Origins of Morality

Note to Reader

This post discusses views on morality and philosophy that some may find personally challenging. Its best to read as an open discussion and not as a challenge to the reader. Additionally, I'm not formally trained at all in any of these topics and the post was drafted approximately 2 years ago and represents my thinking at that time.

Sometimes I think about life and society in ways that make me really think about deep philosophical questions. One such topic is the origins of morality. A while back (~2 years or so) I had an intriguing discussion with a family member about the origins of morality. The seed for the discussion was the ongoing conflicts in the world and how different groups of people view what is "right" and what is "wrong".

So what was the take? Well, my family member posited that morality must be absolute for humanity to continue to exist. I take the contrary view that morality is subjective (i.e., relative) in all circumstances.

Before moving forward, I need to define what is meant by moral absolutism and moral relativism. You can of course get more details on the exact topic by going through the reference links, but let me first start with moral absolutism.

Moral Absolutism

The main guiding feature of moral absolutism is that certain actions are intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of context or consequences. This means there should be, at minimum, one principle that ought never be violated. An example is unjustified killing of a person. Here the "unjustified" refers to an absolute understanding of what constitutes an unjust cause.

My objection to this is there must be some seed of comprehension that leads to this "absolute understanding", but where does one derive from first principles the "absolute" nature of the morality? It is unclear that such a process is possible without some faith, credence, or belief in a "higher power" or a governing entity. This, however, leads to a dilemma because it is not provable (in terms of logic) that such a seed of truth exists. In my view, all we can assume is that groups of people over time develop ideas and concepts that tend to be beneficial in societies, and thus this acts as the seeds of truth to validate or confirm their self-derived view as "absolute". Religion is one such example of a seed of truth that is used to justify the "absolute" nature of morality. Many groups of humans have developed religions and they converge on some top-level principles that, in my view, happen because the net value in general benefits all the most.

I should add some additional discussion on a related view of "moral universalism", which argues that some moral principles apply universally to all individuals regardless of group or society. Unlike absolutism, universalism allows for some flexibility in application and does not necessarily claim that moral principles are completely context-independent. However, it maintains that there are objective moral truths that hold across all groups of people.

I believe my family member was taking the vantage point of moral absolutism, not universality. Both, in my opinion, are difficult to justify, but universality would require that one takes the sentiment that moral principles apply universally, though with some contextual flexibility. Absolutism, in contrast, simply requires some guiding or seeding principle that certain actions are intrinsically right or wrong. Thus one's axiom could be:

"I believe a higher power exists, and this divine entity mandates that unjust killing is wrong."

There are two problems here that I find:

1. What if you don't believe in this "higher-power" and moreover you can't prove with logic or observation the existence or divinity of such entity?
2. Assume you do believe; clearly defining "unjust" in the nuance of every possible circumstance is exceedingly difficult. We do not really know how unjust something is because it's always relative to the context of the situation and previous experiences.

Moral Relativism

In contrast, moral relativism posits that all of morality is subjective and is a matter of lived experiences and environment. If that's the case, how are morals seeded in an individual? How does society birth morality? I argue that this is simply a result of the local social dynamics between humans and their environments.

We clearly see this with the diversity of cultures and religions across the world. What some might view as morally bankrupt, others may view as the commandments of their deity or elders. There is no right or wrong in an absolute sense, but rather in a local, relative sense.

But then you may ask: "Then why is it that most human groups have converged towards the idea that murder¹ is fundamentally wrong?"

For which I would argue, there is a natural ranking of emerged morality within human social groups and murder seems to be one that continually occurs. Most likely due to the mutual benefit among members of those groups who maximize their self-objective function (i.e., survival) by agreeing on a set of conditions (i.e., morals/ethics) where one of them is don't murder each other. This usually is codified through religion. An analogy I think of from physics is we see this kind of behavior with, say, spin-glass systems; entropy would drive these systems to have a state of disordered spins (think of murdering each other which gives you advantage because of less competition for resources), but yet due to high energy penalty (i.e., you might get murdered too!) of such configuration, the spins self-arrange into ordered states (i.e., don't murder each other because although I(we) don't benefit as much in short term, I(we) do in the long term because we live longer and have progeny).

My Stance

So it's probably apparent from the tone above that I'm a staunch relativistic moralist. The reason being is, I don't see how you get to absolutism without a "higher-power"² or governing entity. However, if one goes with absolutism, the debate between an absolutist and a relativist is dead on arrival because the axiomatic difference, i.e., one says god exists, the other does not, and no proof can be given to the other side. As for arguing absolutism through governing physical laws, well it's possible one can argue these laws of morality exist, but again it's hard to see how you get there; your best bet is to try and argue it through physics and complexity theory, but my gosh that is a challenging burden of proof for one to steelman.

Thus I stand by my view that morality is subjective. In the grand scheme of things, if we are lucky, there might be by happenstance a convergence of morals that align well with many groups of people. With globalism this could be more likely; however, with the rise of nationalism it might appear that one group is immoral beyond belief, but in reality it's just a perspective that we're not attuned to. So while many will disagree about what is right and wrong with events going on around the world, it's because of moral relativism and nothing more. It is simply a matter of relative perspective.

Footnotes

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1. Note that murder is specific to intentional malice killing. So killing and murder are not synonyms. ↩

2. Here I use "higher power" broadly to refer to any governing entity, principle, or force that is above human comprehension or ability; not necessarily a deity or god. This could include divine entities, but also abstract principles, natural laws, or any authority that transcends individual human understanding or capability. ↩

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