be good or bad.  A rock has no values, a fox does.  Man is no different.  To live he must have values.  The values he needs are determined by his nature.  To say that values exist outside of nature is wrong.  Values are a type of fact.  They are facts judged in relation to man's nature and the project of living. That is the standard of moral judgment:  your life and its requirements or to put it more abstractly, man's life and its requirements.  You can't get more objective than that.  Surely you agree that we all have needs and values that we share that are not a matter of opinion?

That is what an objective moral value identifies;  Not your personal preference, but what your nature as a Human being requires.  

Man's most basic need is the need to think and he needs to be free to think and to act on his judgment, i.e., he needs to be free of coercion by force.  As Yaron Brook often says, if someone puts a gun to your head and says that 2+2=5, and if you say it equals 4 he'll pull the trigger, could you think?  Could you balance your checkbook, build a bridge, invent a printing press or launch a satellite into space?

Force and reason are opposites.  Force or the threat of force destroys man's ability to think and to act on his thinking.  Therefore force is evil.  That is, the initiation of force is evil, always. The only moral use of force is in defense.  

So let's look at the Holocaust and judge whether it was good or bad?  Did it involve the initiation of force?  Certainly.  Was it bad? Certainly, regardless of whether the Germans thought it was good or the whole of the people on Earth, i.e., it was objectively bad.  Did the allies have the moral right to use force against the Nazi's? Certainly.  Now apply the same principle to rape, murder, theft, lying, cheating, fraud, etc.?

Those are my thoughts.

[DLJ]

^^^ An excellent example of the equivocation errors / pitfalls I am bemoaning in other threads... loads of weak semantics:

Object (thing) vs. objective (universal) vs. objective (in relation to goals);
One's nature vs. of nature;
Value vs. values.

Added bonus, the non sequitur of values-to-facts.

And, for fun, the limiting of 'life' to a quantitative metric (availability) thus ignoring the qualitative metric (capacity / performance).

igh:

[Belacqua]

Some things and actions are bad, harm its life, and other things are good, further its life.  If it takes no action or the wrong action it dies.  If it takes the right action it lives.  

Is it possible to think of an action I could take, which would result in my death, which would be moral? 

What you're saying here, at first glance, seems to say no... that anything I did to end my life would be bad by definition. But maybe I'm not seeing the nuances yet.

Did the allies have the moral right to use force against the Nazi's? 

A hell of a lot of soldiers died to end the Holocaust. It was pretty directly harmful to their wellbeing, in that they got shot and died young. 

In what way, according to your system, was this moral? Is it possible that in certain cases, good actions lead to the death of the person who does them?

[Objectivist]

Some things and actions are bad, harm its life, and other things are good, further its life.  If it takes no action or the wrong action it dies.  If it takes the right action it lives.  

Is it possible to think of an action I could take, which would result in my death, which would be moral? 

What you're saying here, at first glance, seems to say no... that anything I did to end my life would be bad by definition. But maybe I'm not seeing the nuances yet.

Did the allies have the moral right to use force against the Nazi's? 

A hell of a lot of soldiers died to end the Holocaust. It was pretty directly harmful to their wellbeing, in that they got shot and died young. 

In what way, according to your system, was this moral? Is it possible that in certain cases, good actions lead to the death of the person who does them?

Sure Belaqua, for instance, if you died defending your family from home invaders.  If you died going to war to defend your family and yourself from the takeover of an evil dictator like Hitler.  If you died trying to protect any value that you rationally determined was worth risking your life for.  As far as soldiers dying in war it is moral if it is voluntary.  The draft is unspeakably evil.  Remember that there was no guarantee that we were going to win that war.  Those soldiers who chose to join up to fight the Nazis and their allies were moral because if Hitler had won and taken over the world the results would have been disastrous for themselves and their families back home.  They weren't willing to live under a dictator and that is moral.  There are things worth risking one's life for.  What Objectivism would tell someone would be to think, think hard, think rationally, consider all the available facts

[Acrobat]

[ If you died trying to protect any value that you rationally determined was worth risking your life for. 

That's interesting.

It seems to me that there are some values worth risking one's life for, for the value themselves.

