A lot of people think our moral values are the result of ‘social contracts’ formed between people for mutual advantage as societies formed.The reason you think murder is wrong is because you’ve been brought up that way, and the origin of this belief was an agreement (not necessarily actually expressed) between your grand-daddy and my grand-daddy that mine won’t knock off yours if yours doesn’t take out mine.
We are, at core, rational, self-interested individuals, and our rationality realises that if everyone seeks their own self-interest we will suffer. The rational decision is to agree to limit our self-interest slightly in exchange for the greater benefit of having others limit their self-interests too. Everyone wins. If you aren’t familiar with the idea, I recommend you scan the page linked to above; I won’t rehash it here.
I know it is well-liked by atheists, and I can see why: it’s quite a clever theory and accounts for our morality without appealing to the troubling existence of Good, meaning, or purpose.
However, I have a couple of problems with it. Perhaps SmartLX or Healy, or someone else, can answer them.
1. My first problem is less of a criticism than a clarification. If you want to use social contract theory as your sole explanation of where morality came from, you must stop believing in morals. Too often atheists affirm their belief in morals, that some actions are morally better than others, and when asked to account for where such morals came from, cite this theory. No, no, no. This theory denies actual morals, and instead shows why we believe in them. You can believe in actual morals in addition to this theory, but you must explain their existence differently. If you want to believe that torturing babies for fun is actually morally wrong, this theory is not for you.
2. The free-rider problem. If we accept the assumption that we are rational, self-interested beings then a problem arises: the rational thing to do is to break the agreement whenever we can safely get away with it. The best outcome is for everyone else to benevolently honour their half of the agreements while I egotistically break them. I see two implications of this: firstly, is there any reason why should I behave morally if I think I could get away with immoral actions? And secondly, given the first implication, why would anyone enter an agreement? In what way is it different to no agreement?
3. Why do I have any obligations in my treatment of mentally impaired people, physically disabled people, the elderly, or animals? It does not benefit me to enter a restricting agreement with those who are not capable of harming me. A rational, self-interested person would not enter such an agreement. How did those morals arise?
4. Love – real love is neither rational nor self-interested. Which best defines what it is to be human: to rationally protect your self-interest, or to love? The former seems to me more characteristic of a machine than a human. I therefore challenge the foundational assumption of the entire theory on the basis that humans are more than rational, more than self-interested: we love, freely, irrationally, self-sacrificially, humanly.
Fascinating conversation on this on 702 right now. Glover’s talking to Raimond Gaita (Romulus, My Father) about it. Shame I had to get out of the car ….
Oh! I wish I caught it! Do you know if they podcast stuff like that? Or will you be able to jot a summary of interesting points in a comment/blog?
Edit: please?
Slightly tangential from your fourth point, but do you think there is a rational side to love, or does that just arise as we try to rationalize the irrational feelings we find within ourselves? It’s an interesting argument though against social contract theory. However, and correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t your fourth point about love actually allow the possibility of social contracts as an origin for morality. If you accept point 4, then points 1, 2, and 3 seem empty.
I’m too tired to formulate my sentences with any particular clarity, but let me suggest that if you take humans as both loving beings and rational, self-interested beings, a human can be motivated to enter into a social contract. Why would someone enter into a restrictive agreement with mentally impaired, elderly, or physically disabled people (Point 3)? Either because you may end up in such a state at some point in your life and your love of yourself (which is what I take self-preservation to be) makes you desire that others adhere to that same contract, or because someone you love may be in that condition…does that make sense? This also seems to address your second point. So anyway, there’s just some thoughts.
If you want to come for thai on king street tomorrow at 2 for lunch, we can continue this discussion…or if not lunch, I’d be keen to head to campos in the arvo…or we could do both. I’ve got time to kill from about 1:30 til 6 around the city.
YiC – lach.
Don’t go to Campos. Go to Cordial in Carillion Ave!
I had a look on the 702 site and I can’t find a podcast-y-thing (not that I’d know what one looked like).
