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Nietzsche claimed that, “God is dead” (or for the purists “Gott is tot”). When I first heard this (I’m guessing in high school?) I assumed that it was just a particularly direct version of what atheists have been saying for decades. Notable only in that it was an early example of this sentiment, but not otherwise especially unique or interesting.
Since then I have come to understand that Nietzsche was making a deeper point. Though in claiming this I am wandering into the deep weeds of philosophy and it’s entirely possible that I am about to vastly over simplify Nietzsche’s point, or mis-represent it entirely, similar to Otto in a Fish Called Wanda, though this possibility has never stopped me before, so with that caveat out of the way...
As I understand it Nietzsche was saying that progress and technology and the enlightenment had ruled out the possibility of God, and in doing so had removed one of the central pillars of Western-Christian Civilization. And without that pillar, which includes God as a source of absolute morality, that we were inevitably doomed to nihilism. I think you get a sense of this just from considering a more extended selection of what Nietzsche said, which is frankly pretty powerful.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
These are all important, if heavily metaphorical questions, and, of course, to that last question the transhumanist would reply, “Maybe so, maybe we do have to become gods, fortunately that’s exactly what we intend to do.”
Two of the topics I come back to over and over again, Artificial Intelligence and Fermi’s Paradox, relate to this question of the absence of God. And next week I’m going to be doing an hour long presentation on both of them at the annual Sunstone Symposium.
(If you happen to be attending the symposium, I’ll be doing my AI presentation at 11:30 am on Thursday the 26th in room 200-B, and I’ll be doing my Fermi’s Paradox presentation at 10:15 am on Friday the 27th in room 200-D. Please stop by and say, “Hi!”)
Given that I was already doing a bunch of work to prepare for these presentations, I had initially thought that this week’s post would be on AI and then next week’s post would be Fermi’s Paradox. But as I got into things, I realized that for those who have actually read the blog there’s not much point in posting the stuff I’m preparing to present at Sunstone, which is understandably going to be more introductory, and probably a repeat of a lot of things I’ve already said, and which you’ve already read. I’m still hoping they film both presentations, and put them online, so that I can post links to them. I guess we’ll see. It’s my first time so I’m not sure what will happen.
Instead I thought I’d look for a subject which combined the two topics in an interesting way, and I believe the quote from Nietzsche does exactly that, though at a pretty high level (which is to be expected when combining these two subjects.)
It may not be apparent what the quote from Nietzsche has to do with Fermi’s Paradox. Well, if Nietzsche is correct and we have metaphorically killed the traditional Christian God, (and given the similarities probably the Muslim God as well.) Then there’s still the possibility that there might be other god-like beings out there, specifically god-like extraterrestrials. I have not encountered any evidence that Nietzsche considered this possibility, but his statement obviously doesn’t preclude it, and for obvious reasons even if Nietzsche didn’t consider it, we should. One could imagine that if the two main things that Christianity supplied were morality and salvation, that sufficiently advanced aliens could provide both, or perhaps just one or the other.
The first thing that’s evident once we turn to consider this idea is the possibility that if god-like extraterrestrials are going to provide morality it may not be a morality we particularly like. Many people, when considering Fermi’s Paradox have come to the conclusion that the universe is a dark forest. A place of incredible danger. This theory takes its name from the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin where it was the title of one of the books. Here’s how it’s described there:
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds another life—another hunter, angel, or a demon, a delicate infant to tottering old man, a fairy or demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.
Liu is not the only person to put forth this theory (he just gave it the catchiest name). Years before Liu wrote his books other people were arguing that we shouldn’t engage in Active SETI for very similar reasons (this included the late Professor Hawking). For myself I wrote a whole post explaining why I didn’t think the Dark Forest explanation of the paradox was very likely, but for those that do think it’s likely, it entirely undermines the idea of a universal morality, or at least posits that if there is a universal morality, it’s a morality of universal violence. Which takes us to a place not that much different than Nietzsche’s original thought. Instead of being alone, bereft of morality and adrift in an uncaring universe, we could be surrounded by genocidal aliens, gifted with a morality of unceasing violence, and adrift in a malevolent universe. I think most people would actually prefer the first option. But either way, the eventual nihilism Nietzsche predicts is just as likely, if not moreso.
Of course there are a broad range of possible moral codes which extraterrestrials might possess. But within all the speculation it’s very hard to find anyone arguing that there is some universal system of morality which all aliens must, by necessity embrace. And of course my argument is, that if such a system exists, Occam’s Razor would suggest that we already have it, even if we’ve been given the basic, “early reader” version of this morality. And, once we add Fermi’s Paradox to Nietzsche’s observation. If we take that further step and place ourselves outside a human frame of reference, universal morality, or a morality which easily replaces Christianity, becomes impossible to imagine. With this in mind, what makes atheists and similar individuals so certain that there is morality outside of the concept of God? Certainly Nietzsche didn’t think so:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.
Nietzsche argues that even if you maintain the rest of Christianity (and certainly it could be argued that we mostly did, at least initially) that without “faith in God...nothing necessary remains”. And indeed, it certainly appears to me that once people abandoned the lynchpin of “faith in God” that it began a slow erosion of everything else which was once considered Christian morality. Further, as I pointed out, while there’s no evidence that Nietzsche considered the possibility of god-like extraterrestrials, even if we add them to our consideration, there’s no reason to think that they would halt this erosion. Aliens, at least as they are typically imagined, don’t solve the problem of God’s absence, or at least I think we can conclude that they don’t solve the problem of morality. That still leaves us the problem of salvation. Will god-like extraterrestrials come along and save humanity?
Here, before going any further we have to acknowledge that salvation looks different to different people. In its most minimal sense it’s just a synonym for survival. Being saved just entails not ceasing to exist. On the other side of the spectrum salvation is used interchangeably with exaltation. Not only do you survive, but you achieve a state of perfect happiness. On the survival end it makes sense to talk about humanity surviving, and that being a good thing, regardless of whether any individual human survives. But on the exaltation end of things, it’s much more common to look at things from the level of an individual, is any given person immortal and happy. Is that person saved?
