Truisms 3

You have a rather optimistic view of human nature, especially considering the current situation with so many social apes blowing one another to smithereens. But even if your optimism were borne out empirically, I wouldn't have thought that morality was simply a contingent matter of "what humans do". Of course, morality is indeed not based on commands from on high. That was shown pretty conclusively by Socrates/Plato over 2000 years ago: see "Euthyphro dilemma". It's a bit depressing to philosophers to see the divine-command theory (i.e., "god relativism") so popular still after all these years with such a knock-down available to the curious. Then again, 95% of the people aren't at all curious 95% of the time. Which begets the question: Is "thou shalt be curious" a moral truism? Not, I suppose, if as you seem to suggest these are empirical matters.

So, 0.3% of us are perverse? I prefer to think that 0.3% of us are not perverse.

Forgive my lack of stats, Bob, but I think 3 sigmas is more like 2% in a normal distribution...

Is the 95:95 Rule supposed to be at least approximately optimizing (95% of people are more or less as decent as you could want 95% of the time) or merely satisficing (95% of people are at least minimally decent 95% of the time)?

Two problems with understanding 'perverse' in standard deviations: (1) People who we'd usually think of as qualifying for the label 'extremely good' would then also qualify for the label 'perverse' (it's like treating near-perfect working as being a form of malfunction, or nearly extraordinarily good health as an illness, simply because it is so far out on the distribution); and (2) any normal distribution of propensities would have a region of perversity, regardless of what the propensities were propensities for, which seems odd.

With regard to jrshipley's point on the popularity of divine command theories, I find that philosophers tend to be poorly equipped for criticizing them, because we rarely look at what divine command theorists actually believe, and thus tilt at caricatures rather than anything popular divine command theorists would recognize as their own. Most divine command theorists distinguish properly moral goodness from other kinds of goodness (e.g., rational appropriateness) in ways that block straightforward applications of the Euthyphro problem (although much, much, much more complicated forms of it can sometimes resurface). I cannot count the times that I've run across supposed arguments against divine command theory that were already fully handled by Warburton in the eighteenth century; and, indeed, to find philosophers giving genuinely good arguments against divine command theory you have to go back that far.

On statistics: 2% (one-tailed) is about 2 standard deviations. Since one could be perverse in either direction (I'll assume) you want a two-tailed value, which is 2.33 standard deviations. Out at 3 standard deviations (1-tailed) you're looking at 0.13%.

The 95/95 rule is either optimistic or pessimistic. You can look at it optimistically and see that most of the people, most of the time, are behaving morally. Or you can look at the 5% of the time that most people are not behaving morally, and decide that 1.2 hours/day of immoral behavior leaves rather a lot of room for social evils. Or, conversely, that 5% of the people being antisocial much of their time, is extraordinarily disruptive. (I work in a group of about 20 and even my most disruptive person is so only a few percent of the time.)

I'd actually put it more like 99% of the people 99% of the time. The pessimist in me just notes how little time, and how few people, it takes to accomplish quite a lot of evil.

This one I have to take issue with. "moral is what humans do" could mean that separating right from wrong is what humans do, or it could mean that acting morally-i.e. being good--is what humans do. The two interpretations would seem to be mutually exclusive. Could you clarify?

Moral is not "what humans do"; moral is the optimal function for maximizing over a set of choice the probability of something similar to the choosing entity continuing to exist. Ethics is what entities use as an approximation algorithm. Since for beings with only knowledge of past and present, morality is provably incomputable (as a trivial corollary of the Conway-Kochen free-will theorem), the approximation of human (or other species') ethics to morality is necessarily imperfect.

Human (and other species) ethics are subject to variation due to imperfections in reproductions and storage media, which subjects them to competitive selection for effectiveness, and thus evolve, per the Second law of Thermodynamics (see "Natural selection for least action", by Kaila and Annila, doi:10.1098/rspa.2008.0178).

The first proposed Corollary holds, presuming one does not consider the laws of thermodynamics to be "commands from on high" (a possibly interesting theological position). The first Subcorollary holds, but should be extended to remain valid so long as the Second Law of Thermodynamics does.

The second Corollary might be subjected to empirical measurement, but would first require a formal definition of "decent"; the second Subcorollary is a definition, which might be measured for resemblance to the more common social conception of the idea.