I only heard literally two minutes of it, and some of it was a tangent … the only thing that sank in was a rejection of morality being to serve us – utilitarianism – common good and all that; he seemed to be implying that a standard of ‘right-ness’ existed. I wish I’d heard more, because I thought he was suggesting valuing kindness is a product of our religious heritage … I don’t know …
Not much use am I?
Thanks Michelle! I appreciate it
What’s wrong with Campos?
Not procrastinating by any chance are you Lach? haha you’re welcome to procrastinate here anytime! Some good points.
Is there a rational side to love? Perhaps I’m overlooking something, but I think rationality only manifests itself as love plays out, not in the love itself. That is, we may use our rationality to work out what to do because we love, but we cannot rationally decide to love. It is an irrational decision by its nature, I think. Feel free to show the flaws in that, as you do with this cracker:
“doesn’t your fourth point about love actually allow the possibility of social contracts as an origin for morality. If you accept point 4, then points 1, 2, and 3 seem empty.”
This is why I love having a blog! I can get so lost in minutia that I lose sight of the big picture. Having said that, I’m not sure that this is necessarily a fatal problem.
I’m not sure in what sense you use ‘empty’, so if you check back a clarification might help.
My thinking is dull at the moment. I will come back to this when I have mulled it over a bit, but let me sum up the 3 points as I currently see them affected by love: 1) Unaffected – Our capacity to love does not imply the existence of actual morals in either direction, and if it did it does not account for their source; 2) I’m unsure – the implications are perhaps answered, but, it feels to me, the answers are out of character with the theory (that’s the best I can do at phrasing at the moment); 3) Smashed in particular cases, not in the general case.
However, let me say this:
In court cases, lawyers can plead a number of defenses – If one fails, you move on to the second. Consider love the first defense and, should the reader object to it, they may find 1, 2, and 3 to be a combined second defense. (In this way, love does not nullify the first three points for the reader has already excluded love.
I’m ambivalent about your idea to “take humans as both loving beings and rational, self-interested beings”. On the one hand, it might really improve the theory (again, too zonked to know
). On the other, you’ve knocked out the founding assumptions of the theory. You’ve got to consider whether social contract theory is the natural consequence of, or even needed by, the new assumption. Hobbes’ argument centred around his assertion that, due to our self-interested nature, without social contracts the world would be in such a violent state (the State of Nature, he called it) that we would make contracts at any cost to avoid it, since a worse state could not be reached. If you add love into that, would contracts be needed?
Sorry, zonked. Might edit this tomorrow…
I’ve got my own issues with the social contract concept, but they’re not these issues. Here are my responses.
1. You’re confusing actual with absolute. Absolute morals, unchangeable entities which exist independently of us, are the things atheists (generally) don’t accept. Morals which humans have created or arrived at and agreed upon are no less “actual” than the concept of justice, or a verbal contract between businessmen, or the outcome of a democratic vote. Besides, it’s even possible to believe in absolute morals and social contracts; maybe absolute morals do exist, but we need the contracts to believe in them. Not my view, but not inconceivable.
2. I think we’re all agreed that those who act selfishly when they think they can get away with it are not being moral or ethical. I would add that those who only refrain from this behaviour because they think a deity is watching them constantly are no more moral or ethical than the first group. They simply believe that they’re under surveillance.
Do you really think there’s no earthly reason to be altruistic? Simple empathy, the human tendency to put oneself in the position of others, makes it very rewarding to know our actions while not benefiting ourselves have helped others. It also administers a dose of suffering when we act selfishly or cruelly, and teaches us over time not to do so. Hardened killers, rapists, etc. do not universally lack religion, but they do lack empathy towards their victims. Forgetting the social contract for a moment, it feels good to help and it feels bad to do harm, and a person is severely aberrant who doesn’t feel this.
