I have been asked on a number of occasions to speak to my claim that morality is objective. This seems to go contrary to the idea that there must be empirical evidence for things to be considered true, but, of course, I believe that facts supported by empirical evidence are not the only things that should be included amongst the things that we know, morality especially amongst them. I could go on a long round about journey to try to show this. I might begin by speaking about Hume, and eventually come to claims like those made by Philip Kitcher in his rather wonderfully complex yet convincing monograph, The Ethical Project, to show that there are, in fact, reasons for holding that our values are objective, and, while they do not have the hard fact nature of scientific discoveries, are none the worse, as things that we can know objectively, for that. However, I came across last night a talk by AC Grayling which says much that I might have said, and says it so much more elegantly, that it seemed to me of value to include an excerpt from that talk here. When I speak about the objectivity of morality, I mean, more or less, what Grayling says so effectively in this clip from his talk “Setting Prometheus Free,” kindly provided by Atheist Ireland. (The entire lecture is available here.)
We can go on to discuss the ramifications of what Grayling has to say, but I think the main point that can be made here is that there simply are perfectly reasonable responses to situations, such as the case of the person in danger of being harmed, which indicates that, in fact, we do take morality seriously as an objective aspect of our relationships. To say, of someone who is in imminent danger of being harmed, “Well, this should be interesting,” instead of warning the person of danger, is clearly something we quite naturally and reasonably find repugnant. Our morality is based on such considerations, and, while there is still room for disagreement — which is why autonomy is so important — there are points of confluence where agreement is all but universal. Morality is certainly relative to human need and desire, as Hume saw so clearly, but it is also, as social contract theories make clear, determined by widespread social agreement as to the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Morality, of course, as this suggests, evolves, but it is no less objective on this account.
I’m sorry, Eric, I really don’t see that Grayling is arguing for a truly objective morality here. He does argue that morality is, “determined by widespread social agreement as to the conditions necessary for human flourishing” — but that makes it intersubjective (existing between conscious minds; shared by more than one conscious mind), a consensus of a particular culture (in time and space); certainly not subjective (a matter of personal whim or passion), but not objective (not dependent on the mind for existence) either.
Thus, yes, it does “evolve” (ie, it changes over time, not necessarily in a neo-Darwinian way), but it also differs across contemporary cultures (and, for that matter, species).
/@
Ant, I do not see why this should be thought in terms of the consensus of a particular culture, though that, obviously, is how it would begin, since cultures were, until fairly recently, largely isolated from each other. But as cultures mix and mingle, the agreement about conditions of human flourishing becomes more widespread, and those moral beliefs coming from religious sources come to be seen as relative to the growing human consensus. Objectivity, in regard to our morality, will never achieve, overall, the kind of hard objectivity of our scientific findings (which themselves, remember, are cultural products and subject to change and revision), but this does not mean that they are not objective. The fact that we can argue about them, disagree and give reasons for preferring one value to another, and, indeed, to sign international treaties regarding the acceptance of certain moral standards of right, indicates that we are not dealing with things which are merely relative, even though there continues to be room for more precise delimitation in some areas and more open discussion in others, but with things about which we can reason and deliberate. The widespread idea that the world as science knows it is strictly mind-independent is itself a questionable hypothesis, since we have no way of looking at the world without the latticework of scientific concepts. Hawking speaks of “model-dependent realism” which is a far cry from mind-independence. I do think that what Grayling is doing is defending the objectivity of morality, standards which are strictly independent of particular minds or cultures. This is as objective as such things get, even though you must allow for the precision or the limitations of precision that are peculiar to morality, just as, for example, economics, psychology, sociology, etc., have different standards of precision which often fall far short of the exactitude of which physics, chemistry, and, increasingly, biology, are capable. I have just received the book in the mail about the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. It would be hard to argue, I think, that the moral failings of European colonialism, and, in particular, the exploitation of Central Africa by the Belgians, were not great, and can not be known to have been great. To suggest otherwise would be to misunderstand what is meant by morality. To believe it true is to accept that moral judgement can be objective.
Well it seems all Grayling is saying is the same thing that Sam Harris has said – there are ways of acting that are better than others at increasing human flourishing. So, when you say that something is “objectively right,” what you mean is that something increases human happiness or what have you, and that its converse, I suppose, decreases it.
That seems like a very unextraordinary claim to me – we see these sorts of facts about happiness discovered all the time by the study of psychology. It also seems misleading to call this “objective morality,” when morality has always been about making unqualified “ought” statements, the kind which cannot be made given Grayling’s morality.
Eric, in the post that prompted this one, you say you’re troubled by the “increasingly widespread” notion that “we cannot know that some things are right or wrong.” But given your definition of wrong – as that which decreases well-being relative to some alternative – have any prominent atheists actually argued that it is just an opinion that certain things decrease well-being? I have not seen it myself. It seems to me that what most people have done is deny the still-widespread understanding of morality in which, for example, “You should not kill innocent people” is taken to be a fact about the universe.
It’s not clear to me what “objective” means? Universal? Independent of individual judgment? Bipedalism is an objective trait of humans? But tallness, or hairlessness is not an objective trait, because judgments can differ on what is tall or hairless?
If there are objective standards of morality, such as disgust when presented with torture, is it enough that some such reaction is universal AS REPORTED BY witnesses? Or must there be a measurable response, such as heart rate, wretching of esophagus muscles, independent of the judgment of the witnesses.
