Rethinking Morality

[Anonymous]

I think that you are looking at morality as good vs. bad from a black and white there is a law and you broke the law perspective. It might be helpful to explore the field of ethics. There are multiple theories behind ethics but an overarching theme is to accomplish the most good for the largest number without unduly imposing on the few or the one. Another good rule of thumb to gauge ethical behavior is to ask yourself, “What if everyone did the same?” Maybe a particular act doesn’t harm anyone if one or two people do it but would result in great harm if everyone did the same.

In this view, most things become part of a spectrum of ethical behavior and we strive both as individuals and as a society to become more ethical over time. When did poorly when we didn’t know any better but now that we have been taught the expectations have increased.

I also agree that Judeo-Christian values gave us a great baseline upon which to build. We are indebted to those that came before us and established systems of right and wrong that we currently enjoy in “civilized” society.

[Anonymous]

InquiringMind wrote:

Arrakeen wrote:

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?

I believe some biologically encoded morality exists, but it is not necessarily good- it is just what is common to all human societies and cultures. Kindness is present in all human cultures – but so is murder. Our natural inclinations are what evolution has provided us with, for good or bad.

Much of what you have alluded to is what I consider to be the social level of morality, and some of it does depend on culture. As someone who grew up in a multicultural family, I have seen that there are some differences, but a lot more similarities. And the modern world is becoming increasingly interconnected. In fact much of our society’s morality isn’t really the “Judeo-Christian” tradition as much as it is the 21st century. The moral values of someone living in America or China today are far more similar to each other than either are to the values of someone living in the Middle Ages.

[Anonymous]

Arrakeen wrote:

Much of what you have alluded to is what I consider to be the social level of morality, and some of it does depend on culture. As someone who grew up in a multicultural family, I have seen that there are some differences, but a lot more similarities. And the modern world is becoming increasingly interconnected. In fact much of our society’s morality isn’t really the “Judeo-Christian” tradition as much as it is the 21st century. The moral values of someone living in America or China today are far more similar to each other than either are to the values of someone living in the Middle Ages.

I think that a lot of decision-making occurred without understanding or acknowledging indirect consequences to others. Whatever you did at the top of the Mississippi river was your business – no one knew who was at the bottom of the Mississippi river (north going south basically) to experience the consequences of your choices at the top of the Mississippi river. To be honest, the lag-time between being able to identify causes of issues, having the tools to confirm that that were accurate, having the public interest/reporting access to communicate a concern and even start the investigative process, and then actually communicating with the northern neighbors was in the area of decades (if at all). The technological processes that have made issue identification easier and more accurate, and ways to communicate it across long distances have done a ton of work to the dispel the concept of “what I do is only my business” in some areas – because that is less true than it used to be.

Regarding the church – the church has a lot of moral statements from prophets and some well-defined moral stances. The church is big on being a “main” or “most accurate” morality source – it will sell you morals quite happily as it advises you on ways to live a good life. For some people, the price for those morals is a steal – an amazing price – and they are better off because of the church. But for others, the church will not be the only “store” they go to, the only experience they have to think about and buy moral teachings through their choices. And the church wants to be seen as and treated as a classy high-quality boutique type store for all your personalized moral shopping needs – even though your experience may not see it as classy, high-quality (or the only high-quality around), or need a boutique style store in the first place.

[Anonymous]

AmyJ wrote:

I think that a lot of decision-making occurred without understanding or acknowledging indirect consequences to others. Whatever you did at the top of the Mississippi river was your business – no one knew who was at the bottom of the Mississippi river (north going south basically) to experience the consequences of your choices at the top of the Mississippi river. To be honest, the lag-time between being able to identify causes of issues, having the tools to confirm that that were accurate, having the public interest/reporting access to communicate a concern and even start the investigative process, and then actually communicating with the northern neighbors was in the area of decades (if at all).

