On Objective Morality
Aug. 9th, 2006 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
le_bebna_kamniI’m going to go out on a limb here and just wait for the hate mail to roll in. The truth of the matter is, I hate the idea of “objective morality”. There. I’ve said it. Now both the atheists AND the Christians can hate me. Oh, and let’s not forget the other theists, and a whole passel of agnostics.
Before I go any further, I am referring to any form of morality that is defined to exist apart from any individual who might hold such morality. This means any morality that comes from God, logic, or some variation of Natural Law. In particular, I direct my disbelief toward any morality that claims to be absolute or universal (while this could, potentially, include “subjective moralities”, very few subjective moralities claim universality unless one has the either the muscular or persuasive power to back it up).
This conclusion did not come to me in a single night; rather, it came over a series of years in reading comparative anthropology, of looking at various primate studies (both human and non-human primates) and other animal studies. It came to me while reading the [Christian] Bible; it came while reading various religious and atheist texts. I have looked at a lot of claims of “universal morality” – from genetic, religious, and logical standpoints (not necessarily exclusive of each other), and found them not as convincing as evidence that argues against such morality.
I’m not going to refute God-based morality, or logic-based morality, or Natural Law (all sources of objective morality). That may come in future posts, but that’s beyond the scope of this particular thought stream. Rather, I’m answering a question posed (indirectly) in several on-line articles I have been reading tonight: namely, of what value is morality if it’s not objectively based?
Most works on objective morality seem to have these objections:
1) without some absolute moral guidelines, saying something is “right” or “wrong” is meaningless.
2) without such moral guidelines, no laws put into effect would have any meaning.
3) without absolute guidelines, there would be no reason to follow such laws (this goes doubly so for God-based moralities, as one no longer has to fear punishment in the afterlife).
For both the theists and atheists out there, let me say a few things before I even begin to tackle these points:
First, let me say that I am not refuting the existence of God in this particular entry. The existence of God does not automatically lead to the existence of a God-based morality. It is theoretically possible to have a God that exists but could care less about the personal habits of human beings. Yes, we like to think that we’re special, but we don’t know the mind of God. Perhaps he just created us as food for his sacred creatures, the mosquito. There are several philosophers who have argued for an impersonal God, who set the earth in motion and doesn’t come back to check on his little darlings. Arguing against a God-based morality DOES NOT argue against the existence of God.
Likewise, even if God didn’t exist, that wouldn’t be enough to prove or disprove the existence of some other objective standard outside of God. They’re not linked. You could have a God with a God-based morality, a God that didn’t care and a logic-based morality, no god and a logic-based morality, or any combination of God/no-God and no objective morality (however, it is impossible to have a God-based morality if no god exists =P).
As for the points mentioned above, I find most of them somewhat absurd.
For a light start, let’s look at #2 and #3. Statistically, most of the laws on a city’s law books are not about morality – or at least what most people would define as morality. They’re laws about whether or not it’s okay to turn right when the light is red, or what the fine is for crossing the street without a crosswalk. They tell businesses how far their awnings can hang out and how people must cut their lawns. I don’t know many people who could argue that the height of my grass is mandated by either God or some form of Natural Law, yet I guarantee you that if the city wanted to take issue with the way I cut my grass they could do so quite easily (and ensure that I reined in my unruly grass to its rightful tidy state). I also know for a fact that, while I’m not sure that God has any problem with me driving 58 miles per hour (I haven’t seen anything in the holy books yet, but I haven’t read everything so I’m not sure), that patrol car sitting at the 45 mph sign might. And I KNOW if I try to argue that the non-existence of objective morality means he can’t enforce that ticket, the officer won’t buy it.
Now let’s tackle the first principle: it is possible to define something subjectively and have something based off of it be “right” or “wrong”. Let’s take language as an example. I am a native speaker of English. If you read English, then you probably understood the last sentence I wrote. And if you tried to tell me that when I wrote the words “I am a native speaker of English” what I was really saying was “Three cats ate cheese with their breakfast sausage,” I would say you were quite wrong. Yet English has no inherent “rightness” to it. When I say “chair”, there is nothing inherent in that particular shaping of the mouth (or shaping of lines into letters) that says that it should represent a surface to sit upon. In fact, many other languages have come to completely different conclusions about what this representation should sound or look like. Yet is completely possible to say, with respect to each language, which shaping is the right one to express that particular concept.
“But this isn’t about English! This is about Morality (capital M)!” I hear people saying. Alright, let’s choose another closer example. Most cultures have the equivalent of “baby moralities” – small questions, often of etiquette or something slightly important, but not yet answering to the capital M. The issue of rudeness is probably the best example. While most people in the U.S. think that someone being rude – say, smoking in a no-smoking area, or forgetting to use a turn signal when making a lane change (wait a second...does anyone do that anyhow?) – is annoying, it is rarely a reason to think of sending someone to jail, or worse, Hell (well, perhaps the smokers in the no-smoking section will be given their own little private corner in Hades). In fact, we would rarely even think of these people as being immoral. Yet the Japanese would beg to differ. Being rude – even in tiny ways – is seen as serious issue to be dealt with1.
