Chapter 2: The Depressing Chapter- What Confused Me About Ethics

So how do you think we might answer these pesky Questions? It sure seems that ethics is a hard topic to pin down. When I was introduced to moral philosophy I was puzzled by the Questions, but optimistic that there was a solution to them. The more I read, however, the more I became worried. There were several problems in moral philosophy that seemed too hard to ever solve. I began to think that people did not know what they were talking about when they acted "morally." Martyrs were throwing their lives away for no good reason. I was afraid that I would never be able to find a clear goal to work towards. Now that I have found an answer to the Questions – I think – I am not so worried about such things. However, in this chapter I want to discuss the reasoning that confused me. The issues are certainly thought-provoking. Also, I think this chapter will highlight just why the Questions are so important. We use ethical thinking all the time without realizing just how bizarre it is in some ways. So be prepared to have everything you ever believed in blown away! Here we go…

The Is/Ought Gap

Several hundred years ago, the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out a very irritating fact. You can never prove how anything ought to be by only describing how things are. To understand this idea, let’s look at a few examples of common-sense moral reasoning:

Driving pollutes the environment, so I should bike to work.
I made the mess, so I should clean it up.
You need to do the shopping this week; you promised me that you would do it.

Each of these statements seems normal enough, right? Look carefully at each one. Each sentence has two parts. One part points our some fact about the world, how it is. For example, "driving pollutes the environment." This part of the sentence can be a sentence by itself, and will not refer to anything moral at all. Neither will "I made the mess," or "you promised me you would do the shopping." Morality comes in with the other half of each sentence: "I should bike to work," "I should clean up the mess," "You need to do the shopping this week." This other half of the sentence says how things ought to be. So the three sentences above all seem to argue that certain things ought to be because other things are a certain way. We use this kind of reasoning all the time, without any apparent problems. What, then, was Hume’s concern?

To answer this question, we will first look at how to make a good argument. A perfect argument looks like this: "A is true. Whenever A is true then B is true. Therefore, B is true." [2] This form of an argument is called a "syllogism". The first two sentences of the argument are called the "premises" and the last sentence is the "conclusion." An example of a syllogism is: "Bob is a dog. All dogs have ears. Therefore, Bob has ears."

Consider this syllogism: "Bob is a dog. All dogs have wings. Therefore, Bob has wings." The conclusion is false, but not because of faulty reasoning. Rather, one of the premises – that all dogs have wings – was wrong. A might not be true, or it might not be the case that B is true whenever A is true. If both of the premises are true, however, we can be absolutely certain of the conclusion, "B is true". The syllogism is a fool-proof way to phrase an argument.

Of course, you will notice that not all arguments look like syllogisms. Most arguments, in fact, only seem to have one proposition: "A is true. Therefore B is true." But this way of phrasing an argument does not always work. Suppose I say, "Bob is a dog, therefore Bob has wings." This sentence is quite wrong, even though it fits the plan of most arguments. The problem is that I am assuming the missing premise of the syllogism is true, even though I do not say it. I am assuming that all dogs have wings. My argument does not work unless this premise is true as well. If you think about it, every good argument is really a syllogism, even if we do not state both premises.

Let us return to the three moral arguments at the beginning of this section. We can see that each contains a hidden premise. In the first, for example, we assume that "we ought to help the environment." Notice that this part of the argument contains the word "ought." Now, we can finally understand Hume’s point. If we want to make any moral argument, at least one of the premises must be moral itself. The sentences assume, respectively, "We ought to protect the environment," "You ought to be responsible for your own messes," and "You ought to do what you promise." To make a moral argument, we need a moral premise. In order to determine if anything is right or wrong, we need to first know that something else is right or wrong.

Now, here’s the real problem: how do we know about the first thing to be right or wrong? We seem to have lots of ideas about what is right or wrong, but if we want to explain them, we have nowhere to start. One way to think of this situation is to imagine a large group of people who fall over a cliff. Each one can grab onto another person or two, trying to get support. However, nobody is actually holding onto the cliff, so the whole group of people continues to fall. The only way the people can be saved is if at least one person manages to grab something other than another person, such as a tree limb. In the same way that people grab onto other people, moral beliefs seem to depend on other moral beliefs to be true. But what Hume seemed to show is that there are no tree limbs. Each moral argument depends on a pre-existing moral argument. [3]

It is not so straightforward then to make a moral argument as we thought. What Tree Branch of Morality can anchor our Mass of Falling People of Ethics to the Cliff of Truth? It seems like we are using moral language all the time without realizing that we have no good reasons to do so. Suppose you take a moral argument you believe, and look for the hidden moral premise. Now consider the argument for believing that belief, and look for its hidden moral premise. This is like picking a person in the falling group, and finding who he or she is holding on to, and who they are holding on to, etc. What happens if you keep digging deeper? Are we holding onto anything? Perhaps we just assume that by grabbing onto another person we’re safe, when really it does not help at all. Is ethics just a bunch of beliefs we made up that are not based on anything true at all?

Are you confused yet?

Sociobiology and Monkey Justice

People take "right" and "wrong" to be very serious things. Martyrs give up their lives for The Good. Many people believe goodness to be the Way of God. In the last few decades, however, a new group of people has looked at morality from a very different perspective - evolution. Everything else about people seems to be an adaptation that helps our species survive. Why, then, should we not look at ethics the same way? This new point of view is called "sociobiology," since it looks at society from a biological perspective.

