Facts about Morality – How Small can We Make the Is-Ought Gap?

Some time ago, we talked about the is-ought gap, the idea that there will always be an unbridgeable logical gap between facts and moral duties. This is true, but that doesn’t stop us from turning the lens of fact onto morality, and seeing how close we can get.

To begin with, let’s step back to get a look at what morality is from an impersonal, objective point of view. Out of all the different views of morality there are, they have one thing in common: the idea that some things are better than others, that there are potential ways things should be and actions people should take, and there are potential ways things should not be and actions people should not take.

What determines what is judged to be good and what is judged to be bad? It starts with stimulus reaction and anticipation. Some things cause pain, and some things cause pleasure. We naturally recoil from pain and seek out pleasure. This is the beginnings of morality.

It is not the whole story, of course. We often abstain from pleasure or allow ourselves to suffer pain in the service of higher values. We might value order, justice, honor, or a clean mind, and make sacrifices in the realm of pleasure and pain to serve these values. The weight we give to each of our values determines our morality. In fact, we can think of the instincts surrounding pleasure and pain as values, and describe morality as the process of making choices and choosing rules for life based on our values. Values can be fluid; we might occasionally be able to choose our values, but most of the time they are influenced unconsciously, either by nature or by socialization.

It is not just our own circumstances that influence our values, but our capacity for empathy and compassion, to imagine what it is like to be in others’ shoes, and to want good things for them as well as for ourselves. There is a part of us that wants to do what is good for everyone, to make the world better, not just our own lives and actions. This is a double-edged sword, because although it can motivate us to help others, it can also make us think we know what is good for them better than they do, and to try to control their values and the choices they make.

On top of our values, we craft narratives. These can come in the forms of myths and stories, ideologies, philosophies, and religions. Narratives shape our values and help us remember them when the pleasure and pain stimuli become strong enough to make it hard to think. Compelling narratives for values different from ours can influence us to adjust our values in their direction.

The space of moralities is vast and varied. But despite all the variety of this moral landscape, the goal of all moral systems can be summed up in one statement: to make things good.

This is intentionally vague, because “good” means a lot of different things. Some say it’s happiness, others fulfillment, wellbeing, absence of misery, eudaimonia, or any number of similar concepts. In fact, as the philosopher G. E. Moore pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is impossible to define “good” as any specific thing. But in this context, we observe that any time a person looks at themself and the way things are and the way things will be, and says, “this is good,” they all share the same core idea: to be satisfied with one’s life and the world.

Despite “good” meaning different things to different people, it is the goal of all morality. Thus, we can take all conceptions of goodness and all measures according to all people, and indeed all conscious creatures, and add them together to make a “total goodness.” For any event, action, circumstance, etc., there is an objective level of total goodness, determined by the aggregate of its subjective, individual goodness to every person and conscious creature. This is messy and complex and always changing, but it does, in fact, exist.

And here lies the question. Can we say it is an objective, factual moral imperative that we ought to aim to increase total goodness? Well . . . No. Because we run into the is-ought gap. Even though the total goodness of something is an objective fact, that does not mean it is a fact that we ought to work toward increasing the total goodness. There is still an unbridgeable gap in the logic.

Any passage between is and ought requires a leap of faith. But the more descriptive facts about morality we take into consideration, the smaller the leap required. To me, the leap from the fact that there is such a thing as total good to the opinion that we ought to work toward increasing the total good, is small. Not even a leap, really, just a step. I am willing to take that step, and I invite you to take it with me. Let’s make this world a better place.

Free Will – What it Means and Why it Matters

Free will: do we have the ability to make our own choices, or are we merely acting out the course that was set for us in advance? This question may seem straightforward, but it has a whole bunch of unspoken assumptions and associations packed into it. When we ask about free will, we are not simply curious about a bit of scientific knowledge, like how birds fly or why planets are round. We feel deeply that the difference between having and not having free will has a huge impact on how we perceive ourselves and live our lives. In order to explore the question thoroughly and satisfactorily, we have to chip away at all of its layers until we find what we really care about.

Surreal Rings of Mystery, by PhoenixArisen on Deviantart

To start, let’s talk about determinism. Suppose there were a being who knew all the physical details of all the particles in the universe with infinite precision. If the universe is deterministic, that being could accurately deduce the past back to the big bang, and predict the future all the way until the end of time. This being is called Laplace’s Demon, because credit always goes to famous people.

Most people would say, if our actions are governed by determinism, then we do not have free will. If we take free will in its literal sense, it would mean the ability to defy the motions of the particles in our brains, and make new threads of causation spring into existence. This version of free will is called libertarian free will (not to be confused with the political orientation).

