The Moral and the Natural

Amazing cathedrals of thought are built up over questions to which the answers seem very simple to me. A discussion in the blogs I read now centers on a book the subject of which is the relationship of science to values. Tracing these things I discover, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ht), that there is something called meta-ethics, further that it has a component called non-naturalism, and that this something is described as “the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.” Now if that description is correct, and to me it seems self-evident, the relationship of science to values would appear to be pretty tenuous, pertaining to scientists, and how they act and live, not to the work they actually do. To give science itself a role in explaining morality would strike me as inviting my best hammer to read out loud to me. I reach this conclusion quite simply. In order to enable science to speak authoritatively on values, I would have to accept that the mind is produced by the brain and nothing else. Now that, of course, is a widely accepted notion—and assent to it is absolutely required to take seriously the notion that science has anything to say about values at all. Science can speak about facts—but values? First, good definitions. I cannot assent to the notion that values are facts.

The Ambiguities of Moral Action

Let me, for starters, delimit the scope of the moral, thus to separate genuinely moral from what might be called spontaneous useful action. All action is aimed at achieving something good, and we can define good simply enough by saying that it’s something pleasing to us. The issue of moral choice never really arises unless there is a conflict between goods—thus until a situation arises in which we must deny ourselves something for a so-called “higher” good or undergo a pain or deprivation in order to benefit either a future instance of ourselves or to help other people. If there is no conflict, there is no morality involved. Morality always involves the willing acceptance of some kind of deprivation. To eat the French fries may not be a moral act, but to eat the spinach, if I don’t like it, may be—because it is good for me. Similarly, doing services for others in exchange for something else is just exchange. I’m merely pleasing myself by means of other people. When I spend a day helping the old lady next door move her furniture to a small apartment half-way across the city—and I rent the truck and do all the labor—then I’m doing something just because, under the circumstances, I find it appropriate.

Moral action thus seems to require the development within us of a kind of sympathy—both for an enlarged sense of our selves and for other people. In the first case, I enlarge my sense of self from this immediate moment to the larger sense of myself over a long period of time. In relation to others, I include the community as part of my narrow being, hence I give of myself to the collective. In both cases a sense of sympathy and unity must be present as a motive. The sensory pay-offs of abstemious behavior or good deeds are quite minimal.

Now the ambiguities of moral action arise precisely because such action demands this inner state, this intuition, this something that I call a sympathy. And we are not the sole agency that participates in the formation of this feeling. Nurture plays a very big role. Our sense of sympathy is an inner presence formed reciprocally with the community. Suppose a child grows up in a harsh and violent environment where an abusive figure dominates and sets the tone of most hours of the day—whether he or she is present or not. Here I am reminded of Saddam Hussein; he grew up in the shadow of a violent stepfather with criminal tendencies. If our earliest experience is of a certain kind, just how free, later, is our will to ascribe to the “world out there” a benevolent aspect? Why should it—when its own experience has been of a world of irrational and arbitrary threats against which only deception, dissimulation, and countering violence are really effective foils?

Ambiguity further plagues this subject because even people who grow up in the worst of circumstances still retain a sense of moral rights and wrongs. This sense may be deformed, but it won’t be absent. The person will know what hurts him or her, and he or she ought to know to avoid doing to others what he or she does not wish to experience. The good deeds of people scarred like this may be more difficult to discern, but may be present. The Biblical admonition, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” [Matthew 7:1] is based on the perception of this ambiguous character of moral action, the roots of which are so clouded and difficult to see. To shake our organic rootings in actual experience so that everything appears clearly, sharply, and in the right focus, requires a long journey sometimes—and sometimes is present early thanks to the grace of fortunate birth, parents, and optimal circumstances. And even then, the drag of the sensory, the personal, and of the here and now are great enough to lead us into error.

Twisted Together

The concept of complexity suggests an approach to thinking about values. Complex means, minimally, twisted together, entwined. Something made of many parts linked together in meaningfully related ways has more value than something simple existing without relationships. A slice of bread has more nutritional value than a lump of sugar with the same caloric value. Both produce energy in the body but the bread will provide more balanced nutrition owing to its more complex structure.

Another case. You come into a new community and meet two people. Both belong to important and well-connected families. One of them, Arthur, is a leading figure in his family, young but already widely accomplished. The other, Beaumont, is his family’s problem child, the source of many conflicts, with a very patchy history to put it generously. — This, by the way, is how a novelist develops a plot. He says: Who’s going to be more valuable to you in your work in the new community: Arthur or Beaumont? The truth is that odds heavily favor Arthur, and in most cases he will be very helpful; Beaumont may be entertaining, but he’ll be a problem sooner or later. The novelist knows this—knows how people eyeball situations—and therefore has a nice plot situation that might be exploited.

Both are complexly related to their families, but Arthur is integrated and Beaumont is not. This fact suggests that “relationship,” by itself, is not a sufficient condition for value. Relationships are central, but they range between love and hatred. Attraction and repulsion are more neutral terms, but speaking of love and hate permits us to think in terms of willful, feeling agents. We might hypothesize that creation is a movement in the direction of complexity, thus in the direction of an attractor. Destruction then may be envisioned as things spontaneously falling apart because an attractor has been removed; in its absence that which used to cohere no longer does.

Complexity, however, won’t solve the problem of morality. What is it about Beaumont that always produces trouble, mayhem, contention, flare-ups, wrecks, uproars, and the like? Why is it that whatever Arthur touches, it always turns green? Is it a willful quality? Is it grace? Is it nurture, nature, karma? Don’t look at me. I don’t have the answer. I think it is a will that freely decides, but I can’t justify that thought by the mechanics of logic.

