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erectlocution ⊇ boxing jewels

On Dogged Belief

Last week, Robert Bingaman articulated some thoughts about the culture of life as evinced in some current events. This set off a discussion, primarily (of interest to me, anyway) between me and Robert, which, until now, ended with Robert stating the following:

“And if it’s an illusion, your way of life that is, why don’t you do the most meaningful thing possible and kill yourself (with the optional hope that you’d be waking up)?”

On the face of it, especially out of context, this appears to be the utterance of some wretchedly deluded, dogmatic, heartless man. It is, in fact, one of the most complimentary things anyone has ever said to me. There, between the words, holding them together as a fine tapestry, is the subtle and rare respect for others one finds in a mind willing to hold forth consistently and completely from his philosophy. Robert doesn’t blunt his point with a euphemizing retreat. He simply follows the development of his point of view within the thread to its logical conclusion. It’s in his doing so, without feeling the need to pull on the reins to avoid offense, that tells me he respects me and the other readers enough to speak maturely and squarely on the point.

There was some retribution regarding the bluntness, to which Robert replied evenly and respectfully, as anyone who’s read for even a short time (like me) should expect. The retribution is sort of understandable: even as eloquent and, more importantly, well-articulated as Robert is, text can quite often skew connotation through the absence of connotative tools to which we’re accustomed, such as tone of voice and body language. Still, there wasn’t anything patently offensive in the discussion on the part of any participants.

The whole thing comes at a serendipitous moment for me. I am in a foreign place, with little but my internal gyroscope to guide me, and all about me are voices real and imagined whose cacophony confuses. Over the last few months, I’ve spent no small amount of time plumbing the depths of my and my fiancée’s perspectives on religion and spirituality; and I’ve been spending more time watching and listening to messages of faith where I can find them. Honestly, quite a lot has been from the perspective of a nonbeliever looking for specific examples as support of my position on spirituality and, moreso, religion. In all fairness, a good bit of the most easily accessible religious and spiritual media is shamefully asinine, which does religious faith a disservice and, I hope, is not necessarily representative. So, I haven’t found anything that but through this absurdity supports my prejudice. I’ll keep looking. Discussions such as the one continued below offer much more to chew on, and with a hopefully broader and deeper palette of flavor.

Herewith, my response. Comments are open.

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The supposition that the soundest choice afforded me, afflicted as I am with the absence of a larger moral framework from which I draw my own, is death, is interesting, but little more. Your claim seems to be that life is a deterministic result of this moral structure, a structure built by larger design. Without such a structure informing life, the life is inherently without purpose, according to this, and, purpose apparently the foundation for life, it is aberrant, absurd to use your word, and unfit for continuation. I see two problems with your general application.

First, I challenge the presumption that life itself is dependent upon a purpose for it. I see no evidence to suggest that there exists any intrinsic need within the universe for life, any more than there is a need for gravity, and so there is no purpose served by either. Certainly it might be contended that life, like gravity, is a useful result of the perturbations of forces and particles over billions of years, temporal and light, though gravity seems far more useful. At the very least, the terrestrial environment is likely quite different than it would be had not humanity achieved its historic influence. However, whatever this utility might be it is only utility in the context of open-ended processes, with no more value in one or the other possible consequence. If humanity eventually affects some noticeable presence and deformation of some statistically significant volume of the Milky Way galaxy, it would be no more or less beneficial a result than if the species had become extinct. Either is simply a potentiality unfettered by design or intelligent direction. In the absence of life or gravity, the universe would simply be built differently to one degree or another.

Second, there is an implicit contention that the morality thought to result as an extension of a larger, purposeful framework (for fun, I’ll coin “exomorality”) exists less within the domain of the personal mind than does the internally constructed morality (“endomorality”). This is as ridiculous as the coined taxonomy: whatever you consider the source of your morality, it is you parsing the legitimate components of such from the illegitimate. Each of us is as much the puppet of our preconceptions as the other. That you attribute the quality and texture of your conception of right and wrong to some higher, guiding authority doesn’t make it any more objectively well-built than mine. That you think so is simply a result of your conception of right and wrong, and so is circular.