I agree that what we call "morality" is very likely a set of behaviors and inclinations which evolved as adaptations to increasing social living. I'm sympathetic to group selection a la Sober/Wilson, wherein groups of humans with better internal cohesion (held together by moral "rules") proliferated at the expense of groups that were less internally cohesive.

But it's that "at the expense of" part that prevents me from being an optimist. In addition to being naturally moral, I also think we tend to be naturally bigoted. It seems very common for people to have (usually unconsciously) a completely different moral standard which applies to "outsiders".

So, anyways, the 95/95 corollary might need a revision--95% of people 95% of the time behave decently towards those whom they think of as "one of us". I see little evidence that the majority of people routinely behave well towards perceived outsiders. In fact, it seems to me that the best way to get people to stop thinking of different races, different genders, different religions, etc., as their inferiors is to get them to see that the "other" is really just another person like oneself.

Truism: Man is a moral animal because immorality is a hassle and costs too much to practice.

moral is what humans do

Some might say that even contemplating an immoral action is immoral.

Thanks for educating me on stats - I revise it to 2 sigmas. And yes, someone who is too good is perverse; ever worked with a putative saint? You understand why so many saints got shot with arrows or burned upside down in a pit of scorpions after a while.

Wes, I like your revision - with the caveat that what counts as "one of us" depends solely upon the range of behaviours, colours, shapes and sporting clubs supported one encounters prior to the age of about 8. Kids don't naturally identify differences of a certain kind, they get them through induction ("Hmm, rare form/behaviour/accent/etc. Must be an Other! Hit him!"). I grew up with Italians and Greeks and latterly Australian Aboriginals, so I find them relatively familiar. Americans, now, they are exotic.

Alan, here's my claim, which I cut'n'paste from a talk.origins thread:

Here's a statement of the good that has no reference to deities whatsoever: the good is whatever set of rules over the long term increases the well being of humans; their health, survival rates, and fair distribution of resources. This also explains moral relativism (different social and cultural systems will have different ways to increase human well being).

There's no need for the good to be binding. If people follow the rules that increase well being (defined in my mind at least as "sufficient average individual fitness that the society endures through hard and soft times, with the humans involved living a reasonable lifespan") their society will flourish. If they do not, their society will tend to decline and ultimately get taken over or go extinct. You no more need to oblige people to live well than you need to oblige a predator to catch its prey.

I do not think that prescription is something of a different kind or class of things in the world than description (this is one of the things that prescriptivists have trouble with Darwin over - natural selection is not prescriptive, merely post hoc descriptive, and so it licenses no social Darwinism). Prescription is a statement that a given rule operates over a society in which an individual lives. If a Stalin refuses to follow the rules, then the society will either through both positive and negative sanctions coerce "right" behaviour, or the society will suffer accordingly (as, indeed, the Soviet society did) from that person's influence and causal outcomes.

You [my theistic discussant] want a way to bar moral monsters, fine. But in point of fact there are no universally effective ways to do that, and sometimes they slip through. And societies that fail to address this will end up not flourishing, although it may take a short while. Morality, like genetics, evolves on the scale of many generations, and so short term abominations can survive and cause harm.

The greater the competition between societies, the more likely in the long term that the societies that persist will have more widespread and uniform moral codes. China is a case in point, India another. This doesn't mean these codes are ideal, but they suffice in the conditions so far encountered.

Here's something to consider. We're probably inclined to think of 95% decent as being a one-dimensional sort of property, that is, people are "good" or "bad" in the same sort of way a car is going "fast" or "slow".

But it's not obvious from experience that this is the case. Consider the extreme example of the BTK killer, who appeared to be a good father, help out at his church, etc, very normal, other than his unfortunate habit of torturing and murdering people. There have to be quite a lot of different ways of being "perverse": politicians who visit hookers, gay preachers, embezzling bankers, fraudulent stock brokers, and just about anything else from the news comes to mind.

Unless all the different kinds of abnormality cluster together very tightly indeed, the implication is that nearly everyone would have at least one "perversion", be it as something dramatic as criminality, or as pedestrian as being too enthusiastic about stamp collecting.

To make it concrete, if 5% of the population had any given deviancy, and the chances of engaging in one form is independent of any other, then there would only have to be 14 kinds of abnormality to make it more likely than not that somebody has at least one (0.95^14 = 0.49).

Moral is ... our default software setting.

As others have observed, however, we also have astonishing ability to install software overlays in our heads. Much of our currently fashionable software seems to have astonishing ability to override our default setting and to cause harm.