In a world which largely acts as if God is dead, it’s interesting that as the rest of Christian morality has eroded away, the two remaining pillars of moral high ground, of terminal value, end up falling into these same two categories with survival on one end and happiness (or technically hedonism) on the other. I discussed the tension between these two values previously and argued, that if we were going to try to construct a morality in the absence of God that it’s better to build it around the value of survival, if for no other reason that happiness is impossible in the absence of survival. I’ve already hopefully shown where aliens are unlikely to be able to help us with morality, and it seems equally unlikely they would be able to do much for our happiness, leaving only helping us to survive. This idea has appeared in science fiction, though far less often than the opposite trope of aliens looking to exterminate humanity. That said, there are still plenty of interesting examples. For myself I quite enjoyed the book Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.
However, if being rescued from extinction by aliens is a possibility, then, as I pointed out in another recent post, they need to have either saved us already (perhaps through means we can’t detect?) or they probably aren’t going to save us. And of course this applies to everything I’ve said thus far. If god-like extraterrestrials are going to step in and take the place of Nietzsche’s dead god, in any capacity, they need to have done so already.
Thus far we’ve been looking at what the ramifications would be if god-like aliens do exist, but more and more people feel that’s the wrong way to bet. That odds are we’re entirely alone. As examples of this, I just talked about the paper which claimed to “dissolve Fermi’s Paradox” and previously I discussed a book dedicated to the paradox which concluded, after offering up 75 potential explanations, that the most likely explanation is that we’re all alone in the visible universe. If this is the case, then it would appear that Nietzsche was entirely correct about the essential emptiness of existence despite completely ignoring potential god-like extraterrestrials who could step in and fill the gap. Accordingly, we are left with two possibilities. There are aliens, but they almost certainly won’t provide either morality or salvation, and definitely not both, or there are no aliens, god-like or otherwise. Meaning that after a long detour through Fermi’s Paradox, the reality of Nietzsche’s claim has not been significantly altered. We’re still in the same situation we were before, and possibly worse, since, in my opinion, if it did nothing else, the detour provided good reasons for doubting that any sort of universal morality exists in the absence of God.
I should interject here, again, that personally I think there is a God, and I think assuming his existence, along with the existence of religion and all that entails, is the best way to answer all of the issues we’ve covered so far, but I think this puts me in the minority of people with an interest in the paradox.
The main thrust of Nietzsche’s argument, from my limited understanding, is that people have not sufficiently grappled with the implications of there being no God. Now, according to polls, this doesn’t necessarily apply to most people, who still believe in God, and would therefore, presumably, be exempt from any need to “grapple”. Rather, Nietzsche appeared to mostly be talking to intellectuals. In his day and age they occupied the salons and drawing rooms of Europe, and discussed things like evolution and emancipation. In our day and age they occupy the internet and discuss things like Fermi’s Paradox and artificial intelligence. And just as Nietzsche accused the intellectuals of his day of not coming to terms with the ramifications implied in their discussions, I’m accusing the intellectuals of our day of the same thing. Particularly those people who believe that Fermi’s Paradox has been dissolved, who believe we are all alone in the universe. Which, let’s be clear, is a pretty big deal.
If you are one of those people who don’t believe in God, and who further believe that we’re all alone in the universe (or if that we’re not alone that it doesn’t help.) What do you do now? This is where Nietzsche may be at his most impressive. Lots of people pointed out that the decline of religion was going to cause unforeseen issues, though perhaps with less panache than Nietzsche, but when he goes on to say, “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” He manages to precisely describe the transhumanism movement a century or more in advance of its appearance. (Interestingly, his big prediction, a descent into nihilism, has mostly not happened. But maybe it just hasn’t happened… yet.)
I mentioned up front that I was going to be discussing AI, which is the subject we turn to now. And which is less us becoming gods than us creating gods, but the basic principle remains the same. And the question I had with Fermi’s Paradox remains essentially the same was well. If there are no god-like extraterrestrials to step into the gap Nietzsche noticed, is it possible we could create a god-like AI to fill that gap?
Once again those who have abandoned a belief in God are looking to this “substitute god” to provide them with morality or salvation or hopefully both. Though in this case they do have one very important advantage, instead of being required to accept what the universe offers, as is the case with aliens (should they exist), in the case of artificial intelligence we get to design our deity. (I’m actually a little bit surprised no one has started an AI company with the name “Designer Deities”.)
This means, first off, that we’ll almost certainly combine the morality part with the salvation part. Or, to put it another way, we’ll do our best to make sure that whatever morality the AI ends up with, that one of the values is human salvation (definitely in the survival sense and if possible in the exaltation sense as well.) Which means that a century after Nietzsche pointed out the problem, we’ve come up with a straightforward solution: All we have to do is figure out how to teach computers to be good. (They would, of course, also need a certain amount of power beyond that, but most people assume that this is just a matter of time.) All of the problems Nietzsche describes can be reduced to the single problem of AI morality. Unfortunately even though it’s only one problem it’s an extraordinarily difficult problem.
As you may know from reading other posts of mine, or from following the subject in general, no one is exactly sure how you get a computer to be good. In fact no one is entirely sure what good means in this context, and there are lots of things which seem like a good way to implement morality, which could, in practice, turn out to be very bad. I’ve given numerous examples elsewhere, but let’s briefly consider Asimov's three laws of robotics, which are often mentioned in this context. The first of these is:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
It’s not hard to see where taking all humans and locking them up in a padded room with a set number of optimally healthy calories delivered every day would conform with this rule, and fit the survival definition of salvation. This is one of the reasons why some people contend that it’s not enough for our AI deity to ensure our survival, they really need to exalt us.