As for why one would hold to the contract when others are breaking it, these people don’t entirely negate the benefits we get from it. Besides, there are clauses in the contract, if you like, to allow the rest of us to deal with those who are in breach of it. If we’ve been wronged we can call the police, sue the deal-breakers, publicise their actions, defend our lives, loved ones and property by force and so on. The contract is created by people who know it will occasionally be broken. It protects those who keep to it to a great extent.
3. On a purely pragmatic level, although the severely disabled can’t retaliate directly, they have an enormous support network of friends, family, carers, government departments and other disabled. You’d have to be pretty brave or careful to mess with them.
Again, though, empathy is important here. It’s especially strong with those who are so damaged or badly developed that we can’t truly know what they’re going through; our empathy works overtime to compensate and spills over into sympathy, or pity.
4. Love of all our fellow humans is a supreme extension of empathy, it comes naturally to us as humans, and I agree that it isn’t explicit in the social contract. It doesn’t invalidate the contract though; there are still firm reasons in it to behave well. Our human nature is capable of pushing us to behave better than we must.
“but we cannot rationally decide to love”
Not true. Think of 1 Tim – wife’s are instructed to learn to love their husbands and children. Also, I heard a story (second or third hand admittedly) recently of a guy who saw how beautiful (spiritually) and godly a girl he knew was, but he wasn’t interested in dating her. So he prayed God would cause him to love her – they’re now very happily married. If that’s not a rational decision to love someone … In fact, I think we are commanded to rationally decide to love one another. It doesn’t just happen, you do need to work at it!
Campos is not bad. What I’ve heard through the snob world is that Cordial is soooo much better.
“it feels good to help and it feels bad to do harm”. Why? Where does this come from? I can’t understand how you get to this point without an absolute standard of right and wrong, which though some may deny intellectually, they still hold to in their own conscience.
oops, that out to be ‘wives’, not ‘wife’s', sheesh.
… and that ought to be ‘ought’, not ‘out’. Struth, I need to walk away from the keyboard.
I’m still not thinking very clearly about this, but 2 things I think I can express:
“but we cannot rationally decide to love”
Perhaps I should have written:
“but we cannot rationally decide to love”
My emphasis was not on the decision – I think it is often a decision. I just don’t think it is a rational decision to make (not if we are self-interested). I don’t think that love is a rational response. Is that clearer?
If it can be shown that there are cases where it is a rational response, I would respond that it is not the general rule.
“Morals which humans have created or arrived at and agreed upon are no less “actual” than the concept of justice”
I think I wasn’t very clear in how I explained that. When I talk about morals, I don’t mean rules or the ‘moral of a story’ etc. I mean right and wrong, good and evil. So when you say “those who act selfishly when they think they can get away with it are not being moral or ethical”, I hear you saying they are not behaving in a good way. Whereas, a social contract theorist could only say they are not behaving in accordance with the moral rules in place.
Is that right?
Oh, one more thing:
“Besides, it’s even possible to believe in absolute morals and social contracts”
I thought I said this… but if not, I meant to. My problem is when people use the latter to explain the existence of the former (or at least use words borrowed from the former in a new sense created by the latter).
EDIT: Silly me, I forgot to ask: If you want to share your problems with SCT, I’d love to hear them! (Also, which ‘theory’ is closest to your view?)
(Foreword: Just finished the following post, and it’s big. We’re really getting to the heart of something here, so I pursued it.)
I pretty much summed up my issues with social contracts in my first response: the idea nearly captures the experience of living among others, but it doesn’t really take empathy into account. Social contracts leave plenty of room for empathy, but when we’re trying to use them to argue for secular morality, religious folks have a tendency to take them as the be all and end all. As you did, they point out the situations where deeds have no punishment or reward, and say there’s nothing to spur good behaviour. Can’t blame them for not considering empathy if we don’t either. But I do.
By “not being moral or ethical”, I did mean “not behaving in accordance with the moral rules in place”. And I mean by absolute morals exactly what you mean by actual morals: good and evil, right and wrong, and enduring defintions for each independent of us mortals. I think they’re simply human constructs, but since we’re all human, that makes them as good as absolute.
