How Moral Philosophy Broke Politics E-Book

Robert A. Johnson

• Herausgeber: Ockham Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 348

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

We live in a remarkable world: science and technology has shifted our understanding of what's possible and transformed our lives. Rain dances and sun worshipping have been replaced by quantum computers, speed-of-light rockets, and our ever-closer inching towards genuine artificial intelligence.

But somehow, more and more of us are feeling hopeless; we are still ruled by political systems that haven't hugely changed since they fell into place hundreds, arguably thousands, of years ago. The part of our society that makes decisions on everything from our health to our work is almost completely dysfunctional.

Politicians aren't held to account by truth, aren't striving for shared visions of human thriving, and are allowed to mix and mash their policies based upon sound bites and media furores rather than actually progressing humankind. All the while having to focus on short-term goals rather than sustainable ideas.

How Moral Philosophy Broke Politics argues that a rational, evidence-based framework for ethics can be developed, by drawing all of our moral opinions back to three basic principles that underlie all of our concerns. By doing this we can rationally judge and weigh new policies and decisions in a way which is accountable and, whilst still debatable, much easier to find consensus on.

If we were to accept this new framework then we would be much better off not just in politics, but in all those areas of life which politics affects. The world has changed unrecognisably in the last thousand years, whilst politics hasn't changed much at all. We need to start using reason to develop it into something useful.

Leseprobe

HOW MORAL PHILOSOPHY BROKE POLITICS

AND

HOW TO FIX IT

Robert A Johnson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published in 2022 by Ockham Publishing in the United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-83919-031-5

Cover design by Claire Wood

www.ockham-publishing.com

About the author

Robert A Johnson is a practical ethicist and philosopher of science, who graduated in Mental Philosophy from the University of Aberdeen. He specialises in the intersection of morality and rationality, whilst being a staunch advocate of science and evidence-based endeavours. His other interests and work lie primarily in animal ethics, where he has written numerous articles on animal welfare and animal rights, whilst standing up for non-human interests from a rational perspective.

www.robertjohnson.org.uk

Facebook @RationalMorality

Twitter @robjohnson86

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Marrying Morality with Reality

Chapter 2: A Rational Solution

Chapter 3: Defending a Rational Theory of Morality

Chapter 4: A Science of Morality isn't About Numbers

Chapter 5: Practical Ethics

Chapter 6: Animal Ethics

Chapter 7: Determinism and Free Will

Chapter 8: Politics

Chapter 9: Economics

Chapter 10: The Changing Face of Ethics and Society

Introduction

Politics seems to be in crisis, in every conceivable way. In a 2019 audit on the UK’s opinion on politics, the Hansard Society discovered:

“72% say the system of governing needs ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of improvement.”

“75% say the main political parties are so divided within themselves that they cannot serve the best interests of the country.”

“63% think Britain’s system of government is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.”

“50% say the main parties and politicians don’t care about people like them.”

“[When] asked whether the problem is the system or the people, the largest group (38%) say ‘both’.”1

This issue is not unique to Britain, either. According to Pew research, 82% of Americans do not think that the political system is working very well, while 61% say “significant changes” are needed in the fundamental “design and structure” of the US government to make it fit for the modern world.2

Across Europe the story is similar: people are worried about how fit for purpose big political institutions are, even within the institutions that people most respect. In every member of the EU, except for Spain, the majority of voters believe it is possible that the EU will fall apart in the next 10-20 years, despite two thirds of all those polled believing that the EU has been positive for their country.

These views are repeated time and again, throughout the individual EU countries within their own governments. Only around 7% of French people, for example, trust their political parties (and only 14% trust the national government)3. Indeed, as seeming anomalies, only Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden’s electorates have net positive views of their political parties within Europe; yet even the most impressive, in Germany, only garner between 58% and 68% approval in doing so. An anomaly, perhaps, but still not hugely impressive scoring, when between one third and two fifths of the population are unhappy.4

Opinions in Asia are harder to come across, in terms of accurate polling, both because of differences in political systems but also because of the limits of free speech and media in countries such as China and North Korea. According to the Democracy Index, Asia has a far higher proportion of authoritarian and flawed democracies5, so honest assessments of governments there are difficult. But countries such as Japan (9%), South Korea (12%), Taiwan (14%), Mongolia (17%), the Philippines and Thailand (both 35%) and Indonesia (42%) all share in having a majority of voters distrusting political parties.6 When asked about the question of trust in parliament itself, the answers are similar (though Indonesia just rises to 50%).

