There is no justification of morality.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 That’s the bottom line.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before one sets forth boldly to justify morality, it is always a good idea to first acquire an understanding of what it is.\u00a0 Morality is a human trait resulting from predispositions hard-wired in the brain.\u00a0 The exact manner in which it manifests itself in the form of behavior and perceptions is influenced to some extent by the environment.\u00a0 Human beings are an evolved life form.\u00a0 Therefore, traits such as hands, feet, eyes, ears, and morality exist because, at least at some point, they promoted our survival.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Eyes did not suddenly spring into being in perfect form as a result of some remarkable chance mutation.\u00a0 Their development can be traced back over hundreds of millions of years, presumably to the emergence of light sensitive cells on some primitive life form.\u00a0 The same may be said of morality.\u00a0 It is a manifestation of physical processes that take place in the brain.\u00a0 Related physical processes take place in the brains of other animals, as they did in the brains of our ancestors going back tens of millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Until quite recently, our ancestors did not have the mental equipment necessary to speculate wisely about Kant and Schopenhauer.\u00a0 Morality would not have promoted our survival if it had taken the form of a predisposition to read tomes of philosophy, and then draw our own conclusions.\u00a0 It promotes our survival by modifying our social behavior in a much more efficient manner, and one that worked for our animal ancestors as well as it does for us today.\u00a0 It causes us to act according to moral rules or imperatives that we obey without thinking about them.\u00a0 Other primates don’t have the luxury of thinking about why they act morally.\u00a0 They just do it.\u00a0 We can think about it, and the results have been very interesting.<\/p>\n
On evolutionary time scales, human intelligence evolved with great speed.\u00a0 There may have been some alterations in the mental wiring responsible for moral behavior during the process, but it’s most unlikely the related changes took place in perfect harmony.\u00a0 We still experience morality in the same way as other primates, in the form of imperatives, or absolute rules.\u00a0 As a result, it seems to us that those rules must have an objective existence of their own, independent of the mental processes that give rise to them.\u00a0 For thousands of years philosophers have been seeking this object, this holy grail – in vain.\u00a0 Even though we experience it that way, morality as an objective thing does not exist.\u00a0 The holy grail was never there.\u00a0 Morality exists, but its existence is in the form of physical processes in our brains, not as an object with an independent existence of its own.\u00a0 Because morality is not an object, attempts to give it objective legitimacy – to “justify” it – are necessarily in vain.\u00a0 One cannot “justify” behavioral traits that evolved in response to a social environment that no longer exists.\u00a0 At best, one can understand what they are and why they are there.<\/p>\n
It occurred to Darwin that the behavioral traits associated with morality had evolved, and many thinkers since his time have come to the same conclusion.\u00a0 It was, however, a conclusion that seemed to fly in the face of any number of ideological narratives, not to mention most of the world’s organized religions.\u00a0 As a result, it has taken us a long time to accept the obvious.\u00a0 However, our knowledge has continued to expand, and recent scientific advances, particularly in the form of powerful tools that allow us to watch the brain in action, and the ability to unravel the human genome, have made it increasingly difficult to deny any genetic component to morality.\u00a0 The idea has gone mainstream.<\/p>\n
All this comes as bad news to those philosophers who have devoted their careers to the search for the holy grail of objective justification.\u00a0 It completely upsets their apple cart of nicely arranged epistemologies, ontologies, and teleologies.\u00a0 In spite of that, they no longer have the luxury of pretending that the idea doesn’t exist.\u00a0 One way or another, they have to address it.\u00a0 One can find an interesting response to this troubling state of affairs by Jan Gorecki, one of the guild of grail seekers, in his book, “Justifying Ethics<\/a>; Human Rights & Human Nature.”<\/p>\n Gorecki is aware of the idea that morality is there as an adaptive function.\u00a0 He is also perceptive enough to grasp the implications of that idea.\u00a0 Speaking of the genetic explanation of morality he writes,<\/p>\n If true, it precludes not only the validity of the functional justification, but also of all other traditionally claimed justifications. Within the view of the world and of ethics accepted by proponents of this explanation, there is no room for such normmaking facts as divine will, intuitionist ontology, existence of pure reason as the source of ethics, or of human nature understood otherwise than as a genetic fitness implement. That is why no proponent of the genetic explanation supports any kind of objective justification of morality; they understand that, once their explanation is considered true, all justifications fail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Precisely!\u00a0 I couldn’t have said it any better myself.\u00a0 What’s even more remarkable is the way that Gorecki, in spite of this realization, manages to maintain the precarious balance of his own particular apple cart.\u00a0 Here are some relevant quotes:<\/p>\n … the very idea of morality being with us as an adaptive tool is enigmatic… In a living organism, the adaptive emergence of various organs is reasonably clear in the light of natural selection. But how can anyone explain, short of a miracle, an analogous role of moral evaluations in human society? (!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Morality is, from this perspective, just one such technique. It is claimed that the human ability to ontogenetically develop the specifically human moral experiences emerged as a mutation over five million years ago, among hunters-gatherers living in small, endogamously breeding kinship bands. By providing a strong altruistic and cooperative motivation, this ability enhanced the inclusive fitness of the carriers of the “moral gene.” (!!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This brings us to the basic question: is the genetic explanation true? The question cannot be answered in a publicly convincing way. It may well be true; it is possible that whatever exists is matter, that life can be reduced to physicochemical processes and mind to physiology, and that human morality is there since it promotes replication of the carriers of the “moral gene.” (!!!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n