Questions about ethics

It's been two years since I stopped believing in God, but most people in my life still don't know.  When I do tell someone, invariably the first question they ask is some permutation of this: "How can you be moral without God?"

I find this strange, because at the tail end of my time as a believer, my main worry was, "How can I be moral while being religious?"  After all, religion constrains your choices; sometimes you might have to abandon something your conscience wants you to do because your religion forbids it.

But I do try to answer the question, because it's important.  Even if the asker never leaves religion, I want them at least to be thinking about which of their moral choices would still make sense in a godless universe.  Call it the Reverse Pascal's Wager -- act in such a way that, even if there isn't a God, you still haven't done anything horrible.  Believe in God without the Inquisition, is what I'm saying.  And the only way to do that is to know what would be moral if God didn't exist.

I've talked about this a lot before, so you can read all my posts on the topic if you haven't already.  Today I want to talk about a few other moral questions which I've untangled lately.

Question 1: But don't you need objective morality?

I really am not sure what people are asking for here.  Morality is mainly about being objective -- to stop being stuck in your own wants and needs, and consider what is best for humanity as a whole.  Imagine you could pop out of your own body and float above the earth, looking down.  Don't ask "what's best for me" or even "what's best for my friends" but "what's best for everyone?"  The answer that you get from that is a moral answer.  If what is best for everyone is for your nation to, say, allow refugees in -- because the risk to your nation is small but the benefit to the refugees is vast -- then that is the moral thing to do.

Ah, my interlocutor would say, but why should I care what's best for everyone?  You have to give me an objective reason to care.

Well, there is no such thing as an objective reason to care, because caring is a bit subjective, isn't it?  I could tell you there is an omnipotent being who cares, but that is a statement of fact, not a reason for you to care.  I could tell you you'll go to hell if  you don't care, but even that doesn't bring you to an "ought" -- you could claim that you don't mind going to hell.  So no, there is nothing I could say that could universally make you care about this.  It is an observable fact, though, that most people do care.  They don't actually want to make the world a worse place.  And if you really go over it with them, they might admit that they do, in fact, want to have positive relationships with other people, and you get that by being good to people.  The specific arguments against all the various evils people might attempt would be a longer conversation, but I think the arguments could be made.  It won't be an objective proof, though.  It will depend on what the person actually wants, and what their ethical concerns are so far.

Question 2: But why is it moral to care for all people, rather than just some people?

Here's a question that has troubled me for awhile.  A person who's not endowed with much empathy or conscientiousness might be talked into some basic decency because they want to have friends.  They might want to be loyal to their friends; most people at least like to think they are.  But why should they be decent to people who aren't in their tribe?  They might define their tribe as "people they regularly interact with" or "people of their religion" or "people of their race," but that still gives them plenty of people to have positive relationships and engage in trade with, without having to be moral toward strangers.  And human nature doesn't really give us much to combat this tendency with, because it naturally is suspicious of strangers.  This is why there's so much racism and ethnic cleansing and so on -- because neither our reason nor our instincts put the brakes on this tendency very much.

But it occurs to me that the basic game-theory motive for moral action still works on this level.  I am kind to the cashier who scans my groceries because we are both better off if we are both kind, while we will both be worse off if we aren't.  I could be mean, hoping she is still kind, so that I get what I want without being moral, but that doesn't work, because if I'm mean once, she'll be mean in the future.  And this is true of groups as well.  My group can practice reciprocal morality with other groups, just like I can with individuals.  It is better for the US to get along with Canada than for us to fight with Canada, so Americans should be nice to Canadians.

Of course, Machiavelli might say this only holds true if some group, in the future, might have power to hurt us.  If we wipe them out entirely, they can never get revenge on us, so we'll be better off.  And all I can say is that history does not bear this out.  Wiping out an entire race and everyone that cared about that race is virtually impossible.  It didn't work for Hitler, it didn't work for Milosevic, it's not going to work for you.  Keeping them as a powerless subclass doesn't work forever, either.  Haiti is an example of this.

Now the best way to solve tribalism is probably to increase inter-tribal interaction and relationships.  If you have several black friends, and they're actually close, odds are good you won't want to join the KKK.  If you have a Syrian friend on Facebook, you might stop suggesting "bomb the whole region from space" as a solution to the unrest there.  Basically, once you realize that the stranger is not all that different from you, that they have feelings, hopes, aspirations, and loved ones like you have, you will want to be kind.

Still, even if you're a heartless xenophobe, if you really think about it, you should be able to see that a world where people interact positively with one another is better for you to live in than a world where all nations are constantly at war and you're always watching your back in case one of your slaves shanks you.

Question 3: What is a person?

That's a brief way of asking, "How do you define the class of beings that are morally significant?" or "Who has rights?" or possibly, "But who is my neighbor?"

I was brought up keeping it simple: humans.  Humans are morally significant; no other life form is morally significant.  But that sort of leaves out aliens.  If we were to discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I would argue that we should treat them ethically, for all the reasons discussed in question 2.  They would be able to participate with us in reciprocal morality -- perhaps they might share their technology with us, for instance.  Whereas if we tried to wipe them out, we'd probably get a reputation throughout the galaxy of "these people are mass murderers, kill on sight" long before we managed to wipe them out.  So on that ground, even if we're completely selfish, we should try to be nice to aliens.

