Download Jacques Rousseau – Practical Morality

Humanism and happiness
A SCIENCE OF MORALITY?
What is it to be happy?
“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal
value with the arts and sciences of music and
poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more
pleasure, it is more valuable than either”
-
J. Bentham: The Rationale of Reward (1830)
 We can’t know what brings us most pleasure
unless we’ve tried many options
 Immediate argument for education, and
against repression of any sort
Marginal satisfactions
 In terms of marginal utility, a unit of pushpin
could be equal to a unit of poetry for me
 But perhaps there are goods that are
preferable for everyone?
 And if so, maximising those goods seems a
rational strategy for the species as a whole, or
perhaps for sentient creatures generally.
What causes unhappiness (at least,
according to religion)?
 Lack of belonging/community?
 But perhaps we’d be as happy in sports/book clubs without
the (circular) argument that metaphysical purpose is
required.
 Meaning/purpose?
 We all have these – again, why do we need a metaphysical
one?
 Wonder/mystery?
 Isn’t it obviously the case that there’s more of this for
secularists?
 Eternal life?
 Not much different from being offered a 400% return after
a month’s investment...
What actually causes unhappiness?
 Unfulfilled desires? But who says you would have
those desires, other things being equal?
 The source of most conflicts reduce to resource
scarcity (or asymmetries in allocation)
 What is morality for?
 So much of morality may simply be welfare
economics
 In that we have less reason to treat each other
badly – and therefore cause unhappiness – if we
all have what we need
Morality: Traditional
definitions
 For ordinary persons: a simple accident of
geography
 But one that is privileged – dogma and
prejudice which has been allowed to become
axiomatic
 Even non-religious morality has this character
– heuristics and scripts are attractive
Why the holy handbook fails
 Provides easy answers to issues that
can/should be compelling
 And moral confusion where there should be
none – euthanasia, gay marriage, abortion
 More importantly, it cripples our moral
sensibilities
 And forces us to buy into pushpin, not poetry
Without god
@Periyon Without God I have nothing else to live for...
@SupaBaddizI Without God I am nothin, have nothin, && will never be able to
accomplish nothin!
@Rieno2 Without God, I wouldn't know how it feels to LIVE...
@BellaKerber Without God, life has no meaning ..
@taylormatthews Without God there can be no knowledge, good, evil, hope or joy.
@DJFoRenZic_JA: Without god, there is no life!
@iK00lKiDd Without God there is no me...
 Do Stockholm syndrome and abusive spouses come to mind?
 These viewpoints demonstrate a vested interest in human misery
and suffering
 Or drug pushers – make you dependent, and then sell you the only
solution. Is the life of an addict to be admired or emulated?
There are consequences
 The “greener” people are, the more likely
they are to lie and cheat
 Feeling virtuous does not correlate with
actual virtue
 Confirmation bias: we over-value the good
we do and undervalue the harm
 “Our own moral priorities always, uniquely,
earn double points” - Baggini
By contrast
 Secular folk understand that morality is
complex
 And are perhaps less complacent about
difficult choices – and perhaps in the end
more virtuous as a result of more careful
deliberation
 But how do we know what to do, without the
holy handbook?
The State of Nature
 Consider analogy to sport, and our incentive
for following rules
 What does this say in terms of moral rules
being “true”?
 We escape the state of nature by agreeing to
not harm each other
 And morality consists of the rules that make
social living possible at all
Morality - a matter of prudence?
 Social insurance
 The utility of believing in objectivity: mutual
reinforcement, weakening of opposition
 So yes, simple (or not, really) social engineering
 Even secularists have perhaps confused the
usefulness of the narrative of objectivity with
actual objectivity
 And rejecting objectivity does not entail relativism
Morality from rationality
 Defining morality as necessarily objective is an
illegitimate way to privilege religion
 We don’t have any non-pragmatic reasons to
be good – and we don’t need any
 We don’t want morality to be grounded in
empathy or altruism – why?
 Suffering still gives us reasons to act, via gametheory, evolutionary psychology, etc. –
enlightened self-interest
Deriving “ought” from “is”
 Sam Harris and the welfare of sentient creatures
 Controversy regarding “scientific morality”
 But what else can it be? Why is morality held to
different standards than other forms of knowledge?
 We can reach justified conclusions – for now – and
change our minds later (in light of new evidence)
 So, moral reasons not different from other reasons
 They are grounded in rationality, and motivate us
like other reasons do.
Culture and morality
Moral virtue & happiness also a educational and
political achievement
 Education contributes to respect and selfrespect (or can – cf. the 4th “R”)
 Secure & stable political system necessary for
appropriate incentives
 Takes broader culture to even identify some
lapses of virtue
Religion as addiction
 The reflective vs. automatic systems
 Ignoring contradictions
 Confirmation biases
 Sunk-cost fallacies
 In short, a case study of heuristics gone wrong
 And a recipe for unhappiness, in that conflicts
between belief and the world are inevitable –
more so in multicultural environments
Broader issues
 Has the species outgrown religion? Will we ever
do so?
 Can we handle the responsibility of rational
choice?
 Can a theory be cogent, yet not recommended?
Compare to equality of persons
 The usefulness of heuristics in moral behaviour
 Should humanism aspire to becoming a grand
narrative, to tap into these heuristics?
Where are we now?
 Trying to fit foundationalism into a globalised world
 With no way of knowing right from wrong except
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mere habits – and our habits come from another
world, and another time
No moral theory perfectly satisfactory
A long-term project
Knowing, without knowing that you know – all
science is hypothetical, why not morality?
Moral ideas are always up for debate – but we apply
inconsistent standards to happiness and welfare
questions
Applying critical standards, as with all “knowledge”
There is a danger
 Even though atheists are divorcing less than
Christians (Non-Denominational 34%;
Mainline Protestants 25%; Atheists 21%)
 They are having fewer kids
 Unfortunately, education correlates with
both atheism and fewer kids (on the whole,
perhaps not unfortunate) ....
 But proportionally, we’re shrinking
Which means that
 Liberal secularism and high-birth rates are (indirectly)
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contributing to the spread of fundamentalism
The assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a
lessening of religious belief may be wrong – and we have to
work hard
Even the secular role-model, Europe, not safe - most
population growth via immigrants, who show higher
fertility rate and are also religious
And tend to become more so when confronted by Western
secularism
Religion takes on an ethnic, protective character, and
becomes more fundamentalist.
So work harder. Not at having kids (please) – but at
conversion/persuasion
Happiness?
 If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes
to motivate you, you probably have a very easy
job – the kind that robots will be doing soon.
 And while some myths (maybe, that your friends
actually like you) can contribute to flourishing,
those that don’t need to be rooted out
 Science can help us here – not necessarily to
derive moral principles, but as a policeman to
detect the ones that make no sense, or do not
conduce to human flourishing.