(It’s interesting to note here the general principle, that survival is easy, exaltation is tough. Which may end up being the subject of a different post…)
We’ve once again arrived at a place where it becomes apparent that no one is 100% confident that we can formulate a universal system of morality, particularly if it needs to be defined with enough precision to feed into a computer. Now I’m sure there are some atheists out there that will scoff at the idea that religion provides a universal system of morality, but they’re missing the point. Religious people don’t think you can just give the Bible (or the Koran) to your new AI and grant it instant perfect morality. In other words, they don’t think it provides a perfect system of morality applicable in all times and all circumstances. (Though maybe some do.) It’s that they have faith that religious belief combined with God’s omnipotence, creates a perfect system. Which is why, I believe, Nietzsche felt that “By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.” That faith is the critical component.
I understand people who don’t have faith, or think they shouldn’t have to have faith. Or who scoff at the very idea of faith. But I think these people will also find that it’s difficult to universalize morality without it. That becoming gods or creating gods is a difficult project.
Not too long ago, someone close to me came and told me that he had decided to leave the Mormon Church. The person said that he was now an atheist, or at least an agnostic. (I suspect the latter term is closer to the truth.) And he mentioned that one of the turning points was when he encountered something Penn Jillette had said, that you could be an atheist and still be good. I agree with this statement, and I would also agree that the horrible nihilism Nietzsche predicted would accompany the decrease in religion has also largely not come to pass either. But I think, as we examine the various developments in the realm of replacing god (if he is in fact dead, remember I argue that he’s not) it becomes clear that there isn’t some alternate system of morality which slots into the spot once occupied by Christianity. That when Penn says that you can be good and be an atheist, he’s largely saying that you can continue to maintain religiously derived morality without believing in God.
But, the neo-christian morality which seems to dominate these days, and which I assume Penn is referring to, is obviously getting farther and farther away from its core, and when it comes both to morality and nihilism it’s entirely possible that all of Nietzsche’s worst predictions will come true, it’s just taking longer than he expected. That people really haven’t grappled with the Death of God, and that as morality continues to erode, as it becomes more difficult to define, as we seek to replace God, that the reckoning is coming. Yes, it’s slower than Nietzsche expected. And yes, it’s very subtle, but the reckoning is coming.
You may think that it’s easy doing a cursory and ill-informed survey of one philosophical statement, taken out of context, but it’s not, it takes a certain bull-headed determination, and if you appreciate that determination, regardless of how misguided it is, then consider donating.
Hi so the email button in the top right isn't working which is why I'm commenting here instead of emailing you
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if you were aware of the Bayesian conspiracy podcast I think you'd find it interesting in particular their most recent episode which is about magic http://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2018/07/64-magick-with-david-youssef/
I think I may have heard of it, but I'll check it out.
DeleteI suspect the problem with 'universal morality' is that it ultimately makes no sense. Consider general relativity, basically one of it's underlying premises is that no particular observation is privileged above all others. Your clock on earth appears to be running at a normal speed while the clock on the super fast spaceship seems to run slower. To those on the spaceship your clock is running faster than normal while their clock is running normal speed. None of these observations is wrong, both are correct. This is not the same as relativism. There is a right and wrong answer it is just that you cannot divorce the right/wrong answer from the position of the person making the observation. The subjective is part of the objective and if you're pining for 'objective morality/observation' you can't have it if you insist on banning the subjective from that.
ReplyDeleteThis all comes down to what exactly is 'universal morality' absent humans? What meaning is there to say "rape is immoral" in a universe with no humans or human like aliens? To say 'rape is immoral' presumes being a self-aware individual who feels one is in possession of one's own body. A planet, say, of evolved lobsters or slime mold probably wouldn't have the same morality and if we encountered them we wouldn't think they were immoral.
But then does the obsession to ground morality as 'universal' is a transcendent God make sense or is this a leftover assumption from Medieval philosophers? Did pre-Christian philosophers, Hinduism or Buddhism conclude they needed a grounding for a 'universal morality'?
I think the focus on "universal" here is a distraction. What you need is a morality that can be sufficiently generalized to cover social interactions among the people you can expect to interact with. And they need something that will work with people they can interact with. When people were in bands and tribes, a shared religion was a simple way to transmit morality broadly among people within a social construct (laterally), and from generation to generation (vertically).
DeleteThis appears to be one of the evolutionary functions of religion today as well. Religion scaled up fairly well from bands and tribes into the nation-state era. The plurality of different religious traditions has struggled in the era of globalization, given the difficulty interoperability.
This can be seen as a feature, not a bug, of religion-as-a-system-of-transmitting-social-morality. If you have two different systems for transmitting two different constructs of social morality, the last thing you want is for one system to say of another system, "that system is also acceptable." Further, if you can pick and choose among a dozen different moral systems, you can choose to ignore any moral principle you want. Of course, most religiously-based moral systems share many common principles, so you can't get away from all shared societal moral norms by trading (or pretending) religious sentiments at will.
This is likely one reason believers are the most skeptical of atheism. In essence, atheism represents a rejection of one moral system without adopting any other general moral system. It is also likely the reason that, say, Catholics reject Protestant faiths as sufficient for salvation; both reject Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists as leading to salvation (and vice-versa); and all the above oppose Islam and are rejected in turn. If religion is a system for transmitting moral norms laterally and vertically, we would expect different faiths to clash when they meet; and for all faiths to be suspicious of atheism in general. Substitute religion with "socially agreed-upon moral system" and you can see how religious wars turn into war with aim of producing homogeneous moral systems. And while war is horrific, chaos is worse.
This isn't entirely solved with the religious pluralism of the US. Certain religiously-derived moral principles are encoded into law, but nobody is entirely satisfied since their moral system is not fully encoded. This situation would be expected to produce Culture Wars over competing moral principles and priorities.
I would observe encoding religious systems into national norms has never really worked on the large scale. Power tends to fragment and the moment you get an Islamic Empire or Christendom you get fragmentation. Even absent theological disputes, the opportunity to break power away from the whole will cause sub-groups to pick apart minor differences and turn them into major causes of sectionalism. Read about Christianity *before* Luther and you'll see endless rounds of this or that intellectual declared a heretic only to find sanctuary among some prince seeking to thumb his nose at the Pope's power. Only pluralism, IMO, offers religious systems any hope of actually working to maintain themselves on a large scale.
