Knowing and Doing Good

Humans are a curious group.  We worry about some of the strangest things when compared to other creatures.  Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, noted that a simple question like, “What should we have for dinner?” is quite a curious question when you think about it.   A koala doesn’t have to preoccupy itself with what to eat—there is only one thing to eat anyway.  A koala just occupies its time getting the food.  But we humans have so many options.  Beyond food we also think about how build a well-ordered society, how to build specialized devices, how to work out bargains and agreements between each other.  It’s amazing that we can keep track of all these things.  Maybe to the animals it all seems superfluous.  More likely they never give our peculiarity any thought.  I’m particularly interested in our sense of morals.  Words like “should” and “ought” are especially curious.  We don’t just do things simply by instinct.  We think about what things we should do, that is, what things are morally right to do.

Now I wouldn’t say that animals don’t have any moral sense.  Having spent a lot of time with dogs I can tell that they have some sense of guilt or shame when they do something there aren’t supposed to.  Animals that run in herds, packs, or prides definitely have some kind of system going on there with certain boundaries.  But that’s another topic, interesting as it may be.  I’ll stick with humans.  Where does the idea of right or wrong come from?  Why do we even care?

The Ten Commandments in the Bible lay out some of the very basic laws of conduct.  The scriptures don’t have an explanation of the laws or reasons why they are important.  Perhaps many of them are quite obvious and don’t need any explanation: don’t murder, don’t steal, and don’t lie.  But if one may be so bold as to ask this question—why did God decide that these things were bad.  Or another question—is it bad because God says so, or does God say so because it’s bad?  Could God reverse these laws if he wished to?  Could he make murder, stealing and lying good?  If not, why not?  Might there be some source of morality that God uses to pronounce what is right or wrong?  I don’t think that God can make murder, stealing or lying right.  Rather, God declares what is right because it already is right.

So makes something right or wrong?  How can we know it?  This is the question of ethics.  The question is not as simple as it may sound.  In many situations the right choice may not be clear.  Even if you want to do the right thing you may not know what it is.  But what about the people who don’t want to do the right thing?  What about people who deliberately want to be bad?  There is even a more basic question.  Why be good at all?

I’d like to break it down into two basic questions:

1) What is good?

2) Why do good?

I have two different ways of responding to these questions—reason and choice.  The first, what is good, can be answered by the use of reason.  The second, why do good, is a choice.  The better reason is able to answer the first question the easier it is to make a choice for the second question.

Since the eighteenth century, the word “reason” seems to conjure ideas of rebellion against God or a kind of secular arrogance.  I won’t say that fear is entire baseless, but that should be no cause to eschew reason.  Reason is one of the greatest gifs God has given us.  Reason is not a replacement for revelation.  Revelation comes through reason and the mind.  In fact, reason is the way to distinguish true revelation from false revelation.  In 1831 when the Saints in Kirtland, Ohio were going all crazy with wild manifestations, the Lord said in a revelation: “Let us reason even as a man reasoneth one with another face to face.  Now, when a man reasoneth he is understood of man, because he reasoneth as a man; even so will I, the Lord, reason with you that you may understand” (Doctrine and Covenants 50:11-12).  By employing the faculties of reason to understand right from wrong we come to understand why God commands what is right or wrong.  It is not arrogance to seek the mind of God.  It is not to replace but to join God, to be united with him.

We give the concept of “good” an ultimacy that is quite unique and frankly unusual among other concepts.  Words are symbols that we use to describe things in the real world or to describe abstract concepts.  When I say “elephant” people know what I’m talking about.  Of course, I could be referring to and African elephant or an Indian elephant, but we accept that both animals are labeled by this word.  The word “beauty” is less definite.  What may be beautiful to one person may be uninteresting to another.  We don’t get very worked up over this discrepancy of opinion.  We just accept that people have different tastes.  We could define beauty as something that inspires admiration, desire, and etcetera.  We can basically decide for ourselves what is beautiful.  But we usually treat the word “good”, at least in the moral sense, much differently.  Good is something “out there”.  It’s not just “good for me” or “good in my opinion”.  Goodness, though an abstract concept is understood to have reality in some way.

This way of thinking goes back to Plato (428-348 BC).  The thing that is “out there” is called a form, nowadays called a Platonic form.  In its heyday it would have been applied to things like elephants and beauty, though we don’t think this way much anymore.  Most people today are nominalists—that is we don’t think of some perfect elephant form “out there” after which all elephants are imperfect shadows.  But in a way, when it comes to the concept of good there are vestiges of realism—goodness is a real thing.  In this sense I am not a realist (that sounds kind of weird to say).  I don’t believe that goodness actually exists as something “out there”.  Rather, “good” is a word, a concept we use to describe certain moral actions.

Now on the other extreme there is moral relativism.  Though I am a nominalist as regards to the concept of good I am not a moral relativist either.  I don’t think the question of whether it is right or wrong to stone your sister for dishonoring your family depends on what culture you come from.  The word “good” or “right”, that general moral concept must be defined.  But just because we define it doesn’t mean it is arbitrary.  Even the word “beauty” is not arbitrary.  You can’t call something “beautiful” if it causes you to feel complete revulsion and disgust—unless the word becomes completely meaningless.  The concept of “beauty” is by its very nature subjective because it refers to an effect on the individual.  But I believe that “good” can be defined in a way that is meaningful, while perhaps not completely specific.