For most of the history of science, we thought the universe was deterministic. It was all particles and fields bouncing around, exchanging energy and momentum and stuff like that. However, a hundred years ago, the discovery of quantum physics opened the door to probabilism, the idea that the actions of subatomic particles are governed by probabilities, not pre-determined outcomes. We can set up an experiment where there is a 10% chance of one possibility, and a 90% chance of another, and there is no possible way to know for certain what the outcome will be ahead of time, even for Laplace’s Demon.

We might think probabilism would open the door for free will, by letting us influence the probabilities of the neurons firing in our brains. However, that is not the case, because of the law of large numbers. Although it is impossible to know whether individual probabilistic events will turn out to be this or that, the more events that happen, the closer the total results will match the probabilities. This is how the probabilistic world of quantum physics gives rise to the essentially deterministic world of classical physics.

The double-slit experiment, done with thousands of individual photons. As you can see, each photon seems to hit the screen randomly, but once enough of them do, the pattern emerges.

If libertarian free will were true, if we could influence the probabilities of quantum physics, it would create systematic deviations, meaning the results of the experiments would not fit the probabilities as well as they should. This may sound familiar, as it is the experiment we proposed in order to test dualism, the idea that the mind/soul/spirit is a substance different from everything else in physical reality. If neither determinism nor probabilism allows for libertarian free will, does dualism?

At first, it may seem so. After all, if the soul causes new interactions with the brain through choices, then that’s free will, right? Not so fast. By what process does the soul make its choices? What laws of physics—or laws of psychics, if you will—describe the mechanics of soul stuff? If soul stuff behaves deterministically or probabilistically, then dualism does not change anything.

So what would allow for libertarian free will? The only way I can think of is if the mind is an inherent mystery. Not simply that we do not understand it with our knowledge today, but that it cannot be understood, because it does not have an answer. If the mind is a black box, then when we peek into the box, we don’t see anything, because it is mysteries all the way down. This is a view I call quasi-realism, the idea that there are some parts of reality where the answers are inherently fuzzy, and cannot be understood because there is no explanation. I have previously argued against quasi-realism in the nature of reality series, particularly The Nature of Natures, claiming a thing cannot exist without a well-defined way-that-it-is, a nature, and thus, it can be understood. Therefore, the mind, whether dual or physical, has a well-defined, comprehensible nature, and does not supply a loophole for libertarian free will.

But is libertarian free will really what we are interested in? I don’t think so. To see why, let’s take a deeper look at these things we call “choices.” There are two types, at least that I can think of:

1. The exertion of effort. There are times throughout every day when we want to do something, and exert effort to do it; or we know we are on track to do something, and exert effort to avoid doing it.

2. Envisioning possible futures. We don’t know what we are going to do, so we imagine the benefits and downsides of each possibility, and the results play a part in determining what we do.

These definitions do not contain the words “choose,” “option,” “decision,” or anything like that. In fact, these definitions are compatible with determinism and probabilism. Some would say these aren’t really choices, because they are completely determined by the physical processes in our brains, which are determined by a large number of things, like our senses, our knowledge, our skill at accurately predicting outcomes, our self-control, our moment-to-moment body chemistry, the values we learned as children, our habits, our genes, and our cultural influences, which were in turn determined by other things, and so on back to the big bang. Others say, who cares? These definitions accurately describe choices, and that’s good enough to say we have free will. This view, that free will is compatible with deterministic definitions of choices, is called compatibilism.

In situations like this, we are forced to do one thing or another. However, it still feels like a choice is being made.

Is that it? Does the question of free will ultimately come down to semantics? Surely something that feels so profound and significant for our lives must have more to it.

To go further, we need to realize that we are not interested in metaphysics, not really. Determinism, probabilism, dualism, none of that is relevant. What we really care about when talking about free will is the following moral questions:

• Does considering our actions and their consequences matter, or should we just give up and stop caring?
• Is it reasonable to treat people as responsible for their actions or give them credit for their creations and good deeds?
• What is the responsibility of governments and institutions to people who are poor?
• Do we have control over our own actions, or are we being controlled by the manipulations of others or by some kind of Fate?
• Should the criminal justice system focus on punishing people for their actions, or on rehabilitating them?
• Do manipulative agents, such as governments and advertisers, have the right to treat people as means to further their own goals, rather than with respect?

The deep reason people argue for or against free will is because they have a stance on one or more of these questions, or are afraid people who argue against them on free will hold the opposite view on the questions. For instance, some people (like myself) argue free will exists, because they desperately need to believe their efforts make a difference. Others argue that free will does not exist, because they are sick of politicians using free will as an excuse not to help the poor. After all, the rationalization goes, if poor people are poor because of their own bad choices, then the government shouldn’t be responsible to help them.

