If you look in Comments under part one of this topic (right below this entry), you'll see some back & forth with someone who questioned the cheerfully metaphysicslessness of philosophical pragmatism, charging that pragmatists build their house on sand, proposing a world in which there's no particular reason to do one thing or another, neither for moral purposes nor for any other. My answer:
Here’s why: there is no why.
See, I am one of those hardcore prags, eh?
To be marginally less snarky, ultimately the only “why” is that gene pools with “it”—whatever “it” is—outcompeted gene pools that didn’t have “it.” Or less of “it.” Or a less elegant, less functional kind of “it.”
Our problem, collectively, is that most of us are raised to believe in some kind of Purpose external to reality--such that when people talk and talk without alluding to some such Purpose they seem to be evasive.
Not so though.
I asked my now-spouse-of-28-years to marry me while we were sitting on a log on a beach whose name she still can’t pronounce, with a couple of her very young nieces/nephews playing at our feet, on a glorious California summer day.
Why did I ask her? Why do I remember it to this day, as if it were yesterday? Why am I still in love with her? Why does it not matter to me that we’re devoted members of different political parties?
The answers to these questions are all interesting, and well worth asking, and of course nearly all “Why?” questions are nested Russian egg dolls.
And at the center of every one of these eggs there’s the ultimate answer: namely, something we don't yet (and perhaps won't ever) understand, somewhere in the quantum froth of subatomic physics. We also don’t know all the intermediary steps yet (or maybe ever), but that’s where you wind up in all probability. The best we can do is push the "Whys" farther and farther down into the bowels of reality.
Wolf Larson describes it more poetically in Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf”—something about life being like a vat of yeast, with all the little bits trying to climb over other little bits, but it boils down to the same thing.
I know what you’re going to say now: “So, Mr. Smarty Pants, if it’s all particle physics, and hence the whole universe was once a single virtual particle that went kaboom! or something like that 13.7 billion years ago, why did the Big Bang bang in the first place?
To which I say “How should I know?” Though string theory hints at branes kissing in the Bulk (read Brian Greene if you want more of that).
Humans experience powerful motivation, curiosity, empathy, inspiration yada yada. Hard to imagine that it’s all just quantum froth writ large.
And yet that's my best guess. Which doesn't help a bit with deciding whether to take your next vacation in Fiji or who to vote for or whether to return the wallet you found in the street five minutes ago.
That leads to the reductio ad absurdum argument that if morality is evolutionary it must be piffle and arbitrary and why bother?
But it only seems meaningless if you assume that meaning only comes from some external agency. Meaningfulness is built into our DNA, however. We want to live. We want to do the right thing, however we conceive that, within the constraints of evolution.
In other words, you’re lamenting the loss of something that isn’t lost because it wasn’t there in the first place.
Let me share the Scuba Diver’s Mantra:
1. What matters most to you?
Most people say “good job, good personal life, nice home, nice wheels, safe neighborhood, etc.”
2. Scuba divers say “Air.”
Because without that, all the rest becomes utterly meaningless in a millisecond.
3. So a scuba diver wakes up in the morning and asks himself two questions:
a. “Do I have air?”
b. “Am I in acute physical agony?”
If the answers to these are Yes and No, the diver then says:
“It’s a great day!”
As a diver, I have experienced being without air.
I think Sartre said that the prospect of being hanged focuses one’s mind tremendously.
Being without air does so even moreso, and in that instant when you try to take a breath and discover you can’t, all questions of meaning, of purpose, of “Why?” vanish like morning dew in a hot, rising sun.
I find life intensely, exquisitely meaningful because I’m wired that way. I didn’t wire me. Neither did anyone else. It just worked out that way. It doesn’t even require much intelligence. A hooked fish struggles to live, fights for its freedom. Even an amoeba moves away from negative stimuli.
Life itself creates meaning in a blind universe. Life is the meaning of life, and that innate meaningfulness inheres in every living thing, from a bacterium to a blue whale.
And by the same token, moral behavior is mediated by what works for a species. Vampire bats find it moral to suck other creatures’ blood—but also to share their blood meal with fellow vampire bats that weren’t so lucky that evening. Our core morality is hardwired and, human cultural diversity notwithstanding, not subject to our whims. We are driven to care for our peeps and defend them against our enemies, and we only violate our core directives at great personal expense.
That is, I’ve never met a happy putz. I’ve met rich putzes and poor ones; never happy ones. That's why you'll be happier if you return the wallet (with all the money in it).
We don’t need metaphysical “truth.” To be truthful, it just gets in the way, misleading us often as not.
Camus’ morality, he said, came down to this: “Work hard. Be kind.”
I’d only add “Turn rocks over.”
