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.

The Ten Commitments

                         

When life first formed, a little less than four billion years ago, it only formed because it made The First Commitment - To Multiply. This may remind you of a certain book, but unlike the account in the Bible, this form of life we now call Bacteria.  Bacteria and their allies are single celled organisms that multiply and multiply and multiply by Splitting into identical copies of themselves.   

One and a half billion years ago is our next milestone, when plants and animals become separate creatures and both abandon splitting in favour of  The Second Commitment - Sexual Reproduction.  Lets call this the Sexual Reproductive System,later to become - “the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.”  

 As for us animals, unlike most plants,  we committed to The Third Commitment: to eating Food and this leads to both the Digestive System and the Predator/Prey System.

Food is important to this story and we will visit it again when we get to cooking.  But, for now, let’s note that ever since it came into being, the Predator/Prey System is one of the main drivers of evolutionary change.  

Nothing much happens for one and a quarter billion years, (only a couple of mass extinction events, and the arrival of dinosaurs...) and then 250 million years ago smallish creatures that we call the first Mammals arrive.  The mothers of these furry little critters stop laying eggs and instead give birth live.  These mothers give birth to The Fourth Commitment: to the Care, Protection, and feeding of their infants.  Baby mammals are warm and cuddly and they cry when they are in distress.  Baby snakes and lizards are not so cuddly and they are silent, because nobody is going to protect them once they’re out of the Egg.  

The Maternal Caring System  is a very important player in this story as I hope to make apparent to you. Mammal mothers have mammary glands that produce milk.  The hormones that are involved in the release of milk - Prolactin and Oxytocin are triggered by close physical contact between mother and baby.  These hormones contribute to the sense of pleasure and attachment between babe and mom.  

The close contact, the period of helpless infancy, the Attachment Bond between mother and child - these are all important, because they will help facilitate development outside the womb, making possible larger brains, greater learning capacity, and more behavioural flexibility than would ever be possible by a creature that comes out of an egg.  

The Fifth Committment that mammals, as well as some other kinds of animals committed to - Living in a Group.  Growing up and living in a group helps protect individuals from predators, and, just like having a mother, it makes longer infancy and more social learning possible.

65 million years ago a group of mammals called Primates made the Sixth Commitment - Living in Trees.  Why live in trees?  To get away from predators and to facilitate access to fruits and other good things.  By living in trees, primates, such as monkeys, evolved better hand-eye coordination compared to other mammals, and this will be important when we get  to Tools.

20 million years ago Apes have evolved from monkeys.  Apes are bigger and stronger than monkeys.  Male apes are able to cooperate enough to successfully maintain The Seventh Commitment -Collective Defence of the Group against predators, such as boa constrictors big cats, and male outsiders.

About six million years ago our ancestors broke with the trees and made The Eighth Commitment - Walking or: Standing on Their Own Two Feet.  Being primates they had already benefited from improved hand-eye coordination,  so it wasn’t long before they learned to walk long distances, and then to make Stone Tools, such as knives and axes.

Now, you may or may not have noticed that for the last 250 million years, all this time that mothers were caring for their infants, there is little or no evidence of fathers’ commitment to care.   Two million years ago this would all change when the first humans came on the scene.  And here’s why:

Do you remember those maternal hormones that worked so well to create a mother child bond - Prolactin and Oxytocin?  These are produced in male bodies as well, because males and females share most of the same genetic material.  And you may have noticed that humans don’t have nearly as much body hair as apes.  In fact, without clothes we look pretty naked.

 Anyway, my point is that skin-to-skin contact can lead to the release of oxytocin in both males and females and this can facilitate falling in love and Pair Bonding, which is otherwise rare in primates, and doesn’t happen when apes live in groups.   Pair bonding in Chimpanzees is usually prevented by the dominant male who will try to monopolize all the females when they are in estrus.  

Homo Erectus, our hominin precursors, looked a lot more like us then previous Hominins.  It was during their two million year stay on Earth that they were the first to control Fire, and the first to walk out of Africa.

Remember those stone tools we talked about.  They were first used for preparing food, just as knives are today.  They were also used as Weapons.  And here’s where it gets interesting. We note, that in human history, when better weapons are first developed they sometimes have a powerful effect on Social Systems. 

