Initial write. Needs re-write.
This started as a study of disease and genetics, but studying human genetics inevitably leads to a study of survival strategies. I have always called these learned survival strategies, moralities. It seems correct for a number of resaons. Still, while studying them from a genetic point of view has been very revealing, it has left out a lot of context. Morality has been studied before, so the question arises, how does the moral views suggested by genetics compare to classical studies of morality? The moral systems I describe are based on genetics and survival. They are so related to classical moral concepts, that I have to be convinced that classical moral concepts are also ultimately derived from the same source, even though they did not get developed with the knowledge of genetics and biology that we currently have. Using that knowledge clarifies and enhances classical moral philosophy.
I found a description of Moral Philosophy at http://www.philosopher.org.uk/index.htm.
It is a better summary of Philosophy than anything this biologist can write about the
subject, I will use parts of it to show where my work fits in the
context of other traditional Philosophies. I also added one philosopher that I thought
was missing, Ayn Rand, who spoke of modern problems. At the same time, perhaps the most
important philosopher goes unmentioned here.
The Green text is the original document. The black text is what I added
as comments.
Moral Philosophy
For most people morals are sets of rules that we ought to obey, they tell us
what is right or wrong. Moral philosophers want to discover how these rules
are justified and at the logical consequences of moral or ethical beliefs.
The age of enlightenment saw a questioning of religious and traditional
values. If religion is questioned, then so to is morality. Philosophers
needed to base moral system on justifiable grounds.
Kant's moral system is based on rationality. It attempts to show how any
rational being would agree to universal moral laws. Its influence has been
enormous and modern philosophers still use Kant's ideas as a starting point
for discussions on morality.
There is more than reason and logic. Humans also use logic and reason biased towards
survival. That complicates things some. Logic by itself does not offer a reason for
survival.
It's not just about rationality or reason. Any truth a person accepts must pass those
tests, but there are other ways of knowing and biases to reason related to the requirements
of survival. If moral systems, learned survival strategies,
are so important to human survival, is there an instinct to seek out, learn and protect
survival strategies? It is Faith. Faith is defined in the dictionary as an unsupported
belief and as a belief in a God,
but it is more fundamental than that in human instinct. Morality existed before religion
and created religion. Religion is an overlay on that instinct. It is the most basic of
human survival instincts. It is the belief that one should survive. It has become linked
to human reasoning ability.
A person will accept laws that follow both reason and moral reason. Examining values of
people can show how that type of reasoning works. Some of the associated memes can be
articulated, but the best word associated with the instinct is Faith and is often
articulated as values.
The system I describe is very soundly based on reason, even or perhaps especially at
the end where it discusses God. It started as science, mostly biology and it ended as
mostly science. As far as I can confirm, all of it is quite rational. No one has
noted any logical discrepancies I have not recognized and addressed.
One of the main points I make about moral systems is that they have been based on
Authority and Precedence, something that is no longer holds the power it once did
in this so critical time. Moral systems must be based on reason and understanding
as well as faith or they will not be used. The other side of that is the problem
that often religion satisfies moral reason, but not logical reason.
Utilitarianism
The other great ethical system of the post-enlightenment era was proposed by
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) in Britain. They
developed the moral theory called Utilitarianism. It aimed to give a method
of moral judgment based on experience rather than dogma. The principal of
Utility is based on happiness and was seen as being a scientific approach
to morality.
Bentham thought that an action was good if it increased pleasure, bad if it
increased pain. An action or law would by good if it produced "The greatest
happiness for the greatest number". He developed a "happiness calculus" in
order to calculate for any action or law what the consequences in terms of
pleasure or pain would be. Using these principals he designed a prison
called the panopticon where punishment would be measured out according to
the amount of pain caused by the offender.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) called utilitarianism "pig philosophy"; as it
appeared to base the goal of ethics on the swinish pleasures of the
multitude. In the light of this criticism, J S Mill refined Bentham's theory
by suggesting that there were higher and lower pleasures, and that the
higher pleasures were preferable. As he puts it: "Better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied". By lower pleasures Mill meant pleasures
of the flesh, and by higher pleasures, pleasures of the intellect. One
consequence of Mill's modification was that it was no longer possible to
use Bentham's "happiness calculus".
This philosophy developed in my book seems very similar to Utilitarianism except
that it is based on survival, not happiness. It does presume that much of what
causes survival also causes happiness, but this is about survival in the biological
sense so it is about long term survival of the specie. That includes survival of
the individual, family and specie. As such, an individual may have to sacrifice
some of their happiness for the requirements of their family or specie. They may
also have to sacrifice short term happiness for longer term survival. In
moral terms, they may have to sacrifice more than that. Moral strength is the
ability to do what is moral (promotes survival) when it is not necessarily easy
or pleasant. Perhaps even quite the contrary. It is a serious "survival calculus".
It is a decision about survival and that is where faith exists.
Critical philosophers of the nineteenth century were less certain that
universal moral values could be upheld. For Marx morality and ethics were
part of bourgeois ideology: sets of ideas that ignored the exploitative
economic arrangements of society and contributed to False Consciousness.
Nietzsche looked at the origins of morality, and like Marx, saw moral
systems as arising from the interests of social groups. For Nietzsche the
individual had to go beyond accepted morality to create a new morality for
himself.
In terms of survival, the society (that is a human population) is more important
than the individual. Not surprisingly, this injects some complexity. In biological
terms, the specie is not considered as much as the individual. This is because in
most species, biological survival is based around small populations of a specie.
