Thursday, May 30, 2013

Darwin and morality

I'm aware there has been quite a bit of research and debate about how it is that humans and other animals have developed a propensity to altruism. I think this is tackled to some extent in The Selfish Gene and Dawkins' subsequent books. I do have a copy somewhere so if I get the chance I'll dig it out.

If the tribe is successful then it is likely that an individual's genes will be propagated, since presumably there was a lot of shared family history within each tribe (maybe that's what you were getting at?).

It is amazing how Darwin's work so accurately corresponds with what we now know about DNA. There was a fascinating TV programme about Alfred Russell Wallace a few weeks ago (hosted by Bill Bailey) which pointed out how unfair it is that he is almost forgotten whereas Darwin is given all of the credit. It does seem that evolution was an idea waiting to be discovered, I find it quite bizarre - not to say a little scary - that there are so many people (particularly in the US) who claim not to believe in evolution.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Why are we moral?

I would like propose that morality is a human attribute that has evolved through the process of natural selection and survival of the fittest. To quote from Darwin's 'Descent of Man':

"When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included…a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other….A tribe possessing the above qualities in a high degree would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other and still more highly endowed tribe. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world."

Rawls' Theory of Justice

I do think that Rawls' hypothetical original position is a reasonably good basis for conducting the thought experiment.

By hypothetically placing all agents in a completely equal position behind a "veil of ignorance", we can agree on principles that are reasonably fair. I believe that fairness is fundamental to any conception of justice.

Rawls chooses equal basic liberties for all and social and economic equality as the two principles which would emerge from this hypothetical contract. I'm not sure I agree with the second principle because there is a risk that an entitlement culture embeds itself in society and this ultimately leads to another form of injustice.

I think there should be protection for the genuinely disabled and destitute but, for example, I don't think it is fair that 70% of my income is taken away from me by force to give it to people who cannot be bothered to work for a living (economic equality). I also don't think that social equality is always a good thing if it means that it holds back the genuinely talented members of society by dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Moral knowledge and moral scepticism

I think there are a number of possible methods by which we can justify having moral knowledge. I will firstly clarify that I think to have knowledge of something you need to have justified true belief (JTB theory). As I have posted previously, I'm also a moral generalist and not a moral sceptic, in that I do think there are moral principles.

So the question is how do we justify moral beliefs?

I subscribe to multiple forms of justification, I don't believe we have to just pick one. Some moral truths are self-evident in certain circumstances. Others are justified by their coherence with other beliefs - we form a web of support. And finally I think we can have intuitional justification. So I'll opt for a full house of justification theories!

There are a number of problems with moral scepticism:
  • It is an intellectual dead-end
  • It doesn't correspond with common-sense
  • It is an immoral position to hold IMO

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Free Will revisited

Module 2 has a lot of content - it includes Moral Truth, Justice and Free Will. This is probably too much for one week, but I have done my best to keep up.

I covered Free Will in the Introduction to Philosophy and the Metaphysics courses (although each looked at different philosophers' views). My views about Free Will have not changed significantly having done some more reading and thinking. In summary, I am a libertarian and believe that intellectually mature humans have free will.

I do not believe that compatibilism is logically consistent, I think compatibilists should get off the fence and choose.

I don't believe that determinism is consistent with our understanding of what it is to be human. I don't fully "understand" what determinism is because it does not explain the way the world is. Determinism is not an explanation of how humans behave, it is a reductio ad absurdum based on false premises. I believe that the arguments in favour of determinism are often confused, and do not take into account the role of rationality and consciousness. Everybody behaves as though libertarianism is true, without free will there can be no moral responsibility and in fact there can be no morality. Given that, for me, morality exists, I have to conclude that libertarianism is true.

Moral Truth

I would like to recommend WD Ross's essay 'What Makes Right Acts Right'.

Ross is spot on in explaining what we mean by moral principles.

