The Limits of Moral Obedience

According to Christian doctrine, the “original sin”was disobedience, which was what led to the first humans being separated from God and ejected from paradise. The Bible tells us that  at first God planted a tree of knowledge in the middle of the garden of Eden and then forbade the humans from eating its fruits.  Here we have the very first test of obedience, the kind  where children are given access to an attractive goody but are expressly forbidden from partaking, in order to see whether they have the self-discipline to obey authority.  Apparently, Adam and Eve failed the first test, hence the idea of “original sin”. 

 Note that later in the Bible, one of the “ten commandments”  is “Honour your father and mother”.   Put this way, deference to a parent’s authority appears to be a human universal.   But then we grow up and moral authority becomes a lot less simple.  Which authority to recognize?  Is it your priest or rabbi, is it the reigning monarch,  the President or the Emperor?  Or is it an abstraction like “the Law”?

Deference to authority is a central moral requirement in many cultures, but it has its limits.  What if the authorities are immoral? Should we always obey the law, even in the case of immoral laws?  This illustrates the fact that morality itself appears to be authoritative even over legal systems and human authorities. But, if so, where does morality itself derive its authority?  Indeed, how do we know when authorities or laws are immoral?  Some would say that morality derives its authority from God - a very satisfying answer for those who feel certain about these things, but ultimately a problematic answer because there are multiple claimants to knowing God’s commands, with multiple interpretations of what they are.  So we are back to square one.  And it doesn’t help that some of the most vociferous claimants to know God’s real intentions can turn out to be immoral cads such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker, and Jim Jones.

There has to be more to morality than obedience. After all, in the vast majority of human encounters we are dealing with our peers, and when we come into conflict, we need to be able to follow moral rules that we’ve already internalized and agreed on.  Immanuel Kant, who understood this situation better than most philosophers, argued that morality is the opposite of obedience to authority.  In fact, he saw it as an exercise of autonomy in the form of “moral self-legislation”. Kant sums up human autonomy in the  form of the “categorical imperative”:  "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."   I bet many of us have heard their grandma admonish,  when they were caught throwing litter on the street, saying, “What if everyone did that?”  I bet you didn’t know your grandmother was a follower of Kant’s.  Now you know better. I have to say that, as a philosopher, I am very impressed by grandmothers!  

We agree that the moral rules should be impartial, and shouldn’t favour certain people or groups, simply because of their power or status. In other words, no one is above the law.  These are all ways that morality transcends mere deference to authority. This is just as true of religious authorities as it is of secular authorities.

We Need Morality - Not Moralizing!

  People moralize when they use morality as a weapon against people they disagree with.  Some principles are in dispute:  is homosexuality wrong?  We can obviously disagree about this.  Many, if not most people, see morality through the lens of religious belief.   Although the Bible has some prohibitions of homosexual behaviour, it also has prohibitions against wearing fibres mixing wool and linen together.  And like mixing fibres together,  homosexuality is not a major theme of the  holy scriptures.  It isn’t one of the ten commandments.  Jesus never mentions it, although Paul condemns certain kinds of behaviour.  It’s not really a thing in the Bible. You can go through the whole Bible and you will find very little about homosexuality.  It is definitely not an important Biblical theme.

Nowadays there is a strong feeling among many of us that homosexuality doesn’t do any harm, unless by harm you mean ruining a parent’s expectation about getting grandchildren.So the thing is, it’s not clear that same sex preference should be the subject of morality. On the other hand, it definitely can be the subject of moralizing.  Moralizing is weaponizing or politicizing something because you don’t like the choices that some people make.

  Where we all agree on what is right or wrong, that is where moral rules should be. We all agree that killing, injuring, and maiming other people should be prohibited.  In general, if we are able, we want to be able to avoid harm whenever possible.

Rape can be seen as a serious type of harm that should always be prohibited; showing one’s genitals in public is also considered wrong; same with incest and sex with a minor; so there are definitely a number of moral prohibitions to do with sexual behaviour.  In the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the first humans, inadvertently find out that exposing oneself  in public is wrong, and go find big leaves to cover their private parts - and for some reason that only makes God more angry!

 A good argument, that makes a lot of sense,  is that sexual relations should only happen between consenting adults, and that it should be between equals.  It is wrong when it occurs between unequals in power, such as in families of origin, and in pederasty.  In contrast there are extreme religious groups that permit and even encourage unequal sexual relationships, like so-called “fundamentalist Mormons”  who allow established patriarchs to have multiple wives, including underage girls, while at the same time, callously exiling surplus young men from their colonies. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale gives a good picture of what is wrong with the kind of unequal sexual relationship that exists in religious cults.  The point I’m making here is that the reasons for sexual prohibitions should center around harm, not  around preference. 

