Amorality

Sometimes, I despair when I hear some people describing President Donald Trump as amoral. I can’t help thinking what those people mean is, that Trump’s actions don’t comport with their idea of the right way for a President to behave. To my mind that fits with the concept of immoral rather than amoral. Some might suggest that Trump does not care about right and wrong or good and bad.

 I firmly believe the concept of morality exists. I also believe the vast majority of us have a sense of morality. In the same way, the concept of objects having colour exists, and our sense that they have colour also exists. Now we can go through the science of how objects “get” their colour, there it becomes difficult to say for sure they actually do have colour. We know certain wavelengths of light are reflected (or refracted) off a surface. The light is focused on our retinas, where photochemical reactions occur in our rods and cones, particularly cones when it comes to colour. Electrochemical signals are sent down the optic nerve where the signals are processed and objects appear to have colour in our consciousness.

I am led to think that a similar process is happening when it comes to morality. People’s behaviour, including our own, register in our senses. The senses send electrochemical signals to our brains, and the signals get interpreted into likes and dislikes, perhaps neutral, or perhaps good and bad in some way. If it is our own actions or those of someone close to us that we are interpreting, then it might translate to pride, honour, self-respect, or on the negative side, shame guilt, or disgrace. But if we could not have done otherwise and it was, in the end, a happenstance that has befallen us, then believing in these emotions doesn’t make sense to me. I am not saying that emotions don’t exist, but that they are not an accurate reflection of reality. Galen Strawson makes a similar point from an ultimate responsibility point of view, here. As an example, he agonizes over whether to donate to Oxfam or buy some cake, while understanding he is not the ultimate author of his decision.

We seem to jump effortlessly from seeing or hearing something to assessing its goodness or badness. We are seemingly unaware of the physics, and chemistry that guide our evaluation. We, by and large, are unaware of millions and millions of years of evolution that have shaped our patterns of responses. We are unaware of the biases, societal and familial that have crept into our thinking. We are unaware of the triggers that might shape a particular response. If we are lucky, we may be able to identify and point to the odd event or some person who may have helped shape our response. We are surprisingly unaware beings.

I read this the other day in “Philosophy Made Simple”, (an excellent book). It contains a précis of William James on morality, He sees through the compatibilist quagmire, evasion, and jugglery:

Why, then, do we punish people if they could not have done otherwise? If we punish them because we are determined by all sorts of factors to behave in this fashion, then punishment loses all moral significance and becomes only an indication of the influencing factors that determine the punishers. If we punish people in order to alter the factors that condition their behavior, then are we, the judges, free in our decision to punish or merely determined by other factors? If the latter, then punishment is nothing more than inflicting the standard of the group in power on the minority and has no moral or ethical significance.

While I might quibble with some of the wording (and I disagree with James on his libertarian stance), I think he is spot on about his critique of morality in a hard incompatibilist world. But the point is made.

The question I am trying to ask is: when we look at the universe, we can view it with awe and wonder, and the 1.5×10⁵³ kg of baryonic matter we can view happily as amoral. The mass of the Earth is 6×10²⁴ kg and we can see that as amoral. The mass of life, expressed as carbon, is 550×10¹² kg and we largely see it as amoral. The mass of humankind is about 465×10⁹ kg, ie about 0.1% of all life, somehow we can define morality into existence for this tiny fraction of life and an infinitesimal blip in all of creation. Looking at a human being, our bodies are typically 50% to 65% water depending on a variety of factors including sex, health, and age; surely the water is not a moral substance, nor are the bones, lipids, electrolytes, proteins, or enzymatic metals.

Is my brain moral?

OK, the above argument from a philosophical point of view is crappy, to use a technical term. It appeals to incredulity. Having said that, this type of question is one that moralists could be answering. What makes humans and their chemicals moral? We seem to jump directly to the societal and perhaps psychological aspects of the concept. Is morality for free will skeptics some kind of semantic battle for the linguistic high ground like compatibilists and free will skeptics have for the term free will?

There seem to be two broad classes of morality or that it can be divided into two classes: normative and descriptive.

Descriptive morality
Certain codes of conduct are put forward by society, a group, or even an individual for their behaviour.

Normative morality
Codes of conduct that would be acceptable to rational people under given conditions.

My contention is that those who argue that morality is compatible with free will skepticism are in some subtle way using the term morality slightly differently, or at least not in the way the rest of us mere mortals use the word. Two notable authors who argue for this compatibility are Sam Harris in his Moral Landscape and Trick Slattery.

In support of this position here is a piece from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The existence of free will seems to be presupposed by the notion of moral responsibility. Most people would agree that a person cannot be morally responsible for actions that he could not help but perform. Moreover, moral praise and blame, or reward and punishment, seem to make sense only on the assumption that the agent in question is morally responsible. 

And from the same link:

Compatibilism, as the name suggests, is the view that the existence of free will and moral responsibility is compatible with the truth of determinism. 

The point here is not that there are no other views of what morality might be, but that it is a common view that to be morally responsible we have to have free will. Of course, we can define morality as something independent of whether we have free will, but then millennia of debate on the matter is sidelined into this semantic eddy.

Trick Slattery is the author of Breaking the Free Will Illusion. A good book that summarizes the arguments against free will. Trick’s book title is a little bit longer … it goes on: for the Betterment of Humankind. Now, emotionally, I want to agree wholeheartedly, but philosophically I have some concerns here.

Betterment?

If things can’t be different, who are we to say what is better? Of course, we cannot help but have an opinion and work towards what we perceive as better. I can’t help but be reminded of a Joseph Campbell quote here:

You yourself are participating in evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil to someone. This is one of the ironies of creation.

Not that I believe in evil or anything like that. But Campbell recognized that the whole thing is completely subjective and perhaps we might let go

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right. Isaac Asimov with his character, Salvor Hardin, recognized rigid moral codes can get in the way of achieving helpful or wanted goals.

And if we prefer we can end with a slightly religious perspective, a modern Western Buddhist, the late Alan Watts:

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.