If we get into the harder “Morality” (at least as defined by people of Western cultures), we can see that all cultures have laws in regards to murder. Yet every culture has differed on who it was okay to kill (and hence, fair game) and which people would be counted as murder. Many cultures have sanctioned the killing of women (and not men) for being unfaithful to their spouses2. Until recently, this was true of some jurisdictions in the United States. In many feudal and slave societies, it has been perfectly acceptable to kill one’s property, whether that be livestock or people. And revenge killing for the sake of one’s family has been sanctioned (and applauded – the popularity of the “Kill Bill” movies should speak to the U.S.’s feelings on the matter) in cultures on all continents.
That one culture can define killing a new bride because her dowry wasn’t met to be perfectly acceptable – regardless of whether it is “Right” in the absolute sense or not – shows that it is more than possible to have standards of “right” and “wrong” separate from an absolute morality that people respect and that are enforceable (unless you’d like to argue that killing her was absolutely morally right?).
When I’ve had conversations like this with people in the past, they usually start getting uncomfortable, because not having an absolute objective morality poses really uncomfortable questions like “But does that mean that it’s okay to kill women who can’t meet their dowries?”
I admit, that question makes me really uncomfortable too. I personally find the practice offensive and horrible, but I also know that my sense of morality comes from a culture that doesn’t generally require dowries of women, let alone virginity at the time of marriage. All my ingrained moral senses scream, “That’s wrong! It must be stopped!” – and by george, if my country ever conquers their country I’ll make sure it stops! But the issue does make me uncomfortable, because I don’t have any God to back me up or infallible logic or Natural Law (then again, having any of these three to back you up does not necessarily make you humane).
How then, do I know that what I think is right, is “right”? The truth of the matter is, I don’t. I have my logic – I can give you reasons why I think the practice should be abolished, and I can use methods of persuasion or coercion to get you to see it my way. And I have to trust that what I have perceived to be in the best interests of the people involved is, in fact, in their best interests.
But what about the Holocaust?
That’s always the example everyone seems to throw up whenever someone needs a morally horrific event. Adolf Hitler is the poster child for horrific morality. In truth, there have been far worse holocausts, but this one strikes us as so hideous because a) it happened in recent memory, b) to a “civilized” nation, c) in an era where we like to think we are somehow more morally “advanced”, and d) most countries just let it happen (yes, other countries only joined the war because their own nations were being threatened, not because they knew or cared about what was going on with the Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, social deviants, or anyone else considered out of line with the Reich’s ideals).
My answer to the issue of the Holocaust actually came while I was a Christian, believe it or not. I was reading the love chapter of the Bible (1Corinthians 13) and meditating on what it meant to love perfectly. And one of the things that struck me was that loving perfectly would also entail forgiving perfectly – and unconditionally. And the biggest test of my faith was, of course, Hitler – the icon for all that is unforgivable. I felt that in order for me to love the way God required me to love, I would have to learn to love – and forgive – Hitler.
Now, I’m really curious how many people reading this are absolutely appalled at the idea that I could even THINK of loving or forgiving Hitler (trust me, it was a really horrific thought to me at the time, too). But one of the things I realized was that, according to the principle of salvation, Hitler could have been theoretically forgiven. I have no idea what went through Hitler’s mind at the time of his death – for all I know, he accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart and asked for forgiveness of all his sins, which if you take God’s promises seriously, that means God forgave him. God did not say, “I will forgive all your sins...well, except you, Hitler.” No, Jesus died for everyone. So if God could at least potentially forgive Hitler, then I should to.
Now this posed a serious problem for me. How does a person go about forgiving someone who they have always regarded as a monster? So I did what I always do when faced with a dilemma: I do research until something strikes me as the answer I’m looking for. One of the things I learned was that the easiest way to learn to forgive someone was to try and see things from that person’s perspective.
....And I can see all my readers recoil in horror at that last statement. How can we possibly identify with such a monster? you ask. See, that’s the problem with most of our society, and why the same things keep happening over and over again. We hear a tragedy that occurs, and we think, “Those people aren’t us. We would NEVER do anything like that. I couldn’t possibly do something like that.” Then when WE actually become the monsters, we can’t see it because we don’t compare ourselves to the monsters that came before us.
But the truth of the matter is, everyone who ever commits an atrocity is a human, just like you and me. They’re humans with the same motives for friendship and family and life that we have. Take the S.S. officers who manned the concentration camps. They had spouses and parents and loving children to go home to. They got together with their buddies on the weekends. They had childhoods – some wonderful, some terrible, some happy, some sad. They weren’t some special breed of demon cultivated in unusual circumstances. They were ordinary people.