Also, it’s worth clarifying that I didn’t mean to establish the nonbeliever’s moral code as wholly reflexive, as being constructed in a vacuum. Rather, I see it as constructed from observations of the world through the amalgam filter of our cultures. While not nearly as rigorous, it’s not unlike the development of theory through application of the scientific method. I would love to say I’ve developed this hypothesis further, but I haven’t, which is one reason I value this conversation as much as I do. What makes sense upon reflection is that morality is, as life and gravity are, emergent and nondeterministic. There is a larger context from which we gather our morality, but I think that context itself is emergent, undesigned, and variable: human society. I don’t mean the same “society” which all manner of miscreant blames for his or her having grown up in a ghetto or somesuch and, inevitably, for having been forced to commit crimes to live, though, of course, that society is at least a subset of the one to which I refer. I mean society as the summation of all networks of persons past and present, and its quite complicated topology.

Upon this reflection, morality seems a force propagated along that network, derived from a fundamental prerequisite of life, the drive to survive, taken at a species level. It is, of course, as with all emergent systems (or, more generally, most logical systems of any sophistication), fairly complex, and imperfect. Largely disconnected populations can, and have, developed starkly different schemas of right and wrong, and it is with great difficulty at least that any one claims definitively to have the most righteous. If this is true, then there is no objective set of invariable morals, and I find no reason to believe such exists.

Ultimately, we seem to disagree on the answer to a generating question: what is life? You could likely recite more quickly and completely the biological perspective, which I won’t call a definition since there is some contention in the details; but I would more readily consider it a full explanation than you. Where two “nonbelievers” might quibble over whether or not to consider a virus alive, they don’t consider among the criteria a belief on the part of the virus in “Reason–by way of design”. Even the fact that you and I each counts as an element in morality something beyond the person doesn’t bridge that gap, because my categorization allows for a single human to fully constitute both the domain and the range of morality, whereas you would probably still believe in a relationship between that person and an (the) extrahuman designer.

So, not necessarily unfortunately, I must fall back on an inconclusive conclusion, and respectfully agree to disagree with you. I will take that inconclusivity any day over dogmatic and illusory completeness.


In Aether, Aldous on 29 March 2005 with 9 comments

9 Comments

That life has one knowable and morally universal purpose is a separate question from whether or not it exists at the hands of a creator rather than chaos. You know this. To be sure, we need only look towards philosophical and theological history to find that though we may be created, our creator is not by necessity one who cares, one that is good, or even one that is alive at this point in time. These arguments are increasingly weak and, for the time being, off the point.

Beside a sound scientific cosmology (which is hard to come by in some academic circles), the most clear indicator that we as living beings are creatures is the fact that your assertion concerning the singularity of human morality is utterly incongruent to the empirical evidence (which you seem to value). If the moral compass is one that is entirely derived within one’s self, then you have no cause to speak of fairness to anyone other than yourself, in this society or any other. To say that “largely disconnected populations have developed starkly different schemas of right and wrong” is to speak rather strongly to a question that is quite difficult to prove, and moreover, requires serious evidence in its defense (which you have not provided).

It is clear that different forms of human civilization, disconnected or not, have taken on vastly different moral languages. These codes, like differing languages of speech, can look entirely different, mutually exclusive in fact. But to conclude that they have no relation at all, to me, seems to be giving in to the initial sensory overload that both differing languages (and their respective cultures) and differing moral codes can spark. I have met and heard the language used by men from both South Central Los Angeles and East Berlin. Not only are the cultures of these men quite different, but they look and sound as different from one another as any two men on earth possibly can (and yet they are both from today’s West). I can understand why one would conclude that they are all but alien to one another, in every manner of speaking. And it isn’t out of the question to assume that this theoretical pair have truly different ways of thinking, believing, and being. But one would be committing an elementary mistake to be so taken by the surface differences in appearance and language that he does not see that these men not only employ similar sounds with their tongues but in fact have tongues (and ways of life) that are far more alike then they are different.

If we were to take a diligent look at civilizations that have not only been separated by the imaginary line dividing the East and West, but also the long distance provided to each by time, I believe we would be overwhelmed not by the differences, but by the similarities the moral teachings of these societies have to our own. A simple difference is not the same as a total difference. There are societies in which killing is made a way of life, and honor is achieved in ways that seem entirely upside-down to you and me. Yet these societies still seem to value life and the weight of its opposite, and honor is still something to achieve.

