Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The Myths About Moral Agreement

The myths people believe about deep moral agreement across all time and culture are tired myths that rest on fallacies and an ignorance of human societies.  Have cultures always agreed on basic moral ideas?  Not really, when one examines them from a closer standpoint than a superficial distance.  While they often agree on basic concepts (or at least pretend to), like that civilizations should be just, all claims of moral similarities fall apart at a more specific level.

I'll use an example of this.  Romans and modern Americans might all agree that societies should be "just", but the Romans might call their heinously grotesque tortures for non-citizens just, while Americans might insist that prison is just.  Does a murderer deserve to be imprisoned or crucified?  Neither, according to the Bible; the Bible prescribes a different punishment for men and women who murder.  Cultures may agree on a superficial level that certain values, like "justice" and "love", are good, but do they agree at all when one probes beyond empty words?  Not at all!  Simply compare the wide differences between the legal systems of different countries and eras of time and this can be easily seen.

What about being loving?  Do all people agree on what that means?  To use a contemporary example from within the same society, liberal and conservative Christians might strongly dispute what it means to love other people, with the former saying that we should be accepting of homosexual marriages and the latter saying that we should love people by telling them the truth about how homosexual behaviors (not the orientation) are sinful.  Can they both be right?  No, and it is clear that they don't agree.  They do not have the same ideas about love beyond a vague outline that happens to overlap, but when one looks inside the outline, differences can be found in abundance.

Even within the same culture one can find a plethora of divergent moral claims.  Hell, one can find a great disparity in moral beliefs even in the same household and family!  One of the only specific actions I can think of that every society I've read about condemned is murder of upper-class males.  When one probes beyond superficial similarities in the lip service groups pay to moral concepts (they are often not loyal to moral truths but their preferences and socially-inherited ideas of what morality is), one sees that they almost never agree on the specifics of how these concepts are to be applied, and the specifics are where moral systems often fall apart.  These systems can't all be correct, but they can all be incorrect.  Different societies have had wildly differing views on sexuality, torture, racism, sexism, and so on.  Societies that prohibit female leadership and societies that codify gender equality aren't similar.  Societies that discriminate against foreigners do not have the same moral beliefs as those who do not discriminate on such grounds.  Societies that reserve capital punishment for a handful of crimes believe very different things about morality and justice than societies that enact capital punishment for far more crimes do.  Societies that practice pedophilia in the name of philosophy and truth (the ancient Greeks) do not have the same moral beliefs as societies that oppose pedophilia (modern America).

Here a very important point must be made.  Even if everyone on Earth agreed not just about the generalities of morality, such as that an obligation to be loving or just exists, but also in the specifics, it does not follow in any way that their moral beliefs are correct, much less that morality even exists.  If everyone agreed that infanticide or crucifixion or patriarchal subjugation of women is good, the agreement means only that they have a consensus and nothing more; they are not correct simply because they agree and they can all be wrong together.  The same is true even if they all agree that something like murder is wrong.  It is only an appeal to popularity, a fallacy, that is believed when one holds the opposite conclusion about agreement.  Besides, conscience is purely subjective and not a reliable indicator of moral truths in any way [1] to begin with.

The myths of moral agreement are twofold: that everyone actually agrees about what actions and attitudes are right and wrong, and that agreement somehow means that the moral belief at the center of that agreement must be correct.  It screams of irrationality when moral objectivists argue that some moral claim can be known to be true on the basis of some alleged cross-cultural agreement.  First of all, cultures agree on far less than is usually admitted.  Second of all, agreement has no significance whatsoever and only proves that people agree, not that they are correct in their consensus.  Moral objectivists who think murder is evil would never let someone get away with arguing that murder isn't evil if everyone agrees it isn't, and I won't let moral objectivists get away with arguing the opposite conclusion using the same fallacies.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html

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