-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.15/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.15/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 15 </A> ----- The Laissez Faire City Times April 12, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 15 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A Moral Axis: Why Are Ideas Defended? by Tim S. Macneil This essay is written in reply to (but not in rebuttal of) the article " A Psychological Axis: Are We Predetermined?", by Robert L. Kocher, that appeared in the March 22, 1999 edition of the The Laissez Faire City Times (Vol 3, No 12). In his article, Mr. Kocher writes: "Over many years I have come to the conclusion rational religion and competent psychotherapy, even atheistic psychotherapy, converge into fundamental agreement on personal and social behavioral standards. Conversely, corrupt religion and incompetent psychotherapy agree in advocating destructive standards." And, in the rest of that article, Mr. Kocher discusses various important issues collateral to the above observation, but he does not (unless I misread him) actually expressly defend it, as such. Not that he needs to; that is not his purpose. Moreover, Mr. Kocher is not the first person to have made this sort of observation. In C. S. Lewis� book Mere Christianity, which grew out of several "Christian apologetic" lectures that Mr. Lewis gave in 1943 and 1945, Mr. Lewis attempts to argue the case for Christianity based on an initial observation of the existence of "the Law of Nature", or of universal moral law. Specifically, Mr. Lewis writes: "I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations [ sic] and different ages have had quite different moralities. But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own." Indeed, Mr. Lewis himself makes such a comparison in detail, in an appendix to another book of his, The Abolition of Man. In his book Mere Christianity, however, Mr. Lewis takes the observation as his starting point, spending only his first chapter defending the truth of it. He goes on from there to argue, that as this Natural Law is indeed "universal," and as it must come from somewhere, but it cannot (he argues) come either from men or from nature, therefore, syllogism, syllogism, syllogism � so, the Christian religion is true. Now, Mr. Lewis� two books are excellent books, well worth not merely a reading, but indeed worth repeated re-readings. But I reject his argument in furtherance of Christianity, because I reject his premise that universal moral law cannot come either from men or from nature. The purpose of this essay, then, is to supplement Mr. Kocher�s article (if I may be that presumptuous), and to try and prove a mundane origin for �Natural Law�. Why Are Ideas Debated? I would like to begin with the "trivial" observation, that I am discussing ideas here, and that you are reading this (if I still have your attention), because ideas matter to you, too. Indeed, if I may be so bold, even if I don�t still have your attention � and never will � ideas must matter to you, assuming you are a live adult human being in good health. One proof of this, is that live adult human being in good health argue about ideas all the time, and will at times even resort to violence to defend ideas. We go to sweaty school auditoria to listen to refereed debates; we watch "talking head" shows where the massed punditry discuss ideas for our entertainment; and so on � but "formal" debates are only a tiny fragment of the whole: most debates occur impromptu � over the dinner table; in the parking lot after Sunday church service; in a bar; in the bleachers at a ball-game. And, they are happening all the time. But the point is, they are always about ideas. The idea in issue could be as concrete and immediate as whose fault it is that the keys are locked in the car, or whether the @#$% referee made a fair call � or as abstract as whether rent controls reduce the supply of affordable housing, or where morality comes from. But always it�s an idea that�s in issue. Even an anti-intellectual, dismissing all intellectual enterprise as "crap", is articulating and supporting (defending and debating) an idea. What are "ideas"? All ideas are rooted in positive statements about actual or hypothetical reality. All ideas, are either such positive statements, or are inquiries or hypotheses arising from them (including "negation"), or are imperatives or contingencies suggested by them. An idea that is not about either actual or hypothetical reality, is necessarily devoid of any referent and so all content, and so it is not an idea at all. And how can an idea be about some other thing than either of these? "Actual or hypothetical reality" covers the entire c ognitive ballpark. Finally, what else can there possibly be to debate, besides ideas, i.e. positive statements about actual or hypothetical reality, or their logical consequences? Of course, if you are not a live adult human being in good health, this won�t be true. No one ever held debate with a corpse: Yorick�s skull did not answer Hamlet. Children, even most adolescents, but especially young kids, will