And once we start acknowledging they were people with the same types of motivations that all people – even good ones – have, we can actually start to understand WHY people did what they did and make sure that we, the exact same types of people, don’t do it again.
Actually, learning to forgive Hitler was easier than learning to forgive other people in the Reich, believe it or not. Hitler had some serious mental problems going on. Now, I know that doesn’t excuse a person’s actions, but having known people personally who have dealt with mental illnesses, it’s far more understandable (at least to me) how much damage a person can do when not on medications for a real disorder. For anyone who does not have a mental illness or does not have a loved one who has a mental illness, I’m not sure I can begin to describe to you why this would be a legitimate reason to forgive someone. But trust me, if you’ve ever had a loved one threaten to carve you up with a knife if you moved a muscle, and then seen them as a completely different person after medical treatment, you’ll understand this kind of forgiveness.
Now before anyone gets offended about how I can let Hitler off so easily, let me explain: understanding why a person did something and even forgiving them DOES NOT MEAN THAT I THINK WHAT THEY DID WAS RIGHT. Let me restate this, for anyone who doesn’t know this already: I THINK THE HOLOCAUST WAS HORRIBLE, AND THOSE THAT COMMITTED THOSE HEINOUS DEEDS SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT THEY DID.
That being said, I think the reason most people use the Holocaust in discussions of objective reality is that they want an objective measure for justice.
Most people I know would like to see the same thing that was done to the Jews (and the Gypsies, political dissidents, etc.) done to the people who committed those attrocities – and initially, I was among them. But the more I looked into the issue of forgiveness, and the more I tried to understand WHY good people had done horrible things, the more I came to realize two things:
1) I am no different from the people who were involved in the Holocaust. Yes, I would like to think that, confronted with the same situation, I would be a member of the resistance or someone who died for my principles. But I also know that a lot of people in Germany with the same situation and similar beliefs still ended up being on the wrong side. If you can’t look at yourself and at least see the possibility, then it’s likely you’re not honest with yourself.
and 2) The more I look at my own reactions – my anger over what has happened – the more I realize that I am also becoming a monster in wanting bad things to happen to these people. The only thing that keeps me from being a monster, then, is a belief that somehow I am in the right and they are in the wrong.
Why do people want an objective morality? I think it’s because we want to look at events like the Holocaust and say that there is no question, the Holocaust was absolutely wrong. We want to be able to say that the leaders (and followers) involved in the Holocaust were evil people, that those dirty fuckers should receive judgment (whether earthly or otherwise), and that we are absolutely right in wanting that punishment meted out.
If we have something absolute – God or logic or Natural Law – saying that these people are evil and deserve punishment, then we must be good if we agree to (or even help in) the meting out of such punishment.
For those that want that justification, I say “all the more power to you.” Feel free to believe in whatever absoluteness it takes to make you feel that you have done right.
But if there is no absolute morality, we’re left our own problem: we want justice, we want punishment, but we can no longer justify our desire to do wrong to the wrongdoers. We’re no longer the righteous backed by God/logic/Natural Law. We’re just a bunch of mad people who don’t like what someone has done, and we don’t have some external Being or standard to take the blame for the actions we want to do.
And now I can hear everyone screaming, “Does that mean we’re never justified in wanting to see people who do these things be punished? Does this mean that people can go around doing whatever they want, and nobody can say anything about it?”
But we have to take some responsibility for our beliefs – not just fall back on “God/Ayn Rand/Nazi Germany told me so”. There’s got to be some reason other than “God” or “impeccable logic” that makes you think that what you or someone else does is wrong. Why does a person need a god in order to be moral? Why must one only fear punishment – divine or human-inspired – in order to care about our fellow human beings? If God or logic is the only thing stopping me from killing you and raping your children and selling your husband into slavery, then what does that say about your God who created such people or what does it say about your logic when it comes from a person who could do this?
Most people I know don’t help a person in need because they’re afraid of punishment. They help because they’re empathetic – they see the suffering of another human being, and because they know what it’s like to suffer they help that person out. We don’t love our children our spouses because we’re afraid of divine punishment (well, most of us don’t). We don’t lend money to our best friend who needs money to pay for a cancer removal only because we think it’s the most logical thing to do.
In fact, in my reading and in my personal experience, I’ve seen “objective morality” be just as harmful (if not more so) than if no such morality had existed. When a group of people start thinking of their truth as the only truth and their morality as the only morality, it can lead to exceptional harm. Nazis had their own scientists and logicians who backed up why the Aryan3 race was superior, and a full set of ethics based upon this seemingly objective logic4. Logic can be mistaken – how then, do we know we are being objective? And lest God-based moralists (particularly those of the Judeo-Christian bent) be let off the hook, it should be remembered that God ordered the ancient Israelites to commit their own forms of genocide. If we argue that this portion of the Bible is not really the word of God, then we are left with the distinct problem of “how do we know what are God’s divine commands?”
