{"id":4444,"date":"2015-07-11T15:27:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-11T20:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=4444"},"modified":"2015-07-11T15:31:44","modified_gmt":"2015-07-11T20:31:44","slug":"scientific-morality-and-the-illusion-of-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2015\/07\/11\/morality\/scientific-morality-and-the-illusion-of-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientific Morality and the Illusion of Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

British philosophers demonstrated the existence of a “moral sense” early in the 18th century.\u00a0 We have now crawled through the rubble left in the wake of the Blank Slate debacle and finally arrived once again at a point they had reached more than two centuries ago.\u00a0 Of course, men like Shaftesbury<\/a> and Hutcheson<\/a> thought this “moral sense” had been planted in our\u00a0consciousness\u00a0by God.\u00a0 When Hume<\/a> arrived on the scene a bit later it became possible to discuss the subject in secular terms.\u00a0 Along came Darwin to suggest that the existence of this\u00a0“moral sense”\u00a0might\u00a0have developed\u00a0in the same way as the physical characteristics of our species; via evolution by natural selection.\u00a0 Finally, a bit less than half a century later, Westermarck<\/a> put two and two together, pointing out that morality was a subjective emotional phenomenon and, as such, not subject to truth claims.\u00a0 His great work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas<\/a><\/em>, appeared in 1906.\u00a0 Then the darkness fell.<\/p>\n

Now, more than a century later, we can once again at least discuss evolved morality without fear of excommunication by the guardians of ideological purity.\u00a0 However, the guardians are still there, defending a form of secular Puritanism that yields nothing in intolerant piety to the religious Puritans of old.\u00a0 We must not push the envelope too far, lest we suffer the same fate as Tim Hunt<\/a>, with his impious “jokes,” or Matt Taylor<\/a>, with his impious shirt.\u00a0 We cannot just blurt out, like Westermarck, that good and evil are merely subjective artifacts of human moral emotions, so powerful that they appear as objective things.\u00a0 We must at least pretend that these “objects” still exist.\u00a0 In a word, we are in a holding pattern.<\/p>\n

One can actually pin down fairly accurately the extent to which we have recovered since our emergence from the dark age.\u00a0 We are, give or take, about 15 years pre-Westermarck.\u00a0 As evidence of this I invite the reader’s attention to a fascinating “textbook” for teachers of secular morality that appeared in 1891.\u00a0 Entitled Elements of Ethical Science: A Manual for Teaching Secular Morality<\/em><\/a>, by John Ogden, it taught the subject with all the most up-to-date Darwinian bells and whistles.\u00a0 In an introduction worthy of Sam Harris the author asks the rhetorical question,<\/p>\n

Can pure morality be taught without inculcating religious doctrines, as these are usually interpreted and understood?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and answers with a firm “Yes!”\u00a0 He then proceeds to identify the basis for any “pure morality:”<\/p>\n

Man has inherently a moral nature, an innate moral sense or capacity.\u00a0 This is necessary to moral culture, since, without the nature or capacity, its cultivation were impossible… This moral nature or capacity is what we call Moral Sense<\/em>.\u00a0 It is the basis of conscience.\u00a0 It exists in man inherently, and, when enlightened, cultivated, and improved, it becomes the active conscience itself.\u00a0 Conscience<\/em>, therefore, is moral sense plus intelligence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The author recognizes the\u00a0essential role\u00a0of this Moral Sense as the universal basis of all the many manifestations of human morality, and one without which they could not exist.\u00a0 It is\u00a0to the moral sentiments what the sense of touch is to the other senses:<\/p>\n

