Steve, I don't even have time to read all of what you've written here; but the first few paragraphs are very powerful.
I also wanted to make a comment about the piece that you wrote about death a few months ago - but I'm just too busy, still actually working through everything related to the death of my fiance' to respond too much. But, about loving others...I have often commented myself to others with thoughts that are similar to what you have written here...(at least the first few paragraphs)... The only thing we really have to/can/should DO while we are alive, is be kind to each other, love each other and share some of our experience, perhaps. Maybe we should do it only because we are all in this "life" thing together. The reason doesn't have to do with God, or doctrine, or any kind of belief in something supernatural. And NO you do not HAVE to be kind to your fellow person, in fact no one really HAS to do anything at all - but when one thinks of just the ripple on the water left by a drop of water...what do you want your own ripple to be? Once, when watching a version of the movie "Madame Bovary", I was completely transformed by the observation of how incredibly selfish the heroine was...when she dies, she leaves her whole family in a wreck, she's bankrupted her husband, betrayed him, sold off all his possessions and been a terrible mother to her child. What good is that in a life? What shape are the husband and the child in 2 years after the end of the story? What kind of a mother will the girl become? Will they be bitter and unkind because of the ripple she made by her selfish actions? Obviously, I know that there are many points being made in the book - about women's rights and so on...but what's the real net effect that she had on those closest to her? You know why it's good to be kind and to love - regardless of what any doctrine says? Because you know that others will be born after you are long gone and the effect that you have had will continue to ripple; What kind of an experience did one have as a child - was it positive or negative? What kind of experience do you want to have in your life? Don't you want others to have a positive experience too? The only way to have that is to try to perpetuate the lack of sufferings for all others... Why? Because we are all in this life thing together...regardless of a God, regardless of an afterlife, regardless of any other myths or fantasies we can entertain ourselves with; because we are born - grow into some kind of a self-awareness - and die and we know that other people around us do the same thing and will presumably keep doing so until our species dies off. I hope to have time to really READ all of what you posted ...but thanks for posting this Steven. Everytime I hear songs that have lyrics like: "I just need to find somebody to love", I have to laugh - there are PLENTY of people everywhere to love. Just start Loving. Margaret -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steven Peterson Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 9:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [MD] But WHY should we love others? Hi All, As a nonbeliever and a pragmatist, I don't think that we have a duty to anything powerful and nonhuman such as Reason or The Moral Law let alone a supernatural entity. My only duty is to my fellow sentient beings with whom I am fortunate enough to spend a lifetime. If you ask me why I ought to be concerned about other humans, I will have no answer for you. Though I sometimes get asked this question, I've come to find it more and more strange that anyone would think that it is an important question to ask, yet it has been made clear to me that I am thought to be lacking something vital in not having an answer. In being able to respond, "because God says you ought to," believers tell me that they have something significant that I don't have. What I am supposedly lacking is often called a "foundation" for my ethical claims. On the contrary, I think that anyone who needs to sincerely ask the question, "why love?" is the one who is lacking something important--probably love itself. People who love others simply don't ask "why love?" unless they are playing the hypothetical extreme skeptic--the Devil's advocate. The only non-hypothetical people who need an answer to this question are those we call psychopaths, and no offer of a philosophical foundation through reading Kant or Aristotle is likely to convince a psychopath of anything. A theology might work and I think does work in controlling the behavior of some psychopaths so long as the threat of future punishment can be made to seem undesirable and likely enough to balance against the perceived rewards of anti-social behavior, but such is not true morality. Such a person is not doing what is right out of concern for others but only as a matter of animal self-preservation. C.S. Lewis in "An Experiment in Criticism" explained the Christian view of ethics as follows: "In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity." In Lewis's view and my own, moral behavior is motivated by empathy and compassion rather than by fear of punishment or desire for reward. Where Lewis and I will disagree is on the notion that in addition to cultivating empathy and compassion and learning about what compassionate behavior is like, there is a need to also imagine a ground upon which this notion can stand. We need such a thing as The Moral Law and a Divine Command to follow this Law as an answer to the question of why we should even bother cultivating empathy and compassion. But this Divine Command carries with it a system of carrots and sticks that just takes us back to animal self-preservation instead of morality, so by accepting this answer we are rejecting our notion of morality as unmotivated by such insentives and disinsentives. Just as believers who attempt to answer the question "why love?" can point to otherworldly divine judgment and subsequent rewards and punishments, nonbelievers can point to materialist explanations for why we love based on biological evolution and social contracts. Neither