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How Moral Philosophy Broke Politics
And How To Fix It
Robert A. Johnson
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eBook - ePub
How Moral Philosophy Broke Politics
And How To Fix It
Robert A. Johnson
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About This Book
We live in a remarkable world: science and technology has shifted our understanding of what's possible and transformed our lives. Rain dances and sun worshipping have been replaced by quantum computers, speed-of-light rockets, and our ever-closer inching towards genuine artificial intelligence. But somehow, more and more of us are feeling hopeless; we are still ruled by political systems that haven't hugely changed since they fell into place hundreds, arguably thousands, of years ago. The part of our society that makes decisions on everything from our health to our work is almost completely dysfunctional. Politicians aren't held to account by truth, aren't striving for shared visions of human thriving, and are allowed to mix and mash their policies based upon sound bites and media furores rather than actually progressing humankind. All the while having to focus on short-term goals rather than sustainable ideas. How Moral Philosophy Broke Politics argues that a rational, evidence-based framework for ethics can be developed, by drawing all of our moral opinions back to three basic principles that underlie all of our concerns. By doing this we can rationally judge and weigh new policies and decisions in a way which is accountable and, whilst still debatable, much easier to find consensus on. If we were to accept this new framework then we would be much better off not just in politics, but in all those areas of life which politics affects. The world has changed unrecognisably in the last thousand years, whilst politics hasn't changed much at all. We need to start using reason to develop it into something useful.
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Ethics & Moral PhilosophyChapter 1: Marrying Morality with Reality
How do we decide whatâs right and wrong?
In 2012 a prominent politician (one of the most influential decision makers in Britain12) published a much-referenced article in a British newspaper entitled âWe stand side by side with the Pope in fighting for faithâ.13 In it, Baroness Warsi noted that Europe needs to be âmore confident and more comfortable in its Christianityâ and warns against âmilitant secularisationâ which âdemonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimesâ.
One might be puzzled by such statements; after all Britain doesnât seem overly âmilitantâ in its secularism.14 Thereâs no one burning down churches or mosques in the name of atheism, for example, and those who most militantly advocate secularism seem to do so with no more aggression than to speak or write about it. Quite a long way from totalitarian regimes, one might argue. Indeed, since 2012 the world has seen an increase in religious extremism â cities as diverse as Paris, London, Ankara and Boston have suffered horrific attacks. It seems naive to note that many of the recent attacks were Islamic, and so to argue that Christianity is valuable whilst Islam is destructive. A quick glance through history would not allow Christianity off the hook; perhaps a modern look at American terrorism, and its many shootings related to Christian delusions, would also rebalance the scales. And thatâs before we talk about the violent opposition we see towards abortion clinics.
People have naturally waned from Christianity over the years, undoubtedly, but militant secularism seems like an overstatement. This natural move towards secularisation is even understandable. Thereâs no evidence for untestable assertions like that of a God, and people seem to have naturally recognised that religion might just be wishful thinking. The late Christopher Hitchens perhaps summarised it best when he wrote that âI was educated by Sir Karl Popper to believe that a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one.â15 To posit assertions about creators of the universe is akin to positing assertions about surely mythical guardians of the galaxy â the evidence that supports Rocket Raccoon or He-Man being our real saviour is equal to that of God.
Warsiâs entire article seems a bit odd, that is until you read her justification for making such statements: âTo create a more just society, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their creeds.â
Unwittingly, in an impassioned defence of religion, Warsi places her finger right on the pulse of what is arguably the biggest innate problem we face as a society and as a species. With the ever-increasing secularisation of society, stemming from an entirely reasonable rejection of religion, there also seems to be an air of moral confusion. It pours from the gap left by our previous moral rule bearer of religion, and seems to ask us to conclude that without God to set the rules, morality must be flexible and relative else non-existent.16
As such, society is facing a crisis of confusion when it comes to moral inclinations. On the one hand, we want to oppose murder, rape, and hundreds of other heinous acts of cruelty which are currently against the law, in the most fundamental manner. The media and our personal opinions are still outraged by these kinds of acts against innocent victims. On the other hand, we seem to be in a position of understanding that morality is largely relative and thus any newly thought moral or immoral acts we see people engaging in (ethical veganism as moral, or deforestation as immoral, for example) are a matter of subjective choice rather than of any sense right or wrong.17 We tend to take the position that what is illegal is wrong, but so long as something is legal it is acceptable, and thereby only to be taken as immoral in relation to personal tastes. Law reflects objective wrongs, whilst all others are subjective.
This creates a paradoxical tension, an infinite feedback loop that wasnât there before, as law itself is primarily a reflection of our majority societal opinions. So if we want to oppose something thatâs against the law then we need to be able justify why we oppose it â we make law, it doesnât make itself â and similarly we need to leave the law open for new things which we discover to be immoral, in order to legally forbid them. But how can we do this if we want to claim that doing right or wrong is just a choice? How can we believe that morality is both objective and subjective: that some things are wrong, yet others of the same ferocity are a matter of choice? To understand the issue more completely, we need to explore the topics involved.