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not have any woman you liked.
- C.S. Lewis

And yet selfishness permeates each society, our every day. You, Daniel, and I, Robert are selfish beings on a daily basis, despite the fact that we despise it when we find it one another. You could travel the world, and you could travel time, to each of the most distant and remote societies, and as an experiment, you could simply act in your own interest alone, and it is easy to conclude that each of the men you encountered would somehow feel as though they had been wronged (even if they had no way of telling you). Simply because it is impossible for each of us (save just one) to accord ourselves and each of our actions to a universal Right and Wrong, and just because said Right and Wrong are quite difficult (if not impossible) for humans to define under human terms (most humans are members of but one society, and have only one native tongue), does not mean Right and Wrong are mere illusions, or emergent tendencies of evolved human thought and/or society.

It should be quite confounding to consider this. We have a need that we, by our very nature, cannot fulfill (despite what is a common desire to do just that in most of us). Even those who have no interest and no belief in either a creator or a universal moral truth still have trouble denying each. We have the notion of perfection, and yet we cannot achieve it. If we are not so willing to admit it in ourselves, we are readily able to describe it in others. If the moral truths you have arrived at are truly your own Daniel, you have no reason to take offense when someone arrives at their moral truth which involves the murder of your evolving family. I am fairly confident this would cause you great pain. But what about it would truly hurt? Loss hurts even when it comes at the most expected times, but I have reason to believe you would feel a great deal worse, you would feel wronged in fact (especially if you are willing to use the term in any discussion at all). But, by your standards, you would have no worthy reason to complain - as the man who killed your wife and daughter may have morally evolved under an entirely different environment than your own. You and he may in fact have much in common, as you’d both stand squarely opposed to the widely-held belief that a solid universal sense of fairness, and even Righteousness, while hard to define the particulars of, are elements of moral life that have always existed, and always will. So if, in that sense, you and the murderer of all that you love (besides of course yourself and the occasional hobby you might have) are really no different, it would seem that your suffering serves no purpose. No, that your suffering is truly Absurd. And again, your relativism leaves me unconvinced that you have any reason to perpetuate such an existence (of which only death, you might hope, can stop).

I am also quite convinced that my belief in a creator requires no more faith than does your belief in the obviousness or naturalness of emergent evolution without one. Maybe that is why it’s so easy for me to respect and admire you Daniel, for all that we disagree upon - as you are after all, a thoughtfully dedicated man of Faith like myself.

We are both well aware of the fact that human life springs forth from an embryo, and that said embryo developed from the interaction between two healthy former-embryo human adults. It is just as easy for us to map out the obvious evolution that is present in man-made machines, yet we are all aware (if forgetful) of the fact that today’s combustion engine is not the distant descendant of some rudimentary machine that sprung forth from the dust, but from a man of genius. To believe otherwise, or to similarly believe that we are the result of some unnamable and undesigned chaos seems to be the sort of behavior that could be associated with one who enjoys hallucinations, and has either a disdain or an inability to absorb and understand empirical evidence. Or, like I said, it is something I know all too much about - faith in the inexplicable, which one who believes in no such thing as either creation or the Good they involve themselves with every day must admit they have.

The Heavens declare the glory of God. When you see a sunset, do you call it beautiful? Or simply optically engaging? When you witness the act of love, do you call it Good? Or merely emotionally (and therefore chemically) stimulating? If you are choosing the former, why is that you believe anyone (even your soon-to-be wife) has any idea what you’re talking about? Don’t tell me that’s because you grew up in similar societies, this can only explain so much. And if you are choosing the latter, I fear that you are living just as inconsistently (if not more so) to your system of belief than I am. Because if you are that aware of the relativity with which you speak, and the absurd probability that you and the atoms which exist to define you signify nothing more than your existence (one that, again, speaks of ideas and asks questions that can painfully have no true answer), then I am simply at a loss for why you don’t achieve the one truth that is within your grasp by ending once and for all the suffering you feel - that comes at the hands of no one, no thing.

Posted by Robert on 29 March 2005 @ 12pm

This post has been removed by the author.

Posted by Wilson on 29 March 2005 @ 6pm

You question my saying that “largely disconnected populations have developed starkly different schemas of right and wrong” because it is difficult to prove and requires evidence which I don’t provide, and then continue to say that


“[i]t is clear that different forms of human civilization, disconnected or not, have taken on vastly different moral languages. These codes, like differing languages of speech, can look entirely different, mutually exclusive in fact.”

