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

[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.)