accept ideas, and may quarrel with them, but do not, except in practice and as play, "debate" them. Those who are sick, say with a viral lung infection or with clinical depression, are not given to argument and debate (not to say they won�t be cranky): sustained debate takes too much energy for them. Finally, if you are not human, you have fang and claw and armor plate to rely on, but no access to a sufficiently complex language that you can use as a tool wherewith to debate. At least, no animal species we yet know of does. Perhaps whales debate; we do not know it. It is quite telling, that our children "practice and play" at debate, for the young of all the higher vertebrates will, in play, practice the skills (such as hunting or foraging) that their adults survival depends. It is therefore reasonable to infer that debate, or else something quite highly correlating with it, or of which it is a component, is vital to human survival. That correlate, of course, is thinking itself. So, argument and debate take effort and energy on the scale that makes the difference between illness and health; are frequent in the verbal play of young humans; and are a constant activity of adult humans. It�s fair to say, then, that the ideas they are about, are very important, too. The mental activity they reflect, is important. Thinking, is important. What Is "Important"? So what � I mean, who cares if something is "important", anyway? Isn�t "importance" all just "relative"? Different �things� (i.e., ideas) are important to different people, right? Well, actually, no. It is neither true that importance is inconsequential, unless you wish to wallow, for some motive, in philosophical absurdities � nor is it true that importance can be "relative", i.e. subjective. Preference may be subjective, but that is a different concept. Instead, importance is "fundamental", that is, an irreducible philosophical concept that can only be understood by reference to itself. This can be illustrated by asking, "what is the most important thing of all?" An answer: the most important thing of all, necessarily (in the philosophical sense of "necessarily"), is a standard of value, for without it the concept of importance itself can have no meaning. And so on: importance is fundamental. OK, this seems like progress, of a kind � but what standard of value, then? Well, a standard of value had better be something that both permits & requires a standard of value. Otherwise on the one hand importance will be impossible, and on the other, it is superfluous � which is to say unimportant; which is rather a contradiction, now, isn�t it? I submit, that the only thing that both permits and requires importance, is a conscious, contingent existence. If you cannot be aware of importance, how can it be important to you? If your existence is assured (not contingent), then what worries do you have, that would make anything important to you? And, if you do not exist at all � well, what is importance, to you (or more accurately, non-you: it�s an absurdity), at all? So, if you have followed my argument so far, we have reached this point: it is empirically true that human beings "debate" ideas with a persistence of habit that implies that "ideas" are not merely "important" to human beings, but highly "important" to them. And, if we unpack all the meanings from the words, this means that positive statements about actual or hypothetical reality, and their logical consequences, are indispensable to the continued existence of the conscious, contingent existences that live human beings are. Ideas and thinking matter; are important; have value; because they help us survive. The informed reader will realize by now, that we have arrived from other premises, to the place where Ayn Rand argues, "life is the standard of value." After pausing to make that observation, we will now head off in a direction she does not, to my knowledge, ever take. A Moral Axis People�s lives revolve around their ideas, because those ideas are the basis upon which they decide their courses of action. That is, people�s ideas govern their decisions about how to behave. How to behave: morality. Rules constraining behaviour: ideas about it. Everybody has ideas in their head about how to behave. Proof: go & challenge someone�s conduct, and with predictable regularity they come back with an express or implied idea in reply. Even if it�s just a shouted obscenity meant to convey the idea you have no "right" to challenge their conduct. Even if it is a fist meant to convey the idea they�ll be the one to do the challenging of behaviors, thanks very much. Even if it is pointedly ignoring you, to convey the idea that your moralizing (for that is what it is) is of no importance to them. And, we don�t just have "one" idea, about morality or anything else. We carry about in our head vast arrays of ideas, huge collections of them. Some people have collections of ideas that are larger than those of others. Some people have collections of ideas that are better organized, or more coherent, or more consistent, or more empirical than the heaps of arbitrary ideas that others have. But we all have these collections