Inquiring Infidel

 Tonight I had a debate with Richard Carrier on morality. He believes that Goal Theory is the best account of morality, and I believe desirism is more accurate. After any debate, you go back and think of some things that you should have said better, but I think overall it was a great exchange. Video of the debate will be posted soon, but for now, here's the text of my opening speech:

First off, I'd like to thank Ben and the Ethical Society for hosting tonight's debate. I'd also like to thank Dr. Carrier for that excellent opening speech. Like Dr. Carrier, I think it's important to use reason to discover moral truth. We must expose our views to scrutiny and embrace the possibility that we're wrong, for that's the only way we learn. I hope that however tonight's debate turns out, we all walk away slightly closer to the truth. Far too much evil has already been done by people who thought they were doing good.

While I think morality is important, there's nothing magic about the word itself. If someone defined morality as following some person's arbitrary whim, then morality wouldn't matter to me. I don't care about how you choose to define the word morality; I care about making the world a better place.

To figure out what a better world would be, I think we have to start with desires. As Dr. Carrier said in a recent blog post, desire is the root of all value. Among other things, I want to eat a tasty slice of pizza, have fewer people die of preventable diseases, and live a happy life. Those things have value to me. That value is real. The objects of of my desires have real value. But morality is about more than my desires. In order to make the world a better place where everyone gets more of what they value, we have to consider ALL desires.

How do we bring about such a world? We do that by promoting good desires. In a world where everyone hated being hurt but wanted to hurt as many people as possible, everyone would be miserable. But in a world where everyone wanted everyone else to be happy, everyone's desires would be fulfilled. So a moral desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires, and a moral action is one that someone with those good desires would perform.

Some people think that morality should be focused on what action maximizes happiness. But I disagree. If a mother had to either kill one of her children or have them both be killed, happiness would be maximized by her gleefully killing one of her children without hesitation or remorse. This would minimize their suffering, as well as her suffering. However, think about the kind of mother who would do that. If she had a strong desire for her children to be happy and healthy, it would have been very difficult for her to kill either of them and if she did decide to kill one of them, it would at least have been an immensely painful decision for her to make. A loving mother cannot instantly turn off her love in cases like this. Since desiring that your kids be happy and healthy generally fulfills a lot of other desires (like their desires to be happy and healthy), it's a good desire, one that we should promote. We should not praise a mother who gleefully kills her child regardless of the circumstances, because we want parents who have a strong desire to care for their children.

If we promote good desires, we will make the world a better place, and will also make ourselves better off. If everyone had more good desires which fulfilled more of the desires of others, then more of our own desires would be fulfilled. It is in our own interest to get people to have good desires.

In order to promote good desires, we need to make better use of tools like praise and condemnation, reward and punishment. Although those words may have a negative connotation, there's nothing sinister about them. We already use these tools every day. For example, a simple “Thank you” to someone who helped you out can make them more likely to help you in the future. A football coach might praise his team and reward them with an extra day of rest after a well-played game. Your wife might punish you for your indiscretions.

We should focus on improving desires since our desires determine our actions. If I desire to go see the latest Disney movie, and I believe it is showing at 5pm at the local theater, I drive to the theater.

Almost everyone wants to be happy. But it is not the only thing we desire. I would want my children to go to college, even if I knew I would not live long enough to derive any happiness from seeing it happen. I would rather make a groundbreaking scientific advance that was only recognized after my death than be famous in my lifetime for a discovery that later turned out to be false and which ended up holding back scientific progress. The second life might be happier, but I would prefer the first. So happiness, which Dr. Carrier defines in his book as “an abiding contentment” is not the only thing people value. A content world is not necessarily a better world. We must consider everything we care about.

Dr. Carrier could respond by using a different definition of happiness, in which you can become happier even after you're dead. One problem with this approach is that it is misleading since it is so far from how people normally use the word “happiness”. It also doesn't make much sense to say that happiness is the one thing we want more than anything else, if by happiness you just mean everything that we value.

