People willing to cooperate and behave morally with each other – willing to trust and work with one another as part of a group – have a powerful advantage over those who don't, in a very wide range of situations. This would imply a perfectly reasonable evolutionary reason for a "moral sense" to exist. A response to Phillip Ellis Jackson.
Introduction
In "What kind of car would Jesus drive to take his girlfriend to an abortion clinic?," Dr. Phillip Jackson argues for the existence of "a common set of moral values [that] is installed, recognized, and perpetuated within each individual and the human race as a whole . . . It must either involve a purely physical explanation (such as culture, society, genetics, etc.), or a metaphysical one; which is to say a morality based on the existence and purposeful actions of God." It is probably not surprising that Dr. Jackson argues for the latter case.
It's an interesting, if lengthy, read.1 I believe that much of it is wrong, but wrong in an interesting and instructive way. And what is right is interesting as well. A central theme is the example of a violent rape and murder of a five-year-old child. This, Dr. Jackson contends, is clearly wrong to all but a vanishingly small percentage of all humans throughout history,2 and I of course agree. He then explores where such a conviction could come from, but I believe his conclusions on that score are unjustified.
Eliminating Physical Explanations
Perhaps it's best to let Dr. Jackson speak for himself regarding the strategy his argument employs:
The only way a metaphysical explanation can stand is if all possible physical explanations do not fully account for an activity. Then, a metaphysical explanation at least becomes plausible.
It's worth considering, before we proceed, the difference between these two kinds of explanation, 'metaphysical' and 'physical.' What separates them? So far as I can glean the author's intent, he means 'the metaphysical' to be that which is 'supernatural' – "beyond the grasp of human understanding." A metaphysical mechanism to accomplish something (e.g. implanting a moral code in humans) would be not merely an unknown means of operation, but an unknowable one, something forever removed from human ken.
Epistemologically, this is a troublesome concept. How does one, in practice, distinguish between something 'currently unknown but comprehensible' and something 'forever unknowable?' (One might also add other categories like 'knowable in principle but impractical to discover' and 'knowable and practical but, just by bad luck, will never have the explanation stumbled upon.') From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be, but it might also be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt.3
Ruling out physical, 'mechanistic' – in other words, knowable – explanations has a long but less than auspicious history. Once it was widely believed that lightning was a direct expression of divine fury – so much so that Benjamin Franklin's proposal of lightning rods was considered hubristic, even heretical.4 Meteors were felt to be obviously supernatural – what besides magical forces could have held a rock suspended in the sky? – until orbital mechanics was understood. Consider this quote from a prominent physician, J. S. Haldane, close to a century ago, discussing the "mechanistic theory of heredity":
On the mechanistic theory this [cell] nucleus must carry within its substance a mechanism which by reaction with the environment not only produces the millions of complex and delicately balanced mechanisms which constitute the adult organism, but provides for their orderly arrangement into tissues and organs, and for their orderly development in a certain perfectly specific manner.
The mind recoils from such a stupendous conception; but let us follow the argument further . . . This nuclear structure or mechanism must, according to the mechanistic theory, have been formed within a very short period by the union of two others – a male and a female one. How two such mechanisms could combine to form one is entirely unintelligible, and the observed details of the process tend only to make it, if possible, more unintelligible. When we trace each nuclear mechanism backwards we find ourselves obliged to admit that it has been formed by division from a pre-existing nuclear mechanism, and this from pre-existing nuclear mechanisms through millions of cell-generations. We are thus forced to the admission that the germ-plasm is not only a structure or mechanism of inconceivable complexity, but that this structure is capable of dividing itself to an absolutely indefinite extent and yet retaining its original structure . . .
There is no need to push the analysis further. The mechanistic theory of heredity is not merely unproven, it is impossible. It involves such absurdities that no intelligent person who has thoroughly realised its meaning and implications can continue to hold it.5
Reading this passage, it's striking how clearly he recognized the functional requirements that a mechanism for inheritance would have to meet. But he could imagine no physical arrangement that could satisfy those conditions, and concluded that therefore such a mechanism was impossible. Indeed, he insisted that a spiritual explanation was the only remaining option. Laborious work by Watson and Crick (and Wilkins and Franklin6) has since discovered DNA, however, greatly illuminating that which was previously obscure.
As an aside, with this distinction between 'metaphysical' and 'mechanistic' – between 'unknowable' and 'knowable' – in mind, we can perhaps more clearly understand the divide Dr. Jackson notes:
I realize that to some scientists, allowing for God as an independent variable is like asking them to include space aliens or an undersea civilization in their hypotheses. This is no more bizarre than to those on the other side who can't understand why God must automatically be excluded because He can't be observed directly.
Science is philosophically biased towards the 'knowable' – the word itself comes from scientia, the Latin word for 'knowledge.' An explanation that makes use of an unknowable-by-definition element is, ipso facto, not a scientific explanation. "Then a miracle occurs" might be valid in theology; but in science, it's cheating.7 It's not that God is ruled out because It could not be observed, should It choose to act in an amenable manner. Rather, science cannot assume that such a being would be forever unknowable. Science certainly acknowledges unknowns – for example, exactly how the gravitational field could work at a distance was unknown in Newton's time, however well his laws worked – but it is structurally incapable of addressing the unknowable.8
Now, it may be true that there exist subjects that actually are unknowable, and therefore not amenable to scientific inquiry, but the above examples would seem to urge caution before making confident pronouncements on that score. Personally, I'm not convinced there's ever a time to declare something 'unknowable.' If one decides that something is 'unknowable,' one will stop trying to understand it. Perhaps if Dr. Haldane had decided to try a bit harder, the structure of DNA might have been elucidated earlier.
Before Benjamin Franklin's famous experiments, when someone asked, "What causes lightning?" the proper answer was not "Zeus," or "Thor," or "Seth," or "the Thunderbirds," or "God." The proper answer was, "We don't know. Perhaps one day we will." And now, of course, we know far more about lightning because of the inquries of people like Franklin.
In any case, after dismissing politics and culture as potential sources of "universal moral truth," Dr. Jackson goes on to attempt to dispel any remaining possible non-metaphysical explanation for morality by a reductio ad absurdam:
The best way is to assume that a physical mechanism to provide morality does exist (i.e. genetics), and then explore the logical implications of it.
He then goes on to show that genetics cannot "[give] morality its content." But I believe a key mistake was made at this point – by using the phrase "i.e." (id est, "that is," "in other words") instead of "e.g." (exempli gratia, "for example"). If there existed other possibilities besides genetics as sources for 'universal morality,' they remained unexamined. I argue that there exists at least one other possibility at least as plausible as the metaphysical explanation Dr. Jackson proposed.
Divinely-Imposed Morality
But before I elaborate, I'd like to examine the morality that Dr. Jackson proposes in more detail, one "explained on a metaphysical level." It's contended that "all possible physical explanations do not fully account for" universal morality. In other words, it's not possible to deduce its existence from within the universe. Only something 'outside,' on the metaphysical level – i.e. God – imposes such a morality. (It's not directly stated, but implied, that other notions that might count as 'metaphysical,' such as "logic," can't be used to discover these morals.) This is called, in philosophy, "divine command theory."
The key problem with a divinely-imposed morality, untied to any other principle, was recognized long ago in Plato's dialogue Euthyphro. To briefly summarize, Socrates is concerned with what is 'pious.' He and a noted expert on piety, Euthyphro, agree that the pious is that which is loved by the gods.9 However, Socrates presses on to the key question – is there something about the pious that causes the gods to love it, or does the love of the gods cause something to be pious? In other words, sacrificing animals to the gods is pious, and loved by the gods. But is there something about sacrificing animals that is intrinsically pious, or is it just something that, for no particular reason, the gods just happened to love? Does the piety cause the love, or does the love cause the piety?
The extension to morality should be obvious. It is, of course, generally held that God approves of moral behavior. But the question now becomes, is moral behavior approved by God because it's inherently good and deserving of approval? Or is it simply the case that whatever God just happens to approve of becomes, by that very fact, moral and good? Not to put too fine a point on things, we must ask this question: Could God have created a universe identical to this one in all respects . . . except that abortion was morally obligated?
Note carefully the structure of the question. I am not proposing a universe where, say, for some reason all children always grew up to be serial killers without exception. Or a universe where any child born would inevitably suffer unbearable agony. I am proposing a universe completely identical to ours on the physical level, and differing on the metaphysical level only in one respect.
The objection might be raised that actions like abortion or rape violate the innate moral principle of "not harming innocent life;" that God could not make a special exception for one specific case like abortion while maintaining the immorality of rape. A solid case could certainly be made for this. So, let's go to the limit, and rephrase the question. Could a God have created a universe identical to this one in all physical and metaphysical respects except that it was a moral imperative to harm innocent life?
Of course our moral intuitions rebel at the idea. But, allegedly, that's only because we weren't given an "innate moral code" that lined up with such a moral system. Had God chosen to implant in us the moral code that we should always harm innocent life, it would seem perfectly right, indeed noble, to do so. And, if nothing beyond divine whimsy makes something moral,10 attacking babies would actually be right and just.
If morality is simply a matter of what God commands, then saying that "God is good" becomes a vacuous, or at least tautological, claim. Essentially, we simply have the ultimate case of Might Makes Right. A logical corollary of this idea is that, for example, the people in France and Poland who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers did have the right principle in mind. Their mistake was picking the wrong bully to submit to. I find this proposition to be somewhat unsatisfying, certainly, though it doesn't seem to bother everyone. I'd now like to propose an alternative source of morality that doesn't rely on the direct command from a God.
Deriving "Ought" From "Is"
David Hume is generally credited with describing the so-called "is-ought problem." As in Dr. Jackson's essay, the claim is something like "it's impossible to determine 'how things ought to be' from 'how things are,'" or "morals cannot be derived from simple facts about the world."
This may at first seem plausible, but consider the game of chess. There are certain fundamental structures of chess that define it – the 'rules of the game.' We have an 8×8 board, 8 pawns per side that move in certain ways, two rooks per side that move in other ways, castling, the initial configuration of the pieces, etc. Now, when playing chess, there is no rule that you can't sacrifice your queen in the first few moves of the game. It's illegal to move your king to a threatened square, but it's perfectly acceptable by the rules to stick your queen in front of a pawn at the start of the game.
However, if you want to win the game, you shouldn't do that. There are almost no situations (at least, assuming evenly-matched opponents) where giving up your queen at the start will lead to your victory. Similarly, it's rarely a good idea to move your king out to the center of the board before the endgame. It's usually a bad move.
Note words like 'shouldn't' and 'bad.' They are value judgments. They prescribe 'oughts.' But they are not part of the 'rules' of chess. From where do they come? They arise from the combinations of two things – first, the rules and structure of chess, and second, from the player's desire to win the game. They are strategic rules. A player is free to disregard them, but they do so at their peril – it's unlikely to further their goal.
Hopefully the parallel to wider life is obvious. We have 'rules of the game' in life, too – the laws of physics, for example. We are not free to violate these strictures. (Well, technically, if we find a case where they are violated, we reformulate the laws and our theories to take into account the anomalous case. Should we find a rock that fell upward, our understanding of gravity would be wrong, not the rock!11) Many of them are so well established that it's difficult to see how they could be wrong to a significant degree. Unless you can produce a flying rock or a magic carpet, I think we can expect to have to obey the laws of gravity, for example.
As humans, we have desires and goals as well. Some are very basic and inborn and apparently universal (air, water, food, sleep, shelter, etc.) and some are so common that only extremely rare individuals seem not to need them (e.g. the company of other people), and some are deeply personal and not common at all (a desire to write a novel, say). But like chess, might there be strategic rules that arise in the real world from physical laws and conditions, combined with our desires?
Game Theory
Game theory attempts to analyze interactions among competing and cooperating agents in the context of systems of rules governing the options available to them. It's a rich and interesting field, and some of its results have bearing on the topic of morality.
The Prisoner's Dilemma
One useful model in game theory is the Prisoner's Dilemma. Basically, two players have the option of cooperating with, or betraying, each other. If both cooperate, there is a moderate payoff, e.g. 3 points. If one cooperates and one betrays, the betrayer gets a large payoff (say, 5 points) and the cooperator gets nothing. If both betray, there is a small payoff (e.g. 1 point each).
What's the optimal strategy in this case? On average, betraying pays 3 points (5 * 50% + 1 * 50%), while cooperating pays only 1.5 points (3 * 50% + 0 * 50%). Rationally, if you're playing the game it's in your best interest to betray.
The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
But what if we change the situation slightly, by repeating the game over and over with the same opponent? Only a few stable solutions exist, assuming remotely sensible players. If you both betray all the time, your payoff is 1 point per game. If you both cooperate all the time, your payoff is much better, 3 points per game. What about more complex situations and strategies, such as varying opponents?
It turns out that an extremely simple strategy is also among the best. It is called "Tit For Tat." It starts out cooperating, and simply repeats the move that its opponent played the last time. Note that if the other player cooperates, TfT will be friendly, but if it is betrayed, TfT will retaliate. In the rules given above, it is very difficult to beat TfT's usual score.
If we vary the rules a bit, and allow for imperfect players – where there can be occasional 'accidents' when someone mistakenly betrays when they 'intended' to cooperate, or vice versa – things get even more interesting. It is possible for even a pair of TfTs to get caught in a loop of 'mutual recrimination,' with both betraying over and over. Their payoff per game plummets from 3 to 1. In such situations, a more 'forgiving' strategy actually does better.
The Conspiracy Of Doves
Another model is worth noting; the "Hawks and Doves" game. Hawks always fight for resources, until seriously injured. Doves run away instead of fighting, and split resources 50/50 if working with another Dove. Imagine that each 'resource' is worth 100 points. If a Hawk fights a Dove, it gets 100 points and the Dove gets nothing. If a Dove encounters another Dove, each gets 50 points. If a Hawk fights another Hawk, it either gets 100 points if it wins, or -300 points (from being injured while losing the fight).
