Ethics and Morality

As a rebuttal to my previous comment, my friend endorsed an atheist response to the Joel Marks's Ex-Moralist article.  In his blog Why Evolution is True, the ecologist Jerry Coyle argues that Marks did not truly give up morality.  Instead he switched to a utilitarian morality and merely called it something different.  I don't agree.  In the following reply, I suggest that Marks gave up on morality because his atheist philosophy demanded it.

Sometimes it helps for me to start at the beginning.  What is the purpose of defining morality?  Why go through the trouble?  It seems to me that morality is important because there are times when we simply do not know the right action to take.  Sometimes we must rely upon something outside ourselves to tell us what to do.  Our internal compass -- our instinct, our heart, or our head -- fails us.  Morality tells us what to do at these times.  Yet there is also ethics, and both ethics and morality instruct us how to act.

Although both are valuable, I see ethics and morality as distinct.  What separates them is that ethics change and are debated while morals are eternal.  We cannot deny that each of us has times when we disobey even our own rules.  We rationalize them away or we try to forget them.  The moral rules are those which we can never deny or rationalize into nonexistence.  We must accept them.  Morality becomes most needed precisely at the moment one wishes to ignore it.  To make this point clear, consider being accused of something "unethical" versus "immoral".  The latter has a feeling of inviolable transgression that the former lacks.  Or to put it more succinctly: ethics suggests, morality compels. 

I make this distinction because I do not think Prof. Coyne or Sam Harris, whom Coyne mentions, is talking about morality.  They are talking about ethics.  Consider this section from Coyne's post: 

"[Prof. Marks] may not call [vegetarianism] the 'right' thing to do, but it’s what he sees as a way to increase well being.  And that’s exactly what Sam Harris sees as 'objective' morality." 

To be fair, I have not read Harris, and neither Coyne nor Marks wrote in order to define a complete system of ethics, but consider what is here.  They propose that we should act in ways that increase well-being.  That sounds good, but it is easily rationalized away.  If I am selfish and place a higher weight upon my own happiness, then I am justified to act selfishly because my well-being is most important.  Yet we also feel that would be wrong.  (I can give personal testimony to this sin.)  Hence the idea -- that we should act to increase well-being -- is an idea in ethics.  To motivate, it requires some external moral standard that tells us we should not value ourselves so highly. 

I don't think Coyne would be satisfied with that argument.  He would say, I think, that he possess an innate morality which tells him to act humbly.  This morality is guided by the "head" and the "heart". 

"[Prof. Marks's] 'head' is his secular and rational consideration of what consequences actions can bring.  If some consequences are more desirable than others, as in factory farming, that’s not much different from morality.

"His 'heart' is his evolved feelings about the right thing to do.  That is the part of our morality instilled in our ancestors by natural selection." 

He supposes morality is a combination of choosing what is more desirable rationally and judging his choices based on his internal feelings, which have emerged from evolution through natural selection.  So for him, the ultimate external moral standard is based in the natural process of adaptation.  It changes and evolves, and hence it is not truly objective.  (Notice objective becomes "objective" in the quote above.)  Dawkins calls this the "changing moral zeitgeist" in The God Delusion.  But there are problems with such a moral standard. 

Morality is not an abstract idea that we discuss to make us feel better about our actions.  It gives us a basis for truly judging our actions and the actions of others.  Ideally, it should give us a standard by which we construct our laws.  And in this latter way, morality becomes action.  We ruin people's lives by throwing them in jail (or worse) for not conforming to the moral zeitgeist.  We feel we are justified in administering this discipline because they have offended a morality that not only applies to us, but to them as well.  For example, we would all agree that thieves and murderers  are immoral and should be punished. 

And so here is the problem: if we suppose that morality evolves, then how can we justify punishment of immoral acts?  How do we guarantee these wrong actions are not, in fact, just the next step in the evolving moral zeitgeist?  How do we avoid punishing the more evolved actions outside our current morality?  Given the unreliability of our individual moral sense, as I mentioned above, we cannot depend on it.  Toward an answer Dawkins proposes that "the zeitgeist may […] move in a generally progressive direction, but […] it is a sawtooth not a smooth improvement" (p. 308, The God Delusion).  But this is not satisfying: why is the zeitgeist not generally regressive instead? 

Fundamental to Dawkins's argument is that today we know and understand more than our ancestors -- we have discovered more truth.  Therefore we are more likely to construct a proper understanding of right and wrong.  But we cannot know this with certainty.  We can only trust that the zeitgeist is guided by an invisible hand.  Dawkins, Harris, and Coyne would say, circularly, that this is the hand of evolution.  But if evolution is the author of our changing moral sense, we cannot then use our moral sense to judge what truth evolution has given us.  Hence an inner, evolved sense of right and wrong can never provide an objective standard of morality. 

I think in his "anti-epiphany", Prof. Marks peers behind the curtain of the morality argued by Dawkins and Harris and sees the circularity.  The invisible hand disappeared.  He sees no basis for compelling anyone to act in a right way, because "right" doesn't have a real meaning.  Moreover, he has no alternative.  There is no atheistic argument for morality that is not fundamentally circular in the above way.  And that is why he no longer believes in morals.  He can only suggest an ethics from the basis of his internal compass.  (At least, then, he still has a job.) 

But there is an alternative solution that embraces the invisible hand, the teleology, of our moral development.  This solution acknowledges moral guidance as one of the divine attributes, because only God can satisfy our quest for an objective morality.  And it does not require us to redefine words with perfectly good definitions.  But that is for another post.