Unnatural ethics & relativism

Nature is fact, leading to descriptive and explanatory accounts, while morality concerns values and norms. So in an often heard fallacy evolution is somehow tied to ethical randomness.  How do we tie what is good to some objective standard? Is everything allowed, now that ‘there is no God in which to ground morality’?

Well of course not. That would imply there never was, nor ever will be a standard, however subjective it might be, for ethical behaviour, which is plainly wrong from my point of view. That statement won’t solve our problems of course, so we will try a little harder.

Keeping philosophical jargon out as much as I can, it is best to start at an easy place. Many will have heard of it before, yet I often encounter people being flabbergasted by it when the principle crosses their paths in discussion. It is the difference between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, or in pragmatic terms, a fact and norm. It is very easy to grasp this by examples from nature. When, for instance, elderly creatures die because they are less apt for survival, then that is a factual statement, prone to verification or falsification. If it turns out to be correct, what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that older creatures tend to die, duh. This then, is the ´is´ that is not an ´ought´. If you haven’t already recognized the difficulty, then you will be able to now by turning it into a normative statement. ´Elderly organisms tend to die more quickly in nature, this means that they ought to die, as it is only natural`.

Anyone that has an old grandma will protest, or at least I hope they would. But this is, exactly, what it is to turn a factual statement into a normative one. Absolutely not-done in philosophy, although more complicated counter examples have started to arise, but prone to pop up in normal conversation every now and then. If you are inclined, after the grandma example, to deny this, then consider another example.

Paedophiles. Not many people like to have them as a neighbour, especially not when children are around. When they abuse children people are often outraged, and with good reason. When discussing what to do with these people, who clearly have a functional disorder in their brain– that is to say, they are ill and need treatment, not simply punishment- things get a little messy. Most tend to make a swift u-bend and demand punishments, which neither cures victim nor perpetrator. As soon as I start arguing that these people can have a hard time themselves too -by living in a society where their needs are tabooed- I run into wall. “Nonsense, these people are crazy.”

Now if we regress, plunge into the depths and take a closer look at all the arguments, I always keep something in the back of my mind: You cannot punish someone for something he or she cannot help or for which they are not responsible. This does not mean paedophiles may run free, it means they have rights too. At these moments people often frustratingly turn their heads to a last resort “that it is just unnatural”. And there we have it, a natural thing that became a norm.

Is it informative, does it help us here? I don’t think it does. “Look”, you might say, “there are no grown up lions trying to make love with cubs.” That is probably correct, so in the case of lions it is unnatural to have sex with whelps. Does that mean they are not allowed to? You tell me. Paedophiles again: They either are what nature made of them, what society made of them or some mix in between. In the first case the unnatural argument already stopped working, in the second other people are as much to blame as the paedophiles themselves and the third is a bit more ambiguous, but the blame is not all credited to the person’s own fault. These things are very important. From a societal perspective it might be a good solution to simply lock them up,  but from a judicial perspective it is not correct to punish misbehaviour driven by uncontrollable forces.  It is telling, I think, that even in extreme cases like these there are examples in nature where children are involved in sex with adults. There are even monkeys who have sex with ‘children’ to arrange social relations and hierarchy, so unnatural, in the strict sense, will already have been deflated.

My attention was turned to paedophiles for a reason. As I said, and I hope you agree, it shows just how easy it is to condemn an act without thinking it through, sometimes just because it feels wrong. It has been done before on many occasions, as people desperately sought for objective moral grounds, so don’t worry. Here are some other examples, some of which are almost humorous.

Let’s start with the West’s beloved Socrates who demonstrated to his contemporaries the difficulties involved in attempting to assign the gods as the source of morality. He left us the question “is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Whether philosophically inclined or just quick witted, it’ll lead you to a difficulty. When it is pious because it is loved by the Gods, morality becomes arbitrary: It’ll mean that when they decide that killing kittens is pious, it’ll make it a good thing to do, which is clearly counter intuitive. If you choose the other option, it logically implies some other reason that the pious is good, because apparently the God’s also use that reason.

Another example is Aquinas, a rightly famous Christian. He, sadly, deduced norms from nature, which doesn’t work as we already saw. Innovative as he was, he also tried it from a teleological perspective. This takes a different route, but it ends up where we stopped earlier: Something is perceived in nature, and therefore it is right. Take the human eye and nose. They have a clearly perceived function for most of us. If you were to ask, “for what do you use your eye”,  the question would  almost appear to be inappropriate. Well, for seeing maybe? Likewise with the nose, only then for smelling, and perhaps, breathing. There are many more of these examples, many having apparently easy answers, such as what the heart, lungs and ears are for. The problem is that they are pretty clear cut cases on first sight, but what if you push a little further?

