Words&Dirt

“‘I will not rest until my enemy’s identity is known, and I’ve put him in his grave.’

‘But suppose that when you learn his identity, he turns out to be your great-uncle, and your cousin’s brother-in-law, and your best friend’s godfather?’

‘I’m only speaking of one enemy––’

‘I know.  But royal families of Europe are so tangled together that your enemy might bear all of those relations to you at once.’

‘Eeyuh, what a mess.’

‘On the contrary––’tis the height of civilization,’ Monmouth said.  ‘It is not––mind you––that we forget our grievances.  That would be unthinkable.  But if our only redress were to put one another into graves, all of Europe would be a battleground!’

‘All of Europe is a battleground!  Haven’t you been paying attention?'”

––Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 525

“We have undermined the alleged foundation of a strong version of moral realism, which, you will recall, was formulated to insure an objectivity that was supposedly entirely independent of any individual or group perspective.  There is no perspectival-less objectivity.  There are no absolute, self-evidently true moral facts, nor are there any absolute and unconditional moral principles.  There is no adequate cognitive or epistemic foundation for moral fundamentalism.

Moral fundamentalism is thus a false doctrine because it is incompatible with what we have learned about how our minds work.  Humans do not, for the most part, have classically structured moral categories of the sort required for moral absolutism.  Neither do we have strictly literal moral concepts that could map directly and determinately onto fixed states of affairs in the world.  Neither facts nor principles can be regarded as ‘self-evident’ an any significant sense of that term, as required by strong moral realism (as a form of fundamentalism).  This is why I have called moral fundamentalism a ‘non-starter’ from the perspective of the cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and pragmatic conceptions of mind, thought, language, and values.

But moral fundamentalism is not just false from a scientific perspective.  Even worse, it is immoral, and we can now see why.  What makes it immoral is that it shuts down any serious form of moral inquiry, since it takes moral truths as self-evident givens.  It denies the complexity, depth, richness, and changing character of experience, insofar as it selects one basic consideration as the sole key to the determination of a morally problematic situation.  Even worse, it shuts down any further moral inquiry, on the assumption that experience forms a closed, fixed system subject to timeless laws.  Whistling ‘it was good enough for granny, so it’s good enough for me’ is immoral.  What if granny was a racist, an anti-Semite, a pedophile, a warmonger, a sadist?  Neither the faith nor the morality of our ‘fathers’ (or our forefathers) should be regarded as ‘good enough for us,’ at least in any absolute sense.

What we need are not unconditional moral truths that never change, for there are no such things available to human beings in any absolute or eternal sense.  What we need, instead, are refined, tested, and sensitive methods of moral inquiry that we bring to bear on our lives, testing them by our ongoing experience and adjusting them by our best lights, in the face of changing conditions.  As Dewey expressed it:

Morals must be a growing science if it is to be a science at all, not merely because all truth has not yet been appropriated by the mind of man, but because life is a moving affair in which old moral truth ceases to apply.  Principles are methods of inquiry and forecast which require verification by the event; and the time honored effort to assimilate morals to mathematics is only a way of bolstering up an old dogmatic authority, or putting a new one upon the throne of the old. (1922, 164)

The search for absolute foundations is a fool’s quest.  It leads us away from the very thing we most need if we are to face the moral problems that daily confront us––namely, an intelligent, reflective, self-critical, and imaginative moral inquiry that leads us to reasonable action.  This will be an ongoing transformative process, so long as we live.”

––Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, by Mark Johnson, pg. 189-91