Ross argues that the principles of morality are in some way similar to the truths of nature (such as the universal law of gravitation). The law of gravity says that the force of gravity acts on all bodies universally - it is an absolute truth (excluding the quantum scale) but the actual movement of any given body depends on all of the forces acting on it.

Moral truths differ from universal laws of nature in that there is no causal relationship, instead there is a prima facie relationship which is self-evident, although this self-evidence does not appear from the beginning of our lives, it develops as we mature.

I particularly like the section where Ross says "The moral order expressed in these propositions is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe (and, we may add, of any possible universe in which there are moral agents) as is the spacial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic. In our confidence that these propositions are true there is involved the same trust in our reason that is involved in our confidence in mathematics."

Ross goes on to make a very valid point which I think gets to the nub of where Dancy is wrong:
"Our judgement about our actual duty in concrete situations have none of the certainty that attaches to our recognition of the general principles of duty".

Monday, May 20, 2013

End of module 1 - final thoughts on particularism

I was challenged to respond to two possible sets of circumstances in which we might say that infant torture is not morally bad:
  • where the agent is not morally competent
  • where the degree of "torture" is disputed
This is my response:

On the question of the moral 'competence' of the perpetrator, often in heinous crimes the accused will use a defence that they had "no choice", either because they were coerced (e.g. the Nuremburg defence) or they suffer from a mental illness / deficiency. I personally don't think this overcomes the generalist position that torture is wrong, but it does seem to support the particularist point of view that context is always an issue when deciding on moral issues.

When I started typing my response I began by thinking your second argument is less of a problem for the generalist but, on reflection, it seems also to be a good one. One could argue that the moral principle still stands - any argument about whether an act constitutes torture is separate from the argument about whether torture is morally bad, but I can see that there could be significant disagreement.

So to defend my generalist position I need to frame the principle carefully - i.e. "a clear and undisputed case of a fully competent person torturing a baby purely for fun is bad". On the whole I don't feel it is necessary to do this because the vast majority of people know what is meant by "torturing babies for fun is bad" and the arguments are around the facts of the case and not the moral principle behind it.

I think quite a lot of moral principles are generally true, and the debate is mainly over the facts of the case and not the validity of the principle.

A lot of Dancy's variable 'context' will determine the facts of the case (i.e. did the person make a free choice, how much damage is being caused) and not the validity of the moral principle.
I mentioned earlier that a lot of moral principles are tautologous - such as "injustice is bad". Surely it is part of the definition of injustice that we think it is morally bad - take the OED definition for example: "The opposite of justice; unjust action; wrong; want of equity, unfairness. With an and pl., An instance of this; an unjust act."

How can anyone defend the position that injustice is good without contradicting themselves? I don't believe there are circumstances or contexts when we can say that injustice is good (in itself).

Friday, May 17, 2013

When is torturing infants for kicks good?

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, moral particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral principles, that moral thought does not consist in the application of moral principles to cases, and that the morally perfect person should not be conceived as the person of principle.

So under what circumstances is torturing babies for fun morally good?

Are moral principles just generalisations?

It seems to me that sometimes moral rules are generalizations that guide moral thinking and action and sometimes they are universal/absolute principles applicable in all situations. The distinction between the two may well be related to the distinction between high-order and low-order moral judgements, I'm still trying to work through this distinction.

I need to clarify what I mean by universal/absolute. I think that morality is a human construct. As an atheist I do not think that my morality is derived from a supernatural being but that moral facts exist by virtue of human nature and human rationality.

We naturally tend to agree (perhaps it is fairly self evident or maybe it is through many years of debate and experience) that we are in favour of certain moral principles and against others. Principles such as justice, avoiding pain, putting right our mistakes, being grateful for assistance, treating everyone as valuable, equality etc. are the outcome of this process.

I think that as societies have 'matured', they have tended to adopt these moral principles more widely (e.g. abolishing slavery, treating men and women more equally etc.) but because human beings are flawed (our adrenal glands are too big) and politics is involved, there are always going to be conflicts and disagreements.