Where confidence in government remains over 50%, in Asia or elsewhere, we are still seeing drops. India polled at over 80% in 2007 but dropped to around 55% by 2012. In the same time period South Africa dropped from around 67% to just under 50%.7 So whilst 50% or more sounds successful compared to the UK or the US, the drops can be astounding.

Within Africa, again we have difficulties assessing these same questions for the same reason as it is difficult in Asia: lots of countries score low on the democracy index, so people could be killed for expressing distrust in government. But even then there is still evidence of distrust and unhappiness in politics: a cross-national comparative of 18 African countries appears to show that at least 7 hold populations where 50% or more distrust parliament.8

Finally, what about the sunny climates of Australia? Or the snowy wonderland of Canada? The Social Research Institute at Ipsos, in July 2018, showed Australians’ trust in politicians and democracy hit an all-time low: 31% and 40.6% respectively.9 Trust for political parties was at just 16%. In Canada, according to an Angus Reid Institute poll in 2019, only 28% of people appear to trust politicians.10

Whilst we feel this distrust and lack of hope in our governments and our politicians, these statistics show that it is not just us, but widespread throughout the world.

Lack of hope rather than revolution?

In history, when we see large numbers of people unhappy with their government, we tend to witness revolutions and coups rather than simple unhappiness and hopelessness. So why is it only in places such as Syria, where people are overthrowing authoritarian regimes, that we are seeing this?

The answer appears to be in a Pew Research global attitudes survey from 201711, in which it showed that 78% and 66% believe respectively that representative or direct democracies are a good way of governing their country. People don’t trust politics, and they don’t appear to think the system of government works either, but those of us who live in democracies tend to think it’s better than the alternatives. After all, we need our leaders to be accountable to the voters, or else government is opened up to all kinds of levels of human bias, military coups, corruption and personal gain.

As a result, we harbour distrust and lack hope, but our governments largely continue unchallenged as we believe this is the best there is.

Why does a previous failure within moral philosophy hold the key?

The UK is a good example of one of the many political systems globally that hasn’t massively changed in hundreds of years: with our odd traditions and quirks, where mostly everyone votes for one of two dogmatic parties who call each other ‘honourable gentlemen’ one day and ‘terrorist sympathiser’ the next, all the while our media takes sides or else believes centrism is neutrality.

Yet, whilst politics hasn’t changed much, the world has evolved rapidly around it. Far from a world in which we burn people at the stake for being witches, we can now fly people to the moon, fly automated robots to explore Mars, create huge skyscrapers, harvest data about people in their millions, create quantum computers and vaccinate against illnesses that previously killed millions. We can call friends and colleagues who are thousands of miles away, and speak to them via video chat in seconds. The world has changed drastically – some might say unimaginably – but our idea of what democratic politics involves hasn’t, which has left it incapable in the modern world.

The reason underpinning that stagnation is unbelievably simple yet largely unknown, and stems from a basic, yet logical, philosophical principle popularised by David Hume: the is-ought problem.

Put simply, the is-ought problem states that the way things are do not justify the way things should be. Simple, elegant, and almost certainly true. So, an ‘is’ (the way something ‘is’) shouldn’t create an ‘ought’ (the way something ‘ought’ to be).

But it means that whilst science and technology have massively revolutionised the world, and society as a whole – by increasing our objective knowledge of what ‘is’ – our politics remains entirely separate, and entirely subjective, as it is predicated on the world of ‘oughts’.

