On Medium: Childhood Innocence and Godless Morality
Read on for a way of redeeming morality despite the failure of conventional religious and secular reasons for thinking there really is a right way to behave. The key is to develop an existential perspective that encompasses, for example, the recognition of our original innocence and helplessness as infants and children.
''Morality is doubly anomalous and unnatural.''
ReplyDeleteThe universe is almost entirely amoral and lifeless. Living things emerge on a random planet in a random galaxy and as far as we currently know, they exist nowhere else in the preposterously-large expanse of space and time. Some animals develop intelligence, autonomy, and the imagination not just to prefer certain situations to others but to devise ways of pursuing their interests. The more moralistic or idealistic the creature, the more personal and godlike rather than animalistic that creature seems.''
You have a great difficulty with the concept of natural.
Morality has nothing to do with the universe. The universe, literally, is not a totality, but the sum of "infinite pieces". To say that the universe is amoral is exactly to say that a stone is amoral. Morality is related to adaptation. Connotative language implicit there.
I don't know what to say about the last sentence.
I am a very moral creature, I am godless and my morality is universal. But what is most universal is our individual perspective. That is why it seems contradictory.
Right, relative and wrong (better, equal and worse) exist objectively because there are logical criteria. It is wrong for fish to live out of water. The best for fish is to live in a region with few predators. Universal morality starts from that same objective principle, I think. Furthermore, the very act of living especially for self-conscious creatures like us is the same as being distracted from the end. For this purpose anything it's possible and the more fanciful the better.
Morality is the nature and level of existential understanding of living beings with the purpose of maximizing their adaptation. The human being, of course, ideally has the most advanced level of existential understanding. Morality is about understanding what is essential. If non-human living beings act more cruelly, they do not know the consequences of their actions or to think of more than one alternative approach. Empathy is directly associated with a more developed ability to reason, to perceive details instead of acting in a crudely pragmatic way. Slavery (systematized cruelty) without a really valid objective was never decisively essential for human survival. Human morality may have religious foundations, but it has also developed less erroneously.
ReplyDeleteI explain how morality is unnatural. You say morality has nothing to do with the universe. But then you seem to identify right and wrong with biological functions. You say these are objective, since it’s wrong for a fish to be out of water. But that’s not the moral sense of right and wrong. What’s objective there is only the descriptive fact that a fish isn’t adapted to live out of water and won’t be able to survive to reproduce. This is only about causality, not morality.
DeleteMorality is about an ideal that holds no matter what happens on earth. Even if immoral behaviour were normal, moral values would still hold, because those values are grounded in a vision of an ideal, even supernatural world we used to call “Heaven” or “Paradise.” Morality is about steering the actual world in the direction of that ideal one, bringing Earth to Heaven. That’s how morality is unnatural, because moral values are about turning the natural into the supernatural, about guiding us not according to mere natural norms but to our vision of an ideal world that exists only in our imagination.
I agree that morality isn’t entirely miraculous, since it’s based on our social instinct, which developed before religion. But it’s a stretch, I think, to equate morality with biological functions or instincts. You’ll have the genetic fallacy, the naturalistic fallacy, and the Open Question argument to deal with. But we’re both dealing with the potential collapse of morality after the death of God. This is the Nietzschean problem. We need to naturalize morality or explain it away.
When I say morality is “unnatural” I’m saying it’s antinatural (artificial), not metaphysically supernatural. I’m saying morality is unnatural in a sense that can be demonstrated by the history of the Anthropocene. I’ll be writing something soon on the documentary, “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet,” which will go into this again.
''I explain how morality is unnatural. You say morality has nothing to do with the universe. But then you seem to identify right and wrong with biological functions. You say these are objective, since it’s wrong for a fish to be out of water. But that’s not the moral sense of right and wrong. What’s objective there is only the descriptive fact that a fish isn’t adapted to live out of water and won’t be able to survive to reproduce. This is only about causality, not morality.''
DeleteMorality is also about causality.
Morality is not just a human issue because human beings did not come from nowhere, if we are distant relatives of other species. Morality is about the level of understanding and justification of behavior. For non-human living beings, morality is directly associated with adaptive causality. You are suggesting that morality is the same as idealism.
My way of approaching the subject is of course very different from yours. For me or for what I have been thinking, morality is, a priori, the maximum understanding about reality that a species can reach justifying its behavior, what is essential for them to survive. Moral or behavioral knowledge and its consequences expands as intelligence increases, ideally speaking. We can choose from a series of approach scenarios, ideally or theoretically. The other living beings do not have the same level of sophistication, of course.
The moral sense is exactly on a spectrum of right, debatable and wrong and is directly related to the ability to survive but according to the level of understanding of the species.
The difference is that human beings have the visible potential to maximize their long-term security, for example, through the genetic pacification of a population. Another differential is that we have evolved beyond the absolute perceptual limitations of the food chains, reaching the existential perspective. Nonhuman living beings behave without having the slightest awareness that what they do, in a hyperrealistic sense, is extremely frivolous if it will be in vain, fight to survive knowing that will die. The finitude of life is a truth and therefore a knowledge. When we recognize and accept it, it becomes a moral or approach criterion. It is not the wonderful scientific discoveries that are the most important truths but the existential ones. We often confuse what is more complex with what is more important. Besides being the most important, they are also the most difficult to be accepted. We are also or possibly the only living beings who are aware of what we would not like to know. It is a kind of anticipation of pain that the non-human living being can only experience physically.
The exceptionalism of the human species is that we can maximize our adaptive potential without waiting for circumstances to force us to do so. However, the erratic increase in human intelligence in terms of quality, has resulted in the intrusion of an anthropomorphic vision within what would be the field of the existential perspective, caused by the establishment of parasitic social super structures especially from civilization. Most non-human species in optimal adaptability are within their ceiling of understanding the world. They have no choice. A parasitic wasp cannot change its way of being or adapting. However, what it perceives/knows is the maximum it can. In contrast, although we have a choice, we are not at our maximum application of what we know to improve our societies and communities precisely because we live in idiocracies that greatly disturb the qualitative, more egalitarian evolution of our intelligence and its consequent direct application in our everyday lives.
As for ''the universe not being moral or immoral'', I know you understood what I mean.
Delete''CAUSED by the establishment of parasitic social super structures especially from civilization.''
DeleteSorry,
REINFORCED
''since the individual’s good may be sacrificed for the majority’s benefit''
ReplyDeleteFalse-dichotomy
''Moreover, the choice of happiness as the ultimate good isn’t rationally determined''
ReplyDeletewhy not
Life is suffering AND happiness
Perfect world is impossible. Non parasitical and predatory like world does.
" 'Natural' freedoms", or instinctive impulsivity