It is a rather scary proposition that perhaps there isn’t an absolute sense of right and wrong. Perhaps if the Nazis had won the war, they would be considered “right” for what they had done. (Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time that has happened in history. Most people I know think the United States is a great country founded on brave, pioneering people who carved out a nation from pristine wilderness. I think most people in the United States feel that they shouldn’t have to give up land stolen from the Native Americans and go back to where they – i.e., their ancestors – came from. It’s only recently that what was done to Native Americans has been accepted as genocide, and even then most people I know aren’t aware of the actual history of what occurred.)
I think in many respects it would be scary because we know longer know if we’re on the side of right. We want to feel justified that the judgments we make against others are really true. We don’t like to think someone could “get away with something”, and more importantly, we don’t like to think that we no longer have justifications for our own actions. If what I’m doing isn’t any more inherently good or right than what someone else is doing, how can I think of myself as being more entitled to think and act as I do?
So what good is a morality if it isn’t objective?
It seems to me that this question seems fairly obvious. For any culture to survive, it must have basic rules that govern the way people interact. On a basic level, even our primate cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees have basic social rules that define how members of the troop interact (these aren’t “genetic” rules, by the way. Our primate cousins do have learned patters of behavior passed through generations – culture – just like humans do5). Our primate cousins aren’t chaotic – they don’t live in perpetual strife watching their backs and living in solitude. They’re social creatures, just like we are. And they demonstrate many of the same traits for kindness, altruism, and group solidarity (just as they also demonstrate traits of selfishness and cruelty). Most people wouldn’t credit them with an objective morality – the idea of [non-human] apes having logic equivalent to human beings is distasteful to both many atheists and theists, and that God communicates divine law with other animals (and hence, humans are not special) is equally abhorrent to many theists. Yet they have a cohesive social structure where they aren’t constantly killing each other. They raise their young, they form friendships (or caring social bonds – yes other primates do this too), and they don’t constantly live in fear. Why then, do we think that humans aren’t capable of something even “lesser” primates can do?
Not having an objective morality does not relieve us from defining “right” and “wrong”. Every culture has come up with these definitions in different ways (and they ALL can’t be objectively true – or can they?) because these rules have been necessary to provide a cohesive whole. These rules keep evolving because people find (hopefully) better ways to enact these rules – not better in the absolute objective sense, but better in regards to what that particular society currently values6.
Yes, you could potentially end up with moralities that consist of “I have the might, therefore what I say is what morality is” (well, isn’t this what God and most organized governments do?), but as a human species we also have the potential to create moralities that work for mutual benefit to each other.
The night (and this entry) having waxed long, I would like to point out in conclusion that the point of my writing was not to refute the existence of "objective morality" (which I haven't done), but rather, to argue whether or not "subjective morality" can exist and work. The truth of the matter is, everyone's laws and social customs out there are different. So from an absolutist standpoint, one has to argue that if one of them is objective then the rest must be subjective (frankly, I'd argue that they all are). The fact is that thousands of generations have existed before us living with subjective moralities, and thousands more lived before God of the ancient Hebrews came down and gave his absolute ten (and let's not forget that this great deity came only to the Israelite nation. He left Egypt and China and the Americas in the dark until a prosthelytizing branch-off called "Christianity" came to enlighten them. Poor China had a thousand-year golden age without the inspiration of objective morality).
For those who remain staunch objective morality supporters out there, let me point out that needing or wanting a fact to be true does not make it so. It would be wonderful if the human body didn't need food, given that over six million people starved to death last year. But my desires (or the desires of several billion people) don't change this. If objective morality has to exist simply because we fear the Holocaust will go unpunished, then it isn't an objective morality. An objective morality -- if one exists -- has to exist outside of our desires, and we would have to accept that objective morality EVEN IF IT SAID THAT THE NAZIS WERE RIGHT. As for me, I can't accept that. I'll stumble along with my subjective morality -- I'll make mistakes, and I'll learn from them. And I'll see you at the "end of it all" and we'll compare notes.
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1Seriously. Assaults have occurred over simple offenses like putting makeup on in public. The government of Tokyo has even gone so far as to create “The Study Group Relating to the Prevention of Behaviour that Causes Discomfort Among Numerous People in Public Places”. You might enjoy this article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1600980,00.html
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2To get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing
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3Side Tangent: I have always found the use of the word “Aryan” in Nazi Germany exceptionally funny. The original “Aryans” were Indo-Iranians: essentially darker-skinned, brown hair, brown-eyed – completely the antithesis of the Nazi ideal. I’m almost convinced that it was a twisted joke played upon those people who were stupid enough to accept the propaganda.
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4Peter Haas illustrates this in his “Morality After Auschwitz”:
“far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified”
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5For some good reading, I recommend “The Ape and the Sushi Master” by Frans de Waal. There are also a number of good scholarly primate journals out there, but you have to do some digging in university libraries =P.