A good example of this is climate change. Scientists have proved, without any real doubt, that human-caused climate change exists. They’ve also developed knowledge of what causes it, what slows it down and even how we can reverse some of it. They’ve gone so far as to give us rough ideas, even, of what we need to do – reducing carbon emissions – and by at what point in order to avoid catastrophic temperature increases. Science has identified the problem, how to stop it and what we can do.

But because we all believe our moral opinions are subjective, unwittingly due to our belief in the is-ought problem, our politics are predicated in a way that reflects this. So politicians are provided the facts, and in most Western countries even agree with them, but develop political perspectives (or, in other words, moral opinions) to shield themselves from having to take the facts on board. Whilst some countries have perspectives that allow them to accept the facts and act. And furthermore, such as in the USA, some governments entirely doubt that science actually exists, and so presumably just pretend society hasn’t advanced due to science.

And climate change is just one area – politicians do this on everything. In most countries the split is between left and right, whereby the left tends to want to fund social and health care services, but distrust science in some shocking ways, and the right tends to want to allow capitalism to solve issues, and reduce the size of the state. Or, in countries like the UK, there is often also a centrist choice, which is a mishmash of the two. At no point can there be a rationalist party because we believe that morality is subjective and not rational, so how can we have a rationalist perspective in politics? With this in mind, the political see-saw, changing every four, eight or twelve years based on elections, from one dogma to the next, seems inevitable.

Inevitable, that is, unless we can find a way around the is-ought problem, and come up with a rational, justifiable way to judge moral opinions, and thus base politics and economics on reason. Something which makes sense, takes into account different opinions and – more to the point – doesn’t violate that principle that Hume rightly defined all those years ago.

Hope is possible

In the last 15 years, at least in the US and the UK, we have only heard the word ‘hope’ in politics when it is said in relation to particular political positions. Obama offered ‘hope’ to democrats, in that he could get elected, and Corbyn offered ‘hope’ to Labour, in that he wanted to oust the Tories. However, real hope isn’t found in delighting one group of people at the expense of another, but rather in uniting all behind a common cause – something new, inspiring and untested – and in allowing politics to evolve into the modern world, rather than be so far behind it.

Particularly in the UK, though undoubtedly around the world, society is split between left and right. Referendums go further and simply leave entire societies divided on wanting the country to be run based on different dogmas. This can’t be the best way, and I aim to show that it isn’t the best way. Just as science and reason has jumped society forwards over the last 200 years, the same methodology can do so for politics.

This, in political campaigns, is where the author, blogger, journalist, politician or activist would normally ask you to believe in the change they want to offer you. And that’s where this is different. You don’t have to believe it, because it’s based on reason. You can read and follow the logical progression. You can read it and agree with it, or you can read it and disagree with it, but it offers you reason as to why and how things could be different. Not just a different political persuasion, an entirely different system. One that works, is still accountable to the voters, but is modern, based in reason, philosophically justified and rationally progressive.

Structure

Politicians are often told to ‘finish with a flourish’, hence why you can find numerous examples of them getting a verbal beating during debates, sounding as clueless as you can imagine, yet still trying to reel off a series of pre-prepared soundbites as they sum up at the end. Like a robot who hasn’t quite grasped the situation they’re actually in. As if to prove that this isn’t the normal way of doing this, the end to this introduction is instead a guide in how this book works.

I’ve talked a lot above about why this idea is important. It’s not miraculous, it’s not historic, it’s just reason, and it’s necessary. So the first part of the book has to deal with the reason and philosophy itself. Chapters 1 – 4 are thus about discovering what the problems are, how to create a rational version of morality, what it entails and roughly how it would practically work. Chapters 5 – 7 give some basic guidance on how a rational, consensus-based moral code would affect some big areas (such as determinism and animal ethics) before we get to politics. Chapters 8 and 9 are where we really get to the crux of how we can develop a rational, effective and flourishing form of accountable government and economics, having solved the is-ought problem.

Chapter 1: Marrying Morality with Reality

How do we decide what’s right and wrong?

