Medworth.org.uk

Last Tuesday (January 27th) I led a discussion for Big Ideas with the above title. The subject was a truly big one: where does morality come from? What justifies its binding power? How do we decide whether something is good or bad, how do we convince others of our views, and what are the cultural consequences of the answers to these questions?

These questions come from an area of philosophy called meta-ethics, so-called because they are fundamental to any view of ethics and are logically prior to any specific ethical principles or virtues.

The evening started with a short speech from me, which you can find, more or less as I gave it, at the bottom of this post. I began by motivating the discussion, saying what the subject is and why I think it is important. The Big Ideas organisers tend to discourage speakers from giving too much of their own opinion in the introduction, as they have found that this can result in a debate between the speaker and the rest of the attendees rather than a free-form discussion, so I next simply stated that I regard Ayn Rand’s answers to the above questions as correct, and left any substantiation of this to later in the evening. I finished by summarising five historical approaches to the questions of meta-ethics, following the pattern of Prof Tara Smith in her book Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality.

The evening went extremely well. I was surprised and flattered to receive a round of applause both before and after my speech, and several people approached me afterwards to say how much they had enjoyed the discussion. One of the things I love about Big Ideas is its relaxed, informal and friendly atmosphere (the discussions take place in the upstairs room of a London pub). People turn up with some odd points of view sometimes, but I have never heard the discussion deteriorate into insults, provocations, childish misinterpretation, or personal attacks. It is the perfect antidote, in short, to the average Internet debate, and this is a testament to the efforts of the organisers (who are all personal friends of mine) as well as the people who turn up.

My goals for this evening were (a) to give an indication of the unique nature of Ayn Rand’s ethical philosophy, (b) to demonstrate that we Ayn Rand fans (contrary to certain Internet stereotypes) can be pleasant and interesting to talk to, and (c) to have a good time. On (c) I certainly succeeded, and on (b) I’m pretty sure I did: there were a number of UK-based Ayn Rand fans at the event who made excellent and polite contributions. On (a) I had hoped to say more, but I got across the fundamentals: some people definitely learned some new things about Objectivism that night, which is as much as one could ask for.

It was interesting to observe the range of views on display during the discussion. There were a great many people of a relativist/subjectivist bent, and almost no-one was willing to mount a defence of a rationalist approach to ethics (like Kant’s) or a religious one.

A couple of people approached the subject from an evolutionary perspective, following Richard Dawkins. Almost immediately, someone stated that ethical systems confer a survival advantage upon human beings in different contexts, and that’s why we have them. A couple of examples came up: it was alleged that slavery was only abolished for economic reasons, and that women were only given the vote to improve nations’ combat abilities and avoid social unrest.

I have a huge problem with the way Dawkins approaches ethics (in general I consider him a brilliant scientist and communicator of scientific ideas but a mediocre philosopher) and I should have prepared better for this line of argument. There were some intelligent reactions from the rest of the crowd, but I didn’t manage to say anything particularly coherent about it on the night. It is an inevitable consequence of participating in an event like this that immediately after the event is over, you think of all sorts of clever things you ought to have said, and this is a case in point!

My first problem with Dawkins’ approach (in his book The God Delusion) is that he unquestioningly takes over the religious view of what is moral (i.e. sacrificing your own self-interest for the sake of others) and tries to explain this code from an evolutionary standpoint. He is so desperate to rebut religious claims that atheists have no foundation for morality that it never seems to occur to him that the archetypal religious view of what is moral might not actually be correct! This point relates to something another participant said in the discussion, namely that all ethical philosophers basically say the same thing and are trying to mount a retroactive justification of an existing moral code. There is some truth in this — there is widespread agreement among people today about what is moral — but I see that as a failure of philosophers, not something inherent to the subject! Even a cursory reading of Atlas Shrugged will show that the content of Rand’s ethics is very unconventional indeed and clashes at every level with conventional altruistic codes.