 Stone knives  would have had a Levelling influence, undermining the rule of the strongest male. They would also have led to social disruption, because now there  would be a continual free fight over women. Previously the dominant male would have controlled this problem, but stone knives may have eliminated his role.

Easy access to knives would have made it a free-for-all until the group as a whole agreed to a system that limited violence and provided stability.  That agreement was the basis for human nature.

 Two million years ago agreements were not about peace, order, and good government.  The agreement had to be simple, it had to be comprehensive, with no exceptions.  Our ancestors had the right hormones to facilitate pair-bonding, but they didn’t have the right social systems until the Invention of stone knives forced their hands.

 Because the dominant male kept order,  that function needed to be filled by something else.  That function, of allocating women and resources,and controlling violent public behaviour, had to be replaced by a special type of collective commitment. Thus the Ninth Commitment - the commitment to Monogamy and Morality. Today, in almost every human society the vast majority of men and women live in monogamous relationships, which means that somehow, and I think it was two million years ago, we established  monogamous social systems.  Thus males and females committed to living in and supporting long-term relationships.

Animals do most things from self-interest. Humans choose to follow rules that can directly oppose their own self-interest.   This is most obvious in morality.  In morality we have lists of Dos and Don'ts.  We all internalize these rules and we often enthusiastically judge those who break them. Justifying your behaviour by saying that you acted in your own interest doesn’t cut it morally.  Everyone is on the lookout for people who violate moral rules, and if they are  caught, they are punished by various means.

We all can and do feel judgemental about people who have affairs. We realize that they are doing it out of powerful desires, but judge these people for not constraining their desires. The fact is that if people didn't actively constrain themselves, monogamy would be a joke. The only thing natural about monogamy is that it reflects the pair-bond, the deep mutual attachment that can form when two people fall in love. But the trouble is that, in many cases, love doesn't last, and it can be overridden by new attractions. That's why the group had to come together and make a collective commitment, simultaneously creating the social institution of monogamy and the first moral system. My guess is that initially it was simply an agreement to control violence, and allow for pair-bonding and social stability, and the initiators had no idea of the positive consequences that would ensue.

In a single stroke monogamy would have led to fathers being more assured of the paternity of their children, the inclusion of in-laws, and thus, the effective enlargement of groups; the division of labour between males and females, and the sharing of resources among the nuclear family.  In effect, monogamy led to camp fires, cooking, and fatherhood.

At some unknown time, perhaps 100,000 years ago, by increasing social stability and encouraging sharing, monogamy made Language - The Tenth Commitment possible.

Female mammals committed to maternal care; most mammals committed to living in groups; male baboons and apes committed to collective protection of the group; humans first committed to a monogamous social system and then committed to using language.  The trend in all of these commitments is towards the facilitation of longer childhoods, greater learning flexibility, bigger brains,  and more effective and complex forms of cooperation.  Humans have the longest period of childhood, the greatest ability to learn new things, and are by far the most cooperative.  

Remember the camp fire:  Sharing stories, sharing food, singing songs together, facing the darkness together.  Almost everything we do as humans involves sharing: talking, singing, eating, playing, working, building, caring, and loving.  This is what separates us from the animals.  

The Forbidden Fruit

I am not a Christian, I am a philosopher.  That being said, it strikes me that to understand what morality is, it helps to begin with the story of the Garden of Eden.  First of all, the story of Eden is a myth of origin;  and to understand something complex like morality we could start by using our imagination instead of analysing it to death, as we philosophers have done for two and a half thousand years.

 Interestingly, no one knows where morality came from or how it came about.  Many, many philosophers since Plato, and he lived and wrote 2400 years ago, have been fascinated by the topic of morality.  They have many theories about what it is, but they have never come to an agreement.

In contrast, science is younger than philosophy;  it is only 500 years old;  but the thing about science is that even if scientists have disagreements, they eventually come around to agreeing on the main subjects.

 This has not happened with the concept of morality.  There is no agreement.  Some say morality is obedience to God’s commands, others, that it is derived from the general Good, others, that it is derived from Duty, others that it is human perfection,  others, that it is mutual reasonableness, others, that it is a special class of  (moral) sentiments, others, that it is reasoning about moral discourse.  The problem of figuring out what morality is seems an awful lot like the story of the blind men standing around an elephant trying to understand what it is, each touching a different part - the legs, the body, the trunk, and the tusks -  but none of them able to see what it looks like as a whole.

