Does Moral History Have A Direction?
Jonah Goldberg has a very interesting post at The Corner discussing the theory that necessity is the “father of immorality.” The general idea, as I understand it, is that as technology and wealth advance, we come to regard more and more previously-acceptable practices as barbaric. He supports this by speculating that current advances in biology that may eliminate the need to create embryos in order to destroy them, as per the current stem cell debate, will lead more people to consider this practice immoral. He also gives the historical example of dangerous child labor being outlawed only after technology and education had already made it uneconomic.
I think that an extension of this idea (probably implicit in Jonah’s post) is that increasing mastery of our physical environment changes widely-held moral principles in more than one direction: not only do some practices once held to be moral come to be regarded as immoral, but others once held to be immoral come to be regarded as moral. As a general rule, “aggressive” practices tend to be seen as less justifiable, while restrictions on non-coercive personal behavior tend to be relaxed. Technology plus wealth changes trade-offs in both directions.
On one hand, fewer people are willing to harden their hearts against intuitively troubling practices that provide some material advantage, like dangerous child labor, when either (i) we invent a new way of accomplishing the same end that eliminates much of the relative material advantage of the problematic behavior, or (ii) we simply become sufficiently wealthy that the material good we get in return for this practice holds less utility for us. What was seen as moral becomes seen as immoral.
On the other hand, many restrictions on behavior that once served to avoid obvious negative personal outcomes suddenly lose their moral force for many people once technology changes the balance of (apparent) costs and benefits. The introduction of The Pill, to take an obvious example, almost certainly had a much larger effect on female sexual mores than all the sweet talk and chocolates on earth. What was seen as immoral becomes seen as moral.
As advances in technology and wealth proceed at a faster pace, the rate at which these kinds of moral changes occur increases. Because those societies that have high rates of technical and economic advance tend to be open societies in which greater latitude in personal behavior is legally and socially acceptable, this effect is even more exaggerated in places like contemporary America. This leads many people to ask the obvious question: is anything really moral or immoral?
Since almost all humans appear to have some kind of innate need to associate themselves with transcendent values, this is not pure intellectual speculation, but is often an acute psychological conflict between the need for transcendence and the world of moral flux all around us.
This anxiety is radically enhanced by the massive success of the evolutionary paradigm. If we can explain all of human behavior as the product of a physical process that has no purpose or design, and all of human society is an emergent phenomenon ultimately produced by this same underlying process, then it’s hard to view any moral rules as other than an illusion. To go back to Jonah’s post, it’s hard to believe we are in the midst of a Whiggish progression of moral improvement, if we think morality is a fantasy. We can’t have moral improvement if there is no absolute yardstick that enables us to call one set of mores more or less moral than any other; we just have random drift of mores.
I don’t think that either conservatives or liberals have successfully assimilated evolution, and figuring out how to do this is a long-term challenge (in very different ways) for both of them. I recently wrote an article for National Review that tried to take on a very small part of this problem from a conservative perspective: arguing that accepting evolution does not require accepting either atheism or purposelessness. Several years ago Robert Wright wrote an amazing book called Nonzero which takes on a far broader agenda: creating a modern (that is evolution-centric) version of Whig history from a contemporary liberal perspective.
“We can’t have moral improvement if there is no absolute yardstick that enables us to call one set of mores more or less moral than any other”
To paraphrase Shaw, if all the moralists in the world were laid end to end, they would still point in different directions. Everyone has a moral yardstick, and many claim that theirs is absolutely valid, but if you compare them over time and space they are radically different.
So, the lack of a single clear moral standard is not a modern abberation, and not a product of evolution or any other analytical way of looking at the world – it is an inherent part of the human condition, and we should just get used to it.
The thing that makes people uneasy is having their own moral standards called into question, and for many reasons – greater freedom, better communications, faster social change – this is happening more frequently. The problem isn’t assimilating evolution, but assimilating various people who regard each other as moral degenerates into the same society.
— Peter · Nov 21, 06:34 PM · #
Peter:
I fully agree with you that this is a very, very old issue. It was certainly widely written about in ancient Athens and Rome. I’m sure scholars of other societies could point to evidence of it elsewhere in antiquity. Common sense says that some version of it probably predates even the written word.