Does objective mean biological, inborn, or inherited, rather than cultural, or learned? Here’s an interesting study of personality traits thought to be universal: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, which were found not to apply to the Tsimane, who are Amazonian forager-farmers, live in communities ranging from 30 to 500 people dispersed among approximately 90 villages. These are not ethical standards, but if there are inborn, objective ethical standards, they must be related to evolved personality traits, yes?
http://www.stonehearthnewsletters.com/universal-personality-traits-dont-necessarily-apply-to-isolated-indigenous-people/human-behavior/
Perhaps morality reflects the “rules for living” shared by a group (a family, a neighborhood, a tribe, a religion, a nation, even folks who consider themseleves a citizen of the world). Morality’s power and validitiy comes from the agreement of the group, and the group’s sense that the shared morality promotes human flourishing (or soome other standard). Morality’s weakness is that those rules for living can vary from group-to-group, such that individuals may feel conflicted about which group’s rules to follow, and such that there is no way to objectivley judge between competing rule sets.
I can judge all rule sets using my own as the exemplar, or using some proposed standard (maximum pleasure, do no harm, human flourishing, god says, protect the eco system, etc.), but I cannot demonstrate that one standard is better than another in the same way that I could, say, the temperature of an object or even the genetic markers that identify one individual’s DNA as (probably) distinct from another.
The truth of this observation comes from noting other cultures who hold values we reject (or at least question), but which are claimed by that culture to provide positive benefits, using the same (or diferent) standards. If culture A says action X is immoral because god says, and another culture says action X is moral because of human florishing, how do we judge? One possibility is to insist we all use the same standard. But why? Which standard? Who decides? I do not think these questions can be objectively answered.
So morality is a subjective belief, perhaps broadly subscribed to within a paticular group. Like religious or political beliefs, they may not be grounded in facts, and like those beliefs, the fact that many people hold these beliefs does not make them objectively true – it simply means that many people beleive them to be true. Groups may have morals that are rooted in biology, in shared culture, reflecting of shared values – but the morals themselves can be (and are) examined, altered and even replaced as the group changes its mind about what it believes to be moral, or as the group is confronted by other (subjective) standards and measures of morality.
Right at the start of the video clip Grayling says that there is “a thought that there has to be something which has authority over our moral lives.” I thought this was a weak start because it inevitably raises the question of what this ‘something’ should be (he discounts god), and no mechanism or process was suggested other than our desires for the comfort of authority.
Yet we know morals vary from culture to culture. We know morals vary from family to family. We know current morals are not identical to past morals. We know peoples’ morals change through circumstance. That’s an awful lot of variation for something that is ‘objective’.
Over on his blog Sam Harris makes a defence for gun ownership in the USA. Is it objectively moral to own guns? If you disagree with his arguments are you objections objective? Clearly not, strong passions rage over the issue. The strength of your views on morals does not affect the strength of their applicability.
I think the strongest claim you could make is that there are some typical human behaviours that arise out of our human characteristics, but these are quite simple behaviours that are heavily modified and modulated by the culture we grow up in.
Let me just say this at this point, DJ. You say:
Your conclusion does not follow from that premise.
“It would be hard to argue, I think, that the moral failings of European colonialism, and, in particular, the exploitation of Central Africa by the Belgians, were not great, and can not be known to have been great.”
Known by whom? In the Sanders stories by Edgar Wallace, the British colonialists are examplars of a morality which Wallace approves, the native Africans have a morality which Wallace reports on dispassionately as something alien but understandable, and the other European powers in Africa are generally depicted as wicked and corrupt. The British administrators show enormous courage and discipline in the face of war, plague and direct personal threats to their safety. Their main concern is always the welfare of the people under their control. Would-be reformers from Britain are shown to have no grasp of the realities of colonial administration.
Clearly Wallace’s account doesn’t always match reality, but whether the information available about colonialism was adequate and sufficiently unambiguous to make that ‘knowable’ at the time is open to debate. We have first-hand accounts by many intelligent and well-informed people who generally approved of the system, and we have no reason to think that they were deluded or misinformed.
On a more modern note, can you claim to ‘know’ that Pakistan, say, would NOT be better off today under an enlightened colonial administration? Would there not be less killings, less rape, better education, better health, longer lives? And if Pakistan in 2012 why not, say, Basutoland in 1908?
Eric
I think a great deal of this debate hinges on the meaning you attach to ‘objective’.
If you mean “undistorted by emotion or personal bias; based on observable phenomena” then I consider that morals cannot by definition be objective because they are motivated by our emotions. Hence my argument about passionate debate over gun control.
If you have some different definition of ‘objective’ in mind then perhaps that needs to be teased out.
Yes, it does.
Well, not “merely” relative, but not anything which is independent of human minds.
Well, of course the world as science knows it is not mind-independent, because we only see the world through the lens of science. But that does not imply that the world itself is dependent on mind. That proposition is getting dangerously close to Deepak Chopra-esque woo.
That’s not what I took from his words. If you admit (as you do in the last para. of the OP) that morality is “determined by widespread social agreement” (which is what I hear Grayling arguing), then it is not objective; “social agreement” is exactly a cultural consensus; independent of particular minds, but not independent of culture; intersubjective but not objective. Would you argue that if rational, inquiring minds had not evolved that the cosmos would not exist? But, certainly, rational social animals had not evolved, there would be no morality.
Really, as other commenters have suggested, I think you take “objective” to mean something rather looser (to my mind, too loose) than what I take it to mean (which meaning I indicated above).
