Tag: Ethics

A Higher Law for Atheists

We thirst for meaning in our lives. As an atheist, I’ve struggled to find meaning. I want to be part of something bigger than myself but never believed such a thing existed. I’ve learned better.

As the psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noted in his masterful Man’s Search for Meaning, people thrive when they have purpose. Cultural and technological changes over the past few centuries have eroded our sense of purpose and structure. Religion provided these in the past. Now our new, secular society needs a new, secular source.

Duty and purpose in older societies

Our distant ancestors didn’t face existential crises the way we do. In small tribes your role and purpose were clear. The meaning of life was to live the way your ancestors did.

More advanced societies were more complicated. Different demands were placed on the different classes. The peasant class had the least choice, so had the fewest responsibilities. More powerful classes had more expected of them. The warrior class, which held the power of life and death, had especially strong responsibilities.

These responsibilities became a rigorous code of conduct for warriors: the concept of honor. The West called it chivalry, Japan called it bushido. Honor originally meant doing what your liege commanded. They had spent tremendous resources training you and giving you the latest arms, armor, and transportation. You were honor-bound to follow their orders even if those orders felt wrong. To do otherwise was to bring dishonor to yourself and render your life worthless.

The concept of honor as duty to your lord changed over time. Honor became romanticized as a duty to higher principles. Instead of demanding obeisance, honor demanded that you disobey your lord if he ordered you to violate God’s law or a code of conduct.

Warriors were still expected to do their duty, but their duty was now more transcendent. It had become universal.

In a sense, this was the end of honor. It was no longer a separate system of ethics but an elevated form of normal practices. Knights were expected to show bravery, compassion, mercy, and humility – the same virtues as everyone else. Honor had been replaced by God.

The death of God

God died in turn. Society was upended by the one-two punch of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. People lost their sense of mankind’s place in the cosmos, and their personal place in society. Everything once concrete became murky.

The most profound observer of these changes was Friedrich Nietzsche. He’s been immortalized through his famous line, “God is dead.” In this one sentence he summarized the change overtaking Western society.

For centuries before Nietzsche, Christianity guided Europe. The Church was a source of values and purpose. Now the Church’s authority was waning, and a secular perspective was replacing it. Europeans could no longer count on shared beliefs, nor were they given a settled hierarchy where they could feel at peace.

The rise of existentialism

Existentialist philosophy arose to fill this vacuum. It was largely formed in Nazi-occupied France, so, as might be expected, it stressed freedom, individuality, and resistance to groups. This “do your own thing” ethos dominated Western culture throughout the latter 20th century until it became so ingrained that we Westerns are shocked by the group-centric philosophies of other cultures.

The Nuremberg trials and a few famous psychological experiments (the Milgram experiment and Stanford prison experiment) convinced the intelligentsia that existentialism was right: group consciousness was the problem and individual conscience was the solution. They reasoned that evildoers knew what they were doing was bad but did it anyway because of their groupthink and conformity.

They rejected the possibility that Nazis individually believed they were justified in retaliating against their Jewish (supposed) oppressors, or that the Milgram/Stanford experiment subjects believed they were advancing science as part of a well-regulated system. Instead, the intelligentsia said, if these people had simply looked inward, they would have known the moral truth and found the courage to disobey.

This philosophy puts us in a dilemma: either we embrace a hubristic view of our own judgment or we give up on moral judgments altogether. Our own conscience is absolute moral truth and if other people disagree then we must reject them. Much as the ancient Hebrews were commanded to put no god before their God, we must worship our own conscience, for ours is a jealous conscience.

If we reject this and see ourselves as just one human among many, as fallible as anyone, then we risk nihilism. Who are we to say that some choices are better than others? Why even bother having ambitions if they’re just a product of our flawed human heart? Who’s to say that we have responsibilities if we don’t feel like accepting them?

Something more

When we compare ourselves to past generations, the starkest moral differences aren’t in individual character, but in overall social differences. There were noble, decent people a thousand years ago, but even the kindest among them had a casual attitude towards slavery, violence, and capital punishment. Our overall standards have changed so much that it dwarfs individual differences.

That suggests that our individual conscience is less perfectible than our collective social conscience. When we differ from society, therefore, society is more likely to be right. We can tell ourselves that our attitudes will be embraced by the society of tomorrow (and are therefore better than today’s) but people are remarkably poor at predicting the future. When we tell ourselves that the future belongs to us, we’re probably flattering ourselves.

That gives us a solution to the death of honor and the death of God. We have something that we can hold higher than our own judgment: the collective judgment of humanity. If that’s too lofty, then at least we can look to the judgment of our community.

This may sound like cultural relativism: the belief that good or bad are determined by a culture’s values. A cultural relativist would say that stealing is wrong if you’re part of a culture that says it’s wrong, and it’s fine if your culture says it’s fine.

I’m not advocating that view. Cultural values don’t determine right and wrong: if they did, “progress” would be meaningless. Instead, culture is the accumulation of millennia of refinements in our sense of right and wrong. It gets things right more often than our gut judgment. Cultural values are better guesses at right and wrong.

Think of science as an analogy: our body of scientific knowledge is always open to revision. Because it’s open to revision, it’s more likely to be true than the results of any individual experiment. It’s reached its conclusions from the results of thousands of experiments. Only the weight of many new experiments contradicting established theories justifies changing our old understanding.