Let’s go straight to the extreme, upsetting, run-into-the-ground cliche example you put in the subject line: torturing babies. Sorry but I read this one all the time from apologists, I hate it, it makes everyone think of horrible images. But let’s bite the bullet.
Without a moral lawgiver, the religious argument goes, there is no moral law and no basis on which to absolutely condemn torturing babies. Without a god, there’s no good reason to say that it’s evil and wrong. This is an argument from absurdity, you understand, the punchline of which is: this is obviously wrong, of course torturing babies is absolutely evil, therefore there must be absolute moral law and a lawgiver god. It’s a manipulative appeal to consequences, and if this thread went on long enough someone here would probably end up using it.
Imagine for a moment (not to say it’s false, but you sure don’t believe this) that there is no right and wrong besides what humans have consciously and subconsciously decided. What changes? Accept for a moment that once you step out of human context, there is nothing wrong or evil about torturing babies, any more than swatting a buzzing mosquito matters if you’re not a mosquito. Consider it.
What does this matter to a man who has an opportunity to torture a baby? He’s human. His paternal instincts cry out to him to protect the cute little big-eyed creature. His empathy puts him in the mind of a helpless child with no attention span, focusing on every little thing it notices, which screams in pain if it feels so much as an itch. That same sense of empathy turns his mind to the infant’s family, who love the child and who would die to protect it. After that comes more pragmatic thoughts: the law, the punishment, the lifelong guilt.
All of this together is more than sufficient to say, this act is evil and I will not do it. It’s not absolutely true, since we’re imagining evil is not a metaphysical presence, but it’s objectively true based on any of the above considerations and that’s enough. And if he goes through with it anyway, he is an aberration. He’s just not like other humans. He needs help.
Evil need only be perceived to be avoided or fought. People can have different ideas about evil, but when they get together there are many agreements simply because we’re all human. When billions of people discuss it for millenia, they come up with a concept which, while not invincible, will suffice nearly all the time.
It can be an odd experience right after you realise you’re an atheist (it was a realisation for me, not a decision). Slowly, one by one, you then realise that all of the things you thought permeated the whole universe, like good and evil, justice and mercy, meaning and purpose, probably exist only in human minds and writings. You think about it, and come to another realisation: that this means they’re even more powerful. If human beings have built these awesome concepts from nothing but a base of common sense and empathy, but they are now so ubiquitous, it means they have been truly tested. They stand on their own merits and will serve us well in the future. So you use the words: this act is good, this sacrifice has meaning. Although you keep in mind they’re not absolute, and someone could always come along with a fresh perspective and change your mind about them, you’re comfortable enough to let them stand.
Social contracts are just a way of describing what people automatically arrange with each other to honour these shared values. They’re not a replacement for anything; they’re just a perspective on human relations, like memes are a way of looking at ideas. Whatever helps to explain the idea of human-made morals to those who haven’t looked at them that way before.
Hi there SmartLX. I have appreciated your comments so far on this issue. Something strikes me though as missing from your account of social contracts…do you think that there is any reasonable basis upon which we can form moral judgements against others? The empathy that you describe seems to address the individual and personal level, but are you suggest that there is a corporate, common empathy? What do we do when another group of people, which may have a different understanding of empathy, or lack it altogether, arrives at a different set of morals to ours? How can we possibly presume to suggest that our ‘empathy’ is more valid than the basis upon which they form their moral code?
I hope you understand the question I am raising her and I am interested to hear your thoughts.
Hi Lach, good question. You’re right that I haven’t covered cases where two people’s, or groups’, concepts of morals are substantially different, despite everything they have in common.