You continue by developing a point only semantically different from mine with nothing other than its self-evidence as support while deriding my doing the same. I don’t see how this progresses.

In no way did I assert that moral codes among different human societies “have no relation at all”. Quite the contrary, I posit that there “is a larger context from which we gather our morality,” namely “human society”. This society is “the summation of all networks of persons past and present, and its quite complicated topology”, and it’s in this topological complexity that we find the variations between cultures.

Further, I noted that it makes sense that morality is “derived from a fundamental prerequisite of life, the drive to survive, taken at a species level”, which we’re safe in assuming is a commonality among all human societies (at least those which manage to persist). How then can I also attempt to sustain morality as a singularly proprietary artifact (outside the special case of a species of one individual, in which case this would be correct)? I, in fact, directly addressed this point. What I have maintained is that it does not follow that this larger context extends beyond the world of men and women, that there is no substance beyond anecdotal pleasantry to suggest the context is either universal, or designed, least of all both. Of course whether or not a universal moral purpose exists is not precisely the same as whether such purpose was created by a designer or emerged as a function of “chaos”; but they are not disentangled ideas. Surely, a thing cannot have been created if it doesn’t or hasn’t ever existed.

We may yet be overwhelmed, upon thorough study of many of the cultures of Earth, that they are by and large very similar; yet, taken within the context of my points, this only suggests that we are of the same species and draw from that shared topology. It is also not uncommon for similar archetypes of ghosts, magic, and various other superstitions to exist across impressive spans of space and time. I consider this no greater proof of the current or prior existence of a “universal Right and Wrong” than I consider proof of extraterrestrial seeding of Earth the preponderance of the megalithic yard in structures built by societies as geographically dispersed as the Druids and the Aztecs (as was once pronounced on a cable-access UFO-believer-apologist show, the host of which then extended this to Richard Hoagland’s observations of the supposed Cydonia structures on Mars). Of course it’s interesting—all the connectedness and similarity is interesting and worth investigation (to one degree or another); but to conclude definitively that there is a universal Right and Wrong as designed by an intelligent creator is beyond the reach of available evidence.

Yet I won’t claim that it is not a possibility that there is, in fact, a universal Right and Wrong, no more than I would claim that human science will ultimately find unity in the fundamental forces. It is precisely my point, or one of the central of my points, that we cannot claim to know that which isn’t known. Another developing point of mine, with which, in general, I think you agree, is that though we may not know a thing explicitly, we may need to form conjecture about its nature, and it’s soundest to develop the simplest conjecture that fits the evidence. To wit: “[s]imply because it is impossible for each of us (save just one) to accord ourselves and each of our actions to a universal Right and Wrong, and just because said Right and Wrong are quite difficult (if not impossible) for humans to define under human terms (most humans are members of but one society, and have only one native tongue), does not mean Right and Wrong are” not “mere illusions”.

That I would feel wronged if my family were murdered is support for little more than the fact that I’m obviously a caring, compassionate person. Sure, that’s a little disingenuous, because I do, in that regard, represent the prevailing temperament of at least Western society; but this only speaks to the general point that humans value their lives and the lives of their gene line, though this is by no means universal. Nor is it quite that simple. Also, I need not live in a universe with an intrinsic universal Right and Wrong to live in a community (of arbitrary population) within which I am morally justified in feeling wronged by this killing. As with the logistics of gathering food and other natural resources, the social nature of humans has usually motivated an implicit or explicit set of common moral standards, including basic “rights” to life and livelihood, though we do not always agree on even these basic tenets. You may argue that our poor implementation of a moral code does not disprove the presence of a universal code, and you’d be right. Neither does it prove such presence. There is nothing I see which can prove either, which, again, is central among my points.

All of that said, I argue that it is extraneous (if valid) support for my point. If I understand you correctly, your assertion is that there is a universal Right and Wrong that exists outside the bounds of any cultural application, an invariable beacon of Righteousness driven by a Purpose. You maintain as proof of this universality that, the world over, there is in every culture the concept of right and wrong, and that the details of what is qualified as one or the other is immaterial, e.g. that one culture considers the raping of infants right and another considers it wrong has nothing to say about the fact that each culture has some concept of what is right and what is wrong. If this is truly your case, then I can’t see how that is any different than your case in which I have no claim of being wronged if a man feels righteous in killing my family. If all that is universal is that there exists these undifferentiated placeholders called “right” and “wrong”, then this is a trivial universality, and is a greater Absurdity than any mentioned thus far.

