Morality, Relativism, and Supervenience

I find it hard to believe that the point I am about to make has not been made before, so I state that it must have been. If so, this may serve as a welcome repetition, for the point is a good one. It is that moral supervenience and moral relativism are inconsistent with each other. The former says that moral predications supervene on the natural, descriptive, or factual properties of the act in question: if one, then necessarily the other. Nothing needs to be added to get to the moral predication; in no possible world does the entailment fail to hold. But moral relativism claims that the underlying non-moral properties are not sufficient for the moral ones, since the latter are dependent on the attitudes of a given individual or group of individuals. The former properties are intrinsic to the act or state of affairs, but the latter are relational: the moral property is relative to a community, and so can vary from community to community depending on the attitudes held. But that is inconsistent with the assertion that the moral supervenes on the intrinsic non-moral properties of the act. For moral opinions and other attitudes are not supervenient on those underlying non-moral properties (e.g., the fact that someone is in pain). Opinions and facts are not necessarily correlated, but values and facts are. Being good is supervenient on non-value facts, but being thought to be good is not—that depends on the properties of the appraiser. Thus, moral relativism is inconsistent with moral supervenience.

So what–can’t we just give up supervenience? The inconsistency is certainly a pause-giving result, but is abandoning supervenience available to a relativist otherwise demolished? But how could it be that two situations are exactly alike in all non-moral respects and yet differ morally? Don’t right and wrong, good and bad, depend on the facts of the case? If not, they are worthless categories; we may as well just talk only about attitudes and get it over with. Then we have the anodyne doctrine that people can have different attitudes towards the same thing, perhaps because of ignorance; we don’t have the startling claim that one and the same thing can be both good and bad (at the same time). We don’t have to say that pain can be bad here but not bad elsewhere, despite being exactly the same in both places (except location). Supervenience certainly has common sense on its side; relativism is mind-numbingly revisionary—and for what? But we can say more: we can cite the factual properties of a situation in order to justify a moral evaluation, but that won’t work under relativism. We can say that the existence of pain justifies the assertion that it’s wrong to stick a pin in someone, but the relativist can’t say that—he has to say that the justification for not sticking a pin in someone is that other people are not of the opinion that pain is bad. That is what the moral evaluation depends upon not the fact of pain itself. The normal practice of moral evaluation collapses once supervenience is denied, because it is really neither here nor there what people think about pain; what matters is pain itself. So, supervenience can’t be rationally abandoned. But it is inconsistent with moral relativism. Therefore, moral relativism must be rejected. Values are not the same as opinions about them.[1]

[1] This is really an absolute truism, hardly worth enunciating, but relativism has a remarkable hold over the callow mind, so truisms must be treated as contentious doctrines to be ingeniously argued for. Why morality should excite such skepticism I don’t know. No one thinks that we should give up supervenience about the mind because people have minds only relative to a community! No one thinks that being in pain depends on whether people think you are in pain. That would be insane. Yet they think that pain’s being bad depends on people thinking it’s bad. Pain is bad no matter what some idiot happens to think.

Law and Morality

In a morally ideal society, there are no laws. Everyone does what they should out of the goodness of their heart not fear of legal consequences. The whole apparatus of law does not exist—police, courts, lawyers, prisons, etc. It sounds wonderful: no one steals, murders, rapes, cheats on their taxes, speeds, or litters. Laws exist only because people are morally imperfect, evil, sinful, egotistical, greedy, depraved. They are not good in themselves, merely useful in curbing immoral behavior. We would do without them if we could. It is not a source of pride to be “a nation of laws” because this is an admission that the nation is not “a nation of moral right”; a better nation would be to be a “nation of nice”. Laws are an indication of moral weakness or wildness.

But it is worse than that. Consider a society wholly ruled by laws: everything that is morally wrong is covered by a law, perhaps a stringent one. In such a society no one does anything right because it is right but because it is illegal to do anything else. Or rather: morally right action is overdetermined motivationally, with prudence predominating. Suppose children are raised to respect the law but not instructed in morality; any innate morality they possess withers away in such an environment. Suppose that moral thoughts and emotions scarcely exist in this society, replaced by a fear of laws. Wouldn’t that be a horrible travesty of a human being? Wouldn’t it be spiritual death? What would art be like, or friendship, or love. Right and wrong would be swallowed up by legal and illegal. Human life would be one long battle with the law—evading it, being punished by it. Moral consciousness (conscience) would be replaced by legal calculation. It would be a kind of hell. A nation of laws and only laws is a dystopia of the soul. It would be a complete distortion or deformation of the soul, a destruction of human nature. If offered the prospect of such a society, we would do well to decline the offer. We might even prefer a lawless society if morality could thrive in it—morality being the thing that keeps that society on the rails.