“Reasonable” is indeed the word, because there is no known, absolute, authoritative basis for moral judgements. I can say that even though I’m an agnostic atheist – I’m not certain there are no gods. Nothing on this earth is completely authoritative, and although an unearthly god might be, not everyone accepts that one exists. Even if we were all certain, perhaps those being judged are not, and what’s the point of a judgement against another which only makes sense to the judge? We all have to choose between known-but-flawed bases and perfect-but-hypothetical ones.
Leaving out gods for a while, we have a huge number of different things to consider. If we’re judging an action, we have to think about the intent, the effects, the benefits, the harm, the fairness and so forth. All highly malleable concepts, but all based on some measure of common sense, a few really rock-solid foundations like mathematics and self-evident things like the value of human life to humans.
Were people killed unnecessarily? Did this person take things which belong to others and give nothing back? If harm was caused, was it intended? A “yes” answer to any of these questions advances the case that the action was wrong. Any of them might be inapplicable for some reason, but there’s no end to the basic factors like these which you can use. Finally your judgement is complete, based on as many or as few factors as you need. The more factors, the smaller the chance that you’re making a mistake. You can defend any one of the factors by reason, although you might lose. Your basis is therefore literally reasonable. And most of the time, you’ve done all of this in a split second.
So yes, there’s a reasonable basis for moral judgements. There are an infinite number of them, limited only by reason itself.
I know this isn’t very satisfying to a religious person. Someone on the receiving end of one of my reasonable judgements might reason their way right out of it, or reject it completely without even trying to reason, and there would be nothing more I could say. Well, that does happen. Those in (someone’s idea of) the wrong can and often do defy judgement and go about their business. Even those under religious judgements can use twisted theology to rationalise their actions.
Equally unsatisfyingly, whether one person’s moral code is more valid than another’s is for them to work out among themselves by comparing notes. Believing one’s code is supported irrefutably is useless when one’s opponents don’t believe it. All it can do is reassure one, hopefully without making one smug.
The greatest tool we have for solving moral disputes, I think, is our numbers. I’m not saying that majority rule always works or that might makes right, mind you. There are six billion people out there, with varying degrees of intelligence and empathy. If most of them have independently come to one conclusion on a moral issue, like that killing is generally bad (remember, billions of people have not read that Commandment), that is probably the interpretation which results in the greatest benefit to humanity as a whole. If there is a sharp division, the issue obviously needs a lot of thought. And if you’re the only person in the world who thinks something is right, maybe there’s a reason for that.
In short, all I can offer is a heuristic approach, but it’s because I think that’s all there is.
When you respond to something you really go at it don’t you SmartLX? Good times, good times
You should totally do something with that blog you made. At least make up a profile
I really prefer to be much more brief than the above. The longer it is, the better it has to be to keep people reading. Sometimes I just don’t see a way to compress, at least until later.
Sorry this took so long. I hope you aren’t expecting a lot. I also apologise for its length: a long comment tends to provoke a longer answer. I’ve tried to make it easy to follow, leading with your point and following with my response. In many cases I’ve summarised your wording, so if you feel I’ve mis-represented you feel free to catch me out.
Altruism and Empathy
“I think we’re all agreed that those who act selfishly when they think they can get away with it are not being moral or ethical.”
We both agree. Where we disagree is on whether that person is evil, or just a rule breaker. My vote is for the former: take away societies rules and expectations and it remains wrong. You can appeal to empathy if you like, but you leave the sphere of SCT.
Why be altruistic? Empathy: makes it rewarding to know our actions have helped others; punishes us when we act selfishly or cruelly.
This might be why we do act altruistically (although, from your description it doesn’t sound entirely altruistic – I don’t favour theories which need to remove the essence of an action in order to explain it), but it doesn’t explain why we should behave altruistically.
Your reasoning, if it is to show why we should behave altruistically, commits the Is-Ought fallacy, arguing since it is the case that we feel empathy, therefore we ought to behave accordingly.
“Pragmatically, although the severely disabled can’t retaliate directly, they have an enormous support network.”