Our moral sentiments are like the individual experiments. When we feel society is unfairly labelling something morally acceptable as evil, or vice versa, we must be tentative about rejecting society’s judgment. To a naïve critic this is cowardice, but fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Another analogy is the free market. Different businesses (or social movements) offer their wares. The best are selected for and the weakest are weeded out. Any new business or social movement is likely to fail, because it’s being introduced to an efficient market. Only the best can compete and succeed.

Application

This all sounds like abstract navel-gazing. How can we use it to find meaning and ethics?

First, it means the judgment of society matters. If you’re in a group that society scorns– a circle of thieves, a religious cult, political radicals –ask yourself hard questions about whether your group is really doing the right thing. The rest of the group will tell you that they’re good and everyone else is wrong, of course, so ignore them. Take a step back and look at it impartially.

Second, it means status-seeking isn’t as grubby as it feels. It’s easy to mock people who aspire to be managers, businesspeople, or professionals. Those roles have value, though, even if they’re scorned by pop culture. Pop culture, like soda pop, is temptingly sweet but lacks deeper value.

Status-seeking isn’t the only goal that matters, but it is a remedy for a lack of ambition or a sense of meaningless. If you can’t find goals for yourself, ask what accomplishments would make your grandparents proud of you then pursue those goals. There’s hidden value in the mundane life they’d probably want for you.

Most importantly, be humble. There’s something bigger and better than you. It’s older than you and will outlive you. Only if you keep your heart and mind open can you improve it.

Tribalism Can Be Positive

On the ethics of group conflict

People are good team players. Sometimes we forget that. We work together so often that it’s easy to take it for granted. It’s good for your soul to take a step back and look at all the incredible achievements that have been made by people cooperating.

When groups of people clash, though, they can behave very badly. I’m not just talking about historical horrors, such as wars or the Holocaust. Right now, there are groups of jerks are making the American political climate toxic. There’s plenty of blame to go around, from Antifa to the Proud Boys. Even mainstream media sometimes play host to hateful, resentful screeds.

Not all group conflict leads to destructive behavior. Businesses competition in the free market has, over generations, made humanity wealthy beyond our ancestors’ imagination. Teams of athletes competing drive each other to work harder and reach new heights. Competition in politics leads to the worst leaders being replaced and most groups of people having some of their demands met. Even war, the most destructive of human activities, has evolved rules to reduce its harm. The wars of today are gentler than the total war of World War 2 or the ambushes, raids, massacres and rape of tribal warfare.

Still, we’re much better at being good people individually than we are at being good in groups. If we thought more about how we ought to act in group competitions, then maybe we could raise our standards. At the very least, we could come to a common understanding of what group behavior is right or wrong, the same way we almost universally agree that murder, adultery, etc. are wrong.

Groups don’t have individual agency, of course. They don’t have a single mind that can choose between good or evil. Even when a group has a strong single leader, the leader responds to the needs of his followers and is guided by their reactions. That’s one reason why we can’t simply judge groups the same way we judge individuals. We must adapt our views on individual morality to groups.

There are three dominant perspectives on morality among philosophers. They’re called virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology. They say, respectively, that morality is about what kind of person you ought to be, what kind of outcomes your actions ought to have, and what kind of rules you ought to follow.

Virtues

Virtue ethics says that doing the right thing means behaving the way a good person would behave. Specifically, it means behaving in a way that’s kind, honest, brave, fair, etc. Different virtue ethicists have come up with their own lists of virtues, going all the way back to Aristotle.

It’s difficult to apply virtue ethics to group conflict. If we need moral guidance for our individual situation, we can think of people who inspire us with their personal traits. If I’m feeling lazy, I can aspire to be as hardworking as my grandfather; if I’m mad, I could try to be as forgiving as my friend Anthony.

When we want guidance for our group, it’s more difficult to imagine examples. The groups of people we celebrate are mostly honored for the consequences of their actions, rather than for their character. Even pacifistic, loving reformers like the Civil Rights Movement included a wide variety of people, some of them not so nice.

It’s also harder to get concrete guidance. If we want our own group to behave virtuously, we can try to ask ourselves “what would Gandhi’s movement do?” but it’s not clear we could answer that, given how different are our goals and situation.

Consequences

Some people think of morality in terms of its end results. In other words, they see the ends as justifying the means. The most important of these views is utilitarianism: the idea that an action is good to the extent that it creates more overall happiness than suffering.

In other words, it’s good for me to donate my money to an orphanage because it will bring the orphans more happiness than it could bring me. It’s good for a sick person to steal medicine he can’t afford, too, because the good the medicine does will outweigh the harm to the pharmacy.

Many of the worst atrocities in history were done by groups with this view. Think of the Communist revolutionaries that promised a utopia worth any amount of spilt blood and oppression. It’s a very dangerous way to think.

One problem is that humans are terrible at predicting the consequences of their actions on a large scale over a long period of time, which is the level that groups operate at. Communists and anarchists brawled with Nazis on the streets of Weimar Germany… and in so doing, helped the Nazis gain power. The sexual revolution, and the War on Poverty of the ‘60s, weakened family ties and inadvertently led to nearly 3/4ths of African-American children being born into families without father figures. Beautiful intentions can have terrible consequences.

Duties and principles

Ethics that deal with following rules are called deontology. One example of a principle-based approach to ethics is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Jewish Rabbi Hillel came up with a negative version about a century earlier: if an action is hateful to you, don’t do it to others.

It’s not possible to directly apply these rules to a group setting. You can’t control what your own group does or does not do. You can, on an individual level, decide not to hurt other people, or make insulting or dismissive remarks to them, or lie to them. That already seems to be asking too much of people, though.

