Morality

[mmcirvin]

John Scalzi posted an outraged post about the MCA, and some way down the thread somebody named Paul posted a defense of the law that included the following sentence:

7. I find it interesting that people who profess no faith in God or any other higher power can be so dogmatic about "morality". Morality is simply a recognition that some things are right and others are wrong based on some accepted standard. On what do you base your morality? Who sets the rules for you? How do you "know" that something is wrong?

I'd just been reading Fred Clark (who is a Christian, and... let's just say he wouldn't agree with Paul) talking about related subjects and was having warm fuzzy tolerant feelings about ways in which religion could be constructive, and this guy goes and ruins it for me. For Paul, apparently, religion isn't so much a source of moral insight as it is the admission ticket you need to lecture people about right and wrong. He's a God-believer and John and I are not, so what right do we have to tell him it's wrong to torture people? It reminds me of something I read from, I think, Orrin Judd a few years ago, complaining that atheists who behaved decently were free riders, mooching off of God-derived morality without acknowledging its divine author. He seemed almost disappointed that atheists weren't all monsters, as if we were using up his precious morality supply.


On the other hand, I do have to admit that I've been wrestling with Paul's particular question for a long time. Sometimes I think I'm almost a utilitarian and sometimes I think I'm almost a Kantian, and sometimes I almost agree with Raymond Smullyan's cheerful pseudo-Taoist take that axiomatized moral systems (as opposed to ethical feelings) are a dreary and monstrous waste of time, but all these positions seem unsatisfactory to me for various reasons. There are hard moral questions, and even a few easy ones, on which I've made decisions I later decided were wrong, and a more clear-cut moral system might have helped me.

Nevertheless, I find that there are many subjects on which I have no uncertainty whatsoever, such as whether half-drowning prisoners to extract information from them is right or wrong. If you ask how I know these things, I suppose the most honest thing to say is "because I was brought up that way". My parents and society inculcated certain values in me from childhood, and instilled in me, among other things, the idea that empathy is important, that you should treat people as you'd like to be treated, that some rules exist for a reason, but that injustices should be resisted; and that certain things are still right or wrong even if nobody is going to reward or punish me for them. These values do come into conflict with one another, but they have generally served me well. It's not a terribly satisfactory answer, but in practice, that's pretty much all anyone has. And, I suppose, more than some have.


I do know enough to get all Euthyphro on people who think it helps to bring God into it. If there is a God and God likes good things because they're good, then they must be good for some other reason, and theists and atheists are in the same boat morally, except possibly as regards enforcement. If good things are good just because God likes them, and if God decided tomorrow he wanted you to eat babies, that would become good—well, that may be internally coherent, but it seems hardly less arbitrary than saying good things are good for no particular reason, except, again, as regards enforcement. The angle that really makes my head hurt is that it leaves no way to exclude the possibility that God is lying to his prophets and followers about what he wants us to do, just for kicks; if God did it, it would be perfectly OK!

I suspect that what enthusiasts of divine command sometimes really mean is the more pragmatic argument that there's no reason for you to be good unless you're going to be rewarded or punished in the afterlife, but that's not how I was brought up at all.

Comments

hey Matt

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

I've spent many years studying philosophy; I have multiple degrees in the subject and a few bookshelves that terrify casual acquaintances. So I say the following with a respectable amount of institutional authority:

You are a good man.

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I ain't so sure myself. You don't see the highly illiberal, petulant and sometimes bloody thoughts that cycle through my head when I have not gotten much sleep in days, people I respect are telling me my country is dead and civil war or a new Holocaust is coming soon and they're going to torture and rape and kill my wife and my baby and me and it's my fault for not marching in the streets and smashing shit when it might have mattered, thugs are running the government and a lot of Americans seem to like it, it's 4 AM and the baby WILL NOT STOP CRYING.

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And there's something else that haunts me. Scalzi got a couple of other interesting comments, not from defenders of the law but from people outside the US chiding him for a sort of collective guilt.

Commenter annika: "Your pose right now is pretty sad, all considering. You are a pompous ass who believes himself humane. Leave the world alone and spare us your tripe."

Commenter jj: "I think you a the moral cowards.
You and the bunch of US Americans Netizens that think the can safely influence the world behind their computer screeens.
You should be out on the streets.
But you are too far from the streets.
The only people on the streets of the USA are the disenfranchised.
You have for over 50 years built your homes on the basis of isolation and distance form the streets (on streets, there lives "niggers").
You have comitted yourselves to nothing but consumerism.
Now reality is eating you up alive. Through 9/11 and Iraq.
"May you live in interesting times.""

It's probably because I'm a political idiot, but I have no idea what I should have been doing that they're accusing me and other Americans of not doing. Europeans have these very European-labor-movement ideas about general strikes, and some people have proposed 1960s-style campus takeovers, or general smash-shit-up rioting, but I'm not sure how that addresses the general problem of Republicans fomenting fear in the heartland. Those things are scary shows of power; you don't reduce fear that way. Nixon won in '68 and '72, in the latter case by a massive landslide.