While it is always present, I believe that heterogeneity exacerbates the psychological conflict. Some sources of heterogeneity include observation of other cultures with different moral standards, observation of sub-cultures within our society with different moral standards and observation of individuals that change moral standards. That is, an open, cosmopolitan society that is undergoing rapid change in mores is the most likely incubator for this issue.
The role of the evolutionary paradigm is to provide a compelling account for how something as complex as human society can come into being without any purpose – rendering morality mere convention. In Richard Dawkins famous phrase evolution “makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. My view, so that it is clear, is that this is a mistaken interpretation of evolution, but it is a mistake that is often made.
Thanks for the clarifying comment.
— Jim Manzi · Nov 21, 08:38 PM · #
There are moral behaviors that cross societies and sub-cultures over time. The most obvious example is antipathy to murder. Whether such moral first principles are god-given or a product or evolution or both is unknowable, yet the evolutionary justification for them is well covered by Matt Ridley in “The Origins of Virtue.” The examples you provide of shifting morality are beyond those principles core to the survival of a given society. Consequently, it is nor surprising they change based on fashion, wealth, and technology.
— Alex · Nov 21, 11:59 PM · #
Along the lines of Alex’s comment: at the end of his little book The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis provides a list of quotations that indicate agreement among the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions on a range of moral issues. It’s hardly exhaustive, nor is it meant to be, but it’s worth considering before taking the heterogeneity thesis as a given.
— Alan Jacobs · Nov 22, 12:27 AM · #
Alex / Alan:
Thanks for the very thoughtful observations.
I certainly agree that there are some rules (or at least antipathies, as you say with great precision) that are near-universal.
By analogy, imagine that the engineering guidelines for construction of buildings tended to be very different in different places depending on the relative strength of wood vs. stone and so forth. Further, in any given society, some of these rules changed as new technologies were developed that changed trade-offs. Imagine further that there were some rules (e.g., “always put a larger object below a bigger object”, or “always use stone for foundations when it is available”) that were true of pretty much all societies at all times.
Now, here are two things (I think) we can say about these rules:
1. There is nothing inherently “wrong” with violating any of these rules if it turns out in so doing we end up constructing a building that better meets our material needs. Any of these rules is merely a utilitarian means to the end of constructing buildings that have physical properties that we desire.
2. We always have to be prepared for some seemingly eternal rule to be overturned if some new technology antiquates it. For example, somebody invents a high-impact plastic that turns out to make better foundations than stone. So, even though they have been unchanging to date, we can not actually rely on them as eternal. In this way, such a rule is different only in the degree of its longevity, not in kind as a “universal” vs. “variable” rule.
In the same way, to the extent that “Thou shalt not kill” (for example) can be explained as an evolutionary adaptation, this seems to me to undermine the case that it is anything more than a useful means to the end of reproductive success. By analogy with my building codes example, if it is only a driver of reproductive success and if this linkage to reproductive success exists for no purpose other than as the outcome of random chance, then if I see the opportunity to kill Bill Gates, seize all of his money and use this to attract numerous high-status mates, and there is no chance that I will be caught, then it’s hard to see why I shouldn’t do it. Further, if could figure out a previously-undiscovered method of social organization that allowed a small fraction of the population to kill others at will, but led to great reproductive success, it’s hard to see why I shouldn’t adopt this new rule.
This is why I think (the misuse of) the evolutionary paradigm is so relevant. It provides a powerful explanation of where these rules come from that reduces them to strategies to achieve material ends, and so makes a totally amoral view of the universe easier to accept.
— Jim Manzi · Nov 22, 02:18 AM · #
There are data that argue both ways on the correlation between necessity and morality. In Nazi Germany, the euthanizing of defectives was something that was done at a time of increasing prosperity. Yet the economic arguments for doing so constituted much of the justification for it. Or so I understand.
And what about the upcoming legislation in the UK that is expected to allow the growing of babies for spare parts? (See my blog entry about it.) Is it really necessity that is making such a thing thinkable?
— The Reticulator · Nov 22, 07:16 AM · #
Reticulator:
That’s a very interesting point: perhaps as biology replaces physics as our dominant science, technological advances will have an increasing tendency to objectify people, rather than increase mastery of the non-human physical environment, and therefore the general moral impact of technological advance will be less that we become more mild with others and more that we are willing to be more aggressive with others because we increasingly see them as machines.
What a depressing thought. I’ll try to forget about it and enjoy Thanksgiving.
— Jim Manzi · Nov 22, 02:48 PM · #