Does this put the cart before the horse? As a response to the question, “Why do I have any obligations in my treatment of mentally impaired people etc”, can you really assume the existence of support networks? Aren’t they, in fact, the very reason behind the question? Support networks make it rational for me to treat the disadvantaged well, but what makes it rational for the support networks?
Of course, support networks exist because of love. But isn’t this the perfect counter-example to Social Contract Theory? We see individuals willingly and irrationally entering into self-sacrificial, non-reciprocal relationships; we see it and we know it is good.
“Love is a supreme extension of empathy, which comes naturally to humans and, though it isn’t explicit in the social contract, neither does it invalidate the contract. Human nature is capable of pushing us to behave better than we must.”
I confess to being a little lost here. What part of human nature pushes us to behave better than we must, and why?
My original point was an attack, not at the surface form of the theory, but at its assumption. I think it is built on a faulty premise – one that excludes love; that which makes us irrational and selfless, and that which defines our being above our rationality and self-interest.
For interests’ sake, and nothing more, I would have said that empathy does not precede love, but instead flows out of it.
This is an argument from absurdity, the punchline of which is: this is obviously wrong, of course torturing babies is absolutely evil, therefore there must be absolute moral law and a lawgiver god. It’s a manipulative appeal to consequences.
Admittedly, many well-intentioned arguers commit this fallacy:
1. If P, then Q. (If no moral law-giver, then it would be ok to torture babies.)
2. Q is undesirable. (It would be horrible if torturing babies was ok)
3. Therefore, P is false. (Therefore, there must be a moral law-giver.)
You rightly condemn it.
However, you yourself give two ways of framing this argument which do not commit that fallacy. Firstly, you mention the argument from absurdity form:
1. If P, then Q. (If no moral law-giver, then torturing babies is ok)
2. Not Q. (Torturing babies is wrong)
3. Therefore, not P. (Therefore, there is a moral law-giver)
Secondly, you outline another form:
1. If P, then Q. (If it is wrong to torture babies, a moral lawgiver must exist)
2. P exists. (It is wrong to torture babies.)
3. Therefore, Q exists. (Therefore, a moral lawgiver exists)
Each argument is logically sound. You may attack the validity of its premises (premise 1 clearly needs to be shown), but you cannot criticise the logic. It does not appeal to consequences, it asks whether evil exists. If the adjudicator believes it does, the argument will be persuasive; if not, it won’t be.
Good and Evil
By “not being moral or ethical”, I did mean “not behaving in accordance with the moral rules in place”. Good and evil, right and wrong, are human constructs, but since we’re all human, that makes them as good as absolute.
Excellent – this is a very clear explanation of the implications of SCT missed by the people I referred to in point 1. We are clear: the existence of good and evil is not implied or explained by SCT. Those wishing to believe in them must look elsewhere for an explanation.
I find this dialogue difficult, because whenever I talk about the morality of something, whether it is morally good or morally wrong, it always carries that sense of goodness or badness. To divorce the word from that, its strongest connotation (I would suggest its strongest denotation) is not just confusing – it seems deceptive!
I’m not sure what you meant by “since we’re all human, that makes them as good as absolute.”
Imagine for a moment that there is no right and wrong besides what humans have consciously and subconsciously decided. What changes? Very good! This had me for a moment… until I realised it was a Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts.
Danto asked why Warhol made art out of Brillo boxes while the store manager did not, though they are perceptually identical. To quote him, “A philosophical question arises whenever we have two objects which seem in every relevant particular to be alike, but which belong to importantly different philosophical categories. Descartes for example supposed his experience while dreaming could be indistinguishable from his experience awake, so that no internal criterion could divide delusion from knowledge. Wittgenstein noted that there is nothing to distinguish someone’s raising his arm from someone’s arm going up, though the distinction between even the simplest action and a mere bodily movement seems fundamental to the way we think of our freedom. Kant sought a criterion for moral action in the fact that it is done from principles rather than simply in conformity with those principles, even though outward behavior might be indistinguishable between the two.”