But it still haunts me. I feel as if the deterioration of American liberal democracy, and the things America has done without my moving to stop them, morally taints me in an indelible fashion. In some sense I am an evil person by way of being American regardless of how good I am personally. I think part of the rarely-acted-on "I'll run to Canada" fantasy is the idea among ashamed Americans that we can somehow lose that taint by rejecting Americanness. But of course I know that I'm never more an American than when I'm in another country.

Re: hey Matt

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Europeans believe in the power of protest. That's an important thing to remember when Europeans talk politics. Our revolutions weren't - usually - wars of independence against foreign powers, they were revolts against the rulers. The symbolism of this is immense. Even peaceful nations like my own cherish the Moments of Protest when the People Forced The Rulers to change, and we are not just talking leftists and labour moments here, although they certainly have tried to hijack the idea of the Popular Revolt as theirs.

This goes back a very long time but the idea is still strong. We remember how popular protests overthrew East Germany and how other popular protests shifted Ukraine. Just recently riots forced the French government to retreat on youth policy.

So when a European wonders why the American people doesn't protest more strongly it is because to the European mind, protests work.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here, there's a similar sentiment surrounding the 1950s-60s civil rights movement, which really was a moment in American history when protests worked. That is partly because they were very, very, very shrewdly organized protests put together by genius leaders, not just mobs. (Rosa Parks was not just some random woman who didn't want to get out of her seat on the bus.)

Also because there happened to be some important court victories going on at the same time, led by equally brilliant lawyers who happened to get a sympathetic Supreme Court.

But there really haven't been many situations like that here. The really big, central upheaval in US history was the 1861-65 Civil War, which killed half a million people. The country probably could not physically survive another civil war today.

Re: hey Matt

[jwgh]

It seems like there's a tradition of protest, but there's also a tradition of protests being ignored. (In 2003, Bush said, "First of all, you know, size of protests--it's like deciding, `Well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.'")

There's also a tradition of trying to change things inside the system, though voting, funding candidates, running for office yourself, etc. You see a certain amount of advocacy for that in the comments on Scalzi's post also.

I think part of the reason that the civil rights protests had the success they did was that they exposed to the public view the horrible things the opposition did in response to the protests, and people just couldn't stomach it. A lot of what's going on today isn't in the public eye ... I applaud reporters and media outlets that do go to the trouble of tracking down and interviewing people who have been released from Guantanomo, etc.

My dad talked to me about the Weathermen once and said that he understood where they were coming from (although he himself has a strong commitment to nonviolence). In 1964, you had protests with a thousand people or so. In 1965, you had protests with 25,000 people. In 1967, 400,000 people marched on the UN in New York to protest the war. And yet the war continued to expand each step of the way (until 1973). It gets frustrating.

The US does have riots from time to time. I don't think they usually result in the overthrow of the government (which seems like an absurd thing to say, but I would accept 'the current folks in power getting tossed out in the next election and new people more sensitive to the concerns of the people who were rioting being installed', or anything along those lines, for this) but I don't know a whole lot about it, so I would be interested in learning of counterexamples.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and people just couldn't stomach it.

Sometimes I ask myself whether we've changed for the worse, so we can stomach it now. A fairly large fraction of the US population, I think, actively welcomed the Abu Ghraib abuse photos. But then a fairly large fraction of the population went to lynching picnics 80 years ago, and laughed when they shot Medgar Evers and MLK decades later. It's the same crap, and I doubt we've actually gotten worse on the whole, but I could be wrong.

The US does have riots from time to time.

Indeed, one of the biggest ones ever was in South Central LA after the acquittals in the Rodney King beating, not so long ago in historical terms. I'm pretty sure it was bigger than Watts, though it seems to have had less lasting significance. I'm not sure it led to much in the way of change, but I don't live at that end of the country. Were there really significant reforms in the LAPD? Don't know.

[jwgh]

I guess that if there are a small number of people happy to do the things in the Abu Ghraib abuse photos then it makes sense that there would be a larger number of people who would support them, but it is hard for me to wrap my mind around either proposition.

A lot of people were really disturbed by the photos, including people who supported the war. I think many folks have filed them as things to not think about very much, and by and large we have been allowed to do that. (Imagine if they were invoked as much as 9/11 is.)

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Of course, the reason why they don't work so well in the US has more to do with geography than anything else: European countries are smaller and have a much more urbanized population. The US is gigantic, the population density is lower, and, furthermore, outsize political power belongs to almost totally unpopulated rural areas. I guess that's what jj was getting at complaining about suburban white flight, but that's a comical understatement of the problem: it really goes back to the founding of the country and the Compromise of 1787 that assigned seats in Congress.

Re: hey Matt

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Sure, but you have states which would easily be swayed by protests. Given the slightly irrational fear of political break-up some Americans seem to have, I can imagine that would have effect.

There is a related problem which I sometimes do come across when discussing politics with Amros. It has to do with the system. Americans tend to equate government, political system and nation in a way few others do. Thus the rather odd anti-Americanism chants. Few Europeans are that attached to the particularities of political organization, and that means protesting against the system isn't necessarily a protest against the nation.

