Life and Choice as the Basis of Value and Morality

The objective basis of value and morality leaves no room for subjective opinion or arbitrary dictate...

Life makes value possible and necessary.

• The existence of living things is contingent. They can live or die.
  
• Some things benefit lives and other things harm them. Food nourishes and poison kills.
  
• Some benefits "just happen" while others must be actively sought or created. Plants grow roots to get to food, turn their leaves to capture light. Mice find the grain to eat, scurry from predators. Values are benefits which living things ACT to gain or keep.
  
• Values are sought by the beneficiary as a means toward the end of living: life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action.
  
• Life is what establishes something as a benefit or hazard, value or disvalue, good or bad in the short or long term. Eating poison is bad for the mouse and drought is bad for the plant -- by reference to their striving for life. A rock cannot generate action toward an end, and the things that happen to it are neither good nor bad for it because it has no goal being furthered or frustrated. Value has no meaning apart from life.
  

Free will makes morality possible and necessary.

• We have free will. We can choose to live or not, to seek values or not.
  
• But we cannot choose to rescind the Law of Causality. This isn’t remarkable: if you want to build a bridge, then you must act appropriately to bring it about -- you can't act just any old way and expect a wonderful bridge to appear. Likewise: if you want to live, then you must act appropriately to achieve that end -- you can't act just any old way and expect a wonderful life. On the other hand, if you don't want to live, then you do not need to do anything in particular.
  
• So IF we choose to live, THEN we must identify and pursue objective values. That means gaining objective knowledge and acting in accordance with causal law. Subjective feelings and arbitrary commandments won't work so well for that: you can't make up what a life-serving value is, they have to be identified; and you can’t achieve them by arbitrary means, you have to act in accordance with the law of causality.
  
• Yes, gaining objective knowledge in general is challenging. Yet life requires it, and that’s why we need the field of Epistemology.
  
• Yes, understanding objective values and adopting moral principles to guide us in pursuing them broadly and over the long term is challenging. Yet life requires it, and that’s why we need the field of Ethics.
  

This is why I say life is the primary value and objective yardstick in morality, the value that makes all our other values possible and necessary and coherent -- and why rationality is the primary virtue as our faculty for identifying objective values and how to achieve them.

Responsibility and Moral Agency

Picking up on the line, "you cannot be morally responsible for someone else's free choice/action" from my analysis of Christians' marketing campaign, someone asked:

Does this mean that if I don't teach my children correct values that it is not my responsibility if they misbehave? Columbine parents therefore were not responsible to keep their kids under observation and understand that they were living a murderous and suicidal lifestyle.

You should be held accountable for your choices and actions, and others should be held accountable for theirs. So no, you should not be held responsible for the murder your child commits when he grows up. Perhaps you should be held responsible for your horrid child-rearing. But bad parenting and murder are different: different actors acting on different choices with different levels of moral malfeasance deserving different reactions.

We are in this patch of mental fog because you've focused on examples that flirt with absence of moral agency. Recall that free will is the whole reason for morality -- where is no choice, there's no need for morality, and nothing to judge morally. We don't hold kids, the retarded, the mentally damaged, and the brainwashed accountable in the same way we will hold you accountable for that reason. We don't let people vote, get married, form contracts and so on below certain ages to stay clear of those troubles. When free will is diminished or absent, so is moral action -- moral agency is absent, and so is corresponding moral accountability.

If someone has moral agency then they are responsible for their act. If you act through someone lacking moral agency, then you are responsible in the same way you are responsible when you pull the trigger that hurls the bullet that kills. Guns don't have moral agency, either.

So yep, "you cannot be morally responsible for someone else's FREE choice/action." You're responsible for yours.

A Head-Spinning Spiritual Marketing Campaign

Sitting at our Thursday philosophical lunch, something struck me as an explanation for Rob’s original sentiment in that debate.

Morality is the domain of choice and action. Where there is no choice, there is no need for morality; where there is no action, there is nothing to judge morally. So whenever people talk about Original Sin I hear a category error: you cannot be morally responsible for someone else's free choice/action.

Now, virtues are the means by which we gain and keep values. For example, rationality is a means to knowledge, and productivity is a means to stuff. Virtues (and vices) are a species of choices/actions: the kind by which we gain and keep values (or the opposite). Values (and disvalues) are a species of fact: what furthers our life (or degrades it). When we appraise someone morally, the whole point is to look for virtue and vice -- we are examining their choices and actions. Even if we look at the effects of their actions, it is for the purpose of inferring something about the cause. WHAT people have, like houses, iPods, and beliefs are not in themselves praiseworthy -- it is HOW people come by such things where moral judgment comes in (after all, they could come from someone being productive or an embezzler, honest or a shoplifter, rational or irrational). Choices and actions are the objects of moral evaluation; their products like iPods and beliefs are not.

That is why I'm hearing another category error as people talk about eternal rewards based on presence of a certain belief, independent of the cause. It would be different if believers were saying He was rewarding people based on that belief because it indicates mental virtue (say, rationality) -- but they have said explicitly that’s not the case. By their account, God is in fact doling out reward and suffering based on mere presence of a belief, independent of its cause. He is doling out reward and suffering based on something outside the sphere of moral evaluation.

So hearing the core rationale of Christians’ spiritual marketing campaign, I’m left scratching my head at category errors in both the central problem and its sole solution. You are damned for something that can't have anything to do with your moral status, and the one way out of that miserable moral condition is to buy eternal reward with something that's no moral coin.