You have asked, on one level, what would be different if there was no good and evil. There may be differences, but for arguments sake let’s allow that they are perceptually identical. Descartes observed that our current conception of the world is perceptually identical to dreaming. No experiment could be performed to distinguish the two. Have we any good reason to prefer our current conception? None but that the consequences of the other would be so great as to make life unlivable (yes, an appeal to consequences). When we have no other distinguishing factor, no-one complains that we choose to think we have knowledge rather than delusion.
Perhaps our worlds are perceptually identical. But they are ontologically worlds apart (ha ha!). In my world, there is a difference between torturing a baby and swatting a mosquito. In my world, it is good to care for the disadvantaged. In my world, it does not matter if someone is watching.
They may be empirically indistinguishable, but that no more favours yours than mine. You have your theory, which supposes we have been wrong all along; I have mine, which upholds our knowledge and our conscience, that other thing which alongside love makes us human.
We know art from non-art, we know knowledge from delusion, we know gestures from movement, and we know true good and evil from a mere ‘concept’. Call it an appeal to consequences if you will, it’s better than tossing a coin.
I want to end with a question.
You write: What does this matter to a man who has an opportunity to torture a baby? He’s human. His paternal instincts cry out to him to protect the cute little big-eyed creature. His empathy puts him in the mind of a helpless child with no attention span, focusing on every little thing it notices, which screams in pain if it feels so much as an itch. That same sense of empathy turns his mind to the infant’s family, who love the child and who would die to protect it. After that comes more pragmatic thoughts: the law, the punishment, the lifelong guilt.
Ought that man care for the baby? Ought he, if he and the baby were the only creatures on the planet? And supposing that, in addition, he had no prior conception of morality, ought he care for the baby?
There are but two possible answers: You may say “yes, I think he should, but I only think that because I have been conditioned to think that. Had I been brought up otherwise, I might not. Inherently, whatever that man chooses is morally neutral.” Or, you may say “yes, he should; and that would remain true regardless of my own beliefs about the matter.”
As it is, you declare “this act is evil and I will not do it… if he goes through with it anyway, he is an aberration.” You cannot arrive at that conclusion from social contract theory, nor from empathy (lest you commit the is-ought fallacy).
You are keen to combine empathy, an undeniably human experience, with morality. I suggest that they are naturally wedded, but within social contract theory they will not mix. Rather, within SCT they are in tension.
Empathy is indeed a deeper motivation, but why? Why does the ‘is’ of empathy lead to the ‘ought’ of ethics? For an answer, you must look deeper still.
Blimey. And I thought I was going on a bit. Just got back to DC from my weekend in NYC, and happy to see some great material here.
With my points about empathy, I intended to leave the sphere of SCT. As I said, SCT doesn’t cover empathy. You’re absolutely right about where our opinions diverge regarding evil; you think an absolute evil remains when you take away everything else, and I think evil is simply a label given as a result of a judgement call.
I’m not committing the is-ought fallacy, because I haven’t said diddly about what anything should or ought to be. I am concerned exclusively with what is; what does make us behave well. The reason is that the words “should” and “ought” imply that there’s a plan to follow, an ideal to approach. I don’t think there is an absolute ideal handed down from on high, so to me “should” and “ought” are meaningless in the general case.
In simpler terms: “ought” according to whom? Or what? It’s too vague. I avoid it.
You originally implied, by asking a rhetorical question, that there was no good reason in the secular view not to hurt the disabled, so I gave you a simple pragmatic reason to counter the implication. I then used empathy as another reason. I’m sure there are others.
Empathy is the part of human nature that pushes us to behave better than we must. Here’s how, rather than why: it transfers some of another person’s life experience to us, giving us a reason to improve that experience. Not everyone in a disabled man’s support network necessarily loves him, but they all have some idea of how he suffers. I didn’t love the man I traded seats with on the train from NYC today so he could sit next to his daughter, but I knew what he wanted without his asking. That empathetic impulse made me get off my arse.