Rather than arguing at the abstract level of free will, it would be more productive to discuss these issues directly. They are all much more complicated than a simple yes or no, and they are not connected to one another nearly well enough to be put under the umbrella term of “free will.” It is perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe both that our efforts are tremendously significant, and also that the government should provide a strong safety net; two beliefs traditionally placed on opposite sides of free will.

Based on what we have said today, libertarian free will, the idea that we exist outside the processes of the universe and create new threads of causation, does not exist. Compatibilist free will, the idea that our thoughts and efforts play a role from within the deterministic or probabilistic processes of the universe, does. But at the end of the day, what matters is not the metaphysics, but the moral questions of responsibility and how we should live.

The Is-Ought Gap

Some time ago, I wrote a series on morality. My approach was to go through a bunch of different views people have on morality, and give my opinions on each one, pointing out contradictions where I saw them, and picking out my favorites. Now, we’ll revisit the topic from a perspective outside the narratives, which in philosophical terms is called meta-ethics. We’ll be less concerned with which ideas are better than which, and focus on descriptions of moral behavior and ideas, and objective frameworks from which to think about it. To kick things off, we’ll talk about the is-ought gap.

The is-ought gap came from an observation by the philosopher David Hume, who noticed that every time a moral philosopher tried argue for a moral system, they would make a bunch of is-statements about the world, and somewhere along the line take a magical leap to ought-statements. For instance, “The result of evolution by natural selection is to pass on genetic information to the next generation. Therefore, we ought to live in the way that maximizes the chance of our genetic information surviving into the future.” Most of us are not satisfied with this conclusion. What about being kind to strangers? What about lifting people on the other side of the world out of poverty? That’s not the point, though. The problem is that the argument sets up an is-statement, which seems to be leading somewhere, but then jumps to an ought-statement, which does not automatically follow from it.

Another example is the nature of conscious experience. “It is the case that we all have some conscious experiences we would rather have than others. For example, most of us want to avoid pain if there’s no reward from it. Therefore, we ought to take actions that reduce pain in ourselves and others, and to help each other reach the high points of the human experience.” Although this resonates more strongly with most of us than the previous example, it is still a non-sequitur; the premises are not sufficient to prove the conclusion.

You may wonder if maybe we just haven’t found the answer, that someone will come along with a solution and bridge the gap. In fact, many, including myself, have tried. But it is impossible, because it commits a category error. Is-statements are descriptive, whereas ought-statements are normative. Given a number of descriptive statements, you can derive more descriptive statements. Given a number of normative statements, you can derive more normative statements. However, it is impossible, using statements from just one category, to make conclusions that lie within the other. If you ever hear anyone claim to have solved the “is-ought problem,” all they have done is show they don’t understand it.

If we look at what is, we see all kinds of moral systems arising, competing, dying out, thriving above, or beneath, or to the side of others. From rule of the strongest to compassion for all to following the words of the hero or prophet or god or priesthood. It’s clear that moral systems exist, and people follow them passionately, and clearly have a way of determining what they should and should not do within their moral framework. It is also clear that what is true, or what they believe is true, plays a factor in it.

This shows us a sort-of exception to the is-ought gap; if we take some ought-statements as a given, then we have a goal. Once we have a goal, is-statements can show us how we ought to act in order to move toward that goal. This is true for goals that are finished once they are accomplished, as well as for the goals of acting in certain ways over periods of time. In this way, we can use is-statements together with ought-statements to derive more ought-statements. For instance, if we don’t want to be inside a burning building, then we ought to light a fire in the fireplace only if it is safe; and if the fire alarm goes off or the room starts to fill with smoke, we ought to leave the building. If we want to avoid the pain and consequences of a car crash, then if the training programs are good, we ought to receive driver training; if the rules of the road are safe, we ought to adhere to them; if insurance is worth more than the risk of a crash, we ought to have insurance; and all kinds of stuff like that. Given goals, facts about the world can help us know what we ought to do to move toward those goals.

We haven’t bridged the is-ought gap—there is still the implication that we want to be safe and avoid unnecessary suffering—but we have figured out how to use is-statements together with ought-statements to help us reach toward the things we value. There may be no way to prove with absolute certainty what we ought to do, and even if we could, it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be experts on moral philosophy, but we can get by well enough if we inject a little common sense into the discussion and choose to work toward what we believe to be right. We’ll go more into that in the next entry of the Meta-Ethics series.

What is Good?

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, and concluded with Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical framework by which to decide which personal moral system is most appropriate for each circumstance. But when talking about Utilitarianism, I made the same mistake that most Utilitarian advocates make, and that is to define good by a word that means something else. Whether this word is happiness, pleasure, fulfillment, wellbeing, eudaimonia, or, in my case, satisfaction, it feels too limiting, like we’re shifting the definition of good to mean something else. So today, I am going to explain what I mean by “good,” and in the future, I will simply call it “good,” rather than any of those other less satisfactory labels.