Given these ratios, everyone should be a Dove – everyone will average a 50 point payoff. But a lone Hawk among Doves gets a hugely disproportionate payoff; the "Conspiracy of Doves" is not stable. In the above situation, the stable state of the population is 1/3 Hawk, 2/3 Dove, and the average payoff is only 33 points. (Note that this still applies if really there's only one kind of bird, but it has varying chances of acting like a Hawk or a Dove.)
But Chess Isn't The Real World
There is a key difference between games like chess and games like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In games like chess, there is a winner and a loser; one player has a positive outcome, the other negative. Such games are called 'zero-sum;' the benefits one player receives are equal and opposite to the penalties the loser suffers. Games like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, on the other hand, are 'non zero-sum;' it's possible for all players to lose, or all to profit, or a mix of both.
I think we can agree that, overall, our lives in the real world are 'non zero-sum.' We have the option of cooperating with others, fighting, betraying, helping, lending and borrowing, and so forth. We can see analogs of Hawk, Dove, and Tit for Tat strategies in daily life. For example, I would suggest that the Israelis and Palestinians are stuck in a loop of mutual recrimination that results in an overall worse situation for both groups. But neither side is willing to forgive the other, and they've been at it so long they can't even imagine forgiving each other.
Other results of experimental work and game-theoretic computer simulations illustrate additional general principles. In an extremely large group, the effect of any one defection is diluted, but the longer the players expect the interaction to go on, the less attractive anti-social behavior becomes. A player's willingness to cooperate is affected by their estimates of how many other players around them are cooperating, as well.
At this point we know that fixed 'rules of the game,' combined with desires of agents constrained to follow those rules, can give rise to 'meta-rules,' useful strategies that the players can choose to follow – rules just as real as the basic rules of the game, though existing on another level. Can moral precepts be examples of such strategies? It would need to be shown that following such morals led to advantages for those who followed them. And these would have to be intra-universal advantages – not ones based on metaphysical, outside-the-universe considerations.
Morality Can Be Selfish
Fortunately, Dr. Jackson acknowledges that moral behavior can and does pay off in the real world, and gives an example, though he relegates that admission to endnote 15. This is an important datum, which serves to undermine the contention that morality can't be derived from within the universe itself.
We don't have to rely on Dr. Jackson's admission, however. A bit of reasoning and research can make a fairly solid case for the benefits of morality. One very useful item of support comes from those who most vociferously exhort others to follow their moral precepts. While they frequently cite the alleged supernatural repercussions of vice, they also tend to devote plenty of time to its more worldly consequences. Violence, greed, gluttony, sloth, and so forth don't tend to bring about optimal outcomes on a regular basis. Indeed, who doesn't argue that life would overall be better for everyone, if everyone behaved morally as a matter of course? (A real-life "Conspiracy of Doves," if you like.)
The history of moral behavior also seems to make sense within a game-theoretic framework. As noted by Stephen Pinker,12 violence in real terms has been decreasing for centuries – decreasing by huge amounts. E.g. "24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s." It's difficult to argue that religion had much influence on this; indeed, not many people argue that we're more religious now than in the 1300s. Just the opposite, in fact. It seems that technology and economics and medicine have had a far greater civilizing effect than religion. Longer, safer lifespans encourage more extensive cooperation – the longer you can expect yourself and your neighbors to be around, the more important it becomes to treat your neighbors well.
But if moral behavior has real-world benefits – if people living in moral, cooperative, stable societies have advantages over those who don't – then it would seem we no longer require a metaphysical justification for morality. Morality apparently doesn't have to flow from divine command. Given what humans are, and what kind of universe they inhabit, some types of behavior and some courses of action are wiser choices than others.
Let's now return to our previous thought experiment, a universe identical to our own except that harming innocent life was metaphysically 'moral.' If 'divine command theory' were correct, perhaps such a universe would be just as 'moral' as our own. But would it work? How well would humanity get along if, say, the current situation in Darfour were commonly accepted to be noble and just? Remember, the inhabitants of this prospective universe are just like us physically and mentally – the only difference is 'spiritual.' Parents would probably find it difficult to fulfill their duties of torturing their children, since their animal instincts would argue against it. By that universe's rules, a society that protected and cared for its children would be 'evil.' Would it prosper?
The game-theoretic conception of morality seems to handle this thought-experiment much more handily. It would contend that no, God could not create a universe that closely resembled ours but possessed radically different morals. Either the physical laws or else humanity – or most likely both – would have to be quite different to make harming innocent life 'moral.' (This general idea, BTW, is analogous in many ways to the Catholic Church's notion of "Natural Law."13)
The In-Group
Another bit of evidence is contained within Dr. Jackson's paper. Consider this passage:
The truly interesting thing about God-given morality is that even individuals and dictatorial governments who act in the most outrageous, barbaric manner – and who may even reject the notion of a universal morality – still end up drawing their guidance from these same moral principles. Anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who rejected all social norms and set off bombs that killed hundreds of innocent people, nevertheless did not believe that they should settle disputes among themselves by just getting up and shooting the other guy. It's one thing to set off a bomb that kills Mary Jane and her little daughter Alice who happened to be walking by, and another to pull the trigger on Comrade Serge because his definition of "alienation and the means of production" differs slightly from yours. You may ridicule and belittle him, and in extreme cases kick him out of the collective, but he doesn't deserve to die. Mary Jane and her daughter on the other hand, by refusing to join the revolution, have in essence allied themselves with the evil bourgeois forces that make life miserable for the ancestors of future Wal-Mart employees. According to this convoluted logic, they are part of the problem.
If one is part of the 'in-group,' if one counts as a full person, then one becomes subject to the fundamental morality under discussion here. Indeed, it's very hard to see how any group could effectively operate without such rules governing interpersonal dynamics.
But that in-group's membership has fluctuated throughout history. In the earliest past, it may have been as limited as "the male members of my tribe." It certainly didn't include women as full persons in their own right – consider how recently women acquired the right to vote in the United States, and how many countries do not have full legal equality for women today. Slaves didn't count, and people from outside one's own tribe (and then city, and then country, and then 'race') didn't make the cut either. To a large extent, the increase in general moral behavior described by Pinker and others is a record of the gradual expansion of that 'in-group' to encompass more and more people.14 But the point remains that, however the in-group is defined, so long as it is composed of humans certain basic strategies will be necessary to manage it.
The "Moral Sense"
Both Dr. Jackson and I agree that there is a moral framework that humans inevitably work within, and we would even appear to agree on much of its content. (We certainly agree that slavery and terrorism, along with the rape and murder of five-year-old children, are in violation of that morality.) There's some disagreement regarding exactly how that morality is constituted (perhaps we could call my position 'universal morality,' while his might more accurately be called 'extra-universal morality' . . .) but another thing we agree on is that genetics does not, by itself, form a justification for morality.
However, genetics does have another role to play in addition to forming part of human nature. I've hopefully established that morality, properly understood, is advantageous in the world. We have been living as groups of humans (with no significant change in what it means to be 'human') for around 200,000 years, and our near ancestors were living in groups for millennia before that. Other people have formed a critical part of our environment for our entire existence. Would it be surprising to discover that evolution had helped adapt us to living and working with others?
Another interesting model from game theory provides some evidence for this. The Traveler's Dilemma is a variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma. The setup is a bit complicated,15 but in this game, people – all kinds of people, from countries around the world – routinely and apparently instinctively behave in a way that is not strictly rational but leads to a better outcome than if everyone was playing in a ruthlessly rational manner. There may be an explanation for this besides a divinely implanted impulse to be good.
Much work has been done investigating human moral intuitions and behavior. A few illustrative examples may serve to clarify some of the findings. Let's take a pair of quick cognitive tests, freely stolen from Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
Test Number One
You have a set of cards before you. Each card has a letter on one side, and a number on the other.
—– —– —– —–
| D | | F | | 3 | | 7 |
—– —– —– —–
Now, let's say there's a condition that you're asked to check for. The condition is, "If there's a D on one side of the card, then there is a 3 on the other side." Which of the above cards do you need to flip over to see if that condition is met? Take your time, reason it out, and then move on to the second test.
Test Number Two
You have a set of cards before you. Each card has information about patrons in a bar. On one side is what they are drinking; on another side are their ages.
—————— —————— ————— —————
| Drinking wine | | Drinking soda | | 25 years old | | 16 years old |
—————— —————— ————— —————
Now, let's say you're the bouncer at that bar. Your job is to make sure that no one under the age of 21 is drinking alcohol. Which of the above cards do you need to flip over to see if that condition is met?
The Answers
The answer for both tests is the same. You need to flip over the first card and the last card. Most people have a hard time with the first test, and most people have very little trouble with the second test. But the structure of both tests is exactly the same – logically equivalent conditions are being checked for. Why would one be so much easier than the other? A great deal of research, with many variations of tests like this, seems to point to a definite answer: the second test asks people to detect if a social contract is being violated – in other words, it asks people to spot cheating. And it turns out almost everyone has a built-in knack for such things. We all have a positive, built-in talent for spotting cheaters.
I believe I've established that moral behavior has practical consequences and practical justification, or at least have shown that such a notion is plausible. People willing to cooperate and behave morally with each other – willing to trust and work with one another as part of a group – have a powerful advantage over those who don't, in a very wide range of situations. This would imply a perfectly reasonable evolutionary reason for a "moral sense" to exist.
We have other examples of such systems in the brain. Figuring out what babies are thinking is difficult, but experiments seem to indicate that babies have instincts for understanding basic physics – at least, the kinds of physics humans typically encounter. They seem to express surprise when seeing an object float apparently unsupported, for example. We also appear to have built-in systems for understanding the minds and emotions of others and ourselves. This may be more obvious by its absence – autism seems to be a case where development of this 'mental understanding system' goes awry to greater or lesser degree. If there were useful, general strategies for interacting with other people, then inbuilt support for recognizing and applying such strategies would be a reasonable thing for evolution to produce.
Such a moral sense would also include warnings when one contemplates doing something contrary to morality – since moral actions, by this model, are sensible and useful strategies. Additionally, it would be important to realize when one is doing something that others would frown upon.16 Sometimes people violate these warnings anyway – the lure of short-term gains tempting them more than a long-term payoff. That doesn't mean that it's a wise choice.
Recent research17 has indicated that damage to the brain can actually affect how people make moral judgments. If our sense of morality is implanted by a supernatural means, then the details of that experiment are difficult to explain. Dr. Jackson, in making an unrelated point, uses the example of an automobile – even if one doesn't fully understand all of its workings, one can "make predictions about its operation and functioning." If altering the function of the brain alters moral judgment . . .
It might be advanced that, given how complex the world is, 'discovering' such principles would be too complex for evolution to manage. However, we have plenty of documented examples of evolution developing complex novel features despite its inherent lack of foresight. (My personal favorite is the essentially complete fossil record of the development of our inner ear bones from the redundant extra jawbones of therapsid dinosaurs.) Over long periods of time evolution is able to adapt to, and optimize for, even slight advantages.18 And moral behavior has more than slight advantages.
So genetics does not explain morality in this model; it does not, to use Dr. Jackson's words, "[give] morality its specific content." But it can "influence the expression of morality in an individual human being." Of course, genetics couldn't be expected to do so perfectly. Our physical intuitions break down badly when attempting to deal with objects moving close to the speed of light, or with very small particles.19 Our moral intuitions seem to work serviceably enough when dealing with groups up to about the size of a large tribe; beyond that, there can be complications. Our intuitions are certainly highly polished and useful instruments that we should do well to make use of as far as possible. But how should we extend them to the complex societies of today?
Moral Engineering
The real world – and hence, real-world morality – is very complex. No simple moral code will work everywhere. Sane individuals realize this – it's the fanatics who follow the letter of every single rule they receive that, for example, blow themselves and other people up. Difficult moral quandaries that require effort and thought and care – quandaries that may not have any optimal solution – arise constantly. When they involve large numbers of people, we can't hope to have rules that give specific guidance in every situation. But there are techniques we've developed anyway. Some principles of morality are universal, but they need to be put into practice. So we've developed legal codes.
Engineers have an even more complex job than physicists, putting together working mechanisms in the face of many uncertainties and unknowns. They frequently have to resort to 'rules of thumb,' approximations, and techniques that have historically worked, even if why they work isn't always fully understood.20 Engineers generally have to design conservatively, and build in redundancy, and add margins for error. Engineering moral (and legal) codes is similarly complicated . . . but that does not imply that it's impossible. Engineering continually improves and finds new ways of doing things, sometimes better than the old, sometimes merely applicable in certain special cases. There may never be an Ultimate Engineering that can accomplish all possible things . . . but that doesn't mean we should abandon engineering.
Still, we can take some lessons from game theory and psychology when crafting such codes. If there are conditions that help encourage cooperation (long horizons of interaction, clear and fairly-enforced punishments for violating rules, etc.) we should make sure to arrange for them as much as possible. Sometimes we may have to settle, like the Hawks and Doves, for a less-than-optimal situation in exchange for stability. But the fact that humans can plan and coordinate (and the fact that we do have built-in capacities for trust and cooperation as shown by the Traveler's Dilemma) gives us some hope that we can do better than armed truces and Mexican Standoffs.21
Legal codes and societal norms may similarly never be perfect, and certainly don't approach ideal today. But that doesn't imply progress can't be made. Though perhaps not for all the same reasons, I agree with Dr. Jackson's basically Libertarian style, where he advocates education and persuasion to work to end abortion instead of force and violence. I agree more with the practical justification he gives for this than the spiritual one, but our conclusions are essentially identical. Taking a cue from evolution (see below), diversity in the marketplace of ideas is a very good thing.