 Take the ten commandments in the Hebrew Bible, an early written attempt to summarize core moral principles,  supposedly written in stone and brought down from the mountain by Moses to give to the Israelites.  One of those commandments refers back to Genesis:  observe the Sabbath, you must set aside the seventh day of the week - just as God rested on the seventh day of creation.

Whew!  Creation must have been a hard job for God.  Doesn’t God sound like a cranky old man who needs a breather after a hard week  creating the  Universe? According to Genesis, God liked to walk in the cool of the evening. (Naturally, because in the part of the world where Genesis was written - the Middle East - the midday sun is beating down on you.) Genesis is folksy and makes God to be sort-of like one of us.

 It’s likely that Exodus, the story of Moses and the Israelites, was written by a different writer than Genesis.  One of the things that the book of Exodus does which Genesis doesn’t, is create a strong sense of identity for the Israelites.  Genesis is about the beginnings, lost in the mists of time.  Exodus is about establishing a powerful group identity.  A desert tribe that follows ten commandments is one that distinguishes itself from other tribes.

 For some Jews and Christians the  commandment to honour the Sabbath is seen as a moral rule, because they believe that Genesis and Exodus are both literally true, but that is not the case for the vast majority of people on Earth, who disagree. There are hundreds if not thousands of religions, all of them with different versions of the creation myth.  So a commandment to make one day of the week a day of rest because of what is written in the Hebrew Bible cannot really be a universal rule, and therefore it is not a moral rule.

Intuitively we believe that everyone is subject to moral rules.  But if there are a multiplicity of religions, then there are a multiplicity of so-called moral rules:  such as rules about forbidden types of meat, rules about who you can marry, and rules about what is sacred and what is profane.  If we go too far with this line of inquiry we end up saying that there are many cultures with many kinds of moralities.  But if this is so, then moral rules cannot be universal, which contradicts our intuitions.  It can’t be the case that morality is relative to the culture that you live in because this implies that what is morally wrong for me is not morally wrong for you.  That’s why  it’s a better idea to abandon trying to ground morality on  religion, and instead seek a more evidence-based form of moral knowledge.

So why talk about the garden?  Whoever compiled the Bible ( most probably Ezra) produced a master stroke by putting this particular story of the garden of Eden right at the beginning.  It’s actually a creation story that places the origin of morality at the beginning of human existence;  it is presented as the first story to be told, in effect.   I’m assuming that most of my readers are at least vaguely familiar with the story of the garden of Eden.  If so, or even if not, this is a wonderful story that is hard not to forget, once you’ve heard it. First, God creates a beautiful garden, full of plants and animals;  then God creates humankind in “His” image.

The idea that humans were created in the image of God is a fascinating idea, but no one knows what it means, because God is not visible to the human eye.  My concern here is that this idea, that humans are created in God’s image, since we can’t see God, is more likely to be a projection of our own imagination.  It’s more a fact that we see God in our image, rather than vice versa. And that seems to be the result in Genesis, because God is depicted as a cranky old man, who prudently stays out of the noonday sun, and needs to rest at least once a week for an entire day.

Now Plato, in my mind, the greatest philosopher of all time, claims in a book called The Republic, probably the greatest work of Philosophy so far, that apprehending true moral knowledge is like looking directly at the Sun after having lived  cooped up in a cave all of your life.   If we want to learn the Truth, Plato thought that we need to be indirect, that is, we need to learn, not from day to day experience, but from  contemplation of purer forms of abstractions such as “the Good” and “Justice”;  just as it seemed to Plato that mathematical knowledge comes from pure mathematical abstractions, rather than actual imperfect objects.   This has proven to be a much more seductive view of morality than the more down-to-earth view in Genesis, especially for philosophers.  For all we know, Plato’s parable of the cave may have had more influence on Christian Theology and Western Civilization than the Hebrew book of  Genesis.