of ideas. Everyone considers some of their ideas to be more important than others of their ideas. Is there a person, who indifferently ranks their ideas about pocket lint, say, as compared to their ideas about the appropriateness of readily available abortion? And, our most important ideas (by our own lights), we tend to call our "philosophy", or our "religion". We refer to this core set of beliefs especially on those occasions when we have to make critical decisions: decisions that may either seriously affect the quality of our contingent existence (i.e., have a bearing on the things we value), or seriously affect the continuation of our contingent existence, itself. Our ideas are our tools of survival. We defend them as we would our lives, because in a limited sense they are our lives. And, one cannot impale an incorrect or an evil (inimical to life) idea on the point of a bayonet. One can only impale it on the sharp point another idea. So, in the warehouse of intellectual armaments, we find the tools of debate. If someone bests us, we upgrade, "rearm": we improve our ideas, as often as not by co-opting key ideas from a person who bested us. Or, we�ll go to a person (e.g., a parent) we believe to be trustworthy, and ask for help in improving our ideas: it�s called getting educated. Consequently, "good" collections of ideas (those conducive to survival of their bearers) get passed along to others. Ideas that lead to destruction of their bearers, do not get passed on. After all, who is left to pass them on, after their destruction? Ideas that lead to evident mistakes, get weeded out. And so, by means of these various mechanisms, "collections of ideas" that work, will develop and propagate through entire communities. They will become the moral axis of that community. Darwinian Selection of Moral Systems So, we arrive at the point where we can conclude that "collections of ideas", particularly core ideas, about how to behave, if they work (in the sense of favoring the individual persons who live by them), will come to dominate entire communities. They will do so because they will help the individuals in that group avoid �dangerous� or �wasteful� mistakes. And this will permit their bearers to transmit them (teach them) and will also induce others in the community to acquire them (learn them). Except, disastrous consequences are sometimes only the long-term effects of a mistaken idea. Therefore, the better, core "collections of ideas" (moral systems) are those which help their bearers avoid incentive traps, not just obvious failure. Incentive traps are the courses of action which immediately or superficially look like gain, but which lead to the long-term disaster mentioned earlier. And the best moral systems of all, will help not just the individuals in a society, but the whole of the society. They will not just help individuals to "live long and prosper" but all their fellow individuals to do so, as well. They will not only help the entire society avoid collective incentive traps, but enhance the cohesiveness of the whole society, too. A society with a "good" moral system will have the prosperity to insure itself against lean times, and the cohesiveness to defend itself from weaker societies which may attack it. In short order, we would expect societies with weak, incomplete or flawed moral systems to disintegrate, be assimilated to the moral system of a "better" society, or to go extinct. An entire society could be wiped out, if it embarked on a course of action in innocent or willfully blind ignorance of the inevitable long-term disastrous consequences. For example, a society that condones murder of anyone by anyone on a whim, is unlikely to exhibit much material prosperity, nor to be able to resist the encroachment of a society that is less tolerant of the destruction of human lives. And so on, through all the widely accepted (see C. S. Lewis� appendix to The Abolition of Man) moral rules. If a series of geographically separate "experiments" were conducted, you would expect the societies emerging over time in the different geographical areas would "converge" on the moral system most conducive to the survival of humans and of their societies. It is no different than the convergence of forms in biological entities: an ichthyosaur is a reptile that "looks just like" a dolphin. It�s no coincidence: they share the same ecological niche, but at a 75 million year remove. In the jungles of South America and of Africa, and in Australia, we encounter sundry ant-eaters from highly divergent stock: monotremes, marsupials and placental mammals � all with sharp chisel-claws for breaking open insect nests, long snouts for poking about in the debris, and sticky tongues for capturing the ants. The "ant-eater" shape is the optimal solution to the niche of living off ants; given time, the pressures of selection will force any lineage earning its keep in that way, into that form. "Natural Law", then, is the optimal solution to the niche of living off your wits as part of a society of human beings. Over time, the pressures of selection will force any culture that earns its keep in that way, into that form. And