DeleteIt is true that religious faction has always been an issue, but that's the point. If you wanted a universal system you've missed the point of competing moral systems. If I form a separate community and we want to distinguish ourselves, historically speaking one of the best ways to do so is by forming a competing belief system. It's hard to fake True Belief, so fakers can be rooted out with an informal (or even formal) shibboleth system. We can have our in-group and formulate an us vs. them culture.
DeleteWe compete, and if successful we might even come to dominate the culture we split from. Domination may even be seen, ultimately, as evidence we were "right". (CF Islam stating this explicitly, or many implicit arguments from the Roman Catholic Church.) The point of competing religion this way is not to identify it as one set of beliefs that is capable of solving every question ever, but as an ongoing system of adapting to the needs of the present. A system capable of always adapting to the needs of the present would be the pinnacle of religious adaptation, but would still need to compete its way to the top.
Pluralism is good, don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that in such an atmosphere if we expect it to produce harmony, we're likely to be disappointed. History and theory predict it will produce a large and contentious marketplace of ideas all vying for control.
As to encoding religious systems into national norms, I'm not sure what else has really ever been tried prior to the modern era. From the first legal systems down to today, the general trend has been to legislate moral norms first and justify those norms rationally later. Only recently has there been a backlash against the idea that moral norms can a priori be accepted as justification for legal structures.
That's not a moral judgement over whether ancient traditions are better than the modern rejection of them. It's just an assessment, and one people are often blind to when they say things like, "you shouldn't legislate your morality" as though that's not exactly what has been done from time immemorial. Again, I'm not saying they're wrong, but they have to make their case that they're right, not assume theirs is the default system that's always been used and the other is imposing some new standard. Since the opposite is true.
I could be wrong here but I think almost no religious disputes are ultimately about 'moral systems'. Consider Mormonism at its beginning versus other Christian denominations. Or for that matter consider Islam v Christianity. How much conflict is/was there really over 'moral systems'? Could you tell which side was which if all you were allowed to observe would be 'moral behavior'?
DeleteThere's some. Allowing or not allowing polygamy, for example. But really not much moral conflict. Show me one war Muslims fought to veil women or remove pork from the supermarkets? One conflict between Mormons and coffee drinkers over drinking coffee? Instead I would say most conflicts are not so much the moral systems but power and doctrine. Who did God want to be the next caliphate? Who should speak as the 'next prophet'? But as moral systems come and go with different faiths most day to day behavior remains ruled by the same moral system. Cheat, lie, steal and you're going to be on the outs more or less where ever you are, unless you get away with it.
Even within family most disputes are not moral. If you're a faithful adherent of many religions, discovering your son or daughter is gay, or that someone close is transgender might invite a moral dispute. But while this gets a lot of attention, it isn't most families. The disputes that arise are not clashing moral systems but clashing doctrines or simple clashes over power.
So here is a problem if you are seeing religions of various sorts as a type of stealth vehicle for transmitting a more or less universal moral code from generation to generation; this vehicle is not without pollution. If religion is just a farce, a type of Santa Clause story to get people to behave well the price you get from that is people clashing over doctrine and people using religion to gain and control power. Would you entertain Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny for your kids if the kids at school formed cliques of Rudolph partisans who clashed with and sometimes killed Bunny partisans? If the kids fell into pitched battle over the question of whether Mrs. Clause was equal to Santa or less than Santa?
I think we've conflated the modern understanding of religion with the ancient understanding, and it has led to some confusion about how religion functioned within a nation-state. I highly recommend Jared Diamond's books on this subject, including The World Until Yesterday. Until very modern times, there was no such thing as the idea that you could have a religion separate from the political structure you belong to. Thus, a clash between two cultures, nations, religions were all one and the same thing.
DeleteConsider Christianity and Islam, especially during the expansion of Islam and the Christian response to it - the crusades. The conflict wasn't about one specific religious principle, such as whether women should cover their faces, but to say religion had nothing to do with the conflict is to willfully ignore the heart of the conflict for no good reason. The point isn't that people had a specific theological difference that started a war. The point is that two different people, governed by different leaders, different laws, and different moral systems - encoded by different religious systems - competed for dominance. Was religion the driving force behind the the moral structure of societal norms for both groups? Of course! Were these two structures incompatible in multiple ways? Yes! Did they sit down and talk about how to make those two structures compatible and then give up and go to war? Of course not! They went to war first, and competed based on the overall structure, not on the incompatible bits. What pluralism did is introduce a period where we hash out the incompatible bits before coming to blows.
Sure, you can put forward a weak-man argument that coffee wasn't why Mormons and Missourians clashed in the 1830's, but a cursory understanding of the history there doesn't suggest "this had nothing to do with religion." That conflict was clearly multi-causal, including the influx of a bunch of abolitionists to a state recently decreed to be a Slave State after the Missouri compromise. And the Mormons weren't accidentally abolitionist.
Were the Amish and Mennonites persecuted by their fellow Germans for non-religious reasons? Of course not! Was the problem specific points of doctrine? No, it was a matter of competing religious systems.
I think that by "universal morality" Jeremiah means a cross-cultural morality that everyone can agree on. If you're asking how this fits into the scheme of a God who tells humans "don't rape", but seems okay with chimps doing it, the best answer I can think of is that God has a different plan for humanity than He does for chimps.
ReplyDeleteAs a Mormon like Jeremiah, I believe that we are God's children, and while He gives us commandments, He also gives us agency, the capacity to choose whether we obey or not. The rest of creation is, I believe, largely allowed to follow its natural course, until God gives a direct order, which the elements are compelled to obey instantly.
This seems a bit different from 'objective morality' by which many Christian advocates seem to mean morality that is completely divorced from time, place and circumstance. (2+2=4 regardless of your culture).