Law as a reflection of social opinion
There is no âall seeing eyeâ who creates and maintains the juridical system. In modern democratic systems, laws are invented and amended by us. This simple observation quashes the idea that something being against the law makes it immoral, or that something being perfectly legal makes it acceptable. As history progresses, laws will change, and they thus reflect societal opinion of the time, rather than the ultimate answer on whether an act is morally right or wrong.
The most popular examples to demonstrate this point often focus on human slavery, or other things we now find morally abhorrent but which a few hundred years ago may have been perfectly legal. In fact, one may not be far wrong in claiming everything we now view as immoral would have been legal somewhere, at some point in history (race-based slavery, or the ownership of women are good examples). And, unsurprisingly, many things we now find acceptable or even moral (such as challenging scientific conclusions with new evidence or criticising religious doctrine by pointing to its inherent paradoxes or lack of evidence) would have been deemed morally unacceptable in some society at some point. Law is merely the reflection of the current societal attitudes and cannot be used as justification for moral stances, at least not any more than we can justify them by saying that we can physically commit said acts. This statement is summed up nicely by the phrase âthe way things are does not justify the way they ought to beâ. I could jump out of my second-floor window right now, and likely break a bone or two, but this does not imply that I should. The laws of physics and the laws of the land share in allowing us to commit ourselves to certain actions, but neither could be taken as sole moral justification for doing so.
The most likely explanation for the widespread belief in current moral norms, and the corresponding offering of moral guidance solely to law, was uncovered by Eidelman et al in a study called The Existence Bias.18 The authors demonstrated that âpeople treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodnessâŚthe status quo is seen as good, rightâŚand desirable.â Studies such as this can explain why our problematic and irrational beliefs formed, but if the status quo does not conclusively tell us what is acceptable and what is wrong, then what does? The natural act is to begin applying scepticism to the subject of morality.
Does morality even exist?
Religious justification
The oldest and arguably still the most popular reason for invoking a notion of morality is down to religion. If God exists, and has rules he wants us to follow, then these are moral facts. We can thus judge the wrongness or acceptability of any action with reference to whether God approves or not.
Society increasingly rejects this form of moral theory though, with Western society (and indeed various states within Africa and Asia) now providing examples of almost entirely secular governments.19 We live in a world where science moves us forward and is valued based on the fact that it needs to demonstrate (or at least conclusively and rationally imply) that which it wants to confirm as true, rather than merely announcing it. So when such an excellent and developed system for finding truth exists, why would we use the justification of something which we have no evidence for at all? One by one we have discarded beliefs formed out of myth and tradition. The most notable remaining myth in society is religion and its gods.
There is no relevance in the 21st century to an argument that says 'A force/man which I have no evidence for, and which I believe in simply because of my own personal valuing of a mental occurrence called faith, should tell me what to do. My proof is that it is written in a bookâ. We should respect religious people as much as we can within society, but if we take issues like morality seriously we should not be subjecting it to ideas for which there is no evidence. God may be a more serious concept for people than the Flying Spaghetti Monster,20 but when we are discussing rationally they should share equal, non-existent pull. Similarly, opinions about âforcesâ or âenergiesâ which do not resemble classic ideas of God, but which claim to provide moral ideas (like karma, for instance) should be tested and subjected to the rigours of reason. A scientist would be rightly ignored, and perhaps even laughed out of conferences for stating that gravity is not a justifiable force, but that weâre attracted to the ground because strong, invisible, prehistoric jelly covers the earthâs surface. And yet religious and spiritual ideas, like the existence of God, or karma, hold the same level of evidence. Advancement is about proving past ideas wrong, or discarding them based on what we now know, in order to develop our knowledge base. But if we canât discard something thereâs zero evidence for, then thereâs little point in trying to discard anything and the whole system suffers a major flaw.
The âscience is also faith-basedâ defence
It is true that not every piece of scientific knowledge we have can be conclusively supported; indeed theoretical science deals with ideas which we may as yet have no evidence to test with. However, every one of these âtheoriesâ are required because we know there must be a theory. Take quantum mechanics, where several theories battle for describing several different concepts, which we have as yet been unable to conclusively test â at least not to a level of satisfactory and conclusive results (though, we appear to get closer every year). Even if we were never able to test them, we still know that there must be a theory that is correct, as we see activity that must work based on some law. Thus there is need to devise a theory that explains it. However, ideas like religion are not theories in the same manner. We have no need to imply that a theory of religion is needed, as the universe looks precisely as it should look were there to be no God, and were we to be individuals without a perfect ability to understand how the universe works.