Socrates,  perhaps the most famous philosopher in history,  was executed, ostensibly for not believing in the gods of Athens, and for corrupting the youth.  In the case of Socrates, it seems more likely  that a group of rich Athenians manufactured the charges, and influenced the citizenry, with the aim of getting rid of Socrates,  because of the trouble they thought he caused.   This is the first well documented case of moralizing - of using moral accusations to get political results. 

We can see a similar kind of moralizing today in the political use of moralizing to scapegoat LGBTQ people in order to gain people’s votes, and win elections.  This is the modus operandi of the American Republican party, Working on people’s fears and feeding resentment, to seek revenge against their political opponents , with the aim of electing an authoritarian like Donald Trump, a man who is, in fact, grossly immoral.

We shouldn’t condemn morality for the sins of moralizing.  Everyone knows to follow the genuine moral rules in order to avoid causing harm.  Over time our collective  views about what should be prohibited have sometimes changed, but we have never abandoned a core set of beliefs about right and wrong.  Some of the ten commandments reflect that core, although a small portion of them reflect strictly religious prohibitions and are simply not moral rules, such as keeping the sabbath,  not worshipping images,  and not worshipping more than one god. These are all rules that we might choose to obey if we were Christians, Jews or Muslims, but are under no obligation to obey otherwise. Other commandments do, in fact, reflect that core of morality -  such as do not kill, do not steal,  do not lie, and do not commit adultery.

Real moral rules function to avoid harms.  Strictly religious rules function to strengthen religious identity, and so, are irrelevant to non-believers. In Canada we are lucky to not live in a country where joining a particular religion is obligatory and holding alternate beliefs is prohibited, as it is in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Faith should always be a matter of choice, and never obligatory.  It’s morality that is obligatory, because if we don’t agree to follow the moral rules we simply do not belong in any human society.

Where did Morality Come From?

Where does morality come from? We seem to feel what’s right and what’s wrong in our very bones.  Even babies, before they can speak, have been shown to have a nascent moral sense and a definite preference for good over evil.  Did God instill this capacity for moral judgement in us? According to the Bible, God forbade us this capacity when he told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Presumably God wanted humans to receive moral knowledge from God’s commands only, but, as we now know, that didn’t work out too well.  

Consequently, there have been as many interpretations of God’s commands as there have been peoples and religions.  In fact, there is no prospect of getting beyond interpretation, because even people who claim to have gotten instruction directly from God are in competition with others who also claim this, but give radically different directives.  

What about the idea that morality evolved?  Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of natural selection, in his book The Descent of Man, argues that morality could have evolved by “group selection”, where human groups who followed moral rules were more cohesive and stronger, and therefore bested groups who didn’t.  This is an improvement over the idea of natural selection of individuals, which is the basis of Darwin’s overall theory, since “survival of the fittest” fundamentally contradicts morality.  If you can’t see this, think about the fact that widows and orphans, the sick, and the lame, i.e., those who are most likely to perish, are encouraged to do so under “Social Darwinism”, something even Darwin abhorred.

It’s interesting that not long after Darwin died, his most loyal defender, Thomas Huxley, gave a famous lecture in which he contradicted the idea that morality could have originated from natural selection. Huxley compared morality to a well-tended garden, which receives its productivity from the constant attention and effort of the gardener to cast out the weeds, and encourage the beneficial plants.  Humans cultivate productive crops whereas nature gives us weeds. Doing good and avoiding evil takes constant effort. 

 Moral systems do not exist outside human society because animal societies are strictly organized according to dominance relations.  The dominant male produces the most progeny - that’s survival of the fittest.  Whereas in most human societies the vast majority of human families are monogamous,  Monogamy destroys the alpha male’s monopoly over procreation. Indeed, in nomadic hunter gatherers, the first human cultures, male dominance type behaviours, such as boasting, threatening, and violence were actively discouraged, and sharing food was encouraged - evidence that the origins of human morality and monogamy were linked, and did not naturally evolve, but were consciously chosen by the first humans.

On Love

 What is love? It is something that has powerful biological roots in the rise of mammals. Mothers giving birth and loving and caring for their children is a mammalian thing.  Love comes from motherly love.  The hormones that facilitate motherly love are triggered by physical touch, and, since touch is often reciprocal, males can also feel love because they inherit the same hormones. 