of these sorts of answers are very satisfying because they are answers about carrots and sticks rather than empathy and compassion. Likewise, Biblical answers like, we should love, because God first loved us just lead to more and more questions. Why? Why? Why? Anyone who has ever had a conversation with a three-year-old knows that at some point we exhaust our conversational resources in response to such questions upon questions and get tempted to posit some universal principle about the way things just are. But these principles about the way things are now, even if true, won't tell us how things ought to be in the future. Having reached such an impasse, it may make sense to step back and ask whether the question at hand is one we even have. Asking "why should we love at all?", is to play the skeptic in merely feigning disbelief in the notion that we ought to love anybody. It is fake doubt because the skeptic can give us no good reason to think that this question is a practical matter for anyone who already does love. After all, none of us look at their parents or their children or their friend or anyone who they already do love and needs to ask whether or not loving them is a good thing to do. I have heard no philosophical argument in answer to this question that would make us love those who we do not already love any more than such an argument has ever make us not love those that we already do love, and I doubt such an argument is possible. The question posed by the skeptic "why love?" seems to me to presuppose that at some point in our childhoods, those of us who now love were convinced by a strong rational argument that loving is what we ought to do, and therefore we decided to do it, yet I doubt anyone thinks that is how love begins. The fact is that we already do love and recognize the virtue of loving at least some others as self-evident. What we need is not a philosophical foundation to tell us why we ought to love, since for us this is not a practical problem that we have any need to solve. What we need is to better understand how to love others--how to better take into account the needs of more of us and to expand and deepen our circles of moral concern. What we should seek is not a philosophical foundation for our current moral beliefs--a way to give our current practices eternal status as The Moral Law--but rather ways to grow morally--to enhance our moral imaginations for putting ouselves in another's place and sharing in their joys and sorrows. One way in which we have successfully cultivated empathy in the past is through telling one another stories that help us imagine new perspectives. Lewis might object that while cultivating empathy through stories is a good thing, we can't know whether or not we have made any moral progress without knowing whether the resulting behaviors are more of less in accordance with the Moral Law. On the contrary, we can account for moral progress by putting our stories within the larger context of a broader story or stories about how we got from there to here and what moving forward might look like. Such a metanarrative rather than a philosophical foundation is all we need to make our talk of moral progress coherent. >From the American perspective with its largely Christian heritage, perhaps a good story from which both believers and nonbelievers may be able to take inspiration follows. It is a story about where we are now and how we may have gotten here which may also help guide is in where we ought to go in the future. A Narrative of Moral Progress As pre-linguistic proto-humans, we were completely egoistic and amoral. We sought to increase pleasure and diminish pain. We did not yet have any concerns for the well-beings of others. In fact, we had no concepts of "self" or "other" or any concepts at all. It is not until we evolved to have symbolic selves and social roles that it makes sense to start thinking of ourselves at that time as moral beings. Our morals practices were whatever patterns of behavior we had that sometimes put the good of our relatives above the good of ourselves. Some of these behaviors, perhaps even all of them, are best explained as DNA-encoded responses for preservation of our DNA overriding our tendencies toward self-preservation of individuals (Dawkin's selfish gene theory), but as concerns for the well-being of others, these behaviors can be viewed as moral nevertheless. These first moral behaviors were always ethnocentric in the extreme. Those not part of the tribe and perhaps sharing enough of our genes, were of no moral concern. We told stories around the campfire at night about heroes who did great deeds and inspired new moral intuitions about the goodness of emulating their deeds. Our social groups continued to expand to include other tribes once nomadic ways of life gave way to agricultural ones. In ancient Palestine, Moses and Joshua and others emerged as leaders that helped unite our tribes. They codified many of our best moral intuitions in a list of commandments prescribing how we ought to treat one another to be in accord with Divine Law. This Law was said to have been handed down through divine revelation to Moses given to us alone, God's Chosen People, yet we came to know that other societies that had no prior contact with us and presumably were not given the Divine Revelation of the Chosen People also developed the same sorts of laws. The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth initiated a move toward a more universal approach to values while working within the tribal practices in Mosaic Law. When his moral intuitions conflicted with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law he asked rhetorically, "do people exist to serve the law, or does the law exist to serve the people?" For Jesus, the Mosaic Law above all taught that we ought to love God, and he reinterpreted that "first and greatest commandment" to be equivalent to a second--that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. Note that by this greatest commandment, we are not told to believe in God but rather to love God, and we were told