I’m struggling to parse the end of that sentence. Are you saying that the Belgians who exploited Central Africa knew their own moral failings to be great? I don’t see that; my impression is that the consensus among Europeans at that time was that what they were doing was morally right (eg, a non-satirical reading of “The White Man’s Burden”).
/@
* Oops. I didn’t close italics properly after “the world itself”. Sorry. [Closed]
Well, we have to start somewhere, so let’s take this from Ant:
The way to parse the end of that sentence, that the moral failings of the King of the Belgians, who exploited Central Africa for his own purposes, were very great, could be known to be a great failing, and were recognised as egregious moral failings by contemporaries. Had they not been recognised as a great failings by contemporaries, this could only have been because they did not know what was happening in the Congo basin. It was a vicious, exploitative, oppression for the benefit of one man, who was obsessively and cunningly acquisitive, and cared not a fig for the people who came under his control. It was recognised by several people, amongst them Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness was written to describe the evil that he witnessed taking place in that part of the world. To deny that these things could be known is to leave us quite morally rudderless. To recognise that they could be known is to acknowledge the kind of objectivity that our moral judgements can have.
This blog is devoted to the right of people to die when their sufferings become intolerable. The Roman Catholic Church opposes this. I believe they are wrong, morally. They are the direct cause of unnecessary suffering. And they also violate the rights of individuals regarding their life choices. I think the same is true about abortion. But I also think that these things can be known with fair assurance, and can be condemned because of this knowledge. In a very similar way, the way in which Islamic societies are ordered so as to subordinate and control women and their freedom is a great injustice. Their condemnation and victimisation of gay people is also a moral failing of the morality bequeathed to them by their so-called prophet. These are things that we can know, and to which we can be justly opposed. Just because our feelings or emotions or interests are invoked does not make these matters merely relative to individuals or cultures. They are wrong wherever and by whomever practiced.
Eric,
Indeed. But it does challenge the generally accepted usage for the word ‘objective’.
DJ, that, unfortunately, is a narrowly prejudicial use of the word ‘objective’, based on the belief that the only “things” that can be objective are things. But there is a perfectly good sense of objectivity in ethics in terms of which a value’s being objective is its being true independently of one’s feelings or interests. There is simply no reason to confine the use of the words ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’ to entities existing apart from our perceptual capacities. Something rationally demonstrable is objective regardless of its ontological status. So, logical truths are as objective as scientific theories, and have more claim to be regarded as universally true. To suggest that there is no objective basis for the claim that one society (say Switzerland) is more just than another (say North Korea) seems to me, to be quite frank, to be ridiculous.
Consider, more extensively, say, liberal Western values in relation to the values of Islam, and use, as one example, their differential assessment of the value of women and their place in society. We can understand what they are talking about; we can easily see the outcome of these particular moral beliefs; we can reasonably think that any persons treated as the Sharia dictates are being treated as less than fully human or free; we can justly remark that these values are antiquated beliefs, based on the questionable claim that a prophet, having received a word from a god, has left moral injunctions regarding the place of women in society; and that the outcome of these beliefs is a massive injustice done to women. In another religious tradition, we can see the result of Hindu beliefs on the status of women in Indian society. Humanists in both Hindu dominated societies and Muslim dominated societies can question these beliefs, and give good reasons why changes should be made. Should we just leave them on their own, saying that we cannot comment on the values of another culture? Surely not. We have international institutions that can be brought to bear on the way different nations treat their citizens, and call them to account. We can bring to bear the discourse of human rights which every member of the United Nations is bound to uphold, and show how, in respect of those rights, women are too often disadvantaged and unjustly treated. Are you trying to tell me, in relation to these questions, that some choices are neither more reasonable nor more just than any other? If this is what is being said, then perhaps the religious are right in saying that you need god to be good, for the refusal to accept that values can be objective and universal, that, say, enslaving a person in Saudi Arabia is just as unjust and morally wrong as enslaving a person in England, would leave us in the end with a kind of moral nihilism. To a certain extent the world seems to be that way, but can we not say that, to the extent that it is, it is morally regrettable and should be changed?
I quite frankly have no idea what is being suggested by those who think that moral value is entirely relative. Relative to what? Relative to culture? Subculture? Individuals? Moral nihilism is the result. It simply makes no sense to me. Some kind of moral cognitivism is, I think, necessary, to escape this outcome. I may not be able to show this in detail. Derek Parfit, in his two volume On What Matters comes as close as any modern moral philosopher has come in showing why other options lead to unsatisfactory consequences. And showing this does take more space than a blog post or two or three, but I cannot see that merely rejecting objectivism in ethics because it does not accord with scientific canons of proof is enough to go on. This is precisely why I think that scientism is, itself, an inadequate account of what we can know.
Eric, would you still use the word “moral” the way you do if you didn’t want the rhetorical strength that comes with it?
In the past year or so, I have abandoned almost all talk of “rights.” The fact is that they don’t exist, if a “right” is supposed to be something God or the universe guarantees us. We aren’t guaranteed anything. If we were, we wouldn’t be so frequently fighting for our rights! Even governments, which establish themselves for the purpose of guaranteeing rights, fail at least some of the time. So it makes no sense to me to fight for some cause or another by saying “we have a right to X,” when there is no binding sense in which this is true (even constitutions can be changed!) But I do acknowledge that saying “we have a right to X” is quite rhetorically strong language, and it is likely to help one’s cause when used appropriately, even if it isn’t really true. Are you doing the same with “moral”?