 

Why is love so special for humans? At some point in our evolution we lost a lot of body hair which, since that change would facilitate skin-to-skin contact, might have led to  pair-bonding in humans. Pair-bonding, the sexual relations and prolonged mutual attraction between two adults, is actually rare in other mammals.  Most mammals  that live in groups live under polygyny, which is where one male monopolizes all the females and drives all the other adult males away.  There, love exists only between mother and offspring.  

We humans associate love as an emotion that lasts over a prolonged period of time, unlike most other emotions. The reason may be that human infants and children are helpless for a very long time, much longer than  any other animal. They need to be cared for for years, and it helps a lot if motherly and fatherly love lasts at least that long, so that the new generation gets a healthy start on their life’s journey. It helps the offspring if their parents stay together for a long time, and for their bonds to their own parents to  last as well, because grandparents can make a difference in their grandchildren’s survival and thriving.

The transcendence thing comes from the ecstatic nature of loving.  When, as adults, we fall in love with another, we may find ourselves consumed with our lover’s existence.  We can forget our own needs and devote ourselves to our lover’s needs instead.  This experience can be so powerful that it presents itself as a life-changing revelation, one that forms the basis of much poetry, literature, and religious thought.  Hence Plato’s famous dialogue on love: “The Symposium” and the Hebrew Bible’s “Great Commandment”: “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your might” a prayer called the “Shema” by Jews, which I believe was promoted by the prophet Jeremiah after the Babylonian exodus and the destruction of Solomon’s temple.  Because the exiled Jews were no longer able to make sacrifices in the Temple this little prayer was an internal act of love between each individual Jew and God, one that could be practised in any location, making the continued survival of Judaism outside of the Holy land possible, just as a mother’s love makes the prolonged survival of her offspring possible. And then there is Christianity’s fascination with the image of the Madonna which brings us back again to where it all began - a mother’s love for her child.

Tibet and China - "Fellow Passengers"

 Xi (April 2022):  "Countries around the world are like passengers aboard the same ship who share the same destiny."

C.J. : Unfortunately some of those passengers have already become shipwrecked!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Ns02qzLA8&t=3s

The Two Kinds of Fundamentalists

      You can't hide from God. That's what the Bible says. God sees everything and knows everything. We humans lack that perspective. It isn't possible for anyone of us to see everything and know everything. But that doesn't stop us from feeling certain that what we know is true. Indeed, it's probable that if we didn't feel that way we would never commit ourselves to anything.

     In order to engage in an argument I have to respect my opponent. I have to be willing to listen to their side in order to answer or question their claims. But by participating in an argument I am taking the risk that I could be shown to be wrong. It's only by risking being wrong that we can be open to discovering the truth. Unless each party to an argument is willing to be convinced by the other it's just people talking past each other or one person attempting to bully  the other.

     Recent history is full of examples of people who believed that they, like God, couldn't possibly be wrong. When these people gained power they always destroy open society. Communism and fascism were political systems that imposed their perspective on everyone by force. The communists believed that they had a monopoly on truth and so they forbade political and moral dissent. They knew they were right and they refused to risk being wrong. Every professional and “elected” representative had to be a member of the communist party. The representatives didn't debate the proposals of the communist leaders, they simply rubber stamped them. The legal system always ruled in favour of the communist state because it was always right.

 People who now take the “God's eye” perspective are called Fundamentalists. And like the communists and fascists, they try to stack the deck in their favour whenever they gain power. I agree with George Soros that there are two kinds of modern Fundamentalists. Religious Fundamentalists and Market Fundamentalists. Most people believe that they themselves are right, but what distinguishes Fundamentalists is their refusal to risk being wrong in a fair argument.

     For instance, there is no evidence that would convince a Christian Fundamentalist of the truth of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Fundamentalists pretend to engage in argument with evolutionary biologists but behind the scenes they try to stack the deck by taking over school boards, by getting state governments to ban the teaching of evolution  and by intimidating publishers from including the subject of evolution in high school biology textbooks.

     Market Fundamentalists believe that free markets are always more beneficial than government regulated markets. There is no evidence that would ever convince them that they are wrong - not the rising income gap between the rich and poor, not the demise of the middle class, not the “dirty thirties”, not the recent sub-prime mortgage meltdown, and especially not the spectre of global warming.  

Market Fundamentalists have managed to stack the deck by perverting the legal and political system.  In fact, a  good portion of U.S. Republicans still believe that global warming is a hoax. The U.S. Supreme Court has, in “Citizens United”, allowed Corporate power to stack the deck in all future elections.  These two kinds of fundamentalism are what is fuelling and maintaining Trump’s unwavering support in the face of overwhelming evidence of his malfeasance. 