that the way to love God is to love others. In fact, Jesus taught, speaking for God, that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me" whether we knew we were doing so or not. Belief in God was no longer necessary for love of God. In the parable about trees being known by their fruit, it was said that "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." Based on this story, it would seem that belief is neither sufficient nor necessary. Jesus taught in another parable, that the sheep will be separated from the goats on judgment day not based on adherence to any code of conduct or declaration of faith, but based on a compassion test: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." The Gospel writers were clearly of two minds as to whether belief was a sufficient or a necessary requirement for salvation, In addition to the parables, we also have many declarative statements about the necessity of belief put into the mouth of Jesus. However, by focussing on the stories supposedly told by Jesus in his preferred method of teaching, we learned that love rather than belief is what is needed. While modern Christians continue to debate the matter of the importance of factual belief, amny of us coming from the Christian tradition came to learn that love is the first and only law. We knew based on Mosaic Law that we ought to love our neighbors, but Jesus expanded our understanding of what it means to be a fellow human deserving of our moral concern. He didn't do it by articulating a philosophical foundation for ethics but rather by telling stories and asking such questions as "who acted as a neighbor?" in the well known parable of the Good Samaritan. It was through such story-telling that we came to imagine new perspectives and grow morally, and it is such story-telling which may also be our best hope for continued growth through recognizing others as also ourselves. Virtually every society known in history developed some version of the ethic of reciprocity, and like the others, our society has adopted this sentiment as its Golden Rule and as a fine distillation of many of our moral ideals and our best moral intuitions. The life of Jesus and his teaching through stories became itself one of the stories that most inspires us and fits within the broader story of our moral growth that I am telling right now. Stories within stories within stories is how we have grown, and no important consideration to philosophical grounding in first principles was required. Such principles served in some cases to derive truths after the fact from our stories, but our stories give us our moral intuitions against which such principles need to be checked and corrected. The Enlightenment thinkers, while often rejecting much of religious dogmatism, still recognized a Creator and thought we had a duty to nonhuman powers such as Truth and Reason. They were inspired by the moral vision of a brotherhood among men told of in the gospels. With inspiration from the Gospels and the Greek philosophers, they argued for the possibility of a new sort of community where all men were viewed as having been endowed by their Creator with sacred rights--a community where there was no aristocracy and all lives were valued equally. Many doubted that such was possible, but Our Founding Fathers, having read Locke and Rousseau, insisted that their beliefs followed from and were grounded in Truth, Reason, and self-evident principles. If such principles were indeed self-evident, why were they not known before? Why did King George need to be informed of them? Why were these truths not already known to King George and everyone else? Self-evident truths don't need to be boldly declared, they can just be assumed, can't they? Perhaps not. Perhaps a certain amount of moral growth was required before such truths could be recognized as self-evidentially true. One had to have already learned to imagine himself in the place of an other in something like a Rawlsian thought experiment where justice is seen to be independent of the accidents of our births. We needed the ability to identify with the other to a great enough degree of empathy and compassion for the truth of these self-evident truths to be beyond question for us. If so, such universal principles were the result of expanded moral consciousness and derived through the historical progress of better-developed moral intuitions and empathy rather than access to the Moral Law through some special revellation. Though some of them prayed for divine guidance, the Founding Fathers did not claim to have been given any special revelation urging them and advising them on how to forge a new nation upon newly disclosed divine truths. America was from the start an experiment in the possibilities for community where no man (and regretably they did seem to limit their ideas to white males) was in essence superior to any other, and none of us then knew for sure whether the experiment would be a success. The positing of universal human rights in the Declaration of Independence led to a future expansion of our circles of moral concern. Rigid dichotomies between the aristocracy and the peasantry were made fuzzy in a vision of egalitarian democracy where leaders were to be chosen based on their capability to lead rather than by being bothto aristoicratic parents. The principles we asserted as self-evident were stated in universal terms with consequences that we did not foresee at the time. The Founding Father's triumph of moral imagination is remembered along with our profound failure of moral imagination with regard to African slaves. At the end of the eighteenth century we simply could not fathom a world where blacks and whites could live together or a world where woman and men were socially and intellectually equal. It took other moral geniuses to show us the possibilities for new communities where a person could be judged morally by the content of her character rather than by the color of her skin or her gender. While the Founding Fathers appealed to Nature and Providence to explain their positions, they were also challenging many of