Why do people break these rules? The most common justification is “they did it first, we have to keep up to win.” That leads to people trying to silence each other because they believe their group has been silenced, or even getting violent with each other because they see their side as victims of violence.

Principle of Non-Escalation

If we can’t aim as high as treating other the other side with love and kindness, we can at least adopt a principle of non-escalation. At worst we only use the same unkindness as the other guys do. If they disagree with us without saying we’re bad people, we don’t tell them they’re bad people. If they say we’re bad people, we don’t try to silence them with threats or reporting their tweets or anything. If they try to silence us, we don’t harass them in the real world. If they harass us in the real world, or worse, we call the police, and that’s where it ends.

As a caveat: one of the quirks of human psychology is that we give the benefit of the doubt to ourselves and our in-group and we’re more skeptical of outsiders, especially threatening ones. If we want constructive group conflict, we must always hold ourselves to higher standards than our rivals, because we inevitably overestimate our own morality and underestimate theirs.

Look at the example of the Covington Catholic students. Earlier this year, during a protest, a group of Catholic school students stared awkwardly at a Native American man. Their behavior was interpreted by some people as disrespectful. An appropriate response, then, would at worst be disrespect towards the students. Arguably we should show more leniency towards children, so not even advance to the level of disrespect.

Most people did react that way. Some went farther and, among other things, advocated violence towards the students. They violated the principle of non-escalation. Groups that counted the over-reactors as members had a choice: either denounce (and possibly eject) the offenders or accept responsibility for the behavior. If they chose the latter, then rival groups would be justified in threatening them in response.

Ideally, their rivals would choose to turn the other cheek instead of matching their threatening behavior. If their rivals did choose to match the behavior, though, they couldn’t be accused of occupying the moral low-ground.

Of course, their rivals might go beyond matching the critics. Instead of vaguely advocating violence, they might send specific death threats. In that case they’d be violating the non-escalation principle as well. Each step of escalation is worse than the last (going to war is a far bigger step than name-calling) so they would be the bad guys.

Principle of Precision

Limiting your response to your rivals requires that you identify them correctly. Kicking a puppy because you think it’s a member of Al Qaeda will not do. You must be precise in recognizing what group a person belongs to, and to what extent they represent that group.

If the Prime Minister of Canada talks about invading the US, it’s appropriate to see that as the first group threatening violence against the latter. If a random homeless Canadian person delivers the same speech, it shouldn’t be treated as Canada violently threatening America. The Canadian hobo is a Canadian just the same as Canada’s leader, but he doesn’t represent the nation.

If someone calls themselves a Trump supporter and other supporters recognize him as such, then he’s part of that group. If he escalates the situation, and isn’t condemned by his group, then it counts as his group escalating. If a random wacko starts threatening people, and everyone condemns it, then it doesn’t represent either side. We can’t use it as an excuse to escalate the situation.

The higher position in a group someone is, the more they represent that group. Think of the Nuremberg trials: the Allies wanted to punish the Nazis for starting World War 2 and committing mass atrocities. Out of the 8+ million Nazi party members, the Allies put 200 on trial. That’s less than 1% of 1%. The Allies ignored the rest of the Nazis because they didn’t represent the party.

Sometimes we want to retaliate against more people than just those who wrong us. We want justice against anyone who benefitted from their misdeeds. If a gang of thieves steals everything we own, we should be free to steal from them or any of their friends and family who benefitted as well… right?

This impulse has ugly consequences. For example, a nation’s military fights for the interests of that nation’s civilians. We don’t want all wars to turn into massacres of civilians, though. Civilians may be benefiting from their military’s protection (and even their aggression) but we still shouldn’t treat them as legitimate targets.

By the same logic, even if a mainstream party benefits from a radical fringe, we shouldn’t treat the party the way we treat the fringe group. As an example, don’t treat mainstream animal rights activists with the same hostility that you would treat members of PETA. Even if the former group benefits from the latter’s actions (which isn’t clear, anyway) it isn’t culpable for their extremism.

What’s the moral of the story?

Let’s move out of the realm of airy abstraction and return to the example from the beginning. Antifa and the Proud Boys are controversial new political movements. They both have a history of escalation: silencing those who haven’t silenced them, threatening those who haven’t threatened them, and committing violence against those who haven’t been violent towards them.

They also both are imprecise in their attacks. Antifa lumps all their critics into the alt-right, and so treats a defenseless journalist as a target for violence. The Proud Boys accuse their targets of being part of Antifa, even when they’re as mainstream as the Democratic mayor of Portland.

That’s not to imply the two groups are morally equivalent. The question of whether they’re equivalent is a distraction, though. If a murderer and a torture are engaged in a fist-fight, you don’t have to pick one to support. They’re both awful, and you should simply call the police on them.

The Ethics of Reciprocity, Part 3

(This is part 3 of a three part series. Part 1 is the introduction and justification. Part 2 spells out the implications in more detail. Part 3 deals with objections and comparisons to other moral philosophies.)

Distinctiveness

Is there a need to have a separate way of talking about a duty of reciprocity? Can it be covered by other ways of describing right and wrong? No. I’ll go over specific moral beliefs and why they can’t do the job.

Utilitarianism

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. When you cut down the forest, splinters will fly. The ends justify the means. These phrases all point to the same idea: that the end results of an action are what matters, and they can justify any collateral damage.