See a pattern here? Fundamentalists and extremists can never allow themselves the possibility of being wrong.  They are always the most motivated to seize power because they want to prevent the facts, the evidence, and the people from having their say.  It’s not wrong to believe in God or in Capitalism, but it is wrong to refuse to hear evidence or to prevent those you disagree with from having a say.  We can let God be perfect, but humans remain fallible no matter how certain they are that they have the truth.

Wrestling With The Truth

Why do popular philosophical theories of truth deliberately deflate truth’s value? They argue that there is no difference in saying,  ” It is true that Trump colluded with the Russians."   and,  "Trump colluded with the Russians."  They argue that the concept "truth"  seems to be redundant, because it isn't saying  more than what the statement says without it.    The deflationists want us to believe that there is nothing much to "truth",  that it doesn't add anything to our assertions unless we are generalizing about multiple statements, as in "What Mueller said was true."

 If truth is nothing more than a logical connective, why do people everywhere feel so passionate about it?  Why is it so important that we get to hear what’s really in the Mueller report? Why do we want to know what really happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign?   Doesn’t knowing what really happened, or who a person really is, matter critically to what we need to do next, going forward?

 Why is it important to know whether humans are causing global warming?  Does it matter that some people deny this?  Does it matter that many of the people who deny this are closely connected to the fossil fuel industry?  Truth matters to our very existence.

  It is no coincidence that when people don’t care about the truth, we very quickly end up with a serious lack of trust in each other and in our social and political institutions. We want to avoid a tipping point, where if trust is too much absent, we all become caught in a downward spiral of fear and paranoia.   This points straight to the problem of conspiracy theories and to a dangerous tendency for any system of inquiry to exist inside a bubble,  where it can be insulated from competing forms of inquiry, even insulated from contradictory facts.

 A 9/11  “truther”  can lay out all the conflicting and messy evidence of that disaster, and claim it justifies 9/11 being an “inside job”.  Try and convince her otherwise. The stronger your counter-argument,  the more she will dig in her heels.  As Travis View, a researcher and podcaster on the QAnon conspiracy said, “..failed predictions and misplaced expectations haven’t damaged the size or enthusiasm of the QAnon community....  Some QAnon followers even claim that failed predictions are irrelevant, because dates that pass without incident serve the purpose of tricking the evil “cabal” they imagine they’re fighting.”,   “that belief system eventually becomes an absurdly byzantine, Occam’s-razor-defying mess that can barely be understood by its own supporters. The deeper they dig into disconfirmed beliefs, the harder, and more painful it is to get out.”  “The Mueller Report is In, Get Ready for the Conspiracy Theories,” Washington Post, March 26,2019.

Christopher French, in “Why do some people believe in conspiracy theories?”, Scientific American, Mind   26 72,  July 2015, claims, plausibly, that conspiracists are not really sure what the true explanation for a surprising event is.  What they are sure about is that the “official story” is a cover-up.  In fact, he indicates, people who are strongly inclined toward conspiracy theories are also more likely to be believe in contradictory stories. For instance, if they believe that Bin-Laden died years before he was said to have died,  they are also more likely to come to believe that Bin Laden is still alive.

Conspiracy theories are a classic case of Confirmation Bias.  This is our universal human tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs and give less weight, and even ignore evidence which contradicts what we believe.

Now, take the well-known Quine- Duhem thesis in philosophy, which roughly states that sentences by themselves are not true or false, because they are always part of a web of belief. So, any observation that disconfirms a sentence in a theory can always be reinterpreted or neutralized by changing other sentences in the theory to fit the observation.  By jove! Quine and Duhem seem to have inadvertently described the fundamentals of building and maintaining conspiracy theories!  And it also seems to me that what Quine and Duhem were really doing, independently of each other, was developing a new explanation for the metaphor of Induction.

Karl Popper, probably the most influential philosopher of science in the twentieth century, has argued that when “scientific” theories are immune to criticism they are not actually scientific. He was, at the time, in the early part of the twentieth century, concerned with the status of Marxism and Psychoanalysis, and he perceptively argued that the reason these theories were bad theories is that they were constructed to be immune from criticism. If no observation makes any difference to the truth or falsity of a theory, the theory isn’t really about reality, it’s equivalent  to metaphysics, a branch of philosophy whose practitioners are suspected of permanently keeping their heads in the clouds.

  Popper explicitly rejects induction as a viable inquiring system. He thinks scientific knowledge grows by conjectures and refutations, not by our inductively confirming our theories.  Let’s consider induction as perhaps a misleading metaphor, the equivalent of the  Confirmation Bias that I mentioned earlier. And, if induction  is an inaccurate description of scientific practice, as Popper maintains, this suggests that epistemological theories of truth like coherentism and pragmatism overvalue coherence and undervalue the importance of falsification.  The idea that knowledge grows by induction imagines a world where knowledge grows by adding truths, when in fact, knowledge grows by our continuing to recognize and correct our mistakes.