My second problem with Dawkins is that the evolutionary approach to ethics is not really very helpful when making actual moral decisions in the real world. It is all well and good to say we have the moral codes we have today because they have produced the most successful societies, but we all face constant choices about whether socially prevalent moral principles are correct or not, and we need some way of deciding such questions. At some point, people had to decide that conventional views about race were wrong and that slavery should thus be ended: to say this was a purely economic decision is clearly historically inaccurate. It is true that slavery rapidly became impractical as the world began to industrialise (which Objectivists should not regard as a coincidence, given their view of the tight integration of the moral and the practical) and this helped efforts to eradicate it, but the arguments which actually ended slavery were moral arguments, and to pretend otherwise is to deny the moral greatness of the anti-slavery campaigners in a rather cynical way. Besides, most individual decisions have very little bearing on the survival of the species as a whole, and it really is not much use to say that the only way of evaluating whether something is moral or not is to have it accepted on a wide scale, wait a few thousand years, and see if society survives!

One of the reasons the evolutionary approach confused me on the night, I think, is because the Objectivist view of ethics is very much bound up with the issue of human survival. The reason we need ethics, for Rand, is to survive as human beings: our basic means of flourishing is our unique form of consciousness, which requires that we conceptualise life’s requirements and follow our own rational self-interest. The concept of value is unintelligible divorced from the context of a being confronting the alternative of life or death. However, species and societies are not moral agents: they are not living beings making decisions, they are merely aggregates, and so the morally important unit is the individual. This is why Rand’s is an egoistic ethics: for her, the argument for egoism is the argument for morality.

This was a point I was able to get across in the discussion to some extent: I was pleased to be able to note that Rand is the only ethical philosopher I have ever read who actually makes an attempt to tackle what I regard as the really important ethical questions: how we approach the vast, complex network of interlocking values — short- and long-term, simple and multifaceted, physical and psychological, individual and social, fundamental and derivative, vital and less so — which we need to flourish and be happy as human beings. Ethics is supposed to tell you what to do in concrete situations in your own life. Should I take this degree? Should I take this job? Should I go out with this girl? Most ethical systems are completely silent on practical questions of this sort, but Rand is not. She does not claim to make these decisions easy or stress-free in every case, but she does give important principles which help you deal with them.

This brings me on to another point which was the subject of some debate, namely to what extent ethics is social. Would you need ethics if stranded alone on a desert island? Rand’s view is very much yes, as evidenced by this terrific quotation from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged which I was disappointed not to get the chance to use on the night:

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island—it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today—and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.

This paragraph by itself gives a strong indication of the character of Rand’s ethics. However, those who approach morality from a more contractarian viewpoint tend to think that ethics is only needed to mediate conflicts between people, and several people advanced that view. However, I was heartened to see that others were not happy with this and defended the idea of “desert island morality”.

One point I was able to get across successfully (I felt) was the parasitism of a great many ethical codes. I gave the example of hedonism, the view that pleasure is the good, and argued that it has to “smuggle in” values from outside itself. After all, what gives you pleasure? All human values of significance — money, romance, friendship, career — give pleasure only because we value them on a conceptual level! (Even apparently purely sensory pleasures such as that of sinking into a hot bath are strongly affected by conceptual-level context: that hot bath wouldn’t be so nice if you used blood instead of water, even though the sensation is the same.) So hedonism gets the order exactly wrong: value leads to pleasure, not pleasure to value.

The same applies to all sorts of other widely touted moral principles, such as the Golden Rule (”do unto others as you would have them do to you”). By itself, this is unexceptionable — it is not reasonable to hold yourself to a different moral standard from others — but it leaves completely open the question of what you should want done to you! It fails to engage with the really important question, which is what is truly of value to a person.

Another interesting point someone made was a concern that “top-down” rationalistic moral systems are repressive and lead to a kind of moral totalitarianism. In response I was able to argue that the standard alternative between value being intrinsic to certain things (”vacuum-packed” into external objects) and being purely a subjective creation of our minds is a false choice. I managed to convey the point that value for Rand is relational, pertaining to facts about the world viewed from the perspective of human survival needs. I pointed out that the fact that moral principles may have a finite context of application is not the same as saying they are subjective or non-absolute, a point which raises some very interesting questions about the links between epistemology and ethics.

