Rethinking Morality

I have a pretty good idea of what my own moral sentiments are. I know where I stand on most of the very divisive “culture wars” issues, those perennial hot-button issues that define our endless political discourse. You know the one’s I’m talking about. The trouble is that if there is an afterlife, I have no information on what moral choices I would make in this life that would affect my standing in the afterlife. If there is a God, I have no information on what moral choices I would make that would please or displease God, if such a being can be pleased or displeased.

Are the moral issues in the current culture war more centered around which side we take or how we treat people on the other side of the debate?

If I understand it correctly, the concern is the uncertainty surrounding god’s approval of your moral choices.

If there’s no way of truly knowing god’s will with absolute certainty, wouldn’t a question worth asking be, “Am I happy with my own moral choices?”

We may or may not end up living with god but we’re stuck with ourselves. Are we happy with our choices?

This is one of the things that I’ve heard from people who have near-death experiences (NDE). They say that God does not judge anyone; instead, we judge ourselves. The problem I have with this is that self-judgement only tells you whether your actions were consistent with your beliefs. If your actions were consistent with your beliefs, then you judge yourself favorably. It’s only when you are a hypocrite that you might judge yourself negatively. But what if your beliefs are all wrong? What if your values are all messed up? You can have dysfunctional values and if you act in harmony with your dysfunctional values then you’d still give yourself a favorable judgment.

For example, a sociopath might be proud of the crimes he’s committed. He might be quite happy with his choices, in spite of the enormous damage caused to others. He might see no problem with his illegal behavior. He might even be proud of it. If he’s comfortable with his values and he judges himself favorably, does that mean that God will not punish him?

How do you know your values are the “right” values? I have my values that I feel comfortable with, but the fact that others hold very different views gives me pause and causes me to question. What if I’m wrong? What if they’re wrong? Who will God reward and who will God punish? And if God doesn’t reward or punish anyone based on their moral choices, what’s the point of talking about morality?

Morality is complicated and is a combination of several different elements, only some of which we can choose. I believe there is a very foundational aspect of morality baked into our genes. We are all human, therefore we want fairness, we want to love and be loved, we feel compassion at the suffering of others, we justify our anger when we feel attacked, we want to be good people but at the same time often fall victim to our selfish impulses. The most basic elements of morality are things that simply come with being human.

On top of the inherent human morality, there is the level of social morality. The values you grew up with that are influenced by culture, religion, family, and education. There are some interesting moral dilemmas that show the difference between cultures. For example, if a man’s mother and wife are both drowning and he can only choose to save one of them, which one should he save? The answer is often different when the question is posed to someone from a Western European culture compared to someone from an East Asian society. Like the inherent sense of morality we get from genetics, social morality isn’t really something we choose.

Then there is the top level of individual morality. This is where we pick our own morality and decide who we want to be. I think this is actually a relatively small part of our overall sense of morality, but it has a large impact because it is the part that differentiates us from everyone else. All people have pretty much the same biologically determined elements of morality as ourselves, and many of the ones we regularly interact with will also have a similar sense of social morality by virtue of living in the same place and being part of the same community. The individual component of morality is the only one we choose, and is what makes us a “good person” or “bad person”.

If there is a God, he must know that we as humans are incapable of viewing any moral standard objectively, and have much of our morality predetermined. But there is the small part of individual morality that we can determine for ourselves – and this is the precious gift of agency.

Picking your own morality – I would say that is the entire point of our mortal existence. I cannot believe God would give us a gift of agency expecting for us to give it back as a test of faith, submitting our will completely to his. Is life really a test in the sense of seeing if we will adhere to some list of rules, or is it a test in the sense of seeing what kind of person we really want to become? I do not think there is necessarily an absolute right or wrong – only choices and consequences. We often think of judgement day as God determining that in the next life good people get to be happy and bad people get to be sad. But what if the reward or punishment is simply the natural consequence of your choices? If you tried to be a kind person in this life, your reward in the next life is that you are a kind person. If instead you spent your life as a selfish person, your punishment is that in the next life you are a selfish person. But if that is what you wanted to become, you may still view it as a reward. Life is not about God giving out prizes only to the people who got the question right, but an opportunity for all of us to grow and determine what we really want.

To me, moral agency is not about choosing whether or not to obey. It is the freedom to choose our own destiny, to decide who we want to become, and live with the consequences that follow. In order to know what moral direction to take, we have to know what moral destination we desire. And that is something each of us has to decide for ourselves.

“We claim the privilege of worshipping God according to the dictates of our own conscience and all (humans) everywhere the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”

For me, this says it all. I try to decide what my conscience believes and follow it.

So I really take issue with this idea that we can each invent our own moral system independently of the society in which we live.

I don’t think anyone is arguing that people come up with their moral system in a vacuum of the individual. Arrakeen was essentially saying the opposite, that the foundations of our own moral systems are a product of what it means to be human, fitting into larger society, and having a baked in desire for fairness.

In your posts I see morality, conditions of employment, societal rules, and religious beliefs all being subsumed into one. One person may be talking to religious belief while the other is interpreting the response in relation to societal rules. It would help to separate out these concepts and address them individually.

To be honest, I often hear similar arguments of extremes employed in the following fashion.

