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Ethics
[Editor: This discussion has not been edited. There does not seem to be any maths involved!]
By Brad Rodgers on Friday, October 18, 2002 - 05:02 am:

There hasn't really been a good philosophy/politics thread on this board in a while, so I thought I would at least try to start one.

I've recently been reading Kropotkin's Ethics, which is an excellent book, if you're interested. Anyways, the conclusion that Kropotkin reaches, I think, is that morality, even the definition of ethical behavior, is based not in pure reason, but rather an ingrained sense of ethics within humanity (due to evolution). This is not a thesis I agreed with at the start of the book, but I must admit it is one I am coming to realize as correct upon finishing the book.

Before reading I had realized at least that most people's actions was shaped by evolution (memetic or genetic) but though ultimately the true morality of their actions could be determined using pure reason/induction/etc. without invoking highly uprovable moral assertions. I'm no longer so sure of this, though the notion seems, in some sense, repugnant to me, as I can't see how to establish a positive basis for morality that would, say, rule slavery as immoral. It of course clearly seems so to me, but it was not so clear to the greeks (unless they were a slave themselves).

Should we just accept empathy as the fundamental basis of morality, then, or utilitarian theory? (really one in the same, the way I see it)

As it is, I'm very tired, and I'm sure my writing reflects this. I will post more tomorrow, but in the meantime, any thoughts regarding this general topic? Any other Kropotkin fans?

Brad

By Yatir Halevi on Friday, October 18, 2002 - 09:10 am:

My friend and I were having a very similar discussion yesterday (it was the day our prime-minister was shot 7 years ago), we realized that first before talking about ethics you must first define exactly what you mean by ethics, because there is a huge difference between religon ethics (word of god) or democratic ethics. Because killing Yitzhak Rabin (the prime minister) could have seemed completely logical and ethical by religon ethics to some rabbais (because of is actions). The bible itself tells that god ordered the genocide of the Amaleks.
My friends told me that he read a book on the philosophy of Cant (or Kant) and he says that a moral thing is something that you would agree that will be a law (don't think I phrased this well). For example, if you murder someone then the act is moral if you agree that a law will come out that says that everybody could murder.
It is a very interesting definition, but it has one flaw it completely erases private cases. For instance, your boy is very sick and you steal a kind of drug that would save his life, by kant's definition what you did is NOT MORAL.


Yatir

By Dan Goodman on Friday, October 18, 2002 - 01:34 pm:

No time to say much now (but expect more later), but I will say a quick word about Kant. Kant's Categorical Imperative that Yatir referred to above is basically an adaptation of the principle of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Yatir, you've slightly misinterpreted the principle: it says that you should only do something if you would want the maxim of that action to become universal. So, for example in your case of stealing the drugs, probably many people would want the maxim of that action to become universal (i.e. that saving lives is more important than respecting property rights).

By Andrew Hodges on Friday, October 18, 2002 - 03:02 pm:

Brad you say that the book you read states that morals and ethics are a product of evolution,why then do so many different and successfully functioning societies have such different moral codes? Is any moral code more 'correct' or 'universal' than any other? Or is a moral code in fact a fabrication by a particular society, ie in some societies for example cannibalism is morally correct, is this universally wrong and unjust? Can anybody truly offer an objective viewpoint on this matter, having been born into and shaped by a particular society themselves? What about animals, they seem to have different morals to us yet they have their own successfully functioning societies. Does the act of being self aware and able to think about such matters make us more morally responsible for our actions than animals? Can a cat be held morally responsible for murdering a mouse or is it just part of its 'nature'? Do humans have a 'nature' and do the moral codes in modern day society act for or against this 'nature'? Discuss!!

By Arun Iyer on Friday, October 18, 2002 - 07:45 pm:

I hope Mr.Kropotkin in his book concludes in this fashion "I think moral is an evolution of ......" rather than "Moral is nothing but an evolution of.....".I mean to say,he concludes the idea as "his" viewpoint rather than a general truth.

However the ideas of a particular individual does depend upon how the individual views himself in the frame called society.The society thus plays a significant role in modelling one's views on morality.So one might say that everyone in general is quite in agreement with Mr.Kropotkin.

My only concern on the book lies on the fact - whether Mr.Kropotkin has emphasized more on the society or the individual????I have read a book written by "Premchand" one of the noted writers in Indian literature.The book is basically a collection of stories and these stories deal with pre-indian independence times.All these stories have very much the same theme "human moral and ethical values shattered under the grinding stones of slavery".However,you won't believe it, even though the all the stories had the same theme .. these stories had very different and interesting outcomes.These outcomes were generally based upon the individual's frame of mind.....