This is the moral philosophy called consequentialism. The consequences of an action are what matters; the motives are irrelevant, as are any ethical principles. All that matters is the end result. The most important consequentialist philosophy is called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that the specific consequence that matters is the net happiness created. If an action creates more happiness than unhappiness, it’s a good action.

Imagine a relationship between Tom and Jane. Jane dumps Tom, and he’s heartbroken. A utilitarian would look at that and say Jane did something wrong if she made Tom unhappier than she made herself happy. That’s not how we feel about break-ups, though. If Tom had spent years caring for Jane and being a good boyfriend, then we’d say Jane did something wrong- she owed Tom, in a sense. On the other hand, if Tom had been negligent or even had affairs, then we would applaud Jane’s decision. She deserved better- which is to say, Tom owed her more.

Utilitarianism wouldn’t be able to describe the relationship in a way that reflects our values. Reciprocity offers a distinct, useful perspective.

Golden Rule deontology

“Deontology” is just a philosopher’s way of saying ‘code of ethics’. The “Golden Rule” is possibly the most famous code of ethics, and it’s a single rule: do to others what you’d have them do to you. There are variations of it across cultures, such as the Jewish teacher Hillel saying that you shouldn’t do to your neighbors the things that are hateful to you. The Golden Rule is very flexible, so it can cover the same situations as our ethics of reciprocity, but perhaps not as well.

Imagine a young man named Steve. He had a falling out with his parents a few years ago over politics, and now they never talk to each other. He gets a call from his sister saying that their father has died and Steve should go home to comfort his mother and help her prepare the funeral. Steve thinks of the Golden Rule: if his girlfriend had died, would he have wanted his parents coming to comfort him and help him prepare for the funeral? No, he hates them and doesn’t want anything to do with them. Therefore, he shouldn’t help his mom.

Our ethics of reciprocity would give the opposite result. Steve owes a debt to his parents, even if he doesn’t like him, and the least he can do to repay that debt is help his mother in her grief. That answer jibes much better with our natural sense of right and wrong.

Kantian deontology

The brilliant German philosopher Immanuel Kant invented his own code of ethics. He called it the “Categorical Imperative,” and it consists of three (or more) formulations.

One part of the Categorical Imperative is that you should never treat people as a means to an end, but instead as an end unto themselves. Don’t use people, basically. That’s certainly good advice, and it does cover some situations we’re interested in: if you just take from other people without acknowledging your duty of reciprocity, then you’re treating them more as a means to an end (getting stuff) than as individuals just as worthy as you are.

It doesn’t cover all the situations, though. What about our debts to abstract entities like our community or nation? They aren’t people, so it’s not clear under the Categorical Imperative that we have a duty to honor our debts; the reciprocal approach is clear. It’s also fuzzy on the nature of how we could avoid using generous people as a means to an end. If someone is always there for us and helps us out, we certainly ought to do something instead of taking them for granted, but Kant isn’t clear on what we should do, just what we shouldn’t do. Reciprocity does – to an extent – tell us how to act.

Another part of the Categorical Imperative is that you should behave in a way such that everyone else in the world could act the same way and it would be fine. You can’t steal, because otherwise everyone else would steal, and the whole idea of private property would collapse and stealing wouldn’t even make sense any more. It’s a contradiction.

This formulation does allow for a duty to abstract entities. If no one helped their community, then communities would no longer exist as such, and no one would be able to survive long enough to make that choice. No man is an island, after all. It has the same fuzziness issue as before, though, as it still only tells us what we shouldn’t do, not what we should do. To continue our example, how much do we owe our community? Just enough to allow the species to survive? Kant would call this an imperfect duty, which means we don’t owe it our entire time and energy, but he doesn’t give us much more help than that.

Virtue ethics

The idea of virtue ethics dates back at least to Aristotle, and it’s regained popularity recently. Virtue ethicists believe that we should focus less on actions in the abstract, and more on what kind of person we want to be. There is some overlap with ethics of reciprocity: a virtue ethicist could say that gratitude is a virtue that should be cultivated, therefore it’s important to pay back your debts.

Virtue ethics is a very personal view of morality. That makes it great for finding our direction in life. That makes it less great for answering questions about social issues like justice or civic disobedience. Reciprocity can tell us more about these things.

Moral Nihilism

Moral nihilism is the view that there is no such thing as right or wrong. Nihilism can’t be used to judge right in wrong in the kinds of reciprocal situations we’re looking at, because it can’t be used to judge right or wrong in any situation. It denies the validity of any such judgment. There’s no question that it’s distinct from the ethics of reciprocity.

Moral Hedonism

Moral hedonism is the philosophy that doing good means having fun. An action is good if it pleases you, and bad if it makes you feel bad. Hedonism is opposed to principles of duty, obligation, and responsibility, which is a core part of reciprocity. It’s also opposed to doing things for other people at your own expense, which is another core part.

Objectivism

Ayn Rand is a controversial figure. A refugee from communist Russia, she developed a philosophy of Objectivism which is almost the opposite of communist ideals. Her attitude and approach towards other philosophy lead many to view her as not really a philosopher. Still, her ideas are interesting and have been very influential, especially in the US, so it’s worth addressing them.

In Objectivist philosophy, something is right so long as it serves your self-interest. Objectivism’s distinct from hedonism, as Rand defines self-interest as something other than just satisfying your desires. It’s not completely clear what self-interest means to Rand, though.