Genetic Moral Engineering
I've already pointed out the difference between genetics reflecting morality and genetics causing morality, but I'd like to take the chance to address a side issue: some apparent misconceptions on Dr. Jackson's part about using genetics to justify policy decisions. In particular, he argues that if morality were solely "the product of man's genetics as influenced by his environment," actions like exterminating those with genes predisposing people to alcoholism or pedophilia would be justified, or even required. But the conclusion does not follow from the premise.
One of the (many) reasons eugenics is wrong is that it assumes that it's possible to identify genes that are bad, and eliminate them. Genetics is more complicated than that, and traits that are 'bad' in one circumstance can be literally life-saving in others. For example, a person with two copies of the sickle-cell gene will suffer from sickle-cell anemia and die young. But a person with only one copy does not suffer such ill effects and has a significantly increased resistance to malaria. In a region where malaria is endemic, the risk of having babies die from sickle-cell anemia is offset by the improved chances of other babies surviving malaria. Cystic Fibrosis is another recessive trait where only one copy of a mutated gene apparently affords some protection from Typhoid and perhaps Tuberculosis. A further example is RH-negative blood; there is some evidence that, while RH-negative women are at increased risk of miscarriage, they have an easier time getting pregnant.
There aren't genes "for" alcoholism or pedophilia in the same way as there are genes "for" red hair. Mental development is more complex than that, and at most genes may put someone at increased risk for such things. And we don't know what positive traits such genes might help to enable – perhaps the stereotype of the artist susceptible to drug abuse has a basis in fact, and by working to eliminate alcoholism we would devastate the art world. There has been quite a bit of speculation as to Charles Dodgson's (Lewis Carroll's) possible pedophilia; if he was a pedophile, he apparently was able to direct his energies away from harming young girls, and toward entertaining them (and adults) with fantastic stories, as well as mathematics.22
The penalties for actual drunk driving or child molestation should be severe enough to act as a powerful deterrent, and someone who has acted on a propensity for this should be treated differently than one who hasn't. But there certainly isn't now, and very probably will never be, a test that can look at someone's genes and precisely predict their individual future behavior. Lacking that, pre-emptive and involuntary measures are unjustified. Punishment and/or treatment for actual behavior is the only reliable course. Objective examples of people who have been able to overcome such propensities supports this regardless of whether one believes their resistance came from a supernatural origin.
This leads into another evolutionary argument against such eugenic practices. Diversity in a population is a very good thing. It helps a population cope with all kinds of threats – disasters, disease, variations in environment, and more. If a trait really is "bad," it will be eliminated in due course without – even in spite of – our intervention.
Sacrificing The Queen, Part One
Chess masters may occasionally spot an advantage to sacrificing their queen in a game. The strategic rule that "one should not sacrifice one's queen" is a simplification. More precisely, it should be stated that "one should only sacrifice one's queen for substantial positional and/or material advantage." Such cases do arise, but they are fairly rare. Still, this does raise an important question about moral strategies — in what cases (if any) do they cease to apply?
One can imagine hypothetical cases where an action that would ordinarily be immoral might become moral. I alluded to a few debatable justifications for universal abortion above, in the "thought experiment." Indeed, even Dr. Jackson notes that abortion per se is not immoral in absolutely all circumstances (". . . having an abortion to save the life of a mother is a valid exception"). The real world is, as I have said, complex, and very strange circumstances can obtain at times. When there are two innocent lives at risk, there can be genuine debate about the correct course to follow. But I can't really imagine circumstances that would make the rape and murder of a child 'moral.'
The more fundamental the principle, the less common are the possible exceptions. "Not harming innocent life" is a fundamental principle indeed, and exceptions are correspondingly difficult to find. Tens of thousands of people, many of them women and children, died in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is likely that the bombings ended up saving lives by averting a devastating conventional invasion of Japan. On the other hand, others (such as Generals Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Nimitz) judged the use of the bombs unnecessary. As noted before, some moral quandaries have no easy answer.
Sacrificing The Queen, Part Two
What about a chess grandmaster who can beat any and all comers? One who can't even play an interesting match without handicapping themselves dramatically, such as giving up their queen and both rooks? They can violate strategic rules that others need to follow and still win the match. Are there equivalents in the real world of moral strategies?
How about a Stalin, someone who can take over and dominate an entire country for decades? One who can 'get away with' riding roughshod over anyone, or any group, who dares oppose them? What, if anything, constrains them? Why should they care about the kind of morality that the vast majority are concerned with?
I'd like to relay a story I first read during the 2003 invasion of Iraq:23
When one of the most secure and luxurious of his palace-and-bunker complexes was completed in 1984, at a cost of $70 million, Saddam Hussein moved in right away. But even protected by enormous layers of concrete, sand and steel, behind zigzag corridors and blast doors made to withstand a Hiroshima-size explosion, and guarded by men who knew they'd have to be ready to die for him, or be killed by him, Saddam apparently could not sleep.
"All night long he heard a sound like the cocking of a pistol," remembers Wolfgang Wendler, the German engineer who supervised the project. Wendler was summoned by angry officials to find out what was wrong. He discovered a faulty thermostat.
Saddam, of course, deserves no pity. But this is the kind of life he led – literally jumping at shadows, because there was no one he could fully trust. Stalin became so suspicious of doctors that later in life he refused their treatment and consulted with veterinarians instead.24 These dictators had plenty of purely material comforts, but in the process of acquiring them they'd given up any chance of enjoying them untroubled by fears of assassination, let alone the pleasures of sharing them with loved ones. They could literally never afford to fully relax. Perhaps there are a few individuals for whom that would be worth the trade, but I wonder if they ever regretted the situations they'd locked themselves into.
This is an example of why morality is so fundamental: there are inevitable costs for violating it, particularly on a massive and regular basis. People are a diverse bunch, and there do exist sociopaths that might not mind (or even notice) those costs, but that doesn't mean the costs aren't there. As Dr. Jackson himself notes, the fact that exceptions exist doesn't mean the general principle is invalid.
The Foundation Has Changed – What About The Conclusions?
As I've noted, while I disagree with Dr. Jackson as to the source of morality, we broadly agree on the content of morality. Harming innocent life is wrong, for example. Unnecessary restrictions on liberty are wrong as well. What about his conclusions regarding terrorism and abortion, the major focus of his treatise?
Regarding abortion, we're actually in fairly close agreement. For reasons outside the scope of this paper, I'm unwilling to restrict abortions before the end of the first month of pregnancy,25 but after that our positions appear to be identical. Abortion is not justified for the sake of convenience, or even in the case of rape or incest; but when there is a threat to the life of the mother, it's her decision whether to proceed with the pregnancy.
As to terrorism, I agree that it is also immoral. But I think Dr. Jackson engages in a bit of sleight-of-hand when he conflates terrorism and abortion as arising from identical mindsets. Justifications for abortion tend to deny humanity to the developing fetus; but as he acknowledges, Islamic terrorists don't claim their victims are not human, they claim they are not innocent. Of course they dehumanize their enemies as much as possible to help psych themselves up for violence, but this is hardly unique to terrorists. Even our own troops have done this ('gooks', 'hajis'); it's a human coping mechanism, though a dangerous one.26
Dr. Jackson's paper covers a great deal of territory, and I don't intend, or pretend, to discuss it all here. My key thesis in this discussion is that the conclusions he reaches about the origins of morality are incorrect, or at least that he has not met the standard of evidence he set for himself. I welcome constructive discussion, corrections, and criticism.
Endnotes
1. Unfortunately the overall tone of the essay puts me in mind of George Orwell's apology for his "objectively pro-fascism" remark: "To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel." I cannot claim to be free from this inclination myself, but fortunately Dr. Jackson himself in his paper acknowledges that one can "condemn a harmful or immoral action" even if one's past isn't "pure as the driven snow."
2. Of course, some of the exceptions have been historically significant. E.g. 1 Samuel 15:3, Joshua 10:40.
3. "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?" – Woody Allen
4. http://www.tektonics.org/lp/norods.html
5. J. S. Haldane, Mechanism, Life, And Personality, 1913
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
7. http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery.htm or http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery/math/math07.gif
8. It's true that there are principles in science like the "Uncertainty Principle," which states that it's impossible to know with total precision both the position and velocity of a particle. However, this is because in Quantum Mechanics, a particle literally does not have a definite position and velocity.
9. Of course, their polytheistic framework was less efficient than a monotheistic one, so it took them some discussion to reach the conclusion that the pious was, in fact, that which was loved by all the gods.
10. Perhaps one might argue that a God that created the universe would have the right to do whatever It liked with that universe. But the question would immediately arise, "On what basis does the principle that 'the creator of something owns it' rest?" Is that an unchangeable, logically necessary moral principle — or is it imposed by divine whim?
11. When Dr. Jackson, commenting on the 'natural laws,' alludes to the "question . . . of who, exactly, created those natural laws," he betrays a confusion about the nature of natural laws and legal or moral 'laws.' Legal/moral laws are prescriptions for how one should behave; natural 'laws' are descriptions of how things do, in fact, behave. Legal laws of course have creators, but natural laws are not legal laws.
12. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
13. It's worth noting that framing morality in this way allows a creator God to be 'good' in a significant sense again. It even allows It to be the ultimate author of morality, in the limited sense that the morality inherent in a universe would flow from the type of universe created and the kinds of beings placed within it. Of course, it does limit the kinds of morality that such a God could impose, but it seems generally accepted that an inability to create logical contradictions is not a significant limitation on omnipotence. There's even a role for revelation to play. Such a God might be aware of ramifications of the system — of moral precepts — too difficult for limited humans to deduce, and be able to relay them.
14. Consider how dumbfounding the notion of a Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State would have been at the dawn of the 19th century.
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler%27s_dilemma and http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=7750A576-E7F2-99DF-3824E0B1C2540D47&pageNumber=1&catID=2.
16. "Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking." – H. L. Mencken
17. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/health/21cnd-brain.html?ex=1332129600&en=aa03e4a1c7a9ffd3&ei=5088& and http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/10/the_moral_brain.html and http://www.reason.com/news/show/35014.html are popularized examples.
18. Orgel's Second Rule: "Evolution is cleverer than you are."
19. The famous physicist Richard Fenyman once remarked, "You don't understand Quantum Mechanics. You just get used to it."
20. "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works." – Alan Cox
21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
22. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,582828,00.html
23. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3068650/site/newsweek/from/RL.3/
24. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10053223&dopt=Abstract
25. Essentially, I agree with Dr. Jackson that, "If free will is a byproduct of nature, then it is a byproduct of intelligence, because it isn't the heart, or the legs, or the fingernails or the toes that formulates this expression of free will. It's the brain . . ." Before one month, the brain hasn't formed or differentiated.
26. I am not, of course, equating the moral standing of U.S. troops with Al Quaeda terrorists. But they are all human beings, and will inevitably have things in common.
We will have to leave evolution to another time. That will be fun.
We exist as physical bodies. We also interact with a physical world. If you accept that then what makes the decisions in the body? Is it the brain working with random quantum variations in the synapse? Can random variations lead to personality and a UMC? If most of this is hard wired in the brain then where do new ideas come from? If we are driven by self preservation how did we make ordered societies? It is hard to explain the abilities of man from a strickly materialistic world. So just where do these abilities surface from? Something is guiding the material body to perform these abilities that the material body can’t posess. In common language the soul or spirit of man is the ultimate driver of the physical body. The soul or spirit must be massless just like the information contained in our DNA. If you deny the spirit or soul then you are left with materialism as the answer to all questions. If you accept the existance of the spirit then you have to have a mechanism to create it. It can come from the physical body, but we have never found a source for this and we would be asking the body to make something more complicated than itself. If it comes from outside the body then you are left with a metaphysical world. If that soul or spirit comes from outside the physical world then it is a short step to imagine a UMC that comes with it.
Accept for the moment that there is a UMC. Man faced with the UMC would over time try and change it to fit his own needs. The world brings great pressure on man to modify all things to make his life easier. Gadgets are made to make his work easier. Language is dumbed down to make it easier. Societies are adjusted to make life easier as well. This is why communism is an attractive idea. It breaks down in practise but an attractive idea none the less. Then why not the UMC. People pick and choose what to follow and then over time drift from the original dictates. This can be viewed as idea evolution or fallen man trying to self justify wrong behavior. One cannot talk about the UMC without the flip side. That being evil in the world. Lets ignore the source right now. It does exist and it does weigh in as a powerful force. So the chipping away of the UMC over time either comes from some kind of natural evolution or it is done on purpose. One could argue both causes. I tend to think that it is on purpose but most damage is done by individuals with an agenda. For instance a Doctor who is looking for a research grant may tell himself that it is OK to work on frozen human eggs. A movie producer may add raw sex to his movie to get a few more tickets sold. A politician could set rules on welfare so fathers are pushed from households so the mothers become reliable voters. So with all of this pressure we should have drifted to sodom a long time ago. But the UMC has its own pressure. If one does not choose a self gratifying agenda then the UMC drives the individual. These people push back against the tide of change. As I see it we are all talking about this war and the battles we see around us. The UMC has been either with us from the start or man made. I believe it has been with us from the start.
fbaginski, as a computer programmer I perhaps have more respect for what a purely physical system can do than most. The evolution simulator I mentioned above ‘invented’ techniques that I didn’t program in from the start, even unconsciously. I know this because they came as a complete surprise to me, and it took me a fair amount of effort to figure out how they managed to work. And this ‘creativity’ came from something that I know for a fact was not conscious – a 286 laptop with 6MB of RAM.
And what I’ve learned of neurology has not led me to believe in a ‘ghost in the machine’. I humbly prescribe some books by Oliver Sacks, like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” or “An Anthropologist On Mars” or “Awakenings”. He’s a neurologist who writes like he swallowed a poet, and his books are enjoyable and thoroughly informative.
On the more abstract subject of consciousness, “Goedel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter” is a challenging but vastly rewarding book that will expand any mind. There are others I could recommend – Daniel Dennet’s “Consciousness Explained” and “The Mind’s I”, for example. But I’ve already assigned a semester’s worth of reading…
We’re hitting a multitude of topics in individual posts, so I’m going to break out single issues and respond one-by-one where necessary.