DeleteYour view seems to be of a very contingent morality. God says don't rape so don't rape. Tomorrow he may say to rape so be prepared. This seems very transactional to me. We make a decision following God's orders is worth our while. We follow God's orders. We determine that it is still worth it to keep following his orders. Lather, rinse, repeat. The deal is good today, it may stay good tomorrow, might remain good forever but ultimately it isn't God we are following but the premise of doing what's good for ourselves.
I'm thinking 'cross-cultural morality' works for the same reason cross-cultural medicine works. At the end of the day, despite radically different cultures, human nature provides us with some common ground which limits the range of 'morality grammar' we are capable of.
You asked "This all comes down to what exactly is 'universal morality' absent humans?" I thought you were initially comparing species, not cultures. If we found an alien species that had a different morality than us (like the Buggers "Ender's Game"), that wouldn't shake my religious or moral standards at all, because those standards are meant for humans.
DeleteAs far as morality being "transactional" for us religious folk, I guess you could put it that way, especially with the notion of making a covenant with God. But being prepared for God to suddenly say "now it's time to rape", strikes me as a straw man. The commandments regarding sexual morality have been pretty consistent through both Old and New Testament. And yes, atheists love to bring up the former to prove how supposedly mean God can be, but the New Testament is part of the reason we recoil from that particular lifestyle. I believe the tone changed because we were deemed ready for the "higher law". The Law of Moses laid the foundation for obedience and establishing the covenant relationship, but it was not the final standard for morality, just the best we were up for at the time.
I also STRONGLY disagree with the notion "you can't be moral but not Christian." I don't care what motivates you to be a decent person as long as you are one. Of course I still believe my religious/moral philosophy to be the best, and I'll explain why to anyone willing to listen, but like you said, we humans have enough common ground that we still can have decent interactions between cultures.
The Law of Moses in the Torah is often misunderstood by modern readers. In an era where it was okay for a man who suspected his wife was cheating on him to go ahead and kill her himself, the Mosaic law decreed that he couldn't just do this. He had to grab two witnesses and take them before a council of elders and then have a hearing before she could be stoned. This meant he couldn't just kill her and claim infidelity as justification later. Meanwhile, I hear Biblical analysis that amounts to, "But that's not post-enlightenment feminist equality! And you say it came from God. This god of yours must be a pretty awful guy." The analysis is completely anachronistic. It assumes, what, that God is going to come down and decree that people must live perfect lives of moral structure that's centuries beyond their cultural comprehension? And if God just asks people to be significantly more moral than their current societal norms that's not good enough? But whatever He asks of man, it'll either be too much - and therefore lacking all mercy - or not enough.
DeleteOr it sounds to me exactly what you would expect from primitive human tribal culture. Marriage was not just about a couple but about joining two extended families to each other. An alliance so to speak. If a man could casually accuse his wife of adultery and kill her, he would be free to marry again. If the opportunity was out there for a better alliance, this might become very tempting either for the man or members of his family.
DeleteHence one way of looking at that 'improvement' is simply as a pragmatic way to keep contracts in force and avoid the temptation to void them with a frivolous charge. Another way appears to be as part of some 10,000 year nudge to move us from casually killing our wives towards not killing our wives?
Yet here's a problem with this gradual view, human tribes are remade every generation. You could very, very quickly go from casually killing wives to not killing wives. Just consider what happens when you have an isolated, primitive tribe that suddenly starts interacting with modern people's. In 10 years the young people will be on iphones, in 30 years the tribe will be hiring lawyers demanding a share of the revenue from the natural resources of their tribal lands using arguments that took the Western legal systems centuries to flesh out. What doesn't happen is "gee you need 20 generations practicing with wheels before we can introduce you to the concept of a car.
This tells me if the Law of Moses was being driven by supernatural natural knowledge of 'advanced morality', it was pretty well hidden unless 'advanced morality' looks a lot like primitive morality to our modern eyes.
Fair points, but morality and technology aren't necessarily synonymous. Plus it could be argued that it HASN'T been good for primitives to receive advanced technology before they are ready. For example, the Native Americans loved European guns and other toys, but without the infrastructure to manufacture their own, they were utterly dependent on European trade. Some of the earliest settler/Indian conflicts occurred when the Natives traded land for European consumables. Then the consumables ran out, and they'd trade more land for more consumables. Then they found themselves without enough land to sustain them, and they'd fight to get some of it back.
DeleteSo yes, I think it can very dangerous to give a culture advanced ideas it's not ready to receive.
This is all true, but I think it kind of misses the topic here. You are pushing what one might call Lamarckism Moral Evolution. Lamarckism, you may remember, was a variant of evolutionary theory that said parents could pass down behaviors to offspring in addition to genes. Hence if you have a dog who you taught to do math by barking for sums less than 10, her puppies can quickly pick up that skill and then expand it to sums less than 15.
DeleteHere you seem to be saying if some tribe was in a moral abyss, killing their wives for frivolous reasons for a hundred generations. Getting them to stop in a single generation may create some sort of 'bends'. Instead they must be slowing 'decompressed'. Say first a generation of 'no murdering your wife on Tuesdays', then odd days of the week, then every other even day, then finally all days.
First, there's no evidence you can cite that shows us anything like this is true.
Second, even though high tech cultures meeting low tech are often problematic, I don't think you can detect any real generational lag. Suppose a child in an amazon tribe that often killed people was found orphaned and taken to Sweden to be raised by an botonist couple that was there for research. Is that child going to grow up with an urge to kill? Probably she will grow up quite comfortable with Swedish culture and morals. Yet that culture stands on a hundred generations of philosophers, lawyers, theologians and other thinkers. In the blink of an eye that will be passed down to the Amazonian child. Yet an infinite God would need a hundred generations of baby steps?
"So yes, I think it can very dangerous to give a culture advanced ideas it's not ready to receive."
Sounds like a fair trade except to the murdered wives. That would imply that today we are doing great wrong to certain people but this is ok because we are 'not ready to receive' some higher moral teaching. In fact since you are arguing it is dangerous to implement 'advanced morality' before its time, even if you think you know who these wronged people are today it would be immoral for you to try to help them.