Objectivism, like hedonism, is directly opposed to reciprocity. If you’re given a gift, a sense of reciprocity demands that you return the favor.  Objectivists deny that you have any such duty. Your only duty is to serve your own self-interest, and if you spend your time repaying unspoken debts then you’re misguided or even immoral.

Objections

Not all moral intuitions are equal

Why should we treat all moral intuitions as equally legitimate? Why should we think of this kind of moral debt as being on the same footing as the Golden Rule, for example? If we do treat them equally, wouldn’t we have to start recognizing all moral feelings as legitimate, and treat ‘blasphemy’ as immoral, and condemn eating ‘unclean’ foods, and all the other moral beliefs humans have had?

If we could find other broadly shared moral sentiments like reciprocity, then I would bite the bullet and say we should account for those sentiments as well. There just aren’t, in fact, very many of those, so accounting for them isn’t difficult. Maybe you could look around human societies and say “all human societies treat their dead with respect, even if ‘respect’ means different things to different groups. Must we therefore consider treatment of our dead to be a moral issue?”

I would respond yes, it’s fine to start thinking of respecting the dead as a moral issue, arguing about it the same way we argue about offensive speech or adultery or corruption or any other moral concern. It’s just that “respect” is so subjective, and so bound up in specific traditional practices, it will be hard to reach any consensus about how to respect our dead. Whether it’s a moral issue isn’t the problem; whether it can be handled philosophically is the problem. That’s true for other moral sentiments, but not for reciprocity.

Creating moral blackmail

If reciprocity means you owe a debt to anyone who gives you something, then people who keep giving you things – even against your objections – will hold power over you. By creating a debt, they will gain influence you, in a kind of ‘moral blackmail’ (or, perhaps, just an extreme version of guilt-tripping). To an extent, we already recognize this power of gifting: giving gifts to politicians is heavily regulated, and many times people don’t accept gifts from enemies.

Our duties to over-givers like these are naturally lessened. As an analogy, think of someone who complains all the time. Normally we have an ethical duty to avoid making people feel bad, but if someone always finds a reason to feel bad about everything we do, there’s a point where we can stop taking their objections seriously. Our duty to be nice to them is reduced. Likewise, if someone bombards us with gifts, then we don’t have to treat that debt seriously.

Wouldn’t recognizing the moral force of reciprocity therefore lead to a society where we’re trying to help each other all the time to hold power over each other? That’s certainly not the worst dystopia imaginable, and even resembles some real-world cultures. Still, if we were to explicitly recognize the moral weight of reciprocity, then we’d be more likely to turn gifts down. Rejecting gifts would be less insulting when it has a known, rational explanation.

Not everyone senses this reciprocal debt

If reciprocity is a universal moral truth like duty and compassion, then why do some people not feel it very strongly, if at all? And why is it lessened in some cases, e.g. we don’t feel any duty when a company gives us free samples?

Not everyone feels the pull of duty, compassion, empathy, or other moral goods, either. Some people are amoral or selectively moral. The near-universality of slavery throughout history doesn’t prove that compassion and egalitarianism aren’t moral values, it just shows that people can find a way to work around their morality and ignore uncomfortable realities.

In brutal societies, treating executions as entertainment is normal, so one’s compassion is attenuated. In corrupt societies, fair play is for fools, so one’s sense of justice is attenuated.

The Ethics of Reciprocity, Part 2

The implications of reciprocity

(This is part 2 of a three part series. Part 1 is the introduction and justification. Part 2 spells out the implications in more detail. Part 3 deals with objections and comparisons to other moral philosophies.)

Justice

An ethical code of reciprocity can help us rationalize our views of justice. We want to draw a line between justice and vengeance, for example. Justice demands punishment proportionate to the social damage done by someone’s actions. Vengeance (and revenge) are when one delivers punishment greater than is demanded by justice. They’re when you overstep the bounds of justice out of a personal emotional desire.

The way we normally think of morality has led to this retributive desire being stigmatized. Some believe that all suffering is bad, so anything that increases suffering must be bad, therefore any punishment that doesn’t deter or rehabilitate offenders is unjust. That view of justice is too narrow to fit our moral intuitions. Even many of its adherents can’t bring themselves to be consistent. For example, I’ve seen left-wing believers in this view of justice make an exception for people convicted of rape or hate crimes. At that point, they’re no longer concerned about reform and deterrence, but about making the punishment fit the crime. They’ve tried to dull their sense of reciprocal justice but in the cases they find most egregious it comes roaring back.

It’s also why improving the condition of prisons is so controversial. To those with no sense of reciprocity, improving prison conditions simply results in the standards of living of some people being higher. What can be wrong with that? The problem is that prison is a way of paying back the harm inflicted on society. A tough, spartan life is the prisoner’s way of paying his dues. A life where the greatest problem is a limited Playstation game catalogue – as the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik complained of – is not a suitable way of paying back a debt to society.

Loyalty

Loyalty has a mixed reputation. It might make you think of faceless, mindless hordes doing what they’re told. You might instead think of a band of brothers sticking together when their lives are on the line. You might even think of the romanticized loyalty codes of the past, like the codes of chivalry or bushido.

The ultimate meaning of loyalty is being reliably good to the people who’ve been good to you. It’s simply another example of reciprocity. Loyalty, then, should be proportionate. People who don’t want to be loyal to a group (or to a partner) will try to describe all the ways the group has been bad to them, as justification for why that group isn’t owed (much) loyalty. The group members will take the opposite position and lay out benefits that person has received and why they do owe the group continued loyalty.

