Re: Morals for Atheists
Reply #31 - December 30, 2010, 02:40 AM
Ayn Rand: Objectivism
Author Ayn Rand's philosophical system, known as Objectivism, holds that the ultimate value upon which all other values depend is the individual's life, and that ethics ultimately consists of self-interest, each individual doing whatever benefits his or her life the most. Objectivist moral philosophy rejects altruism, instead arguing that each person should do only what is best for that person.
However, as should be obvious, the glaring problem with Objectivism is that it fails to accommodate Prisoner's Dilemma-like situations. If two or more Objectivists were placed in such a situation, each would immediately pick the option that was best for him individually, and the result would be a poor outcome for all. If all the individuals in this situation are rational (and rationality is a key tenet of Objectivism), they would all soon realize that the only realistic way for any of them to attain a good outcome is for each of them to cooperate and pick the less selfish course of action, i.e., to be altruistic. But this is a contradiction with the basic Objectivist tenet of selfish behavior. The fact that the selfish interests of rational individuals very often conflict, and the fact that doing what is best for us individually sometimes requires acting in altruistic ways, cause the entire system of Objectivism to collapse. To find a workable universal moral code, we must look elsewhere.
Aristotle: Virtue Ethics
The ethical system of Aristotle, developed in the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics, argues that there is a single highest good that is desirable purely for its own sake. Aristotle identifies this good as happiness (eudaimonia) and argues that it can be achieved through practicing the virtues, qualities which he identifies as courage, wisdom, kindness, and so on. He further argues that each virtue lies in the middle of a continuum, in between two undesirable extremes; for example, courage lies in between the vices of cowardice and rashness.
While Aristotle's system has much to recommend it - in particular, its correct identification of happiness as the ultimate good - its major problem is that it does not explain why some traits are virtues and not others. It does not argue that the specific qualities he identifies will lead to happiness rather than others. It also does not adequately support the claim that virtue lies in the middle of a continuum rather than at its extremes - might not extremism in defense of other good traits be a virtue, for example, rather than compromising with evil?
Aristotelian ethics, though they are not inherently flawed, lack foundation; they are "floating free" without sufficient justification. However, its listed virtues do intuitively seem like good ideas, so a worthwhile moral system should be able to derive them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract
The theory of the social contract, proposed by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, holds that individuals may freely agree to join together into a group (a state) in which each individual member, as well as the state as a whole, possesses certain rights and responsibilities. The main idea in this ethical system is that each individual agrees to surrender a certain amount of his or her freedom in return for protection and other benefits that accrue from being a member of that state.
There is nothing inherently problematic with this idea, but social contract theory cannot provide the foundation for an ethical system, for the following reason: while a state may be needed to enforce morality, it cannot create it. Democracy is the only ethical system of government, but it cannot itself be the way to create ethics - that would imply that what is right and wrong can change with the changing will and cultural mores of the people, which is, as stated above, a conclusion I must reject. Even if we assume for the moment that we have a state whose members have the power to create and enforce laws, we are still left with the question of what laws to create and why. In sum, social contract theory assumes the existence of some underlying morality which the social contract itself does not provide - and thus we must delve deeper to find the true foundation of ethical behavior.
Immanuel Kant: The Categorical Imperative
The philosopher Immanuel Kant's theory of the categorical imperative holds that one should not act in accordance with any principle that one cannot rationally will to be a universal law. For example, take the case of a person who is short of money and asks someone else for a loan, promising to repay it but secretly intending not to do so. If we apply the categorical imperative to this situation, we find that if everyone were to behave in this same way, no one would ever trust anyone else's promises. Therefore, it would be impossible for anyone to get a loan from anyone else, and a contradiction occurs; the person who wants the loan cannot rationally will that everyone act the same as him, otherwise he would not get the loan. Kant's system connects morality with rationality and holds that we should only act in ways where no such contradictions arise.
The categorical imperative does correctly sweep the board clear of actions such as lying, stealing and killing which have been generally agreed to be immoral. However, the problem with this moral system is that it is too strict: it rules out as immoral things which rational people can intuitively agree are not immoral at all. For example, take the case of what a person does for a living. According to the categorical imperative, what career should we choose? Clearly, under this principle we cannot rationally choose to be doctors, or lawyers, or computer programmers, or politicians, or artists, or craftsmen, or in fact any other specialized career - because if everyone did the same thing, society would collapse and the openings for these specialized positions would no longer exist. In fact, the only career we could choose according to this system would be the one career that we can without contradiction will to be universal: namely, a subsistence farmer, growing only the necessities of life and making all one's possessions oneself.
Clearly, this is an error. It is not morally wrong to choose a specialized career. In fact, the division of labor that exists in industrialized societies is the very thing that makes possible scientific research and technological advancement that brings about much overall good, such as cures for diseases and improvements in the length and quality of life. The categorical imperative fails when it comes to the important issue of what we should do for a living.