If, on the other hand, the ways in which humans develop their applications of “right” and “wrong” bear on this sense of universality, then, as we’ve both indicated that these applications vary the world over, this universality is foiled. I spoke of “schemas” and you of “languages” or “codes”, all of which are equivalent in this discussion. The differentiated applications of the concepts of “right” and “wrong” are the schemas, or the languages, or the codes. As there is no universal schema, language, or code for morality, it follows that there is no universal Right and Wrong (again, if we take the nontrivial universality as a prerequisite condition).

There is obviously something about your belief in a creator which makes such sense to you that you feel it requires no more faith than my belief that we have emerged from “chaos” (more specifically, what I believe is that this emergence is the most sensible among the proposed solutions to which I’ve been exposed which attempt to explain the available evidence). I doubt I can argue you away from this comfortable perch, nor is it my exact intention. However, I think you would agree that it requires more faith to believe that a spirit bathed in flames and effervescing kerosene brought a house to burn down than to believe that the kerosene was used by a more Earthly arsonist. That each explanation is consistent with at least some of the physical evidence is not to say that each is equivalently explanatory of the phenomenon, nor even that either is the truth. While I can’t fathom anything that would unequivocally quash the idea of a flaming spirit, it’s not the better of the two options.

This extends somewhat unevenly into our foray here, but the leading principle is the same: the simplest answer which meets the evidentiary requirements is most likely the right answer. We can say that morality derives from the variable topology of society (as previously defined), and also, beyond that, that the social moral infrastructure is informed by a universal Right and Wrong; but if the former meets our requirements well enough, the extended answer only ambiguates the issue with extraneous “information”.

If adherence to this extraneousness is less an illusion than to hold to the unnamable and undesigned chaos, I can’t see it. It is precisely an appreciation for empiricism that leads many nonbelievers to not believe, and all appeals to proving your mother loved you, or differentiating a chemically engendered attraction to a sunset from an appreciation of its divine character, fall short of any goal save obfuscation. In truth I don’t believe there to be any difference between the emotion of love and a reaction of neurotransmitters and hormones, as there is no indication that there is more to be had. Is it gratifying, and exciting, and wonderful? Yes, for me it is. Does that hint that there is some greater Hand at work, or some unified field theory of Happiness in the orbits of electrons? Hardly. I believe in less than you do because less is required to adequately explain things to me.

Posted by Daniel on 30 March 2005 @ 9am

I’ve been fascinated by the ongoing discussion you and Rob have been having on his site and now on yours. As a long-time friend of Rob’s, I’ve had my share of weighty conversations with him over the years. I’m always interested in how his mind works, especially when he’s challenged. Let’s see if I can add anything worthwile in response to your post, and in addition to Rob’s response.

In your first challenge, you question why life is dependent on a purpose. But in your supporting argument you seem to conflate life’s purpose with the purpose of the universe, or a hypothetical universe. Sure, a hypothetical universe without life might still have a hypothetical purpose. But if our discussion is about life, we’re not concerned with a hypothetical universe in which life (or its purpose) could not exist.

I think the more pointed question at hand is this: Given the existense of life, is its worth dependent on a purpose? Or is life it’s own reward? Is existence itself (on an individual basis, or as a collective experience) enough to make life worthwhile?

It’s my belief that if life is its own reward—if my own small sphere of capability and understanding (or my neighbor’s) is as far as human life goes or can go—then that reward is too small. Too small to measure up to the cost of simple human suffering, to say nothing of the damage human life inflicts daily on our corner of the universe.

In your second point, you reject the contention that morality is necessarily external to the self. You point out (very rightly) that it is you (the individual) to parse any external morals and ultimately to act based on your own interpretation of morality. I agree that our own interpretations are inherently imperfect and inconsistent, but I don’t agree that this precludes the existence of a perfect morality that exists outside ourselves. Just because we can’t perfectly comprehend the Truth doesn’t mean nothing is True.

Individuals are inherently inconsistent. You point this out in talking about different cultures which develop different traditions and patterns of accepted practices. Even among those who do believe in an external source of truth, there is inconsistency in interpretation. I fail to follow you on this point. You seem to conclude that since everyone’s opinion is different, therefore everyone must be wrong - and furthermore there must be no right answer. Independent of what I believe, I just can’t see how that stands on its own logical feet.