I think we can enunciate the following (natural) law: the more a society is governed by laws, the less it is governed by morality. The more morality exists, the less need is there of laws. This is not a paradox but a logical consequence. Laws are proxies for moral precepts, so they lead to the attenuation of such precepts, even to the point of extinction. Morality goes extinct when laws take over its territory. Legal prudence takes over moral altruism. Conscience gives way to self-interest. Doing wrong is no longer an occasion for guilt and shame but merely for self-centered regret (“I wish I been more cunning”). And what happens to doing good? It degenerates into legality: the action wasn’t legally punishable. That is a pretty thin emotion and hardly a reason for (proper) pride. Laws eat away at the moral core of a person. They give us less scope for doing good and dilute our reasons for avoiding doing bad. Laws tend to destroy the moral center of human life by converting altruism into egoism. They are really bad if overly indulged in. And the point is not merely theoretical: casual inspection reveals that this process is going on right now. People in a certain country (I won’t name it) have lost their grip on morality and ceded it to the law. They have little ability to talk intelligently about morality, still less to engage privately in genuine moral reasoning. They are apt to be moral relativists or nihilists or simply oblivious to moral discourse. Fortunately, we still have a society in which law has not yet penetrated to every corner of human life, particularly personal life, but we are well on the way to fixing that problem. Imagine if marriage or friendship or parenting were subject to laws at every level—for example, marital rows are now illegal, friendships are legally enforced, and parents are forbidden by law from teaching their children right from wrong (the law has taken that over that function). As things are, morality no longer governs our business dealings or property rights or divorce proceedings; imagine a world in which the law also controls everything else that happens between people. Imagine if promise-breaking were punishable by six months in jail, if you are caught (otherwise you have nothing to worry about). The essential point is that morality and the law have quite different psychologies: morality is about our duties to others, altruism, not inflicting suffering, basic human decency—whereas the law is about self-interest, connivance, not getting caught, taking advantage of other people where it is legally permissible. You can evade the law, but you can’t evade morality—conscience will always “catch” you. We don’t need more laws (and less morality); we need fewer laws (and more morality). We need to educate our children in moral right and wrong not legal prohibitions. The ideal is not the universal rule of law but lawless moral integrity. We need to get rid of the law (defund it). Of course, I don’t mean go cold turkey on the law; I mean we should re-direct our efforts to make the law unnecessary. The law is at best a necessary evil not a desirable end in itself. It is not civilization but the decline of civilization, properly understood. Just think of the freedom you would feel if there were no law to fear, with all its errors and rigidity and injustice. It is a terrible burden on the human spirit not a welcome helping hand. No police, no judges, no prisons–just morally refined individuals doing what they know is right. Is that our future or just more legal overreach? We want a world without doctors because there is no illness; likewise, we want a world without lawyers because there is no wrongdoing (or just a tiny bit here and there). We want the unpaid hand of morality not the overpaid agent of the law. As it is, we have a faltering grasp of morality combined with a bloated system of law. The latter should be phased out as the former regains its authority (think of human society before laws but tightly controlled by morality). The problem is that as law gains more of a stranglehold on our psychology and behavior, the less power morality possesses, to the point where it becomes in danger of extinction. Morality and law are more rivals than collaborators, as things stand. The law is about what you can get away with; morality is about what must be done. I thus advocate moral maximalism and legal minimalism as a guiding principle.

A bonus is that we get a smaller state under the recommended social system. A large part of the power of the state derives from its legal apparatus: its legislature, its courts, its prisons. This is expensive to run and potentially oppressive. It enables the government to exercise power over its citizens, especially when allied with the military. A society with a minimal (or nonexistent) legal system is cheaper and less oppressive; morality costs nothing. The stronger morality is in a society, the less need there is for law, and hence the less need for a powerful government. Virtue undermines big government, or would if it were sufficiently prevalent (imagine if everyone observed speed limits from moral conviction). The difficulty is that most people tend to obey the law not their own conscience (if they have one), and that means they do what they think they can get away with not what they recognize as right. The optimistic view is that the law is just a passing phase in human history, destined to be replaced by a more developed moral sense; the pessimistic view is that the law will eventually strangle morality and leave something truly terrible in its place (law-abiding moral idiots).[1]