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6The Aqils of Somalia have traditionally been a people that have allowed revenge killings. Yet in recent years they have changed their views on this. Likewise, the practice of arranged marriages is falling by the wayside.
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Before I go any further, I am referring to any form of morality that is defined to exist apart from any individual who might hold such morality. This means any morality that comes from God, logic, or some variation of Natural Law. In particular, I direct my disbelief toward any morality that claims to be absolute or universal (while this could, potentially, include “subjective moralities”, very few subjective moralities claim universality unless one has the either the muscular or persuasive power to back it up).
This conclusion did not come to me in a single night; rather, it came over a series of years in reading comparative anthropology, of looking at various primate studies (both human and non-human primates) and other animal studies. It came to me while reading the [Christian] Bible; it came while reading various religious and atheist texts. I have looked at a lot of claims of “universal morality” – from genetic, religious, and logical standpoints (not necessarily exclusive of each other), and found them not as convincing as evidence that argues against such morality.
I’m not going to refute God-based morality, or logic-based morality, or Natural Law (all sources of objective morality). That may come in future posts, but that’s beyond the scope of this particular thought stream. Rather, I’m answering a question posed (indirectly) in several on-line articles I have been reading tonight: namely, of what value is morality if it’s not objectively based?
Most works on objective morality seem to have these objections:
1) without some absolute moral guidelines, saying something is “right” or “wrong” is meaningless.
2) without such moral guidelines, no laws put into effect would have any meaning.
3) without absolute guidelines, there would be no reason to follow such laws (this goes doubly so for God-based moralities, as one no longer has to fear punishment in the afterlife).
For both the theists and atheists out there, let me say a few things before I even begin to tackle these points:
First, let me say that I am not refuting the existence of God in this particular entry. The existence of God does not automatically lead to the existence of a God-based morality. It is theoretically possible to have a God that exists but could care less about the personal habits of human beings. Yes, we like to think that we’re special, but we don’t know the mind of God. Perhaps he just created us as food for his sacred creatures, the mosquito. There are several philosophers who have argued for an impersonal God, who set the earth in motion and doesn’t come back to check on his little darlings. Arguing against a God-based morality DOES NOT argue against the existence of God.
Likewise, even if God didn’t exist, that wouldn’t be enough to prove or disprove the existence of some other objective standard outside of God. They’re not linked. You could have a God with a God-based morality, a God that didn’t care and a logic-based morality, no god and a logic-based morality, or any combination of God/no-God and no objective morality (however, it is impossible to have a God-based morality if no god exists =P).
As for the points mentioned above, I find most of them somewhat absurd.
For a light start, let’s look at #2 and #3. Statistically, most of the laws on a city’s law books are not about morality – or at least what most people would define as morality. They’re laws about whether or not it’s okay to turn right when the light is red, or what the fine is for crossing the street without a crosswalk. They tell businesses how far their awnings can hang out and how people must cut their lawns. I don’t know many people who could argue that the height of my grass is mandated by either God or some form of Natural Law, yet I guarantee you that if the city wanted to take issue with the way I cut my grass they could do so quite easily (and ensure that I reined in my unruly grass to its rightful tidy state). I also know for a fact that, while I’m not sure that God has any problem with me driving 58 miles per hour (I haven’t seen anything in the holy books yet, but I haven’t read everything so I’m not sure), that patrol car sitting at the 45 mph sign might. And I KNOW if I try to argue that the non-existence of objective morality means he can’t enforce that ticket, the officer won’t buy it.
Now let’s tackle the first principle: it is possible to define something subjectively and have something based off of it be “right” or “wrong”. Let’s take language as an example. I am a native speaker of English. If you read English, then you probably understood the last sentence I wrote. And if you tried to tell me that when I wrote the words “I am a native speaker of English” what I was really saying was “Three cats ate cheese with their breakfast sausage,” I would say you were quite wrong. Yet English has no inherent “rightness” to it. When I say “chair”, there is nothing inherent in that particular shaping of the mouth (or shaping of lines into letters) that says that it should represent a surface to sit upon. In fact, many other languages have come to completely different conclusions about what this representation should sound or look like. Yet is completely possible to say, with respect to each language, which shaping is the right one to express that particular concept.
“But this isn’t about English! This is about Morality (capital M)!” I hear people saying. Alright, let’s choose another closer example. Most cultures have the equivalent of “baby moralities” – small questions, often of etiquette or something slightly important, but not yet answering to the capital M. The issue of rudeness is probably the best example. While most people in the U.S. think that someone being rude – say, smoking in a no-smoking area, or forgetting to use a turn signal when making a lane change (wait a second...does anyone do that anyhow?) – is annoying, it is rarely a reason to think of sending someone to jail, or worse, Hell (well, perhaps the smokers in the no-smoking section will be given their own little private corner in Hades). In fact, we would rarely even think of these people as being immoral. Yet the Japanese would beg to differ. Being rude – even in tiny ways – is seen as serious issue to be dealt with1.