I do therefore think that it is a feature of a moral truth that it is universal. If it isn't universally true for all mankind then it isn't a moral truth but a political or cultural point of view.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The Golden Rule as a high-order moral principle

The Golden Rule says that we should treat others as we would like to be treated. I think this is a candidate for an absolute moral principle.

The clever thing about the Golden Rule is that in a sense it makes every action altruistic while at the same time being selfish. If we are obliged to treat other people as we would like to be treated, the distinction between altruism and selfishness seems to dissolve away.

It is true as you suggest that application of the Golden Rule effectively leads us to impose our morals on other people and I think this is a valid criticism. I can envisage a situation where for example a doctor is against abortion on moral grounds and therefore refuses to help patients who chose to have an abortion.

Some people might think it is not a bad thing if we impose our morals on others (absolutists) whereas others would find this abhorrent (relativists).

In this example I think you would still want to say that the doctor believed himself to be acting morally. Perhaps the Golden Rule inevitably results in moral absolutism. For me this is not a problem as I voted for high order absolutism in the course poll smile. The choices were:

I am an individual relativist.I am a cultural relativist.I am a lower order moral absolutist.I am a higher order moral absolutist.I am a particularist absolutist.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Denial of moral particularism

If it were true that there are no moral principles then I'm not sure how society would function. It seems to me that we need moral rules in order to help us to learn how to behave and to attribute praise or blame on others' behaviour. Moral principles function in the realm of moral behaviour in the same way that rules of the road function for drivers. Would Dancy argue that there are no rules of the road, and in every instance the choices are context specific?

Attempting another analogy, could it be the case that our moral code is a bit like a recipe - if we follow the recipe then we end up with the outcome that we seek. In the case of cooking, we end up with a meal. In the case of normative behaviour, we end up with a functioning society.
No recipe should ever be followed in every circumstance, we have to allow for many factors such as the preferences of the guests, the temperature of the oven, the nature of the ingredients. The fact that we have to use judgement in the way we follow the recipe clearly can't lead us to conclude that the recipe doesn't exist.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Generalism v particularism

Our first assignment is to read an article written by Jonathan Dancy in which it is argued that there are no moral principles, everything in morality is situation or context dependant.

My response to this challenge is as follows:

I agree with Dancy that it's difficult to formulate moral principles that apply in all circumstances, but I do not think that we must conclude that there are no moral principles just because it is not easy to formulate them.

There are two possible solutions to this problem:
1. We need to formulate the rules in a way that allows for exceptions and special pleading
2. There are in fact rules which are universal

Approach 1, might say that for every rule we add an addendum which states "unless to follow the rule would lead to more harm than not following the rule". I do not think it is unreasonable to develop a rule which allows for exceptions in certain circumstances and by doing so I don't think this means that the rule isn't a rule. Alternatively, we could make the rule more complex and thereby allow for unusual situations.

Approach 2 - what about the 'golden rule' that we should always treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves? I am struggling to think of a situation where this doesn't apply.

I have been thinking about how we apply rules in other circumstances and came up with the example of the rules of golf. When we agree to play a game by a set of agreed rules, those rules apply in all circumstances. There is no special pleading. Maybe the problem is that often the way we frame moral rules is too simplistic - the rules of golf run to many pages and thereby try and take account of special circumstances, such allowing for inclement weather and lightning.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Ethics: An Introduction

My latest online philosophy course begins today and runs for 10 weeks.

The subject this time is an introduction to ethics. From the OUDCE Philosophy website:

"In this introduction to ethics, the philosophy of morality, we shall be considering questions of both practice (is lying wrong? Must we keep our promises?) and theory (what makes an action wrong? Is it only human who worry about morality? How do we apply moral theory to society?). We shall examine four important ethical theories (Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s deontologiy, Hume’s expressivism and Mill’s utilitarianism) and we shall apply them to two practical questions: the rights of animals and euthanasia. There will be plenty of opportunity to engage in debate and to test your own moral theories."

I will try and post regularly. Comments are welcome.