When someone talks about how their country has mistreated them, or their parents neglected them, they may be implicitly making this kind of argument for why they don’t have any duty of loyalty. When someone complains about their partner’s behavior, even after all they’ve sacrificed for their partner, they’re implicitly making the argument that their partner isn’t paying the ‘loyalty debt’ that they owe.

That doesn’t mean those arguments are automatically suspect: some people really have been mistreated and shouldn’t be expected to show a typical level of loyalty. Think of Muhammad Ali: one reason he refused to fight in the Vietnam War was the racism he experienced in the US. You could argue that he was right, that the suffering other Americans inflicted on him reduced his duty to them. You could argue the other way, too, of course; the hardships Ali experienced weren’t so bad that he could abandon his duty, or that his duty was to America writ-large and the bad behavior of racist Americans was irrelevant. The point is that there’s a real, intellectual argument to be had about the merits to this justification for draft dodging (setting aside his other, legally defensible religious objections).

Tradition

Tradition is how we practice reciprocity towards our ancestors, and how our descendants will practice reciprocity towards us. Many things we do will benefit the people of the future. Think of environmentalism or investing. One this they can do to pay us back is respect our values.

We would be demanding too much loyalty if we expected future generations to behave just as we do, but considering how much their lives will have been improved over hunting-gathering, it’s fair to expect them to observe (or at least pay lip service to) some of our most basic values, such as a high respect for freedom or a taboo against infanticide.

The Ethics of Reciprocity, Part 1

Why one good turn demands another

We have a moral duty to repay what we owe. Not just literally repaying money owed to our creditors but repaying favors and gifts. On an intuitive level we all know this, but it’s not normally explicitly talked about on a moral level. It’s time to spell out an ethics of reciprocity.

(This is part 1 of a three part series. Part 1 is the introduction and justification. Part 2 spells out the implications in more detail. Part 3 deals with objections and comparisons to other moral philosophies.)

Prison sentences: a case study

When we bring morality into a debate, it’s usually to argue about the harm or benefit done to people and our duty to follow certain principles. Take, for example, arguments about prison sentences. We argue over the ability of prisons to rehabilitate, thereby making the prisoners happier in the long run as well as making the rest of society happier by changing a destructive person into a productive one. We talk about how we have a duty to keep society safe from dangerous people by locking them away, or how it’s unjust for us to lock someone away for a long time in bad conditions.

That ignores part of our intuitive understanding of justice. When someone hurts society, they owe a debt to us. They repay this debt through their time imprisoned. Once they’ve served their sentence, we even explicitly say that they’ve “paid their debt to society”, or “paid their dues”. This is called retributive justice. We know it, but we tend not to bring it into our arguments.

That’s one reason why it’s so difficult to motivate public opinion about prison reform. Reformers talk about how prisons don’t work to reform the prisoners. They’re right, but people don’t much care, because that’s only one role of prisons. Reformers also sometimes point to criminology research and say that we don’t need to keep so many people imprisoned, that it’s reached a point where it isn’t making us safer. They may also be right about that, but again, it doesn’t motivate public opinion because that’s only part of what prisons do. Prisons are still serving their purpose as a place where people are punished to repay their debt to society. Because we don’t normally talk about these kinds of moral debts, it’s hard to have constructive arguments about issues, like prison reform, where these debts matter.

Reciprocity is a fundamental moral sensation

Morality feels simpler than it really is. It seems to us like some things are obviously good and noble and right, and others are clearly wrong and outrageous. Moral philosophers have worked for centuries (if not millennia) to create logical systems that can justify these feelings and resolve disagreements, with mixed success.

The systems are all derived from our basic feelings of right and wrong. We have a fundamental sense that we ought to treat people well, not harm them, and follow certain rules. We argue about how to weigh those different feelings – should we be honest even when it hurts people? – but the inputs to our arguments are those moral feelings.

The sense of reciprocity is another of those basic moral feelings. Think of someone who just takes and takes but never does anything for anyone in return. Their ingratitude doesn’t feel like a minor character flaw, like if they were forgetful or chronically late, but a more serious moral defect.

We think the same way when we hear about someone being fired or dumped by their lover. We don’t just think about how bad they’ll feel. We mostly worry about whether they deserved to be treated that way. If someone was a good employee, we’ll be outraged that their employer wasn’t good to them in return. If they had always been cheating on their partner, then we’ll shrug at the news they’ve been dumped, even if it left them devastated. We care about more than the emotional impact; we keep a mental tally sheet of what people deserve.

People throughout history have seen filial piety the same way: if you don’t pay back your parents for the work they did raising you, then you’re doing something morally wrong. They held the same attitude towards repaying your ancestors, or the spirits of the animals you hunted, or other gods or spirits. Think also of the concept of “blood money” – paying money to the victims of a crime you’ve committed as a way of literally settling the debt. No amount of money can restore the life of someone you’ve killed, but that’s not the point. It’s to settle a moral debt, not to undo damage.

Feelings Can’t Be Wrong

It seems obvious but leads to uncomfortable conclusions

Morality is about the choices we make. There’s been much thinking, writing, and sermonizing about morality, and one of the most common themes is that we should judge actions. It’s not about judging the things we have no control over. That means condemning bullying, not contempt; condemning adultery, not lust; condemning violence, not hatred.

Yes, even hatred, the most taboo emotion in American society, is neither good nor evil. People don’t choose hatred: it’s a feeling that automatically burbles up from the depths of their brain, the same as any other. It can motivate awful behavior, but the same is true of other emotions like hubris and greed. That’s not enough justification to condemn it as evil. Only our choices can be morally judged.