There's a new film coming out from Terrance Malick, about the life of Franz Jagerstatter, a simple Austrian Farmer who refused to take the Hitler oath, refused to partake in the War, even though everyone else in his village and community supported it. He was spat on, abused, treated as a traitor, and eventually executed. He didn't save anyone's life, he didn't protect or hide any Jews (though if given the opportunity he may have), but allowed himself to die for the sake of some value he refused to sacrifice, a pearl he'd rather die than give up.

We all might be able to recognize that there was some thing profoundly good about this man. Something so profoundly human about him, and inhuman about his community. Yet this good seems to fail any attempt to categorize it into our particular moral schemas. It's not for sake of the preservation of his life, or the avoidance of death, but for the sake of something deeper, like the preservation of his soul, his being, that transcends any material benefit or aim.

[The Grand Nudger]

Hence the potential cost of moral behaviors in selection.

[downbeatplumb]

Hello Acrobat,

I actually signed up to answer your question.  My answer is informed by Objectivist principles so it will probably be very different from other answers you've gotten in the past.  Good and bad or good and evil are value judgments and as such, I don't think they exist outside the mind-reality relationship or the subject-object relationship. The subject is the conscious knower and the object is the thing that the knower is aware of. 

The concept "value" presupposes the answer to two questions:  of value to whom and for what? The who is a living being, the what is the life of that being.  Morality in my view is a code of values and principles to guide one's actions and choices for the purpose of living.  Every living being faces the alternative of life vs. death and every living thing must act in order to live.  Every living thing has a specific identity and specific conditions must be met in order for it to not take a dirt nap.  Some things and actions are bad, harm its life, and other things are good, further its life.  If it takes no action or the wrong action it dies.  If it takes the right action it lives.  So right there you can see that good and bad are inextricably tied to life.  It's only to a living thing that things can be good or bad.  A rock has no values, a fox does.  Man is no different.  To live he must have values.  The values he needs are determined by his nature.  To say that values exist outside of nature is wrong.  Values are a type of fact.  They are facts judged in relation to man's nature and the project of living. That is the standard of moral judgment:  your life and its requirements or to put it more abstractly, man's life and its requirements.  You can't get more objective than that.  Surely you agree that we all have needs and values that we share that are not a matter of opinion?

That is what an objective moral value identifies;  Not your personal preference, but what your nature as a Human being requires.  

Man's most basic need is the need to think and he needs to be free to think and to act on his judgment, i.e., he needs to be free of coercion by force.  As Yaron Brook often says, if someone puts a gun to your head and says that 2+2=5, and if you say it equals 4 he'll pull the trigger, could you think?  Could you balance your checkbook, build a bridge, invent a printing press or launch a satellite into space?

Force and reason are opposites.  Force or the threat of force destroys man's ability to think and to act on his thinking.  Therefore force is evil.  That is, the initiation of force is evil, always. The only moral use of force is in defense.  

So let's look at the Holocaust and judge whether it was good or bad?  Did it involve the initiation of force?  Certainly.  Was it bad? Certainly, regardless of whether the Germans thought it was good or the whole of the people on Earth, i.e., it was objectively bad.  Did the allies have the moral right to use force against the Nazi's? Certainly.  Now apply the same principle to rape, murder, theft, lying, cheating, fraud, etc.?

Those are my thoughts.

The Nazis saw the Jews as a greater evil so in their twisted morality getting rid of the jews was the moral thing.

Many of them didn't like doing it (some did and enjoyed it) but they did it for the "greater good".

You can see the same sort of thing happening in the US today with the demonization of immigrants, democrats and Muslims by the president ,where people feel that killing those people or putting them in concentration camps is in some way good.

What I am saying is that morality is quite flexible and is prone to change from outside influences.

Homosexuality was considered immoral but is now accepted (and so it should be)  slavery is now seen as wrong where for most of human history it was ok.

So morality IS subjective but is subjective to society at large not one individual. Richard Dawkins called this the zeitgeist.

[The Grand Nudger]

That would be descriptive moral relativism, not ontological subjectivism. It’s that and subjective, to individuals, and also....possibly, realist.

Your comment on what should be accepted strongly suggests that you harbor realist opinions, for example. You’re saying that those cultures and people that don’t accept something are wrong, not that their intolerance is just their opinion.