I don’t think there’s absolute morality, because such a thing would be completely impractical. Human existence is simply too complicated to tolerate a real absolute set of behavioral guideleines. Thus, to apply a set of absolute morals, you either have to radically change your existence (which I think is pretty much impossible, at least to the extent that would make absolute morality work), or you have to radically change the way you see the world. And I don’t mean that in a good way, either. I’m talking about deluding yourself and constructing a worldview that doesn;t even reflect reality a little bit.
That being said, where’s the basis for morality? I think Dawkins is kind of circling the issue and getting close to it in this interview, but I think he missed the core.
At the core, human morality is (or should be) based on informed empathy, the basic concept of caring about other people, coupled with some active effort to find out how your actions affect them.
So, what makes killing wrong? Simply put, because being killed sucks,a nd I don;t want to be killed. Also, having people close to you be killed sucks, so I don’t want to kill some other mother’s son. But it’s not just the Golden Rule in its simplest form, because empathy means being sensitive to how other people feel about things even when it’s different from how you might feel about it were your positions switched.
It also means trying to be aware of broader effects of your actions. It’s easy to have empathy when you’re ignorant of how your shoes were made, for example. But that’s an irresponsible way of going about things. Part of informed empathy means finding out how your shoes were made, and then exercising a bit of empathy and foregoing products made with sweatshop labor.
I’m not talking about full-blown Utilitarianism, the greatest amount of hapiness for the greatest number of people. Again, that’s an absolute moral system and thus I think it’s impractical when applied to real life. I’m simply talking about taking other people into consideration when we make decisions. Callously disregarding other peoples’ suffering? Easy- that’s immoral.
Sure, things change. Mores and norms change over time. Peoples’ ways lof looking at and thinking about the world often evolve and become more sophisticated. Much of this stuff is what Dawkins was talking about, the external morality. But internally, I think empathy is natural human trait that is truly universal (except for the dysfunctional and the broken- and well… they’re broken). Granted, people often apply empathy to only their own family or their own clan, or whatever. And people can have the empathy trained out of them, by various experiences and circumstances, intentional or un-. But at the heart of it, empathy is universal, and so it seems like an easy basis for a universal (though not absolute) morality.
Informed empathy is simply a matter of extending the sphere, and is by definition universal (in the sense of “this is what everyone should do, even if it not what everyone does”) because it means applying empathy to as large a number of people (and other living things) as possible.
No, informed empathy doesn’t answer all the questions. It doesn’t solve the moral dillemmas, but I think if we’re looking for something that’s going to solve the moral dillemmas, we’re kidding ourselves. Existence is simply too complicated for that. That’s why they’re called “dilemmas.” Sometimes the situation may mean that you have to do something that hurts someone, despite the empathy you feel. Nothing’s going to fix that- if you’re looking for a moral system that never makes you make that kind of hard decision, then you’re either looking for a fictional notion or behavioral paralysis. But the point of informed empathy is that you realize and feel the ramifications of those decisions. You do them knowingly- if you have to hurt someone you feel a bit of their pain, and it makes you take those kinds of questions very seriously. Empathy is not going to tell you what to do; it’s going to tell you the factors to consider when deciding what to do. It leaves the judgment call to you without passing the buck.
What informed empathy does is give a basic moral compass, one that is natural, internal, and universal, while at the same time it invites one to step a little bit outside their comfort zone and actively try to find out how other people feel, so as to better feel and show empathy.
Empathy doesn’t give you answers, it just helps you understand the question. In the end, I think that’s all one can expect from morality. Anything more is unrealistic and out of touch with reality.
I don’t think there’s absolute morality, because such a thing would be completely impractical. Human existence is simply too complicated to tolerate a real absolute set of behavioral guideleines.
I think this is why I’m a virtue ethicist.
At the core, human morality is (or should be) based on informed empathy…
I think this statement begs the question in a way. What basis do we have to say that morality should be anything? The very idea of morality is that our behavior should be contained within a subset of all possible behaviors. I think “should” and “ought” and the morality that they imply are a broken way to view the world.
When it comes down to it, our morality is and always has been based on what we want. It is defined by human desires. Empathy adds a layer of complexity to our desires. We experience vicarious pain when we see others suffer. We don’t like to see others suffer, so we say that they shouldn’t suffer. We label it immoral.
Those who consider abortion morally acceptable tend to remove their empathy for the fetus by never calling it a baby, a boy, a girl, or a person or by saying that it can’t really experience pain. Those who consider it immoral tend to empathize with the fetus because they consider it a person. The moral/immoral divide is aligned with people’s experience of vicarious pain or their lack of those experiences. I imagine that the widespread historical practice of infanticide (ex utero) must have also required its practitioners to dodge the thought that the babies were fully human or worthy of empathy.
When we say something is immoral, what we really seem to mean is that we don’t like it.
When we say something is immoral, what we really seem to mean is that we don’t like it.
And folks like Dawkins think that science can answer the question of why we don’t like some things to the point of wanting to ascribe a universal and eternal law to govern them. Of course, Kullervo’s point is a good one ’cause part of the answer that science is bound to find is likely to include a highly complex and subtley fluctuating human sense of morality over time and circumstances — not really the nature of god.
Hmmm. This could be a form of virtue theory, focussed primarily on the virtues of compassion and empathy. Which is interesting, as this form of ethical theory isn’t so interested in hard and fast rules, but in notions of moral character (what character traits must I foster in myself so as to further human flourishing, both in myself and others) and practical reasoning (what should I, as a virtuous person, try to do in this given circumstance?). There tend to be no hard and fast rules for doing the latter; no easily statable precepts that allow a logical deduction of absolute right and wrong. It’s a form of ‘tacit knowledge’ [1].
Have you read Mary Midgley’s ‘The Ethical Primate’? It covers fairly similar ground (and for good measure has some amusing comments about octopi and social contract ethics…).
[1] Used in the philosophy of science to refer to the type of knowledge picked up by scientists during their careers that they can’t consciously state, aren’t really aware of, but couldn’t carry out their work without.
And people can have the empathy trained out of them, by various experiences and circumstances
Where did u get this assumption from? I am only asking because i am in the middle of my A-level psychology coursework, and i need to research empathy to apply it to an assumption made by a newspaper, and i cannot find any research at all about how or why empathy is changed by external experiences and circumstances!
Many thanks
Jess
x
Um, try the Stanford Prison experiment? Or the Other-izing that happens between cultural groups or in warfare?