At this point or juncture,i would also like to make a special mention of the film "CAST AWAY"....
Think of tom hanks .. who is left alone in a island..For him,moral and ethical values hold no interest as he lost himself in the crowd of silence and is rendered speechless....The picture takes everyone through waves of different human emotions and at every point humanity is kept in perspective.....(A very beautiful picture indeed)

love arun

By Brad Rodgers on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 12:50 am:

I'll start from the base. My basic problem arises from the fact that there is no correlation between what is defined as "moral" and what one should do. Indeed, even the word "should" is loaded in this context, and seems the phrase "one should" seems hopelessly ambiguous and without definition.

But, suppose a given set of actions is defined as "morality." Before we could convince others (or ourselves) that they should act "moral" (in the sense of the word used above) we would need to show the logical connection between this set of actions and something defined as what one "should" do. I haven't the foggiest idea what this thing one "should" do is though, and I can't see a way to not go in circles at this point. It doesn't seem as though a positive basis for ethics or morality could be established. Indeed, often the "should" assumption is implicit in any sort of system of ethics, but the same logic will apply.

Having this, how could one rule out say, slavery or cannibalism, without appealing to some sort of prejudices? And surely these prejudices aren't universal, as perhaps some sort of notion of cause and effect is, simply because, as Andrew points out, conceptions of what 'should' be done has varied tremendously between various civilizations.

However, scientific conceptions have also varied tremendously from age to age, and this certainly shouldn't prevent us from assuming that there is a definite observable universe (though it may cast doubts). My guess (and only a guess) is that such things as cannibalism and slavery were not truly justified from a moral viewpoint, but rather merely 'done.' I know a good deal of people who currently act not according to any moral conceptions, but rather have just become socialized to a given state of being. It seems this is possible, just as it is possible for people to believe spectacularly untrue things because of a threat of punishment or because everyone else believes a particular thing.

Andrew, you mention two things of interest. First, animal "ethics." To the extent that animals have been observed, some general similarities between their conduct and our conduct have been observed, and they do practice various forms of mutual aid, probably without the underlying reasoning humans tend to use when justifying their behavior.

Second, the survival of societies that practice immoral things, at least so far as I or you can tell. To say that this influences evolution, however, neglects the fact that evolution occurs over a very long time, and it would seem that a conception of ethics in mankind was carved out in the neolithic age or earlier, probably much earlier. So, I don't think the survival of such societies implies anything more than the survival of, say, the church, which has promoted and continues to promote blatantly false doctrines.

You also write that ethnocentrism is likely to influence any discussion on morality. This is probably true, but I don't see what it really adds to the discussion - unless you can show that a particular comment by a person is ethnocentric, I don't think their comment should be automatically swept aside. Reality is reality, however much that reality may be influenced by a particular social meme. This is probably taking your comment farther than it was intended, though, and if so, I apologise.

Brad

By Yatir Halevi on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 01:21 am:

I don't see ethics as something that undergoes evolution but rather as something that changes in time, and in different cultures. I think everyone to himself can decide what is for him considered to me moral. This "moral machine" formalizes in everyone, I think, at the first 15-18 years of his life and influenced by society, by personal expriences, by norms and by family. So it is enough to plant a seed in a child that tells him something like cannibalizm is OK for it to slowly infeltrate our society. The child himself might not see this kind of thing as moral, but he would have less harsh feelings about this kind of acts, and probably after some generations cannibalizm could turn to be a norm.
I read somewhere that while the europeans were discusted by the cannibalizm of the native americans, cannibalizm was wide spread in europe itself. These acts were dressed up in clothes of cures and medicine (parts of decised people, mummies etc..).

Have any of you read the book "Lord of the flies" it shows very remarkably how society behaves the same even in a remote island with only children.

Yatir

By Brad Rodgers on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 02:22 am:

I've read Lord of the Flies, and enjoyed it, but it's far from scientific. I suppose some system of roughly tribal organization is inevitable in any "undevoloped" society, though (and to some extent certain aspects of tribes are still very much preserved in the modern world - this in itself is very suggestive about human nature).

However, when I talk of morality, I should distinguish this from the way in which humans actually act. The way a human A reacts in situation X is, to me, behavior, not morals. Similarly, the way a human A thinks he should react in situation X is not morality; it is beliefs, which could, and often do, coincide with morality/ethics. Morality is the way human A "should" act in situation X - by definition it is universal. Again, it seems to me that considerations here are guided by meeting human needs and wants. In this sense, I think that cannabilism, while an established habit, was not moral.