In 2012 a prominent politician (one of the most influential decision makers in Britain12) published a much-referenced article in a British newspaper entitled ‘We stand side by side with the Pope in fighting for faith’.13 In it, Baroness Warsi noted that Europe needs to be “more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity” and warns against “militant secularisation” which “demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes”.

One might be puzzled by such statements; after all Britain doesn’t seem overly “militant” in its secularism.14 There’s no one burning down churches or mosques in the name of atheism, for example, and those who most militantly advocate secularism seem to do so with no more aggression than to speak or write about it. Quite a long way from totalitarian regimes, one might argue. Indeed, since 2012 the world has seen an increase in religious extremism – cities as diverse as Paris, London, Ankara and Boston have suffered horrific attacks. It seems naive to note that many of the recent attacks were Islamic, and so to argue that Christianity is valuable whilst Islam is destructive. A quick glance through history would not allow Christianity off the hook; perhaps a modern look at American terrorism, and its many shootings related to Christian delusions, would also rebalance the scales. And that’s before we talk about the violent opposition we see towards abortion clinics.

People have naturally waned from Christianity over the years, undoubtedly, but militant secularism seems like an overstatement. This natural move towards secularisation is even understandable. There’s no evidence for untestable assertions like that of a God, and people seem to have naturally recognised that religion might just be wishful thinking. The late Christopher Hitchens perhaps summarised it best when he wrote that “I was educated by Sir Karl Popper to believe that a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one.”15 To posit assertions about creators of the universe is akin to positing assertions about surely mythical guardians of the galaxy – the evidence that supports Rocket Raccoon or He-Man being our real saviour is equal to that of God.

Warsi’s entire article seems a bit odd, that is until you read her justification for making such statements: “To create a more just society, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their creeds.”

Unwittingly, in an impassioned defence of religion, Warsi places her finger right on the pulse of what is arguably the biggest innate problem we face as a society and as a species. With the ever-increasing secularisation of society, stemming from an entirely reasonable rejection of religion, there also seems to be an air of moral confusion. It pours from the gap left by our previous moral rule bearer of religion, and seems to ask us to conclude that without God to set the rules, morality must be flexible and relative else non-existent.16

As such, society is facing a crisis of confusion when it comes to moral inclinations. On the one hand, we want to oppose murder, rape, and hundreds of other heinous acts of cruelty which are currently against the law, in the most fundamental manner. The media and our personal opinions are still outraged by these kinds of acts against innocent victims. On the other hand, we seem to be in a position of understanding that morality is largely relative and thus any newly thought moral or immoral acts we see people engaging in (ethical veganism as moral, or deforestation as immoral, for example) are a matter of subjective choice rather than of any sense right or wrong.17 We tend to take the position that what is illegal is wrong, but so long as something is legal it is acceptable, and thereby only to be taken as immoral in relation to personal tastes. Law reflects objective wrongs, whilst all others are subjective.

This creates a paradoxical tension, an infinite feedback loop that wasn’t there before, as law itself is primarily a reflection of our majority societal opinions. So if we want to oppose something that’s against the law then we need to be able justify why we oppose it – we make law, it doesn’t make itself – and similarly we need to leave the law open for new things which we discover to be immoral, in order to legally forbid them. But how can we do this if we want to claim that doing right or wrong is just a choice? How can we believe that morality is both objective and subjective: that some things are wrong, yet others of the same ferocity are a matter of choice? To understand the issue more completely, we need to explore the topics involved.

Law as a reflection of social opinion

There is no ‘all seeing eye’ who creates and maintains the juridical system. In modern democratic systems, laws are invented and amended by us. This simple observation quashes the idea that something being against the law makes it immoral, or that something being perfectly legal makes it acceptable. As history progresses, laws will change, and they thus reflect societal opinion of the time, rather than the ultimate answer on whether an act is morally right or wrong.