If we get into the harder “Morality” (at least as defined by people of Western cultures), we can see that all cultures have laws in regards to murder. Yet every culture has differed on who it was okay to kill (and hence, fair game) and which people would be counted as murder. Many cultures have sanctioned the killing of women (and not men) for being unfaithful to their spouses2. Until recently, this was true of some jurisdictions in the United States. In many feudal and slave societies, it has been perfectly acceptable to kill one’s property, whether that be livestock or people. And revenge killing for the sake of one’s family has been sanctioned (and applauded – the popularity of the “Kill Bill” movies should speak to the U.S.’s feelings on the matter) in cultures on all continents.
That one culture can define killing a new bride because her dowry wasn’t met to be perfectly acceptable – regardless of whether it is “Right” in the absolute sense or not – shows that it is more than possible to have standards of “right” and “wrong” separate from an absolute morality that people respect and that are enforceable (unless you’d like to argue that killing her was absolutely morally right?).
When I’ve had conversations like this with people in the past, they usually start getting uncomfortable, because not having an absolute objective morality poses really uncomfortable questions like “But does that mean that it’s okay to kill women who can’t meet their dowries?”
I admit, that question makes me really uncomfortable too. I personally find the practice offensive and horrible, but I also know that my sense of morality comes from a culture that doesn’t generally require dowries of women, let alone virginity at the time of marriage. All my ingrained moral senses scream, “That’s wrong! It must be stopped!” – and by george, if my country ever conquers their country I’ll make sure it stops! But the issue does make me uncomfortable, because I don’t have any God to back me up or infallible logic or Natural Law (then again, having any of these three to back you up does not necessarily make you humane).
How then, do I know that what I think is right, is “right”? The truth of the matter is, I don’t. I have my logic – I can give you reasons why I think the practice should be abolished, and I can use methods of persuasion or coercion to get you to see it my way. And I have to trust that what I have perceived to be in the best interests of the people involved is, in fact, in their best interests.
But what about the Holocaust?
That’s always the example everyone seems to throw up whenever someone needs a morally horrific event. Adolf Hitler is the poster child for horrific morality. In truth, there have been far worse holocausts, but this one strikes us as so hideous because a) it happened in recent memory, b) to a “civilized” nation, c) in an era where we like to think we are somehow more morally “advanced”, and d) most countries just let it happen (yes, other countries only joined the war because their own nations were being threatened, not because they knew or cared about what was going on with the Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, social deviants, or anyone else considered out of line with the Reich’s ideals).
My answer to the issue of the Holocaust actually came while I was a Christian, believe it or not. I was reading the love chapter of the Bible (1Corinthians 13) and meditating on what it meant to love perfectly. And one of the things that struck me was that loving perfectly would also entail forgiving perfectly – and unconditionally. And the biggest test of my faith was, of course, Hitler – the icon for all that is unforgivable. I felt that in order for me to love the way God required me to love, I would have to learn to love – and forgive – Hitler.
Now, I’m really curious how many people reading this are absolutely appalled at the idea that I could even THINK of loving or forgiving Hitler (trust me, it was a really horrific thought to me at the time, too). But one of the things I realized was that, according to the principle of salvation, Hitler could have been theoretically forgiven. I have no idea what went through Hitler’s mind at the time of his death – for all I know, he accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart and asked for forgiveness of all his sins, which if you take God’s promises seriously, that means God forgave him. God did not say, “I will forgive all your sins...well, except you, Hitler.” No, Jesus died for everyone. So if God could at least potentially forgive Hitler, then I should to.
Now this posed a serious problem for me. How does a person go about forgiving someone who they have always regarded as a monster? So I did what I always do when faced with a dilemma: I do research until something strikes me as the answer I’m looking for. One of the things I learned was that the easiest way to learn to forgive someone was to try and see things from that person’s perspective.
....And I can see all my readers recoil in horror at that last statement. How can we possibly identify with such a monster? you ask. See, that’s the problem with most of our society, and why the same things keep happening over and over again. We hear a tragedy that occurs, and we think, “Those people aren’t us. We would NEVER do anything like that. I couldn’t possibly do something like that.” Then when WE actually become the monsters, we can’t see it because we don’t compare ourselves to the monsters that came before us.
But the truth of the matter is, everyone who ever commits an atrocity is a human, just like you and me. They’re humans with the same motives for friendship and family and life that we have. Take the S.S. officers who manned the concentration camps. They had spouses and parents and loving children to go home to. They got together with their buddies on the weekends. They had childhoods – some wonderful, some terrible, some happy, some sad. They weren’t some special breed of demon cultivated in unusual circumstances. They were ordinary people.
And once we start acknowledging they were people with the same types of motivations that all people – even good ones – have, we can actually start to understand WHY people did what they did and make sure that we, the exact same types of people, don’t do it again.