There is an asymmetry between truths and falsehoods.  Discovering that an expectation has been falsified is  often a clear mark that we have to change direction and revise our expectations.  We should let observations and results which falsify our expectations give us that vital feedback.  This is something that  we will not get from simply accumulating coherent facts.  The problem with induction is that you will not be looking for mistakes, you will be looking for confirmation - you have to go far out of your way to find these contradictory observations, and nothing about induction, per se, requires you to do so.

 Conceiving of truth as the end of inquiry seems obvious, which is what motivates both coherence and pragmatic theories of truth.  After perception, most of what we learn about the world comes from inquiry, does it not?    But isn’t it true that there are forms of inquiry that compete with each other?  Science contra Theology, Behaviorism contra Psychoanalysis, etc.   Are we then, staring into the abyss of Relativism, where what is true for a Marxist Economist is not necessarily true for other kinds of Economists?  Or, does it all reduce down to physics and logic as the Deflationists would have it?

One can try and solve this problem by avoiding the use of the word “truth” and replacing it with “warranted assertability” or “justified knowledge”, which is what the pragmatists Dewey and Rorty end up doing, but this is just kicking the can further down the road.  Rorty is infamous for arguing that we don’t actually need the concept of "truth" at all.  But, against that road, I think we should first agree that “truth”  is an idealization.  Since inquiry is ongoing, and no body of knowledge is settled, we cannot “know” the truth objectively.  But then, if that is the case how can we use truth as an ideal?  In order for any kind of  idealization to work you have to  use it, believe in it, and see it as an ideal.

One can think of inquiring systems as model-building.  Like the first philosophers, we try to use rational explanations to understand reality.  Our  explanations then become a model of the system that we are trying to understand. We first build a model, then we test it over and over again by subjecting it to observation, experiments, and peer criticism.  Over time our models become bigger and more sophisticated.  They can explain and predict more things with more accuracy.  This is the ideal.

I featured, in a longer essay on  truth,  a discussion of  Plato’s parable of the cave.  I did this for a number of reasons, one of which is that it shows that even  Plato, truly a giant in Philosophy, couldn’t really figure out a rational explanation for how we come to know the  truth.   In this “noble lie” of Plato’s,  The Truth flows one way, from the Sun or “the Good” to the escaped prisoner - from more divine to less divine.  It’s hierarchical, and based on authority.  It reflects the idea of the enlightened master passing on his “divine” wisdom to his disciples.  It’s a closed Inquiring system that rejects experiment, observation, and peer criticism.  It is more like a cult, or like conspiracy theories;  observations that contradict the theory are “shadows” and false images;  observations that support the theory are “clear and distinct ideas”.

Mythical stories can be aesthetically beautiful, but, like Plato’s “noble lie”, they exist to lull people into ignorance and superstition. They are like drugs that can make you temporarily happy by helping you withdraw from the rest of the world, giving you the illusion that you are entirely self-contained.

Unfortunately Plato was so successful that it is almost impossible to think about normative concepts such as “truth” and “good” without imagining a “higher power”  from which they are derived.  In other essays, I've argued  that  truth is an important means of regulating human conduct that emerged from human collective agreement and not at all from any putative divine source.  This is a natural explanation but not a reductive explanation.  It does not explain truth according to physical forces or particles.   I believe that the question concerning the origins of normativity is the basic question concerning human nature.  Answer this question with a natural explanation, and you have the beginnings of a science of human nature.

 However, the closer that human knowledge comes to uncovering the nature of what  distinguishes humans from other animals, the more it tugs at our sense of identity.  The more we focus inquiry on human nature, the more potential our findings have to disturb us.  so we might not like what we hear, and since it is about us, we are highly likely to dispute any evidence that contradicts our most cherished self-images.  In some sense these dangers exist in constructing any natural explanation, but acutely so with questions of human nature.  These are theories and concepts that touch on our strongest feelings about who we are and why we are here.

Take the question of human-caused global warming.  Scientific climatological inquiry has uncovered this connection, but a substantial segment of civilized people who recognize the authority of science still cannot bring themselves to believe in it.  Why is that?  It is because this issue deeply challenges our very identity as human beings.   The idea that we need to be accountable for how our actions impact on our greater environment, and the idea that our lifestyles and economies need to change to incorporate this new understanding is a serious challenge to the way we see ourselves.   And, apparently, it is too much of a challenge  for some.