Just how comfortable are you with your position?
First, Lamarck knew nothing of DNA. So we rightly view his ideas as antiquated when it comes to generic heredity.
DeleteSecond, the reason people like him came up with the theories was because they couldn't tell the difference between generic heritability and social heritability.
I think you've confused the two as well. Your examples seem to be, "sure we can look at examples of gradual stepwise moral improvements and see them as developing moral systems, but what about when am advanced culture meets a primative one? Doesn't need to be one step at a time!" Sure. They also done need to reinvent transistors. Of course, that doesn't prevent the advanced culture from taking advantage of the primative culture, as Reg pointed out.
I don't understand why you would straw man his argument by suggesting it all ends in murdered wives. A little introspection goes a long way here. For example, Western social morality has been roundly denounced in many parts of the Middle East. There, trying to shove too much down their throats at once has led many to outright reject all of Western morals and norms, such as women's rights and respect for individuals. The result has not been moral advance, because the advances were not introduced in a way that the society was able to accept from where they were.
Also, CF Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall didn't take to democracy it capitalism well. This is generally understood to be because they did not have the social and institutional background to implement them.
It's fine to talk about one child adapting to society. We're talking about whole societies clashing.
What's old is new again, epigenetics tells us that the environment can turn genes on and off so Lamarck might have had half a point.
Delete"There, trying to shove too much down their throats at once has led many to outright reject all of Western morals and norms, such as women's rights and respect for individuals. The result has not been moral advance, because the advances were not introduced in a way that the society was able to accept from where they were."
I would say the Middle East is a horrible example to use here. Unlike a hypothetical Amazon tribe, the Middle East and Western civilization have been in intimate contact with each other for at least 2,000 years and counting. Certainly much more in contact than China, Japan or Korea. Russia is a good counter example if you're going to treat capitalism as a moral system. Russia was part of Europe for nearly all of recorded history and was a European power right up until the Russian Revolution. If capitalism should have eluded any nation 'not ready for it', it would be Japan, Korea or China.
"I don't understand why you would straw man his argument by suggesting it all ends in murdered wives"
It's the price you pay. Again let's say we make contact with an Amazon tribe that freely murders wives. Your argument is not just that we should tolerate that behavior but also that we should help and assist them with killing wives making the transition away from killing wives very slow and 'gentle'. But slow and gentle means a lot of wives being murdered. To them you have to say something like "yes it's bad that today you are murdered but the long run moral payoff is so huge it justifies this, please understand". If that is not something you feel you can honestly say you should reconsider your stance here because that's directly where it leads.
It also directly implies today we are doing something really bad that will be 'changed' in the future when we get more directly from 'advanced morality' that we are ready for. Who is it that we are harming? Sadly, though, even if you figure it out you can't change it today. You can't try to 'jump start' morality by advancing beyond our level so even if you figure out who is getting wronged today, you can't oppose it but must support it. Likewise if you had access to a time machine you'd be obligated to help the past society murder wives where the two witnesses were produced. To not do so would be to rob those people of their long run moral development and eventual enjoyment of advanced morality.
Challenge for you: Point to a single time in history where an encounter between advanced and less advanced cultures produced a negative *moral* outcome for the less advanced side? I would argue that all such episodes you can pull out would consist of the more advanced culture using their position to take advantage of the less developed culture. This may be a bad outcome *but* in terms of morality it seems to me to be a failure for the more advanced culture.
DeleteThis is problematic for your theory because the more advanced culture is supposedly enjoying that advanced morality, yet why are they susceptible to failure? I suppose you could counter that all humans are on the same moral plane so unlike technology, there is no more advanced/less advanced human cultures in terms of morality. But this would conflict with your justification of Biblical having wife killing as part of it's moral culture.
That defense is also a problem for you because it robs you of the only analogy that might work as evidence. What reason do we have to think 'advanced morality' might cause more harm than good when introduced 'too soon'? What is even the mechanism here?
Say the moral steps are; don't kill your wife and don't kill animals. We are more or less there on the first level but on the second level we are pretty far from that. Nonetheless there are some who argue our culture is blind to the cruelty we have to animals hence they raise the issue and change their behavior. Even if it doesn't change the outcome it might just turn the ship around long in the future.
What exactly is the downside of getting out ahead of that? The negative consequence might be people will feel you're forcing something down their throats and react very badly? That may indeed be a negative consequence but it isn't a moral one. If you get really angry at being told you can't kill your wife and you go out and murder a dozen random prostitutes....that's not a problem with the moral precept of 'don't kill your wife'. That's a deep moral failing on your part. Should we let you murder your wife to save more lives? We may have to accept such a sorry state of affairs as a society but it hardly seems consistent with your idea of morality that gradually unfolds.
One example?! I feel we're talking past each other and are therefore at an impasse. If you can't ask that question and immediately conjure up many examples from the past 500 years I don't know where to go from here. Let's go backward and skip a lot of history, just so we can keep to the most sensational stuff:
Delete- Neocons trying to spread democracy in the ME; PLEASE tell me we can learn from this one!
- Western introduction of capitalism into post-Cold War Russia led to the rule of the oligarchs
- French colonialists introduced the ideas that the Rwandan genocide was based on (and then when UN helpers tried to intervene they made the crisis worse - we don't even know how to help during a disaster!)
- British attempts to bring "civilization" to Africa led directly to the slave trade (or rather increased trading and capture of slavery and inter-tribal war)
The world as I see it is replete with examples of advanced cultures trying to instill values on more primitive ones. Failure versus success is often partial and/or unpredictable. And we're not talking about values like "transgender bathrooms". We're talking about things like slavery, brutal dictatorship, and not killing your wife for adultery. And it's easy from our vantage to point to those cultures and say, "Of course they're wrong! If some Divine Being would just go up to them and tell them how wrong they are they should easily be able to change."