In human terms, we are all individuals with individual needs and desires. In
evolutionary terms, we live and die as individuals. Still, examination of personal values
show that individuals have instincts (trained or not) to put the society
above themselves. Aside from what classical biology says about survival at the individual
level, we currently do not know all the implications of the use of highly cooperative
strategies. Do they compare in any way to the more genetically based cooperation of
insects? Still, basic human survival strategies are based on cooperation. Society is more
important to human survival than it is to other species. Where it sits exactly in
evolutionary terms is still to be decided.
In the twentieth century, there has been growing pessimism about the
possibility of a universal moral system. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80)
emphasized the subjective judgments that an individual must make in order
to be "authentic".
Since the results of any action may be different from the intent,
subjectiveness is a result of many things, including being human.
Anglo-American philosophers have wondered whether philosophy could say
anything meaningful at all about what is right or good, as they put it
moral statements have no "truth value". For these analytic philosophers the
role of philosophy is to analyze how we use moral concepts, rather than say
what morality should be. Writers like A.J. Ayer (1910-89) suggested that
moral statements simply express the moral sentiments or attitudes of the
individual and that philosophy has no way of evaluating which set of moral
statements is best.
This may be true. This view includes the bias that there is something special
about the biological survival of humans. Really, that is a bias that must be
recognized. You will see this reflected in a lot of thought, but only in the
context of survival does Morality make sense. It is the result of faith. Faith
is survival biased intellect. That
survival is important may be arbitrary to some degree, but we are human.
Analyze anything popularly considered a morality
and you will see that it is a method of survival or a relation to a method
of survival for humans. If it's not related to humans, it would be
hard to find the point.
Kant's Categorical Imperative
For Kant human beings as moral agents are rational and autonomous (free to
make choices). He thinks that as rational beings we are able to judge
whether any action is moral by asking if the action is consistent with the
categorical imperative.
If there is a catagorical imperitave you will find it intertwined with the
memes of faith even more than reason.
One formulation of the categorical imperative is, "Act only on that maxim
(intention) whereby at the same time you can will that it shall become a
universal law". What Kant means by this is that they way that we judge an
action to be moral is to universalize it: If I want to know if telling a lie
on a particular occasion is justifiable, I must try to imagine what would
happen if everyone was to lie. Kant thinks that any rational being would
agree that a world in which there is no lying is preferable to one in which
lying was common; in a society in which lying was common no one could trust
the word of anyone else.
It's more complicated than that. That is a logical exercise. This is a
human condition. Deception is part of common human survival strategy and
it often serves not just the deceiver, but the deceived as well. Could our
social structure exist if humans had the knowledge given by a dog's nose
about the sexual state of individuals we meet? Try what I call an Ayn Rand.
Tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the unvarnished truth
regardless of the consequence. Don't let people develop a misunderstanding
of your meaning. Good luck making it work for more than about a month. It
damages the society. Besides, people take time to think of things. We are
very imperfect. This is true for far more sins than untruth. Humans live
complicated social lives and ignore a lot to get along.
Another formulation is: "Always act to treat humanity, whether in yourself
or in others, as an end in itself, never merely as a means." What Kant
means by this is that a rational being should not be used as a means to
another person's happiness; if we use another person as a means to our ends
then we have removed that person's autonomy.
In some other world. That premise ignores that human strategy is based
on cooperation and is not just win-lose. Optimal human interactions are
win win. That is called symbiosis in biology. It is a common survival strategy.
Employer, employee relations can be a good example of mutually
benificial behavior. A team is created for a goal, one of the highest cooperative
accomplishments of humans.
Nietzsche: The genealogy of morals
For Nietzsche there are two basic types of morality: master morality and
slave morality. By this, he means that moral codes arise from people's
social origins.
Master morality sees the noble as good and emphasises heroism, courage and
individual greatness as can be found in the aristocratic morality of the
ancient Greeks.
Slave morality is the morality of the weak. What harms the weak is called
"evil", and what helps them is called good. Christian ethics are identified
with slave morality.
Nietzsche thought that each individual needs to create their own moral
system: the point of morality is to enable each individual to sublimate and
control their passions, in order to emphasise the creativity inherent in
their being.
That is completely prejudiced with no basis of proof. It is also incorrect
in terms of survival because, humans use different strategies, moral systems,
to survive. There is no one right way to survive. Experience and analysis can
suggest what will not work, but it's very difficult to reach valid conclusions
about what will work. It is an open question not easily resolved by logic or
modeling. Biology has always solved the problem by testing and conservatism
of what works. Any value judgments about a moral system must first be based on an
unbiased test of if the system works for its purpose. It should be recognized
that some survival strategies may only work in the short term or come into
conflict with larger elements of the society. Currently there are massive
changes occurring. The past can be a guide or not. Besides that, you can have
two groups with different opinions on right and wrong, based on how it effects
the survival of the two different groups. It's universal because it is based
on survival, but it is not universal because it is inherently subjective to
the survival of individual or group. Many different moral systems exist.
***
Ayn Rand was so amazing. She had an energy and an ability to communicate. She was
persuasive, rational and convincing. She was also wrong, but just a little bit. A
lot of people that read her books find themselves just a bit uncomfortable with
her ideas, but it is hard to say why. She wrote that the Ego Was The Fountain
Head Of All Creativity and that Selfishness was the virtue that produced the
greatest good. It is Faith that is the Fountain Head of Survival and Creativity.
When you make a decision that is right, it is judged by your survival sense,
your moral intellect as well as your objective intellect. Faith includes the
individual, the family and the community
so it includes the ego and self, but it includes more. The easiest way to convinve
you of this is to tell you to honestly think about it and see what your moral
intellect tells you.