Pragmatic Morality

One of the many useful things that religion does is provide a framework for morality. If God has told us what is moral, then the sincere religious person can rest easy knowing that by following his religion’s dictates he is doing what is right.

Without religion it’s more difficult to define morality and to decide whether something is right or wrong. At that, without a divine mandate, the entire enterprise of determining what is moral is called into question. Why does is matter is something is moral? After all, what is considered “good” or “bad” is largely determined by a combination of social norms and biological instincts. Neither of those are important in a written-in-the-sky kind of way, so who cares whether something is moral or not! That the norms of my society or my instincts tell me that I shouldn’t do something is not in itself a reason not to do it.

I think both problems, creating a moral code and a reason to keep it, can be addressed by adopting a pragmatic approach. And I think that a good starting point for a pragmatic morality is the Golden Rule. As Hillel phrased it: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

This is entirely pragmatic. If everyone follows the Rule, then we will all be treated well by everyone else – and that also provides the reason for behaving morally. I must behave morally because if I don’t, the system breaks down. It may be in my best interests at the moment, to, say, steal something from the grocery. If I do, though, then my fellows hano longer have motivation to treat me well – since they are treating me well in order that I treat them well – and the system breaks down. Inevitably, someone will steal from me – something that I don’t want to happen. Therefore I refrain from stealing from the grocery store in order to maintain the universal agreement that we all treat each other well.

The Golden Rule provides a simple, though not easy, basis for judging if an action is moral. If I were the person my action is affecting – not if I was in his place, but if I was him, with his likes and dislikes, his personality, his history, etc. – would I want to be treated that way? If yes the action is moral, if no then the action is immoral.

Of course, as with any moral system, there are gray areas. For example, giving a child a shot. The child certainly doesn’t want to be stuck with a needle, but it is in his best interest. Perhaps we could say that, if he knew that it was in his best interest, he would want it – except that forcing someone against their wish to do what we judge to be in their best interest is a dangerous road to go down. This needs more thought.

There is also the problem of bringing criminals to justice. A criminal who recognizes that what he did is wrong is not much of an issue. We look at it from his perspective, and try to treat him as we would want to be treated if we were caught doing something wrong. If I did something wrong, I would like understanding and compassion, but I recognize that there must be immediate consequences to deter people for whom the long-view of keeping things pleasant for everyone isn’t enough to keep them from breaking the moral code and ruining things for everyone else.

But what about someone who believes that what he did is right? I certainly wouldn’t want to be punished for something that I thought was the right thing to do. Not that I would want to be punished for something that I agree was the wrong thing, but there at least I can recognize the necessity of the punishment and acquiesce.  And what about someone who ascribes to a different moral system? We cannot subject him to the consequences of the Golden Rule moral system – after all, we would not want to subjected to consequences under the rules of his moral system. This also needs more thought.

These are some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for a while. A fully-developed moral system is beyond the scope of a single blog post, and likely beyond my amateur attempts at philosophy. I kind of like this idea, though. Any thoughts on how to make it more coherent?

Duex Ex Homo Sapiens

I just finished reading an excellent book, “Supersense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable” by Bruce Hood. The book explores how the way our minds are wired leads us to intuit the supernatural. It’s concepts such as the ones in this book, the way our minds really work as opposed to our intuitive understanding of how our minds work, that kept me interested in psychology in college.

Among other things the book discusses “essentialism,” the tendency we all have to think that there is a metaphysical essence attached to all objects and organisms that makes them what they are. The idea of essences goes all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy, and Dr. Hood quotes a Greek philosopher to make his point. He tells the story of the Ship of Theseus, a famous ship in the Greek world which saw years of service. Over its lifetime, parts of the ship were replaced as they became warped or rotten. Was it still the same ship at the end of its service as it had been at the beginning, despite having had many of its planks replaced? What if one were to take the cast-off planks and assemble them into a second ship? Which would be the real Ship of Theseus, the one that had parts slowly replaced, or the one that was made of the original, now cast-off planks?

A modern-day Ship of Theseus lies at anchor in Boston Harbor. The USS Constitution is an eighteenth-century wooden super-frigate, and is the oldest ship in the world to hold a continuous naval commission. Built during the “pseudo-war” between the United States and France near the end of the1700s, it became famous during the War of 1812 when its crew watched shot from the British frigate HMS Guerriere bounce off its sides and gave it the nickname, “Old Ironsides.” In the over two centuries it’s been in service, every splinter of the Constitution has been replaced at one point or another. Is it still the same ship that traded broadsides with the Guerriere?

That we still think of it as the same ship despite it physically being made up of entirely different material is because of our intuitive sense that there is some essence that defines an object as itself, an essence that is separate from the physical material it’s made of. We see the Constitution as an entity, not merely as a thing made of wood and steel.

Dr. Hood suggests that we have this sense because it helps us identify objects and people as having a continuous existence. He cites a rare neurological disorder in which patients are unable to identify people and objects as those they are familiar with, and instead insist that their parents have been replaced with exact duplicates; and that their closets are full of clothes that are the exact size and style as the ones they own, but belong to other people. Their sense of the essence of objects and people is damaged, and they don’t intuitively connect the beloved parents they spoke with before they became sick with the identical-looking people they’re speaking to right now.

