Sources of morality, or “That monkey knows he shouldn’t fling poo”

We talked about this before, and you’re right that we ought to try to bring it up here.  (The “you” in that sentence being “somejerkontheinternet,” I haven’t figured out where this fourth wall goes yet…).  It’s probably going to meander all over the damn place, but so be it.  We hereby commit ourselves to a series of inevitably-incomprehensible posts!

I’ve long been a believer that morality would eventually be explainable in biological and psychological terms.  There will be the basic morals, that is, those tenets that are hardwired in our genes, and there will be social morals, or the morals which are not hardwired but are acquired and spread socially.  The former are biological in nature; a scientist with sufficient (and granted, that may be a practical impossibility) resources could determine the basic morals for an animal (or, why not, any living thing) based on its DNA.  The latter are psychological; a psychologist could put together a good idea of how an individual would react based on the social environment around it.

The golden rule comes with a choice of toppings – but the toppings are also cursed

The Golden Rule is definitely a good place to start, as it ties one’s outward behavior with self-interest. If religion taught us one thing, it’s that the best motivator for good behavior is usually a carrot no one can disprove and an eternally burning stick (that no one can disprove, again). So, you make it part of the social bargain: everybody agrees to treat each other the way they want to be treated, and in theory they will always be treated the way they want to be treated by others.

So why doesn’t it work? Offhand, I have two reasons: (1) free-rider problems and (2) differences in expectations.

The free-rider problem is easy to see, and, I think, pretty damn hard to solve. Let’s say I’m walking by a bum (an honest-to-goodness, down-on-his-luck type guy, with polio or something) and he asks for change, and I proceed to light a cigarette with a hundred dollar bill and then put it out in his eye (smoking is bad for you, after all). If I end up stricken with late-life, sudden onset polio and homelessness, how is anyone who passes me on the street going to know that I deserve to receive some cigarette burns in my cornea? There’s no karmic credit-checking service, so we’re on the honor system. Needless to say, I don’t trust the honor system.

I think that problem, however, pales in comparison to the second, at least in how many people it affects (I guess I do have some faith in the honor system after all). I do believe there are a lot of people who, for whatever reasons, believe that it’s better not to give the guy a dollar. Or that he doesn’t deserve it. Or something. And I don’t believe it’s spite; I believe these are people who may quite possibly be applying the golden rule. I believe many of them believe that “if I were homeless, I’d be able to get out of it without asking for money, and thus I don’t need to give other people in that situation any money.”

Another flavor of that comes from the fact that there’s no inherent duty to rescue in the rules we have down in the first post. So, let’s say we have a hypothetical person, Dan E. Dan E. goes to college and, without any real forethought as far as the rest of his life, gets a degree in English. He graduates, and “Surprise!” can’t find a job anywhere. He also sleeps with some floozy, knocks her up, and suddenly has no income and multiple mouths to feed. If you ask me, “if you had a kid and no money, would you want people to help out with that,” I’d emphatically say “Yes!” If you asked me, “Would you have put yourself in a situation with no employment prospects and an unplanned child,” I’d say “No!” So, does the golden rule require us to help out given the discrete circumstances at the time, or does it allow us to refuse to bail out people who foolishly get themselves into trouble?

Personally, I think looking back to the causes of the current situation that someone is in is just a way of getting out of the obligation, but to require each person to assist no matter the level of responsibility the “victim” in his own plight would create some seriously perverse incentives. Do we need a “reasonable golden rule,” then?

Full disclosure to the hypothetical readership, I’m unemployed and have the utmost respect for English majors. Also, no kids I know of.

Improving the Ten Commandments, vol. 1

Some wiseacres would argue that it’s not too hard to improve on the Ten Commandments, but it’s still probably not a terrible exercise to work on better ones.  These are moral precepts for individual thought and behavior.  Of course everyone will fall short, these ideas are just supposed to be concepts that, if taught and borne in mind, would lead to a more moral, content, and productive society.  I’m an American, born in the late 20th century, so these all come from that perspective, living in a relatively secure, multicultural society.

#1)  The Golden Rule is a sensible enough place to start.  Just to clarify that you don’t tell a baby to just get its shit together, let’s state it as, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you, in like circumstances.”  Hopefully that makes clear that extroverts shouldn’t treat introverts like extroverts, assuming that extroverts can be brought to learn that sort of thing.

#2)  “Strive to eliminate chauvinist thinking.”  There, that’s a moral compulsion to weaken all form of prejudice, in yourself and others.  It doesn’t foreclose judging, say, Hitler’s Germany as bad, but it does prevent you from saying, “Weimar Germany is bad because it’s run by the goddamn Hun.  They’re going to try to take over the world one of these days, those Weimars, mark my words.”

#3)  “Stay engaged in your work.”  It makes you happier and more productive than treating work as just another damn thing to suffer through and endure.

OK, that’s 3.  More to follow.