This is how I feel about the sexual revolution. We were told by the revolution that whatever consenting adults do behind closed doors is their business, and no one has any place to tell anyone how they should behave sexually beyond the base standard of consent. Particularly churches have no place, we’re told, to tell people how they should behave sexually. Now we are all downstream of the consequences of that failed revolution. The lag time was quite long, but it’s clear now.

This is where I think the Church gets things right. A lot of post-Mormons are very outspoken in criticizing the Church’s relatively strict sexual standards. But look around at the disaster than happens when people are allowed to be promiscuous. It’s a huge catastrophe. And yeah, a lot of the decision-making of the sexual revolution was made without acknowledgment of the downstream consequences to others, which was a huge mistake.

[Anonymous]

InquiringMind wrote:

This is where I think the Church gets things right. A lot of post-Mormons are very outspoken in criticizing the Church’s relatively strict sexual standards. But look around at the disaster than happens when people are allowed to be promiscuous. It’s a huge catastrophe. And yeah, a lot of the decision-making of the sexual revolution was made without acknowledgment of the downstream consequences to others, which was a huge mistake.

I don’t think we view the sexual revolution in the same way. I think that people have always been/always wanted to be promiscuous – and that the sexual revolution was just preventing pregnancy from that outcome. I don’t think that the double standard of “men can/are more likely to sleep around” while women didn’t get to sleep around/didn’t get to enjoy sex because they were worried about introducing another mouth to feed in the family was exactly a great model.

The story is usually told about females getting birth control and sleeping around now. The bigger story is what birth control does for married people. I think it’s a good thing that a woman can use birth control and have relationships with her spouse to draw closer together and not worry about whether there will be a baby to feed in 9 months, or whether she has to figure out how to remove the pregnancy.

I think that in the last 20 years, conversations are happening about “if we aren’t using sex for procreation – what are we using it for and why”?

I think that this is actually causing a paradigm shift.

A) The bible was written out at a time when humans were basically machinery (mostly men in coal mines, farming – food and cash crops, soldiers), and women were child-creators, child co-tenders and machinery (sewing and other cottage industries). The high death rates of infants and new mothers was a huge concern. In addition, a lot of children were needed to replace the individuals lost to early death, wars, disease, and workplace hazards.

Joseph Smith’s time wasn’t that far off the Bible paradigm. Actually, because of the new lands being fought over in North America, the focus was population growth and expansion.

C) Now we have machines that can do tasks faster that have replaced humans in the fields, are replacing soldiers, sewing, etc. We have shifted to need few fields in education, science, and a ton of other options not even thought about during the times of the bible writers and of Joseph Smith.

I think that the “sexual revolution” of the 1960’s was a necessary part of the paradigm shift. I am not sure that it is over yet.

[Anonymous]

AmyJ wrote:

I think that the “sexual revolution” of the 1960’s was a necessary part of the paradigm shift. I am not sure that it is over yet.

As one who has lived through it I think you and I are in agreement in respect to the sexual revolution Amy, and I do agree it’s not probably not over. Some of the “moralistic ideals” depicted in 1950s and 60s (and even 70s) TV were not real reflections of America was, they were reflections of what some people thought it should be. Father may (or may not) have known best but there were no families as perfect as the Andersons. My ancestors were Puritans (I am a direct Mayflower descendant) and I see the sexual revolution as something that was overdue in dealing with false moralistic ideals that were held onto from that time. Don’t get me wrong, I am by no means advocating sexual free for all, but I do agree that what happens with and between consenting adults is none of my business (and it’s none of the church’s business).

I think most relevant to today in regard to the sexual revolution not being over involves LGBTQ+ rights. My state was one of the first to legalize gay marriage. When it was being debated there were all kinds of dire predictions about what would happen – families would disintegrate, taxes would go up, the cost of health care would increase, etc. So gay marriage was legalized and guess what – the next day the sun still rose, men and women were not leaving their families in droves for gay relationships and families did not disintegrate. The people who I knew who were in gay relationships still were, but now they could say they were married if they desired to do so. Taxes didn’t go up or down any more than usual and neither did health care (and there were many other factors involved in those). Over 10 years down the road, I can say the same thing – status quo.