” Dr. Jackson contends that ‘morality does not equal advantage’ and ‘morality does not equal consequences’. I think in this section he misunderstands my point, in a few different ways, some minor, some major. A minor example appears when discussing his ‘now famous ‘Endnote 15′, where he notes that in a particular case when he acted morally, he did not engage in ‘strategic calculation’. I did not suggest that the calculation in such cases needed to be, or even commonly was, performed consciously. No one denies that such unconscious calculation can happen in other cases, like the example I posted a few comments above about an outfielder who knows where to run to catch a pop fly without having to consult a pocket calculator. The judgements we make in this sort of case are largely unconscious and instinctive.
*** The baseball example is not instinctive. It is learned, and through practice and experience, becomes rote (therefore “instinctive” in a very circumscribed way). The UMC is part of all of us (unlike my lack of outfielding skills).
Living life can help bring it the UMC out (we see things that have moral implications and think about whether we want to be like that). Prayer and introspection can help us find the right moral choice (as happens in the difficult decision not to abort an unwanted child, but carry it to term and give it up for adoption. There’s a lot of personal pain and anguish in this for the mother, but the UMC helps her understand that the issue is not about her very real pain and anguish, but about the life of an innocent human being.)
There are even times when someone is so confused by the messages he’s learned from others that he needs to be “taught” certain things to help access the UMC. In all of this, operating under the UMC does not involve any conscious or subconscious strategic calculations. Like I explained in my example, I simply acted according to the UMC with no direct/indirect conscious/unconscious strategic or tactical thought about the consequences, implications or potential impact of that action. I did it simply because it was the morally correct way to behave in that circumstance. The fact that it may have helped produced (or not prevented) a positive material outcome later was a bonus. But since the UMC is the ultimate definition of what is “good”, I do know that I’m better off materially and spiritually by acting this way, even if there had been no material ‘payoff’ in this example — unlike the baseball player, who needs a material payoff (i.e. catch the ball) every time his ‘instinctive’ baseball skills are invoked.
“From a purely selfish standpoint, doing whatever you want whenever you want sounds nice, but the reality is that other people will not go along with that. What works is, well, what we’ve seen throughout history to work – mutually beneficial cooperation, punishment for defection, etc. Sometimes this means you accept less than you want.”
*** This, again, is a judgment made on a western value system, not a universal notion. Entire political systems from Soviet Communism, to Chinese Communism, to Nazi Germany, to tyrannies throughout the ages have built their actions not on mutually-beneficial calculations, but on an elite few dominating the masses for the elite’s benefit. Others (like our present political system), act closer to Mr. Ingle’s observations. This is why I contend that there is a difference between a UMC requiring that we do nothing to deliberately harm an innocent human life, and the “rational” calculations of human beings as they interact with one another. Ingles, by and large, gives us good insights into how people act or game a system. He falls short when he tries to link that outcome with some supposed moral judgment about the outcome.
“One of the reasons I don’t go stealing things that I want is because the penalty for that is being kicked out of the ‘game’, at least for a while. (The main reason we have punishments is for the deterrent effect they have.)”
*** This describes a legal system, not a moral one. There is no built-in deterrent in the UMC. Free will gives you the option of acting immorally. The UMC is a guidepost that tells you in absolute terms what is right and what is wrong. How you behave in the real world is a different issue.
“Whatever we may think about what science can say about love, I do love my family and friends and their welfare is important to me. I want them to be happy (indeed, my personal definition of ‘love’ in the ‘agape’ sense is ‘the state where the happiness of another becomes important or essential to your own’) and so I work to treat them well. I also believe that (at least) the vast majority of people are worthy of being loved, and one of the reasons I try to treat people well is because they might one day be someone I love. I explicitly noted the non-material advantages Stalin and Saddam forsook in their quests for power.”
*** This definition of “love” is so broad it means nothing special when applied to a husband/wife and a parent’s children. You’ve just described being a decent person when interacting with others, regardless of who they are, which is what the UMC is all about. You haven’t shown us how love can be quantified the way physical lust/attraction can, which was the point I made. Love is as real as the UMC, but science can no more quantify love than explain the UMC independent of God.
“Would Dr. Jackson like to live in a world where everyone rolled over and fired people for petty whims or political consideration? Would he like his loved ones to live in such a world?”
*** No. I wouldn’t want anyone to be treated that way, even the people I have great political differences with. The UMC says that every human being deserves the same basic treatment. That doesn’t mean I can’t disagree (at times vehemently) with others. But I’ve never tried to deliberately harm any political opponent of mine, and never would. I challenge their ideas, which is fair game, but I don’t violate the UMC’s dictates against deliberately harming an innocent human life by trying to get them fired, ruin their credit, etc.
“Moral action doesn’t always lead to optimal long-term results either, but most of the time – on average – in the general case – well, I think that’s the way to bet. And as Dr. Jackson pointed out in endnote 15, you never know how it might work to do so. Dr. Jackson’s good outcome in that other case, as he himself states, did not come from a suspension of natural law. I see it as natural laws working the way I’ve claimed they do.”
*** The problem is, you haven’t shown that natural laws give content to the moral code. Natural laws don’t produce universal “rights” and “wrongs”. The UMC operates within the physical world, and people may choose to ignore it or follow it according to their own perceived selfish or self-interests. But again, there is nothing in “natural” law that says slavery is immoral. But the UMC does say this.
“Even if moral action were only slightly more likely than not to lead to better long-term outcomes, it would still be an advantage that evolution could work on. Over thousands or millions of years, even very small advantages become significant. (Again, this is evolution responding to a real advantage in the real world, not evolution creating such an advantage.)”
*** Yes, I too believe that acting moral is better than immoral. But acting morally can get you killed or marginalized in a society. [Try following the UMC in China today regarding forced abortions]. Morality is not the product of evolutionary biology anymore than evolutionary biology defines the content of morality.
“Yes, doing the right thing can hurt, even kill. I’ve never been in the situation where I had to risk my life to save a stranger, but I like to think I would do so. I certainly want to live in a world where strangers would help me (or my loved ones) if I were in need, and I hope I’d be willing to do my part to make this that kind of world if the need arose.”
*** All of which means, as I said before, I think you’re a basically decent guy — because you are in touch with your God-given UMC. None of this comes from any of the natural or game-theory processes you described.
“BTW, Dr. Jackson, when I said you didn’t address the reason God instilled the UMC in us, I was talking about the question of: Why that specific moral code? Could God have picked a different one? If not, why not? I understand why you say a code was ‘instilled’. I was asking why that code and not some other one.”
*** One day we’ll all have a chance to ask God that very question. I presume it’s because this embodies what God has decided is just and good — concepts that God must define for us through the UMC because game theory, human consensus, societal influences, etc., cannot.
I work to account for the existence of that feeling [morality] without appealing to a God to instill it. Of course that won’t result in a morality ‘instilled by God’. But if we define morality in more common terms – something like ‘the principles that should govern how we relate to others’ – then it can result in ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’, ‘goods’ and ‘bads’… and even ‘right’ (in the sense of ‘correct’) and “wrong” (in the sense of ‘incorrect’).”
*** This is a great illustration of our differences. Not every issue is a moral issue. But, Mr. Ingles calculations recognize no difference between morally-neutral issues and issues involving morality. The way the human mind process information about pizza or fish for dinner is the same way they process information about abortion. For example:
“if we define morality in more common terms …”
*** This watered-down approach comes very close to equating morality with human consensus. What we do as a matter of life becomes moral by virtue of its prevalence, widespread-acceptance, etc. But slavery was once prevalent and widely accepted. This doesn’t make it moral.
“ … something like ‘the principles that should govern how we relate to others …’”
*** Who defines “should”? Other men (political leaders, philosophers, scientists, etc.)? Now we are dealing with human consensus = morality.
“… then it can result in ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’, …
*** You’ve just describes a legal system. You should not run red rights; you not abort a baby after X weeks; etc. Not every should/shouldn’t involves a moral issue. And when it does, it doesn’t matter what the law (as the embodiment of human consensus) says. The law permits elective abortions today, just as it permitted slavery in the 1800s. Neither action is therefore “moral” because it is legal.
“… ‘goods’ and ‘bads’… and even ‘right’ (in the sense of ‘correct’) and “wrong” (in the sense of ‘incorrect’).”
*** It is “correct” to say thank you after receiving a gift. This is not a moral issue, however. It is good to conserve water during a drought. This can be a legal issue if conservation is mandated, but it is not a moral issue. I may have the resources to water my lawn 24/7, keep every light in the house on, etc. Unless it’s illegal to do so, I can do it. This may offend a conservation’s sensibilities, but the actions in themselves are not either moral or immoral (though they may be good/bad, correct/incorrect by some other criterion).
“And as we’ve both noted, we come to broadly similar conclusions about what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, though we may understand the meanings of those terms differently.”
*** This is the point to ask a question that should help clarify our differences. I believe that slavery is immoral. You do to. I believe it is universally immoral because it violates the UMC. Why do you believe that slavery is immoral?
Specifically:
1. Is slavery always immoral, or can consensus/logic/etc. make it moral under certain conditions? And if so, which conditions?
2. If slavery is always immoral, what is the specific calculation that makes it universally immoral? I gave you mine: it violates the UMC that prohibits deliberately harming an innocent human life. Show me the logic that makes slavery universally immoral without invoking this God-given UMC?
I believe that you and I share similar conclusions about moral behaviors like slavery, aborting a child who is the product of rape or incest, etc., because you are influenced by the UMC (as all decent human beings are). Other than postulate a couple of coulds/mights, you’ve never shown how any of your judgments are universally possible. And if they are not universal judgments, then morality is just what we all want it to be at any given point — which describes human wants/desires, not “morality”.
“As to why that feeling is universal among humans – well, because they’re humans. All humans have wanted food, disliked pain, expected unsupported objects to fall, etc. And, as I’ve been trying to lay out, instincts like that are pretty much necessary for people to live as human beings.”
*** Doubletalk. Something isn’t good because it’s goodly. Something isn’t moral because its moral. The fact that a human needs food doesn’t make it moral to kill his neighbor and steal his food because he’s hungry. And before you tell me that such an action would violate rational human action, look at the class-warfare revolutions throughout history where just such actions were justified. Taking the most benign example, deposing the French monarchy is one thing to redistribute wealth and power. Killing the children of nobles in furtherance of this goal is another. The latter is clearly wrong according to the UMC. According to your logic, it could be “moral”.
Understanding the laws of gravity is a morally-neutral activity. Learning not to touch an open fire becomes instinctive once your hand gets burned (or your parents slap it to teach you not to touch the flame). None of these actions involve any moral calculation at all. They are simply parts of living life — and not every life action is a moral one (fish or chicken, blondes or brunettes, shoes or sandals, etc.)
“ But even more traditional morality such as you propose still invokes self-interest. It postulates extra-universal consequences (of some kind) and, as you say, ‘it’s better to obey a God-given UMC than violate it’. I can only presume you mean ‘better for you’ – as in, that it leads to the best long-term outcome from your point of view.”
*** Better for me personally in that since morality comes from God, and God created the universe, and when I die I don’t just vanish from existence but will face God who will judge how well I used the life he gave me. And better for the people I interact with, since being moral focuses energy on doing good thing, and since part of life is to interact with others and our surroundings, doing good things is always better than doing bad things. But Al Gore doesn’t tell me what doing “good” is, so I can still do good while rejecting his off the wall notions about global warming and working against the so-called solutions he offers. But God isn’t Al Gore, so when He tells me it’s wrong to practice elective abortions because it violates his UMC, I listen and obey.
“(What if God wants to find out who’s really selfless, and punishes those who do good? After all, only a really good person would do good even though they’d be punished for it…)”
*** Who knows? I’ll find out after I die, since that when the true consequences of my life on Earth will be felt. I don’t presume to know why God says I must do/not do X to live a moral life. I only know that according to God, I must do/not do X if I want to act morally. But I do have the free will to tell God to take a hike and do what I want regardless of the UMC. It’s a fool’s choice, but it is there.
As I said before, there’s a difference between knowing why I must do X to behave morally, and knowing that X is a moral behavior.
“I’m not trying to make fun of your position”
*** I know. This has been a good debate, None of my challenges should be interpreted this way either.
“I’m trying to illustrate that even traditional morality appeals to self-interest.”
*** Not aborting an unwanted child produced by rape or incest appeals to self-interest? Hardly? The problem, again, is that you can’t speak about a universal “morality” because your view doesn’t allow for it. It only allows for the outcome of human consensus, game theory logic., etc. to be called “moral” (or actually, “traditionally moral” as you said above), because in your view ‘morality is as morality does.’
“I have to assume that he means that a soul is ‘infused’ into a zygote at the moment of conception.”
*** That would be a logical assumption to me, as a general statement (which is exactly the kind of statement I made).
You went on to speak about identical twins (something my family has personal knowledge of). I don’t see how any of this negates what I said. We don’t need to get into a “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” argument to recognize the basic difference between a sperm, egg, and a fertilized egg. A fertilized human egg will not develop into a cow, or rabbit, or sea slug. Fertilization is the unique moment where a human life is created. The fact that a zygote doesn’t look like a 30 year old woman is no more significant to this discussion than the fact that a just-born female baby does/doesn’t look like a 50 year old woman.
There is only “confusion” about a human soul being infused at conception if one has a basic problem with the following notions:
1. There is a God
2. God created the Universe
3. God assigns human status; not other men.
I have no idea how God does precisely what he does, nor do I believe that man will ever be capable of knowing everything God knows. [I don’t know what a soul looks like, whether it’s a presence, an energy, a spiritual connection to God, or none of the above. It’s a shorthand way of saying that unlike animals, humans will “live on” after they shed their corporal body, instead of just cease to exist except for their recycled parts. That which makes each human a unique individual is embodied in their soul.]
