MORE ON MORALITY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Well, I'm sorry to have dismayed Nato and Tom on the issue of materialism and moral philosophy. I mentioned a feeling of "poor sportsmanship" in my last entry about this, and afterwards I realized another reason why: to say that morality is impossible to justify in materialist terms sounds ad hominem, as if I'm saying "if you don't believe in God, you have no morals." Let me be clear that I am not saying that. In my experience, atheist and materialist individuals (societies are a completely different story) I have known have certainly been moral and ethical, no less so, as far as I can tell, than Christians. In one respect, perhaps, atheists in a Christian society are likely to be more ethical than Christians, because many people are raised as Christians, and to doubt and deny the faith of their upbringing involves a certain courage and commitment to truth. If materialism does not provide any real basis for morality, as I am claiming, why do atheists and materialists, in practice, behave ethically. I think there are two reasons. First, a sense of right and wrong, conscience and guilt and so on, are innate in human beings, and while theories and ideas and traditions can certainly strengthen, weaken, or channel these, the basic moral impulses are resilient and ineradicable. Second, most people are guided less by moral ideas than by the praise and blame of those around them.

Next I have to slap Tom on the wrist for making what appears to be a repetition of one of the most naive mistakes in all moral philosophy (also made by Bentham):

Since there is no dogma but empiricism and reason dictating the best way to fulfill self-interests, she merely must learn from her experiences and failures and improve her behaviour to lead a good, moral life. The ultimate end of this moral system is the psychological and physical welfare of the individual.

Morality, by this account, is enlightened pursuit of one's own "psychological and physical welfare." Let's take an example. Suppose you and I, perfect strangers far from home, pass each other on a road, with no one else in sight. Each of us has a fair amount of money, but I have a gun, and you do not. Should I hold the gun to your head and take your money? "Thou shalt not steal," thunders the Old Testament, and has its counterparts in other traditions, but Tom suggests that we should instead simply contemplate what best enhances our own "psychological and physical welfare." In terms of physical welfare, I benefit from the money, but run a risk, in this case small, of getting caught by the law (which in corrupt countries may in any case only oblige me to pay a bribe.) How I weigh this will depend on my information about the efficiency of the law, and on my degree of risk-aversion. Next, psychological welfare. Even if I can get away with it, would the scene, or the fear of capture, haunt me afterwards, offsetting the monetary benefit? On the other hand, it might be fun to rob someone-- a thrill, a sense of empowerment. Or I might learn something-- understanding what it's like to be a robber. If I'm feeling lazy, or benevolent, I'll let you pass. If I don't like your face, and I'm in the mood for an adventure, in short if I think it would enhance my psychological and physical welfare, I'll rob you. To be precise, robbing you is the moral thing to do, by Tom's theory. The same applies to corruption, or rape, or genocide, or whatever: if it feels good, do it! Tom seems to be doing his best to prove my point about morality being impossible for a materialist. Morality's first task is to get people to sacrifice, sometimes, their own psychological and/or physical welfare for its sake. This is not the whole of morality, just the simplest, most elementary first step-- only the first, mind you, there is a long road ahead after that. To pursue only one's own "psychological and physical welfare" would serve as an excellent definition of amorality.

Next, I want to admit that, as Nato guessed, I have "not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good." And I was no doubt too bold in stating categorically that modern ethical philosophers "have been refuted." Frankly, I suspect I could "refute" the recent philosophical efforts if I read them (at least inasmuch as they offer a materialist basis for morality) but I haven't, and I probably won't, which perhaps puts me in an awkward position here, so how can I justify myself?

I've heard about a school of computational Biblical interpretation, people who run extremely complex computational operations on Biblical texts, as if they were code, and generate findings that some have found surprisingly cogent. I am imagining that I attended a party full of such people, excited about the latest prediction of the 2004 election based on computational Biblical analysis. Not having read the works they found persuasive, how would I be able to justify my skepticism to them? Well, maybe I'd just lay low, and maybe that's what I should do here, but if I chose to argue, I think I would have to explain why the whole line of work seemed to me unfruitful because it was built on faulty premises: in the case of computational Biblical interpretation, because it would seem somehow unworthy of God to have packed His holy book with bizarre codes.

In the case of Nato's reading list, I suspect they are imbued with a faulty, but at present widespread, epistemology. Let's revisit a basic question: What can we know? The skeptic follows Descartes' example of doubting everything, denies that we can put knowledge back together, and answers "nothing." If we defy him, he counters with an infinite regression: "how do you know x?" and then, in response to "because y," he says, "but how do you know y?" There are two ways to escape this infinite regression: 1) we can say at some point, "we know that a priori" or "we know that by introspection," or something of that kind, or 2) we can bring the chain of reasoning back around to some place where we've already been. These two methods of answering the skeptic define two schools of epistemology, "fundamentalism" and "coherentism." The problem for fundamentalists is to argue how we can "just know" something; for coherentists, it's to deal with the charge that their whole system is a "circular argument."

Nobody wants to be a skeptic, and the charge against coherentism is decisive, so I (with most philosophers these days, I'm told) take the "fundamentalist" line, and am willing to accept that there are a number of things it is fundamentally absurd or impossible to doubt. The most self-evident truth is my own mental experience, which consists of thinking and making choices, along with some basic logical truths; next is the existence of the physical world, and its laws; and gradually I try to build the edifice from there. To me, choice is as fundamental as it gets. I have my own private proof of the existence of the physical world, too, though some might not be satisfied with it. But that is all somewhat secondary: introspective knowledge is the starting-point.

Science is so prestigious nowadays that it tends to inspire a certain selective application of Cartesian doubt. People apply skeptical techniques and infinite regresses to morality, intuition, etc. quite freely, arriving at a fairly complete skepticism or relativism, while taking science as "proven"-- and in particular, accepting (consciously or by osmosis) the idea that everything, categorically, must be governed by certain fixed natural laws. If this is your epistemic position, it seems worthwhile to try to study the mind in a materialistic way, and import the certitude of the physical sciences into the field of phenomenology of the mind, about which our information is poorer. But since I find the epistemology underlying these efforts flawed, I don't expect that I'd learn much by reading this literature, except to see a lot of interesting examples of how initial flaws "flow downstream" in the course of an argument.

This brings us to choice. Nato asserts that:

freewill is properly the opposite of coercion and determinism is the opposite of indeterminism.

No, no, no! This is like saying that what matters in the game of baseball is not scoring the most runs, but having enough mitts and bases. If I am "coerced" to shoot myself, that might mean, 1) you fold your fingers around mine and push them to pull the trigger, or 2) you threaten me with much worse tortures, and persuade me to go the easy way. In the first case, coercion has overcome free will, but it's hard to say then whether I shot myself at all: a better description might be "you shot me, using my own fingers." In the second case, coercion certainly narrowed my options, but I still had free will. Even in the first case I still had free will: my thoughts, my decision to push back, and so on, were still under my control. Free will still exists in a case of coercion, just as it is possible to play baseball without mitts and bases, though each circumstances makes judging the outcome harder. But just as you can never win a baseball game except by scoring the most runs, no matter how many mitts and bases there are, you don't have free will if deterministic molecular interactions predetermine your every move, no matter how absent coercive circumstances are.

I have more to say to reply to Nato: stay posted!