Person A: I want to “live my truth” and not be held to a particular rule your religion is trying to impose upon me.

Person B: If people can “live their truth” it’s a slippery slope that would let mechanics make planes crash.

Person A and person B are using the same language to discuss separate concepts. That’s why I think it’s important to separate concepts.

What if that same airplane mechanic had to follow guidelines for VCR repair and that forced them to repair an airplane in a way that made an airplane crash? That produces the same outcome as the mechanic that doesn’t fix an engine because they just don’t want to.

These are extremes. Everyone calling their own shots for every decision imaginable, however small. The other extreme is that no one gets to make any of their own decisions whatsoever. Life is somewhere in the middle.

Today, right now, a pilot flying a plane scheduled to arrive at France is free to fly to Germany. They might have to knock out their copilot, but they could do it if they wanted to. The vast, overwhelming majority of pilots don’t and never would. Why? Maybe the answer to that question has a lot of similarities for most pilots but is still slightly unique to each individual pilot.

Perhaps consequences factor into a person’s morality. Maybe one question to ask is whether society should rethink individual consequences that have been normalized.

So I am getting frustrated because I want to “live rightly” but I have nothing to go on at all other than my own moral sentiments. I can follow my own moral sentiments and live by them, but I have no way of knowing if my particular moral choices are pleasing to God or if they will improve or hurt my status in the afterlife.

I think ultimately you get to pick what your morality is — such is the nature of free agency.

I like this quote ascribed to Marcus Aurelius, even though there is some question about whether he actually said it:

““Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

What I like about this quote is that it represents “sensitivity analysis” — a business technique where you forecast different scenarios and then pick a decision that mitigates risk or lets you win regardless of the forecasted outcome. In this case “living a good life” fits all scenarios related to the existence of God, so it’s the best choice.

The question is, what is a good life? I think that is up to you to decide. And I think the definition will change as you change, and as your circumstances in life change.

At one time, living the standard party line in the church was my definition of a good life. But then, as I saw a lot of my time wasted– and I don’t use that term lightly — wasted in efforts that generated no results, I realized there were other arenas in life where I could make a bigger impact. And so, I redefined my definition of a good life to encompass service in the community with only minor deference to the church. That lasted for about 10 years. Now, I redefine living a good life as being kind and patient with my family, and making the experience of living as my age and health have limited my ability to work 18-hour days 6 days a week like I used to.

In the end, I think you’ll be judged on how much you obeyed your conscience. And if I get censured, I will probably ask why the “good life” wasn’t more clearly defined, rather than relying on warm fuzzy feelings.

Your mileage my vary (YMMV).

I believe there is a very foundational aspect of morality baked into our genes. We are all human, therefore we want fairness, we want to love and be loved, we feel compassion at the suffering of others, we justify our anger when we feel attacked, we want to be good people but at the same time often fall victim to our selfish impulses. The most basic elements of morality are things that simply come with being human.

I used to like evolutionary psychology and it used to be an important part of my worldview, but this is a place where I think evolutionary psychology has been wrong. What evolutionary psychologists do is that they look at American and Western culture and they assume that American cultural norms are human universals, and they try to fit a model of genetic self-interest on top of American cultural norms. The result is something that looks like a genetic version of free-market competitive capitalism that probably has nothing to do with human nature. Then they announce that they can reject American culture and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition because it’s all encoded in our DNA so we don’t need religion to be moral. Further, they argue that religion is not just wrong but actively harmful, and if we have any moral sensibility we will become atheists and do everything we can to destroy religion.

It’s actually not obvious that humans should treat each other with fairness. Indeed, in Ancient Rome you’d be more likely to outrightly slaughter you enemies than to make an effort to treat them fairly. The entire concept of “human rights” was certainly not obvious enough to ancient people to be encoded in their laws (at least not by our standards), and is still not obvious to many countries around the world who still engage in egregious human rights violations. It’s actually not encoded in our DNA that you can’t go slaughter somebody just because you don’t like them or you don’t like what they’re doing, because people throughout history have done exactly that. Far from being encoded in our DNA, Western and American cultural norms – including fundamental human rights – are actually very unusual in historical context. It’s actually quite strange that we would try to treat each other with basic dignity rather than treating each other horribly, which is the historical norm.

That’s the thing about the Judeo-Christian moral tradition – if we were fish, the Judeo-Christian moral tradition would be the water that we’re swimming in, and we wouldn’t even notice it. It’s frankly preposterous to say that these norms are human universals. You can confirm this by a quick look around the world. Then the “New Atheists’ go and say that we don’t need religion to be moral, even as they themselves are living out – and benefitting from – the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

One thing that perplexes me very much is that even within the Judeo-Christian tradition, people disagree sharply about morality, as is obvious in our political discourse. It’s not clear to me why this should be so, and it’s not clear to me what it means. If there is no objective morality, then it really doesn’t matter whether you choose Left, Right, or Center. Or Far Left or Far Right or Anarchist for that matter. If there is objective morality, then one group is right and everyone else is wrong. If all moralities are equally valid, then why am I wasting my time trying to be a productive and responsible citizen when it would be just as morally valid for me to be a slacker, a mooch, and an outlaw?