It seems that reason may be required for moral behaviour but is it sufficient to explain it?
I ran a few searches and found lots on rational morality. It seems that most philosophers assume that morality is based entirely on reason and that a system of ethics can be logically deduced from some very basic first principals. I think this is a very big assumption to make.
From an evolutionary perspective altruistic behaviour is an attempt to beat non-zero sum games. It is hard for two rational agents to cooperate in a prisoner dilemma situation but moral agents do it all the time. We also see that psychopaths are capable of reasoning but do not behave morally.
Morality is not always rational. The example of a surgeon deliberately killing somebody so that his organs may be harvested to save the lives of three other people, springs to mind. The act is entirely rational, but not moral.
I think morality NEEDS to be rational. Situations requiring moral choices will not always be easily broken down into “rules” or “precise guidelines” that people can follow blindly. Moral choices need to be made “on the hoof” - “thinking on your feet” if you will. For this to be effective, children need to be taught how to make moral choices based on what is good for all concerned (never causing harm, inconvenience etc). A set of arbitrary rules will never be able to cover all aspects of morality so, IMO, rational skills need to be taught from an early age in direct relation to morality.
If children are taught this from the beginning, we may reach a point where rationality will lead to morality (it doesn’t at the moment because we haven’t been taught the skill properly - morality has mistakenly been given to religion to teach, and they have failed).
A mechanic might use spanners. Does a mechanic therefore have to know the physics of levers to wield a spanner? If he is not au fait with said physics, is he therefore any less skilled as a mechanic for it?
The point, in case it is too obscure, is that even though we may be able to construct rigorous watertight post hoc accounts of certain phenomena that such accounts are what initially provoked that which we are contemplating.
I would agree that many moral decisions are based on how we intuitively judge the results of a rather lengthy reasoning process. If there is any flaw in that reasoning process it seems likely that the results and our judgements thereof would be flawed as well. Whether or not children can be taught to make moral choices I’m still undecided, but I agree they can probably be taught how to make more rational choices generally.
Agreed, it would be great if reason got its chance. Morality is a difficult enough problem without throwing religion in the mix.
I’ve looked at Kohlberg’s stages of moral development a while ago to determine at what age a child is ready to stop believing a magic being (Santa, Tooth-fairy, Jesus etc.) will reward good behavior; and at what stage the child can determine morality through own devices e.g. empathy. I’m not enough of an expert to attack or defend his views, but it does make a good read.
Are you implying also that morality may be irrational? Surely if contradictions exist in a moral code (e.g. choosing a certain course of action (good) in one respect, while this action becomes evil in another) the code is inapplicable. No moral code could claim infallibility however as an error in judgement or knowledge may lie at its root. ???
I’m saying that, as always with these types of questions, the situation is not as clear as we would perhaps like it to be. For every argument you care to put forward that morality is (or is not) purely rationally derivable, there is a strong counterargument. Certainly, the ethical codes that humans have today are those that have co-evolved with the needs of the societies in which they are found. That is, they did not spring firm and fast from some a priori rational considerations, just as a spanner did not need the principles of moments and levers for its invention. Our morality is a product of pragmatism because it’s the one that (mostly) works best for us. It will no doubt continue to grow and adapt according to these needs and pressures, which are, for all practical purposes, largely unforeseeable.
It is also worth noting that “rationality” can be gauged differently by different individuals. Sacrificing virgins to appease the volcano’s ire is rational or irrational, depending on the facts one takes as established. This is not to say that some facts are not better descriptors of the world than others, only that practical rationality has little to do with any kind of objective yardstick for measuring it.
But perhaps the most important facet is the inescapable fact that as soon as an ethical code consisting of more than a single imperative is put before one, one can imagine situations in which these imperatives run into conflict with one another. One will be faced with a dilemma and rationality is often not sufficient for obviating these kinds of logical dilemma. It requires making a choice in the way of prioritising the operant criteria, even if that choice is later defended by ostensibly rational reasons that were not to hand at the time the choice was made.
Perhaps, I don’t know. I’m not convinced that it is entirely rational though, it seems a rather big assumption to make. Even if it is rational I doubt we are consciously aware of all the reasoning processes behind it, a lot of our moral judgements seem to be based largely on feelings and intuition.
Well, if one looks at all the moral codes we have developed over the years and compares them to experimental results one sees large inconsistencies. Different sets of moral codes correlate with different situations. In some situations we are utilitarians, others not.
I’m beginning to think morality may not be reducible to an internally consistent code of conduct. I still hold out hope that moral judgements might be predictable though.
Thanks for the clarification. The only problem I can see with the comparison between a priori rational considerations and levers is that levers do not require any kind of awareness to function.
Sure if the volcano had an ire to appease it might be rational to do so. Reason is pretty useless if you make the wrong assumptions.
I’d have a hard time buying that this defence had much to do with the original choice.
I dated a pagan girl once - she followed the Wiccan religion (no, she was not a basket case). They have one rule: “Do as you will, but harm none.” I kind of like that. It seems to cover a lot of bases. Not all of them, obviously, but certainly more than most of the other religions.
It was a recent discussion of the Trolley Problems on the SGU which got me thinking about all of this. Just read the Wiki page on it:
Seems it’s way worse than I thought. I just don’t get how there can be this much argument about experimental results which were so intuitively obvious to begin with. If a theory doesn’t fit the facts one should change it or get rid of it.
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person, Julius Malema, tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person, your only child, tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person, Jesus of Nazareth, who your pastor told you is capable of self-resurrection, tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?
In the case of the Julius Malema variant, it should be pointed that even in the absence of five people having been tied to the track, a knotty moral dilemma would remain for many concerned South Africans… :
In the case of the Julius Malema variant, it should be pointed that even in the absence of five people having been tied to the track, a knotty moral dilemma would remain for many concerned South Africans…
Please show me the track and location of the switch…
It is interesting that such moral considerations assign an unquestioned and supreme value to human well being and life. I’m wondering if it would be at all possible to imagine a moral dilemma where a human life is potentially spared at the cost of destroying a sensitive wetland, or a slab of rain forest. How many giant pandas will equate to one politician? Are we not somewhat biased in this whole ethics thing? Or maybe, in pitting humans against nature, we’ll be adding apples to oranges, causing our moral algebra to bomb out completely.