I think there is perhaps a confusion somewhere, in connexion with the subjective (bad)/ objective (good) distinction. What is first of all objective about morality is the fact that as social animals we possess it: it is grounded in our feelings as social animals, which in turn are connected with our feelings for the group to which we belong, something that explains why it is very easy for someone to behave immorally (by his own group’s standards) to someone from another group and not to regard his action as immoral. Regarding that fundamental and objective morality, which resides of course in our subjectivities – the kind that (Grayling’s example) leads us to cry out and warn someone on whom a stack of bricks is about to collapse on him or (Meng-tse’s famous eample) that leads us to save a child from falling into a well – it is not a set of ‘objective’ and clearly-stated rules that we are required to follow (which is what most people seem to think constitutes an ‘objective’ morality) and that we can argue about (if the authority that sanctions them permits it), thus providing jobd for theologians and philosophers. The idea that morality is a set or sets of rules leads to debates that seem to me to be wholly sterile. The best tradiional moral thinking that I have come across (I think of certain Chinese philosophers and the Buddha) begins from the fact of humanity having a moral nature and building on that. The worst sort of moral thinking consists in sterile battles about sets of rules that are taken to be ‘objective’.
I should also add Montaigne as a great moral exemplar and a great moralist, although his cunningly wandering style, full of doubts and qualifications, upset such as Descartes and Pascal, who sought straight lines and certainties, and continues to upset the kind of people who think of morality as a sort of rulebook, packed with helpfully objective and universal rules, that one gets out and refers to when in a morally ambiguous situation or a moral quandary (`Oh, yes, I shouldn’t torture that child in this situation!’). And talking of morality, there is a splendid bit in Doughty`s Arabia Deserta about some Arab chieftain who became, as I recall, a chieftain by accident (after the death of a cousin, perhaps) and though personally a kindly and eirenic man was forced by his situation to kill certain rivals or be killed himself… I think we need to think first what morality is – for it is a vast, unwieldy and contradictory thing that derives from our nature as social animals, is also a function of the kind of society in which we happen to be brought up and to live (or, historically, to have been brought up and to have lived), is a function of the various situations we find ourselves in (as in the case of the Arab chieftain), and is shot through with religious beliefs, rules and anathemas, as well as philosophical positions, agreements and disagreements – and then to think, given this protean bulk that rests on the narrow foundation of our nature as social animals, how we might begin to discuss it.
Tim, I am quite prepared to accept all that you say here, but I would still say that, in our ability to discuss things in the way that you do, and as Doughty does, in defending against the accusation of immorality and inhumanity an otherwise eirenic person, we are dealing with matters that are objective, and because objective in the appropriate way, even though complex and sometimes apparently contradictory, discussable and arguable. And Montaigne’s irony would have been impossible without the background awareness that he presumed people to have about a domain of moral discourse in which things could be known to be true. The best parody or caricature is based on features that are known to be (objectively) there.
Nor, let me add, did I say anything about a distinction between subjective/bad and objective/good. But I did suggest that what is merely subjective is also merely relative, and does not achieve the status of rational belief until it is mixed in with the experiences and understanding of others. Everything that you say points to the objectivity of morality and moral understanding, while at the same time noting its complexity, ambiguity, and, perhaps occasionally, as Isaiah Berlin insisted, the tendency of values to conflict with one another. When values conflict, however, they do so because we acknowledge their status as providing genuine reasons for action.
Eric,
I prefer finely judged to narrowly prejudicial… I wonder if you think that I only value scientific knowledge? Not so. I value the wisdom of personal experience too. I just think you are making a rod for your own back. Many people don’t agree with your ‘objective’ morals, just as you don’t agree with their ‘objective’ morals. Two contradictory reasoned objective morals? How can this be? You’ll be claiming that the Right to Die is objective and some bright spark will be pointing out the holes in your reasoning – from their point of view, their axioms, their beliefs.
I’ve never known any significant number people to change their minds through reasoning, people change their beliefs, then their minds, and then they invent reasons to validate their changed minds. Still it’s your blog, if you wish to use ‘objective’ in a broad and sloppy way that’s up to you. I think it will detract from you putting your points across though.
Tim, DJ, you seem to misunderstand, I am not suggesting, for one moment, that there is a list of rules which comprise objective morals. I am saying that, of things of which we can argue, and give reasons, there are often reasons for accepting one way of acting rather than another, and if this is so, there are objective differences to which those reasons attach. To speak of my “objective morals” as opposed to someone else’s “objective morals” is to simply miss the point. This is not a sloppy use of the word ‘objective’ at all, as anyone who has read literary or art criticism will understand.That there are no final, and definitive moral laws, just as, in a very real sense, there are no final, definitive laws of nature, does not at all diminish their objectivity, and it is hard to see why you would think so. There are, of course, moral prescriptions which look pretty final and definitive. A prohibition of raping babies, for instance, of which there have been several instances in India, is, I suggest, one of them. In the same way there are laws of nature that look pretty stable, and likely to remain largely unchanged, at least for the forseeable future.
I do think the right to die is an objective right, and that it is wrong for people to force people who are suffering intolerably to die in ways dictated merely by their diseases. This is not something from “my point of view.” There are reasons for believing this to be the case. Some of these reasons are the outcome of a long evolutionary history, of both humans as a species, and as cultural beings, and are none the worse for that. (See Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project for an account of how morality and moral reasoning may have arisen.) The refusal to recognise such rights and freedoms means that we cannot even begin to question, and oppose, actions which are plainly unjust and an offence against the human, such as the attempted murder of Malala, or the rape and torment of the woman in Delhi. If these are not offences against quite objective standards of what is right and wrong, I would like to know what they are.