Some feelings are dangerous but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong

Many emotions are like fire: handled improperly, they can do tremendous damage. Greed, anger, ambition, hatred, lust, jealousy, etc. can motivate people to do awful things. They can also be channeled into constructive activity, though. The emotions that we think of a positive, such as love and compassion, can be channeled into harmful activity.

Some Allied soldiers fought Nazis because they hated “krauts,” an ethnic slur for Germans. They may have had anger in their hearts, but they still played a role in ending WW2 and the Holocaust. Mirror-wise, black community leaders and the Black Congressional Caucus wanted to defend their community from the epidemic of crack cocaine. That noble intention led to them passing laws that gave very harsh penalties to crack possession, which has had terribly racist consequences.

I’ve written before about how emotions don’t matter in politics, but it can be applied more broadly than just politics. Your choices and their consequences are what matter.  What’s in your heart might be interesting, but it doesn’t determine whether you’re a good or bad person. Your bad feelings might tempt you to do bad things but it’s how you react to that temptation that matters.

Human hearts are all the same

We spend an awful lot of time thinking about how We have good feelings and They have bad feelings. We are filled with love and faith and tolerance, They are filled with greed and hatred and a hunger for control.

Ultimately, though, that’s unproductive. If we think of other people as having fundamentally different feelings than we do, it’s impossible for us to empathize and cooperate. Stigmatizing emotions makes us unable to recognize those feelings in ourselves and handle them appropriately.

If we use ‘desire for power’ as a label to dismiss our enemies, we won’t acknowledge that desire in ourselves and our allies. Because we’re made of the same flesh-and-blood as our opponents, though, we’re just as likely to feel that desire. We’ll just be repressing it, so we’ll be unable to think clearly about it, and we might ultimately express it in a destructive way.

Only choices are good and evil

There aren’t very many settled arguments in moral philosophy. Is the Bible the ultimate guide? Are the consequences of our actions the only thing that matters? Is morality just about following principles?

Fortunately, I don’t have to settle any of those arguments. Very few moral beliefs actually condemn emotions. Let’s run through some moral philosophies to prove the point.

Consequentialism

Consequentialists believe that the consequences of an action determine whether it’s good or evil. The most well-known kind of consequentialism is called utilitarianism, and it says that the happiness or pain caused by an action is what matters. If you do something that creates more good feelings in humanity (and maybe animals too) than bad feelings, it’s good. It doesn’t matter what the specific action was.

Consequentialists care solely about actions. That makes it immediately clear that they can’t condemn hatred, jealousy, greed, or any other feeling. Consequentialism is about your conduct, not what’s going on in your mind.

Deontology

Deontologists believe that you should follow moral principles. The philosopher Immanuel Kant created two influential moral rules. The simplified versions are: first, act in a way that everyone else could act; second, never treat people as a means to an end. It’s like when your mother asked you “what if everyone else did that?” as a way to discourage your bad habits.

The rules deontologists create are, again, about actions. It’s about what kind of choices you should make. It’s not about who you are deep in your heart-of-hearts, it’s about how you choose to interact with people and the world.

Divine Command

Another view of morality is that right and wrong are determined by the will of God, or multiple gods. There are many religions, so it’s not possible to cover all of them, but generally speaking they’re concerned with actions and faith. Take the Ten Commandments, for example. Of the ten of them, only one is concerned with how we feel, rather than what we do.

The commandment not to covet thy neighbor’s house etc. is a prohibition against feeling a certain way. That’s difficult to reconcile with the “emotions can’t be wrong” argument. In fact, Jesus would expand on this, saying that anger towards one brother is a sin, and that desiring adultery is committing adultery in your heart. This is like the Buddhist condemnation of desire.

When these (and other) religions condemn feelings, they aren’t necessarily doing the same thing as other kinds of moral condemnation. When we say an action is evil, we say that we should avoid doing it, and perhaps even that it should be punished. It’s impossible to avoid feeling a certain way, and it’s not feasible to punish people for their innermost feelings, though it’s certainly been tried before!

These yearnings are stigmatized as evil so that followers will try to discipline their inner voice. If they’re told it’s shameful to feel lust, or that desire leads to the cycle of suffering, then they will try focus their thoughts away from those feelings when they experience them.

The downside is that they may feel shame and inadequacy because of their longings. They will repress or sublimate those feelings and possibly express them in a bad way later. Take the common criticism of the Catholic Church: their attitude towards sexuality leads to priest repressing their desires, so some priests end up expressing those desires in an unhealthy way, as pedophilia. I don’t completely agree with that criticism of the Catholic Church (I think it’s more complicated than that) but the reasoning makes sense.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is an old-fashioned view of morality that’s enjoying a popular resurgence among philosophers. The central idea of virtue ethics is that we shouldn’t be concerned about actions and consequences at all, but rather that we should be concerned about virtues: positive personal traits like courage, humility, grace, or wisdom. The right thing to do is simply what a virtuous person would do.

A straightforward reading of virtue ethics contradicts my theses: a virtue ethicist believes that feelings certainly can be right and wrong, and they’re actually the basis for judging right and wrong! If you feel courage when faced with a threat, you’re a virtuous person; if you feel cowardly, you aren’t.

That may be a valid understanding of virtue ethics, but there’s another way to look at it. If a person is filled with terror at the sight of a mouse, then we could condemn them as lacking the virtue of courage. If they’re able to overcome their terror, though, are they really less courageous than people who didn’t feel fear in the first place?