This is part of the problem with Mr. Ingles’ analysis. He assumes that a soul is a measurable, physical entity (like a DNA component).
Since God defines what is/isn’t human (not human consensus or scientific analysis), and since a fertilized human egg is uniquely different from a single sperm and a single egg, this tells me all I really need to know. I can understand that humanity arises with human conception. Removing an egg and sperm to unite it outside the womb to start the development of a human being in a way that will not allow it to actually develop is not in keeping with the UMC.
Mr. Ingles problem is that he reject the notion that there is a God. Therefore, if man cannot explain it, it is not explainable. It’s why all his moral judgments are conditional (“traditional morality”, etc.)
I believe that we can say certain things about when a human becomes human without fully understanding exactly how God works out all the limited “exceptions” Mr. Ingles notes. This doesn’t fundamentally challenge my larger observation, anymore than me saying that because science can’t tell us everything about how subatomic particles behave, there is no quantum universe. [There may be, or there may not be; but not having 100% of the science down pat doesn’t automatically disqualify these theories.]
There’s a big difference between pointing to human conception as the moment when a human is created, and trying to explain why humanity is only bestowed upon a developing human-conceived zygote/embryo/fetus because some man-determined milestone has been reached. There’s more inherent logic in my view than any artificially-determined standard, since I can at least point to a unique event that justifies me looking at this event as a starting point. Other human-rationalized criterion require us to accept things like humanity only equals a functioning brain (of some sort or another), which leads to the problem areas I addressed in my response to Mr. Ingle.
Neither Mr. Ingles nor I can prove our case scientifically. But as I said before, science doesn’t always have all the answers. And excluding God as a possible source of this explanation will never allow such issues to be fully understood, because in some cases God may in fact be the “answer”.
As Mr. Ingles stated, “some moral quandaries have no easy answer.” This is not the same thing as saying that we can’t begin to zero in on what can help shape that answer, and what clearly will not.
Regarding your stock market example. Not every issue is a moral issue. Non-moral issues are evaluated differently than moral issues.
You also keep confusing God-given morality with religious teachings about morality (which may or may not represent the UMC): “Consider a Polynesian island girl clad only in a loincloth, an American teenager with a sensibly long skirt and covered cleavage, and an Iraqi girl in full burqa. Each intends to be, and believes they are, dressed modestly. I think modestly is an admirably principle (in some ways I’m glad to only have sons, and in other ways I fear for the temptations they’ll face growing up in the future fashion world) but the principle itself doesn’t specifically dictate a particular application.”
None of this has to do with the discussion of a God-given universal moral code. It has to do with religious teachings about morality, some of which are just human consensus, not reflections of the UMC.
“I will note, though, that situations can change. The Jewish dietary laws were quite sensible in many ways for the times they arose. Putting cheese with meat for any length of time, absent pasteurization and refrigeration, will swiftly result in rotten meat. However, this was extrapolated to the (so far as I can see) unfounded prohibition on having meat and cheese in the same meal. We should take such rules under careful advisement, certainly, but even Dr. Jackson agrees that specific pronouncements should also be taken with a grain or two of salt. “
*** Yeah, because it has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with a UMC! It has to do with following (or not following) a religion’s teachings.
Dr. Jackson, you’re right, not every action is a moral one. Again we’re talking past each other. I put up a definition of morality as “the principles that should govern how we relate to others” (and I meant ‘should’ in the sense I’ve been using it, “best in the long term”). If the action doesn’t involve “relating to others”, then it’s not a moral issue. Thinking beings are different from non-thinking beings. If I get angry at my rake and set fire to it, well, that’s wasteful and childish but it’s not “morally significant”. If I get angry at my child and set fire to them, though… that’s different. A rake can’t suffer harm, thinking beings can. (And, yeah, nothing I’ve said would imply that “killing the children of nobles” would be moral. If killing children isn’t ‘unnecessary harm’ I can’t think what would be. I can’t resist pointing out that even those of a very religious mindset haven’t always seen things that way, and I pointed out some prominent examples in my endnote 2.)
(And, btw, while they are not human and don’t have full human rights, I think we’d have to agree that animals can feel pain, and thus deserve some moral consideration. I assume you think the UMC would forbid cruelty to animals, right? A dog may not be a human, but neither is it a rake.)
As you note, there are strategic rules that govern all kinds of areas of life, actions that are in one’s best interest and actions that aren’t. Actions that don’t impact others are morally neutral – buying Enron stock might have been stupid but not immoral. But even an action that in most circumstances would be morally neutral can become a moral issue if it ends up involving others. If you’re spending grocery money on Enron stock and not feeding your children, it’s an issue – you clearly haven’t done your homework and it’s impacting others.
You ask, “Not aborting an unwanted child produced by rape or incest appeals to self-interest?” If you think you will “suffer consequences” from a God in an afterlife because of it – note that I was talking about “traditional morality” in the sense of ‘religiously-based’, I thought that was clear from context – then yes, not aborting such a child becomes a selfish act. Sure, you have some hardships in this life, but you avoid ‘consequences’ (or perhaps gain ‘rewards’) later.
How do I justify it from a standpoint of ‘intra-universal’ self-interest? First off, as I’ve noted, before the brain forms I would not forbid it. Women can detect pregnancy in the case of rape and incest before this. But after that, there (at least a good chance that) there’s a thinking human being in there, and, well, you made a decent case in your original essay that “life isn’t just what one individual experiences. It’s also how that individual’s life impacts others”. I note, reviewing that case you made, you appealed to a “positive impact” within this world. I see no reason to disagree with that.
You ask me if slavery is always immoral? Yes, under the ‘what if everyone did that’ kind of analysis, and also as a practical, historical ‘self-interest’ fact. The ancient Greeks had some impressive science for their day. They built things that showed that they could have built steam engines. But they didn’t, because their economy (and, indeed, regime) was based on slave labor. It couldn’t survive a sudden plunge in demand for labor, so no one worked in that direction. And so they missed out on starting the industrial revolution a few centuries early.
Slavery in the U.S. south led to similar economic dependence and stagnation. They simply couldn’t compete with the north on materiel and supplies. Only luck in having good Confederate commanders, and some serious blunders by Union generals (e.g. Antietam), let the war drag on as long as long as it did.
If communism actually worked, then it would be a morally superior system to capitalism. But the real-world fact that it doesn’t work (as history has shown too many times) makes attempts to impose it immoral – by now, certainly, people should know better. Even unfettered laissez-faire capitalism has moral issues (Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, anyone?) but overall, maximizing freedom works, and has been shown to work over basically all of human history – because cooperation for mutual benefit works better than slavery.
I will reiterate that you know your UMC from the feeling you have that some things are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We both agree that that feeling exists. You believe that feeling was instilled/infused from outside the universe, though you can’t really account for the details of the feelings – why some particular thing feels right.
I, however, assert that the feeling is the sum of instincts we humans have developed because they helped guide us to the best outcome on average. And I’ve pointed out real-world examples where such behaviors, and therefore such feelings, are advantageous.
You can point out cases where they aren’t advantageous. Sure, sometimes even a great-looking investment tanks, and people lose money on the stock market. But that doesn’t mean that doing your homework and carefully judging your bets, though it will inevitably fail at times, is still the way to bet.
BTW, Mr. Skurka, I’ve had my hands full taking care of my own life and trying to answer Dr. Jackson’s points, so I don’t have a lot of time to explain how I understand the complicated interactions between genetics and behavior, but you might get something out of this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
The link between how particular electrons flow in a few billion logic gates in a computer, and the keystrokes some human made on a keyboard years before while writing a computer program, which became electrical signals, and then magnetic pools on a hard drive, and then microscopic pits on a CD, and then reflected laser light, and then electrical signals, and then magnetic pools again, and then electrical signals in a CPU… well, it can get complicated. That doesn’t mean that it’s a “leap of faith” to assume that there is a connection, even a causal one. Just because a system is complicated doesn’t justify assuming that it’s magic.
It’s interesting, Dr. Jackson, that the UMC you propose makes so few specific prescriptions. Abortion, terrorism, slavery – those are forbidden. Dress codes, vegetarianism vs. hunting, etc. – those are just ‘consensus’. The UMC seems in your model to be a set of general principles; and in a few rare cases their application is particularly clear, but for the vast majority of human activity there’s plenty of room for disagreement. So you avoid the need to confront almost any specific cases.
But I’ve been continually hit with requests to justify this or that special case in detail. I think I’ve done pretty well, but I’d much rather focus on my overall point – I believe evolution provided us with instincts and general principles; in a few rare cases their application is particularly clear, but for the vast majority of human activity there’s plenty of room for disagreement. Some actions just feel ‘wrong’ or ‘right’. And they feel that way because, on average, such actions have been bad or good, foolish or wise, respectively, for people across history.
Yes, this doesn’t produce a divinely-sanctioned morality. I get that. But your primary evidence for this divinely-sanctioned morality was that feeling, and if it can be accounted for without recourse to metaphysical considerations, then you’ll need to come up with some other evidence if you want to convince people of the existence of that divine sanction.
Oh, and BTW, I didn’t assume “that a soul is a measurable, physical entity”. You were the one looking for objective moments where humanity began, and you proposed conception. And you argued that a soul was infused at that point.
I was merely pointing out that this led to problems. I didn’t propose that a soul was objectively measurable. I know that you don’t think it is. I was pointing out that using terms like ‘soul’ while saying that others are avoiding “objective analysis” is inconsistent.
I’m not sure that there is a sharp objective dividing line between ‘personhood’ and ‘not-personhood’. Does your family have personal knowledge of Alzheimers? Toward the end it’s hard to say that what’s left is the original person in any real sense, but there’s no particular day you can point to and say, “this is the day she died, though the body kept breathing”.
What’s the exact nanosecond ‘day’ becomes ‘night’? Is it when the sun dips past the horizon? Which part of the sun, the actual sphere or the corona too? What if even the corona dips below the horizon, but then a large solar plume pops up again?
I’m not sure these questions have a fully objective answer…
“I put up a definition of morality as ‘the principles that should govern how we relate to others’ (and I meant ’should’ in the sense I’ve been using it, ‘best in the long term’).
*** Exactly who says we “should”? Other men? Game Theory? Or God. The first two are examples of relative morality. The last is who gives us all a universal moral code.
“(And, btw, while they are not human and don’t have full human rights, I think we’d have to agree that animals can feel pain, and thus deserve some moral consideration.”
***Animals are not covered by the UMC which talks about not deliberately harming innocent human life. That doesn’t give us license to treat animals with deliberate cruelty (there are man-made laws against this). Even without man-made laws, treating animals without cruelty may be a byproduct of extending the logic of the UMC (I haven’t though much about animals and have no firm opinion on this). The problem is, we can debate endlessly whether killing an animal for food is cruel (cruel period, if done with a hammer blow to the head vs. electrocution, etc.). There’s no “universal answer” here. But no matter how humanely we abort a child who poses no risk to its mother’s life, or no matter how humanely we treat slaves, it’s still morally wrong.
“Actions that don’t impact others are morally neutral”
*** Actions that don’t impact the UMC are morally neutral. My preference for brunettes vs. blonds certainly “impacted” my decision to marry my wife. [All jokes aside --- and there could be an endless series here --- nothing intrinsic about this decision involved “not doing deliberate harm to an innocent human being”, which is the test of whether something is moral or immoral.]
“But even an action that in most circumstances would be morally neutral can become a moral issue if it ends up involving others. If you’re spending grocery money on Enron stock and not feeding your children, it’s an issue – you clearly haven’t done your homework and it’s impacting others.”
*** Correct, because you’ve now transformed a neutral act into one that impacts the provisions of the UMC.
“You ask, ‘Not aborting an unwanted child produced by rape or incest appeals to self-interest?’ If you think you will “suffer consequences” from a God in an afterlife because of it – note that I was talking about “traditional morality” in the sense of ‘religiously-based’, I thought that was clear from context – then yes, not aborting such a child becomes a selfish act. Sure, you have some hardships in this life, but you avoid ‘consequences’ (or perhaps gain ‘rewards’) later.”
*** I believe that my actions have consequences. I believe that the UMC tells me right from wrong, and will form a basis for God judging how I spent my time on earth. Having said this, I don’t measure every action I take out of fear of adverse consequences or expectations of future rewards. I just try to do the morally correct thing as often as I can because there are few (if any) other such certainties in life. I think it’s best for me, my family, and society as a whole to live by the UMC credo not to deliberately harm innocent human life, and this tends to guide how I treat other people. I’m not oblivious to the fact that it’s better to face God after death having done morally good things than morally bad ones, but I don’t even have an unconscious checklist of my past actions. In short, I’m not keeping score, I’m just trying to behave as morally as I can while working on my human frailties that can occasionally get in the way of doing what’s right, vs. what’s easy, convenient, or self-serving.
Finally, I recognize that acting morally isn’t just about me. When I act morally by not aborting an unwanted child (not doing it in my family, or raising the issue publicly as I have in the hope of influencing others who see things less clearly), I know that this action not only benefits me by helping me choose the morally-correct path, but it helps the non-aborted child too by keeping it from being aborted.
“First off, as I’ve noted, before the brain forms I would not forbid it. Women can detect pregnancy in the case of rape and incest before this. But after that, there (at least a good chance that) there’s a thinking human being in there … ”
*** To quote from one of my favorite movies (My Cousin Vinny), “that is a logical, cogent, well presented argument. Overruled.” You’ve just explained what “you” would/would not forbid. Convince enough people, and you have the basis for morality by human consensus. Unfortunately, this is not “universal morality”. When the consensus changes, the morality will change. Universal morality is unchanging.
“You ask me if slavery is always immoral? Yes, under the ‘what if everyone did that’ kind of analysis, and also as a practical, historical ’self-interest’ fact.”