As to your unfortunate dismissal of reason and the powers of reason, I can only wonder why you think it worthwhile to argue or to give reasons as you have for some time been trying to do. It is true that we are often impervious to reason, but that does not mean that reason does not give us grounds that should change our minds. Creationists, for instance, are determined to remain ignorant, and to base their beliefs on plain ignorance, but their refusal to accept perfectly good reasons for believing otherwise does not make reason pointless. It just make them ignorant and possibly delusional, as Dawkins has suggested.
My confusion cleared when you talked of objective differences between moral views because I understood what you meant when you talked of objectivity in morals but no definitive set of morals. I wonder if much of the debate has sprung from the literary and art criticism use of language compared to the scientific use of language. Two cultures perhaps.
But then you spoiled my clarity by talking of the right to die is an objective right. Did you mean that the right was justified by your personal evaluation of objective differences from other views? Or that it was the only sensible view for people to hold? Calling the right to die an objective right sends a confusing message to someone like myself (and some of the others up thread it would seem) who use the word ‘objective’ in a different way.
I wonder if the different levels of privilege accorded to personal knowledge within the Art/Science domains explain some of the difficulties in discussing ‘ways of knowing’, knowledge, morals, human experience, and the unquiet relationship between Philosophy and Science? Too much for this thread perhaps. I’ll say no more.
No, Eric, I largely agree with you, though I do find your insistence on the ‘objectivity’ of morality a bit dubious – it seems to me that it is not so much that morality in itself is objective as that it can be be argued about in more or less reasonable and objective ways (by comparing one culture’s morality with another, or by suggesting better standards whereby moral rules or practices may be judged). One reason why I feel dubious about claims as to the objective validity of certain moral standards (though I cannot imagine any society where raping babies would be considered a good thing) is because of the way in which some standards thought to possess an objective validity have been, and still are being, imposed by one society on another. The British were right, surely, to try to end the practice of suttee, but Western attitudes towards homosexuality, for example, had – and still have – an unhappy influence on Asian societies that were in many ways tolerant of homosexuality; and, also, there is a tribe in western China whose name I cannot recall (not the Na Khi, about whom Joseph Rock wrote so eloquently) where women have great power, can choose their lovers, etc, but which has been, ever since the Communist Revolution, virtually under siege from officialdom, who consider them ‘backward’ and seek to impose the more patriarchal marriage institutions of the Han Chinese (now not really much different from Western marriage institutions)… I think also of the attitudes of so many white South Africans towards the ‘vermin’ who lacked morality that they considered the Bushmen to be, attitudes that led to the wiping out of those Bushmen tribes who lived in the Drakensberg. Incidentally, I wonder about Corio’s adverting to Basutoland in 1908 – is there some genuine reason why he does so, or does he does do so merely because he thinks the Basuto people in those days were black savages who needed to be controlled by more advanced peoples?
What I feel is important is a constant questioning of, and conversation about, moral matters; and I am not really interested in whether such a conversation or its object (if I may use the word) is subjective or objective.
Discovered Joys brings up the old ‘two cultures’ business again… there are very good reasons for saying that Shakespeare is a greater artist than, say, Thomas Campion, a poet for whom I have huge admiration because of the delicacy of his ear, or, say, Agatha Christie. Such things are not matters of merely personal taste, and do not depend on what DJ calls ‘personal knowledge’, by which I suspect he means ‘unbridled subjectivity’.
DJ:
I think we are making headway slowly. When I call the right to die an objective right, I am saying that there are compelling reasons to suppose that it is. I am not saying that those reasons are not (possibly) defeasible, though I do not think they can be defeated, at least as I now understand things. I think it is the most sensible view for people to hold, though I understand that some people hold contrasting views. In many cases, those views are based on antiquarian notions of a law of God inscribed as the pope says, in human nature. I do not think the pope can make good on his claim. There are other possible arguments that can be fielded against the right to die, such as the familiar slippery slope arguments, but they are not compelling. The point is that when we are arguing like this we are arguing for values that each person believes is objectively based on sound reasons. The difference between this use of ‘objective’ and the scientific one is not so great, though the basis for scientific positions has a different methodology, and, at least for the so-called “hard” sciences like physics, chemistry, biology, etc., more stable conclusions. Notice that “more stable”, for reasons and evidence can also be proposed for revising our understanding of what were once taken to be conclusively established.
Tim, you say:
But that is what is meant by ‘objectivity’ in science or morality. Science has greater claim to more assured conclusions, but they are not absolutely secure, as the logic of induction teaches us. Morality is much more complex and includes incredibly complex moral and social and cultural situations, and so we may expect that the difficulty of achieving assured, that is, objective results, will be more difficult as well as more embroiled in prejudice, self-interest, and other characteristics that lead us astray. The insistence on objectivity is simply an insistence that there are, when push comes to shove, things that we can know to be wrong, or be very certain about things being wrong, regardless of who we are, and what we stand to gain or lose by the proposition.
