Objective Morality - Criticism

In this post, I am going to surface the sharpest criticism that I can think of to the Foundation for Objective Morality, and respond as best I can.  Before reading this, you should be very familiar with the original Foundation for Objective Morality.  So read that first and see if you can come up with some criticism on your own.  Then read the second post Views on Objective Morality to see how this approach might be compared to other posts about objective morality.

A Quick Summary of FOM

Every person lives their lives according to some personal set of rules (personal morality).  Many of those rules are learned from others around them, and so we can talk about the rule set that is shared by most members of that culture (cultural morality).  We can and do compare the morality of different cultures, and what we are doing is comparing the rule sets that they live by.

Rule sets are not composed of simple clear rules.  We would like a rile to be simple, like “never kill others.”  But we recognize that if might be OK in self defense.  We might like a simple rule like “polluting the air is bad” however a small amount of polluting is OK if you have to drive a car to work or to the store.   Even exhaling is a form of air pollution which is pretty much universally acceptable.  The precise rule definition will include elaborate conditions on the context which might include place, time and particulars about the people involved (complex contextualized rules).

A culture lives and dies according to the rules it follows.  An illustrative example:  a culture that values sanitation will live longer and the members will live better than one that does not value sanitation.  If you have five cultures, and one of them has particularly bad rules to live by, that culture will die out, and those rules will be forgotten.  Therefor, the only rules that are passed on to the next generation are those cultures that succeed.  (cultural darwinism).  The distinction between a society that survives and one that dies is a completely objective fact:  there is no personal opinion that a culture dies or survives, but we can objectively measure this, and all observers will agree.

As we observe many cultures with many different sets of rules, one can see that there must exist an optimal set of rules that would allow a society to survive optimally.  It exists in the sense that the value of PI must exist, even if your culture does not have the ability to calculate it.  Cultures that are closer to the optimal do better than cultures that are further from the optimal, and so, over time cultures get closer and closer to the optimal set of rules.  Those rules are objectively better than the others, because they allow a society to survive longer and better.

From that quick summary, let talk about the problems.

More than a Single Optimum

Sam Harris uses the term ‘moral landscape’ to evoke the idea that your moral position could be any place on a two dimensional plane, and that the altitude would be the “goodness” of the rules that define the position.  Clearly this would need many more dimensions, maybe thousands, but still the idea is that for any position in that space, there is a “goodness” value for that position.

Different cultures can be seen as seeking higher ground in the same way that evolution allows a species to seek a better form.  In reality, there is no seeking it is just that those cultures in a better position live longer, while those in a worse position die out quicker.  When a culture dies, the rules they live by are forgotten.   So the worse rules die out and are forgotten, while those with better rules survive.

Rules change incrementally.  A part of a culture might separate off and follow a changed rule or two, but most of the rules will remain the same.  So the new experiment will not be far from the culture that spawned it.  This allows a culture to explore and find better and better positions on the moral landscape incrementally.

Unfortunately a particular culture might “find” a local maximum which is not as good as some other place further away.  But from the local maximum, any change is for the worse, so incremental movements are all downhill.  The culture may be stuck sub optimum.   More importantly, there can be any number of separate peaks.  These peaks are all local optimums.

Even though there are more than one peaks, each peak represents an objectively define local maximum which can define morality.  As cultures get closer and closer to the optimum, they get better and better for their members.  The higher the peak, the longer and better the culture lives.  This measurement is still not subjective in any way.

Co-Dependency

Cultures do not exist independent from each other.  It is likely that one culture might be optimal only when situated next to another culture, and vice versa.  The analogy from nature is the flower and the honey bee, neither of which would be optimal on their own, but instead can only survive if both are there.

This predicts the possibility that you might have two cultures neither of which have optimal morals, but survive with their suboptimal morals because of the way they interact.  The specter of the American Democrat and Republican parties looms as examples that seem morally hollow on their own, yet survive because of the dynamics of the interplay between them.

We are never limited to exactly two cultures either, there are many many cultures interacting.   The true import of this concept is that there will be many dynamically surviving cultures that are not optimal on their own, but nevertheless survive due to the way that all the various cultures are woven together.  Where is the real optimum morals in this case?

This shows the system to be far more complex than the initial simplified portrait, it does not diminish the conclusions in any way:  there are still cultures competing on the basis of the goodness of their rules.  Any time a particular culture “sees” an opportunity to be better off, that position can be occupied moving the entire system (on the average) higher on the moral landscape.  The mechanism causes cultures to get better, but it does not guarantee that they will ever reach the maximum goodness, nor does it guarantee that all people will be subject to the exact same rules.

Survival vs. Well Being

Utilitarians argue that the best society is one that offers the greatest amount of well being.  That is, averaged across all people, the well being count is the highest.  But is there any guarantee that the culture with the highest general well being is also the culture that survives?