of course, if you are a human, there are no alternatives to living off your wits. Or are there? Moral Parasitism So far, we�ve seen that to "live long and prosper" as a human being, one has to resort to ideas (and their manipulation: thinking) for one�s survival. One has to live by one�s wits, then, it seems. At least, I submit that I�ve shown (as have numerous others, elsewhere, endlessly) that one has to live by wits. The question now is, by whose wits does one live? Earlier, I discussed (by implication at least) how children have to learn to think. It follows as an obvious corollary, that until they master this art, they must be being kept alive by the wits of others, viz., their parents. And that is their nature, so there�s not a lot to be said against it. Similarly, others, too, may be involuntarily reduced to dependency on the care of others. There is no moral dimension to that, either (in the dependent person). There is a moral dimension to taking care of the dependent people one loves � the moral rule is, take care of what you value (love) or you will lose it. And there is also a moral dimension to choosing whom to love, and whether one must love (and so care for) certain people who are truly dependent on us. But discussing that meaningfully would take me beyond the scope of this essay. Incidental to the arguments I have presented so far, is the empirical fact that all prosperous societies always feature a division of labor, and a reliance on trade. But these facts imply that all of the members of such a society are dependent on their fellows, i.e., for whatever specialty they do not specialize in making or providing, themselves. We can�t all be our own brain surgeons. This is interdependence, and the trade between the members of such societies is the proof that the participants are each "supporting themselves", indirectly. However, this leaves one group of people, who live by the wits of others, but not out of genuine dependence (for they can take care of themselves, if they only would), and not in the interdependent sense of trading, in exchange for the benefits they get from the wits of others. This group includes a variety of individuals who pursue this habit of life by various tactics and strategies. Some exchange the benefits they get, for nothing (begging), others exchange the benefits they get, for a negative (thieves and fraudsters). But the historical lessons of life in the human niche make clear, that it is against the rules, i.e. it is contrary to Natural Law, to persist in "helping" someone who insists on begging, despite having no genuine dependency. Also it is against the rules to allow fraud, or to tolerate theft. Don�t take my word for it: go look up all the codes of all the s ocieties that have lasted as intact cultures for at least a thousand years. Therefore, someone insistent on pursuing such a "way of life", in a culture that has lasted long enough to have its collective rules converge to the norms of Natural Law, is obliged to exert their efforts to subvert the collective rules, so as to force those collective rules to diverge once again from congruency with Natural Law. The most sophisticated human parasites, in other words, must subvert objective morality to persist on their course. Conclusion To conclude, "Natural Law" or universal moral law is very real. It is a consequence of the absolute fact that a human life is a conscious, contingent existence, and the absolute fact that humans live as social animals. Thereafter, selective pressures and time between them are sufficient to guarantee that the forms of human societies will converge on the optimal form � that the rules the societies live by will converge to the same, universal rules. No appeal to Divine Revelation is necessary (nor ruled out!) in explaining "Natural Law". Conscious, contingent existences living together + passage of time = "Natural Law". Its opponents, can only be those who wish to evade the effort of consciousness, or avoid the Iron Law of Contingency ("consequences follow"), typically by expressly or implicitly demanding that the effort be exerted by "someone else", and that consequences be faced by "someone else" � compulsorily, if need be. Which is a pretty succinct description of the "moral reasoning" that undergirds the political program called the Welfare State. And as to what sort of havoc mentalities of this order wreak on society, and as to whether they imperil civilization (orderly human existence) itself � for that I refer you back to the article that prompted me to write this, Robert Kocher�s "A Psychological Axis". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tim S. Macneil is a High School Math teacher living in Victoria, British Columbia. His email address is: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 15, April 12, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved Disclaimer The Laissez Faire City Times is a private newspaper. Although it is published by a corporation domiciled within the sovereign domain of Laissez Faire City, it is not an "official organ" of the city or its founding trust. 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