While we're typically happy when our desires are fulfilled, happiness and desire fulfillment are not the same. People who are moderately depressed may still desire that their family does well even if nothing makes them happy. We also may be willing to sacrifice our own life to save someone else's. Even if we know that we will die instantly and get almost no happiness from the action, we will lay down our life if we care enough about the cause.

For these reasons, I think it is wrong to say that happiness is the goal of morality. Morality should take into account everything that we value.

I think Dr. Carrier is also mistaken when he says in his writings that since people will always do what they most desire to do, we should focus on making sure that all moral agents act rationally and with sufficient information. It's important to be rational and well informed, but I think he's mistaken when he argues that everyone would act morally if only they were fully informed and rational. The problem is that everyone has different desires. Some people have more evil desires than good ones and could best fulfill their desires by acting immorally. If your only desire is to kill as many people as possible, being more informed and rational will not prevent you from killing.

Of course Dr. Carrier could respond by slipping morality into his definition of rationality, but I think this is problematic. A theist could simply define rationality as acting based on the Bible. By that definition, the theist could rightly argue that if only atheists were rational, they would believe in God. Rationality is about acting consistently with your reasons for action and the only reasons for action that have been shown to exist are desires.

I think Dr. Carrier would respond by saying that even if someone has bad desires, they would be happier if they acted perfectly morally. For the moment, let's set aside my concern that happiness is not the only thing we value. What reason do we have to think that someone would be happier if they were perfectly moral? There are definitely some moral traits that make us happier, but it seems like an extraordinary claim to say that evolution would just happen to result in all our brains working in such a way that every moral trait would increase our happiness. Evolution works on the individual gene level. If an immoral trait makes it more likely that you'll pass on your genes, that trait will become more common. Even one of the works that Dr. Carrier cites to defend his claim that acting virtuously makes you better off argues that evolution promotes some negative traits like aggressiveness. Sometimes doing good makes us happy, and sometimes doing evil makes us happy. Sometimes evolution favors good, sometimes evolution favors evil. With all the violence in the animal kingdom, and our own species, it seems unreasonable to assume that every trait which helps others would also help one's own genes. So I see no reason to think that evolution would make it so that acting morally would always make us happier.

In addition to happiness, many of us value the freedom to be ourselves and pursue the things we want to pursue. If we could become fully informed and rational, and then had the same desires that all the other fully informed and rational people have, we would lose everything that makes us unique. We would no longer have our own unique memories, or our own unique wants. Even if a fully informed perfectly morally person was maximally happy, that person would not and could not be me.

So I reject Dr. Carrier's claim that knowing about morality causes you to act like an angel regardless of your desires. Many philosophers argue that in order for something to count as morality, it has to provide a reason-for-action that motives all people to follow it. I don't think that such a morality exists, but I also don't think this is an essential part of morality. People have many contradictory beliefs about what morality is and no definition could satisfy all of them. But this doesn't disprove morality any more than some people believing that God is supernatural and others believing that he's the entire natural world proves that God could not exist. If our definition of a word had to be consistent with everything people ever took the word to mean, then we would have to throw out all language.

Atoms used to be defined as the indivisible building blocks of everything. But when we discovered that they could be divided, we didn't say “I guess atoms don't exist after all”, we just said that they're slightly different than we once thought. However, when we discovered there was no mass-less inside things which was released by fire, we stopped using the term phlogiston because there was nothing for it to refer to. Even though morality does not compel evil people to be good, it still has all the important components of morality. Under my view of morality, we can still say that regardless of individual opinion, certain actions are wrong because they tend to hurt other people by depriving them of things they care about. We have good reason to praise those who do good, and condemn those who do evil.

We can condemn slavery as the evil that it is. Even if everyone on Earth thought slavery was moral and  wanted to be enslaved, it would still be wrong since it deprives people of things they want, like freedom to make decisions for themselves, freedom from pain, and the ability to choose one’s spouse and protect one’s family. Evil desires like the desire to enslave others thwart more and stronger desires than they fulfill.