[1] It might be said that crime is part of human nature and therefore ineradicable. I think this is not true: morality is innate and therefore part of human nature, as has been persuasively argued; but crime is acquired and hence localized. Moral motivation is a genetic given, but criminal motivation is a result of upbringing (though there may be predisposing genetic factors). Crime can in principle be eliminated without revision of human nature, but morality is here to stay, short of genetic alteration. Laws are imposed, morality is original. This does not, however, prevent law from replacing morality psychologically, since genetic programs can be suppressed. There is nothing natural or inevitable about crime. Laws are not a necessary condition of good behavior.

No Reply

I recently wrote to the University of Miami philosophy department asking when, if ever, the ban on my visiting the campus would be lifted (I live five minutes from there). I also asked what the reason for the ban was. I got no reply. Then I wrote offering to make a donation to the department in honor of Ed Erwin, to be awarded to a deserving graduate student. I got no reply. I wonder what would happen if I offered to give the department a million dollars no questions asked.

Can Dogs Talk?

I watched a very interesting documentary last night on PBS about whether dogs can talk. Of course, they do talk—they talk dog. There could be an interesting documentary on whether humans can talk…dog language. They might to a limited degree, but not as well as dogs. But the documentary was about whether dogs can talk human, i.e., whether they are bilingual. Everyone knows that dogs understand many human words (from 80 to 200 in some cases), but the question is whether they can communicate with humans using human words (they do pretty well with dog words). A new technology allows them to press buttons with their paws that make word sounds—food, walk, etc. They have gotten quite good at this, it turns out. I wish to make two points about this research. The first is that the reason dogs don’t talk to us in English (say) is that they lack the vocal apparatus—not the cerebral apparatus. They just don’t have the right kind of larynx and mouth; their brains are up to the task. Their understanding of English is not hooked into their motor systems in such a way as to produce speech; it isn’t a cognitive problem. A human with a damaged vocal tract might have the cognitive capacity to speak but not the anatomy, and dogs are like that. The reason they don’t speak is not like the reason trees don’t speak—that they are linguistically incompetent. In principle, we could fit them with a vocal prosthesis that enables them to convert their linguistic understanding into spoken words. Then you could literally talk to your dog and it would reply in kind: you, “What do you want?”; dog, “Walk”. This would completely change our relationship to dogs and it is within the bounds of possibility. It might even change our whole attitude to animals (see Dr Dolittle). They have the mental power in them already. This is quite predictable from the fact that they understand human speech (to some degree).

The second point is less technology-fictiony but more interesting. It doesn’t follow from the fact that dogs don’t or can’t talk out loud that they can’t talk at all. Not once did the documentary mention the possibility, which might be empirically verified, that dogs could be talking to themselves. I am morally certain that they do. They hear the English words in their minds, much as we do. For their minds follow their ears, which are exceptionally acute. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that when they want to go for a walk, they hear the word “walk” in their head, perhaps quite insistently; they just can’t say it. Or they can’t say it outwardly; inwardly, they might be saying it quite clearly. They could be having inner speech, with meaning, in English—along the lines of “Boy, could I use a walk right now!” or in dog English “Walk-walk!”. They can talk in English internally using auditory imagery. In fact, they have been doing this for centuries and in many human languages—they are veritable (silent) chatterboxes. Perhaps some scientist could do some brain scans to test for this. Do children go through a similar phase before they begin outer vocalization? It is a wonderful thought that your dog, your best friend, is hearing your voice inwardly all the time, perhaps conversing with you in some primitive way—who knows what the dog imagination is capable of? We know that dogs dream and the odds are that they experience auditory vocal imagery: maybe they converse with their owners while dreaming. So, actually, they are far more linguistically active than the researchers believe; it just takes place in their inner world. Do they dream of asking their owners to take them for a walk—in English? That is not disproven by their inability to vocalize outwardly like a human. Can dogs talk? Yes, they do it all the time and have been for thousands of years, but secretly. Perhaps this is why they pick up the trick with the buttons quite quickly—because it simply externalizes what has been going on internally their whole life.[1]

[1] Of course, no philosopher was consulted in this documentary. But, you know, we can actually talk. Chomsky makes the point that most human linguistic activity takes place in silent speech not in overt behavior.