Another important problem with the categorical imperative is that it offers no advice on what to do when universal laws conflict. Certainly there are situations in which two incompatible actions could both be construed as the right thing to do, and the principle guiding each one could be universalized without contradiction. What, then, do we choose? (A concrete example: You pass a beggar on the street asking for money. One course of action might be to give it to him, on the grounds that this unfortunate is a human being who deserves compassion and assistance. Another might be to not give him anything, on the grounds that the homeless should be encouraged to work for a living rather than ask for handouts. It seems that a society could abide by either of these principles without producing widespread self-contradictory behavior. What would this system advise?)
A third problem with the categorical imperative is that it is too strict, in that it encourages us to formulate exceptionless universal laws which take no notice of relevant factors that might make an act wrong in one circumstance but right in another. For example, take the classic case of a person in Nazi Germany sheltering Jewish refugees in his house when a Gestapo officer comes to the door and demands to know if he has seen any Jews lately. Clearly, the moral thing to do here is to lie. But the categorical imperative, in this case, says exactly the opposite - that we should tell the truth! The categorical imperative against lying admits of no exception, no matter the extenuating circumstances. Kant himself said as much: in his essay On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies From Benevolent Motives, he argued that even the protection of innocent lives does not release us from our moral duty to never lie and to immediately disclose the full truth to anyone who asks us any question.
On this point, the categorical imperative is not just wrong, it is abhorrent. A system so manifestly in error cannot serve as the basis for a universal moral system, and therefore we must look elsewhere.
Herbert Spencer: Evolutionary Ethics
The ethical system sometimes called evolutionary ethics holds that human beings' sense of right and wrong originates from the process of natural selection that brought our species into existence. Under this proposal, our moral sense is an evolutionary adaptation for living together in social situations. This ethical system has no one founder, but perhaps its most infamous advocate was Herbert Spencer, who defended a version of it commonly known as "Social Darwinism" which proposes that it is both biologically foreordained and morally right that certain races and economic classes be treated as inferior.
Aside from the fact that evolutionary theory supports no such notions (human beings as a species are very genetically homogeneous, and no one group of people is inherently more biologically "fit" than any other), the fatal problem with this ethical system and all others like it is that it commits what is known as the naturalistic fallacy by attempting to derive an "ought" from an "is". Simply stated, just because something happens in nature does not mean it is right that such a thing should happen. All ethical theories that claim otherwise illicitly leap from noting the occurrence of a fact to attaching a value to that fact. Even versions of evolutionary ethics which hold that cooperation and reciprocal altruism are our species' nature suffer from this problem. Given the enormous diversity of behavior observed in nature - from selfishness, parasitism and xenophobia to love, altruism and cooperation - any simplistic attempt to derive a moral system from biology is bound to fail, and in any case no moral system can escape the fact that observation of facts alone can never produce an ethical "ought".
Jeremy Bentham: Act Utilitarianism
The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill after him, made one of the most significant contributions to the field of moral philosophy with their formulation of the good known as utilitarianism. In Bentham's original version of utilitarianism, good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people.
Though later modifications may have improved this system, as originally postulated it is not sufficient. For example, act utilitarianism makes no allowance for the concept of human rights - if treating one person or group unfairly would bring happiness to a greater number of others, this system would counsel us to do it. (One example of this might be a government passing a law to censor the speech of a small and unpopular political group.) Also, it judges acts purely according to their consequences, disregarding motive and intent; it holds that pleasure is always valuable even if obtained through evil acts.
Despite these problems, utilitarianism has much to recommend it; most importantly, it correctly identifies human happiness and suffering as the fulcrums of morality. It seems that its major flaws could be fixed by grafting the doctrine of human rights onto it, but what would be the justification for such a forced coupling? A satisfactory ethical code should be able to derive that idea from first principles rather than tacking it on in an ad hoc fashion.
John Rawls: Contractarianism
The philosopher John Rawls' influential conception of morality, which is an extension of Kantian and social-contract ideas, holds that the way to establish a just society is to have the relevant parties - either the people who live in that society or rational agents representing the interests of those people - agree to meet and draw up a set of rules governing how that society will operate. The catch is that these decisions must be made from behind what Rawls calls the veil of ignorance - a hypothetical position in which none of the negotiators know morally irrelevant facts about the parties they represent, such as their age, sex, race, social class or religious beliefs. Deprived of this information, the negotiators cannot insist on rules that benefit any one group, but rather will be motivated to work out rules that treat every group fairly and equally, since they do not know what their ultimate position in society will end up being once they step out from behind the veil of ignorance.
There is much merit in Rawls' conception of social justice, and its main flaw is not a theoretical but a practical one: his proposal is and forever will be a thought experiment only. There is no way this scenario could ever actually be carried out, and no matter how good a moral system seems in the abstract, it does no good to postulate one not grounded firmly in reality. Morality is inseparably enmeshed with everyday experience, and we need a moral system that recognizes this, one that can be used "on the ground" to serve as a reliable guide to ethical reasoning without removing all the actors to a far-away notional realm. This conception of justice does not help to reach a decision unless we assume that all people act as if they were reasoning from Rawls' original position, and this is clearly not the case.
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Topic: Morals for Atheists