Thankfully, today there are few people who actually want to own a slave. This is a huge change in just 200 years. We didn't get rid of slavery by presenting everyone with a logical case for why slavery is wrong. It's not like those who supported slavery hundreds of years ago had a logical case for it or that most people today oppose it because of logical arguments against it. It's that people are far less likely to want to enslave others today since slavery is seen as reprehensible. We need to condemn and punish those who hurt others in order to change their desires and make the world a better place .

That is why tonight's debate matters. If something like happiness is the root of all value and acting morally makes us perfectly happy, we could just get people to be moral by showing them that only morality leads to happiness. But if not, then we have to work to change desires. It may not be easy, but if we try, we can make the world just a little bit better. Thank you.

I recently did another debate with my friend Ben.  We've been taking turns defending some of the most popular theistic arguments.  This month, he was defending William Lane Craig's version of the moral argument for the existence of God.  Here's the basic argument:

1.  If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2. Objective moral values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Skepticon II, a free conference on skepticism held in Springfield, Missouri. I had a fantastic time, and if anyone lives nearby and missed it this year, I highly recommend going to Skepticon III. There were many excellent speeches, but the one I found most interesting was DJ Grothe’s speech on morality. DJ is someone who thinks deeply about life’s big questions, as demonstrated by his Point of Inquiry podcast. He is also a great speaker and all-around good guy. So I was excited to hear that he was going to be speaking on morality, a subject that I have recently become very interested in. While I agreed with many of the points he made in his speech, I do not think he succeeded in showing how morality can exist without God.

1. Evolution can help explain ethics; it alone cannot justify ethics.
2. Justifying ethics requires critical reasoning.
3. Mere knowledge of evolution does not make people less moral.

In his speech he argued not only that you need reason to justify ethics, but how you can use reason to justify ethics. I strongly agree with all three of DJ’s conclusions, but do not think he provided any reasons to move beyond moral nihilism. Although I am a moral realist, I thought his arguments for moral realism were inadequate. I recognize that a short speech can at most sketch out a moral theory, but I don’t think he even managed to provide a good sketch of his beliefs on morality, let alone justify them.

The first part of DJ’s speech was his attack on evolutionary ethics. He made the excellent point that showing that the golden rule evolved would not establish it as moral any more than showing that xenophobia evolved would establish it as moral. As he said in his speech, “Evolution is inefficient, wasteful, [and] cruel.”

After explaining why he disagrees with grounding morality in evolution or in God, DJ briefly explained his view of morality. He stated that freedom from unnecessary suffering is something good to the individual, something that has value. He then went on to say that something everyone values is good in a more general sense. He defined his position as “well-being consequentialism” whereby the goodness of an action is determined by its effect on the well-being of individuals.

One problem I have with this is that he never explains why he thinks it makes sense to call this collective good a moral good. Everyone can value something without it being a moral good. For example, if everyone on earth valued the Mona Lisa, that wouldn’t make it morally good. Even taking things like this into account, there’s still the question of whether any of the remaining goods can be rightly called moral goods.

He addressed this a little bit when he was asked about the “is-ought distinction” which basically says that you can’t get from what is to what ought to be. DJ said that he buys into the is-ought distinction, but there can still be something that feels like the science of ethics. I saw this as a very poor response. Creation science may feel like real science to some people, but that doesn’t mean it is. This seems like a concession that DJ was not actually talking about morality all along and that while something similar to morality might exist, morality itself does not exist. I’m sure that DJ would disagree with that implication, but if so he should explain why he thinks morality exists in spite of the is-ought distinction.

Another problem is that he never defines “well-being.” He instead leaves it so incredibly vague that it’s almost like saying the goodness of an action is defined by whether something has good consequences. It seems so vague that you could use it to pretend you have a basis for your moral beliefs when instead you are really just relying on your moral intuitions (which may be completely unreliable since they are products of evolution). Is drinking alcohol good because it makes people happy and happiness is part of one’s well-being, or is it bad because it has negative health consequences?

