Christians always ask me why I don't torture babies or something, as though life is like a Dostoevsky novel. I don't think nihilism is compelling or rational. Here I will channel an insight by the Christian Richard Swinburne. If you stack five leaky buckets on top of each other you end out with one pretty water-tight buckets.
Bucket #1 is group selection. In our evolutionary past humans were shaped by two competing forces. Evolution at the level of individuals favored selfish free riders. But human society existed as tribal foragers. Those tribes that could cooperate with each other prospered whereas those that had many free riders suffered. This weeded out free riders and left humans with basic prosocial traits which are the evolutionary basis of cooperation. I have a sense of sympathy, guilt, shame, and compassion. I have what Herb Gintis calls a social epistemology that grants me access to the contents of other human minds and which grants others access to mine through body language, facial expressions. I can't act as an anti-social sociopath anymore than I can decide to go without eating.
Bucket #2: Strong Reciprocity Strong reciprocity takes much of the benefit out of being a free rider. Altruistic punishers will punish free riders even at a cost to themselves. Moreover, as Eric Smith points out in his contribution to Moral Sentiments and Material Interests, much (all?) of the benefit of altruistic punishment can be explained by signaling. Furthermore, as the number of altruistic punishers goes up and the number of free riders goes down, the costs of being a strong reciprocator declines dramatically.
Bucket #3: Subjective Well-Being Call it the Richard Carrier principle. Research on subjective well-being shows a clear pattern in which people are happier if they volunteer, give to charity, and practice moral acts like forgiveness. I disagree with Carrier because there are some notable exceptions like having children and caring for a disabled spouse. It also leads to relativism because people on opposite sides of an issue may each feel a sense of well-being for the part they play. But it is another leaky bucket that provides more coverage.
Bucket #4: Modernization theory There is a lot of chance and consistency in any evolutionary process, but on balance it moves towards increasingly cooperative and sophisticated. A society that maximizes the use of all its members will outcompete societies which oppress their members because oppressed people do not have an incentive to contribute to the common good. The practical outcome of this is increasingly egalitarian social contracts that treat everyone fairly.
Bucket #5: Signaling Altruism may be a costly signal, not a costly sacrifice. Donating to charity, volunteering, and helping others in need are ways to signal to others that you are a good person to cooperate with. It shows that you have a low rate of time discounting and can be trusted.
Put all these five buckets together and you've got something that does an effective job of approximating morality.
Justin Martyr will not address these points. The purpose is to challenge other Christians and inspire atheists.
3 comments:
I'll bite.
Bucket 1# may catch quite a bit, but but it is poorly shaped, and has a leak equivalent to 0.6% of the surface area.
It is poorly shaped, because altruistic instincts apply only to humans you perceive as people. Alfred Oobu-Oobu, your tribemate, lying injured in a ditch? Yeah, sure, help him. George Wobu-Wobu, from an enemy tribe? See if he has anything shiny on him, then club him over the head. This is still true now as it was then. Someone who would never think of taking a friend's TV will willingly shoplift two from the store. A soldier who would never harm a fellow countryman will kill and pillage a foreign village. And this is only a slice of possible scenarios. There are many more things which do not cause us shame or guilt but are still wrong. Something could bring us guilt, but would even be right.
Furthermore, this bucket is completely missing for the six psycopaths out of every thousand. Strangely enough, they live perfectly fine doing whatever they want having as much guilt as a blind man has sight. They often achieve places of power or wealth, as they have no qualms as to which way up. For the other nine-hundred ninety four: Do not think that your sense of guilt is any more immutable. Torturers once felt just like you and me.
As for Bucket #2, doing what will benefit yourself materially hardly falls under 'morality'. If anything, that seems more to fall under the category of 'evil'.
The most respected heroes are the ones who fought against opposition to do what was right: Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, those who tried to smuggle Jews out of Nazi Germany and were killed for their troubles, the supporters of the Underground Railroad, that preacher guy back around 0 AD (whatever his name was), the list goes on.
Obviously, this principle applies in reverse. If your society decides that slaves are just fine and dandy, and offers you a job, with great perks and a high salary, as a slave catcher, will this 'bucket' help you at all?
Bucket #3 seems like a restatement of #1, and has the same issues. Sure, being 'good' can make you happy, but there soon comes a point where, materially and emotionally, the right choice is a net loss.
No amount of possible gain could offset giving up your own life. Consider that for a moment.
Bucket #4 I will agree with--to a point. A 'good' society will probably succeed, but why do you care about the success of your society except as it applies to you? This might give a evil dictator pause to not to be an evil dictator, as his fate is tied to that of his nation, but what does it matter to Average Joe? If society will be six times better in a hundred years, what will it matter, as you won't live to see it?
Bucket #5 will only help out if you are helping out people you know, or in a visible way. If you drop a few coins in the Salvation Army drum as you pass by, who will remember? Who will care?
Not to mention that this signal is only worth it if said activity is appreciated by your society at large. If it is not, you may have painted a costly bull's-eye on your head.
In conclusion, attempts to contrive an 'ethical' system which both matches our desires and is rational to obey will always be, well, contrived. To really find out the truth, you have to start from reality and see what rational system pops up.
Good thoughts!
Gigalith:
"doing what will benefit yourself materially hardly falls under 'morality'. If anything, that seems more to fall under the category of 'evil'."
Adam Smith will be glad :)
Evolution jumped in a long time before human societies to sort out the free rider problem. Chimps, dogs and even rats have been shown to have empathy and, to varying degrees, a sense of fairness. It would be fair to point out that justice in a social animal competes well against selfishness, although both can happily surivive in a population at certain ratios.
The 'leaky bucket' defense doesn't cut it for me. Morality has to have a justification outside of evolution, it has to have an intellectual component. To go 'with your gut' on all moral issues leads to huge errors. We are actually awful at making a reasoned decision at the gut level, instinct takes over and leads to short-termism, myopia and huge mistakes (like people who can't swim jumping into rivers to try and save a child in trouble).
If you can get past the gut reaction you will see that many things we consider immoral actually have no harm component and so no real justification for being called wrong. As a basic example, homosexuality: what two consenting adults get up to in the bedroom, harming no-one, is not my business and I have no right to call it immoral.
I guess my general point here is that we should escape all the buckets and try to design a new one. We can take our intellect and dispassionately agree an over-arching philosophy of right and wrong, ignoring evolution and our animalistic reactions, and define our ethics based on the more generally agreed moral points. This system would be based on, in my opinion, freedom; empathy; justice; the common good...
A good question for this would be "What society would you create if you didn't know what position in society you were going to occupy?" Thus you'd want a society that somehow cared for the sick, as you may be sick, but also allowed the intelligent to flourish as you may be one of them.
To do this we need no outside, absolute morality, simply the intelligence to take what's best about us and apply it fairly and equally to everyone. Would this be subject to change? You bet it would, and that's what's great about it. We may think we have some grasp of right and wrong, but we may not. Future generations may think out treatment of animals is barbaric and wish to outlaw it, or maybe our views on incest are wrong so make that perfectly okay, and this system allows for that. We are not tied into a morality that was deemed the best at one time but isn't any more, we don't have to defend what people did or thought at one time, we can say they were wrong and improve upon it.
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