Who Were the Sea Peoples?

We typically fine people occupying one of two extremes on the issue of moral relativism. Some people wish to impose rigid rules across all of time and space, regardless of circumstances: e.g., "The ancient Israelites were wicked because they practiced animal sacrifice." Others sense the (partially) historical character of right and wrong and leap from that genuine insight to the unwarranted conclusion that right and wrong are subjective, or whatever any particular society happens to deem them to be. In Religion and Society , Collingwood explains why both extreme views are wrong: "What is right for one society," we are told, "is wrong for another. It would be sadly narrow-minded to wish that every portion of the human race could live under the same kind of social organisation. On the contrary, to confer the blessings of civilisation upon the savage often means nothing but to force him into a mould for which he is quite unfitted and in which he can never...

The liberal rite for treating moral issues is argumentation. (I say "treating" rather than resolving because what generally characterizes this rite is that the argumentation never ceases, and the issue is never resolved.) Any attempts to justify a position based on, say, intuition or tradition, is roundly mocked by liberals. But what is not done is to demonstrate why argumentation is the right way to resolve moral issues! And clearly it is not the right way to resolve every issue. Imagine trying to walk by having an argument with everyone around you about where your foot should fall next.

Gene's post on free will and time makes me think of an idea I was kicking around a while ago about the necessity of Time for us to be moral creatures: If there was no Time (for us), we would never be compelled to make moral decisions. Since we live in Time, we are forced to make decisions, and those decisions take on moral weight. We are, I guess it can be said, "forced to be free" in the sense that we are compelled to face choices and therefore make moral decisions given the construct of Time (as we experience it). If there was no Time (for us) we wouldn't have to make any choices at all; we could simply accept infinite stasis. Perhaps that's what Hell (or a version thereof) is like? Complete frozen-ness? To tie a bit of Judeo-Christian "existentialism" into this rumination: it would seem that there is something fundamental in our creaturely nature that requires us to make decisions. We were made to make choices. God wants us to freely choose to love ...

"If -- not merely for practical purposes but as a matter of speculative certainty -- we identify its injunction with any particular duty, circumstances will be found upon which the bindingness of that duty is contingent, and the too hasty identification of the categorical imperative with it will issue in a suspicion that, after all, there is no categorical imperative, no absolute duty, at all. After the explanations just given, however, we need not shrink from asserting as the basis of morality an unconditional duty, which yet is not a duty to do anything unconditionally except to fulfil that unconditional duty." -- Prolegomena to Ethics , from Principles of Political Obligation and other writings , p. 261 This captures very nicely a point I have been making about morality: it is both timeless and universal and dependent upon circumstances. The view that it must be one or the other ignores Hegel's philosophical breakthrough in conceiving the concrete universal.

As Ed Feser notes , is that it cannot explain moral obligation. Perhaps we can get a perfectly satisfactory materialist, evolutionary explanation of the cause of every one of our moral beliefs. ("We think incest is wrong due to the fact incestuous breeding weakens the gene pool," "We believe stealing is wrong because groups that don't respect property rights failed to prosper," and so on.) What we would now have is not a theory of moral obligation, but a theory of why moral obligation is an illusion . To illustrate: let us say I convince my son of the truth of "evolutionary morality," and he responds, "Great, that's all it is? I thought there was something wrong with stealing, but now I see that thinking that is a kind of trick that our genes have played on us. Well, personally, I don't give a hoot about the survival of the group, and I'm taking up stealing!" It should be pretty obvious that the believer in such a materia...

Are witness to the objective nature of morality: "The discordance over moral codes witnesses to the fact of moral experience. You cannot quarrel about unknown elements. The basis of every discord is some common experience, discordantly realized." -- Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason , p. 86 This is very reminiscent of Wittgenstein's point that we can only disagree on a matter upon which we largely agree. For instance, one of the readers of this blog can refer to me as a "retard" on property rights only because we largely agree as to what property rights are. If I thought property rights were flying purple snakes that lived in my dreams, we would simply be talking about completely different things, and not disagreeing about the same thing.

Consequentialism tells us it is good to do something if the consequences of doing it are good. But how do we judge if the consequences are good? If we do so by looking to their consequences, obviously we have entered an infinite regress. Therefore, we need non-consequentialist criteria for judging a consequence good or bad. In that case, consequentialism turns out to be not a complete system of morality, but merely the idea that we ought to pay attention to the consequences of our actions. But what moral theory says we should not pay attention to those consequences?! Every moral thinker of whom I am aware would differentiate between cutting a person with a knife to kill them from cutting them with a knife to save their life in an operation, which is judging the action by its (likely) consequence. (Yes, intentions are involved, but the intentions just are aiming at a certain outcome, right?) So consequentialism is either impossible or trivially true.

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which knowledge of the purpose of cooking had been lost. Many, many fragments of cookbooks remain in existence, but no one knows exactly what they are for -- people in this world eat all of their food raw -- only that their ancestors deemed them very, very important, and that somehow, these rituals are supposed to do something very positive for one and for one's community. (Seriously, it is interesting that someone who doesn't know what cooking is for might be able to read an entire cookbook and still not find out.) Cookbooks become the sacred scriptures of the time, and people perform the recipes in them in very solemn ceremonies, but no one realizes that what is produced was once intended to be eaten and to taste good. We would find all sorts of conflicting opinions on cooking. Some people would claim that cooking was all just subjective: one merely had to look at the huge variety of recipes put out by different writers of sacred cookbooks...

Well, as Eugene Volokh notes , that is what law does: "But most of the coercive laws that we hotly debate involve the forcing of a majority’s views on the minority. That’s true of laws protecting endangered species, antislavery laws, antidiscrimination laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental laws, intellectual property laws — or for that matter bans on infanticide, child sexual abuse, or more generally murder, rape, or theft. Some of these laws may be sound on the merits, and others unsound. But the fact that they force one group’s views on another doesn’t make them wrong."

I would not have someone over for dinner who thought raising children for food is OK. But I do, in fact, have people whom I know are "pro-choice" over for dinner. Why the difference? I think it is because one has a different attitude when what one sees as an error in moral reasoning is widespread. Let's say you lived in the South in 1830. You might think black slavery was wrong, but you'd pretty much expect most people you met to disagree. You'd still sit down and have dinner with these people. You would tell yourself something like, "Well, I think these people are wrong, but on most issues, most of us are products of our time and place... so it's understandable they think this way." On the other hand, today, you'd probably find someone advocating black slavery to be really creepy, and you'd want nothing to do with that person.

Irin Carmon says we get to just make up whatever moral rules please us: "The Rush Limbaughs of the world don’t get to define the boundaries of appropriate sexual or moral behavior. But something is happening: Women are defining those boundaries for themselves, with many men alongside them, and they’re being reminded that there’s a concerted movement to take that right of self-definition away. And we’re mad." Hey, and let's have serial killers define their own morality for themselves as well. It's hard to see how Carmon could object to that, except to say it doesn't fit her definition.