I also took the opportunity to point out that rationalistic systems tend not to be very good at giving us concrete moral advice of the kind I argued above that we need, using the example of Kant’s distinction between “strong duty” and “weak duty” (the former being things he thinks he can logically prove are duties, and the latter basically being things he’d like to prove are duties but can’t really do it).

The most enjoyable part of the evening for me was talking to individual attendees after the “formal” proceedings finished. Apart from the fact that it was the time I finally felt safe to drink some beer (!), I had some great follow-up conversations about some of the topics discussed. I was talking to one attendee about Rand’s distinction between the standard of morality and the purpose of morality, a crucial point which clears up a huge amount of confusion and error. A number of people turned out to have read Ayn Rand at some point, and I had some very enjoyable conversations about that. I was able to clarify a few fairly subtle misunderstandings of Rand’s position, which is something of which I am very proud: it shows how far I have come intellectually in the last few years.

The really encouraging thing about this evening was the good manners and intellectual quality of the attendees, even those with whom I vehemently disagreed. When I explained Rand’s view that morality is egoistic, I did not get a single scoff, laugh or curled lip. Big Ideas really is a troll-free zone, and I would like to thank the organisers and everyone who turned up for a really stimulating and pleasant evening.

Now, as promised, here is my introductory speech.

Good evening.

I’d like to begin with a joke I heard from a Christian evangelist. Most of you will know the Bible story where Moses goes up Mount Sinai so God can tell him the commandments he wants the Jews to live by. Moses goes up the mountain, and a few days later he comes down with the stone tablets God has given him. He gathers the Israelites around him and says, “Guys, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, I’ve got him down to ten. The bad news is, adultery’s still in.”

On the face of it, this might seem like just a silly joke. But I’m going to argue that it is in fact quite philosophically profound! It nicely reveals a serious unease we have about morality, which (as the joke also suggests) has been around for thousands of years.

Almost everyone recognises that human beings need a moral code. We need a set of values to live by. Almost everyone believes in some code of morality, and lives by it at least most of the time. But most of us chafe against our moral code. There’s a widespread belief that we’d each be better off if everyone else had to follow morality, but we didn’t — that morality hurts the one who practices it, but that it’s a painful necessity for successfully living in society.

Most of us also have great difficulty justifying our beliefs about morality. How do you argue for a moral viewpoint? You might try appealing to a popular principle of morality, such as Jesus’ “Golden Rule” — do unto others as you would have them do to you — but then how do you justify that?

The subject of our discussion for this evening is going to be the area of philosophy which lies at the root of ethics. There are many questions we have to answer before we can even begin to discuss any specific code of ethics. What are moral values? Do we really need them, and why? Is there an ultimate value, to which all others are subordinate, and if so, what is it? What standard — i.e. what measuring stick — do we use to determine whether an action is moral? How do we know what is a value and what isn’t, and how do we convince others of our views? Who (or what) should be the beneficiary of our actions? These questions come from an area of philosophy called meta-ethics, so-called because we’re talking about the subject of ethics as such rather than any specific moral principles.

Now, this isn’t just a dry academic subject: like all the best philosophic questions, this is of absolutely crucial importance to all our lives. Concern and confusion about these questions is everywhere in our popular culture. While preparing this talk, I watched out for all meta-ethical references I could see, and they’re absolutely everywhere. Given my time restriction, I’d like to pick out just two to motivate you.

The first is a scene from the film Terminator 2. The young John Connor has just figured out that this killer robot (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) will do whatever he tells it to, so naturally, he tells it to beat up a couple of guys for no reason. Arnie proceeds to do this, and showing no emotion at all, he pulls out a gun and is about to shoot one of the guys dead. This wasn’t what John had in mind, so he stops Arnie and tells the guys to leg it, which they do. He then turns to Arnie and says, in effect, “What are you doing? You can’t just go round killing people all the time!” To which Arnie’s classic response is, “Why?” John says, “What do you mean, why? Because you can’t!” “Why?” “Because you just can’t, OK? Trust me on this!”