If each individual is the only ultimate source of his or her own morality, morality doesn’t really exist per se. All that’s left is individual choices. There is no room for anything universal or consistent. Even if we restrict the scope to just one individual, I can do something today that I consider to be wrong, but all I have to do to absolve myself is change my mind tomorrow. Morality implies accountability, and accountability implies something contstant to which to be accountable. Otherwise it’s just lip service.

If I’m interpreting correctly, you imply that culture serves as that constant - specifically the “amalgam filter of our cultures.” But as that phrase implies, culture is nothing more than an aggregation of individual decisions and opinions over time. Cultural morality is morality by committee, and a pretty poorly organized committee at that. It relies on what is popular and accepted by the shifting and arbitrary standards of a group of people in a single place and time. In your example, we’ve augmented our own fickle and inconsistent conscience with the fickle and inconsistent conscience of the masses. I fail to see how that’s a step in the right direction.

If morality extends, as you propose, only from our own innate instinct to survive as a species, and there exists no purpose for our survival other than our own existence, what a cruel and absurd joke of nature is our own existence - to think that we’re born with an unconquerable instinctual need to run a race that has no destination. To borrow an analogy from a wiser man than I, it’s as if we had the capacity to feel hunger, and to starve, in a world where food did not exist.

If that’s all life has to offer, we have no choice but to despair.

Posted by Wilson on 30 March 2005 @ 9am

Wilson,

Welcome! I’ve never really had the chance to carry on dialogues like this until the last few months. Most people tend to prefer their cloistered, hard-won rhetoric, and my appeals to their logic come across like so much prattling. It’s been even less likely that any of these discussions would have been with those with a faith in an extrahuman consciousness. Now, with my aforementioned fiancée, who adheres to a belief in God if not in any specific machinations of religion, I have someone with whom to carry on; and then the dialog here. Is it too glib to say I’m in heaven?

To your points (somewhat more briefly than I’d like—I’ve spent a lot of my work time on this lately), that life as its own reward is too small a reward is an aesthetic point, not a logical one. It would presume a threshold of reward as a requirement, which I doubt any of us can produce. I might agree with the aesthetic, but not beyond that.

You then make a point that, taken basically, is to say that just because we are limited beings doesn’t mean there aren’t things beyond our limited abilities of appreciation. I agree. That is the case with more debates than just this on believing or not in an extrahuman consciousness: we do not understand the human brain; we do not understand earthquakes; we do not understand the babbling of infants. By your and Robert’s contention that our ignorance is no proof of something that exists beyond our ignorance, we could say that the human brain is actually a single organ shared by all humans, a fleshy thing existing in five spatial dimensions such that it can maintain its integrity while appearing to our lesser dimensional awareness to be completely decentralized. That would be pretty interesting, and I might like a world where this was the case; but there’s no evidence for it so I won’t say it’s likely.

As to the consistency of opinions and social moral machinery, while it’s certainly possible that, in a world with such disparate implementations of morality, there can still be some universal code taken as a source, I can’t see how it necessarily follows. The maintenance of this universality in the face of such disparity of implementation feels like the clutching of a happy illusion. In analogy, this is like saying that God exists because you “know” he will speak to you someday: as each day passes with no such message, you’re more than welcome to hold to your belief; but it becomes progressively more delusional.


“If each individual is the only ultimate source of his or her own morality, morality doesn’t really exist per se. All that’s left is individual choices. There is no room for anything universal or consistent.”

Yes, and no. I maintain that morality is most likely a resultant of variable social forces, and, so, is itself variable. This is something more than individual choices, though we are the unit of morality and are responsible for our own implementation thereof. If I said that I’d grown up in a family and been taught that hunting for sport was morally viable, only to find that I felt otherwise in adulthood, I can’t say that I’ve developed my morality completely in the absence of external inspiration. Still, it’s my sense of righteousness, and it differs from that of others. None of us can say which is truer, or even if there is such a thing as an invariable moral truth.