Well, we're not divine, but our attempts at this have failed too often, and when we try to intentionally replicate our successes we can't do it. That suggests our theory is wrong somewhere, and we don't know how to transmit morality from one culture to another. So at least grant me this: when someone tells me they know how to help another civilization advance in morality, I'm going to be very skeptical.
Yes, we can take INDIVIDUALS from one society and transplant them into another society; and as they adopt their new societal norms they also adopt a new moral baseline. Meanwhile when we try to do this at a societal level we routinely fail. How is this NOT strong evidence for the hypothesis (and not a particularly controversial one) that moral values are encoded in societal norms - including religious norms? Throughout history we see societal adoption of a new religion accompanying wholesale societal changes in behavior. From burial practices (and other ritual behaviors) to moral norms (Puritans in NE, Amish, Shakers, Catholic vs. Protestant differences in moral norms, etc., etc.).
To this day, there are still societies practicing slavery - not just human trafficking, either. There are cultures where it's okay to kill an adulterous wife. They know we're here. They know we're rich and prosperous. They want to be rich and prosperous like us. They know we think they're wrong about morality. They still disagree.
Talk to them sometime - in their cultural home - and you'll see how sticky these ideas can be. "You were only cheated on because you allow your wife to walk about unescorted. If you had beat her when she got out of line she would not have become so wild, and she would not have cuckolded you. If you haven't been cheated on, you will be unless you learn to control your wife. It's your own fault if you don't control her and you end up having to kill her."
Your examples don't seem to work well IMO.
DeleteSpread Democracy in the ME: Is the ME 'primitive'? Slavery? Was that a moral failure of Africans or moral failure of the more 'advanced' Europeans and later Americans? You seem to be conflating problematic outcomes with morality, different things.
"To this day, there are still societies practicing slavery - not just human trafficking, either. There are cultures where it's okay to kill an adulterous wife. They know we're here. They know we're rich and prosperous. They want to be rich and prosperous like us. They know we think they're wrong about morality. They still disagree."
But they aren't wrong. Your model here is some things are moral when a society is 'immature' and they become immoral as a society advances or grows up. If that is the case you can't just disagree with the primitive society that is killing wives, you must support and even help them! When the Bible says kill the wife only if there are two witnesses, that isn't a waystation on the path to not killing wives, that's a positive command. Should you have a case with a wife and two witnesses, you must support her being killed....or at least not lend her aid in escaping being killed.
Of course you have a point that practically just because you say something is immoral doesn't mean it won't happen. We say stealing is wrong, but a lot of shoplifting happens and is never detected. Saying it's wrong doesn't mean we must spare no expense to monitor people 24-7 to ensure absolutely zero shoplifting happens. Other values can come into play. Likewise saying we don't think husbands should kill their wives doesn't commit us to going around the world like Superman jumping between every husband-wife altercation. It does mean, though, that the spade is called a spade and we don't issue a 'compromise morality' saying wife killing, for now, is ok but only if this or that condition is in place and over time we'll make the conditions higher and higher.
""You were only cheated on because you allow your wife to walk about unescorted. If you had beat her when she got out of line ..."
It seems when you imagine these other cultures you also imagine they are more than happy to stick to their moral systems and even advocate for their wisdom. So if they were open to hearing from us why would we opt to sugar coat our moral system rather than us just giving it to them (even though they might ignore our advice)?
Again, I feel like I'm getting the straw-man treatment. You're making arguments I never made and saying they're required when they are not.
Delete"It's the price you pay. Again let's say we make contact with an Amazon tribe that freely murders wives. Your argument is not just that we should tolerate that behavior but also that we should help and assist them with killing wives making the transition away from killing wives very slow and 'gentle'. But slow and gentle means a lot of wives being murdered. To them you have to say something like "yes it's bad that today you are murdered but the long run moral payoff is so huge it justifies this, please understand". If that is not something you feel you can honestly say you should reconsider your stance here because that's directly where it leads."
I never said, "let's not tell societies who murder their wives that it's bad to murder wives". I said the assumption that we can induce moral development in another society - and specifically that we can induce moral development to mirror our current understanding of morality - is flawed in practice. I didn't say, "if you have a time machine you need to go and assist people in killing their wives." However, from what I said you might conclude, "if you had a time machine and tried to get societies to stop killing their wives cold-turkey you might run into a culture clash that would not result in reduced wife-killing and might actually end in an unintended increase in wife-killing."
So you could choose to just destroy the culture of that uncontacted tribal village, forcing them to stop killing their wives. But if you assume, "I cannot absorb this culture into a larger, morally advanced culture" you're going to have to deal with the reality that changing culture is difficult and - yes - stepwise by nature. It's not a matter of being happy with, or assisting with immoral behavior. It's a matter of not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. "Unless you stop murdering your wives, y'all're sinners going to hell." will probably be met with, "That guy is stupid. This guy is talking about forest orgies and sacrificing our children to Molech." If, instead, you had tried, "You can only murder your wife if you go through a complicated legal proceeding most of you will agree with now but find too onerous to actually go through with later." you might have made some progress, changed the culture a little, and saved some women from death and some men from becoming murderers.
The point isn't that it's moral for a society to kill wives. The point is that a legal innovation saying, "you have to have two witnesses, and admit before the community that you were cuckolded in order for the community to carry out the death sentence" is better than, "if you get mad you can kill your wife and then later make a baseless claim that she cheated on you and get away with it." To the extent that fewer wives were killed, it was a moral improvement, and set the groundwork toward fundamentally changing the relationship of women and men in a society that existed over 3000 years ago. It was a moral innovation that was advanced through religious means and it affected a whole society.
"I never said, "let's not tell societies who murder their wives that it's bad to murder wives". I said the assumption that we can induce moral development in another society - and specifically that we can induce moral development to mirror our current understanding of morality - is flawed in practice"
DeleteOK but go back to your original statement:
"The analysis is completely anachronistic. It assumes, what, that God is going to come down and decree that people must live perfect lives of moral structure that's centuries beyond their cultural comprehension?"