 So, on with the story!   In the middle of the garden is a tree called the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”  God tells Adam and Eve that they can eat the fruits of all of the trees in the garden except this one.  Now, I ask you -   why would God single out this particular tree?  Why wouldn’t God want Adam and Eve to  eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge?  The author of Genesis slyly supplies the hint: one of the creatures in this garden is a talking snake, who tells Eve that God does not want them to eat the fruit because if they do they will become more like a God themselves. The snake, no doubt, has a hidden agenda, which leads it to  suggest to Eve that it would be well worth it to disobey God.

Later on in Genesis, you have the story of “The Tower of Babel”, where God is quoted as saying  he doesn’t want the builders to make a tower that reaches to the heavens because they will become too much like the Gods if they do.  God, proactively causes all the builders to speak mutually unintelligible languages or "Babel", (short for Babylon, which is the writer of Genesis' little way of mocking the Babylonians) - so that they get confused and can’t finish the tower. (Is that why philosophy was invented too - to confuse people about what morality actually is?)

 So it’s as close as it gets to being official - God is ambivalent about humankind. God created them in “His” image, but is dead serious about preventing humans from becoming too much like “Him”.  After all, God, the cranky old man, doesn’t want them to eat the fruit, and yet he puts the tree right in the middle of the garden and he draws the humans attention to it further, by forbidding them to eat from it.  Any parent knows that if you forbid something that is attractive and easily accessible, you are asking for trouble.   And Adam and Eve are so, so, human, being the first of their kind.

 Just think for a minute - each and everyone of us  will want to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong.  It is absolutely a mark of being human that we need to know the difference between good and evil.  Only the human species uniquely desire this fruit, and to a man or a women, we are not capable of resisting its seductions.  But then, neither can God do anything but act the part too, by throwing Adam and Eve out of Eden for disobedience.

 The story imagines God the creator as Father, and Adam and Eve as children.  We might agree that, in real life, we do not expect infants to know the difference between good and evil,  but we expect that  they will learn the difference as they mature. In the meantime, as they are growing up, we expect them to follow our rules and commands.  The old way is that if children disobey their parents, especially their father, they need to be punished to be shown their place and to be set on the right path.  Hence the “moral”  of this story and perhaps the main reason why this particular story was chosen to begin the Bible.

From a philosophical perspective, what is going on here? First, the Biblical editor's  selection and placement of Book of Genesis implies that the acquisition of moral knowledge marks the real beginning of the human story.  God does not need to forbid the other animals from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, because animals don’t care about being right or wrong. But God is forced to throw the humans out of Eden because they cannot exist as humans without the knowledge of good and evil. Hence, having moral knowledge is exactly what sets us apart from all other creatures.  This is the irony of human nature.

 No wonder the first two humans get into such trouble; the whole thing is a set-up!  The very idea that we can gain moral knowledge by eating the fruit from a tree is simply diabolical; but what a delicious idea:  it is so physical, so scrumptious!  And yet, we all know intuitively that it doesn’t work that way -  as if we could gain moral knowledge by consuming a  pill;  we know that gaining moral knowledge is not easy -  it takes work and it involves a lot of  negative emotions and unpleasant feelings;  it can’t be right to gain that knowledge just by eating a piece of fruit -  but who wouldn’t consume this fruit if they had the chance?  No one!

God, the lonely old father, really wanted us to stay in Eden but made the serious mistake of creating the first humans in “His” image.  If God had just dropped that little requirement, then humans could have permanently resided in the garden, but then they wouldn’t have been human would they?  How diabolical!




                                                  II



  What happens  after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit?  It's one of those stories that some of us love to hear again and again, because it seems preordained,  a kind of formula:  God has created a “perfect” garden full of wonderful things, and there is just one tree and one fruit that Adam and Eve are not allowed to eat there.  Someone whispers seditious ideas into their heads and by a single act of disobedience they inadvertently destroy all that beauty and perfection. What a  tragedy!  But it is not, in fact, the act of eating the fruit that gets them turfed out of Eden, it seems instead that the consequences of  their gaining  moral knowledge is what really riles up Jehovah.
Once Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit they become aware for the first time that they are naked.  That is, they realize that they are doing something wrong, just as we would know we were doing something wrong if we walked around naked in public.  And, having acquired moral knowledge, they are motivated to correct their wrong by covering their genitals with fig leaves.  Plus knowing now that they have done wrong, they feel guilty and hide, as young children might do.