Further, just as we can empathize with a fellow human from a different country, with different experiences, because we have many things in common with him ... so too would we have things in common with intelligent aliens.  Their culture and minds would be vastly different from ours, but their experience must have some commonality with us if they're rational like we are.  We might find they make interesting friends.  And our instinct not to kill a being that has hopes and dreams and friends will likely kick in, once we get over our squeamishness over their different appearance and start communicating with them.

But of course once you draw the circle larger than "the human race" you open a massive can of worms.  Are animals morally significant as well?  Should we respect the lives, liberty, and happiness of animals?  How are we to know whether or not we should?

This is a really, really thorny problem and it isn't something I'm going to be able to hash out in its entirety here.  I do think that, to some degree, intelligence matters.  A pig or a dog, which can be trained, read a human's intentions, and solve problems seems a lot more likely to be morally significant than a shrimp or a snail, if only because the "higher" animal will experience longer, more complex kinds of suffering if it's mistreated, while the snail doesn't seem to be capable of it.  (It may be impossible to say for sure.)

My general feeling is that it is good for animals to exist and not suffer.  However, for them to die is not such a big thing.  I know this sounds odd, but animals generally do not seem to comprehend death, and so they aren't upset by being in a situation where they will die, unless they are otherwise afraid or in pain.  Most domesticated animals don't mind a lack of liberty, either, so I don't consider them to have a "right to liberty" the way humans do.

Of course the reason this is so thorny is that humans like to eat animals.  So I feel like I should be able to justify, morally, why I eat meat, or else stop doing it.  My current reason is this: either we farm domesticated animals like cows and chickens, or these animals, with a few lucky exceptions, cease to exist.  If people stopped eating meat, farmers would probably kill their breeding stock, sell them for dog meat, and go out of business.  If there is no money in cows, there is no reason for cows.  They eat a lot, and humans cannot afford such a huge drain on the world's food resources unless we're going to eat the cows.  (We also kill an awful lot of mice and birds to keep them away from our crops, but that's a whole other problem.)  Cows and chickens cannot survive in the wild; they are too thoroughly domesticated.  Pigs can, but pigs are environmentally devastating if you let them run wild, so humans would probably end up having to cull them anyway.

Given that the cow is not distressed, per se, by being kept in captivity and then painlessly killed, it seems that if it had the capacity to choose, it would prefer to live a short time than not at all.  This might change if its life were guaranteed to be full of suffering, as the lives of many farm animals are.  But if you take farming in the abstract, if it were perfectly done, I don't see a problem with eating any animal that cannot visualize and be upset by the prospect of its future death.  It's going to die at some point, anyway, and Temple Grandin pointed out that, if she were a cow, she'd rather get knocked on the head than eaten by a lion.  "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be," is a catchphrase of hers.

I do think that any animal that can suffer, should be treated humanely so that it doesn't suffer.  We shouldn't scare dogs on purpose, or keep pigs in tiny crates, or cut off chickens' beaks.  It's not my life's crusade or anything, because there are still so many humans being mistreated all over the earth, but ideally, we would be humane to all feeling creatures because we too are feeling creatures and can understand that no one wants to suffer.

This isn't something I am able to prove, per se.  There is a great deal of argument on either side of the question of animal rights.  But for the moment, I'm not vegan and have no real intention to be.  I am hoping to buy some pastured beef soon, though, because the more I find out about conventional meat, the less I want to eat it.

Question 4:  Is there any limit to how selfless you're supposed to be?

I've been bothered by "utilitarian guilt" for some time.  I mean, I've rationally worked out that I'm no more important than anyone else.  Then how can it possibly be justified for me to spend more effort on myself than on anyone else?  I just ate some ice cream.  Someone elsewhere in the world died of malaria.  Why did I buy the ice cream instead of a bed net?  Am I a monster?

I was going to call this scrupulosity, but I think if I were really all that scrupulous I would have bought the bed net.  Nah, I'm as selfish as the next person, but it does kind of bother me how selfish I am.  I mean, I could always be doing more.

And the answer, which I got from John -- whose lack of angst on this topic is refreshing -- is this: if you make the world a worse place, you're a bad person.  If you leave it the same, you're an okay person.  And if you make it better, you're a good person.  Instead of trying to divide it between "stuff I do for me" and "stuff I do for other people," why not take it as given that I, as a human being, am going to take care of myself, because that's what we do.  If I eat ice cream, and I pay the person who made it, I'm breaking even.  I didn't do anything good, but I didn't do anything bad either.  I'm still at the neutral place between good and bad.

But if once a week I skip the ice cream and give a buck to the Clean Water Fund, then I'm edging into positive territory.  I haven't done anything that great, but I did a thing and I don't have to weigh it against all the things I did for myself.  Taking care of myself isn't an ethical negative, it's a zero.

I do feel every person has an obligation to do good and not simply avoid evil, but perhaps there is no minimum amount of good you have to do before you count.  If you do something, that's good, and if you do more, that's better.

I am not sure if thinking about it this way helps anyone else, but I'm throwing it out there.


Does anyone have any other questions about morals -- either in the abstract, or my moral reasoning specifically?  Don't be bashful, I like talking about it .... to the point that I often mistake idle questions on the topic for Serious Curiosity and take up hours of somebody's time. 

(If anyone is wondering why I have been posting so rarely .... it took me a solid week to write this post.  That is how little time I have these days.)