What if there is an optimal set of rules “A” that allows all people the maximal well being, but they are constantly being overrun by a culture with rules “B” where all the people are miserable all the time?  How do we know that the miserable culture is not somehow fitter to survive, thereby causing the better rules “A” to be forgotten, and only the worse rules “B” passed on?

There are many components to well being, but one of them is certainly a modicum of security.  The society with the best rules that allows the society to survive would have to also provide some security to the individuals.  It seems illogical to conceive of a society where people have well being without any security.  That feels like a contradiction of terms.

One might imaging a “ant colony” society which out performs all other cultures, but for which all the members are effectively slaves and miserable all the time.  It certainly is plausible.  However, one also has to ask the question: if you are miserable all the time in your culture, while your neighbor his reasonably happy, why wouldn’t you switch sides?  People are able to switch cultures, no iron curtain strong enough to hem everybody in.  The culture where everyone is miserable is bound to lose people, while the culture with true well being is likely to gain people.  Generally any society which has a reasonable amount of well being is very attractive, and that attraction helps to make them successful.  The exact opposite is true of the society where everyone is miserable.

Individual well being, and cultural well being seem to be tied together. Any culture that thrives seems to allow at some level, the individuals to thrive.  I can’t prove it, but it seems plausible that happiness, eudaimonia, well being and thriving of individuals will contribute in a big way to the success of the culture as a whole.  Cultures where the majority of individuals suffer seem to quite commonly die out in every case that I can think of.

Multiform Rules

It should be obvious that rules for proper behavior in the arctic are different that rules for proper behavior in the tropics.  One way to think about this is not that there are different rules, but that there is one set of rules, but the rules are contextual.  It is equally obvious that there are rules that depend upon the age of the individual: some things permitted as a child are heinous as an adult.  There are actions that are moral and good for a person in one profession, while being morally bad for others.   Slicing open a person might be good in general for a surgeon, but not if that surgeon is in the middle of robbing a bank.  Part of the context for morally good surgery is that it is done for the purpose of bettering the person being sliced.

I explain this elsewhere, but it stands to be emphasized: rules are not simple.   We like to think of rules as being a simple sentence, like “don’t lie” or “don’t kill other people”.   Reality is that the full set of rules includes exceptions for each of these simple rules.  The problem is that we must define human behavior — which is so complex and situated in a context — using terms which are very imprecise tools.  The actual rule sets include all sorts of special conditions for the situation.  Lying to save a person from violence is clearly a good thing.  Killing in self defense is acceptable.  The situation matters when considering which rules apply, and one aspect of the situation can be differences between the people who are involved.

No Guarantee Of Fairness

The rules may not even apply equally to all people.  Rules for tall people are different from rules for short people.  Rules for good looking people apply differently to homely people.  Rich people are treated differently from poor.  Rule for men vary from rules for women. We all know about unequal treatment of people who appear to be of different races, and setting aside whether this is morally good, it is still possible that the optimal rules for a society involve rules that apply differently to different races.

It is entirely possible that there comes a culture that is strictly egalitarian: all rules apply to all people exactly equally.  That might not guarantee success of the culture.   There might be a culture next door which does not guarantee equality but everyone has a higher level of well being.

Our only measure is the well being of the society as a whole.  We have no right to interject an ideal of “equality” and know with any confidence that that is actually morally superior.  The only thing we can do is to try it, and see if it results in greater well being.   If we find that equality decreases well being, then equality is morally bad.  End of story.

The rules might be unfair on many levels.   The ubiquity of slavery in ancient times persuades strongly for the position that a culture with slavery was better off for all people on the average, than a culture that forbid slavery.  Similarly, it seems fairly certain that cultures that had a special ruling class that was treated far better than the average citizen still resulted in a culture that was better overall for everyone.  Sure, the royalty are far better off, but if that royalty works and provides stability, then the poor might actually end up benefiting more than they lose.

Summary

These are four important arguments to make, however, in conclusion they don’t dissuade me from the theory:

• There is no single optimum, but that does not matter.  There a places on the moral landscape which are better than a given culture, and that is an objective measure.  The slop “up” to better moral rules sets still means that morals are simply a person’s opinion.
• Codependency makes everything more complex, because multiple cultures could exist in optimal positions that would not be possible without the other, but that still reinforces that the moral position is objective.  These cultures are not facing off because they have opinions, but that their positions relative to each other are objectively measured.
• Success of a culture seems always to depend on the well being of the citizens.  A culture that is successful, but leaves the citizens miserable, will tend to lose citizens overall.  At some level, good societies always have people with high well-being.  They can credibly be tied together.
• No guarantee of fairness is not a problem.  I am arguing that morals are objective, not that they are fair.  Also, we don’t necessarily know what the right moral rules are.  I am saying only that there exist (at least one) optimum set of rules that will allow a culture to thrive.  I make no guarantee of equality or fairness.