The most popular examples to demonstrate this point often focus on human slavery, or other things we now find morally abhorrent but which a few hundred years ago may have been perfectly legal. In fact, one may not be far wrong in claiming everything we now view as immoral would have been legal somewhere, at some point in history (race-based slavery, or the ownership of women are good examples). And, unsurprisingly, many things we now find acceptable or even moral (such as challenging scientific conclusions with new evidence or criticising religious doctrine by pointing to its inherent paradoxes or lack of evidence) would have been deemed morally unacceptable in some society at some point. Law is merely the reflection of the current societal attitudes and cannot be used as justification for moral stances, at least not any more than we can justify them by saying that we can physically commit said acts. This statement is summed up nicely by the phrase ‘the way things are does not justify the way they ought to be’. I could jump out of my second-floor window right now, and likely break a bone or two, but this does not imply that I should. The laws of physics and the laws of the land share in allowing us to commit ourselves to certain actions, but neither could be taken as sole moral justification for doing so.

The most likely explanation for the widespread belief in current moral norms, and the corresponding offering of moral guidance solely to law, was uncovered by Eidelman et al in a study called The Existence Bias.18 The authors demonstrated that “people treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodness…the status quo is seen as good, right…and desirable.” Studies such as this can explain why our problematic and irrational beliefs formed, but if the status quo does not conclusively tell us what is acceptable and what is wrong, then what does? The natural act is to begin applying scepticism to the subject of morality.

Does morality even exist?

Religious justification

The oldest and arguably still the most popular reason for invoking a notion of morality is down to religion. If God exists, and has rules he wants us to follow, then these are moral facts. We can thus judge the wrongness or acceptability of any action with reference to whether God approves or not.

Society increasingly rejects this form of moral theory though, with Western society (and indeed various states within Africa and Asia) now providing examples of almost entirely secular governments.19 We live in a world where science moves us forward and is valued based on the fact that it needs to demonstrate (or at least conclusively and rationally imply) that which it wants to confirm as true, rather than merely announcing it. So when such an excellent and developed system for finding truth exists, why would we use the justification of something which we have no evidence for at all? One by one we have discarded beliefs formed out of myth and tradition. The most notable remaining myth in society is religion and its gods.

There is no relevance in the 21st century to an argument that says 'A force/man which I have no evidence for, and which I believe in simply because of my own personal valuing of a mental occurrence called faith, should tell me what to do. My proof is that it is written in a book’. We should respect religious people as much as we can within society, but if we take issues like morality seriously we should not be subjecting it to ideas for which there is no evidence. God may be a more serious concept for people than the Flying Spaghetti Monster,20 but when we are discussing rationally they should share equal, non-existent pull. Similarly, opinions about ’forces’ or ‘energies’ which do not resemble classic ideas of God, but which claim to provide moral ideas (like karma, for instance) should be tested and subjected to the rigours of reason. A scientist would be rightly ignored, and perhaps even laughed out of conferences for stating that gravity is not a justifiable force, but that we’re attracted to the ground because strong, invisible, prehistoric jelly covers the earth’s surface. And yet religious and spiritual ideas, like the existence of God, or karma, hold the same level of evidence. Advancement is about proving past ideas wrong, or discarding them based on what we now know, in order to develop our knowledge base. But if we can’t discard something there’s zero evidence for, then there’s little point in trying to discard anything and the whole system suffers a major flaw.

The ‘science is also faith-based’ defence

It is true that not every piece of scientific knowledge we have can be conclusively supported; indeed theoretical science deals with ideas which we may as yet have no evidence to test with. However, every one of these ‘theories’ are required because we know there must be a theory. Take quantum mechanics, where several theories battle for describing several different concepts, which we have as yet been unable to conclusively test – at least not to a level of satisfactory and conclusive results (though, we appear to get closer every year). Even if we were never able to test them, we still know that there must be a theory that is correct, as we see activity that must work based on some law. Thus there is need to devise a theory that explains it. However, ideas like religion are not theories in the same manner. We have no need to imply that a theory of religion is needed, as the universe looks precisely as it should look were there to be no God, and were we to be individuals without a perfect ability to understand how the universe works.