our preconceived notions of what Human Nature was like. Would democracy just be the tyranny of the majority? Are we really fit to rule ourselves? If so, then human nature must be something other than the fixed essence that Aristotle thought it was and more of an open question as Rousseau described it, because we were never thought to be fit to rule in the past. Philosophical dogmas founded on the intrinsic nature of humanity have typically been one of the hurdles to be overcome in moral growth such as what was being sought in the American experiment. We should remember that it was thought that The Chosen People were intrinsicaly different from foreigners. It was thought that the aristocracy ruled by divine right. Their rule was justified by their intrinsic nature as royalty. It was once thought that blacks were different in some essential way from whites, and it was thought that women just didn't have the aptitude for intellectual endeavors. They were by nature too emotional to be able to make important decisions. All these beliefs were held on what was considered strong philosophical foundations. The moral we pragmatists draw from this story is not that we need to find that one true foundation for our philosophies. Instead we need to drop the whole notion that ethics ought to be founded on something called Human Nature. We ought to instead favor a view of ethics surrounding moral imagination in recognizing our shared humanity (i.e., empathy) and the expansion of our circles of moral concern in seeing the joys and sorrows of others as our own (i.e., compassion). Our moral intuitions are not what they once were. How did we get to where we are now? Not because we finally discovered the right philosophical foundation for a system of ethical thought, but by stories--the visions of moral geniuses like Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, Siddartha Gotama, Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu having been to the mountaintop and having brought back their stories to inspire the rest of us and the rest of us continually telling their tales. It was by reading Uncle Tom's Cabin rather than Kant that opened our hearts to the cruelty of slavery. Though the history of ideas has had a part to play in this broad narrative of narratives, such ideas about human nature are just one type of story we tell one another about ourselves and often not nearly so effective in changing hearts as humanistic narratives that get us to see one another and ourselves through new eyes and imagine new ways of living. Our history is not a relentless march toward a pie-in-the-sky goal, but a halting, mistepping, backtracking, and correcting struggle to find some path toward something undefined but better. This story doesn't tell us what "better" will look like in the future--we can only hope that future moral geniuses will come along to paint such pictures of new and better utopian visions for us--but it does tell us what "better" means in moral terms. We will have improved from where were in the past if we have successfully created new forms of life where the separation between the needs of the self and the needs of the other is dissolved. "Humanity" in this view is not an intrinsic nature to which we need to better conform, but is instead the title of a grand epic. It is not a static Platonic form but a promising project--a work in progress such that a look back through history will give us a hope for future progress and perhaps inspire new visions for what we may someday become. This narrative of progress I sketched is open to a lot of criticism. It is too simple, of course, which is the expense of brevity and attempted tidiness, and I am sure it is historically inaccurate in parts (I don't know much about proto-humans for example), but the need for such historical corrections asside, let's consider some more substantive objections to the ideas behind it. Objection #1 One of the criticisms of this metanarrative that I anticipate is the question, " is this metanarrative of moral progress--this story that paints everything as stories upon stories--itself true?" In asking whether the narrative I offered is true is to try to beg back the question. My argument boils down to saying that "but is it true?" is the wrong question that gets us involved in all those dualisms of Platonism. In place of such questions as "is it objective or subjective?" or "is it absolute or merely relative?" I suggest the question about my narrative, "is it any good?" In doing so I am begging back the question. The most basic issue at hand here is whether the Good ought to be subordinated to the True. the question is whether claims about what we ought to do need to be grounded in a philosophical systems of deductions to be valid or whether the true is instead only a particular kind of good--what is good to believe or a compliment we pay to sentences which are earning their keep in guiding us to what we want rather than a replacement God as capital-t Truth that demands our allegiance. With regard to my metanarrative (where I paint a view of moral progress as better taking into account the needs of more and more beings through the expansion of the moral imagination through stories that help us see the other as also your self and their needs as also your own), I invite critics of this view who ask "but is it true?" to offer an alternative narrative or improvement upon the one I offered. (I'm sure it can easily be improved upon by others.) In doing so, I will be be trying to move the conversation back from "but which one is true?" to "which story is the better story?" because that shift in conversation away from grounding in philosphical foundations toward new and better narratives is what my metanarrative is really about. Objection #2 This move away from grounded Truth is promoting irrationalism. Some will see this move as anti-rational, but it is only anti-Rational. It supports our atempts to find better justifications for our beliefs and to also seek new and better beliefs, but it opposes the view that our beliefs can be grounded in an ahistorical transcultural