Again, yes, if by ‘we’ you mean highly educated, intelligent and fair-minded modern people much like yourself, and not, let us say, a 15th-century Aztec, in whose eyes ‘human flourishing’ required a constant supply of human sacrifices (including child sacrifices), or, let us say, the kind of Brahmin who really did not care at all if babies of the sudra were raped(and perhaps in some, one hopes few, cases still does not), or the kind of ‘conservative’ (Mitt Romney, say) who believes that all working-class people, particularly if they are black, are idle and greedy and constantly clamouring for handouts from the state, or all those people who have forgotten about what was done at Fallujah, if they ever noticed it, or the many people who are perfectly willing to accept the suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for various reasons that seem good to them… What strikes me about the world is that, although in many ways through the efforts of good people like you, Eric, it is getting better, is the indifference of so many people to the plights of others, and the world’s sheer recalcitrance… which of course does not mean that ‘we’ should not keep striving to make it better.
And a challenge for Corio: perhaps he could tell us what British rule did for the indigenous people of Tasmania.
Ah, well, I have never claimed that ethics is easy. Indeed, one of my complaints regarding religion is that it has largely trivialised morality, by making it a matter of a supposed legislation, when morality is about the very complex and sensitive relationships between human beings. I get worried, though, when people start to talk about human flourishing, (though of course, in general, that is what morality is about), because so many presuppositions can so easily be imported into moral discourse by this very general word of moral appraisal, and it tends to suppress the many difficulties involved in achieving a sensitive understanding of what we owe to others.
[quote]But that is what is meant by ‘objectivity’ in science or morality. Science has greater claim to more assured conclusions, but they are not absolutely secure, as the logic of induction teaches us. [/quote]
Doesn’t this simply imply that, for people who accept a particular moral premise, they can agree on the conclusions? I doubt that most people who believe that drone strikes are morally permissible condone civilian deaths – they are using a utilitarian argument, invoking least harm. Likewise, all sorts of what I might see as regressive, immoral actions are deemed by some cultures as morally permissible, because they result in a society that, from their perspective, is better off as a whole (less immorality, more respect for tradition and religion, closer adherence to what god says should happen).
Many people do not believe that that equality, self-determination, or fairness in and of themselves are worth transgressions of traditional or religious standards. Many argue, with the Apostle Paul, that “these light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor 4:17). Many people believe that a god has setup the world such that a particular race, creed and/or gender deserve (or in any event have) special priviages that ought to be preserved. That certain actions ought to be punished or proscribed, simply because the believe god says.
These folks will not agree, objectively, that the things you condemn are morally impermissible. But, that is what is meant by ‘objectivity’ in science or morality. Science has greater claim to more assured conclusions- but they are not absolutely secure, as the logic of induction teaches us. We have no independent, objective way to resolve this difference of opinion, because they start off with a very diferent premise.
This seems to me to be more significant than simply acknowling that science has “claim to more assured conslusions.” The situation may be closer to Darwin’s time, when Larmarkianism and Darwinism were two plausible explanation for inheritance. Science offered a way to settle the matter. I don’t see any way to resolve moral disagreements except through some sort of conversion from one premise to another.
I’ve been away for a few days while this thread has been progressing. In regard to the questions posed to me: a) I plucked ‘Basutoland’ out of the air as a name because it was the first one that came to me. It could equally well have been Tanganyika or Nyasaland. b) Regarding the Tasmanian Aboriginals, there were people ‘on the ground’ at the time who had observed the fate of the mainland Aboriginals, and decided that Tasmanian Aboriginals needed to be ‘protected’ by being rounded up and moved to isolated islands. You _think_ they were wrong, and on balance so do I, but that’s a far cry from _knowing_ they were wrong, and further still from insisting that they must have _known_ they were wrong. Eric seems to believe that they would have access to information which would have told them they were wrong, but this in itself is surely a matter for debate. Can you really supply an accurate and detailed account of all the sources of information open to a low-level official in a remote colony in 1830? Yes, any well-informed high-schooler now has access to a thousand times more information than they did, and we now have much less excuse for the bad decisions we go on making, but at the time…?
Regarding the larger point, Eric, now you’ve conceded that we need reasons to make moral decisions, you seem to have essentially come round to my view that the adjective ‘moral’ as applied to decisions is inherently meaningless, and that we should approach the decisions commonly regarded as ‘moral’ from the same perspective as any other decisions — that is, by taking due regard of the likely consequences in the light of the best evidence that we can find. And naturally our own feelings about the issue, and what will happen to us as a result of the decision are part of the mix of evidence that we need to consider. Each situation in the real world is unique, and so we need to spend as much time reasoning what to do from first principles as the importance of the outcome warrants. Sometimes rules can help us; sometimes they are useless and sometimes misleading. But the ultimate goal of a ‘moral’ decision-maker is the same as the goal of any other decision-maker: to think things out in such a way as to attain the best possible outcome for everyone concerned.
But — here’s the kicker — people still vary in their judgement about what is ‘best’.
Judging from various sources I have read, Corio, the fate of the indigenous Tasmanian people does not seem to have been quite so much a matter of the best intentions gone wrong as you suggest; here’s Wikipedia:
(Some) ‘historians regard the Black War as one of the earliest recorded modern genocides. Benjamin Madley wrote: “Despite over 170 years of debate over who or what was responsible for this near-extinction, no consensus exists on its origins, process, or whether or not it was genocide”; however, using the “U.N. definition, sufficient evidence exists to designate the Tasmanian catastrophe genocide.”