Actually, learning to forgive Hitler was easier than learning to forgive other people in the Reich, believe it or not. Hitler had some serious mental problems going on. Now, I know that doesn’t excuse a person’s actions, but having known people personally who have dealt with mental illnesses, it’s far more understandable (at least to me) how much damage a person can do when not on medications for a real disorder. For anyone who does not have a mental illness or does not have a loved one who has a mental illness, I’m not sure I can begin to describe to you why this would be a legitimate reason to forgive someone. But trust me, if you’ve ever had a loved one threaten to carve you up with a knife if you moved a muscle, and then seen them as a completely different person after medical treatment, you’ll understand this kind of forgiveness.
Now before anyone gets offended about how I can let Hitler off so easily, let me explain: understanding why a person did something and even forgiving them DOES NOT MEAN THAT I THINK WHAT THEY DID WAS RIGHT. Let me restate this, for anyone who doesn’t know this already: I THINK THE HOLOCAUST WAS HORRIBLE, AND THOSE THAT COMMITTED THOSE HEINOUS DEEDS SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT THEY DID.
That being said, I think the reason most people use the Holocaust in discussions of objective reality is that they want an objective measure for justice.
Most people I know would like to see the same thing that was done to the Jews (and the Gypsies, political dissidents, etc.) done to the people who committed those attrocities – and initially, I was among them. But the more I looked into the issue of forgiveness, and the more I tried to understand WHY good people had done horrible things, the more I came to realize two things:
1) I am no different from the people who were involved in the Holocaust. Yes, I would like to think that, confronted with the same situation, I would be a member of the resistance or someone who died for my principles. But I also know that a lot of people in Germany with the same situation and similar beliefs still ended up being on the wrong side. If you can’t look at yourself and at least see the possibility, then it’s likely you’re not honest with yourself.
and 2) The more I look at my own reactions – my anger over what has happened – the more I realize that I am also becoming a monster in wanting bad things to happen to these people. The only thing that keeps me from being a monster, then, is a belief that somehow I am in the right and they are in the wrong.
Why do people want an objective morality? I think it’s because we want to look at events like the Holocaust and say that there is no question, the Holocaust was absolutely wrong. We want to be able to say that the leaders (and followers) involved in the Holocaust were evil people, that those dirty fuckers should receive judgment (whether earthly or otherwise), and that we are absolutely right in wanting that punishment meted out.
If we have something absolute – God or logic or Natural Law – saying that these people are evil and deserve punishment, then we must be good if we agree to (or even help in) the meting out of such punishment.
For those that want that justification, I say “all the more power to you.” Feel free to believe in whatever absoluteness it takes to make you feel that you have done right.
But if there is no absolute morality, we’re left our own problem: we want justice, we want punishment, but we can no longer justify our desire to do wrong to the wrongdoers. We’re no longer the righteous backed by God/logic/Natural Law. We’re just a bunch of mad people who don’t like what someone has done, and we don’t have some external Being or standard to take the blame for the actions we want to do.
And now I can hear everyone screaming, “Does that mean we’re never justified in wanting to see people who do these things be punished? Does this mean that people can go around doing whatever they want, and nobody can say anything about it?”
But we have to take some responsibility for our beliefs – not just fall back on “God/Ayn Rand/Nazi Germany told me so”. There’s got to be some reason other than “God” or “impeccable logic” that makes you think that what you or someone else does is wrong. Why does a person need a god in order to be moral? Why must one only fear punishment – divine or human-inspired – in order to care about our fellow human beings? If God or logic is the only thing stopping me from killing you and raping your children and selling your husband into slavery, then what does that say about your God who created such people or what does it say about your logic when it comes from a person who could do this?
Most people I know don’t help a person in need because they’re afraid of punishment. They help because they’re empathetic – they see the suffering of another human being, and because they know what it’s like to suffer they help that person out. We don’t love our children our spouses because we’re afraid of divine punishment (well, most of us don’t). We don’t lend money to our best friend who needs money to pay for a cancer removal only because we think it’s the most logical thing to do.
In fact, in my reading and in my personal experience, I’ve seen “objective morality” be just as harmful (if not more so) than if no such morality had existed. When a group of people start thinking of their truth as the only truth and their morality as the only morality, it can lead to exceptional harm. Nazis had their own scientists and logicians who backed up why the Aryan3 race was superior, and a full set of ethics based upon this seemingly objective logic4. Logic can be mistaken – how then, do we know we are being objective? And lest God-based moralists (particularly those of the Judeo-Christian bent) be let off the hook, it should be remembered that God ordered the ancient Israelites to commit their own forms of genocide. If we argue that this portion of the Bible is not really the word of God, then we are left with the distinct problem of “how do we know what are God’s divine commands?”