We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.

You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.

But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.

There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.

One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.

Negative Morality: The Divine Hierarchy

Morality:
Intuitionism
Authoritarianism
Divine Command and Attributes
Ethical Egoism
Utilitarianism
Virtue and the Golden Rule

Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy

A year ago, we did a series on morality, where we looked at the philosophy of morality, and the moral systems that are discussed in intellectual conversations. Since then, it occurred to me while thinking about the viewpoints of villains and bad people, as well as some misguided people with good hearts, that there are other moral views we have not talked about. These moral systems are not widely considered by philosophers, because they cause oppression and suffering, rather than reduce it. So I have decided to do a mini-series called Negative Morality, where we take a look at these moral systems, so that we may avoid their pitfalls in our own views.

If I were to start the moral series over, I would put Ethical Egoism and Authoritarianism in the negative morality category. But the original series has a structure to it, and I don’t want to mess that up by reclassifying them.

Our topic for today is what I call the divine hierarchy. The concept is simple: the degree to which you are good or evil, holy or unholy, worthy or unworthy, is not primarily determined by what you do, but by what you are. It usually goes something like this: above all are the gods (or just God), beneath them are holy beings like angels, below them are mortal men, below mortals are the animals, and below the animals are demons and unholy monsters. Within each category, humans especially, the beings may be divided into sub-classes, which may either be stratified into discrete levels or smeared out over a continuous spectrum.

This leads to the divine hierarchy’s biggest and most obvious flaw: it makes it very easy to justify prejudice of all kinds. In the hierarchy, men are usually placed above women, the upper classes above the lower classes, and the people of the nations whose armies conquer above the peoples who are conquered. For example, the West has a historical dark side of seeing the world as full of morally inferior savages, theirs for the conquering. History is much more complicated than that, of course, with many positives and negatives, and it can be argued that the attitude of colonialism has greatly diminished from the modern world, but that is a discussion for another time. The point is that a morality structured around a divine hierarchy makes it easy to justify racism, sexism, and discrimination by all other kinds of immutable characteristics. “Know your place” is a common phrase to hear from someone higher in the hierarchy to someone lower down who tries to exercise more freedom than is considered appropriate for them.

In some versions of divine moral hierarchy, it is possible to move up or down the spectrum by performing good or bad actions. More often than not, it’s easy to move down, but very hard to move back up. There is a set of actions, usually based on notions of cleanliness and obedience, that are identified as “bad,” not because the consequences hurt people, but because the action covers you with an invisible sludge called “sin” and makes you less holy. Once covered in sin, there is one of two ways to have it removed, depending on which hierarchy model one believes in. The first is to do penance, an action prescribed by the religious leaders as a medicine for the soul, which may or may not result in good actually being done. The second is to pray that God (or whichever of the gods views you favorably) will be merciful and “wash your sin away” instead of bringing upon you the punishment which your unholy existence deserves.

It should be noted that divine moral hierarchy is not the only context in which sin and religion can be viewed. Some perspectives are not so harsh. There are also other ways that people justify prejudice. We have talked about some of them in other contexts elsewhere on this blog, and may do so more in the future.

If used in a fantasy story, a divine moral hierarchy doesn’t have to be bad. Middle Earth, the setting for The Lord of the Rings, exists in a Divine Hierarchy, with Illuvatar the creator on top; then the Valar, which included Sauron’s master; then the Maiar, which include Sauron and the wizards; and then the elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men. It is also present in the lesser known Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, with Maleldil (basically Jesus) on top, the Eldila (angel-like sci-fi beings) below him, the hnau (sentient creatures) below them, and non-sentient animals implicitly below them. In fiction, we can look at the downsides of a divine hierarchy, or anything really, and say “in this world, the bad consequences just don’t happen.”

If a moral system leads to more suffering than would exist without it, then it is not moral. The idea that people have moral worth based on the genetic lottery of birth clearly does more harm than good, and we should train ourselves to avoid slipping into that way of thinking. If we see others who are consciously or unconsciously influenced by a negative morality, then we should kindly and respectfully ask questions that lead them toward recognizing it.

The Stigma Against Being Wrong

When it comes to knowing things, we like to be right. We give praise to people who have lots of knowledge, and ridicule those who hold false beliefs. We feel it is our duty to correct them, because we feel it is wrong for people to believe false things. In fact, we use the same word, “wrong,” that we use to describe evil actions.

Why do we do this? Why do we feel so strongly that everyone should believe the truth, or at least as much of the truth as we feel should be obvious? Perhaps we believe that they must have based their beliefs on faulty reasoning, and by using that same reasoning they’ll fall prey to con artists and propaganda. Perhaps it is because we fear their false beliefs will cause them to hurt people. Perhaps it is because we care about them and don’t want them living in delusion. Part of it is certainly because we are afraid that our own beliefs might not be as well-grounded as we think, and the more people who agree with us, the more comfortable we can be with those beliefs.