What would you do if you risked your eyes drying out, making them dysfunctional? You would see a doctor, I suppose. Even if you wouldn’t, I still imagine you will, just for the sake of argument. Now, the eyelash seems to hold a proper relation to the eye in making sure it keeps functioning. So my inclination is that it is a natural function of the eyelash to keep your eye healthy. That is a descriptive statement or an explanatory one at best. If we walk the path laid down to us by Aquinas, batting your eyelash to impress someone across the street will therefore be an immoral act.

Are there any other ways out? Going for another optional route in stating that ‘nature almost universally tends to function in that way’ -which you could see in this case as the equivalent of saying that certain things almost always work in a certain way, via a certain route and sometimes towards a certain goal-, won’t bring us anywhere. One simple example to illustrate this: Most people are right handed. That logically excludes the possibility that most people are left handed, provided we read ‘or’ as ‘implying only one option’. Does this mean that, because most are right, being left handed is an act of immorality? The judgment is yours to make.

The basis of the actuality of moral standards

The forgoing was almost entirely couched in negativity meaning my objective was to defuse some of the issues that invariably arise in any discussion of ethics thus denying them the opportunity to obscure our vision or to block any further fruitful discourse on these matters. We’ll turn now toward a more positive, more actual instantiation of morality that will presumably provide a framework wherein I will not argue for decisive rules that ought to be followed, but rather one that demonstrates why being an atheist does not deprive an individual of an ethical paradigm.

Surprisingly, it brings us back to an aspect of nature. After all the deflation, it is time to give nature some credit for the qualities with which we are bestowed. The most relevant one is, without a single doubt, language.  Having an ethical code, let alone adhering to one, is virtually impossible without an ability to use and turn to language, as reflection needs a vehicle.

As there are many different languages, subtracting things that are present in all of them is an unlikely and immensely complicated way of gaining results. Gladly, there are better ways. The foundation of a language is important here. Languages are not prone to individual changes, they are large systems guided by rules. Changes of meaning can therefore only be achieved via acceptance and recognition by more than one person.

You might say: Well I am able to rephrase this sentence or re-examine the meaning of this word. You still won’t have moved even an inch, as language’s syntax –grammar or structure- held you firm in place. This fact, the very simple observation that language is bound by rules and therefore non-random, together with semantics (meaning), creates a collective body enabling you to communicate and pass on intelligible information. In this the reason for the impossibility of a private language is hidden: A private language knows no rules but those of your will; content, structure and meaning can be changed to your liking. Ask why those things are necessary for a language and I will turn to Wittgenstein by replying: “That is what it means to be a language”. (And there is no denying that, unless you are able to go beyond your own cultural horizon, which will need reflection, and guess what you need in order to reflect?)

My indebtedness to Wittgenstein is great here, as he demonstrated not only the omnipresence of meaning in language, but also a refutation of scepticism. Scepticism requires language to express itself, but to refute itself as well, hence it presupposes what it tries to falsify or deny. This also means that language is, in a certain way, something objective, something you can use to build with or on. It might not prove reality beyond all doubt, but it is ‘as solid as a rock’ for human standards.

The good thing is that language, by its semantics, is meaningful. Being meaningful, it carries value in the widest sense of the word. Don’t think metaphysics; remember Husserl who said (transl.) ‘Go back the things themselves’, in a similar fashion Wittgenstein said ‘Don’t think, look!’. This means something very simple. Concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ and ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’ are part of the system. Can you strictly define them? I couldn’t, and I dare say you cannot either. Still, you do grasp their meaning. You grasp their meaning because you know how to use them, you know when either one of them can be applied to a situation in reality, precisely because they became what they are via a route that ties them to the horizons of our lives.

If this sounds vague, then let me explain. There is nothing that makes ‘good’ an objective thing, or better: there is not a Platonic essence of ‘goodness’. If you encounter something, judge it to be ‘good’ and ask yourself ‘why ‘:  What will you seek? Reasons or essence? They are not the same. You know something to be good, because you have been raised and taught, acquired and mastered a language in a culture that you made your own, came to be a creature capable of reflection and independent thought: This is what makes you yourself able to judge, because you have a standard that is both your own, and that of your culture.

This implies something: Sharing aspects is not the same as sharing everything. Being embedded in a culture, then, still leads to misunderstanding. There is room for discussing things, thanks to a common language, but there will remain things on which you cannot come to agree (republicans versus democrats, for instance). The jump towards ethical relevance is nearly there, because, on those things we agree to disagree, it is most often our norms, not our values that ensure pluralism.