Brad

By Yatir Halevi on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 09:54 am:

I can you be sure that there is a thing called "unviersal morality"?
I see it as a definition made by man.
It is like saying that thre is a universal fashion, that there is an ideal how everyone should change and it changes from time to time like morality. I see it as absurd.

Yatir

By Andrew Hodges on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 02:14 pm:

So do the people in which cannibalism occurs not consider how they are behaving? They must surely think that what they are doing is moral otherwise they'd be an inherently evil society. Or they may not consider moral issues at all, in which case could they be classed as human? It could be that they have just grown up with the habit establshed within their society but that habit must have begun sometime and so the group which started it must have been evil or not human in the true sense of the word. Unless we adopt the moral relativist viewpoint that is.

By Yatir Halevi on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 02:27 pm:

I don't agree andrew, what if cannibalism is the nature to humans and some group came up and said: "No, we don't agree". Just like most of the world eats meat, and the rest are vegeterians and are opposed to it.

Yatir

By Brad Rodgers on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 08:41 pm:

I think the situation with cannibalism is analogous to the one with "meat-eating." I currently am a vegetarian but was not always so, and the time I wasn't I really didn't consider the morality of eating meat. I don't think people necessarily consider the morality of their actions - I certainly don't always - and this may lead to immoral behavior, but not necessarily immoral conceptions of how one should act. (This is to say nothing of why I believe vegetarianism more moral...)

You counter this by writing, "that habit must have begun sometime and so the group which started it must have been evil or not human in the true sense of the word," implicitly assuming that the group that started it had some form of rational justification for it. I very much doubt there was such a justification, just as I doubt the "decision" for humans and other animals to form a society was in any way motivated by rational discourse (although, in the latter case, it very well can be justified rationally). Why should we assume that these things (cannibalism, social organization, etc.) occured after man had developed the rational capabilities to consider them, or the linguistic capabilities to cause others to consider them?

The closest I can come, currently, to writing anything concise about my opinions on morality: There are certain moral conceptions ingrained within all humans, similar to the way induction is within all humans. This does not mean that humans always use either of these; they often do not. As to what these moral conceptions are, I cannot be sure. They seem to arise from considerations of collective welfare, at least within myself.

Brad

By Yatir Halevi on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 09:15 pm:

So what you are saying is that there could be a person with perfect morality?

Yatir

By Dan Goodman on Saturday, October 19, 2002 - 11:47 pm:

Still no time to say much, but when you suggest cannibalism as an example of something that couldn't be moral, is it because of the eating, the killing, or the killing for the purpose of eating? Why? For example, if someone was dead or had been killed, wouldn't it be a waste of meat not to eat them? Perhaps if I didn't eat some dead guy I'd have to kill an animal to eat that instead, wouldn't that be worse?

By Brad Rodgers on Sunday, October 20, 2002 - 12:05 am:

I'd say the killing, personally. I'm not too sure where you're going, but it seems immoral because they would probably prefer to be alive. As to why I don't eat dead people then - I'm following Spinozas advice of 'conforming where it does not inhibit ones purpose.' :) (something like that)

Brad

By Dan Goodman on Monday, October 21, 2002 - 01:46 am:

OK, I have some time now.

I don't think there is a universal morality in any meaningful sense. Possibly, given a set of moral axioms you could specify behaviour to be moral or not moral. There are two problems with this. Firstly, nobody has to agree to those axioms. Secondly, it is likely that it would be technically impossible in most real situations to derive anything from the axioms. Utilitarianism always had this problem; how do you evaluate individuals' utilities? how do you aggregate these utilities? In general, you're going to come up with the same sorts of problems you get when trying to unambiguously frame a law, there has to be interpretation and interpretation is subjective. The best you can achieve is some degree of consensus.

Thinking about morality and ethics analytically is then not going to get us to a set of rules or maxims that everyone can agree on, but that doesn't mean it's useless. By thinking carefully about morality we can decide what we think is right to do. One way to do this is to internally propose a general rule and see what sorts of conclusions it leads to. If we're satisfied with this rule we can provisionally use it as a guide for own behaviour. (This may have been what Kant was trying to get at with his categorical imperative, but I haven't read enough to know.) The internal debate can also be made into a public debate. Although we shouldn't expect to reach a perfect consensus on issues of morality, debate can still help us to understand and modify our own beliefs about morality.

Personally, I find two principles to be particularly useful in thinking about these things myself: (1) Kant's categorical imperative described above, (2) the definition of liberty (which I think comes from the French revolution) as freedom to act in any way that doesn't infringe on anybody else's liberty.