Regardless, we treat having false beliefs as an abnormal condition that must be corrected. However, this stigma does more harm than good. Other people are as certain in their beliefs as we are in ours, and instead of seeing the truth in our words, they think we are the ones who need correcting. This leads to closed minds and hostility, and leaves us worse off than when we started.

To avoid this, to have good relationships and work productively together, we need to recognize that if someone believes something that is not true, it does not make them a bad person. If someone has the wrong idea of God or insists that the Earth is flat, it’s not that big a deal. Let them believe what they believe. The world is big enough for the both of you. No one believes only true things. We are all full of bias and assumptions. We are human, and what we really need is to be respected, not pressured to conform our beliefs to someone else’s expectations.

There is a time and place for everything.The time to debate facts with reason and evidence is when both parties come to the table with open minds, ready to think about things in new ways. This means you have to be willing to listen to them too, and change your mind if they present a good enough argument.

There are also times when a person’s convictions must be challenged, like when they believe God told them to kill someone. The line between false beliefs that are tolerable and those that are not is when they cause the person holding them to neglect their responsibilities. What exactly counts as a responsibility is debatable, but many of the things we argue about, like the compatibility of science and religion, are not even close.

This message is as much for me as for anyone. When I hear someone say biological evolution doesn’t happen, or universal basic income is socialism, or global warming is a hoax, I get mad. A few weeks ago, after I started writing this, I made a fiery reply to someone’s facebook post about multiverses. Reflecting on it afterward, I wondered if I was qualified to speak about being tolerant of others’ beliefs. However, I’ve realized that respectfully allowing others to be wrong is important enough that it’s worth saying, even if I’m not a shining exemplar of it.

What is God?

I grew up in a Christian home in rural United States, believing, as most people in that culture do, in the existence of God the person. This person called God had his own subjective conscious viewpoint. He had the ability to cause anything to happen merely by willing it to be so, including both temporary suspension of the laws of physics, and the creation of the entire Universe. This God was thought to be real and literal. In other words, I believed in a physical God, also known as a “personal God” or “literal God.”

Back then, if you had asked me if I thought God was physical, I would have said no, God is spiritual. If you had asked me what I meant by that, I would have said physical reality is made of one type of substance, and spiritual reality is made of another type of substance. However, that is a false dichotomy. After all, the part of physical reality my present and past selves agree about is made of multiple types of substances. There are particles, fields, and space-time, and maybe a few things we do not know about yet. However, the reason we group them under the umbrella term, “physical” is because the way in which they exist is the same. The God I believed in was not made of space-time, particles, or fields, but he was thought to exist in the same way. That is why I call this kind of God a physical God.

I viewed God as the answer to questions like, “why does the Universe exist?” and, “why do we exist?” The Earth was the way it was because God made it that way, with human beings in mind. Everything that happened, everything I did, was measured against what God wanted, and how it fit into his grand plan. However, after about 20 years of living like this, I started seeing things that did not add up with this view. I learned how ideas of God and gods appeared in cultures and developed over time, and I saw how my God was the same as any other in this regard. I saw sick people get prayed over. Some of them were healed, and some were not. I had ideas pop into my head about the future. Some of them came true, and some did not. Eventually I came to realize that things can happen by chance, that if there are a million opportunities for things with a one-in-a-million probability to happen in a day, we should expect to see one-in-a-million things happen every day.

As we learn and grow, our mental pictures expand, filling in more of the jigsaw puzzle of knowledge. Sometimes we replace ideas with new ones, which may or may not be more correct, but other times we come to see a larger view of the picture, one which encompasses the views we had before. We come to see those views more clearly, why we held them, and how they fit or don’t fit with the rest of reality.

One fateful day, I was hit with the realization that the Universe and everything in it behaves as it would without a physical God. I looked up evidence for the existence of God, which came in two forms. The first was from science, but these were all either conspiracy theories, or of the form, “this seems like too much of a coincidence, therefore God is responsible.” For instance, I have heard the argument that since the conditions in the Universe make life extremely unlikely, God must have created the Earth for us. These arguments don't stand up to probability, nor do they meet their burden of proof. The second form of evidence for God was in philosophical arguments, like the Ontological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Cosmological Argument, and the Argument from Morality. However, all of these either have extraordinary claims in their premises without justification, such as “it is possible for a Maximally Great Being to exist,” or their conclusions do not follow from the premises. Ultimately, I had to admit that I could find no evidence that the physical God I had believed in for my entire life actually existed.