By now you’ll understand, I hope –or I’ll have failed abysmally-, that ethics is not something beyond our lives. If nothing was new to your brains, then I regret wasting your time, but then you might as well read the rest. My conclusion of this paragraph draws precisely on the fact that, though meaning is not strictly definable, it is here. Remember that it is part of a (language and cultural) tradition, a process of learning, constantly being redefined, subtracted off and added to. Everything then, is not permitted, or at least not in our world. If anyone thinks this is not true, try to murder in our world and see what happens: You’ll be locked up. Why? Because you attacked our system, the system we live in and came to see as justified, true and worthy of consent.

An attack on cultural relativism; ‘why we can be good, after all’

So morality and language share as close a relation as anything. As there are so many languages, do they all lead to different codes and standards? If so, are we confined to live in a world of relativism?

To the first question, I am inclined to nod. Yes, there are many languages; yes these lead to different codes of behaviour. I left out the most crucial question, however: Do these lead to different values? To that, I vigorously shake my head. ‘Naturally’, it is possible that people might live differently from what we are used to, and therefore come up with a system so tellingly anti-us, that nothing seems to be able to explain it away, and it some cases people might even have very different values, but these, I think, are exceptions and no need whatsoever to think morals and ethics are a waste of our time, by never being able to live up to any objective standard.

To prove my point, I’ll use some rather extreme examples. Extreme example are well able to shed light on normal issues, as both I and another greatness of the 20^th century share as an outlook (Austin, a British philosopher of language. The use of ‘another greatness’ refers to Wittgenstein. Don’t confuse my imperfect reference for arrogance).  Two examples are hopefully enough: Ritual sacrifice and reincarnation.

A ritual sacrifice is not something that is generally considered to be inherently valuable, as it is tied to a set of ‘ought’ beliefs. It describes or prescribes what must happen. Think of several reasons why rape as a ritual sacrifice must happen, such as ‘it pleases the Gods’, ‘it makes the Gods less angry’ or ‘the Gods are bored with normal politics’. Whatever you come up with, you will see it is not a value that is being denounced.

Not being denounced? What could be more gruesome than rape? Not much springs to mind to give a satisfying answer. And it needn’t. It is the norm that is revolting, not the value. Gods that like rape scenes repel us, no doubt. What about the people who practice these rituals? At first thought, they too would suffer the fate of our displeasure. But what makes them do it? Pleasing the Gods: The very same thing Christians profess to do when attending church and Muslims when practicing Salaat. Westerns burned witches in ‘the middle or dark ages’, as they were ‘devilish’. We don’t agree with that, but we all understand what drove them: Their religious beliefs, their loyalty to God, and surely their ignorance. That is what you get when God is the ground for morality: Everything is allowed, as long as God likes it. It is not evolution that makes this world random, dangerous and immoral here.

One more example, before I’ll call it a day: Reincarnation. Some people are very, very reluctant to kill earthworms. This would strike many of us as odd. They make such good baits for fishing!

Does this mean -or do those people believe- that earthworms are valuable, precious creatures? No, it does not. There is another belief backing their supposed love for earthworms. Those people love their relatives, and they believe that those of them that died could, or even might have, come back as earthworms. So the value here is (for instance): You don’t kill or harm those you love. Taking it a step further, this will imply a norm: You don’t kill or harm any earthworms.

A meaningful world

The notion that gives morality actual input is tied to the world we live in, I feel like I have said it a dozen times (maybe I have). Values are much more universal than we they are, especially when we encounter strange, unfamiliar cultures. Surely you can come up with many counter examples that put heavy strain on my point of view, from cannibals to devil adherents. You would even have me on your side, but that is not the point. The point is that we now have a reasonably objective platform from which we can judge not just our own standards, without those of others as well.  And isn’t that a lovely fact?

Isn’t it a good thing to know we, not just religious people, can be moral? You might wonder why nothing was written on evolution in here. The most notable and well-known scientific theory on earth, perhaps, yet that would irritate as many readers as it would please. The paradigm of science tells us all about evolution, and we would do well to look beyond evolution, which is after all a realm of facts not of norms. All the stories about our endowments with a social nature are very plausible to my mind, even if they aren’t to yours. These would explain why we are social, why we reason and why we care about morals, but they would not justify them, as we now know.

To end this article neat and clean, I would have to present a nice summary and conclusion, but if you are a good reader you will have had enough; enough to know that all is well.