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.”

Mark Twain

If a person is inclined towards vanity, but can control their impulses and act with modesty, then are they less virtuous than someone with a natural inclination towards modesty? If someone can acknowledge their feelings of fear, hatred, or pride, and behave virtuously regardless, then perhaps virtue ethicists would recognize their goodness.

The Dangers of a Science of Morality

Treating values like physics could be a trap

Humanity has advanced tremendously in our understanding and control of the world around us. We’ve created institutions and a methodology that keep this momentum going with no end in sight. Progress has become our default state. This continual advancement sits uneasily with our gradual, stumbling, ambiguous moral development.

There’s a hope that we could science-ify morality and improve our values at the same breakneck speed as we improve our knowledge and technology. Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes is an example of this dream. Sometimes it isn’t expressed as a hope, but as a Jurassic Park-style warning that we must gain wisdom as fast as scientific knowledge or we’ll be destroyed by our own creations.

A scientific approach to morality is more likely to be Frankenstein’s monster that destroys us than our salvation.

We ought to avoid the “is-ought” problem

The Scottish philosopher David Hume warned of the “is-ought” problem. This is when we confuse the way things are with the way things should be. For example, most human cultures through history have had slavery. That doesn’t mean slavery is a morally acceptable institution.

For a more controversial example, take arguments about homosexuality. Some gay rights advocates point to examples of homosexual behavior throughout history as proof that it’s not wrong. There are many fine arguments for gay rights, but this is not one of them.

Granted, scientists could avoid this mistake. Take Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, for example. Haidt simply describes different moral perspectives without endorsing any. Anthropologists are also trained to describe values, rather than prescribe.

There are as many examples of failure as success, though. The field of psychology in general has an extreme problem with the is-ought distinction. The bible of psychology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), looks at the world of upper middle-class American professionals and considers it the way things ought to be. Deviation is stigmatized as “disorder”, at least until favored activists lobby to change it.

Science is done by scientists

It sounds obvious, but scientific research is done by scientists in that field. There’s not much room for dilletantes and amateurs. That’s a necessary part of advancement: keeping up with research and having access to the latest tools and methods is a full-time job. That means scientists will inevitable create a group identity.

No matter how you educate a group of people, they’ll still have the heart of a primate tribe. They’ll still uncritically absorb a set of shared values that they’ll eventually consider above criticism. They’ll still separate “us” from “them,” and view criticism from “them” as being an attack on “us” that requires rallying together and hiding any weakness. They’ll still ascribe nefarious motives to “them.” They’ll still use motivated reasoning to justify their own values and diminish outsiders’.

That’s a problem for a field like psychology that has a suite of tools to pathologize its critics. Scientific moralists would be even worse. They wouldn’t just imply that critics are crazy, they’d accuse critics of being evil people.

In the Middle Ages, the Church was the center of morality, and when you criticized it you were practically standing against Goodness. Imagine that the Church also claimed to be part of a group that was responsible for all progress in knowledge and technology. Even the most devout Christians during the Middle Ages saw some pre-Christian thinkers (e.g. Plato) as being brilliant, important figures. The Church couldn’t claim a complete monopoly on reason and progress the way a scientific morality institution could.

Think of the late 18th and early 19th century. There was a fad for phrenology and ‘scientific racism’ among intellectuals. They were confident that they could scientifically determine the worth of people (by measuring their skulls, for example) then institutionalize or sterilize the unworthy. That would be just the beginning.

Occam’s Razor will cut our heart out

Our sense of right and wrong is complicated. We value competing goods like happiness and justice. We’re sensitive to context. We use morality differently in different situations; for example, how we should react to a friend’s misbehavior versus what kind of legislation we should support. This would all be hurt by a naïve attempt to make morality scientific.

Science involves breaking complicated, poorly understand processes into simple factors that can be understood. Think of Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Periodic Table of the Elements. Occam’s Razor encourages us to eliminate any factors that we don’t think we need.

Human beings, however, resist being broken down into simple factors. The social sciences have had trouble advancing at the pace of the physical sciences, and achieving the same kind of successes, because there’s so much irreducible complexity in the human mind and in human societies. Reductionism hasn’t had much success.

The ne plus ultra reductive approach to humanity is a moral philosophy called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that increasing happiness is the only thing that matters. They don’t just think that the ends justify the means, they think that the means don’t matter at all: whatever you do should be judged only by its consequences. Specifically, it should be judged by how it effects the net global amount of happiness. Everything from breaking a promise to murder is fine so long as people like it more than they’re made unhappy by it.

It sounds absurd when you first hear about it. It sounds absurd to most experts on it, too.  But there’s a deep psychological appeal, especially to numerate intellectual, to deriving right and wrong from a simple equation.

That makes it appealing to would-be scientific moralists. Even if they didn’t adopt utilitarianism whole-heartedly (though some, such as Joshua Greene, already have) they would be drawn to reductive views for the same psychological reasons. If there isn’t room in their theory for moral concepts like duty or honesty, they could just dismiss them. They’d be the same as the aether or phlogiston. Outdated explanations that no longer serve a purpose.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a long tunnel

Maybe one day it will be possible to reduce the evils of the world and the human heart through research and engineering. That day has not yet come. In the 19th century, people believed that humans had nearly completed their understanding of a mechanical, clockwork universe. Then the 20th century came and blew apart everything we knew about the universe. We can’t afford to have the same hubris about morality as we had about physics.