*** Your main problem with the immorality of slavery is not that it’s fundamentally immoral, but that it’s impractical in the long run. As I’ve always maintained, you judge morality by outcome (“success”). “If communism actually worked, then it would be a morally superior system to capitalism.” So, if abortion continues as a practice for another few decades or perhaps centuries, it will become de facto-moral because it’s still functioning within some societies? Again, despite all you’ve written, you can’t escape returning to a belief that morality = consensus (with a dash of practicality/success thrown in for good measure).
Your ‘what if everyone did it’ logic also fails. If everyone aborted a baby before their brain stem was formed, then there would be no more babies. So, even though a baby is just a zygote, we should let it live, because if everyone let their zygotes die, there would be no more people. Morality is not outcome-based. It’s either moral to abort a zygote, or it’s not.
“you can’t really account for the details of the feelings – why some particular thing feels right.”
*** Of course I can! I’ve said so repeatedly. If there is a God (which you reject), who created the Universe (which you do not believe he created) and who, because He’s God gave us the UMC to know right from wrong, I understand why accessing these universal moral codes will make me feel good for doing something good, and bad for doing something bad. God gives us the broad template to help us make our day-day decisions. You reject the existence of God, which is why you can never believe that God has anything to do with morality.
Your notion of morality is highly transient and conditional. Therefore, you keep talking about “advantages” without ever once telling us what a universal advantage is. You speak about personal advantages, and at times allude to advantages that make more sense in a western culture than a non-western culture, but ask 100 people to define your terms and you’ll get 100 personal answers.
If morality is nothing more than what people want it to be, or agree that it is this year, or make it equal to “advantages” where everyone has a different definition of advantageous, then the word means nothing.
You’re better off arguing that there is no morality than all these things are examples of morality. In fact, that is your real thesis. The only way everything you say holds together is to say “there is no morality, just human behavior,” rather than to say human behavior leads to morality. It’s still wrong, but at least your position is now understandable.
I don’t say this with rancor, just to be descriptive. You are a moral relativist who believes that only human beings (not God — and God is not the same thing as “religion”) should judge the appropriateness of other human beings’ actions. And further, only human beings should define who is a fellow human being. Actions that man approves of are moral; actions he opposes are immoral, and where a conflict exists you let society and social evolution sort it out until one position prevails. That position is then declared “moral”.
“It’s interesting, Dr. Jackson, that the UMC you propose makes so few specific prescriptions. Abortion, terrorism, slavery – those are forbidden. Dress codes, vegetarianism vs. hunting, etc. – those are just ‘consensus’. The UMC seems in your model to be a set of general principles; and in a few rare cases their application is particularly clear, but for the vast majority of human activity there’s plenty of room for disagreement. So you avoid the need to confront almost any specific cases.”
*** Breaking a person’s arm for spite (rather than killing them) is against the UMC. Stealing money also harms someone by robbing them of their possessions. Making a 10 year old boy (or retarded person) stand trial and be subject to the same penalties as an adult violates the UMC (it denies their innocence relative to the action). There are thousands of other examples that would logically flow from “it is immoral to deliberately harm an innocent human being”, where I talked about harm in my original paper. I just chose abortion, slavery and raping and killing a 5 year old child because even moral relativists can see that these acts are immoral, just to help speed the conversation.
“Dress codes, vegetarianism vs. hunting, etc.” are just ‘consensus’. Some may involve religious issues (which is not the same as the UMC).
To think that God has to instill a software program in all of us that will list specific items for every period of human history to cross-check for morality is silly. As I’ve shown, it only takes a few words to get the basic concept of right and wrong across in a way that lets us all apply those principles to living our lives. And it’s no mystery that God — since He is God — could and would give us the guidepost we need in such a simple, elegant way.
“I didn’t assume ‘that a soul is a measurable, physical entity’.
*** Good. That’s why I found most of what you wrote off the mark. You actually hit on the issue pretty well when you said “What’s the exact nanosecond ‘day’ becomes ‘night’? Is it when the sun dips past the horizon? Which part of the sun, the actual sphere or the corona too? What if even the corona dips below the horizon, but then a large solar plume pops up again?”
We might quibble about whether “night” begins at one nanosecond or another, but we all recognize fundamentally that we’re speaking about something that is “not day”. The problem with arbitrarily setting a criterion for designating human/non human status once conception takes place is that it’s all just conjecture, opinion and personal rationalization. There’s nothing fundamental about those cut offs, the same way a human egg is fundamentally transformed once it’s fertilized. To use your analogy, once the sun has set, we’re talking about how dark it is — not whether it’s not really dark at all. Once a human egg is fertilized, we all talking about what stage of development the child is in, not whether it’s a goat, or a tree, or human on Wednesday at midnight but not human on Tuesday at 11:59pm.
Here’s the key disagreement: “Exactly who says we ‘should’? Other men? Game Theory? Or God. The first two are examples of relative morality. The last is who gives us all a universal moral code.”
It’s true that a game-theory-based morality is relative. But… it’s relative to the laws of the universe. In the Theory of Relativity speeds are relative to the speed of light… which is fixed. (I’m expressing mathematical concepts in English; if you want the full details – “in vacuum, popular press accounts of ‘slow light’ are misleading, etc.” – email me.)
Let’s assume that there’s something about humans that makes them human – i.e. we’ll assume that there’s something valid about classifying people as ‘human’ rather than something else. And let’s further assume that there are in fact predictable regularities about the environment humans exist in. This inevitably, by logic, has implications for how they should behave in order to carry out their desires.
If you want to keep living, you can’t go jumping off cliffs on a regular basis. There’s nothing ‘relative’ about that – in the pejorative sense you’re using the term – despite the fact that people occasionally do survive such things. Similarly, harming others without need almost always ends up coming back to bite you, later. And there’s nothing ‘relative’ about that, either.
You’re using definition B-1 from this link when I’m using B-2, which is the core of our disagreement, I think: http://www.wordreference.com/definition/relative
And, finally, please stop saying I “reject God”. I’ve been very careful through this whole debate to not do so, quite explicitly. What I have said, repeatedly and clearly, is that the case that was made for the UMC coming (miraculously) from God was lacking. (There’s still room for ‘theistic evolution’, God arranging things so that evolution would produce the (divinely) desired result.)
I did not state that meant there was no God. All that I said was that a non-miraculous alternative accounted for the ‘moral instinct’ just as well, so far as I can see. I explicitly volunteered that, even within the game-theory framework, there were still possible roles for divine authority and intervention and so forth, and laid out some of them. I really can’t imagine how much further backward I need to bend.
Can you concede that there is a difference between “rejecting God” and “not accepting that God is unequivocally demonstrated by this specific argument”?
Raymond Ingles
Know what you mean, things can get hectic when you are multi-tasking. Considering your reply, I’d make a few observations. First, your computer example shows a factually descriptive cause and effect relationship relative to how computers operate – you could easily have included much more detail but probably refrained for the sake of brevity.
But, the inherent difference I see lies between all the rich detail you could provide describing how computers work contrasted with the lack of detail you can provide describing how genes determine behavior. My objections relate specifically to this lack of rich detail. Nor can any scientist I’m aware of (and I keep up on the advances within the field) provide specific and proven empirics on genetic predisposition to certain behaviors. Without such detail, the genetic/behavior link is merely an intuitive inference.
How would you personally view a different intuitive inference? Say one where computers will become self-aware, they will “evolve” to a separate and distinct form of intelligence, there are “ghosts” in the machine and computers may some day develop a “soul”? These are popular themes in Hollywood and where do we draw the line between what’s fantasy and what’s reality when we make inferences on where computers are going or, more importantly, what computers are capable of eventually? I can’t do more than laugh at speculations that computers will eventually become self-aware and develop some form of inherent intelligence.
Why laugh? Because such a speculation flows solely from our human propensity to anthropomorphize computers; ultimately they are merely machines, and ultimately they will remain mere machines. But, there is nothing to stop us from speculating such a feat is possible (and perhaps everything to encourage us). Computers are complex machines, they appear to have intelligence, they have developed technologically over time, almost evolved you might say, and appear to continue to evolve. So why can’t I just go along and make a leap of faith – primarily, it’s because our understanding of the nature of physical reality doesn’t allow machines to become self-aware with a separate and maintainable intelligence. And this understanding is based on a rich detail of factual knowledge relative to how machines operate within our physical reality. It would require a “leap of faith” to abandon such knowledge and assume such a change will somehow be possible “in the future”.
And this “in the future” promise is another trump card played by speculative philosophers. We don’t know all the details now, but with further advances in science, we will someday – so we grant ourselves a license to speculate. But, this proposition isn’t scientific either; we can’t prove through the scientific method that such an advance in knowledge must or will occur – another “leap of faith” is required on our part here. Basically, I can’t see any difference between the speculative fantasies of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and the Hollywood fantasy of a human cyborg called a Terminator. The pattern here is revealing, speculate freely claiming a scientific basis, assume science will somehow verify your speculation “in the future” and disregard current empirics and conclusions based on empirics when necessary.
Another observation is that your choice of a computer as an example of a complex system illustrates a system intelligently designed with goals and a purpose. If it’s meant to represent evolution and claims by evolutionary psychology, it fails for precisely those reasons. Orthodox evolution theory emphatically denies biological life was designed and insists our present state was achieved through accident; our physical attributes must somehow contribute to survival or we wouldn’t be here – there was no intentional design and evolution doesn’t work toward a preconceived goal.
The biggest hurdle evolutionary psychology must overcome among the general public is this widespread observation that biological life is complex and appears to have been designed – it didn’t just happen by accident. Some scientists and philosophers have compared life forms to complex products of design such as Chevy Corvettes or 747’s. Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” remarks on how life appears to be designed but in reality isn’t. Even Charles Darwin rhapsodized over the appearance of design in the first edition of “Origin of Species” – he then realized he had gone too far and qualified his “appears designed” statement in later editions.
The complexity of life has been an intellectual curse to those who insist life is solely a product of random chance and strictly physical laws. How to acknowledge incredible complexity without explaining specifically how this complexity came about by accident? As I noted above, your computer example attempts to rationalize biological complexity without acknowledging the analogous relation to a designed process.
Another observation concerns eugenics and its history as related to undisciplined scientific speculation. Only a few short years ago my home state of California acknowledged and apologized for the 20,000 forced sterilizations performed on its citizens – and California was only one of more than 20 states that performed such legally sanctioned sterilizations. In the early part of the 20th century, scientists through incredible arrogance mistook their tiny store of knowledge about biological development for the unsupported notion they had unlocked the secrets of life and subsequently became determined to use this knowledge to improve the human race.
The public isn’t generally aware that Hunter’s textbook “A Civic Biology” of Scopes Monkey Trial fame casually advocated eugenic measures be taken to eliminate the “poor”, alcoholics, mental defectives, sexually promiscuous women, etc. Clarence Darrow’s defense of free scientific inquiry in Dayton Tennessee was actually a defense of eugenics. More importantly, nothing has changed since the 1920’s – scientists still believe as they did in those days – they’re just more circumspect at expressing such opinions.
Science as represented by the professional journals and scientific societies never repudiated eugenics. How could they? Repudiating eugenics meant abandoning evolution as a theory and that was unthinkable. Flowing logically from evolution theory, eugenics is alive and well today in speculative constructions like Pete Singer’s “rape” gene or “infanticide” gene. Eugenics only fell out of favor after WWII when the public got a close look at how Hitler and Stalin applied evolution theory in the field.
Nazi Germany initially eliminated the mentally ill confined within mental institutions, not the Jews, under its Master Race concept. Eventually, Jews and Slavs as well as other classes of so-called “sub-humans” were systematically eliminated in a quest to improve the race. How could the Germans, expert at making toys to delight children and lovers of dogs, accept such arrogant nonsense as logical and moral? Not all Germans did, but the siren call of Master Race notions has never been completely rooted from beliefs derived directly from “science”.
Slowly, eugenics began to fade from public school textbooks and by the late 50’s it was gone. But, not because scientific discoveries overturned eugenic concepts, rather because scientists feared the loss of their cultural prestige by continuing to support an idea the public linked with Hitler and the crematoriums. To be sure, science eventually expressed regret over eugenics and refused to publicly support it any longer. But, evolution theory drives eugenics and while the movement died, the concept never did – it just went into hiding only to emerge again when science unlocked the existence of DNA.
Now it’s back stronger than ever, but with promises of disease free immortality through genetic engineering. The arrogance that drives scientists and relativist philosophers to engage in science based speculations may ultimately prove more hazardous to our well-being than a world full of Islamic fundamentalists.
“You’re using definition B-1 from this link when I’m using B-2, which is the core of our disagreement, I think.”
Let me put it this way. I believe that morality is a universal truth that is not the result of human consensus, game theory, societal influences, genetics, etc. It’s the same for all people, everywhere, in all periods of time. I’ve given examples of this universal moral code both abstractly (“it is immoral to deliberately harm an innocent human life”), and concretely through examples that transcend different times, human consensus, biology, and societal influences. I further contend that because of this, the only way to account for this universal moral code is to look to God as its source.
You maintain that something other than God explains morality. You cite human processes and game theories, etc. to show how people arrive at a decision. You assign value-laden terms to these decisions {such as “advantageous”) which are not universal concepts, but merely reflect the thinking of certain people and societies. You equate the persistence of an action (it’s “success”) with its morality. Your approach cannot account for the content of morality other than to look at outcomes and say X is moral because X is what people think, what people do, is how people behave, etc. This is not a universal notion of morality. It’s a relative notion of morality. It will change as societies change, as new people voice their personal opinions, etc.
You keep talking about morality as if it is the same kind of thing as the law of gravity or the speed of light. These are aspects of the physical world governed by the laws of physics. Falling off a cliff is neither moral nor immoral. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is neither moral nor immoral. The concept doesn’t apply to them. It’s like asking whether a vacuum is “pretty”, or a falling apple is “good”.