You are confusing, IMO, the question of what is right with what is practical. I fully admit large scale rapid social change may be impossible or may come with very deep costs. Therefore compromises are made. The US and USSR ended up allies in WWII even though both viewed the other as embodying an immoral system. This is not how the 'two witnesses' is presented, a temporary concession to pragmatism. It is treated as a moral good in itself.
True or false, how would individuals who felt unsure about killing a wife even with two witnesses have been treated by this moral dictate? They almost certainly would have been told they were wrong, it was their duty to kill. If the law was a compromise by an infinite entity that wanted to improve human morality but not tamper with free will, the dictate could have easily been written in such a way as to not confuse it with a positive command (i.e. "You may kill your wife IF...." is at least a bit more moral a compromise than "If X, then you shall kill your wife").
So how would you go about stopping a primitive tribe you just met from killing their wives? Would you rule them by force, "Anyone caught killing their wife will answer to us!" Without that kind of subjugation, the best you could do was tell the women they don't have to die, say you have their back, and hope they stand up for themselves or leave the tribe. Some would likely choose to stick to the old ways, and you would have to wait for them to either come around or die off, with the next generation hopefully being more enlightened after being expose to cultures that get along fine without wife murder.
ReplyDeleteThe wife murder scenario made me think of the India practice of "sati", where widows were immolated on their husband's funeral pyres. From what I've read, it took about 60 years from the first protests from the British to a nationwide ban on the practice. And it was indeed a gradual process, likely more gradual than reformers would have wanted.
That's a great example. I think there's a perception that the "moral arc of history" always eventually bends toward justice, and all we have to do is wait for exposure to take care of things. I used to think this way, until I read Martin Luther King's "Letter from Burmingham Jail":
Delete"Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait.""
It's clear from examples like this, where a minister is literally negotiating/fighting/arguing with other church leaders, that religion often acts as both an impetus for, and a bar against, change. That doesn't mean religion is the only place societal change can occur, but it is definitely a catalyst for it and often a reason that change is postponed long after it becomes 'obvious' to everyone else that it must happen. People identify themselves as members of groups, and act accordingly. When leaders of that group declare an action a moral imperative, historically, that has had major impacts - for good and bad. Whether by improving moral practices such as desegregation, or by giving people cause to fly planes into buildings.
I don't know but consider this, imagine a wife escaped the 'primitive tribe' and is now in your land. Would you seek out her tribe and return her to it to be killed? Remember the reading of the Old Testament given above is not just an accommodation to a 'primitive people' but a positive command. If there are two witnesses against the wife then you are obligated to participate in bringing her to 'justice'. By this reasoning of 'not yet ready for advanced morality' it's not simply about tolerating those with this 'lower morality' but about embracing it yourself is somehow going to make things better in the long run. Hence you have to not just tolerate the killing of the wife but participate in it as well...otherwise you may be robbing the society of their chance to eventually get to 'advanced morality'.
DeleteIn contrast you point out the British took 60 years to challenge sati successfully and presumably even at the beginning they didn't endorse or participate in it even if colonial administration didn't think it was wise to actively suppress it. In terms of ancient history 60 years is a blink of an eye....since a non-God actor could change a culture so fast what again is the reason to lock in wife killing in the 'sacred text' for thousands of years?
Why would I "have" to tolerate it? I would give any who wanted to leave the tribe asylum, what I would NOT do is get a bunch of guns together and say, "Wife-killing is wrong, and if you don't stop, we'll make you!"
ReplyDeleteAs for the thousand-plus years of the Law of Moses, the prophets always had to struggle to keep the people of Israel from drifting back into paganism - until after the Babylonian captivity. By then, what was left of Israel associated paganism with the cultures that were beating them up. Then instead of pushing for idolatry, the culture changed to how fanatically they could live the Law of Moses. This may be one reason why that was the time the higher law was introduced. Now if you think God still ought to have done better, there's not much I can say to that, except that to most religious people, God has never been a cosmic genie out to wave away all imperfections in an instant.
I think part of the disconnect here is that Boonton's view of the Torah is to conceptualize it as "Divine Command about moral and eternal absolutes", and Reg and I have a view of the Law that is more, "God's command to a specific people at a specific time, which he could - and did - change as the society progressed, morally."
DeleteTo be fair, Boonton's understanding is probably closer to a more traditional Jewish understanding of the purpose of the Law of Moses. Under Boonton's view, if God says, "I will give you a moral code that advances you from one low level of morality to a higher one," but that higher moral code is still clearly backward from a sense of morality the three of us share, then there's something wrong with God. It's obviously a bad move to codify forever a low bar for morality that's clearly unjust for large swaths of society. And if that were my view of what happened with the Torah, I would entirely agree with Boonton's argument. Indeed, I see no other reasonable conclusion to come to under that scenario.
If, instead, you see God's commands in the Torah as a step of moral progress by God, shepherding a people to greater and greater heights of moral understanding, this problem disappears. From this view, there's no reason for modern people to go back to a primitive moral system - especially if God still has prophets who can continue to reveal the next step along the plane of Divine societal moral expectations. You're not trying to justify "well, God said that even though it's wrong but then He changed His mind." You're saying, "God gave that command at that time because that's what those people needed to be a more just society. It didn't create perfect justice any more than the current set of demands will. But perfect justice isn't expected here on Earth. What we strive for is to become better than we were before."
We can't go back in time, so we assume God knew what he was doing when he ratcheted up the moral standard for prior civilizations. Meanwhile, in modern times as we encounter people operating under a different moral standard/system than our own, we can approach this situation by assimilating individuals into our moral system, or by attempting to nudge others' moral systems through whatever influence or advocacy we can achieve. But expecting whole societies to adopt our values wholesale is - I believe - unrealistic at best. And it's neither pandering nor a form of moral vacillation to have a non-absolutist expectation toward societies that have moral norms incompatible to our own.
I think it's less "God could have done better" and more of "this is the type of imperfect stuff I'd expect from mere humans doing their best over time".
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