If we could say the same about physics at the quantum level – that it looks precisely how it should look if there were no quantum theories – then quantum theory would be a mute subject and would not be considered science. We see subatomic particles appear to behave in ways we need explanation for, though, so we create theories of explanation to test. We have never come across an event with which we need to create a theory of God to explain – not when we have the ability to say ‘we don’t know how that happens yet’ – and furthermore, what kind of idea could have us so perplexed, that culturally invented icons and mythologies are a good explanation? It is best to remember that God was created in human minds; there is no evidence for it, and we’ve no need to invoke a theory of God in order to explain worldly events.

If you have to use God as an explanation for something then all kinds of other ideas are back on the table also: Thor, Allah, Superman, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Spider-Man, an omnipotent Barbie or an all-seeing alien cockroach are just a tiny fraction of an infinite number of explanations that work as well as a theory of God. It is only when you consider the sheer number of other potential theories which work just as well as God, in the situations where God could possibly be required as an explanation, that you realise just how poor an explanation it is. If there is something we can’t explain then a cultural myth is not likely to be the answer we are searching for. ‘Randomness’ or ‘chance’ is actually always going to be a better explanation than ‘God’, as it is always more likely that things happen entirely naturally but in a way we can’t fathom yet, than it is that they happen because an omnipotent and immaterial being created them.

As a result of ideas like this, and given the ever increasing secularisation of society over the years, we've begun to grow away from these irrational religious ideals of morality as a factual, God-given concept. Previously, many societies were largely ruled by the idea that a God or benevolent force had set the rules and we must follow them, else we might be punished in some way.21 Many Western court rooms, which dealt with such laws here on Earth, started proceedings with oaths on the Bible.22 However, as science has gotten more capable, so has our ability to doubt the existence of a Creator of any kind.

The rational debunking of this first aspect, religion, has left morality in the firing line. Religion is the easiest way to justify morality, as it claims to need no evidence. So if there is no God setting moral rules, how do such rules realistically exist in the first place? After all, scientists are hardly climbing mountains to uncover new moral facts underneath rocks, or implying the existence of moral truths in reactions after the collision of particles at a sub-atomic level. If God isn’t setting objective moral laws, how do they exist?

The spiritual 'get out clause'?

It’s true that many admit the fallibility of religious conceptions of morality in modern society; however, a good chunk of those people believe there is an irrational ‘get out clause’ in science, which means spiritual arguments are valid, and thereby we can base our morality around what would have been irrational ideas like ‘independent moral facts’.23 With a regular reference to quantum mechanics (an area of science that proves very popular in religious and spiritual discussions due to it being fundamentally misunderstood by many), the argument goes that some areas of science conclusively prove that the laws of physics are paradoxical. Hence we do not know science to be a reliable, consistent method, and spiritual ideas are perfectly valid.

Indeed quantum mechanics is an interesting modern form of scientific investigation, which baffled (and still baffles) many physicists. Danish physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Whilst the infamous Richard Feynman is thought to have elaborated further with, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.”24 It’s little wonder that people have leapt on the subject in order to provide evidence for the mysterious. It’s not at all difficult to find spiritual groups and influenced companies who mangle the ideas or terminology of quantum mechanics in order to make a profit or create a justification for nonsense.25

Quantum mechanics truly is a fascinating discipline, and not just because of its counter-intuitive results. The entire area demonstrates the real strengths of science: that whatever ideas are held to be correct should be constantly challenged if new evidence is uncovered. Science does not stick to rigid accounts of events which do not hold to be true, and instead develops as our understanding of the world develops. Quantum mechanics would not be studied under the umbrella of science at all if scientists were not held strictly to these high standards.

But what is either a dishonest claim or a simple misunderstanding is that areas like quantum mechanics mean spiritual ‘theories’ should be supported. Sure, science is a developing system which constantly evolves and so can often hold truths which it later proves to be wrong. But the truths it holds are not personally posited, nor the subject of desires, individual experiences or armchair philosophical inquiry. Every truth held in science (however wrong it may prove to be in the future) is held precisely because it makes sense with what we know of the world, and is the best account we have in relation to the evidence. A spiritual idea that says we can’t prove everything with science, or that science is wrong by virtue of its evolution, is engaging in methodological hyperbole. Science is built to take into account the changing nature of truth based on increasing levels of evidence, so it is telling that it has yet to embrace the supernatural as having positive truth values.

