I’ve been involved in a couple of forums
where the subject of morality has come up. In one, the members are interested
in spirituality. Some of these people seem to think that non-dualist
spirituality means there is no such thing as bad or good. Everything’s perfect
so morality is basically meaningless.
On the other forum, most of the members
are atheists, and they’re trying to understand how an objective morality could
exist. The question is, without a God imposing morality on humanity, how can a
human system be anything but relative?
I’m not an atheist, but I don’t think God
intervenes in the evolution of the universe. In other words, I think the
unfolding of evolution proceeds in an inevitable fashion. So I like to find
ways to explain phenomena like “morality” and “love” without recourse to
metaphysics (although I think there can be an explanation from an underlying
ground of consciousness, see note at end).
This question of the objectivity of
morality is important. By objective I mean something that can be agreed upon by other people. If morality is subjective, that means you can just do
what you like; there would be no difference between saving someone from
drowning and cheating that person out of their life’s savings. Any society that
adopted that ethos would quickly descend into chaos.
Last year I read philosopher
Alexander Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and
enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would. I think part of the reason
is that Rosenberg attempts to understand concepts such as morality as evolved
behaviors.
Evolutionary biologists propose
that a special dynamic of evolution called “group selection” has brought about
altruism in humans: groups in which the members cooperated and could trust each
other did better than groups in which there was a lot of infighting and deceit
(see
this blog post). This process led to the development of moral attributes.
Rosenberg asserts that there is
a core morality that all human societies share, and the most basic components
of that morality are: reciprocity, fairness/equality, trustworthiness/honesty,
and caring for your children. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (you can read
chapter 9 free online which discusses morality) has identified six candidates: care, fairness, loyalty,
authority, sanctity, and liberty. Other possibilities, he says, are property,
honesty, and a dislike of wastefulness.
Rosenberg writes, “All societies
and cultures have words for anger, disdain, shame, and guilt, and in each, they
name roughly the same set of bodily feelings.” Shame is the feeling we get when
we go against core moral principles, and blushing is a signal to the others in
the group that we realized we made an error.
When it appears that other
cultures don’t share this core morality, Rosenberg says it is because of the
interference of beliefs (see this
post for more on beliefs):
The next step in understanding moral disagreement involves recognizing that such disagreements always result from the combination of core morality with different factual beliefs. When you combine the uncontroversial norms of the moral core with some of the wild and crazy beliefs people have about nature, human nature, and especially the supernatural, you get the ethical disagreements that are so familiar to cultural anthropology.