2 comments:
If morality is hardwired, then morality in your terms is completely in kind than how it has been traditionally used. Morally is normally defined as following a rule or generating some kind of "good" or "appropriate" outcome. It is a normative scale by which we can judge the "good" from the "bad."
Morality in a strictly "hardwired" sense would mean following the rules that we have absolutely no choice over. Therefore we cannot have morality in the traditional sense because we have no choice. We must follow what has been pre-programmed. Okay, that's fine. As far as bringing in cultural diversity, I don't see how you can and keep your feet on solid ground. You said morality is hardwired, yet there are apparently cultural norms? So people are formed by societies? That is an existential claim that does not match your essentialist genetic claim.
Pragmatists don't deny that they exist in a sea of normativity. Pragmatists normally cast aside the why question and say that it doesn't have any truth value. They why doesn't give us anything useful and therefor should not be asked.
Regardless, you still are telling me "how." The answers to that question are easy. They can be described by science. A decision is made when my flight or fight reaction is triggered by the limbic system and sends electrical signals which cause my glands to dump a cocktail or hormones and other chemicals into my blood producing X, Y and Z outcomes. It is due to a complex evolutionary history that this process evolved. I don't doubt it. I am actually a scientist. I agree with it completely. But why? Why does it work that way? I know how it works. I know how to manipulate it. But why? Same with questions of politics or social organization of ethics of you name it. Yes, the why doesn't have any use value to a pragmatist. That doesn't mean that the question is not important.
We're all finite beings anyway. Death is the great end to all of us. I find it funny that you go to Sartre and Camus. Sartre's world was a world of negation and nothingness (granted he did try to turn existentialism into a humanism). Camus the great absurdist, who viewed life at its core as being completely absurd. Not too much truth value in that...
The protean drive for morality is hardwired, but not in detail. We’re an omnivorous ground-dwelling social animal with a big brain & protracted childhood. All our fundamental morality can be derived from what’s in that sentence.
This detracts nothing from our feeling of free will. Maybe we’re just biological robots with no real free will. But no matter how enlightened we become, or what sorts of elaborate moral schemas we adopt, nothing relieves us of the agony of decision—especially in situations where every option leads to pain, either directly or through empathy.
Particularly because of our innate duality between ruthlessness & tenderheartedness. We can’t be just one of these. Anyone who tries, loses. But having both elements inside us always—that’s tough too.
So while we have no choice over our species’ built-in basic rules, we can choose to fight them—people do that all the time. Or we can play the hand we were dealt as best we can.
You don’t have one iota less of free will than you had before you read my 1st comment about philosophy. I’m just trying to draw back the curtain, & reveal a bit of what was there all along. You still have choice because you can’t not have choice.
As for the conflict between biological determinism & cultural diversity—there’s none.
Every culture instantiates those fundamental rules, or, more accurately, vectors. Each instantiation interprets the fundamentals in a particular set of ways.
Now it’s possible to have societies that violate a lot of that hardwired morality through distortions of how human character is viewed, & of our relationship with nature.
So I will call societies that practice FGM as being evil, for example. To me they’re applying to our loved ones the ruthless side of our character that we were given to use with enemies. Same goes for ghetto thug culture that views all women as ho’s or b…….es. Same goes for pacifist subcultures that deny our obligation to defend loved ones.
Bottom line: our hardwired morality is general, leaving lots of wiggle room for individual societies to develop unique sets of rules & mores—even if you limit your approval to societies whose rules all line up with our hardwired core morality.
People are formed by societies within the confines of our innate character.
The whys are mostly answered by the stunningly simple evolutionary rule of reproductive advantage. One group prospers, another withers, because group A’s structure turned out to be more adaptive than group B’s.
Remember, even though we look out on the world as individuals (especially in Western societies), biologically evolution works at the gene pool level.
Thus homosexual, caring Uncle Ernie may contribute more to the reproductive success of his gene pool than Joe the selfish studmuffin who’s a lousy parent. Altruism is a potent force in gene pool success.
I’m fascinated by why one group does better than another—and not just human. As a scuba diver, I see many examples of cooperation between species aiding in the success of not just the gene pool but of an ecosystem. Cleaner wrasses, shrimp gobies, & human-dog partnerships are just a few examples.
But I can’t help feeling that your why differs from my why—that you think my whys are your hows, perhaps? That you’re looking outside the natural world for purpose, while I’m not?
I draw from various philosophies. To me Sartre is (I hope) the last of the existentialists endlessly whingeing over the Death of God, & Camus is the first who simply turns to the business of living in this universe.
So from a theological viewpoint, Camus may seem like an absurdist, but to me his “Myth of Sisyphus” just tells us to get on with it & quit worrying about all the stuff we can’t change.
Like our mortality. But I love my spouse, I care about my friends, my country & this Earth, so my concerns do extend beyond the timeframe of my own existence.
Which just reflects my hard wiring, eh?
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