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Moral Facts, Opinions, and Suppositions
Discussing a New York Times op-ed by a college professor about how young people are taught that all value statements are matters of mere opinion, Dennis Prager blamed the problem on a lack of religious faith. He went on to say that the kids have the logic, if not the conclusion: without religion, all moral statements have no truth claim:
If God doesn’t say “Do not murder,” murder isn’t wrong. Period, end of issue… Morality [becomes] just an opinion for “I like” or “I don’t like” if ultimately, there is no moral God in the universe that makes morality real. Without religion and God, there is no moral truth…
You can say “I think murder is wrong,” and I certainly hope you do. You can say “I believe murder is wrong.” But you cannot say murder is wrong.
I agree with Prager that it’s vastly easier to argue in favor of objective morality if we stipulate the existence of a moral God; indeed, I’d list that as among the top benefits of religion. I’ll further agree that the lack of belief in objective morality is likely related to the decline in belief in God (though I wonder if we’re seeing a similar effect as with voting; i.e., people’s habits and beliefs change — often for the better — as they get older and wiser).
However, I’ve two problems with Prager’s argument, one that he’s made before. Logically, I think he’s making a false choice by sorting all things as either demonstrable facts or mere opinions. As Professor McBrayer writes in the piece Prager cited, there’s a third option:
Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false… It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives).
So while demonstrating that the intentional taking of an innocent life is objectively wrong is difficult to do if God doesn’t exist, that doesn’t actually comment on the truth or fiction of the statement. The Earth was, objectively, the fifth-largest body orbiting the Sun even before we had the means of showing it (assuming, of course, that we actually have that correct now). As such, “murder is wrong” isn’t necessarily a mere opinion, but unproven supposition or speculation — perhaps with a lot to recommend it, logically and otherwise, but supposition nonetheless.
But there’s another, more practical problem: by switching the burden from proving the moral validity of a statement to proving God’s existence — which is the effect of Prager’s objections — you leave people without a belief in God with nothing else to work with. In a civilization with an increasing number of unbelievers, is it wise to essentially dismiss all ethical philosophy that isn’t explicitly religious?
I’m not making an argument against religion, let alone in favor of atheism (I’m not an atheist). But just as we seek independent lines of evidence in other pursuits as a means of moving suppositions and hypotheses toward the realm of working theory, it strikes me as a fool’s errand to abandon an entire line of pursuit. Civilization is too important.
“Vitrail de synagogue-Musée alsacien de Strasbourg” by Ji-Elle – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Published in Culture, Religion & Philosophy
I don’t understand. Why do you fancy that considering how much stock you put into common intuitions?
Not one way to happiness, well-being, or self-respect, no. Else everyone would have to have the same job, the same diet, and the same relationships to achieve those things, and that’s clearly not the case.
But there are broad patterns that can be discerned. And even people who believe they can achieve these things through immorality eventually tend to find that, to their great unhappiness, that they can’t.
Are you familiar with the works of Theodore Dalrymple? He’s spilled much ink cataloging what goes on in the relative moral vacuum that is the English underclass. Their lack of moral training, alas, doesn’t deprive the majority of them of an innate moral sense. Maybe they’d be happier if it did.
He says it’s common for members of the underclass to feel used up, empty, despairing – essentially in existential crisis – by the time they hit their thirties. It gets called “depression”, but he sees it as a normal human response to not knowing how to live. “Even” they eventually figure out that they’re not living good, fulfilling lives (which points to humans having an innate moral sense), though by the time they do, it’s usually too late.
He also said another thing I found interesting: that he preferred to work with murderers rather than other criminals, because murderers typically feel genuine remorse. Remorse not because they failed to get away with the murder and are now locked up, but remorse for what they did.
Granted, the English underclass are still English. Even the most squalid corners of the slums can’t be guaranteed free of “contamination” from Western bourgeois values. But we are not conservatives because of cultural chauvinism, a desire to impose Western bourgeois values on others whether it makes them happier or not. No, we’re conservatives because we genuinely believe those values give people a happier, more fulfilling way to live.
Ahh. Well, that was probably my fault. A better way to put it is stock in “common sense” intuitions. But common sense is not that common. People hold inconsistent intuitions all the time, but they either don’t care or don’t realize it.
I take consistent common sense intuition to its logical extreme, allowing for exceptions in strange hypothetical cases because those exceptions are common sense as well.