[Anonymous]

InquiringMind wrote:

Arrakeen wrote:

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?

I will attempt to answer what I believe are your exceptionally brilliant questions with what I have come to believe. First, I want to redirect the problem to the great crisis of “agency” that divided heaven and created civil war in the most intelligent and advanced society of our universe. That crisis, as you pointed out, is always created whenever someone is able or capable of making a choice become reality. The obvious crisis is exactly as you framed it – if a person is allowed to make a choice become reality; what are we to do when the choice becomes critical and the choice is deliberately or accidently made to cause harm to others? The reality of the problem is that the intent of the choice eventually does not manner.

The only logical conclusion I have been able to intelligently apply is that agency must include a deliberate choice of all applicable consequences. If all applicable consequences are not understood, then I do not understand how we can say the choice is a matter of agency – rather it was an experiment in chance. Now we have an additional problem to deal with. That problem is that somehow the harm done must be rectified or there is no justice. It is also obvious (at least to me) that punishment is not justice because it does not deal with the harm that was done. Likewise, mercy (forgiveness) is not just either.

I have been unable to intelligently deal with mortality as an exercise of agency without including the LDS logic of a pre-existence and post death justly fixing of harm done because of inevitable bad choices (that cause harm) of mortality. As an extension of this dilemma, I cannot find proof that not only justice does exist, but any morals can are justified for that manner. If any choice or consequence does not maters (as expressed) also implies that even intelligence does not matter and in reality, does not exist. I base this on the scientific definition that intelligence is defined as the ability to learn and modify behavior which implies that a choice is made because of possible “learned” consequences.

It is my understanding that LDS theology (as a branch of Abrahamic religions) teaches, from the Eden epoch, that only by partaking of the fruit of tree of the knowledge of good and evil can we discover the “knowledge” of good from evil based on consequences. Our LDS theology teaches that only through a mortal existence resulting in death can we experience and thus understand consequences of the choices that cause harm – to ourselves as well as others. We are also given to believe that through the atonement of Christ the fix is made to restore all that is lost from all the harm because of choices.

Extending the concept of reinventing the wheel, we can include in our understanding of religion a vast database of human experience and logically determine morals for human society. Unless the interpretation of human experience is corrupted – which we have learned (I believe we have learned) by our human experience – inevitable cause harm. The conclusion I have come to is that for justice to exist there must be a means of enforcing it. Whatever that means is – I logically conclude defines G-d and once we have a definition of G-d we have a definition of true religion. From this I conclude that religion is not so much an adoration of G-d as it is an alignment with G-d’s bringing about justice (which I believe must include mercy and forgiveness) to resolve the inevitable experience of the harm that results from mortal life. In LDS theology this inevitable mortal experience is called “The Natural Man” which we are instructed in LDS theology is an enemy of G-d or His restoration of justice.

The problem I see in all this is, in essence, what I have already touched upon – which is that we cannot prove or demonstrate the existence of justice strictly from our mortal experience. For justice to exist there must be an enforcement of justice outside of mortality. Which explains the scripture that in essence employs the logic that if in this life (mortality) we have hope (faith) of Christ (which Christianity defines as the justice of G-d) we are of all men most miserable (harmed by injustice).

What I have intended is not to pass out to everyone my so-called card containing my definition or list of that which ought to or ought not to be defined as morality (good and evil or right and wrong). Rather, a means by which one can use their own intelligence and experience to learn for themselves what moral choices (agency) they will or intentionally choose to employ – which I believe is the concept of LDS theology of teaching correct principles and allowing the use of agency (that we individually) govern ourselves). Thus, agency is the driving principle of a morality that guarantees justice which cannot be completed in mortality. I have only discovered this logic presented in LDS theology. If it is anywhere else – I have yet to encounter it.

[Anonymous]

Fascinating take Watcher. Thanks for sharing.

[Author]

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