To illustrate the basic idea of sociobiology, we will look at a simple example. Consider two groups of prehistoric people, the Niceies and the Meanies. The Niceies have many of the same moral principles as us. Each person feels obligations to help others. Families are close, and people share their belongings with those who need them. The Meanies are very unlike us. Each individual has no concern for any other. People steal each other’s things when possible, and never cooperate.

Which group will survive better? Which will grow powerful enough to spread its ways of life? Each Meanie has some advantage, as he or she does not "waste" any time helping the needy, or caring for others. As a whole, however, the Niceie society fares much better than the Meanies. Among the Meanies, nobody could cooperate to accomplish any major tasks. Without the ability to trust others, they cannot effectively trade goods, share useful information, build irrigation canals, or do anything that requires more than one person. The Niceies help each other survive, which helps the whole society to thrive.

The theory of evolution, then, gives us an idea of how humans came to act morally. Groups of moral people can survive better than groups of immoral people. Our ideas of right and wrong tend to spread, while the Meanies’ behavior dies out. The evolution of our moral behavior is just like the evolution of the behavior of a monkey, snake, or flatworm. Ethics, which seems to separate Man from Beast, does not seem so impressive any more.

The sociobiologists’ view of ethics is very different from the more serious view of ethics that I discussed at the start of this section. If ethics is just something we evolved to think, then why bother being moral? Just because something evolved does not mean that it is good, but only that it is a survival advantage. Our sex drive is a survival advantage, but that does not mean we should have sex with the nearest person whenever we feel like it.

Sociobiology made me feel manipulated: "Evolution forced me to think that I should be ethical, so I don’t really need to be good." Now that I have seen the light and escaped from the Prison of Evolved Moral Thinking, I am more free. I can do what I really want, not just act as evolution has forced me to behave.

As I will explain in the next chapter, I have now found this view to be greatly mistaken. However, the argument does seem compelling. After learning about sociology and the is/ought gap, it sure does not seem ethics is worth very much at all.

People as Machines

What is a machine? A machine is made up of parts that each do some small task. When all put together, a machine can do things that are much more complicated than any of the parts could do on its own. A good machine is predictable. If is it set up the same way in the same situation, it should do the same thing.

I don’t feel like a machine. My mind feels like one thing, not a collection of individual parts. I do not feel like I must do the same thing if I am in the same situation twice. I can decide to do whatever I want, so I need not be consistent. If I choose, I can act unpredictably.

However, as we learn more about the world, it seems more and more like people are merely another type of machine. The body is a machine made of organs, and each organ in a machine made of cells. The mind seems to be somehow "in" the brain, and the brain seems to be a machine made of neurons. If a person’s brain is damaged, they actually lose part of their mind. They may not be able to remember faces and yet still remember other things, or be unable to see motion and yet see the locations of objects. A victim of brain damage is no longer the same mind.

People often compare minds to computers. The mind can do more complex things than any machine humans have yet built, but computers can do many mind-like things. A computer can read words on paper, act on spoken commands, and other things that seem rather human. We certainly have not yet built a machine that is as good as humans at everything we can do, but it seems likely that we will do so at some point in the future.

It seems, then, that the mind too is a machine. But machines do not have ethics. A computer does whatever it is programmed to do. It does not have "will" or "choice." In the same sense, people must also do what they are "programmed" to do, by their genes and culture. We only feel like we have freedom to choose what we like because our minds are complex and difficult to predict. But this complexity does not mean that in principle, someone could predict what a person would choose. If I probed enough of your neurons and knew how they were connected to each other as you made a decision, in principle I could predict your answer.

What is the point of ethics, then? If we are just machines carrying out rules, what exactly does it mean for any of our behaviors to be "right" or "wrong?" We simply carry out what we are going to carry out. There does not seem to be any room for value in this picture of the world. The world is just a bunch of stuff that is.

If value were something real in the world, why do we not see it anywhere but in people? I am confident that mass is a real property of things, because I can measure it with a scale. I know rules to describe how mass changes (like the Law of Conservation of Mass) which accurately predict what I see. But there is no "value-meter" that can detect right and wrong, as a scale can measure mass. There certainly does not seem to be a sixth sense organ anywhere in the body that "sees" right and wrong. Value does not seem to be anything real in the outside world. Perhaps "right" and "wrong" are just ideas that people invented. Now that we know more about physics and psychology and how the world works in general, do we no longer need these old ideas of ethics?

The Moral of the Story…

As you can conclude from these last three sections, ethics is meaningless and we should all go be mean and steal whatever we like.

…But Wait!

Perhaps I spoke too soon. I need to decide what career to pursue when I grow up. Which should I choose? I see good reasons for being a professor, and also for being an engineer. Hmmm… Since ethics is made up and meaningless, I really don’t have anything to go on. Also, I need to decide if I should go on that vacation this summer. It sounds fun, but it costs a lot of money. Should I go? Shoot! The word "should" doesn’t mean anything, but I just used it twice in the same paragraph.

We can’t escape ethics. We need to make decisions, and we need something to go on. How will we get out of any dilemmas? Also, it sure feels like I have some freedom to choose. I may be nothing but a machine, but here I am, faced with a choice. If I don’t act, the choice will not get made for me.

Something is wrong with all of the arguments in this chapter. Somehow, ethics is a real thing, and we need it to make the decisions we are faced with every day. But how do we answer all these arguments that ethics is just something people made up?

[2] There are actually other ways to make a syllogism. For example, "C is not true. If D is true, then C is true. Therefore D is not true." If you think about it, however, we can turn this type of syllogism into the other type mentioned above. (Hint: C="A is not true" and D="B is not true".)

[3] Perhaps we can use our intuition to just know that some moral things are true. This is a position we will consider in the next chapter.

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