faculty called Reason. I'm not asserting anything like "it's good to believe falsehoods" which would cash out to saying something like, "it is good to believe things that are bad to believe." I care very much about the truth. What I don't care about is the notion of Truth where our truth claims are thought to need a philosophical foundation that somehow stands God-like outside of history and culture in order to be taken seriously. We've never had anything like the foundation that philosophers of the past have said we needed and would someday provide for us. I don't think we will ever cash in on their promises, and I should therefore not be thought of as missing something very important in not claiming to have one or in saying that we don't need one. What I've tried to illustrate in the above story is that we can talk about progress without reference to one. Objection #3 Without a genuine foundation, the skeptic, the cynic, and the criminal will see you metanarrative as an easily dismissed fairy tale. In my story, the cynic and the skeptic are the result of the notion that our belief need a genuine foundation. Once we drop the Cartesian notion that our beliefs need to rest on some ground that stands outside of time and culture (which becomes easier when we recognize that Descartes's desire to have such a foundation was as culturally contingent and as historically situated as any other human desire and did not itself rest on anything outside of human experience) we come to see such skepticism as fake doubt, and we come to see such cynicism as merely the sounds of disappointment many of us make in never being handed the philosophical foundation that philosophers of the past told us we ought to be demanding but were never able to deliver upon. The criminal you mention is a different story. I she does not already love and our stories have no effect despite all our most creative efforts, the best we may be able to do is to provide a system of carrots and sticks for getting her to act as though she does or else admit defeat and incarcerate her if that fails. Objection #4 The question "why love?" is one do I sincerely have. I'm no psychopath, but I'm no Jesus either. I don't need a reason to love my family and friends, but I need a reason to care about people I don't know. With the psychopath bit I was only getting to the basic question of "why love anyone at all?" (which I think is easily dismissed as a question that no one but the deranged really has) rather than the tougher questions we all struggle with like "why love people I don't even know?" I'm suggesting that these questions, like the question "why love anyone at all?" and "are human rights really self-evident?" only get answered with the expansion of moral imagination as we come to love others as ourselves--not as we love ourselves but literally recognizing others as also ourselves. That is moral growth and the only kind of moral growth. "Thou art that," as they say in the East. Your suffering is my suffering. Your joy is my joy. That is the sort of compassion that the Jesus most resonate with me taught--not to follow rules which presuppose a separation between the self and the other, but to cultivate the love that unites the two where such rules and carrots and sticks become irrelevant. These questions don't ever get answered with rational arguments that convince. Instead, the answers become self-evident with moral development just as Human Rights only became self-evidently true once humans became morally developed enough to recognize them as such. Conclusion Believers and nonbelievers will mostly agree about what is and is not moral. We pretty much all think it's good to help old ladies across the street, obey reasonable laws, and treat others with the same kindness that we would like to see returned. And we pretty much all think it is bad to rape, pillage, and murder. Our moral disagreements are generally far less significant thatn our agreements. Nevertheless, one idea we pragmatists may face strong disagreement from believers in the above concerns the notion that there is something called Human Nature and Natural Law that we need to conform to. I've pointed out that in the past this notion was often been used as a tool of oppression, but Darwin showed us that there is no such thing as human nature that defines moral boundaries. We are constrained more by the limits of our moral imaginations than by our Natures. We have benefited from moral geniuses of the past like Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK who have helped us to imagine new and better forms of community. I see the genius of such people in that they were able to see beyond supposed constraints on our moral possibilities due to our so-called "intrinsic natures." They denied the sort of claims that were made against them--all those platitudes that we still hear today that the way things are now is "only natural" and therefore cannot be made better. The fact that morally we are more than what we once were suggests that there is every reason to think that we can't strive to be still better. While the injunction "be pragmatic" often cashes as a suggestion that we ought to lower our expectations, the anti-foundationalism of James's, Dewey's, and Rorty's pragmatism helps free us to work toward a future which is not so constrained by our past as was previously thought. To be pragmatic in the Rortyian way is not to lower our expectations to conform to our Natures but to pehaps expect unimaginably more than we have been expecting. A look at out past makes it seem doubtful that future progress will be a matter of better conforming to two thousand year old moral moral visions of what our Nature is like. Such a brief look back at our past transcendence of old conceptions of our Nature as this may help us look more hopefully to the future for still further progress in the expantion of our circles of moral concern as we learn to better understand and take into account the needs of more and more beings capable of experiencing happiness and suffering. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