But for at least some Americans, that political system the larger-than-life founding heroes jotted down between hurling coins over rivers (I'm being ironical, of course) is a much stronger related to the nation. The system is sacred. Few European nations think like that - we have sacred founders and hero-leaders too, but the grandchildren of them are as incompetent as any and the systems they used aren't by nature sacred. So it is easier to protest against the system without being called a civil war inciter or treacherous non-patriot.

While I suspect this respect for a once amazing and still decent but not nearly as amazing system has had great worth in building the American prosperity, stability, safety, identity and power I also suspect it is slowly approaching a point in time when non-reform will instead be a liability and the conservation strategy instead accelerates the decline. Failing empires always make reforms too late.

Another thing has to do with the perception of protests. If you look at Swedish news, protests are 90% considered good. (And there are a lot of protests from all over the world). The protestors, rebels and rioters are against injustices, their national leaders are to blame for running things incompetently or outright unfairly.

So the media glorify and perpetuate the picture of the noble, desperate, outgunned, bleeding protestors against stupid or uncaring overlords. I certainly think this has a lot to do with European sympathies for almost any stone-thrower, including Palestinians and Iraqis. It is like peasant-rebellions, WW2 resistance people, anti-communist crowds and labour strikes come to life again.

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sure, but you have states which would easily be swayed by protests. Given the slightly irrational fear of political break-up some Americans seem to have, I can imagine that would have effect.

The state where I live is mostly anti-Bush and anti-Republican-crap already, less so at the rural western end but dominantly so. It's not ready to secede, though.

Part of the problem is that we remember that Civil War and we have better military tech, which is all in federal hands. If Massachusetts really tried to secede, it would be extremely easy to simply reduce it to rubble. Trying to occupy it afterwards might be almost as bad as Iraq, but in extremum there's always the nukes. I think most Americans assume that political breakup will lead to mass extermination of the rebels.

Re: hey Matt

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Fortunately the people have guns, right? ,-)

Seriously though, it would be interesting to know if a modern US would take the same violent stand on secessionism as the US did in 1861. It was a different world. I'd guess the federal government would try to bribe secessionist states instead to convince them to stay.

Re: hey Matt

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't know... I grew up in the bloodiest battlefield area of the Civil War, and to a lot of people around there it's definitely not a different world. To many of them the war isn't over.

Given the current situation I'd guess it would be essentially the former Union states trying to secede from a US effectively controlled by the former Confederacy. And the Union states produce an outsize chunk of the economic productivity and tax base of the US, but the former Confederacy supplies much of the military, and has most of the guns (and the military would also be federally controlled). So the dominant South might be faced with the realization that, as much as they hate the Yankees, they can't let them leave lest they drop into permanent Third World status, and force might actually become attractive. On the other hand, control of the federal budget would make bribes more possible.

Re: hey Matt

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Hmm. But that's essentially a direct-division scenario.

Picture this instead. One small, marginal and particularly fed-up state - say Vermont or Hawaii - elects secessionists and demands autonomy. Similar rumblings might be heard from other states, but only one actually takes the full step. Do you a) send in the army to prevent a small, rather marginal state to leave? Do you b) bribe it with looser federation articles or lots of money? Do you c) let it go?

If you choose a) you might make for more dissent spreading, other states might refuse to send troops to Vermont, vast international outcry and so on, not to mention binding up more of the military at home. That might be uncontrollable in the long run, you might get a revolution if you aren't careful or a true civil war, and you might in the end lose Vermont anyway or be forced to bribe it.

If you accept b) special federation status, more fed-up states will possibly join in and the entire Union risks transformation and deconstruction. You can bribe it in other ways, but that's costly and will also set up a precedence other angry states might go for.

If you c) let it go you lose some tax payers but not that many, and you also get rid of an opposition stronghold. It might be the cheapest solution. But if you let _one_ go, you risk more states doing the same, and the next state wanting to leave might be something more important than Vermont, or a whole bloc of states, and then it becomes really problematic to send in the army.

Re: hey Matt

[jwgh]

If a state stopped obeying federal laws I would expect there to be a few steps to be gone through (starting with witholding federal funds) before troops were sent in, but I would expect troops to be sent in eventually if other things didn't work. We've invaded places for worse reasons. *cough*

Re: hey Matt

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Old liberty never extended to secession.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hawaii and Vermont are interesting cases; I'd say Hawaii would have a much better shot at pulling it off, and unlike Vermont it already has a significant secessionist tendency today, though both states have been independent nations in the past (Vermont only briefly and marginally).

I think Vermont might suffer a great deal from independence, since crossing the US border is increasingly a pain. Hawaii's tourist trade produces a lot of income for the state that could remain almost undisturbed if it were independent--crossing national borders is no big deal on an overseas vacation--but on the other hand a lot of the trade is from the mainland US and could be choked off by US/Cuba-style economic sanctions.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I think California, which also was briefly independent, could have a good chance as well, because it's so big. But maybe the US would fight extra-hard to keep it.