For a while, I felt bitter toward the culture I had been raised in and the people who had taught me what I perceived to be nothing but lies. I faced existential and epistemological crises. This period did not last long, but it was rough. It is no wonder people get defensive and afraid whenever someone says something that even hints at a conflict with their worldview.

This was a turning point in my life. From then on, I started studying all different fields of science and philosophy. I wanted to understand the world and humanity as broadly and in depth as possible. In my quest, I have come across many public intellectuals with deep and important things to say. Among them was the psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who introduced me to the concept of Jungian archetypes, the models of behavior built into the human unconscious that manifest in fictional characters.

With perfect timing, in one of those one-in-a-million events that I mentioned earlier, Jordan Peterson started a series of public lectures, which he posted to YouTube, about the significance of the Biblical stories from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. Instead of taking them as literal historical events, like I had for my entire life, he treated them as a window into the depths of the human mind, as stories passed down for hundreds of generations, undergoing a kind of natural selection so that only the most meaningful and resonant parts remained, the rest lost to memory. Freed from the blinders of literalism, the Biblical stories exploded with meaning like I never imagined.

My thoughts turned back to consider once again the idea of God. Of course, a physical God was out of the question; the more I learned of science and philosophy, the more solidly that coffin was nailed shut. However, things I had heard believers say before, but had made no sense to me, started to come back. The idea that morality could not exist without a god. The idea that everyone worships something, whether they profess to or not. And for the first time in my life, it all started to make sense. God is not a person, not in the physical sense. God is an archetype.

Archetypes are the embodiments of human behavior patters. We see ourselves in fictional and mythological characters, and in forces of nature. This is where the gods of Ancient Greece and other pantheons come from. Capital-G God is the archetypal embodiment of all of the best qualities of human nature. This is why religious people take “God is good” as a truism, and why they say that without God, morality does not exist.

Atheists sometimes point to the things God does in the Bible which are obviously evil, and say, “God is not good.” But those instances are a product of the limitations of human knowledge at the time they were written. Archetypes are not made-up, they are discovered and studied. Since Biblical times, humanity has gone through revolutions of moral philosophy, so our understanding of the best of human nature, God, has matured. It is only natural that parts of the ancient views of God will appear barbaric to us. They were trying to understand, and, not having the philosophical knowledge of millennia to draw upon, got some of it wrong.

So why do most people insist on believing, and requiring others to believe, in a physical God rather than an archetypal God? Or from another perspective, what could drive me to speak such heresy? The answer lies in our psychology. We have a natural instinct to search for the meaning in facts, and to take that which is meaningful as factual. Only in the past few hundred years, since the dawn of science, have we begun to learn the difference.

Some would call me an atheist, because I believe there is no physical God. Others would call me a Christian, because I actively try to learn about and model my life around the best and fullest aspects of human nature, which God represents, and because I find value in the philosophy and culture that has come from the Christian tradition. I don’t care about the labels myself. It’s the honest search for truth that matters; after all, that’s in accordance with the nature of God.

Moral Theory VI: So How Should We Live?

Moral Theory:
I. Intuitionism
II. Authoritarianism
III. Divine Command and Attributes
IV. Ethical Egoism
V. Utilitarianism
VI. Virtue and the Golden Rule

Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy

Last time in the Moral Theory series we started from basic observational facts about human beings, and building on them with logic, came to the conclusion that the objective truth of morality is Utilitarianism, where utility (the good to be maximized) is defined as the sense that things are as they should be, both outwardly and internally, which I summarized with the word “satisfaction.” Yet even though this is built on a bedrock of logic and facts, it still has a lot of problems. The most glaring is the information problem. To do what is best, one must know two impossible things: the subjective experience of other people, and all dimensions of all possible consequences of all possible actions. Almost all of the people in the world know what is good for them better than anyone else does, with the exceptions of young children and sometimes people who are very close to one another, and most of us are bad judges even of what is best for ourselves. The effects of moral actions are part of a vast, chaotic system, where one thing causes eight more, which each cause many more, and so on. We know so little about the broader consequences of our actions that we might as well be clueless.

But we don’t have to rely on Utilitarianism alone for moral guidance. That would be like using only quantum physics to try to figure out how to use a new coffee machine. Sure, quantum physics is the bedrock truth of how matter works, but there are easier ways of thinking about coffee makers to get them to do what you want. The same is true with morality. Utilitarianism may be the bedrock truth, but there are other, simpler systems that can guide us to do what is good. Throughout the series, we have talked about some of these systems, but now with Utilitarianism we have the tool we need to evaluate each system and compare them to each other, to determine which is best for which situation.