I recently attended a debate at Arizona State University over the role of science in determining right from wrong.  Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape, argued that science can and should be used to answer moral questions of right and wrong.  Lawrence Krauss argued further that moral questions could not be answered without science.  Harris uses the word science rather broadly to include scientific thinking, which I just call reason.  Harris says that morality must relate to the well-being of conscious creatures.  The concept of well-being is not especially well defined but Harris notes that the concept of health is not well defined either—and that doesn’t stop us from trying to be healthy.  We seek after well-being in our morals much like we seek after health.  A non-conscious being like a rock has no sense of well-being and so there really isn’t anything wrong you can do to a rock.  But a person with sensations and emotions has a very keen sense of well-being as opposed to suffering.

I think we already understand “good” and “right” in this way.  It’s a little nebulous but I think people would know what is being described.  Causing people physical or emotional pain is not conducive to their well-being.  Science can, to a certain extent, evaluate these effects on the body or the brain.  Whether or not neuroscience can yet analyze these things in detail is not the issue.  They are certainly discoverable even if the ability is not yet there.  Yes, a person can say that decreasing a person’s well-being, causing pain, sorrow, suffering, etc is “good” but only at the expense of allowing the word any meaning at all. 

Cases such as torture, rape, murder and other violent acts seem very obvious.  But it should be noted that there are physical effects observable by scientific means to show that these acts harm the well-being of individuals.  But there are less obvious moral questions where we really get down into the science to make moral arguments.  For example, the debate over Global Warming really centers on the science.  Why is this?  The claim is that human activity is causing the global temperature in the troposphere to increase, especially in the Arctic and that this will cause environmental affects that will be harmful to humanity on a huge scale.  If the science and the projected effects are correct there is a huge negative effect on the well-being of millions or billions of people.  We all know this.  So if it is true then we feel we must do something about it (if possible).  But we are unsure about the science.  Here is an example of a case where science is being used to sort out a moral question of right and wrong.

The benefit of reason is that it doesn’t matter what culture you come from or what moral standards your family had growing up.  Through reason we can look at the world around us, make observations and think about them.  I’ll go back to the example of honor killings.  In some cultures, it is thought that killing a girl who has had sex with the wrong person is a morally good thing to do.  This is a cultural or religious belief.  But if we use our reason to look at this situation we can see the effects of this action on the well-being of everyone affected.  First, and most importantly, is the effect on the girl who is killed.  There is a huge decrease in well-being from life to death.  Death is the lowest possible state of well-being, i.e. not being at all.  Then of course, there is the suffering leading up to death, especially if it is from stoning.  This kind of pain is not an illusion, it is a scientifically verifiable phenomena.  What about the well-being of all around her?  What about her mother, sisters, friends?  There is likely emotional trauma here, a physical effect in the brain.  There is no moral relativism that can weasel out of this.  If we accept the definition of moral good in a way that correlates to the well-being of conscious creatures than we can make reasoned decisions about moral behavior irrespective of cultural biases.

Whether we use Harris’ definition or some other way to pin down the concept of “good”, reason can lead us to figure what is good.  But then there is the question following that—why be good at all?  This is the question behind the question, the real issue at the heart of ethics.  And it seems that reason cannot penetrate beyond this point.  But that shouldn’t discourage us from acting morally.

This is the Is-Ought problem expressed by eighteenth century philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). In his work, A Treatise of Human Nature he wrote: “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

Here, Hume called into question the possibility of deriving any ought-statements from is-statements.  This has become one of the basic questions of ethics.  How can you make the jump from facts to values?  How can you go from what is to what ought to be?  To use an example, it is demonstrable that if you shoot a bullet into a person’s head they will die or at least be severely injured.  Most people agree that death or severe injury is undesirable, so it follows that one should not shoot bullet into anyone’s head.  But this already presupposes that death and injury are undesirable.  This itself is another ought-statement.  Why are death and injury themselves undesirable?  Trying to answer this question seems fated to lead to an infinite regress of similar ought-statements.  Thus it seems that a moral conclusion cannot be derived by deduction from facts.

At the debate I attended, Patricia Churchland conceded Hume’s assertion that an ought cannot be derived from an is by deduction.  But then she asked, "But what about induction?"  We generally operate on inductive reasoning in our daily activities.  For example, why do we drink water?  We probably drink water because we know from experience that if we don’t we will get thirsty and after prolonged deprivation become dehydrated.  We don’t really need to justify this action by deduction because we have knowledge from experience.

We can use reason to understand that certain actions will lead to certain effects.  We can also determine through observation and reason what actions do and do not relate to the well-being of conscious creatures.  But how can we make the jump from seeing these things to deciding to do what is good?  We do exactly that—decide.  It is a choice.  It is similar to health.  Why eat healthy food?  Eating healthy food leads to better health.  Why should I want better health?  I just do.  I choose to be healthy.  Moral good is also a choice.  You can choose to be bad but must accept the consequences.

Reason reinforces the ability to make moral choices.  Most people already want to do good, they just need to determine what is good in order to do it.  Reason is a tool that they can use to figure these things out.  Some people may not want to do good.  They may in fact want to do evil.  But if these people also employ the use of reason it is more likely that they will be convinced to do good because in the process of reasoning they will see the effects of doing good.  But ultimately, it is a choice for every person.