By Andrew Hodges on Monday, October 21, 2002 - 04:15 pm:

When I said these people may not be 'human in the true sense of the word' i meant that they were not capable of rational discussion and justification of issues so I agree with your point Brad on that, sorry for a being a little ambiguous!
I like your distinction between believing in a moral framework and acting within a moral framework, people often act without thinking and sometimes there instincts or desires counter what they believe to be morally just. Out of interest how do you think a behaviourist would view morals? Could he make the same distinction between believing in a moral framework and acting in a moral framework?

By Arun Iyer on Monday, October 21, 2002 - 08:20 pm:

I have read some books where authors beleive that ethical codes have arisen by evolution through the interplay of biology and culture. In a sense these authors are reviving the idea of moral sentiments that was developed in the eighteenth century by the British empiricists Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith.

What have been thought of as moral sentiments are now taken to mean moral instincts (as defined by the modern behavioral sciences), subject to judgment according to their consequences. Such sentiments are thus derived from epigenetic rules -- hereditary biases in mental development, usually conditioned by emotion, that influence concepts and decisions made from them. The primary origin of moral instincts is the dynamic relation between cooperation and defection. The essential ingredient for the molding of the instincts during genetic evolution in any species is intelligence high enough to judge and manipulate the tension generated by the dynamism. That level of intelligence allows the building of complex mental scenarios well into the future. It occurs, so far as is known, only in human beings and perhaps their closest relatives among the higher apes.

A way of envisioning the hypothetical earliest stages of moral evolution is provided by game theory, particularly the solutions to the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. Consider the following typical scenario of the dilemma. Two gang members have been arrested for murder and are being questioned separately. The evidence against them is strong but not irrefutable. The first gang member believes that if he turns state's witness, he will be granted immunity and his partner will be sentenced to life in prison. But he is also aware that his partner has the same option, and that if both of them exercise it, neither will be granted immunity. That is the dilemma. Will the two gang members independently defect, so that both take the hard fall? They will not, because they agreed in advance to remain silent if caught. By doing so, both hope to be convicted on a lesser charge or escape punishment altogether. Criminal gangs have turned this principle of calculation into an ethical precept: Never rat on another member; always be a stand-up guy. Honor does exist among thieves. The gang is a society of sorts; its code is the same as that of a captive soldier in wartime, obliged to give only name, rank, and serial number.

In one form or another, comparable dilemmas that are solvable by cooperation occur constantly and everywhere in daily life. The payoff is variously money, status, power, sex, access, comfort, or health. Most of these proximate rewards are converted into the universal bottom line of Darwinian genetic fitness: greater longevity and a secure, growing family.

And so it has most likely always been. Imagine a Paleolithic band of five hunters. One considers breaking away from the others to look for an antelope on his own. If successful, he will gain a large quantity of meat and hide -- five times as much as if he stays with the band and they are successful. But he knows from experience that his chances of success are very low, much less than the chances of the band of five working together. In addition, whether successful alone or not, he will suffer animosity from the others for lessening their prospects. By custom the band members remain together and share equitably the animals they kill. So the hunter stays. He also observes good manners in doing so, especially if he is the one who makes the kill. Boastful pride is condemned, because it rips the delicate web of reciprocity.

Now suppose that human propensities to cooperate or defect are heritable: some people are innately more cooperative, others less so. In this respect moral aptitude would simply be like almost all other mental traits studied to date. Among traits with documented heritability, those closest to moral aptitude are empathy with the distress of others and certain processes of attachment between infants and their caregivers. To the heritability of moral aptitude add the abundant evidence of history that cooperative individuals generally survive longer and leave more offspring. Following that reasoning, in the course of evolutionary history genes predisposing people toward cooperative behavior would have come to predominate in the human population as a whole.

Such a process repeated through thousands of generations inevitably gave rise to moral sentiments. With the exception of psychopaths (if any truly exist), every person vividly experiences these instincts variously as conscience, self-respect, remorse, empathy, shame, humility, and moral outrage. They bias cultural evolution toward the conventions that express the universal moral codes of honor, patriotism, altruism, justice, compassion, mercy, and redemption.

love arun

By Dan Goodman on Monday, October 21, 2002 - 09:14 pm:

Arun, when you're quoting someone you should say so. In this case, a link to the article would be best: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98apr/biomoral.htm.