When this morality is taken within the context of my community (again, of arbitrary population—it may be my family, my city, or the planet), I am free to act on it, but there may be some accountability depending on that community. Accountability does not require constancy, only some external standard against which to compare. This standard need not be constant across the species, and there seem to be very few candidates for such, not even murder. If I were the whole of the human population, then I would not be accountable to anyone for my actions. I may not even develop the concepts of “right” and “wrong”: we have all developed as people with and around people, and, try as we might, we can’t accurately fathom a world where this is not the case. As with a universe without life, we aren’t necessarily concerned with a world with one human being; but in both cases we are examining our logic at the extremes, a common tool in these discussions.


If I’m interpreting correctly, you imply that culture serves as that constant - specifically the “amalgam filter of our cultures.” But as that phrase implies, culture is nothing more than an aggregation of individual decisions and opinions over time. Cultural morality is morality by committee, and a pretty poorly organized committee at that. It relies on what is popular and accepted by the shifting and arbitrary standards of a group of people in a single place and time. In your example, we’ve augmented our own fickle and inconsistent conscience with the fickle and inconsistent conscience of the masses. I fail to see how that’s a step in the right direction.

I agree it’s not necessarily the best case. I agree on your qualification of the current state of affairs as something less than optimal. None of that, unfortunately, bears on the questions here. It’s unfortunate that we are at war; but we are at war.


If that’s all life is, we have no choice but to despair.

There may be something to that. It’s worth noting that what I speak to is what I think is reasonable to expect, not what we’d want. I am very positively interested in the idea of a power greater than humans. I can’t stomach the orthodoxy of religion—the apparently arbitrary standards of decorum and worship, among other things—so it’s not that aspect of the potentiality of a greater being that is attractive.

But this positive interest cannot overwhelm or extend the available evidence and a logical deduction therefrom. I also, for instance, like conspiracy theories, and the idea of a face on Mars, and a whole host of other cockamamie things; but I don’t conclude that there was a second gunman in the grassy knoll, nor that the face on Mars is anything more than the human proclivity to find patterns that might not exist. This might make for a cold universe, and I might be disappointed (and it doesn’t escape me that these things are not of the same import as morality and its implications—they are just logical toys); but the universe is not motivated by my sadness.

Posted by Daniel on 30 March 2005 @ 10am

Daniel - thanks for your response. I think we could go back and forth for quite a while on this, picking up where the other’s argument left off. But we’ve both spent plenty of work time on this already. Your mention of your distaste for religious orthodoxy reminds me of one of the most interesting and influential books I’ve read on the subject that might be the perfect jumping-off point for you to continue this thought on your own time. The book is (aptly-titled) Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, an early 20th century English writer who had a lot to say on the current subject. I’d suggest starting with the second chapter, which deals arguably the most directly with the current line of discussion, before starting over at the beginning to digest the whole thing.

Posted by Wilson on 30 March 2005 @ 11am

And I, as can be expected, have a great deal more to say. Though it hasn’t been written, to be sure it involves less of my paper friend Mr. Chesterton and much more of Mr. Daniel. In short, and for the time being- not worth your challenge, I find that your theory is only suitable (as an experiment) if you can find a way to live life without involving the interests of another living human. That is to say, if you can live life as selfishly as your philosophy requires. Otherwise there is needless suffering and hypocrisy.

I have been accepted to a graduate school, and apparently, in order to attend, I must graduate from school. Odd, I know. So I’m going to work on that for a few days, and come back. Hopefully the door will still be open. In the meantime I urge you to follow Wilson’s reading advice - not because of your obvious need for enlightenment, but because it’s a book I enjoy, and one I plan to also revisit in the coming days.

I know it’s unfair for me to leave a somewhat strong abstract of my future thoughts here now, but, well…life’s unfair isn’t it? It’s unfortunate that I can’t hear your affirmative reply, as it would provide me with even more ammunition.

Good day.

Posted by Robert on 30 March 2005 @ 12pm

I think we’ve all reached the point where pursuit of the discussion taxes the remaining elements of our lives. I’ll throw a brief rejoinder, and that is that your answer is in the conditional statement at the end of your paragraph. It dovetails nicely with both your sardonic question and the ironic state you’re in because you can’t hear my reply.

Posted by Daniel on 30 March 2005 @ 3pm

[...] it be thought that I’m of the same “science != religion” mindset I was just a few short years ago, here’s a hopefully fruitful excerpt. Of course, science itself probably holds no [...]

Posted by boxing jewels - Prayer ⇒ Opposable Thumbs? on 21 May 2008 @ 11am

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