No. It’s not abstract.
Saying that one should be moral because there will be negative consequences if you don’t is nothing but a threat. And while a threat may be useful and it may be effective in getting people to follow your demands, it doesn’t explain why you want that behavior in the first place.
It’s logically the same asking why I should obey a law that decrees that I must shoot my wife before the end of the week. Then I ask why I should obey such a law, and you answer “because it’s the law and you’ll be imprisoned if you don’t.” Well, OK, that may offer me an incentive for acting the way you want, but it doesn’t justify why that should be a law in the first place.
When I ask why I should respect my neighbor’s welfare, you answer “because society will retaliate against you if you don’t.” That’s not a justification; that’s a threat. And so, to get you to answer with a justification, I construct a question which removes the threat – what would happen if I could get away with it? That’s the question you refuse to answer, replying instead that the threat is enough.
What’s the justification for moral behavior? Please don’t reply with “because if you don’t …” as that answer isn’t a justification for the behavior. I’m looking for the justification of the behavior, not a threat that would motivate me to comply.
Can people achieve happiness, well-being, self-respect, etc by actions you or I might consider immoral?
What makes it common then? Or by common sense do you really mean something more like: “what I think is obvious”?
I mean things like, if you sat people down and showed them a video of someone beating up someone else and taking what they have, practically everyone would look at that and say the guy doing the beating is in the wrong. That’s evidence of something.
Do you consider “Because if you don’t, you’ll starve,” a sufficient justification for eating?
No it has not. It has merely been included among my answers. “Because it will make you happier if you do,” “Because you’ll eventually feel regret if you don’t, “Because you like your neighbor,” have also been included among my answers. I’ve brought up fellow-feeling, the psychological rewards of virtue, the emptiness that may descend upon us without virtue. All of those are consequences. Not all consequences are retaliation.
In most everyday situations, there’s not some abstract “society” out there threatening to retaliate against you, but real flesh-and-blood people whose well-being is important to you – has consequences for you that are not well summed up by the word “retaliation”.
If I make my husband miserable, he is not “retaliating” against me by being miserable. He’s just miserable. That doesn’t change the fact that, for my own happiness, I should not make him miserable. Why is this so hard to understand?
No, that answers nothing, because the question (in morality) is not whether there is a cause-and-effect but why that cause-and-effect is there in the first place.
The logic is no different. Retaliation and consequences are logically the same thing; both are appeals to your self-interest, but they’re not explanations of the act.
Suppose I told you to go to Afghanistan, and you asked why.
Both are consequences, and both appeal to your self-interest. But neither one explains why I want you to go to Afghanistan in the first place. That’s the justification I’m asking for.
Can you offer any justification for morality other than some form of self-interest?
Perhaps to moral philosophers.
We could also ask, “Why is there metabolism in the first place?” There’s nothing wrong with that question, surely. It’s probably a very interesting question. Yet we do not need to answer it to know that, if we don’t eat, we’ll starve.
Well, first thing is that this new scenario with the video is contra your assertion that common sense isn’t common; now you’re back to claiming that most people will recognize it. Ok, so why do you persist with your unpopular or obscure viewpoints (eg anarchocapitalism, no borders)? Why are you acting contrary to common sense? Or do you claim (loathe as you may be to admit it) that you do have some special knowledge of common sense that isn’t actually common?
Second, that many people come to a common understanding may indeed be evidence of something but why do you insist that it’s evidence of universal morality especially considering that it isn’t actually universal and you don’t necessarily accept anything common as truly moral?
To circle back then: do you or don’t you distinguish between the moral and the practical?
These sound very much like personal preference. Is morality based on something more or more objective than personal preference?
Why should you respect the welfare of others?
Both of these answers appeal to your self-interest, positively or negatively. But if self-interest were the only criterion, it wouldn’t explain why you should respect others’ welfare when there were no consequences.
If the only reason you acted was because of the consequences that follow, you wouldn’t be acting in anyone else’s best interest. You’d only be acting in your own self-interest.
“Retaliation” typically denotes a willful act, an act consciously chosen for revenge, an act with intent behind it. “Consequences” does not. Surely you see the difference.
Do we need to be able to explain why commonly-observed human behavior happens the way it does in order to observe it and modify our own actions accordingly? Isn’t the fact that such behavior exists justification enough for taking it into consideration?