The simplest, most elegant system for good moral behavior is the Golden Rule. It has several different phrasings. The Book of Matthew in the Bible says, “do to others as you would have them do to you.” Confucius said, “Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself.” But my favorite, and what I think strikes best at the heart of the rule’s meaning, is the way Immanuel Kant stated it, which he called the Categorical Imperative, “act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means.” This means that nothing is more important than people, and everything we do should be for the benefit of people. This might seem familiar. After all, it is basically the same good as identified with Utilitarianism, except explained in way that is easier to apply to our everyday encounters with others.

The Categorical Imperative has an added bonus, in that it resonates strongly with our moral intuitions. It just feels right. When searching for a way to live morally, the Categorical Imperative is a great place to start, and even if one lives their entire lives without moving to something more complex and nuanced, it has a very high chance of leading to a life full of goodness.

However, no one is perfect, and people fail to live up to the moral expectations of others and of themselves. People break rules, they lie, they steal, they shout at each other and refuse to understand. Despite this dismal truth, though, there is no need to despair. Instead, we can look to Virtue Ethics, the principle of accepting ourselves and others as we are, and always looking for the next step to become better.

It is not reasonable to expect anyone, least of all yourself, to become perfect overnight. People can change, but only through small, gradual changes over time. Virtue Ethics is a way to focus on that change in ourselves, not to compare ourselves to others, but to measure ourselves against what we were yesterday, or last week, or last year. When we succeed at this, we feel an amazing sense that the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which is revered by philosophers as a state of mind more desirable than happiness. It is the sense that, though things may not be perfect, we are moving in the right direction internally, and because of that we can accept life as it is given to us.

Virtue is a clean, nourishing word. It brings to mind traits like patience, courage, and self-control. However, virtues are not a set of rules for how to live, rather they emerge as side-effects of a person's never-ending journey toward being a better person. Virtue Ethics is all about the journey, not the destination.

Utilitarianism may be the bedrock factual truth about morality, explaining what is good, but it does a lousy job at telling us how good we should be and what to do to get there. So instead of being a guide to morality itself, it works better as an objective standard by which to compare other moral systems that are subjective, but easy to digest. Most of what we have talked about in this series does not score very well. However, the Categorical Imperative, considering its simplicity and all the good it leads to, gets an A, and the contagious positivity of Virtue Ethics gives it an A+. Combining Utilitarianism's objective scale, the reference point of the Categorical Imperative, and Virtue Ethics’s push to always move forward, we have found a robust system of morality, which can be as complex or simple, as nuanced or general, as global or personal as we need it to be.

Moral Theory V: The Greatest Good

Moral Theory:
I. Intuitionism
II. Authoritarianism
III. Divine Command and Attributes
IV. Ethical Egoism
V. Utilitarianism
VI. Virtue and the Golden Rule

Negative Morality:
Divine Hierarchy

Note: I did not explain good very well in this discussion, so a year later I wrote a better explanation. You can read it here.

So far, as we have examined moral systems in our search for objective morality, we have gotten lucky and found contradictions. However, there may be many moral systems that have no internal contradictions. If we want to be able to compare them objectively, we will have to approach the question from a different angle. Today, we will see what we can find out by starting with observations and building upon them with logic.

So far, we have asked “what is morality?” But when we look closer, we can see that question can be broken up into two: “what is good?” and “what should we do?” The second question looks like it depends on what “good” is, so let’s put it aside for later and consider the first one.

To begin, let’s take a step back even further and ask why we have moral systems in the first place. Why do we care about how we and others choose to live our lives? The answer is because we want to strive to create a state of affairs that satisfies us, about which we can say, “this is good.” Although each of us has different ideas of what “good” is, we all have something in common, in that we want to be satisfied by the way things turn out and the actions we and others took to get there.

Perhaps, then, we are blinded by the actions we think of as good, like helping people, being rewarded for hard work, etc., and are missing the real purpose of morality: to be satisfied with what we and others have chosen to do, and with the results that have come from it. Satisfaction is the goal of every system of morality, which means satisfaction is equal to goodness. The answer to “what is good?” is satisfaction.

Knowing this is not enough, though. We are still left with a bunch of competing moral systems, all of which differ in whose satisfaction matters and what types of satisfaction are emphasized. We need a way to take morality from the subjective view to the objective. 50 years ago, philosopher John Rawls suggested we view the world from the Veil of Ignorance, where we look at the world as if we do not know who we are. From this objective perspective, all people are equal, and no one’s need for satisfaction deserves more weight than anyone else’s. The objective good, then, is to increase the total amount of satisfaction experienced by humanity, and all creatures capable of experiencing it.

This leads us to the moral theory of Utilitarianism, the idea that the best, most moral actions are those that create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. As John Stuart Mill said 150 years ago, “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong in proportion as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” Mill called it “happiness,” and I call it “satisfaction,” but context shows that what we mean by these words is in principle the same thing.