It's easy to observe the results of our cultural overlay software, and to become a bit jaded as a result. Our cultural capacity to cause harm can be a distraction that makes it difficult to remember our default setting.

I seriously doubt that recent cultural history has already erased the default behaviors we evolved as a social species. I strongly suspect our default setting for social behavior is still available to us, should we ever decide to uninstall the most blatantly harmful experimental software and reset to our social default.

Moral is our default setting. Moral is what humans do, when we're not working hard to override our defaults.

Thanks for reminding us of this simple truism.

Cheers

John, your definition of morality ("whatever set of rules over the long term increases the well being of humans; their health, survival rates, and fair distribution of resources") strikes me as unjustifiably speciesist. Why should morality only be a trait of human societies, and not (with a different set of cultural ethics) exist in canine societies such as wolf packs, or cetacean societies such as a pod of dolphins?

Additionally, health and "fair" (a term you leave undefined) distribution of resources are primarily important only insofar as they tend to increase survival odds (for the individual or the society in which they live).

While the difference is subtle, I think my version "moral is the optimal function for maximizing over a set of choice the probability of something similar to the choosing entity continuing to exist" is a hair closer. (I'll also note that "happiness" simply seems to be part of an evolved approximation metric for measuring this, and as such, is similarly secondary in the same sense health and resource "fair"ness are.)

"Truism 3: Humans are moral because that is the nature of the species - moral is what humans do"

In general, I agree with you. However, I think that there is a "core" morality that is a set of behaviours that have evolved over time (at least amongst so called social animals) to insure the survival and well being of the group (species - whatever that is) e.g. sanctions against murder, theft, etc. - ( It is humanly moral for a human to kill a wolf that is attacking its child because that killing aids humans; it is wolf moral for a hungry wolf to kill a human to feed the pack because that aids wolves.) There is also a "peripheral" morality that is relative to the specific sub grouping: e.g. sexual behaviour, use of various intoxicants, specifics of mating arrangements, status of "state sanctioned murder" (capital punishment), etc. This "peripheral morality" evolves over time in a seemingly random way: perhaps related to the preferences imposed by a sub groups currently most popular mythology.
Perhaps we need different terms to apply to these different "moralities.

Tim E, I am very sure that your "peripheral morality" does not evolve randomly, that it works like other evolved systems. Even when a leader, committee, elected body, etc. proposes or enacts a legislative change (let's imprison murderers for life instead of execution) it is not a solution fished out of a box with A-Z possible choices written on pieces of paper. Those new ways happen because we contemplate that we did it that way, then this way, then the other and now we think this may be/is the best [most moral] option.

"Truism 3: Humans are moral because that is the nature of the species - moral is what humans do"

Nice summary. I've written sometime similar (just with a lot more detail) here.

And when it comes to 'core' or 'peripheral' morality ('necessary' and 'contingent'?), it's important that while our capacity for morality has evolved - the morals themselves are not evolved. Were they so, they would be hardwired and inflexible.

Instead we have evolved sentiments (empathy, outrage, disgust etc) that trigger moral judgement. These are more or less universal to all humans. What triggers them is contingent on culture, experience etc.

But we have also evolved self-interested sentiments, and these come into conflict with the moral sentiments regularly. Even moral sentiments fight with each other occasionally (trolley dilemmas anyone?). The result is the complex and diverse moral systems we see around the world.

Tim Dean, thanks for your concise summary. It seems like a useful explanation.

The link you supplied had some extra characters. Looks like this may be the one you intended:

http://www.abbrev.com.au/logos/2008/11/evolutionary-intuitive-ethics.ht…

Just skimming, I think I see some interesting stuff at your site.

Thanks, and cheers

"Morality is not based on commands from on high"

I was raised as a (rebellious) fundamentalist Christian, and one of the things that struck me at about 11 years of age, was the obvious absurdity (among many other absurdities) of the whole Christian moral story. God is omniscient and "knows the beginning from the end", and he "created" you knowing beforehand whether or not you would suffer horribly forever. The vast majority of humans will supposedly receive this fate. But even Jesus didn't suffer forever on the cross. How on earth is that moral? By His own standard, this "God" should be condemned to Hell along with those he created for the purpose of torturing forever, shrieking his lungs out for all eternity. It was not until years later that I grasped a deeper truth:

"Since the masses of the people are inconsistent, full of unruly desires, passionate and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death." -Polybius, Histories (~125 BCE)