‘By 1833, George Augustus Robinson, sponsored by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, had persuaded the approximately 200 surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians to surrender themselves with assurances that they would be protected, provided for and eventually have their lands returned to them. These ‘assurances’ were in fact lies – promises made to the survivors that played on their desperate hopes for reunification with lost family and community members. The assurances were given by Robinson solely to remove the Aboriginal people from mainland Van Diemen’s Land. The survivors were moved to Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island, where diseases continued to reduce their numbers even further. In 1847, the last 47 living inhabitants of Wybalenna were transferred to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. Two individuals, Trugernanner (1812–1876) and Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905), are separately considered to have been the last people solely of Tasmanian descent.’
And why might the Basutoland you admit to pulling out of the air have equally been Nyasaland or Tanganyika? Yours seems, if I may say so, a rather undiscriminatig way of aproaching important matters.
Tim, if you don’t like my examples, then go ahead and supply your own. I’m just suggesting that Eric’s assumption that we can look back from our wealthy, egalitarian, privileged, Internet-equipped, historically-aware, politically-correct, enlightened open society and clearly identify what people fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago _must_ have _known_ was right and wrong is — in my view — a naive one. Just like the view that we now somehow have a complete grasp of what morality is all about, and that there will be no changes to Western morality in the future.
To refer to my analogy about language, it’s like assuming that you know perfectly well what Jane Austen meant by ‘sensibility’, and that she couldn’t possibly have meant anything else. Maybe so; but you will have a hard time proving it.
Corio, let’s start here:
That is one thing that I have never said (and I find it surprising that you should attribute it to me) and I am quite aware that ethics is a developing (perhaps an evolving) project. To apply the values of one age to those of another is always a hazardous thing to do, because, in fact, it is often not true that the people of earlier times knew or could have known that some of the things they took for granted were wrong. The point, nevertheless, is that, while they may not have achieved a standard of value which recognised the rights of all to the same moral regard (as, for instance, Aristotle seemed unable to recognise that the “natural slaves” that he thought existed simply do not), they had moral standards of right and wrong and were every bit as concerned for moral value as we are. That they did not know what we know is not necessarily through any fault of their own, but represented a different stage of development towards a broader moral understanding. But we can recognise their moral concerns as being continuous with ours, and aiming at the same (or at least similar) ends.
However, when you see cultures clashing, as for example European culture and Central African culture clashed in Leopold II’s Congo, there are clear parallels between the values of the conquerors/exploiters and the indigenous people. That Europeans did not bring their own values with them and treat the indigenous inhabitants of the Congo Basin with more humanity is a failure of morality on the part of the Europeans, and could be seen, by both morally aware Europeans, and by the indigenous peoples, to be such a failure. The same goes for the treatment of the indigenous people of (say) Newfoundland or Tasmania. I see no reason at all why these examples should convince us that moral value is not something knowable. That it is complex, and developing (just as other areas of knowledge are subject to revision, change, and greater truth to reality), should not surprise us, but it need not for that reason be thought that there is nothing that we can know with some assurance, to be right or wrong, good or bad.
The analogy with language is very inexact. Words certainly change their meaning over time, as new uses for old words develop, but they do not necessarily do this in a systematic way, and semantic change seldom has important moral consequences. If you look at the development of the moral project, I think you will find that there is more system than chance in the changing fortunes of our moral terms, largely because this is something of the utmost importance to our lives, and therefore has received the systematic attention of our best minds. One of the things that surprises me in this discussion is that some people take the difference of value based upon religious sources to be somehow proof against the objectivity of morals. Certainly, it was an early attempt to express the sources of the conviction that our moral values are indeed objective, but it was not a very satisfactory way of achieving a rational morality, and now that we are gradually shaking off the incubus of religion, we can find more satisfactory ways of understanding that objectivity.
That religious moralities clash is unsurprising, since they are usually absolutisms based on supposed sacred sources. Since Plato’s Euthyphro there has been no reason whatever to suppose that these sources are above suspicion or criticism, and there is now a widespread international project which is in the process of developing a worldwide morality. This still has a long way to go, especially in view of the fact that the religions are so intransigently hostile to anything which challenges their imperium. This does not, however, mean that there is not already a fairly widespread idea that human beings, qua human beings, have moral standing which it is wrong for others to ignore. This growing awareness that human beings the world over have rights to self-determination and opportunity, may reasonably be thought to be the beginnings of a universal morality. The orthodoxy of free-trade economics and religious moral systems get in the way of achieving anything like a world moral system, but in the end we may hope that we will more and more see that humanity has more to gain from acting rationally, than simply acting in accordance with age-old religious moral orthodoxies, or in ways determined by some of the least moral of our compulsions (viz, the voracious desire for wealth and power).
“That Europeans did not bring their own values with them and treat the indigenous inhabitants of the Congo Basin with more humanity is a failure of morality on the part of the Europeans…”
Only if you accept the modern belief that all human racial groups are deserving of the same treatment. This is a tenet of modern Western society, and rightly so, but it’s still disregarded in many non-Western societies, and it’s not so inherently obvious as to be something that people of that era ‘should have known’. If our Western forefathers regarded indigenous peoples in the light in which we now regard, say, mentally disabled people, then by our current moral standards it was quite appropriate for them to treat indigenous peoples as we now treat the mentally disabled. OF COURSE they were wrong; but I don’t see that it’s obvious they could have known they were wrong.
After all, the African slave trade was made possible by the enthusiastic participation of African chiefs who were all too willing to capture and deport their enemies from other tribes. Should THEY have known that this was wrong? How? Many cultures, including the Ancient Greeks, have regarded other cultures as sub-human, and not entitled to full human rights. As we discussed a few weeks ago, many religious groups still do. Once again, they were and are wrong; but I still don’t see how they could have been expected to KNOW they were wrong.