Utilitarianism brings up a lot of questions whose answers are not immediately clear. For one, how do we deal with the fact that sometimes people get satisfaction out of hurting others? Do we say that some kinds of satisfaction are good and some are bad? That would seem to undermine the whole argument. However, we don’t have to say that; Utilitarianism takes care of it naturally. All satisfaction is good, but it must be totaled up over all people. If someone takes satisfaction at another’s expense, it is usually worse overall than if they had left each other alone, and always worse than if they had worked together to increase both of their satisfaction.

But what if there is no possible way for everyone to be satisfied? What if no matter what anyone does, someone will have to suffer? There is a classic counterargument to Utilitarianism that goes like this: suppose there are five patients in a hospital who each need an organ transplant, or they are going to die. In the waiting room, there is a perfectly healthy person here for a visit. Wouldn’t Utilitarianism say that it would be better to kill the one person in the waiting room and take their organs than to let the five patients die?

The answer is no, as killing someone in the waiting room has broader consequences beyond the six people in the example. If people can be killed for their organs, it creates what I call a Shadow of Fear, a stifling blanket over everyone in society, as they are afraid of being killed for their organs. The amount of satisfaction lost from everyone in society under a Shadow of Fear outweighs the satisfaction of continued life from the five people who were going to die.

What if the doctors cover it up? What if they claim the person in the waiting room died from a heart attack, and so using their organs was justified? This would seem to eliminate the Shadow of Fear, bringing Utilitarianism back under fire. However, such a lie is unstable. If the truth were to come to light, it would create a stronger Shadow of Fear than if they had been honest from the start. Not only would there be a Shadow of Fear about the possibility of being killed for one’s organs, but there would be a further Shadow of Fear about the deception; people would be worried that there are other cover-ups that they don’t know about, and they might be harmed or killed for all kinds of unknown reasons. The mere risk of such a shadow outweighs the satisfaction gained by the five saved patients, and Utilitarianism prevails again.

Another common counterargument regards sacrificing oneself for the greater good. Hypothetically, if there was some kind of monster who would gain tremendous satisfaction from eating you, so much that it would outweigh all the satisfaction you would have in the entire rest of your life, wouldn’t Utilitarianism say that it is best for you to feed yourself to that monster?

Maybe, but maybe not. Humans are extremely bad at predicting all possible futures, so in almost every case, we would have no way to know whether we would have more satisfaction in the rest of our life than the monster would gain by eating us. But there might be some kind of extreme circumstances where we would know, and that seems troubling.

However, we actually make this decision all the time; it’s called eating meat. We sacrifice the futures of animals for our own pleasure, even raising them from birth for the purpose of eating. The amount of satisfaction from the pleasure we get from eating a meal is certainly less than the amount of satisfaction the animals would have experienced in the rest of their life, yet we feel it is justified. So then, so what if Utilitarianism tells us that there are possible circumstances where it would be better to feed ourselves to a monster? What license do we have to complain about the perceived speck in Utilitarianism’s eye, when we have this plank in our own?

What about intentions? Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, which means the goodness of an action is determined by its consequences, not the intentions of the person who performed it. This will lead to situations where people with malicious intent end up doing good things, and people with good intent end up doing bad things. At a glance, Utilitarianism seems to say the person with good intent is worthy of condemnation and the person with bad intent is worthy of praise. But this once again ignores the broader context. People with good intentions are more likely to do good in the future, and people with bad intentions are more likely to do bad. So the desire and effort to do good can be as praiseworthy as good consequences, or even more so. It is also noteworthy that it is more satisfying to oneself to have good intentions than bad.

There are still many questions left about Utilitarianism that I don’t have the answer to. What level of satisfaction, if any, is low enough that it is equal to nonexistence, and are there states of living that are worse than death? Would it be better to have billions of people in near-death misery, or millions in luxury? What about animals, whose brains are not powerful enough to have moral intuitions, but can feel pleasure and pain? These questions are interesting puzzles for philosophers to debate over and solve. Despite the uncertainty, I am convinced that Utilitarianism is the objective foundation of morality.

There is one major problem left, though. Utilitarianism is only half the answer; it tells us what “good” is, but it does not tell us how to act. We cannot be obligated to always and only do that which is best, because it is impossible for us to know anything close to the amount of information required to make that kind of decision. Other than that, Utilitarianism does not provide a clear line between good and bad, nor give us instructions on how to increase goodness. So how can we hope to live good, moral lives? The answer is that Utilitarianism is not exclusive. It allows and even encourages other moral systems, including those we have already talked about. Utilitarianism gives a way to know when to follow rules, when to trust your intuitions, when to serve yourself, and provides a foundation for God’s nature and commands. Utilitarianism does not tell us what to do, but gives us a measure by which to compare prescriptive moral systems against each other. Next time, we will look at a final two moral systems in our quest to answer the final question, “how should we live?”