Great post. Some points:

What if we change the human genome so that killing each other becomes acceptable: so that we can accept it morally; so that we get a great kick out of killing; so that our genetics relieves the pain of dying, and once a fatal blow is made the brain and body goes into “Ah well, never mind.” mode instead of the desperate clutching to life we have now? Since we all agree, then that’s fine in my book.

A crucial pair of questions for morality as I see it are: (a) if all humans were suddenly wiped out, would there be any morality? (b) if all but one human were wiped out, would there be any morality? My answer is no to both, but I guess those who see some objective morality say yes to both, and some of those who see no objective morality but who see something special in humans might still be inclined to say yes to (b).

There is a tendency to reject moral relativism as a folly of post-modernism (e.g. female genital mutilation (FGM) is a cultural issue, who are we to say it’s wrong). But this is a rather woolly moral relativism that dictates moral behaviour (i.e. excuses us being non-committal).

But without God or other source of objective (in this context outside human biological – e.g. ‘cosmic’) morality, our morals are very much relative. Some of the strong basic moral codes that most humans share across cultures seem to persuade us that moral relativism is itself immoral. But how do you have moral codes about morality itself? Barring objective morals, is it wrong that I don’t care if I don’t?

It seems to me that moral relativism is an observable fact. Not only across cultures, but within the same person over time and incident. In-group and out-group moral behaviour is evident.

So, how do we deal with examples like female genital mutilation (note the emotive moral judgement in the term)? Well, as the human global population becomes more homogeneously mixed, in ethnicity and culture, we seem to be driving towards global moral standards. What’s wrong with the greater population making their feelings known on any topic? This is a modern Western view of course. It cuts both ways, so to speak, when in that any community that favours male genital cutting and yet objects to FGM. There may be many practices that a wider cultural opinion might object to about the West. Morality seems a very contingent social tool.

Ethics is a messy business, I think, because of its historical link to ancient philosophy – excusable then because there was limited understanding of the nature of humans as evolved animals. That’s changed; but I think a lot of philosophy still clings on to some of the old notions that were seen to be the product of ‘pure reason’.
Your Comments

I have to say that I’m not that impressed by the naturalistic fallacy. It presupposes that morality actually has a non-natural foundation. It’s as much a human construct as any other extension to our basic biological drives and those drives that have developed in our cultures. Any throw-back to the Greeks’ has all that philosophical history to contend with and seems to be influenced by that: here and here.

All our moral codes seem to be arbitrary in some respect. If they are culturally constructed then they are as arbitrary as the culture in which they emerge. Where they are based on our biological drives they are as arbitrary as those biological drives are in their evolutionary emergence.

Suppose our evolutionary heritage had contained something like that of the lion, where it is the norm for a lion taking a new mate to kill any cubs she had by some previous mate. How would infanticide have crept into our moral codes? What would be the current ritual regarding step-children? Perhaps the custom, the adapted socialised norm, would be for step children to leave, or to be adopted if young.

Maybe we have already socialised various forms of human killing, so that myths of sacrifice move the target to animals. Is Christianity’s crucifixion the final socialization of some basic human drives?

Look at the moral change that started with a pragmatic norm of trying to prevent unwanted pregnancy that in turn resulted in institutions like those illustrated in The Magdalene Sisters. With birth control, greater social acceptability of un-married pregnancy (single women or unmarried couples) the emergence of what with hindsight was atrocious treatment of young women was done at the time with due regard for the greater moral good life.

Teaching a child to live a good life can be emotionally painful for children not predisposed to it. And that pain clearly continues in adults who never quite make the good life as easily as those who can; so that the ‘failures’ are subjected to the moral indignation of their peers that are more successful at following a good life. Is it immoral to insist on the good life? What if I don’t care about the good life? Would you take any more notice of my suggestions that you be more hedonistic than I would of yours that I follow the good life?

“Take another example. Imagine an alien species where the young can only survive to adulthood if they are given no parental care (no love, no compassion, no kindness) during their formative years. If they are shown any sort of compassionate care, they simply don’t develop the right kinds of cognitive processes to become fully functional adults. Being the recipient of kindness is actually psychologically damaging. These aliens would consider it incredibly immoral to treat their young with what we call love and compassion, since it would bar them from actualizing their potential as the types of beings they can be.”

You are right that this is not a very good example, because this is just a case where love and compassion are being expressed in a different way. The motivation – to do what is best for another – is completely understandable, it is only the way of going about this that is foreign to us. It’s not even that alien – human parents may have disagreements over how much to allow their children to work things out for themselves.