Granted, observations must take place within some amount of theoretical framework. Measuring temperature, for example, requires some conception, however nebulous, of what “temperature” is, and so on. But people were capable of observing different temperatures and acting on those observations long before they developed a coherent theory of temperature. Even reptiles can observe temperatures – in fact, their physiology requires them to be rather good at it!
Your example is of course artificial – telling others to go to Afghanistan out of the blue isn’t something that humans typically do.
Midge – is there any justification for any moral act, other than self-interest?
Look, there are two aspects of morality. One is moral theories. The other is moral behavior. It does not take a highly-developed moral theory to observe that others’ well-being matters to us. This is something we get the pleasure of observing every day, in sundry contexts.
When we describe people as moral, or conversely, as having “moral failings”, we are most concerned about their behavior, not their moral theories. It matters less why a person exhibits moral qualities like kindness, responsibility, and honesty than that he does. When he does, he strikes us as “moral”, even if he justifies his actions using purely “selfish” arguments. When he doesn’t, he strikes us as “immoral” – even if he’s a moral philosopher!
If we ask ourselves,”What will make us morally better people?” well, a more coherent theory of morality might. What’s more likely to work, though, is becoming more skilled at taking the consequences of our actions into account.
We often get a sense that immoral people have difficulty processing the consequences of their own behavior. Maybe that’s because they do.
I’m not particularly interested in this question right now. More interested in arguing that consideration of the consequences does in fact play a big role in getting us to behave morally.
To argue that X is a better justification of moral behavior than you think it is doesn’t exclude Y and Z from also justifying moral behavior.
Here I thought that was the point we were discussing on the thread.
Let’s look at an incorrect common intuition. People have an intuition that government should exist. This is very common, but there is evidence that humans have an inherent bias to accepting authority, even when it asks people to violate other common sense morality against harming others.
So, this is an example of both a common sense inconsistency and a place where I have “special knowledge” that leads me to accept strange sounding conclusions. When people watch people presumably hurt (and possibly kill) another just because someone in a place of authority asks them to, it tends to offend people’s moral intuition very strongly even though the vast majority of people would do the same in that situation. So this is in fact a case where we should be skeptical of our intuition because of external evidence.
I thought we were discussing whether there are ways to avoid “switching the burden from proving the moral validity of a statement to proving God’s existence,” as Tom said in his OP.
“Us”? It doesn’t take a world-weary cynic to see that others’ well-being does not matter to all of us, and certainly not to the same degrees.
So saying that you care about others isn’t proof of morality. We have to first define morality in order to judge a specific behavior as moral or not. Don’t we?
Ok, but discussion about practical rules of thumb still doesn’t get to the level of “proof”. How do you prove the moral validity of a statement when faced with competing/contradictory self interest?
In other words, there must be something more than self interest. What is it?
In practice, not so much. Often, we recognize something as unkind or unfair before we can define why it is so. This is true not only of behavior directed toward us, but also of our behavior toward others. For example, haven’t you ever felt guilt over being inconsiderate, even when you couldn’t put your finger on what, exactly, you did that was inconsiderate?
Yes, but perhaps it does take a world-weary cynic to believe that imperfections in the general trend render the trend itself meaningless ;-)
It is evidence, though, and evidence contributes to the burden of proof. (Fulfilling a burden of proof isn’t the same as, say, the ironclad proof of mathematics. In fact, some burdens of proof are rather weak.)
Tom is supposing (hoping?) that there is some non-God way to hold a statement as morally valid. How to do that? By relying on preference for certain outcomes? That “works” until you encounter enough dissenting. By looking for common understandings? That works too but we must acknowledge that understandings change and there is definitely more than one around at any given time.
So I thought we were discussing whether such a non-God “proof” is even possible. Or is a statement like “x is moral assuming y” the best we can do?
Can’t something which makes you feel unkind and unfair still be moral? Conversely, can’t something which is immoral make you feel kind? Don’t people often have opposite feelings about the exact same event?
Personal feelings are not the same as morality. Are they?
Finding a way to get by is not the same as morality. Is it?
Tom wants to find a non-God way to moral validity. Personal feelings ain’t it unless you’re settling for a statement like “x is moral assuming y” as the best we can do.
Ok, but isn’t the opposite practicality experienced by other people evidence in their favor? Are you arguing that morality is dependent on perspective?