Empathy may be strengthened by love but it does not spring out of it, at least not exclusively. You can empathise with a serial killer without loving him; you can know why he killed and roughly what he was thinking when he killed. Crime dramas on TV wouldn’t make any sense if not for this kind of empathy. Actors couldn’t even play the killers. Now think of a love that exists without empathy. Which one, therefore, could possibly be the sole progenitor of the other?
The two general logic forms into which you’re slotting the baby argument are sound, sure, but as you say you’re still only asking a question: does evil exist? It has to before you can believe anything is absolutely wrong. In both cases you would indeed have to show premise 1, but you’ll find premise 2 a lot harder without invoking the conclusion ahead of time.
The problem of indiscernible counterparts is in fact the explanation of, “Since we’re all human, that makes them as good as absolute.” We are stuck in the human perspective. If something strikes all of us as wrong, rationally or not, it matters not a jot whether it’s “actually” wrong. In this life we’ll never be in a position to find that out. Wrong-to-humans is as good to us as actually, absolutely, irrefutably wrong.
In your world, torturing babies is wrong. Same in my world, for all intents and purposes. The real difference is that you think the world outside of humanity matches your world in this specific respect. I don’t seek or require this invisible means of support.
You’re on shaky ground about what “we know”. Every one of the divisions you say we can distinguish is a hotly debated topic. Ask an art critic about paintings, or a choreographer about movement. We do not know these things, we decide them. We’re not always correct, and we don’t always agree. Are you looking for the truth, or simply declaring the truth to be what you already believe?
I arrived at the conclusion that child torturers are aberrations from rough mathematics alone. Aberration means deviation from the norm. Just how many child torturers are there compared to the general population?
I, in the voice of the man with the baby in his power, declared “this act is evil” based on everything I had just written. Compassion for the baby and its family born of empathy, pragmatic concerns about punishment and so on. I emphasised that it is probably not absolutely true, and that it is a decision based on every factor considered giving a poor appraisal of the act. I also said “I will not do it” rather than “I should not do it”. It’s not a philosophical decision when you’ve got the baby in front of you, it’s a practical one. “Ought” has nothing to do with it. If the man is like most of us, he does not torture the baby. He probably does care for it.
Read what I later wrote to Lach about moral conflicts and resolutions. You’ll get a better idea of my general view of all of this. We do not make moral choices and judgements based on any one thing, but based on everything we think to consider. It’s a heuristic process, which means that it can’t work every time so it works as often as possible instead. Whatever we know is unreliable, and anything we think is rock-solid may not even exist, so we have to make do. Most of the time, though, we can achieve a certain level of confidence.
Fairly sure there’s an evolutionary aspect in there somewhere. Some animals would just eat the young from another male (e.g. Lions), but like humans a lot of animals are instinctively drawn to protecting it.
Consider dogs – a large dog will generally not harm a puppy, regardless of who sired it. You can have the meanest nastiest big giant dog, and he will sit there stoically while a puppy gambols around him biting his ears and sticking his tongue in its eyes.
And, like humans, there are exceptions. Sometimes the puppy is just too damn tasty looking, and sometimes that baby just won’t shut up.
Yes HH, but how does that make anything ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? There’s no explanation at all for morality in what you’ve just said.
And do we never do something abhorrent unless we were provoked? I say rubbish to that argument! Also, I actually find your illustration pathetic and disgusting- though I expect that was deliberate on your part. It’s also nonsense, because you haven’t demonstrated it to be ‘wrong’, nor explained why we have an intrinsic sense of what is right or wrong; all you’ve illustrated is that sometimes people lose their temper, albeit with horrific consequences.
Michelle, I really wonder about our “intrinsic” sense of right and wrong when there is someone who “intrinsically” senses that something or other is wrong and others don’t. I don’t think you’d dispute that this does happen. If our sense of right and wrong were truly intrinsic, would there be such things as moral conflicts between people, groups or nations?