My gut reaction is that any such example you can come up with will be similarly explainable in terms that we would accept as being ‘basically’ moral.

Hi Richard, I actually tend to agree with your first paragraph**, it’s just not what I chose to focus on in the post. I think the practical considerations surrounding genetic modification research and the realities of use and access after it’s developed should, if not completely stop us from pursuing it, at the very least make us extremely cautious moving forward. Though it also depends on the type of modifications. Susceptibility to diseases and disorders is not a line of research I would want to block.

**Quick edit to note I misunderstood the comment. I thought you were saying we shouldn’t pursue genetic modification because of the suffering inherent in the process. I should read more carefully!

“In other words, I don’t think our DNA is the only thing governing our natural ethics.”

You make some interesting points that I didn’t consider in my post. For the most part I don’t disagree with your comments. The only thing I would say is that regardless of how much society and context changes, there is still the constraining factor of our biology. We are still biological organisms that experience pain and pleasure, that can be in states of suffering or well being. We’re malleable, but there are limits.

If the question is put as, “which would necessitate a change in our ethical systems more, changing our dna or changing societal structure?”, I’m not sure I’m ready to answer it quite yet. Though my intuition is that changing societal structure responds to our ethical considerations, rather than creating them. Though new contexts we’ve never dealt with before could certainly force us to address ethical issues we hadn’t considered before.

JS, I think I can agree with your post as well. I think you’re right that there is an underlying motivation that would likely be the same. But it seems to me that it still works with my overall point. The nature of how we would have to express that motivation through our actions would have to be altered to accommodate the new facts of our biology. My point is that this isn’t easy to figure out. How will we determine the proper correspondence between someone’s neurophysiology and how we should best interact with them given that, when we don’t really know the implications of the changes we’re making? You might want to say that the point is somewhat trivial, as we’re not so great at figuring out how to interact with each other properly as is, but I think the question is interesting and worth considering.

Hi Greg,

OK on the naturalistic fallacy. It’s just that it is often represented by objective moralists (God or some other objective source) that natural (biological) sources are not the real source.

“If you don’t care about being moral, under my conception, you’d still be in error of your ideal ontology.”

If your conception is right. I don’t think there is a ‘right’ moral conception in any foundational sense, only a purely contingent one – contingent on our biology and sociology. Back to natural sources: yes harming and loving are both natural. But the significance of the difference is pain, caused directly as psychological pain (e.g. threat of torture) or actual pain (e.g. actual torture).

Take electricity as an example. There are positive and negative charges. The choice of which was which was an entirely arbitrary choice made early on in the study of electricity. But there is a practical difference in that negative charges are on small mass electrons, while positive charges are on larger protons. So, though the sign, the labelling, is arbitrary there is a foundational difference.

The same with pain. There is a real physiological difference. The biological difference is based on the frequency of action potentials in nerves, for example. So, pain versus pleasure has a real physical foundational difference. In animals this leads to behaviour that avoids pain and seeks pleasure, as deterrent and reward systems. This is where the moral difference comes from. So, even though killing and loving are natural we have a basis for the difference.

Even so, this is ultimately arbitrary to the following extent. It’s not inconceivable that a biology could exist where pain was not implemented as related to the frequency action potentials, but to some other mechanism. Let’s suppose pain was determined by the shape of action potentials, then you could have two biological lineages, where in one they feel pain with one shape, and the other lineage feels pain with the other shape. A tool for torture in one lineage might be pleasure in the other.

This is why we can say, in humans, with our biology, FGM is wrong. We don’t like it personally, and we don’t like seeing it done to others.

Hey Ron, I think you and I are in agreement on the majority of your response to Richard in regards to FGM.

I fully support this point for instance:

“Outside human psychological considerations (and physical pain’s psychological experience is what makes pain matter to us) there is no objective morality dictating that FGM is wrong.”

I also fully agree that the basis from which we do our moral reasoning is arbitrary in the sense that the evolutionary history that led us being a certain way biologically and psychologically is in fact arbitrary.

Where I disagree is in drawing the conclusion that this makes our actual moral statements and judgments arbitrary as well, and that the best we can say is “We don’t like it personally, and we don’t like seeing it done to others.” A moral expressivism of sorts. I mean, maybe the way the universe is, is arbitrary. Maybe the laws of physics could have been different. But that doesn’t make our scientific theories arbitrary. It makes them objective descriptions of a universe that may be arbitrary in the sense that it could have been different

You’re right that moral facts aren’t these free floating entities that exist in some sort of metaphysical sense outside of contingent and contextual human facts. But that doesn’t lead to the fact that we thus can make any objective or normative claims about how we should act and how we should treat each other. Given those facts, there are objective statements we can make, of a normative character significantly stronger than “I don’t like it, and I’d prefer if you didn’t like it either”. Maybe you want to say that when it comes down to it that’s all a moral “ought” really is. Maybe we’re having a semantic quibble. I guess we could only tell if the prescriptions we’d suggest for society and for how we should interact individually are markedly different because of our differing terminology. i.e. – I say that we can make an objective moral statement about FGM and you say all we can say is that we don’t personally like FGM. In either case…so what? Given that, what do we do? If both our answers are the same, then I don’t see a substantive difference in our positions.

