So, is there a universal morality?

[avevale_intelligencer]

Obviously not in the sense of a morality that applies to viruses and quasars and anteaters and glaciers. The only function of morality is in the interaction of sentient beings. That's what it's for.

I've spoken about individuals having moral compasses, and about religions having them. The basic notion of a compass is as something that points to something outside itself, a standard which is of some use in navigation. Whether we choose to recognise the fact or not, we all use our moral compasses as if that is what they were doing, as if there was something called "morality" beyond our own selfish wants and fears which we could use to govern our actions.

But if there is, as some say, no one right morality, or if right morality is forever beyond our understanding, then it doesn't matter. Nobody's compass is worth a damn. Whatever your particular group evolves to help it function more successfully is right, and when it comes up against another group's morality, the one which can destroy the other will be right, and so on. Morality is decided by the winners, like history.

I reject that absolutely. Whether morality comes from a god or gods, or from us, there is right and there is wrong. I don't agree with all the moral values of the society I live in, or any other society, but that doesn't make them all the same; some are closer to "right" than others, and I believe that "right" is attainable. And I believe that, however they may fall short in other respects, the religions of the world have been performing the important function of aligning people's moral compasses in some degree towards something that is "right" for a very long time. Each religion has a moral code of its own, and YES, damn it, they all have bits in with which we no longer agree, which we now see as unnecessary or downright wrong. They all stick pins in the compass to stop it swinging where they don't want it to. That does NOT make the religion itself immoral, or mean that it cannot contain anything of rightness, and I'm so tired of knocking down that particular straw man and seeing it bob up again.

A minimal "right" morality might start with something like:

An it harm none, do what you will.

Gosh, that sounds almost like it came from a religion.

There is, of course, much more to it than that. The various key words ("harm," "none," "do" and the rest) need to be defined, and one could come up with specific examples like "thou shalt not kill," "thou shalt not steal," and so on. (That sounds religious too.) There may even be exceptions, which would have to be dealt with, and one could mix in useful maxims like "two wrongs don't make a right," to prevent our ideally moral society, say, sanctioning the killing of someone who had killed someone else. And even as I add in these elements, I can feel the compass shifting, the swings of the needle narrowing, getting closer to true north.

If there is no true north, then killing and stealing and all manner of nastiness can be justified in terms of one's own notion of morality, and that is what many societies do, usually for strictly secular reasons. If there is no true north, then the dream of "an ethical society" is just that, a dream, because without some external justification, no moral or ethical principle can be maintained. It is in precisely this case that a religion of some sort comes into its own as a potential force for unity and moral consensus. An ethical society without a universal morality is an impossibility, unless the morality is imposed by appeal to some outside authority.

So, either there is a morality that is "right" for all human interactions, or there is a crying need for religion. One or the other. I'm happy to have both, but then, I'm a belt and braces kind of chap, or I would be if I could find any braces that fitted. I would not wish to live in a world with neither.

My next post will be about something else.

Comments

[nameandnature]

Maybe there's a Right, but I can't see how I'd find it or demonstrate it to everyone else. It'd be interesting if human brains were all such that there were a universal solvent, something which would convince humans, but how do we even know that's Right? And how would we convince the Pebblesorters when they pass through our solar system and want to convert Earth into a heap of pebbles (this isn't quite the point of the Pebblesorters, which is to illustrate Yudkowsky's belief that morality is a big computation we don't understand but implement anyway, but they're a multi-purpose metaphor).

We might hope that God will tell us what's Right, but he's not so talkative these days. If he's there at all, he doesn't look like any of the major theistic religions envisage. In particular, he's not that bothered about telling us about Right, and he's not that bothered about enforcing Right either, which is another problem with the idea: we might manage to be Right, but that won't stop us being turned into pebbles.

So, I'm not convinced that Right is an interesting thing. Morality will ultimately come down to what you can convince people of. As someone else has pointed out, that doesn't mean it necessarily comes from the barrel of a gun (though it might, if we ever face the Pebblesorters), it means winning the argument. Because of stuff humans share (whether by genes or culture), it seems there are arguments and meta-arguments which a lot of people will respond to (you've mentioned some). If you think you know what's right, you'd better be convincing. That's what I think morality is about, although I acknowledge a debt to people like Yudkowsky and Ken Macleod (it's not clear Macleod agrees with his own "True Knowledge", of course: maybe he intended the whole thing as a parody). You are, in fact, in a universe where you might lose to people you regard as evil. That's a scary thing, but it's better to know it, I think.

