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.

Mainstream Morality: Subjective and Relative

Someone proposed another notion of justice to replace the one we'd been talking about: justice as the (fair and impartial) application of law (imposed by a higher authority). This seems like a derivative idea. That sense of the term is drained of meaning if said laws are themselves not just in the sense already being focused on: people getting/giving what is due.

If a king decides he would enjoy having his way with the lasses, then he could simply proclaim a law that kings can deflower virgins on their wedding night. (Ala Braveheart?) Fair and impartial application of this law handed down by a higher authority literally means getting Royally Scr… you know. It is relativist to call this "justice" on the mere grounds that a higher authority handed down a law that was applied in an evenhanded way. What makes the application of law just or not is the nature of the laws, not just the nature of their application. So let’s talk about what’s in the nature of laws that makes them good/proper/just or not.

You could talk about the work of some (sure, "fair and impartial") authorities -- like Popes, Rabbinical Scholars, and Supreme Court Justices -- who faithfully toil to interpret and apply the will of kings or gods or democratic bodies. But it is deeply relativist to say someone’s mere preference “properly” rules men's lives: this king’s, that god’s, some voting body’s – especially as interpreted by some religious or secular authority struggling to identify and enact that king's or god's or winning majority's whim. Surely you don't mean to define "justice" as the (even well-run) application of whim? Yes, people have done so throughout history, but let's not confuse Might with Right. The basis of morality can and should be objective instead of subjective, absolute instead of relative.

Put up or shut up, you say? Okay, here’s my nutshell of the objective basis of morality: (1) As living beings our existence is contingent -- some things further our life and happiness, others don’t; some things are values, some aren’t. It is an objective fact that some things kill us and others are good for our lives: the difference between poison and food is not a matter of subjective opinion. (2) As volitional beings we choose/act well or poorly relative to that objective standard. We therefore need objective principles, a code of objective values, to guide our choices and actions relative to that objective standard. (3) This is all a factual matter and acting on anybody’s subjective whim can kill you. This means gaining and using objective knowledge, and the fact that doing so is hard and error-prone does not change the fact that there is an objective reality out there for us to discover, and that it imposes an absolute standard of morality: life vs. death.

This is why I highlighted the fact that it is valuable to our lives to objectively judge peoples’ character and act accordingly (associating with sociopaths degrades your life while hanging with the honest and productive furthers it): it’s the objective basis of justice.

An Ethical Double-Standard for God?

Another participant in the ongoing discussion agreed with my definitions of justice and mercy, then offered examples from our legal system to show how they weren't really at odds and might even be seen as harmonious. Here's a juicy one:

The State of California versus Goldstein. Goldstein was a young man charged with driving while intoxicated. It so happens that the judge to hear his case was his father who had a hard-nosed reputation - a "hanging judge" of sorts because he always gave out the full penalty for a given offense. The newspapers asked, "Will the hanging judge hang his own son?" When the son's guilt had been established, the Judge Goldstein fined his son $5,000. Then he stepped down from the bench, took off his judiciary robe, and said, "I am a just judge and require the full demands of the law for your offense. But I'm also your father and I know that you can't pay the fine, so I will pay the penalty for you." With that he submitted a check for $5,000.

Notice this example involves the presence of two opposing standards of justice: the law's vs. some benefactor's. It is extra entertainment value that a single person does double duty and serves up judgment based on both standards, but the benefactor need not be the judge enacting the law (anybody can pay your fine by giving you money or something that costs money, like food which would free up your food money to pay a fine). The law says Joe should feel the sting of a fine; some benefactor disagrees and erases that sting with a gift. Justice is served and Joe gets mercy -- high-five, it's Miller time! Except...

Also notice that one of the two opposing standards prevails: Joe can't both feel the sting of a fine and not, get a penalty and a break, receive both justice and mercy. Only one of the two standards obtains (benefactors win out in civil cases).

Finally, notice that the benefactor thinks it is unjust that Joe should feel the sting of that fine. The benefactor is actually attempting an act of justice in removing the sting with a gift. That makes sense, since (again) justice is getting what you do deserve while mercy is getting what you do not deserve. To pull off an act of mercy would require the benefactor to, oh, agree fully that Joe darned well should feel the sting of that fine... while paying it for him! If that sounds insane, it should: mercy and justice are literal opposites -- one has a "do" in a critical spot where the other has a "do not" -- so managing to accomplish both at the same time necessarily requires leaning on a double standard... remove the double standard and the contradiction really stands out.

So that inspires the question: Has God set up an analogous double standard? If so, who are the warring factions vying to enact their notion of justice as against the injustice of the others? (Or: As the lone Omni-Legislator, -Prosecutor, -Judge, -Jury, -Father, and -Creator, how could God disagree with Himself on what is just??) If not, then these examples don't help and we are still left staring at the bald contradiction of God being both just and unjust (merciful) at the same time and in the same respect.

