On moral systems, Part 1

During an interview with General Lord Dannatt, during which the former head of the Army talked about whether the military could teach the rest of society anything about moral values, Edward Stourton put the following question (Sunday 13.11.11):

The other question it raises is whether it’s proper to talk about instilling moral values or whether what you’re essentially doing in the armed forces is instilling a code of conduct, because if you’re talking about instilling moral values you are talking about using a moral system, and it’s quite difficult to see how you do that in a society where there isn’t a consensus about, for example, Christian belief.

This reveals several questionable assumptions, which are common in discussions about moral values.

• Repeated use of “instilling” implies a blank slate view of human nature, in which things like moral values have to be acquired by children from adults. Against the blank slate view is a variety of compelling evidence (Pinker 2002), including our possession of an innate language instinct. There is also growing evidence of an innate moral sense.
• It is assumed that religion and ethics naturally go together, which is not surprising given that Sunday is a BBC “Religion & Ethics” production (there is no BBC category called “Atheism & Ethics”).
• There is a blind spot, in that secular moral values which might cross both national and cultural boundaries aren’t in the frame.
• Strangely in this religious context, there is a kind of relativism at work. The reference to a consensus about Christian belief implies that a Christian’s moral values may differ from those of another religion.

With the phrase “code of conduct” Stourton distinguishes between arbitrary social conventions (e.g. the rules of football) and what he probably believes are absolute moral values (e.g. it wrong to commit murder). However, these supposedly absolute moral values, if they are handed down by God, are actually as arbitrary as the rules of football, in that goodness is determined by fiat rather than by appeal to a standard of goodness that is independent of God (as shown by the Euthyphro dilemma).

For the religious, where lies the true distinction between the arbitrary and the absolute?

Moral values originating from a supernatural source have all the same problems as divinely revealed knowledge: how do you know whether such knowledge can be trusted? This holy book says one thing, which is contradicted by another holy book. In this scheme, there are as many moral systems as there are people who claim to be able to communicate with the divine: no wonder the religious are often confused about what is right and what is wrong!

Recognizing the natural origin of moral values would help clear up much of this confusion, and allow progress to be made in ethics. No one would claim that the rules of football are part of human nature. They have to be taught explicitly. In contrast, according to Boyer (2001, p. 198), we “all have moral intuitions (‘My friend left her purse here, I must give it back to her’), moral judgements (‘He should have returned his friend’s purse’), moral feelings (‘He stole his friend’s purse, how revolting!’), moral principles (‘Stealing is wrong’) and moral concepts (‘wrong’, ‘right’)” that are part of a normally developed human nature.

A Darwinian perspective enables a better understanding of both the origin of moral behaviour and how it develops in humans, and it also provides the fundamental polarity that is the basis of many moral values: what is good or bad for the organism is what allows that organism to flourish or causes it to suffer. This principle operates deep within the physical world (even single-celled organisms are either repelled or drawn towards stimuli), and in that sense it is “absolute” in that all life respects it. Of course, that “absolute” does not survive translation into complex domains: what is good for the lion (a meal of freshly killed gazelle) is not good for the gazelle, and what is good for the gazelle (the lion and her cubs starve) is not good for the lion.

One of the major themes of Robert Frank’s (2011) latest book, The Darwin Economy, is that there is often a conflict between the interests of individuals and those of the group. Darwin recognized this at work in many of the species he observed, and Frank recognizes the same conflict in our economic life.

There is I think a sense in which moral behaviour is an attempt to resolve this conflict, or at least turn down the volume. After all, one man on a desert island would find it easier to follow the ten commandments than one man in New York. Only in the presence of other people do we have to worry about whether our interests align with theirs. Out of all the animals, of course, humans are best equipped to reflect upon their situation and to take steps to mitigate their bad behaviour.