By Yatir Halevi on Monday, October 21, 2002 - 09:28 pm:

First of all, arun, I must say: "Well said and written" , you can easily submit this as an essay somewhere.
Second, what you're saying (if I understand you correctly) is that an act is considered moral if and only if it coincides with the moral database of the group. Lets say there was a first vegeterian, his ethics didn't coincide with the group so his decision to "not eat animals" is considered immoral. He decides to stick with his beliefs because of a certain genetic trait, that "orders" him not to go along with the main-stream. After a while more people join his "group of vegeterians" and they start to form a group as well and they keep on growing until the major group is forced to accept their vegeterianism as moral and thus accept the notion that it is ok for some people to eat meat and for others not to eat meat, to accept the fact that there is no contradiction.
We are left to conclude that these minority people that have in them the genetic trait of going against the system are the creators of moral standards.
Maybe if Arun's hunter had chosen to leave his group maybe he would have started a snowball that would have resulted in us believing that it is a "moral" act to hunt seperatly. [To abandon your friends for private reward (food)]


Yatir

By Yatir Halevi on Monday, October 21, 2002 - 09:34 pm:

And I thought you wrote it!
(I wrote my post before Dan's)

Yatir

By Brad Rodgers on Tuesday, October 22, 2002 - 02:58 am:

Hi. I think this discussion is "diverging" into a debate between ethical relativism and absolutism; indeed, there were strains of this debate in my original message. In any case, I have much to say on this topic, but before I say these things, I should reccomend the essay by W.T. Stace entitled (at least in the book I read it from) "Is There a Universal Standard for Ethics?" [it was taken from the book "The Concept of Morals"]

I am, at least to the extent that I am currently persuaded to be, a moral absolutist. The primary objection to this is, namely, the one Dan made:

"nobody has to agree to those axioms." That is, there has been a great variation among moral ideas in the past, and different tribes, societies, and even different people within the same society, have concieved of different "axioms" for morality.

This is without a doubt true. But people have done the same for interpretations of objective reality, or indeed the supposition of induction itself (e.g. the Pyrrhonist sect). Does this imply that there is no objective reality? No such concept as induction?

One could press on, however, stating that morality is ill defined, and that there is no real starting point - something that, say, objective reality definitely has. This is true, and to be honest, I have no way to circumvent it. It just seems that humanity is ingrained with so many common features that a definitive system of morality is unavoidable, just as the way all humans use induction is essential for survival. I cannot, of course, prove this, and I see no point in trying to argue it. I wouldn't put much faith in it, and I would reverse my opinion in a second if any concrete evidence were used to support the other side.

It just seems that, if you ask a child (perhaps anyone) which is better, something that causes greater happiness, or something that causes less, he will say the greater. To me, morality consists in this. We then only need to find what sorts of things meet humanity's needs and provide contentment and happiness. Easier said than done, I'll admit.

Brad

By Arun Iyer on Tuesday, October 22, 2002 - 08:31 pm:

Dan,
i must say i had no idea of the site there.....Thanks for the link...

We are having a Mock-GD test next week in our college so i was going through some of the books in the library when i stumbled upon a book called as "Discussions and Debates" which had a compilation of good discussion papers and illustrations of live debates....

One of these papers is incidentally the one in the site.Amazing!...(Damn!! it would have been much easier for me to cut and paste that thing or even just give the link rather than type the whole thing out!!!:))

Anyways,i am sorry for all the trouble u people went through....i should have mentioned that "the extract is from a book"..But the topic was so interesting that i just typed it out so that everyone has a look into this thing ... especially the paragraph i mentioned is very captivating one ....

Hope no one holds any grudge against me:)!!

love arun

By Arun Iyer on Tuesday, October 22, 2002 - 09:35 pm:

(Continuing from the last to last post .. though this is not from the book :))

If anyone has read the entire link that Dan gave or atleast has gone through that message i posted before would realise that at the end we are to left to visualize two examples there ... one is of the gang members and the other is that if the hunters....

It was hard for me to actually gulp the idea down my throat since i felt something missing there.....it drove me to make a pragmatic search of such examples...

This is an incident that took place in train while i was coming from college today...
A child (not more than 9 years maybe) was begging a man to give him some money.....
The conversation went something like this..(originally it was in hindi)

The child : Saheb!!!give me some money please!!
The man : (kept mum)
The child : Saheb!! i haven't eaten for two days!!please give me some money!!
The man : Are you hungry??
The child : yes
The man : Then let me buy you some food rather than giving u the money....
The child : No saheb!!you just give me the money...i will buy it myself!!
The man : no i cannot give u money but i can buy you some food..
The child : no saheb!!i have brothers and sisters who are hungry just as i am ... so how can i eat??
The man : well where are your brothers and sisters now??i will buy them some food too??
The child : they are not here....so please can u give me some money??
The man : i won't..

The child just left the place....

It seems that the man did not beleive the child's story and thought that he was collecting money for some other purpose and not for food...looking at the child it didn't seem as if the child was bluffing ..... however,i was left with the pondering question....who was morally correct??

love arun
P.S->Saheb is a hindi word for "sir"