If we could say the same about physics at the quantum level â that it looks precisely how it should look if there were no quantum theories â then quantum theory would be a mute subject and would not be considered science. We see subatomic particles appear to behave in ways we need explanation for, though, so we create theories of explanation to test. We have never come across an event with which we need to create a theory of God to explain â not when we have the ability to say âwe donât know how that happens yetâ â and furthermore, what kind of idea could have us so perplexed, that culturally invented icons and mythologies are a good explanation? It is best to remember that God was created in human minds; there is no evidence for it, and weâve no need to invoke a theory of God in order to explain worldly events.
If you have to use God as an explanation for something then all kinds of other ideas are back on the table also: Thor, Allah, Superman, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Spider-Man, an omnipotent Barbie or an all-seeing alien cockroach are just a tiny fraction of an infinite number of explanations that work as well as a theory of God. It is only when you consider the sheer number of other potential theories which work just as well as God, in the situations where God could possibly be required as an explanation, that you realise just how poor an explanation it is. If there is something we canât explain then a cultural myth is not likely to be the answer we are searching for. âRandomnessâ or âchanceâ is actually always going to be a better explanation than âGodâ, as it is always more likely that things happen entirely naturally but in a way we canât fathom yet, than it is that they happen because an omnipotent and immaterial being created them.
As a result of ideas like this, and given the ever increasing secularisation of society over the years, we've begun to grow away from these irrational religious ideals of morality as a factual, God-given concept. Previously, many societies were largely ruled by the idea that a God or benevolent force had set the rules and we must follow them, else we might be punished in some way.21 Many Western court rooms, which dealt with such laws here on Earth, started proceedings with oaths on the Bible.22 However, as science has gotten more capable, so has our ability to doubt the existence of a Creator of any kind.
The rational debunking of this first aspect, religion, has left morality in the firing line. Religion is the easiest way to justify morality, as it claims to need no evidence. So if there is no God setting moral rules, how do such rules realistically exist in the first place? After all, scientists are hardly climbing mountains to uncover new moral facts underneath rocks, or implying the existence of moral truths in reactions after the collision of particles at a sub-atomic level. If God isnât setting objective moral laws, how do they exist?
The spiritual 'get out clause'?
Itâs true that many admit the fallibility of religious conceptions of morality in modern society; however, a good chunk of those people believe there is an irrational âget out clauseâ in science, which means spiritual arguments are valid, and thereby we can base our morality around what would have been irrational ideas like âindependent moral factsâ.23 With a regular reference to quantum mechanics (an area of science that proves very popular in religious and spiritual discussions due to it being fundamentally misunderstood by many), the argument goes that some areas of science conclusively prove that the laws of physics are paradoxical. Hence we do not know science to be a reliable, consistent method, and spiritual ideas are perfectly valid.
Indeed quantum mechanics is an interesting modern form of scientific investigation, which baffled (and still baffles) many physicists. Danish physicist Niels Bohr famously said, âAnyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.â Whilst the infamous Richard Feynman is thought to have elaborated further with, âIf you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.â24 Itâs little wonder that people have leapt on the subject in order to provide evidence for the mysterious. Itâs not at all difficult to find spiritual groups and influenced companies who mangle the ideas or terminology of quantum mechanics in order to make a profit or create a justification for nonsense.25
Quantum mechanics truly is a fascinating discipline, and not just because of its counter-intuitive results. The entire area demonstrates the real strengths of science: that whatever ideas are held to be correct should be constantly challenged if new evidence is uncovered. Science does not stick to rigid accounts of events which do not hold to be true, and instead develops as our understanding of the world develops. Quantum mechanics would not be studied under the umbrella of science at all if scientists were not held strictly to these high standards.
But what is either a dishonest claim or a simple misunderstanding is that areas like quantum mechanics mean spiritual âtheoriesâ should be supported. Sure, science is a developing system which constantly evolves and so can often hold truths which it later proves to be wrong. But the truths it holds are not personally posited, nor the subject of desires, individual experiences or armchair philosophical inquiry. Every truth held in science (however wrong it may prove to be in the future) is held precisely because it makes sense with what we know of the world, and is the best account we have in relation to the evidence. A spiritual idea that says we canât prove everything with science, or that science is wrong by virtue of its evolution, is engaging in methodological hyperbole. Science is built to take into account the changing nature of truth based on increasing levels of evidence, so it is telling that it has yet to embrace the supernatural as having positive truth values.
The spiritualist will also often point at the âbig bangâ and question âwhat came before it?â The answer science predicts of nothingness is not a shot in the dark so much as the best supported answer we have. There is no evidence that there was anything before the big bang, but there is evidence to suggest there was a big bang. The spiritualist who claims nothingness cannot create something (however intuitive this is) shouldnât then posit a spiritual idea, which there is no evidence for, as true due to this paradox about nothingness which they have identified.
The fact is that there is less evidence for any spiritual idea you can think of (whether it be of a supernatural force, or energy, the positions appear to be limitless) than there is for nothingness. The beauty of admitting there may have been nothing, but that science hasnât yet developed to a ...