Regarding your comments on language, I would say that on the contrary, language changes in a very adaptive and purposeful way; as the most important method we have of describing the world by far, it’s absolutely crucial that it does so, and that we have words available when we need them to talk about the things that are important to us. There are many highly skilled people in all areas of research and discovery working very hard to provide us with the language we need to explore those areas: it’s extremely systematic.
But why, Corio, did you choose those examples – because they were all places where what you suppose, without having looked into the matter, to have been uncivilised black African savages lived, perhaps? And why did you attempt to whitewash what happened to the native people of Tasmania? I suggest that talking about morality surely requires some sort of scrupulousness and honesty, some sort of willingness to look at historical facts and not to resort reflexively to a what appears to be a racial or chauvinist defensiveness. As for your remark about Jane Austen and ‘sensibility’ (which seems to have nothing to do with your subsequent remarks about those ‘highly skilled people’ who are ‘working very hard to provide us with the language we need to explore those areas’ – words like ‘quark’, perhaps?), I should like to say something about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, but since this is not my blog I shall not say anything about your teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. but will merely say that for various reasons, amongst which are having directed and acted in plays by Shakespeare and having directed Monteverdi’s opera ‘Orfeo’, I am well acquainted with the ways words change their meaning over time. As for those ‘adaptive and purposeful’ and ‘systematic’ ways in which language changes, perhaps you could explain to us, in terms of these ways, how the word ‘silly’ changed from the meaning it has in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton to the meaning it has now.
Oh, come on, Corio. Of course they should have known. By the time Leopold came along lusting after colonies, the slave trade had been abolished. He even lobbied for international agreement on his rule in the Congo partly on the pretext that he wanted to suppress the Arab slave trade, and this suppression was even included in textbooks later used in the Congo, extolling the virtue of Leopold’s rule. It may be true that, at the time, it was not recognised in Europe that indigenous peoples had a right to govern themselves — the “white man’s burden” and all that — but it was at least recognised that cruel treatment, slavery and indiscriminate violence against indigenous people was contrary to contemporary moral standards. Leopold went to great lengths to portray his rule of the Congo (and it was a private fiefdom unrelated to the Belgian government) as enlightened, trying to suppress accounts of that rule which showed his rule to be ruinously exploitative, inhumane and promiscuously cruel. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness reflects accurately the reality of Leopold’s misrule of the so-called Congo Free State, so named to encourage international acceptance of Leopold’s claimed humanitarian purposes in taking the Congo under his personal rule. Leopold was widely known for some time as a great humanitarian and philanthropist on the strength of his claims regarding the Congo, when the truth was quite otherwise. Leopold knew. Of course he knew. Just as we, sadly, know how many people are exploited so that we can enjoy cheap electronics and fashionable clothing.
As to language, I think you would be hard pressed to show that there is a systematic way in which meaning changes over time, but I am not sure what this was supposed to show in any event.
One of the major functions of religion is to define an “US” and a “THEM”. US are assumed to be morally superior. The moral inferiority of THEM can often be rationalized as a justification for US to treat THEM in a way they would consider unacceptable if done to US. Kinship, race, language, gender, cultural practices can be used where convenient to classify someone or group as THEM. Nationalism has perhaps become the most powerful discriminator, but religion takes it to another level. “God is on our side” can, has, is, and will justify almost any atrocity. The arrogance of religious superiority justified the evils of imperialism that several have mentioned, and continues to.
Eric, if there are objective principles of morality, where do they come from? They must come from the human brain, which is an evolved structure. One could think of the human brain as evolving a capacity for morality, as a capacity for language. I believe Kitcher addresses this and also E.O. Wilson. Specific ethical principles such as “thou shall not kill” seem more difficult. There is evidence that the human brain has become wired with circuitry that facilitates language. But there is no evidence that it facilitates one language better than another. “Thou shalt not kill one’s own offspring and siblings” seems well supported by biological selection. Further generalization to larger groups, and perhaps to all humans would, I think, have to be a product of cultural evolution.
Culturally, one can point to progress in abolishing slavery, supporting equal rights for women, minorities, gays etc. in western cultures, as moral progress. Can we consider these accomplishments as progress toward an objective standard, or are we actually progressing in our capacity for empathy to levels not reached by earlier societies?
When it comes to moral issues like war, torture, rape, abortion, and equal rights for women, minorities, gays, etc., the evidence of history is not promising. If there are objective moral principles, they have not been effective in restraining man’s inhumanity to man. It is not obvious that we are making progress.
The notion of an objective morality may be as fabricated by the human mind as the notion of an objective god. The notion that morality is striving to achieve some objective ideal has justified the worst atrocities (e.g. Nazis and racial purity). We humans are on our own and have to make our own rules. We often have to act against our own evolved natures to live up to the ethical standards that we have created for ourselves and continue to create. When it comes to issues like war, torture, rape, abortion, right to die, equal rights for women, minorities, gays, etc., the evidence of history is not promising. If we are to move forward, we cannot rely on some kind of innate, evolved human inclination to universal moral judgments.
Maybe we need to take responsibility for ourselves and our behavior and stop pretending there is some “objective” standard or authority, whether it be god or natural law that give us guidance.
This is a most interesting discussion. Thanks Eric and all contributors.