Hi Greg. Sorry to jump the gun, but could you include a comment on why you would be uneasy with that formulation.

Thanks,
Ron

Hi Greg,

It may be a semantic quibble. Mostly, I’m just emphasising a point, clarifying my view, which may coincide with yours once the semantics have been cleared up.

Yes, I agree that morals aren’t arbitrary within a context, I mean only that if the source of the context is arbitrary, then so must the morals be. The point really is only to emphasise this overall arbitrariness in contrast to any objective claims for morality outside that context.

But, once we have a human evolutionary context, “We don’t like it personally…”, this is the starting point and the basis for any further development.

So, as you say, the question is where do we go from there? The problem is that we humans have already gone from there. Our social morality is somewhat lost in early human and pre-language times, and so it has acquired a status that supposedly lifts it above reason to some extent. This is one aspect of the state of philosophy that seems rooted in the past that gave primacy to thought and reason. We seem left with some of the baggage and are reluctant to tackle it. We seem to want to say, in many cases, “It’s just ‘wrong’, period” (This is no criticism of Richard. We all do it because we that’s how we have learned to react).

That ‘you can’t get an ought from an is’ seems to be taken at face value, as if morals do have some objective independence of everything else; when really it’s a criticism of that very notion. What Hume appeared to be saying is you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ because the ‘ought’ you suppose you have is an invention, a fantasy, that has been elevated into another realm, disconnected from the reality of any ‘is’, particularly from the reality of the experiences that actually drive us.

I’m really just adding this point, this emphasis, that we shouldn’t take the history of ethics too seriously as some sort of ontology. Morals (beyond the biological reactions) are human constructions, even though many go so far back in our history if feels as though they are natural truths of the universe. We should challenge every single one. The more of a done deal a moral example is the more useful it is in exposing our deep historical biases.

This is why I brought up FGM, and lions and infanticide. We could be so different. Why is euthanasia wrong? Why might genetic modification be wrong? Since these do go against the grain we have to lose the baggage so as not to bias our views on these unusual departures from familiar moral ‘truths’.

Slight change of tack.

I have an optimistic and pragmatic view of the new: let’s go for it and work it out as we go along. That’s what we always end up doing anyway. Won’t genetic improvement create an uber class? Well, maybe. Let’s see, and if we don’t like it let’s fix whatever is wrong. Creating a brain dead clone (remember that pain is bad because of the psychology) to harvest body parts? Let’s give it a go.

What the Luddites and the Frankensteins tend to forget is that whatever misery they might imagine from some new technology, whatever hiccups along the way, it’s purpose is usually improvement.

And they tend to ignore the continued misery that ensues without improvement because they see that as the status quo.

My mother is still alive because she has a pacemaker. A friend has an artificial heart valve. Both lives are improved. But I also have one friend who lost a leg a couple of years ago, and another who has recently lost most of his stomach. Having see the pain and depression I can assure any critic that they would be better off if a new leg could be grown or harvested, or if a genetic cure had been available. I refuse to let excess moral baggage steeped in ancient philosophy and religion get in the way of improvements to lives (we can argue the details of what constitutes improvements based on empirical grounds).

I’ll make my morals fit what feels good to me, and if necessary change what I feel good about if reason dictates it necessary. Old established

This is what many stright males have had to face up to over the last forty years or so. I’m sure there is a genuine biological repulsion that some straight men feel about homosexuality – and given we evolved with sexual reproduction it would be odd it it wasn’t biological. It is our reason, our rationalising, that if human integrity is deserving of all humans then some particular biological differences, or even lifestyle preferences, should not be a bar to the greater goal. Our reason has allowed us to overcome ingrained prejudices, many of which were based on superstition. Similar changes have had to be accommodated to overcome inherent fear of the group difference, with regard to race (an obvious visual difference), and to overcome sexual power and dominance issues, with regard to gender.

The Church of England makes my point about the worth of challenging archaic established moral ideas for me: no women or gay bishops!

(apologies if I’m hogging the comments, but your post struck a chord.)