The spiritualist will also often point at the ‘big bang’ and question “what came before it?” The answer science predicts of nothingness is not a shot in the dark so much as the best supported answer we have. There is no evidence that there was anything before the big bang, but there is evidence to suggest there was a big bang. The spiritualist who claims nothingness cannot create something (however intuitive this is) shouldn’t then posit a spiritual idea, which there is no evidence for, as true due to this paradox about nothingness which they have identified.

The fact is that there is less evidence for any spiritual idea you can think of (whether it be of a supernatural force, or energy, the positions appear to be limitless) than there is for nothingness. The beauty of admitting there may have been nothing, but that science hasn’t yet developed to a space where we can begin to answer these questions fully (possibly because the problem is our limits of understanding ‘space-time’, rather than that the answer is paradoxical), is in the fact that we are being honest. The dishonesty of claiming it was a god, or a similarly irrational spiritual idea is clear to see. And as the example of the Flying Spaghetti Monster shows, it makes no sense to posit these equally unsupported spiritual ideas which claim to answer questions they couldn’t possibly know the solution to. These responses are the equivalent of making answers up. If you can’t figure out the answer to a mathematical problem, you don’t just make an answer up. This might be a good bet if you want to maximise your chances on an exam, but a developing body of knowledge cannot work when it’s filled with random or personal guesses.

The mathematics comparison

The comparison, though compelling at first glance, is still illegitimate upon inquiry. Rational concepts, like mathematics, which are not rooted directly in physical facts about the world, stem from our understanding and investigated evidence in it. For example, the sum 2+2=4 is essentially linguistic symbolism for seeing two things, and adding that same amount of things again, so as we can symbolise the resulting amount (4) in our communication rather than having to be experiencing it at the time. No matter how complex and abstract mathematics can get, and no matter how removed from the world it can seem, you can always reduce any mathematical problem back to these initial observations if you really put in the effort. There is a real-world relation that supports the notion of 2+2=4, and the symbolic substitution of language is referencing it, not referencing some intuitive and non-physical concept. Maths is a symbolic way to explain real-world events, in ever-increasing complexity, for the furtherance of human understanding, without the inconvenience of having to get a million things and add a million things to it, to show the resulting ‘two million’, for example. It works for every form of maths when it is related back. Maths is a shorthand for real objects and measurements.

What about the most theoretical numbers, like Pi? They are still remarkably easy to draw back to real-world evidence. For example, Pi is infinite in digits, and we’ll likely never know every last digit which it constitutes.26 However, this does not mean our belief in Pi is abstract like our belief in moral facts would be. Pi represents a very real concept, and we know it must exist from observations about Euclidean circles and the relation of their circumference to their diameter. It is a fact that Pi, as a concept, exists, and if you reduce it back to where it is being implied into existence, then you come back to those millions of measurements of circles made during the history of human civilisation. These measurements themselves are made with rulers, measured out and marked by numbers in a certain order; the order of the numbers being those same things which are symbolically referencing real-world objects (which we know exist from observing 2 stones + 2 stones, and referring to those 2 sets of 2 as 4, which in turn tells us the order of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). Like words creating sentences, we create mathematical arguments with symbols, but they reference real, physical facts if reduced back – like with any words. And hence the meaning of words and numbers are factual, being grounded in the materialist, scientific world.