Mercy vs. Justice and the Barbarity of Human Sacrifice

Intriguing clarification arrived in the ongoing exchange:

One of Rob's premises is that God rewards or punishes based on belief. That is a true premise, but he concludes from that premise that God is unjust. I conclude from that premise that God is merciful, since my belief in Christ's sacrifice allows me to escape that which should be rendered due to me. ...God's justice has not been ignored, but still satisfied. If a judge concluded a criminal could go free we would say that is unjust, but someone else said "I'll do the time so justice is fulfilled" then we are receiving mercy and it is because someone else is taking for us what should be rendered due for the crime. ...I conclude God to be merciful and not unjust

The conclusion is that He's merciful and not unjust? But mercy conflicts with justice: justice means getting what you deserve, while mercy means getting what you don't deserve.

Suppose Bugsy murders someone. Justice doesn't involve just any fellow being executed as some sort of generic payment to the Cosmos, nor even someone who volunteers to take one for the team -- it is Bugsy being executed that brings him his due. Justice here doesn't call for just any payment to be made, it calls for a payment by the offender. This example involving a judge isn't allowed in our courts precisely because it is unjust for the bad guy not to do his time, whether or not someone else wants to take his place. Pinch hitting may work for baseball, but not for prison time.

But there's something a lot more disturbing going by here...

Mercy is the injustice of giving the unearned; taking the unearned is theft or parasitism. Injustice, theft, and parasitism. Who wants to enable and encourage those in themselves and others? Not me, they are all bad. The practice of human sacrifice is barbaric and evil precisely because it combines them on a grand scale, at the level of entire lives. Appeasing volcanoes with barbecued virgins, helping the sun rise with fresh Aztecan hearts, sacrificing an innocent to benefit the wicked -- these are all monstrously bad in practice and moral policy.

I recoil when I find people embracing human sacrifice and making it central to their most cherished institutions.

The Problem of Inherent Evil

In response to my pointing out how God sure seems to be the opposite of just, I was given some further clarifying comments:

The Christian belief is that people are not inherently good, but inherently selfish and our just penalty is eternal separation from a God who is holy and good. Jesus Christ lived a perfect life and willingly died so that God's justice could be satisfied. No person can live a perfect life so God gives you the option of accepting Jesus Christ's death as your penalty.

Wow, maybe ten words before needing to stop for a fundamental problem: saying people are inherently bad clashes with both free will and moral judgment!

The idea of free will is incompatible with the idea that we are inherently good or inherently bad -- having free will means you can choose to do either good or bad. So you can't have both free will and inherent badness. Assuming you (wisely) keep free will, the fact that people can and do choose is the entire point of moral judgment: we need to evaluate peoples' choices and actions as good or bad to understand their value significance in our lives and treat them accordingly (for one, it is really good for us to avoid sociopaths and instead hang with virtuous people who can offer us value instead of the opposite). Give up free will and you won't have any choices to judge morally -- punishing someone for putting a baby in a plastic shredder would be like punishing them for having blue eyes. And even somehow setting aside its incompatibility with free will, inherent badness would mean moral judgment divorced from our choices and actions. Uh, what's moral judgment again? Talk about a contradiction to write home about, that's up there with "married bachelor"!

God's Immorality

So there was that debate I was participating in, and my friend Rob spent almost all of his round with the visiting rock-star apologist talking about having a hard time believing Christians' fantasic claims, even after long and hard work. His point was that, if the Evangelicals are to be believed, God is setting him up to eternally suffer for his sincere efforts, a notion he considers patently unjust -- contradicting their idea that God is just.

(Talking with him beforehand, I predicted they were not likely to see it as a slam-dunk contradiction and would simply tell him that his puny human idea of justice is irrelevant and he needs to know his place. Who does he think he is? God made him and everyhing else and can damned well call anything he wants "justice." Didn't Abraham grab the knife and try to kill his kid when ordered? Didn't Job get the difference between God and man and take whatever was dealt? Those lessons are there for a reason and he should study them, 'nuff said. So they would say something like that, and then a much longer and more interesting discussion would follow: the basis of morality.)

Strangely, it turned out that the visiting expert never really heard the question despite a bunch of people in the audience trying for quite some time to clarify what Rob meant. The flailing spilled over into an email thread in the following weeks, and several rounds later I jumped in to try to help by recasting Rob's beef:

Belief per-se is an act subject to moral evaluation: you may believe for good reasons, or bad; you may withhold that assent for good reasons, or bad. Those four combinations are good, bad, good, and bad, respectively, because you are in fact being moral or immoral, furthering your life or degrading it. You are either practicing the virtue of rationality or blowing it. Acting on your understanding is likewise subject to moral evaluation: you are either acting on what you know will further your life, or degrading it by not acting or even acting contrary what you know. You are either practicing the virtue of integrity or blowing it. Now, when people talk about their faith as being more than mere assent, I imagine they are giving a nod to the fact that all the virtues go hand in hand. Looking at how just these two play together: what good is acting on your beliefs if they are wrong or arbitrary, and what good is knowledge if you won't use it? Integrity isn't a virtue for the irrational, and rationality isn't a virtue for hypocrites.

While they go hand in hand, it is still valid and useful to focus our attention on particular aspects of the situation. I think Rob is focusing on the virtue of rationality in this case (rather than integrity or both), and it is sufficient for making his point.