It is a rather scary proposition that perhaps there isn’t an absolute sense of right and wrong. Perhaps if the Nazis had won the war, they would be considered “right” for what they had done. (Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time that has happened in history. Most people I know think the United States is a great country founded on brave, pioneering people who carved out a nation from pristine wilderness. I think most people in the United States feel that they shouldn’t have to give up land stolen from the Native Americans and go back to where they – i.e., their ancestors – came from. It’s only recently that what was done to Native Americans has been accepted as genocide, and even then most people I know aren’t aware of the actual history of what occurred.)
I think in many respects it would be scary because we know longer know if we’re on the side of right. We want to feel justified that the judgments we make against others are really true. We don’t like to think someone could “get away with something”, and more importantly, we don’t like to think that we no longer have justifications for our own actions. If what I’m doing isn’t any more inherently good or right than what someone else is doing, how can I think of myself as being more entitled to think and act as I do?
So what good is a morality if it isn’t objective?
It seems to me that this question seems fairly obvious. For any culture to survive, it must have basic rules that govern the way people interact. On a basic level, even our primate cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees have basic social rules that define how members of the troop interact (these aren’t “genetic” rules, by the way. Our primate cousins do have learned patters of behavior passed through generations – culture – just like humans do5). Our primate cousins aren’t chaotic – they don’t live in perpetual strife watching their backs and living in solitude. They’re social creatures, just like we are. And they demonstrate many of the same traits for kindness, altruism, and group solidarity (just as they also demonstrate traits of selfishness and cruelty). Most people wouldn’t credit them with an objective morality – the idea of [non-human] apes having logic equivalent to human beings is distasteful to both many atheists and theists, and that God communicates divine law with other animals (and hence, humans are not special) is equally abhorrent to many theists. Yet they have a cohesive social structure where they aren’t constantly killing each other. They raise their young, they form friendships (or caring social bonds – yes other primates do this too), and they don’t constantly live in fear. Why then, do we think that humans aren’t capable of something even “lesser” primates can do?
Not having an objective morality does not relieve us from defining “right” and “wrong”. Every culture has come up with these definitions in different ways (and they ALL can’t be objectively true – or can they?) because these rules have been necessary to provide a cohesive whole. These rules keep evolving because people find (hopefully) better ways to enact these rules – not better in the absolute objective sense, but better in regards to what that particular society currently values6.
Yes, you could potentially end up with moralities that consist of “I have the might, therefore what I say is what morality is” (well, isn’t this what God and most organized governments do?), but as a human species we also have the potential to create moralities that work for mutual benefit to each other.
The night (and this entry) having waxed long, I would like to point out in conclusion that the point of my writing was not to refute the existence of "objective morality" (which I haven't done), but rather, to argue whether or not "subjective morality" can exist and work. The truth of the matter is, everyone's laws and social customs out there are different. So from an absolutist standpoint, one has to argue that if one of them is objective then the rest must be subjective (frankly, I'd argue that they all are). The fact is that thousands of generations have existed before us living with subjective moralities, and thousands more lived before God of the ancient Hebrews came down and gave his absolute ten (and let's not forget that this great deity came only to the Israelite nation. He left Egypt and China and the Americas in the dark until a prosthelytizing branch-off called "Christianity" came to enlighten them. Poor China had a thousand-year golden age without the inspiration of objective morality).
For those who remain staunch objective morality supporters out there, let me point out that needing or wanting a fact to be true does not make it so. It would be wonderful if the human body didn't need food, given that over six million people starved to death last year. But my desires (or the desires of several billion people) don't change this. If objective morality has to exist simply because we fear the Holocaust will go unpunished, then it isn't an objective morality. An objective morality -- if one exists -- has to exist outside of our desires, and we would have to accept that objective morality EVEN IF IT SAID THAT THE NAZIS WERE RIGHT. As for me, I can't accept that. I'll stumble along with my subjective morality -- I'll make mistakes, and I'll learn from them. And I'll see you at the "end of it all" and we'll compare notes.
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1Seriously. Assaults have occurred over simple offenses like putting makeup on in public. The government of Tokyo has even gone so far as to create “The Study Group Relating to the Prevention of Behaviour that Causes Discomfort Among Numerous People in Public Places”. You might enjoy this article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1600980,00.html
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2To get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing
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3Side Tangent: I have always found the use of the word “Aryan” in Nazi Germany exceptionally funny. The original “Aryans” were Indo-Iranians: essentially darker-skinned, brown hair, brown-eyed – completely the antithesis of the Nazi ideal. I’m almost convinced that it was a twisted joke played upon those people who were stupid enough to accept the propaganda.
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4Peter Haas illustrates this in his “Morality After Auschwitz”:
“far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified”
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5For some good reading, I recommend “The Ape and the Sushi Master” by Frans de Waal. There are also a number of good scholarly primate journals out there, but you have to do some digging in university libraries =P.
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6The Aqils of Somalia have traditionally been a people that have allowed revenge killings. Yet in recent years they have changed their views on this. Likewise, the practice of arranged marriages is falling by the wayside.
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