Logic depends on concepts, but in Beaumont’s (or anybody’s) actual case, a point comes where a weird concept spoils the logic. Beaumont acts on his perceptions of reality; in his own mind he chooses the good. He seems unable to perceive the full context of his choice, unable to see that, more complexly considered, the choice he makes will lead to a negative outcome. That inability to see: is that also a choice? or is it a real inability. Logic can’t untwist that one for us. When I do bad things, I willfully ignore what I do perceive. Hence arises my belief that evil is chosen knowingly. But I can’t honestly speak for Beaumont.

This all sounds innocent enough, but its implications are quite major. We’ll have to go there.

The Two Faces of Janus

To continue for a little longer on the subject of morality, it strikes me that ethics may be pictured as the Roman god called Janus, a figure with two faces looking in two directions. Janus was the god of gates, of entries (alas, perhaps of border regions too) looking back and ahead. We get our January from this figure because Janus was also the god of endings and beginnings. But my purpose in using the symbol here is to emphasize that the ethical impulse we carry within us is at every step opposed by contrary impulses. Nothing is better known. That is why ethics gets the emphasis it does. No one preaches that we should eat or breathe. That, sire, (as Samuel Johnson might say), you can be sure shall be accomplished.

I concluded the last posting by pointing out that the moral impulse in us indicates a vector, a direction, some place we wish to reach: one face of ethics. Its other face is the resistance to this impulse everywhere manifest and at so deep a level that in the Christian tradition we call it original sin. Janus is a very good symbol for summing up the confusions and contradictions of “being of two minds”; no sooner decided on a path than the other mind has a better idea—and the struggle, therefore, is endemic. As Goethe aptly said:

Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
One wills to part itself from the other,
One holds fast with savage love-lust
To the world with hard organic force,
The other lifts itself by power from the dust
To the domains of higher ancestors.
[Faust, Act I.]

In the cosmic models I’ve discussed in other posts, the notion of one order entering and becoming entangled in another serves as an explanation of why life as we know it, a purposive striving, exists in a universe where nothing analogous is visible to us. The ethical impulse is thus that which “lifts from the dust” and the “savage love-lust” is the other face of our experience which clings desperately to the world. We may very well have this two-faced duality because we only see the one clearly, the world; and the other one, the domain of our origins, we see very dimly by intuition only. We cling to the familiar; we do so in ordinary life as well; we do so even when it is suboptimal; the new seems dangerous. So we cling. But something in us, a secret knowledge we can’t quite grasp firmly enough, tells to go on. Hence the struggle. The curious aspects of this suspension between two realities, only one of which we clearly see, is that the explanation of our entanglement in matter will probably become known to us only after we’ve managed to escape it.

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Image courtesy of this site concerned with Freemasonry.

Ethics, Morality, and Custom

O tempora! O mores! [Cicero]

The concept of morality, which as a child I encountered as rooted in divine commandment, therefore of transcendental origin, acquired that special sense during the Christian centuries of our civilization. Our own form of that word was coined by Marcus Tullius Cicero [104-43 BC]; Cicero was seeking a good translation of the Greek word ethikos, meaning exactly the same thing as morality. The Greek itself came from ethos, meaning “custom” or “usage,”; hence if we wished to use a word equivalent to Cicero’s moralis, we ought to translate it as “customary.” The Latin for customs, of course, is mores, singular mos. The Latin moralitas was a later addition used in ecclesiastical Latin.

Now, to be sure, customs change, and long before Cicero already the concept had taken on pretty much the same transcendental flavor I tasted as a child, namely as a higher law or standard—illustrated by Cicero’s own sighing comment above: “Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”—implying that they had deteriorated from a permanent and higher standard up in the sky. Similarly, an additional meaning of ethos is “character,” a concept humanity has always treated as a permanent and enduring state. A person whose behavior undergoes frequent and abrupt changes in response to circumstances is not considered to have character but a lack thereof. I still remember the contemptuous flavor of the German adjective charakterlos, meaning, literally, character-less; those so designated were, indeed, beneath contempt.

This brief definitional walk-around the subject thus shows the curious duality of the moral, as something usual, accustomed, sanctioned, relied upon, and practiced by an entire society, the mores—as well as a permanent standard from which individuals and groups can deviate with regrettable results.

What I detect here is an interesting indication (as in the sense of “economic indicator”) of the real rooting of morality—not at all in custom, although that’s where we anchor the words we use—but in some permanent quality of the inner agent that we are beneath the flesh and bones. Down there in the invisible self we have an innate perception of right and wrong, good and bad. We also, obviously, collectively favor one side of this duality; if we didn’t then the notion of customs could not have become intimately associated with morality. We favor the good for practical as well as transcending reasons. It is the indicator of the vector that we are trying to follow in our collective quest. I have attempted to sketch various cosmic models to indicate where that vector points, namely to some possibly lost state of greater happiness or higher development lost because we erred.

Another and concluding note on this subject. The whole concept of “situation ethics” is based on the denial of absolute moral standards; thus Cicero’s plaint about the tempora would have to be viewed as whining and sentimentality. Whatever the mores are, that is what they are. They evolve with circumstances and are defined pretty much by what some majority concludes is good. Someone out here on the edge of the Borderzone might wonder: “Is that, perhaps, how we came to be in this vale of tears in the first place?”