I would frame it this way: The idea of God being just is incompatible with His creating a situation where immorality brings reward and virtue brings suffering. It is immoral to believe when not convinced -- yet doing so (and sure, acting integrously on that belief) is rewarded. It is moral to withhold assent when not convinced (and of course good to be integrous and not act contrary to what you know) -- yet doing so is punished. Punishing virtue and rewarding vice isn't just. It is the opposite.

Come to think of it, the next time someone lobs Pascal's Wager my way, maybe I'll skip talking about how pathetic it is as an argument and simply denounce them for encouraging immorality (and their god for rewarding it, and their religion for sending adherents out to corrupt peoples' character).

Condescending and Rude

On one of the breaks at that debate I was participating in, a lady approached me and a friend who were chatting about nothing in particular. She started out by heading in a really fuzzy way towards what I eventually picked out as the notion that morality requires an external authority (otherwise it is anything-goes relativism).

So I explained that yes, subjectivism/relativism was definitely not desirable, but that she had bought into a false alternative and one could indeed have an objective morality sans subjectivism/relativism and independent of God/religion. (If she had read the Preface to my talk that I handed out there, she might have noticed that I called out rejection of this false alternative as precisely the sort of thing that ought to catch someone's attention as something they don't expect and likely worth trying to understand -- I listed a handful of that sort of category-buster to try to pique interest.)

Dropping that, she gestured to how, as she listened to the exchanges of the evening, she felt sorry for guys like Rob and me. You know, I really should try to get into the habit of brightly replying to condescending stuff like that with something like, "Thanks -- I feel so sorry for you, too!" Very Miss Manners.

Rob had spent a lot of his period working over the notion of his having a hard time believing these fantasic claims even after sincere, long and hard work. The claims seem arbitrary to him, and it would be a mistake to believe them. She referred to that and started explaining that belief in the Christian system is more than just intellectual assent, that it also requiring something akin to submittal.

She went on to say that Man has a fallen, rebellious nature, and so she sees my problem as being unwilling to submit because I'm rebelling against God. My first response was to laugh that she should speak for herself on being a fallen, rebellious brat. I quickly pointed out the plain logic that I can't rebel against something I'm not even aware of. She didn't seem to follow that, so I picked a handy example and asked: speaking of submittal, is she rebelling against Allah? (I'm told Islam literally means Submission.) No, she admitted, because Allah doesn't exist. So I suggested the parallel: She can't rebel against Allah because she doesn't recognize His existence (there's nothing to rebel against)... And I can't rebel against her god because I don't recognize it's existence (there's nothing to rebel against). So we're even, right? No dice, they seemed like totally different cases to her. Sigh.

Despite my being the world's single greatest authority on the thoughts in my head, and even explaining that it was logically impossible for me, she insisted on psychologizing with something like: "Deep down, when you are all alone, you can hear that quiet voice inside admitting you just don't want to submit." Hoo, boy. That's when I explained that most would consider that quite offensive, that it would be like my saying to her, "Deep down, when you are all alone, you can hear that quiet voice inside admitting you are insecure and afraid to face reality as an adult, putting away childish things like imaginary friends." Even if true, it's both rude and unhelpful to toss that sort of thing out.

The Great Debate

I gave a lecture at an Objectivist conference back in 2003, and here's the transcript:

God, Faith, and the Supernatural: The Objectivist Perspective

When I did a test-run of it before leaving town for the conference, I met a bunch of people who get together regularly to chat about philosophy and theism and all that. Fast forward to this past weekend, where developing that talk and chatting with these people over Thursday lunches turned into an interesting encounter.

Rock-star Christian scholar/apologist Gary Habermas was brought to town. He's debated the famous atheist philosopher Anthony Flew a couple of times, they talk on the phone a lot, and he interviewed Flew just as his famous conversion to deism/theism was happening (maybe even helped break the story?).

Habermas was brought here by some local believers to speak for an hour or two and give his perspective on Flew's conversion, and to give some presentations on what he's written about in his books (he's considered a huge expert on the history of and evidence for the Resurrection). And most interesting: they came to our discussion group and asked me and my friend Rob to debate him. You know, like local canon-fodder. :^)

There were 50 people in attendance (half believers, half not). I started the evening by going one-on-one with him for about an hour, then Rob worked with him for an hour, then all three of us were on stage for an hour of anything-goes Q&A with the audience. Pretty interesting experience, I've never locked horns with a theist at his level of training and experience. Since he's actually a heavily-trained, bleeding-edge kind of guy, he said some things I'd not heard before, and I left thinking that I might want to write a little paper about his meta-argument that evidence for the Resurrection (even assuming it is completely iron-clad) could demonstrate there is a God (much less that He is the one Christians think He is).

Anyway, Rob wanted people to have something to carry away and think about. Lacking time, I handed out booklet-printed copies of that lecture from a couple of years ago. But because it was designed for an Objectivist audience, I decided to write a new Preface to try to motivate and orient a mixed audience to get something out of it and not start pulling their hair out in frustration quite so quickly.