It’s a funny scene, but it eloquently illustrates how difficult we sometimes find it to justify even our most uncontroversial moral beliefs.

The second example I have is from an episode of The Twilight Zone, the colour series from the eighties. There’s an episode with Bruce Willis (who had hair back then). Basically, Bruce Willis plays a man who is immoral in just about every area of his life. He neglects his wife and child, he drinks, he cheats and back-stabs his way through work, and is generally just not a very nice guy. The premise of this episode is that a clone of Bruce Willis suddenly appears, and starts competing with the “real” Bruce Willis to live his life. The point is that this new Bruce Willis is a nice guy, who goes around trying to undo all the damage the original did and get his life back on track. Eventually, the good Bruce Willis takes over and the bad one just fades away.

The really interesting part of this episode is some conversations the two Bruce Willises have about the life they’re competing for. Basically, the good one is saying, “look at all the damage you’ve done, you’re a really bad guy and I’m going to fix it”. And the line which really interested me was something the bad Willis said to try to justify his behaviour. He said (paraphrasing), “I can’t be perfectly good all the time, I’ve got mouths to feed.”

Notice the implications of that. He doesn’t feel he can follow morality 100%, because it prevents him from succeeding in life and enjoying it.

The reason I chose these two examples is because they illustrate the two points I’d like to focus on in this discussion. The Terminator 2 example illustrates the relationship between fact and value, a very ancient philosophic problem (though it was most famously raised by David Hume in the 18th century). The problem is: how do we derive moral principles from facts about the world? How do we move in logic from what is, to what ought to be? And Hume basically said we couldn’t do it.

Now what are the implications of this? Well, if you can’t reason from “is” to “ought”, as Hume claimed, then there can be no such thing as a science of ethics. In science, we attempt to learn about facts out there in the world, and if there is a disagreement, we can in principle resolve it by looking at the relevant facts. If Hume is right about morality, then for moral questions we have no such final court of appeal. Morality is ultimately going to be subjective: if you and I disagree about a moral question, neither of us is going to be able to point to facts which prove we are right: it’s all a matter of subjective feeling. So when John Connor disagrees with the Terminator about such a basic issue as whether it’s right to kill people, there isn’t really much he can say to convince him.

Not only does this kind of subjectivism in ethics deprive man of the kind of moral guidance he so desperately needs, it also leads to terrible irreconcilable social conflict. If we cannot appeal to reason to settle moral questions, there is ultimately going to be only one alternative: physical force. If we are going to establish a code of social morality which we are all going to follow, and there is no objective way to determine what it should be, then we are necessarily faced with warfare between competing pressure groups with different ideas about social morality. The best we can hope for is some kind of democratic system which keeps this battle as non-violent as possible, where the group with the most members wins at the expense of everyone else.

The Twilight Zone example illustrates the relationship between the moral and the practical. If we can’t be fully moral all the time and still lead a happy and successful life, then choosing our actions is always going to be a matter of compromise between the moral and the immoral. We’re going to have to cheat on our morality to survive and prosper — and then guiltily pay our dues to our principles.

(This is an ancient problem which has evolved over time: consider the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, or the modern theories of evolutionary psychology which seek to explain immoral behaviour in terms of its survival value.)

Not only does this lead to self-contradiction (how much we should be moral is itself clearly a moral question, so there is circularity here), if following your own self-interest is amoral at best as this account suggests, man is deprived of moral guidance in many crucial areas of his existence. Worse, an impractical morality causes unearned guilt in its followers, and an atmosphere of hypocrisy and cynicism in society.

(If you think these issues only surface in high-brow popular culture, consider the slogan of Loaded magazine: “For men who should know better”.)

In my view, the fact that philosophers have not provided satisfactory answers to these two questions explains a great deal of the unease we feel about morality today. The dominant cultural trend, as evidenced by everything around us, is that morality is an incomplete and subjective guide to action — and this leads to misery, conflict and cynicism.

So that’s the motivational part over; that’s why I think we should all care very much about meta-ethics in general, and the two issues I’ve highlighted in particular. But this is a very abstract subject, and so I think we need to give a brief overview of some of the historical approaches to meta-ethical questions to give you something to chew on in the discussion.