And there is also the problem of what happens when something is good for someone’s well-being, but is bad for someone else’s. Instead of putting forward a means of saying what is moral when there are competing interests, DJ just says that when something is good for each individual’s well-being, it is good. But if you can only establish morality when something is good or bad for everyone, it becomes a useless concept. The morality of an action only matters if that action might actually take place. But if something makes everyone worse off, then who would have the incentive to do that action?

After the speech, I asked DJ how he defined well-being and how he determined morality when an action made some people better off and other people worse off. He named a couple things that he saw as part of well-being, but he never really defined exactly what he meant by it. We only talked for a few minutes, but hopefully we’ll be able to continue our conversation in the future. It may turn out that DJ has good answers to my objections, but based only on this talk, I am very skeptical of his view of morality.

Update: I just listened to the recent Reasonable Doubts podcast in which they interviewed DJ. While this post is primarily about DJ’s speech at Skepticon, he makes a few points in the podcast that I wanted to respond to.

He says that his response to moral nihilists is to say that just because something evolved doesn’t mean that it’s unreliable. Our eyes evolved, yet we think it’s reasonable to trust them. I agree that the fact that our view of morality evolved does not make it unreliable. But there’s a key difference between our moral sense and vision. While we have good reasons to expect that evolution will give us a generally reliable sense of sight, we do not have any reason to expect our evolved morality to generally match true morality. If predators looked like human babies and babies looked like predators, our species probably would not have survived as long as it has. However, if there are moral facts distinct from all other facts, why would evolution make our moral sense match these facts instead of whatever led to the greatest reproductive success? I think our senses and intuitions are pretty reliable in cases where we need them to be accurate, but are unreliable in other cases. For example, while my intuitions about physics are roughly accurate in the everyday world, science has shown that my intuitions about the very large and the very small are way off. And finally, I don’t see how someone could say it’s rational to trust our moral sense, but it’s irrational for someone to trust their sense of God (their sensus divinitatis).

When asked about how we can justify our ethics without looking at what is (in light of the is-ought distinction), DJ said that we can ground our morality in critical rational reflection. But this doesn’t make sense to me. If you can’t use what is to determine morality, what are you basing it on? I guess you could arbitrarily make up a few moral facts and then rationally determine the implications of those facts, but then there’s no reason to trust your conclusions.

When asked about moral duties, DJ says that we have to start at the beginning: what is valuable to us. I agree completely. He says that we value well-being, which he minimally defines as “limiting unnecessary suffering.” But I think you need to consider all things that we value. If you only look at one thing, then all of your moral conclusions are suspect because there are some times that limiting suffering is worse than the suffering itself. As an extreme example, hooking my brain up to a machine that makes me experience a virtual world in which every day is the same may prevent me from ever feeling suffering again, but it would also deny me other things that I value. A more complete definition of value is needed.

Finally, DJ says, as he did at Skepticon, that from his vantage point, he can say that what the Nazis did is morally wrong, even if it made sense to the Germans. But anyone can say anything; the key is whether he has good reasons for saying that what the Nazis did is wrong. This depends on whether he has good reasons for believing that his view of morality is true. I could believe in a Magic 8-Ball based system of morality in which whether something is moral is determined by what a Magic 8-Ball tells me. If I ask it whether what the Nazis did was immoral and it says “It is certain”, then from my view of morality, I would be able to say definitively that what the Nazis did is wrong. If we have no good reasons to believe that a certain theory of morality is true, then we have no reason to believe that theory’s implications. Unless DJ has some other justification for his view of morality, I see no more reason to trust his theory as a reliable guide to morality than to trust the Magic 8-Ball based theory.

The issue of morality comes up a lot in debates between atheists and Christians. Christians say that it’s impossible for there to be morality without God and we have no right to say a murderer did anything wrong, while atheists say that it’s impossible for God to be omnibenevolent when, according to the Bible, he has killed millions of people. As is often the case in formal debates, it becomes more about scoring political points than really investigating the issues. I think people on both sides should give a little more thought to the basis of their moral beliefs.