“And, finally, please stop saying I ‘reject God’. I’ve been very careful through this whole debate to not do so, quite explicitly. … Can you concede that there is a difference between “rejecting God” and “not accepting that God is unequivocally demonstrated by this specific argument”?
*** I do recognize the difference, and I concede that you have not made these direct statements in your essay. But that’s not my point. I don’t believe that space aliens really exist, and therefore would never consider an explanation for the Kennedy Assassination that involves space aliens. That is my bias. Nothing anyone ever says will convince me to include space aliens in my Kennedy assassination hypothesis.
You have approached the subject of human morality by examining possible scientific explanations for it. You don’t believe that God exists, and therefore nothing I say in answer to your questions will ever convince you that God may provide an explanation. [On your website you say the following: “I am generally what is called on the USENET newsgroup alt.atheism a 'weak atheist'. That is to say, lacking any convincing evidence, I don't believe in God(s). In general, I take the position of not(believe(God)).”] You may be a weak atheist, but you are an atheist, which means that you don’t believe in God. If you don’t believe in God, God can never be seen as a valid explanation for any event, regardless of whatever evidence I assemble.
On the other hand, I’m willing to concede that God is not the source of the UMC if someone can show me how I’ve erred in either (a) asserting that there is a UMC, (b) erred in giving practical, universal examples of the UMC, and/or (c) can account for a&b without any mention of a direct role by God. This wouldn’t disprove the existence of God, but it would show that God is not directly responsible for the UMC.
I have no problem believing that the moon was created by natural forces, that fire can be explained scientifically (rather than “miraculously”), and that fertilized eggs produce babies rather than spontaneous generation. I can appreciate that God created the universe and all the laws of biology and physics within it, and look to those laws/processes for the “how-to” details. None of this denies God’s existence; it just means that God doesn’t have to do something directly in that regard. But saying this doesn’t mean that God cannot directly give us our souls, and fill those souls with a UMC to help us understand how we should live our lives.
This is my point: that you would never consider God to be an explanation under any circumstance because you don’t believe in God in the first place. This is why your reasoning takes the course it does. It’s why even now you have to characterize any explanation that God would give us our UMC as a “miracle”, which implies that God violates the laws of nature he created to somehow act like the mythical gods of Mount Olympus. Not only can you not accept that God may be the answer to how we all come to possess a UMC, you can’t even rephrase what I say without equating God with some mythical human superstition. This doesn’t make you a bad person — on the contrary, you’ve been very decent throughout this debate, as I hope I have toward you even when I’m being somewhat direct. But it does explain why your logic and reasoning takes the course it does, and why you cannot accept the basis for anything I say. If God is a myth, then you must look for answers elsewhere, regardless of what I say.
This extended passage from my original essay speaks to this point. [Again, nothing personal!]
I can’t make a case that Apollo 10 should have been given the green light to land on the moon instead of making one final practice run in advance of Apollo 11, if the guy I’m talking to is convinced the whole moon landing thing was a hoax. If an atheist believes that nothing created the universe, and we cease to exist on any level once we die, then we have no common ground for a discussion. He believes that the contents of my cat’s litter box has the same intrinsic value as he. They both exist as the result of a natural process, and will both degrade back into their base elements at some future point in time. Neither has any inherent value in its own right (i.e., a soul), though each does possess a set of different characteristics. The turd can’t talk, but the atheist can spout sh*t, and that’s really the only thing that separates them when you look at this on a cosmic level. Since the universe created itself, and man grew out of that creation, there is no role for God. If there is no God, then there is no morality independent of what man himself creates.
I’m convinced that most atheists arrive at the conclusion that there is no God by confusing the concept of God with the practice of a specific religion. If you don’t believe in the Holy Trinity, or that Jesus was the literal Son of God, then God literally doesn’t exist. If all this Messiah business and the prohibition against eating pork is a bit too much for you to swallow, then God must not exist. Or perhaps you think that Allah isn’t everything he’s cracked up to be? Then you hope to God that you’re living in the U.S.A. instead of the Middle East so you can become an atheist, instead of becoming dead.
But like the previous illustrations of hypocrisy and morality, we’ve got to keep our eye on the prize instead of being dazzled by all the twinkling lights. In the final analysis it doesn’t make any difference if we “guessed” right about Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, the chubby little oriental guy the Dali Lama worships, or his lady friend with those waving arms and hands over there in India. God either exists or he doesn’t, regardless of whether any individual religion got the details right or wrong. The fact that the vast majority of Americans think that “alienation” is a foreign country does not mean that Karl Marx never existed, or that he starred in a movie with James Caan a few years back. The same is true of science and God. The fact that science is improving our understanding of how things work on earth and throughout the universe doesn’t mean that “figuring something out” must automatically translate into “God doesn’t exist.”
In this respect, I’ve always marveled at the people on both sides of the question who reject or reinforce their belief in God based on the debate over human evolution. Let’s say scientists in 2006 revamp a theory they used to explain the mechanics of evolution in 1976, which modified a theory from 1946, which replaced a theory from 1926, and so on, and so on. Science “really doesn’t know,” so the Biblical story of Creation must be literally true; or at the very least, while plants and animals evolved over time, man was somehow exempt from these same natural forces. On the other side are those individuals who, having discovered the secrets of DNA, understood the dynamics of plate tectonics, and have seen evidence of what they believe is physical change in the human species over time, automatically must deny the existence of God. If man can understand it and, in certain cases replicate it, then that’s all there is to it.
I find both extremes equally ridiculous. I know next to nothing about cars. However, if I came across a disassembled one and, with some trial and error, was able to piece it together so as to understand the fundamental relationships of its constituent parts, it wouldn’t deny the existence of General Motors. So I figured it out? And even though I still don’t know what that little piece over there really does, I can start the thing and make it run. I can even make predictions about its operation and functioning that are proven true, like an empty gas tank mean ‘it won’t go no mo.’ We call this knowledge. The fact that I understand something doesn’t make me its creator. It just makes me wiser.
Where atheist-scientists really get hung up is over the notion of random vs. purposeful actions. God doesn’t exist because, having figured out how things work to a certain extent, we can see that one cause produces another effect. There is no magical interference by an other-world entity, just random actions occurring within specifically defined laws of nature. Leaving aside the question for a moment of who, exactly, created those natural laws, the fact that I see something as random doesn’t necessarily mean that it is random.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I built a perpetual motion pool table sitting on top of a recurring earthquake fault. The colliding balls go bouncing around this table in a complex, but somewhat predictable manner that, with patience and the help of a supercomputer, can be discerned. But every time the table randomly shakes it upsets the old pattern and a new one emerges that has to be reanalyzed to be understood. Since we don’t know when the random shaking will occur, we can’t really make anything other than some precise short-term predictions and a few general long-term ones. In short, we understand the actions of these balls through the laws of nature that operate in a random environment, limiting overall predictability while still allowing fact-based conclusions to be drawn. This is the world without God; lawful, predictable and explainable to a point, but ultimately random.
Except for one tiny detail that wasn’t explained. Who set the balls in motion? Why can’t God create a universe with immutable laws of physics, start things in motion, then sit back and not interfere? To some people, the progress of the universe may seem random. Maybe it really is after things got started. Then again, maybe it is developing according to a pre-set plan our human minds are incapable of grasping.
I’m sure if you asked a two-year old to explain why daddy does the things he does, they’d either not understand at all, or think daddy’s actions are arbitrary or random. “Hmmm, daddy dresses with this funny thing around his neck Monday through Friday, but not Saturday or Sunday. But now he wears an open shirt every day (summer casual). Now he’s back to the thing around his neck, but not on Fridays (Friday casual), but not this Friday (a board meeting so he’s in a suit), and he’s not wearing one on Monday (a holiday). And now he wears them every Monday through Friday even in the summer (new management), but now he’s not wearing it at all (a vacation), and now he’s wearing one on Sunday (a funeral).” Would the child see a pattern, or understand any of the underlying dynamics of the father’s actions? No. The actions would appear to be completely random, just like it does to a human being who tries to think exactly like God. There are some things you can “get,” and other things your human mind will never be able to truly understand.
For those of you who really want to explore this topic, I strongly suggest a book by my fiction-writing partner Roy Abraham Varghese. In The Wonder of the World, Roy shows how the notion of an infinitely intelligent mind grounding the universe is not only compatible with, but presupposed by science. Consequently, you don’t have to reject the existence of God because you reject a literal belief in a Garden of Eden or other so-called “creationist” dogma.
I inadvertantly left off this sentence to my post on the term “relative”, which I use to refer to relativist thought: “the philosophical doctrine that all criteria of judgment are relative to the individuals and situations involved.”
In this sense, relative morality is the opposite of universal moral truths. Hope that clears up any lingering confusion.
Pat Skurka, thanks for comment 71 a real gem
I read out loud the comment from Ingles about the 286 having created new ideas from thin air. We laughed out loud. I have been in computers since switches set the ones and zeros.
I think we should settle the evolution argument by performing an experiment. I think we should take all of the basic elements of life and place them in sealed sterile containers. In order to speed up the experiment we should make billions of these containers. In short order we should see new life self generate in some of these containers. With hundreds of billions of these experiments going for decades, we should, if evolution is correct, come up with new life. And to speed things up we would place proteins and aminoacids in the containers. Of course I am refering to all canned and bottled foods from over the last hundred years. The fact that evolution is not true gives us confidence that the food inside the container is the same as when it was sterilized. I bring this up because we need to be creative when testing the past. Since time travel is not possible we must devise an experiment to test the past or be real precise in looking at the traces of the past left in stone.
We should look at the Bible as a historical document that shows a version of the UMC. Using this document that spans thousands of years we could see if the moral codes in its pages evolved. What I see is that forty writers over a couple of thousand years maintained a consistant UMC. The world around them changed and nations did rise and fall. What would drive these writers to consistantly maintain a UMC.
Dr. Jackson: “Before impugning an opponent’s motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.” – Sydney Hook
Just because I am an atheist does not mean that every argument I make is an atheistic one. By that logic, your points about abortion could be dismissed since ‘you are a male and could never understand pregnancy’. I do not appeal to atheism at any point in my case, and trying to dismiss it on that basis…well, I’m reluctant to accuse you of ad hominem, but I’m having difficulty seeing it any other way.
For example, you really seem to engage in the stereotype that just because I don’t accept that the existence of a God has been demonstrated, that means I could never under any circumstances be persuaded of it. In the bit of my site you quoted, you’ll note the “lacking any convincing evidence” part… that’s significant.
For example, like you I don’t think that space aliens have been shown to exist. Unlike you, that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t accept aliens as an explanation “under any circumstance”. I’m not impressed by supposed UFO sightings. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found evidence of life on other planets around other stars, but if they did come here, they wouldn’t behave the way the ‘space alien’ nuts claim they have. If they’ve got the tech to travel between stars, they can dang well pick up radio waves. They could gather plenty of information about the civilized areas of Earth without coming anywhere near us. We’d expect a lot more ‘sightings’ in the less developed areas of the world, but oddly enough, we see the opposite, where there’s a cult of true believers. And that’s just one of many problems.
However, there are things that would convince me that aliens were probably present. If we picked up radio signals from outside the solar system that counted off prime numbers, that would be nearly certain proof. If someone wanted to claim they were in contact with an advanced race, as a first step I’d ask them to factor a 4096-bit number. Easy to check, Very Hard to do. (Our current record is a 1017-bit number, and that took eleven months on many advanced computers. Each bit roughly doubles the difficulty…) Anything that could do that is way past where any human or government is now. (Actually, that’d be a good way to test prophets, too… at least we’d be sure something unusual was going on.)
We don’t have that kind of evidence right now, so like you I find explanations that involve aliens… unlikely. Similarly, I find explanations that involve God unlikely. That does not mean that there’s no circumstances where I would find God a likely explanation. As you say, if physical explanations can’t account for a phenomena, then you’d have to look elsewhere. The problem is, the “UMC” doesn’t seem to be a case of that, and I’ve explained why in detail.
This whole debate reminds me a bit of the ‘luminiferous aether’ controversy at the turn of the last century. Light’s a wave, right? And a wave needs a medium to propagate in, right? So there simply must be the aether, that light travels within. Except that it ran into problems, and other explanations covered the same data without the same problems. There were scientists who didn’t accept it, though – “how could a wave propagate without a medium”? (Go read the history of the paradigm on Wikipedia.)
You essentially ask, “how could there be rules without a Rulegiver”? I’ve laid out a case for that. (Though there’s still room to believe that a Rulegiver laid down the physical laws that the ‘meta-rules’ derive from. I reserve judgement on that, we just don’t know.) And, as in the ‘identical twins’ example, I think your model runs into complications that mine doesn’t.
Yes, my model doesn’t have transcendent, extra-universal morals. But it accounts for the data that you presented, and the data that I presented, without needing them (the same way Relativity explained a whole host of data without appealing to an aether). It’s possible that transcendent morals still do exist – I never said they were ruled out – but your argument doesn’t establish that. I think you’ll need another argument.
It’s possible that the universe “is developing according to a pre-set plan our human minds are incapable of grasping”. But that proposition is, by definition, totally unfalsifiable. There is literally nothing – “never… under any circumstance” – that could count against it. (If you disagree, provide an example of something that’d disprove it.) That really is the kind of thinking that you accuse me of engaging in.
I really think we’ve reached the limit of useful discussion now. We’re still talking past each other, in our different paradigms. By definition there’s nothing I can present that would disprove your model. There are things that’d disprove my model, but they don’t seem to be in evidence. I guess we’ll have to leave it at that.
Mr. Skurka, I freely concede that we are still in early days understanding neurology and genetics. But I believe you are committing what we can call “Haldane’s Error” from my original paper. “Because we haven’t figured something complicated out at the moment, it must have a mystical explanation.” I simply use the standard of evidence Dr. Jackson set, that the “leap of faith” to metaphysical explanations is a last resort when physical ones are exhausted, not a first resort.