I should tell you at the outset: I am an admirer of the Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand, who is most famous as the author of the novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I believe she has solved the key problems of meta-ethics. My main research text for this talk was the book Viable Values, by Professor Tara Smith of the University of Austin, Texas, who is one of Ayn Rand’s key contemporary defenders. However, the Big Ideas organisers don’t like speakers to give too much of their own personal views up-front, as they understandably don’t want the discussion to turn into me defending a view and you attacking it.

So I’m going to follow chapters two and three of Prof Smith’s book, which gives you what she regards as the key historical answers to the question “why be moral?”, which is essentially the question at the core of meta-ethics. (She lists five.) I believe, with Prof Smith, that these answers are all fatally flawed, and certainly not jointly exhaustive, and in the main, I’m not going to give arguments for or against them, even though some of them are very famous.

I’m hoping this will facilitate a good discussion. Perhaps someone will want to give an argument defending one of these views; perhaps someone will want to attack one. Perhaps someone has an idea for an alternative approach! There are lots of interesting questions about how the approaches Smith lists tie in to specific moral positions, such as utilitarianism or religion. Also, not all the approaches are fully mutually exclusive. Maybe you’ll just want to ask a question about something I’ve said, or raise an alternative opinion or objection. That’ll be the idea, and we’ll see where the discussion goes from there!

To help make this a better discussion, please try to avoid assuming any specific content to morality. We’re dealing with issues which are more fundamental than any specific moral principles. We’ve all come through the door tonight with certain beliefs about what morality consists of, and it’s fine to think about how those beliefs might be grounded, but what we can’t do is assume a priori that particular forms of behaviour are moral or immoral and then try to build a retroactive justification for those views: that would be a reversal of the proper order. Please leave your morals at the door!

If you want to use concrete moral principles to illustrate your views, please choose non-controversial examples like murder, rape or theft (as opposed to abortion or carbon offsetting). These will be just as good at illustrating meta-ethical ideas and will help avoid the key issues being clouded by our preconceptions.

So, after all that introduction: why be moral?

The first response Smith considers is actually an attempt to dismiss the question as incoherent and invalid. The argument goes something like this. If you ask me why you should be moral, that’s like asking why you should do what you should do. But what kind of answer would you accept to this? If I tell you why I think you should be moral, couldn’t you say, “well, you’ve told me why I should follow morality, but my very question was why I should do what I should do?” The objection is that my answer — whatever it was — would have to beg the question, by assuming morality’s binding power while trying to prove it. On this view, asking “why be moral?” is like asking “why are scarlet things red?”.

Now, this argument does show something. It shows that it is not possible to give a moral reason for being moral. If we are going to give a reason, it is going to have to be something from outside morality. Thinkers who take this approach to meta-ethics generally assume that ethics must stand alone and not be “subordinate” to anything outside itself. But this is a major assumption which needs to be justified! Where morality comes from is precisely what is in question here, and to assume the only possible justification for ethics is within ethics itself is unwarranted and question-begging.

Once you accept the authority of morality, it is foolish to ask why you should do as it prescribes. But whether we should accept that authority is precisely what is in question. On what grounds do we designate some actions as “right” and others as “wrong”? Usually, a reason for doing something is tied to our purpose in doing it: for example, we brush our teeth to avoid cavities. If moral principles are going to be self-sufficient, such that a moral reason for doing something is independent of any purpose, we’re going to need a justification of that. But thinkers who make the argument I have described never provide one. (There aren’t many of them: Smith lists John Hospers and Stephen Toulmin.)

The second approach Smith considers is called intuitionism. This is the view that human beings possess a direct faculty for judging an action right or wrong. On this view, morality is self-evident. We do not arrive at moral judgements by means of argumentation of any kind, but by a direct form of awareness. The nearest comparison for the human moral faculty would be one of our forms of sense perception which give us direct awareness of reality, such as vision. We don’t need any argument to establish that that table is brown, we just look and see; similarly, the intuitionists say, we consider an action and our conscience will just tell us whether it deserves praise or blame.