It seems to me that most people make moral judgments primarily based on intuition. Both atheists and theists intuitively feel that there is something deeply immoral about killing or raping someone. They also intuitively feel that things like kindness, honesty, and generosity are good. I think abortion polling illustrates that many religious people rely on intuition rather than their religion when it comes to religious matters. For example, in a poll from earlier this year, 50% of Catholics said that abortions should be legal in most cases and only 16% said it should be illegal in all cases, despite the Catholic Church’s clear stance that abortion is deeply immoral.

But some people do not merely go by intuition and end up adhering to a certain system of morality. Some theists try hard to behave as they think God wants them to, and some atheists try to behave as they think they should based on some variety of utilitarianism (or some other ethical theory). Of course, people may still be relying on their intuition when choosing a religion or an ethical theory. If a believer intuitively believes that it is wrong to prevent gay people from getting married, he will probably be less likely to join an extremely conservative church. If an atheist feels that people have a moral obligation to help the poor, he’s probably not going to adopt Social Darwinism. But I think that many people do not go further and try to figure out why God’s will or a certain brand of utilitarianism is the standard of morality.

I think that many atheists have a very weak foundation for their morality (of course, this does not mean that atheists cannot be moral people, as people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been incredibly generous). Some atheists believe that something like happiness or preference satisfaction has intrinsic value and this serves as the foundation for morality. The problem with this is that there’s no reason to think that intrinsic values exist, and people’s behavior can be explained without resorting to a strange entity that we have no evidence for. I think that atheists who reject God because he’s a strange entity that we have no evidence for, but believe that intrinsic values exist without any evidence are being inconsistent.

However, morality is an even bigger problem for Christians. Atheism itself does not make any claims about morality and if there is no such thing as objective morality, that does not invalidate atheism. However, an important part of mainstream Christianity is that God is omnibenevolent. If God could not possibly be good in a meaningful way, that would pose a serious problem for Christians. The Euthyphro Dilemma asks whether God commands things because they are good or whether they are good because God commands them. If God commands things because they are good, then God is not the source of morality and Christians have the same problem of having to explain the foundation of morality that atheists do. But they also have the added problem of trying to reconcile this morality with God’s actions in the Old Testament (such as Numbers 31). If God is the source of morality, then God’s morality is arbitrary and God could have made murder good and love bad if he had wanted to (and he could have made us intuitively see murder as good). Most people try to get around this problem by saying that God’s nature itself is good, but then you have the problem of whether God is good because his nature has the properties of moral goodness, or whether the properties are good merely because God has them. There have been attempts to reconcile this problem, but I don’t think any of them work. Wes Morriston, although himself a theist, sees serious problems with the answers believers typically give to the Euthyphro dilemma. If you have a chance, I encourage you check out two articles that he has recently written on the subject: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/GodGood.pdf and http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/wes/WhatIfGod.pdf.

But even if all current models of morality do not work, that wouldn’t prove that morality does not exist any more than proving to ancient people that Zeus did not exist would have proven that there could not be a God that actually does exist. However, I actually do think there is a moral theory that has a good chance of being correct: desirism. It’s a relatively recent theory so it needs to be subjected to more scrutiny before concluding that it’s correct, but it seems to avoid the common pitfalls of other moral theories. Basically desirism says that desires are the only reasons for action that exist and that a good desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires. For example, a desire to rape is a bad desire because either the desires of the rape victim to not be raped are thwarted, or the desires of the rapist to rape are thwarted. We all act based on our desires. It’s not like there’s something intrinsically good about kindness that forces us to be kind against our will, we are kind because we have the desire to be kind (and that is a good desire). Divine morality would not prevent someone who desired to kill someone from killing that person if they did not desire to go to heaven or please God. Similarly, divine command theory does not somehow force someone to be moral regardless of their desires. However, there are means such as the legal system, praise, and condemnation which can give people a strong desire not to do evil acts. The threat of hell is not the only means of inducing someone to act morally. I’ll try to explore desirism in a little more depth in future posts, but if you want to read more about it, I suggest checking out this article on desirism.