It’s not really related to this discussion, and I’ve typed plenty the last few days, so I’m not really enthusiastic about tackling a whole new subject. If you want to know why I think it plausible – even very likely, given the evidence I’ve seen – that humans are indeed ‘machines’ (though I see nothing ‘mere’ about them), you can read the books I recommended, or at least visit the link on my website from comment 48 where I’ve discussed it in detail. (Doesn’t look like anyone’s bothered.)
(Just as an aside, professional journals and such never “repudiated” eugenics because they’d never “pudiated” it in the first place. I find it rather disingenuous that you’d bring that up when I devoted quite a bit of space in my essay to explaining why actual evolutionary science is against eugenics. The eugenics types were just as wrong (and unsupported by the actual science) as the Social Darwinist types.)
And fbaginski, since you’re familiar with computers, you’ll therefore have no trouble actually downloading and running the evolution simulator I wrote. I guarantee it’ll work for you – it’s in vanilla ANSI C and should run on practically anything. I’ve tested it on multiple flavors of Unix, OpenVMS, Minix, and Windows – it’s even 64-bit clean. It took weeks of running on a 286 (and btw, I was wrong – it only had 1MB RAM) to get some of the results I mentioned, on a modern machine you should be able to duplicate them in a few hours. (The whole program, data and all, should fit in the L1 cache of any modern CPU.)
If you don’t have a C compiler, there are plenty of free ones out there, even Microsoft has one. It’s less than 7,000 lines of source code, easily analyzed. There are a few things I’m not that proud of, but I was somewhat inexperienced when I wrote it. There’s plenty of documentation (see especially the file “INTRO” in the “doc” directory where I describe the system and the results I alluded to).
It’s based on Tierra. Anyone curious should look up Tierra and Avida – very interesting and suggestive.
I really don’t have time to keep this up further. I was up late last night settling down our five-week-old, and I have work to do. If you’ve got specific questions, feel free to email me, but I don’t think I’ll be checking this site regularly for a while. It’s been interesting…
Raymond:
I think we are talking past each other at this point. I wasn’t impugning your motives. I was describing the consequences of how you’ve approached this debate when the subject of a God-based morality arose. I never said you were a bad person or dishonest; I simply showed why nothing I say will ever convince you if God is part of the explanation.
At worst, I’ve accused you of being inconsistent in the standards you set for accepting a “proof”. You’re prepared to accept the fact that love exists, even though you concede there is no scientific proof at the present time that there really is such a thing as love. Love cannot be measured, quantified, or objectively defined to clearly distinguish it from other human emotions, the way lust/sexual arousal can be quantified. God cannot be proven scientifically either, but unlike your belief that love exists, you won’t apply the same standard to a belief that God exists. Before you will accept God as an explanation for any phenomenon you must have a tangible, physical-world of proof that He exists — touch Him, actually observe Him, measure Him, or speak directly with Him. Defining God as that which created the Universe requires none of this. I don’t have to visit Detroit (or even know there is a Detroit) to know that the car I drive didn’t just appear one day out of thin air. Something had to create it, just like something (God) had to create the universe. If we can’t even agree that this “something” suggests that God exists, then nothing I ever say will convince you.
I, on the other hand, am open to having you explain why slavery is universally immoral, why raping and murdering a 5 year old child is always immoral, and why abortion is always immoral (at least after the first 30 days where your view finally coincides with mine), without invoking a God-given UMC. You’ve done none of this with your argument. In fact, you’ve done precisely the opposite. You’ve argued that morality is linked to success/outcome. Your concept of morality is indistinguishable from human consensus. Human consensus changes over time, therefore your vision of morality changes over time. This is not “morality”; it’s just a decision. Like I said before, you’d have been much better off arguing that morality does not exist than to claim that your framework defines “morality”. You’d still be wrong, but at least your argument would be less confused.
The reason your argument fails is that your model does not account for the data I presented. As I took pains to illustrate in my formal reply, you assume that things like “advantageous” mean something concrete. This is a value-laden term that can (and DOES!) mean different things to different people. Saying that human cooperation/interaction produces “advantages” (where the definition of what is an advantage is not a universal concept), and then equating advantage with morality, is meaningless. Your discussion of morality confuses the outcome of the human thought process and human interactions with something that is intrinsically moral. Your definition of morality is relativistic, not universal and transcendent as mine was. And I provided examples to back up my real-world definition.
I appreciate the professional way you’ve approached this debate, and I don’t want any of my criticisms of your approach to be interpreted as a personal judgment. You’ve already demonstrated that for the most part you adhere to the same UMC that I and everyone else does, which is the main thing that matters. I don’t share the same exact religious beliefs that others who have contributed to this (and other) comment sections have, but as I said before, my discussion of a UMC does not require one to believe in a single religious philosophy. To reiterate what I wrote in my original essay:
As passionate as Christians are in their belief that they “got it right” in nailing the details of religion, there’s a bunch of other different religions out there too. And what about their concept of God? Aren’t their points of view equally valid?
I’m not going to get drawn into this conversation for two reasons.
First, it’s another Relativistic trap. Even though I write Catholic fiction with my partner Roy Varghese, I write a lot of other things too, none of which have to do with the tenets of the Catholic faith. So be careful in this matter or any other of making a logical, but incorrect assumption. Just because I sound like you, and think like you, doesn’t mean I’m really anything like you. I may be in part, or in whole. But I may not. Just because I can conduct myself in a respectful, professional manner, doesn’t mean I can’t cuss a blue streak in private that will make a sailor blush. That goes too for how I practice the tenets of my Faith. Whether I attend Church every Sunday, only at Christmas and Easter, or never at all has nothing to do with whether the logic of what I’ve been saying stands or falls on its own merit. Focus on the message and the logic that supports it, not necessarily the messenger.
And second, while “God” and “religion” are two closely related topics, they are not identical, regardless of how universally-correct one believes his religion to be. Discussing universally-shared moral values is not the same thing as discussing Christian beliefs vs. Muslim beliefs vs. Jewish beliefs, and so on. Religion A may put forth a set of standards that differ from Religion B. But underlying both, I contend, is a basic, intrinsically-understood moral foundation that helps tell us right from wrong in a given situation. This means that certain options are always excluded, while other options may or may not be included, depending upon what each religion teaches. And, as the Islamo-fascists have more than demonstrated, we also need to consider whether those teachings are being interpreted by honest, sincere people, or a group of self-righteous thugs.
What defines proper action, therefore, may be circumscribed in one religion (Quakers and pacifism, for example), while no such limitation automatically exists in another religion. In this case, the basic morality of the action is never in question, just how it is applied to real world examples. On the other hand, a clearly immoral action (such as raping and murdering a five-year old child), can never be justified. It isn’t that Religion A has different rules about this than Religion B, like Christians and Jews do about eating pork. It’s that the action is absolutely prohibited regardless of which religion we discuss, be it Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Druid, Coptic, or any other faith. Universal principles of morality apply across the board.
This fact allows us to recognize the difference between an honest dispute over the proper interpretation of a moral code, and an action that is morally wrong but is justified or rationalized in allegedly-moral terms. It’s not wrong because I don’t like it, or wrong because I grew up in America instead of Tunisia, or lived my life in Alabama instead of New York, or because I’m a female instead of a male. It’s wrong because it is wrong, and all the rationalizations and justifications in the world won’t make a dime’s worth of difference in changing this fact.
Let me just close by saying that while I appreciate this opportunity to expand upon my original essay, I reject your assertion that I haven’t answered your arguments. I did so extensively in my reply to your essay, and again in the comments section. You’ve addressed none of the specific challenges I’ve raised to the terminology you use and the inferences you draw from that value-laden terminology. Your theory has nothing to do with illustrating morality. It simply speaks to how human beings act and think. And as I’ve shown, sometimes they act and think immorally.
fbaginski
Although we’ve strayed off topic as usual, your comments bring up two important points and if I may presume to summarize them in question form as:
First, can we resolve the evolution argument once and for all with an experiment? And, what would be the nature of the experiment?
Second, regarding your time travel comment, is evolution theory a scientific concept which can or cannot be resolved by the scientific method? Or, is it an irresolvable metaphysical concept?
Given the media hoopla over the success of the Human Genome Project, it’s surprising scientists haven’t called for a federally funded Human Evolution Project. The experimental subject of the Evolution Project would be the most intensively monitored species on this planet – namely human beings. There are an estimated 6.5 billion of us, surely a population large enough as well as geographically dispersed enough to provide evidence of ongoing evolution.
It’s a construct so well accepted it probably isn’t necessary to quote individual scientists stating evolution is a continuous and ongoing process – for humans beings, for example, evolution didn’t permanently stop on October, 28th in the year 948 B. C. E.. Therefore, assuming an ongoing and unending process and a quantifiable genetic mutation rate among a 6.5 billion species population, would ongoing human evolution be detectable by science? And, the Project would be searching for evidence of macro-evolution – trying to resolve the controversy over evolution’s power to create new species, rather than simply looking for micro-evolutionary variations within our species.
As Phil Jackson pointed out, which evolution theory would we be testing, there have been so many different versions over the years? But, many scientists have stated evolution is both a “fact” and a “theory”. The “fact” part speaks to evolution as the one and only possible explanation for historic biological development. The “theory” part refers to how the evolutionary process operates and it is accepted there are widespread disagreements over the specifics of the process. Scientists have stated there is nothing to resolve, evolution is simply a fact, but for human evolution, the specific mechanisms and future outcomes should be of intense interest to both scientists and the general public. So, is it time to throw down the gauntlet, put up or shut up, resolve the issue once and for all? After all, even presidential candidates are being asked to state their position on evolution – so the Human Evolution Project should be enthusiastically supported by the both the media and the public.
There are several possible outcomes from a Human Evolution Project and it’s not hard to detect the hesitancy among scientists when the subject is broached. Best case, the project is a resounding success, ongoing evolution is detected and we can point to living examples; Susan Doe of Petoskey Michigan and Shen Wu of Suzhou – Jiangsu China show detectable mutations supporting evolution leading to a new species. But, once the unqualified success is announced within the mainstream media, scientists from all over the world will demand access to the data and want to independently confirm the conclusion. More than likely, a series of scientific cat fights will break out challenging the data or the conclusions or both. Ultimately, unless the empirical evidence and resulting conclusions are so clear cut as to be beyond any reasonable challenge, the Evolution Project may simply illustrate that science can’t agree on or basically doesn’t know how to recognize evolution at work – and that would tend to put the entire theory in doubt.
The other scenarios are varying degrees of worst case. Science would fail at unqualified success and fall back on various weasel words like “human genetic mutations supporting evolution may be undetectable in present form and will require the passage of vast periods of time to become detectable.” It’s highly unlikely science would simply state no evidence of ongoing evolution was detected. However, weasel words rationalizing failure would create a media firestorm throughout the world. Some factions would conclude that evolution isn’t detectable because it was nonsense all along. Others would claim the experimental conditions were unfair and merely a plot by the religious right to discredit evolution theory. Let the games begin.
Ultimately, there would only be varying degrees of downside for science resulting from a Human Evolution Project – the chances of unqualified success are very slim and the loss of cultural prestige and professional credibility highly probable. My conclusion is that science will balk at any put up or shut up experiments. Micro evolution has documented support and centuries of public acceptance (animal breeders understood it long before Darwin). Macro-evolution is simply an extended case of micro-evolution – they’re a package deal according to scientists. There won’t be any Human Evolution Project and the argument will continue, which brings us to the second point and your time machine comment.
Some individuals within the hard sciences have expressed doubt that the scientific method can effectively resolve questions concerning a biological history extending over 3.5 billion years. It’s not a sneer at biologists, but rather a concern that the scientific method is being corrupted when applied to evolutionary arguments. Drawing clear conclusions supported by controlled experiments or irrefutable empirical evidence and observations is functionally impossible when directed at remote historical events, and a 3.5 billion year history is indisputably remote.
Consequently, the scientific method itself has to be modified to allow new rules of reasoning and acceptance of ambiguous evidence not allowed within those conclusions reached by the hard sciences. This concern doesn’t attempt to refute evolution per se, rather it challenges the notion that the scientific method will ever be adequate to confirm evolution.
My conclusions in this area are more cynical. The point of the argument is to perpetuate the argument – no one in science wants it resolved. Generations of young men and women have spent years earning advanced degrees in highly unmarketable areas such as paleontology and evolutionary biology. They have every intention of practicing their chosen profession and want the taxpayers to fund a professional and personal lifestyle to which they’d like to become accustomed. Some would prefer a tenured university post and teaching for life position. Others want to perform field work or dress daily in white lab coats while filling out grant applications. Pursuing your chosen vocation is highly problematical when no one wants to pay you – you’re either a trust fund baby financing your own research or the scientific version of a starving artist.
But, the whole point is to somehow, in some fashion, continue your professional ruminations at public expense. Nor does it matter which side of the argument you take – orthodox evolution theory proponent or intelligent design supporter – the goal is the same and the argument itself is ultimately the goal as long as someone foots the bill.
Cynical explanation yes, but the argument has gone on for over a hundred years and I’m pretty sure all the concerned parties would like it to go on for another hundred years – nice work if you can get it.
Pat Skurka
I like the idea about a modified scientific method for the soft sciences. But it will fall into the same trap as the quest for evolution. As long as the rules are the way they are the apple cart will not fall over. Current justification for funding does not rely on good science but on a good emotional plea. Changing the method may make it more difficult to obtain funding.
I did hear that one of the ivy leaque schools was taking on the task of proving evolution. That was a couple of years ago. I haven’t heard anything since. More than likely a funding drive.
To me the fundamental question is why am I here and what am I supposed to do? Am I here by an accident of nature? I have answered that for myself but know that many have accepted the PC version taught in schools. So the fight for answers is the good fight. Actually the fight should be to include all possible explainations in school and let the kids decide for themselves.
Thanks again for the comments, always a pleasure.