So, mathematic intuitions do not exist out with the physical world; they are, however indirectly, informed by observations at every point, and can often be proved correct or incorrect. But how can the same thing be said of moral intuitions? These are intuitions implanted in us by a rich evolutionary history. They didn’t evolve when the concept of God was invented, and this is supported by the fact that we see altruistic behaviour in other species,27 and also by the existence of mirror neurons, which will be explained later on. And furthermore, given that everything we do is possible because of evolutionary development (morality is no different), then what makes moral facts a true concept, but not religious facts? Or colour facts? One could imply the factuality of any concept by reference to the fact we have intuitions about it, and if one doesn’t agree that there is a universal, independent fact of what is the ‘universally best colour’ then that casts serious doubt on the consistency of arguing that there are acts which violate universal facts about morality. People’s intuitions disagree on things as extremely immoral as murder, and hence we see people committing murder. So to pretend that intuitions tell us ‘murder is wrong’ is simply to push your own intuitions as correct rather than the murderer’s, on the arbitrary basis that they aren’t you, or perhaps that they aren’t in agreement with the majority of you. If you disagree about mathematics, one of you can most likely be proved right with linguistic argumentation which draws back to real-world truths, or by physical experiment, whereas the same cannot be said about disagreements on morality, in which we could only ever push our own opinions.

So although mathematics might involve intuitions at some point (there might be an intuition to measure things, or a seemingly innate yet probably learned intuition that 4 is bigger than 3), they are of a very different type to morality. We can prove or disprove our mathematical inclinations by reference to facts in the world, and when they are so abstract as to defy current methods of proof (or even defy all methods of proof forevermore) we can at least go back and provide reasons why we think it is the case (reducing back to physical facts and noting the reasons why there must be a mathematical law which the numbers are adhering to). And indeed if a theory doesn't match up with the facts we can prove about mathematics, then we can discard it and remain in search of a better answer which might be the true fact on the issue. We can even be unsure if it is truly knowable.

But what happens if we hold morality to these same rigours that other non-physical facts (like mathematical facts) have to be held to? We can’t even get started down this path, as morality isn’t derived from evidence and facts like mathematics is. We can say someone is being murdered (a fact), and that we feel bad about it (a fact), but how can we say that it is right to feel bad about it because there is a universal fact that ‘murder is wrong’, which this emotion is referring to? Such a physical fact doesn’t, and can’t, exist. Moreover, if classic morality passes this test of reason by virtue of it relating to intuition, then so can any belief. Realistically speaking, the fact I feel things doesn’t make it true that the feeling is correct, and similarly the fact I want something to be wrong doesn’t make it wrong. This is the argument that flaws religious thought as a rational matter, and it also does away with the idea that there are independent moral facts that we can search for.

It seems fair to say the mathematics comparison is simply inaccurate, and if moral facts do exist they certainly aren’t of the type that says intuition is referring to independent moral facts about the universe. We need a more relativist form of morality in order to marry it with reality, one which takes into account the fact that morality exists because evolution has developed it into us as a social tool, and which does not make claims about there being non-physical facts floating in the universe to which our intuitions can be right or wrong in relation to.

The evolution of morality

As touched upon in the last paragraph, morality is a socially evolved trait. In Richard Dawkins’ update on Darwin’s theory of evolution, The Selfish Gene,28 he notes that our bodies are vehicles for genes which, although selfish in wanting to reproduce (and hence have spawned complex structures of tissue and forms of intelligence over the millions of years that they have been evolving, in order to protect and enhance their ability to play the reproduction game), they have not evolved into structures that are selfish in the classic ‘survival of the fittest’ type, as many people erroneously think. Whilst selfishness may be a useful trait, so is altruism and the ability to cooperate, among others. The ‘fittest’ refers to those who utilise the best traits in the most successful way, not some tooth and claw idealism (although it might manifest this way in many species).

As a result, and as societies of these individuals (made up of selfish genes) have grown more complex, we see that all types of persons can thrive in society. But moreover, in a social society fully selfish individuals will not often be reproductively successful. Reproduction is about carrying genes on, and our natural desire to protect our own genes is in competition with our natural desires to protect our children and parents (who share on average 50% of our genes), our brothers and sisters (who also share around 50%), and perhaps more relevantly we have developed – at times long before we could be called humans – a social desire to protect others as a mutual matter of developing both a society and fulfilling social relationships in which ourselves, our young and our relatives are looked after with minimised risk of them being destroyed.