This viewpoint was explicitly originated in the eighteenth century by Bishop Joseph Butler, and still has some modern defenders. It is really a sort of “anti-theory”, in that it rejects any need for an answer to the question “why be moral?”, and as such it is closely allied to the explicit rejection of the question I just mentioned.

The third approach is called contractarianism. The essence of this viewpoint is that morality is a matter of human agreement. The most famous statement of a contractarian position is that of Thomas Hobbes: since life in the “state of nature” (i.e. without morality) is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, we all agree to accept some limitations on our behaviour, and it is this agreement which binds us to do the right thing. There are all sorts of variations on the basic contractarian argument — for example, is the agreement tacit or does it have to be explicit? does the agreement have to be actual, or can it be hypothetical, i.e. something a person would agree to if she was acting fully rationally? and so forth — but they all see morality as grounded in a social contract of some sort. This is essentially an appeal to self-interest: we give up some of our freedom, in exchange for greater benefits.

The fourth approach is rationalism. This is the view that we should be moral because rationality requires it. Logic itself compels us to do the right thing: to do the wrong thing would be to hold a contradiction, to be illogical, to be irrational.

The classic example of a rationalist is Immanuel Kant. He famously came up with what he called a Categorical Imperative, which reason demands that everyone must follow as an end in itself. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is the principle of universalisability. To test whether any action is moral, said Kant, identify the principle behind it, and imagine that everyone in the world followed that principle without exception. If this would be logically impossible, the action is immoral, otherwise it is moral.

A trivial example of a principle that would be ruled out by the Categorical Imperative is: “never buy a newspaper, always read someone else’s”. You cannot follow this principle unless someone else violates it by buying a newspaper, so it is not universalisable.

According to Kant, therefore, “it must be rejected, not because of any disadvantage accruing to myself or even to others, but because it cannot enter as a principle into a possible enactment of universal law, and reason extorts from me an immediate respect for such legislation…. The renunciation of all interest is the specific mark of the categorical imperative, distinguishing it from the hypothetical.”

It is vital to recognise the special nature of the argument being made here: Kant is not asking us to consider all the terrible consequences which would follow from everyone reading someone else’s newspaper, he is saying that it would be logically impossible for everyone to do so, and therefore no-one must act on this principle. Desires, ends and consequences don’t enter the picture: just follow the Categorical Imperative for its own sake.

For moral rationalists like Kant, being moral is not the means to any higher end: virtue is its own reward. You must be moral (i.e. rational) even if it makes you miserable — even if it makes you and everyone else miserable! Kant was shockingly explicit on this point: the most moral man, for him, is one who wants to do evil but resists temptation.

Not all rationalists accept Kant’s categorical imperative, but all follow the same pattern: for them, the moral is the rational, arrived at without regard for the ends and desires of any moral agents. The virtuous action advocated by reason is to be done for its own sake, for no further reason other than the fact that “pure logic” demands it.

The final approach to grounding values Smith considers isn’t really a systematic approach to grounding morality: it’s more a means of getting around problems with the other four approaches. I’m referring here to intrinsicism. This is basically the idea that a certain thing (or things) is simply good in itself, not as a means to anything further. The goodness of an intrinsically valuable thing is completely contained within that thing, and is independent of anyone’s preferences or goals, any other aims, or any relationships to any other things whatsoever. Intrinsically good things should be sought as ends in themselves, as opposed to the means to higher ends.

We often hear assertions that certain things have intrinsic value. For example, when discussing assisted suicide, or industrial development, or arts subsidies, people often refer to the alleged intrinsic value of life, nature or art.

There are many advocates of intrinsic value among philosophers: two you might have heard of are Robert Nozick and G. E. Moore. Such philosophers disagree about what precisely has intrinsic value and how we know this, but they have in common the belief in intrinsic value of some sort.

So those are the five historical approaches. Note that all of them have knock-on implications for the fact-value and moral-practical relationships I referred to at the start. For example, intuitionism has obvious implications for the fact-value relationship, and Kant was obviously intensely unconcerned that his morality should be practical.

With that, I’ll turn the discussion over to you.

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