(The Moral Sense) furnishes the basis or the elements of the moral sentiments and conscience, much in the same manner in which the cognitive facilities furnish the data or elements for thought and reasoning.\u00a0 It is not a sixth sense, but it is to the moral sentiments what touch is to the other senses, a base on which they are all built or founded; a soil into which they are planted, and from which they grow… All the moral sentiments are, therefore, but the concrete modifications of the moral sense, or the applications of it, in a developed form, to the ordinary duties of life, as a sense of justice, of right and wrong, of obligation, duty, gratitude, love, etc., just as seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling are but modified forms of feeling\u00a0or touch, the basis of all sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here, in a manner entirely similar to so many modern proponents of innate morality, Ogden goes off the tracks.\u00a0 Like them, he cannot let go of the illusion of objective morality.\u00a0 Just as the other senses inform us of the existence of physical things, the moral sense must inform us of the existence of another kind of “thing,” a disembodied, ghostly something that floats about independently of the “sense” that “detects” it, in the form of a pure, absolute truth.\u00a0 There are numerous paths whereby one may, more or less closely, approach this truth, but they all converge on the same, universal thing-in-itself:<\/p>\n

…it must be conceded that, while we have a body of incontestable truth, constituting the basis of all morality, still the opinions of men upon minor points are so diverse as to make a uniform belief in dogmatical principles impossible.\u00a0 The author maintains that moral truths and moral conduct may be reached from different routes or sources; all converging, it is true, to the same point:\u00a0 and that it savors somewhat of illiberality to insist upon a uniform belief in the means or doctrines whereby we are to arrive at a perfect knowledge of the truth, in a human sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The means by which this “absolute truth” acquires the\u00a0normative power to dictate “oughts” to all and sundry is described in terms just as fuzzy as those used by the moral pontificators of our own day, as if it were ungenerous to even ask the question:<\/p>\n

When man’s ideas of right and wrong are duly formulated, recognized and accepted, they constitute what we denominate MORAL LAW.\u00a0 The moral law now becomes a standard by which to determine the quality of human actions, and a moral obligation demanding obedience to its mandates.\u00a0 The truth of this proposition needs no further confirmation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As they say in the academy to supply missing steps in otherwise elegant proofs, it’s “intuitively obvious to the casual observer.”\u00a0 In those more enlightened times, only fifteen years elapsed before Westermarck demolished Ogden’s ephemeral thing-in-itself, pointing out that it\u00a0couldn’t be confirmed because it didn’t exist, and was therefore not subject to truth claims.\u00a0 I doubt that we’ll be able to recover the same lost ground so quickly in our own day.\u00a0 Secular piety reigns in the academy, in some cases to a degree that would make the Puritans of old look like abandoned debauchees, and is hardly absent elsewhere.\u00a0 Savage punishment is meted out to those who deviate from moral purity, whether flippant Nobel Prize winners or overly principled owners of small town bakeries.\u00a0 Absent objective morality, the advocates of such treatment would lose their odor of sanctity and become recognizable as mere absurd bullies.\u00a0 Without a satisfying sense of moral rectitude, bullying wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.\u00a0 It follows that the illusion will probably persist a great deal longer than a decade and a half this time around.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, Westermarck still had it right.\u00a0 The “moral sense” exists because it evolved.\u00a0 Failing this basis, morality as we know it could not exist.\u00a0 It follows that there is no such thing as moral truth, or any way in which the moral emotions of one individual can gain a legitimate power to dictate rules of behavior to some other individual.\u00a0 Until we find our way back to that rather elementary level of self-understanding, it will be impossible for us to deal rationally with our own moral behavior.\u00a0 We’ll simply have to leave it on automatic pilot, and indulge ourselves in the counter-intuitive hope that it will serve our species just as well now as it did in the vastly different environment in which it evolved.<\/p>\n

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British philosophers demonstrated the existence of a “moral sense” early in the 18th century.\u00a0 We have now crawled through the rubble left in the wake of the Blank Slate debacle and finally arrived once again at a point they had reached more than two centuries ago.\u00a0 Of course, men like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson thought this … Continue reading “Scientific Morality and the Illusion of Progress”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[85,181,110,105,6,166,28,5,29,108],"tags":[120,299],"class_list":["post-4444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-blank-slate","category-ethics","category-evolutionary-psychology-2","category-good-and-evil","category-human-evolution","category-human-nature","category-morality","category-philosophy","category-secular-religions","tag-morality-2","tag-westermarck"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-19G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4444"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4451,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions\/4451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}