I'm not sure why an ethical society is crying out for religion. Sufficiently enlightened self-interest might do the trick instead. It's tempting to push a religion as a handy shortcut for convincing the people who aren't sufficiently enlightened, I suppose (see Plato, as told by Russell), but I'm (morally) against telling people stuff that isn't true to make them behave better. Something like Buddhism might be OK, I suppose, but I'm not sure how effective it'd be: it seems the more you want to influence people, the bigger the lies you have to tell (looking at which religions are growing, it's not the nice liberal ones).

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm certainly not going to try to convince you of anything. I believe that truth and morality (as I conceive it) are quite often on opposite sides, and when that happens, for me, truth loses every single time. As I've said earlier, I think morality starts with not harming another human being, and if I have to tell human beings lies to stop them harming each other, I'm damn well going to lie like a trooper and not wait for them to become "enlightened" enough to figure it out.

A lie in this context can be a truth we haven't made true yet, like for instance "crime does not pay." Of course it pays, it pays by the truckload, and if truth is all one cares about then there can be no objection to letting everyone know that and govern their lives accordingly. If enough people believe the lie, though, there are fewer criminals, they're easier to catch, and sooner or later the return from crime becomes uneconomic and lo, the lie is true. That's how we achieve morality; we start with a lie and make it true. If you start with a truth you can't change anything.

But once again I come up against the unquestioned, untested, almost unnoticed assumption that all religion is lies. As long as that assumption is embedded in the bottom strata of anyone's thoughts, I cannot find any common ground or engage in any meaningful discussion, because there is no reason to assume it. It is entirely possible, on the evidence we have, that some form of religion (however distorted, however misused) was indeed divinely inspired and represents a measure of truth. I don't say any particular one is, or does...but I'm against basing my entire view of something on a statement about it that I do not know to be true, but merely want to be true. And that is what people are doing (whatever flattering name they give it in their own minds) when they decide that there can never have been, can never be, any truth or any good or any value in any religion.

[nameandnature]

I think I'd rather have efficient police and courts than just try to make people believe that crime doesn't pay. Once you can catch criminals, it's certainly worth advertising that you do it, though: in the UK, I think I'm right in saying that fear of crime is out of proportion to its incidence. I don't think saying "crime doesn't pay" is a lie in the sense that I'm talking about, because I genuinely don't believe that crime is in people's long term interest.

I didn't say all religion was lies, in fact, I gave an example of one which I thought was OK (I'm not a Buddhist, but I know some). Nor do I think that there is no truth or value in religion. Rather, the claims which are unique to the big theisms (rather than being stuff that non-theists could have told you, like "don't murder people") are very probably wrong, because, for example, they portray God as speaking, caring and intervening in a way that he doesn't.

There might be a form of religion which was divinely inspired, but neither of us seem to know which one it is, so that possibility can't make any difference to our lives until we find out. So, I'm not sure where the religion that a society needs is going to come from: do you propose to create one, or try to find the one that is true, if it exists?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I don't propose to create one, nor do I have the means to find the one that is true. But I think it will happen, as long as we remain open to the possibility. Which is why I always object, swiftly and vocally, to any attempt to close that possibility off; and it always gets me into trouble...

That is an interesting piece that you link to. I don't propose to address it, partly because I'm completely fed up at the moment with trying to wade through this stuff and partly because I don't think anything I could say would be heard. I have theories and analogies, but the author would rule those out before I had even finished typing as ad hoc, or simply made up to try to answer the question (why else would you make up a theory?), so it isn't worth bothering. He's happy. Why try to spoil that?

And I didn't say "just" try to make people believe crime doesn't pay; but police and courts are efficient in inverse proportion to the number of people committing crimes, so any measure that reduces that number, without actually affecting the freedom of people in general to live within the law as they choose, is fine with me. "Efficient police and courts" sounds innocuous enough, but the point could be stretched to a truly horrendous degree; and would be, if that were all keeping people from becoming criminals.