But God, who, as we all know by now, customarily takes his walks in the cool of the evening, is on to them. “Where are you and why are hiding?”  God asks.  “We saw that we were naked so we covered ourselves with leaves and hid,” says Eve.    “Who Told You That You Were Naked?”  (It’s impossible  for me to read that sentence and not imagine it spoke in a loud booming male voice.)

 The story both makes perfect sense, and doesn’t make sense at all, depending on your perspective.  It makes perfect sense if we picture God as the Father and Adam and Eve as the children,  but it makes no sense if God was a perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing being.  I’m tempted to say that Christian Theologians abandoned the Genesis image of God (as an irritable old man) and instead were more heavily influenced by Plato’s attractive idea of Perfection, which then renders the story quite absurd. But I am more interested in how morality was pictured by the author of Genesis, who, thankfully,  lived some time before Plato.

The author of Genesis is telling us that Morality is just what distinguishes us from all other animals; that knowing right from wrong motivates our behaviour in a way that does not exist for other kinds of animals, that we have feelings of guilt and regret for doing wrong, and that wrong behaviour needs to be punished.  Note the focus on wrong behaviour and on punishment.  Even the ten commandments are mostly prohibitions rather than  a “to-do list”.  This is not a coincidence.  Prohibitions are simpler types of rules, and easier to remember and to follow.  In contrast, what is permitted is impossible to detail in advance because of the sheer number of things that we can do.  This is an important point, so I want to emphasize it here: we can easily supply a short list of forbidden things, but it is impossible to list all the things that we are permitted to do, there  just are too many.

The author of Genesis may have been hinting at the idea that God didn’t want us to have moral knowledge because to some of us it seems to go beyond our finite capacity for understanding.  Better to leave that complicated stuff to God, just as parents don’t usually expect their toddlers to know the ins and outs of right and wrong.

As an actual explanation for how humans got morality, the book of Genesis is both imaginative and suggestive, but obviously it is not an  accurate or a complete picture at all.  Still it is a better account than most modern philosophical treatments of the subject, which largely derive from the works of either Plato or Aristotle.  Perhaps it is because Genesis was written independently of Greek Philosophy that it still has something important to say .  There are six basic things about morality that the book of  Genesis gets right:  that morality is a special kind of knowledge, that morality focuses on collective human interests rather than individual interests (eg. the wrong of public nudity), that it distinguishes us from animals, that it involves motivation and the guidance of behaviour, that it mostly consists of prohibitions rather than positive suggestions, and that punishment is essential in its administration.  Pretty good for the first story in the  Bible.

What Exodus, the second book,  gets right about a moral system is  that it requires  full group adherence, collective kinds of enforcement, and collective expressions of group identity. This may not be intuitively obvious to people today, but that is largely because we have successfully internalized morality and it forms the background to all our behaviour.

Many modern moral philosophers, (remember the blind men and the elephant!) with the exception of Bernard Gert,   don’t get that  what is fundamental about morality  is exactly that it distinguishes humans from other animals.   Instead, they point to  the existence of language as that dividing line.  Twentieth Century moral philosophy, often called meta-ethics, is all about the language of morality, moral concepts, moral reasoning, moral discourse, and moral expression.  It largely centers on language, ignoring the importance of punishment, group identity, simple prohibitions, and any demarcation between humans and other animals.  My suspicion is that because philosophers are so good with words and definitions, they tend to obsess about language when talking about morality.

The book of Genesis is a valuable antidote, because it avoids this emphasis on linguistics altogether.    I can see another reason that Philosophers avoid the account in Genesis too.  Evolutionary moral philosophers maintain that morality evolved gradually, so they are invested in the idea that there is no real demarcation between humans and animals.  Also, origins are not fashionable these days, for various reasons having to do with the real difficulties of looking  that far back into human history. My thinking is this:  When we try and imagine how morality originated we are undoubtedly taking a big risk, due to the lack of clear evidence.  All the same, the story of the garden of Eden does a good job of opening up the question concerning the nature of morality, and in doing so it also uncovers some of the paradoxes and complexities involved in  that understanding.