The sense of essence then is extremely useful, as it allows us to intuit continuity. This is even more important with people than with objects. While the entirety of the Constitution has been replaced over the years, it still looks much as it did when it was first launched in the late 1700s. People, on the other hand, change as they age. My daughter today looks almost nothing like she did when she was born. Then she was a tiny, wrinkly, floppy thing that did nothing but eat, sleep, and cry. Now she’s nearly three feet tall, talks incessantly and loves to run and jump. Yet I intuitively see her as the same person.

This brings us to the soul. Our intuitive sense of essence, of a supernatural component to objects’ and peoples’ identity, lends itself to the instinctive assumption that there is metaphysical soul which animates our physical body. The sense of essence creates the illusion that there is something more to the people we interact with than their physical bodies, and together with other phenomena, such as our experience of our consciousness as existing in a metaphysical space somewhere behind our eyes; our sense that we occupy our bodies and drive them around like meaty vehicles; our difficulty truly conceiving of our own non-existence and a world that we are not a part of in some way; and the lack of obvious physical change at the moment of death, causes us to infer a metaphysical entity that animates the body and is the actual person we are interacting with – a soul.

Unfortunately for proponents of the existence of a soul, none of these things are evidence that a soul exists. Intuiting essence is useful to us because it lets us identify objects as having a continuous existence, but essences aren’t real in an objective sense – for either ships or people. Our sense of our consciousness as separate from and in control of our bodies is just a quirk of experience – our consciousness is an emergent property of our brains, and some of the brain areas responsible for various experiences have already been identified. Our consciousness is not any one of the experiences produced by discrete areas of the brain, but the sum of those experiences. Our difficulty conceiving of a world in which we do not exist is due to our complete lack of experience with our own non-existence – an experience that would be impossible to have. And the lack of an obvious change that turns a person into a corpse is because we cannot detect brain activity without sophisticated equipment. People die because their body breaks and stops working, much the same way a computer will stop working if a circuit board is cracked. There is no ghost in the machine that makes a computer work, just silicon chips, ceramic platters, and electric current. And there is no need to posit a soul to animate our bodies, just neurons, neurotransmitters, and bioelectricity.

The Worth of a Sandwich

Our intrepid heroes, inter-planetary explorers, have landed on the Planet of the Week, a Brave New World where No Man Has Gone Before. Before long they meet the native’s leaders and are having a merry old time - until they begin to discover that things aren’t quite right. The idyllic society has a nasty underbelly, and it is their duty as heroes to Right All Wrongs and expose the evil to the commoners.

Before they can, their once-genial hosts catch them. They are told that they cannot leave the planet, because they might report what they have seen to an outside authority; and they cannot stay, because they might tell the commoners the truth about their utopia. But their captors are not so backwards as to execute them, or toss them in a cell and throw away the key. Instead they are to be hooked up to a virtual reality machine, where they can live out the rest of their lives in a fantasy of their choice, while their bodies are kept alive by IV feeding. Our heroes declare that such a solution is unacceptable, as they could never be happy or find meaning in a life they know to be entirely artificial.

I think most people would agree with our heroes that an artificial existence would be meaningless. We would agree that getting married, having children, a career, being active in the community – in short, all the things we value as indicators of a life well spent – would be meaningless if acted out in a virtual fantasy world. Despite having our every desire catered to, such an artificial existence would quickly lose its novelty and become depressing as we realize that nothing we do really matters.

Why we would feel this way is an interesting question.

An even more interesting question is why we don’t feel this way about the “real” world.

If raising children, being active in the community, etc., are not considered meaningful in the virtual world, then we can conclude that it is not the act itself that has value. The actions and experiences of the individual are the same in the real and virtual world. Rather, the value must be the action’s effect on others. Because there are no “others” in the virtual world, only virtual constructs, the actions are not considered to have value.

The question then is why do we think that the impact of our actions on others give the actions value? Do our actions in fact have objective values, or is it merely that we are wired to believe that acts which help others are meaningful? If so, what if the virtual reality machine could be tweaked to make those hooked up to it believe that making turkey sandwiches has intrinsic value, and they happily spent the next sixty years making turkey sandwiches. Is that bad? They would be happy and would believe they led a meaningful life. How is being programmed to believe altruistic acts have intrinsic value any different than being programmed to believe that making turkey sandwiches has intrinsic value?

If there really is no difference, and person in a virtual world programmed to believe making virtual turkey sandwiches has value can find the same fulfillment that an unaltered human in the real world can find in being altruistic, if in the virtual world tombstones read, “expert turkey sandwich maker,” instead of, “loving father, devoted husband, invaluable member of the community,” then our meaningful, productive, altruistic lives really have no more intrinsic value than the virtual world’s inhabitant’s years of sandwich making.

Havael havalim hakol hevel