Channeling Robert Ingersoll for Thanksgiving

by Gary Berg-Cross

Another Thanksgiving week and millions of us will be surrounded by family and old times feeling as peruse the bounty of turkey, stuffing with gravy and cranberries to the limit. Sure there are things to be thankful for and among the nonreligious moments of thanks, aka  “secular grace” grows in popularity among , humanists, agnostics, freethinkers and that group now called “nones.”

In  1897 Robert Ingersoll, ak a  “the Great Agnostic,” gave what he callled  “Thanksgiving Sermon.” Turning from the divine he instead asked who should be thanked.  He found real groups of people - scientists, artists, statesmen, mothers, fathers, poets in contrast to religious organizations and their operatives.. He found plenty of things to be thankful for starting with the long rise from savagery to civilization. 

"Looking back over the long and devious roads that lie between the barbarism of the past and the civilization of to-day, thinking of the centuries that rolled like waves between these distant shores, we can form some idea of what our fathers suffered — of the mistakes they made — some idea of their ignorance, their stupidity — and some idea of their sense, their goodness, their heroism.





It is a long road from the savage to the scientist — from a den to a mansion — from leaves to clothes — from a flickering rush to the arc-light — from a hammer of stone to the modern mill — a long distance from the pipe of Pan to the violin — to the orchestra — from a floating log to the steamship — from a sickle to a reaper — from a flail to a threshing machine — from a crooked stick to a plow — from a spinning wheel to a spinning jenny — from a hand loom to a Jacquard — a Jacquard that weaves fair forms and wondrous flowers beyond Arachne’s utmost dream — from a few hieroglyphics on the skins of beasts — on bricks of clay — to a printing press, to a library — a long distance from the messenger, traveling on foot, to the electric spark — from knives and tools of stone to those of steel — a long distance from sand to telescopes — from echo to the phonograph, the phonograph that buries in indented lines and dots the sounds of living speech, and then gives back to life the very words and voices of the dead — a long way from the trumpet to the telephone, the telephone that transports speech as swift as thought and drops the words, perfect as minted coins, in listening ears — a long way from a fallen tree to the suspension bridge — from the dried sinews of beasts to the cables of steel — from the oar to the propeller — from the sling to the rifle — from the catapult to the cannon — a long distance from revenge to law — from the club to the Legislature — from slavery to freedom — from appearance to fact — from fear to reason."


Here are some more of the ideas from the sermon as well as other of Ingersoll's notable quotes that may satisfy the secular senses at this time of the year.

















I thank the honest men and women who have expressed their sincere thoughts, who have been true to themselves and have preserved the veracity of their souls.


I thank the thinkers of Greece and Rome, Zeno and Epicurus, Cicero and Lucretius. I thank Bruno, the bravest, and Spinoza, the subtlest of men.


I thank Voltaire, whose thought lighted a flame in the brain of man, unlocked the doors of superstition’s cells and gave liberty to many millions of his fellow-men. Voltaire — a name that sheds light. Voltaire — a star that superstition’s darkness cannot quench.





I thank the great poets — the dramatists. I thank Homer and Aeschylus, and I thank Shakespeare above them all. I thank Burns for the heart-throbs he changed into songs, for his lyrics of flame. I thank Shelley for his Skylark, Keats for his Grecian Urn and Byron for his Prisoner of Chillon. I thank the great novelists. I thank the great sculptors. I thank the unknown man who moulded and chiseled the Venus de Milo. I thank the great painters. I thank Rembrandt and Corot. I thank all who have adorned, enriched and ennobled life — all who have created the great, the noble, the heroic and artistic ideals.


I thank the statesmen who have preserved the rights of man. I thank Paine whose genius sowed the seeds of independence in the hearts of ’76. I thank Jefferson whose mighty words for liberty have made the circuit of the globe. I thank the founders, the defenders, the saviors of the Republic. I thank Ericsson, the greatest mechanic of his century, for the monitor. I thank Lincoln for the Proclamation. I thank Grant for his victories and the vast host that fought for the right, — for the freedom of man. I thank them all — the living and the dead.


I thank the great scientists — those who have reached the foundation, the bed-rock — who have built upon facts — the great scientists, in whose presence theologians look silly and feel malicious...."

See also " Top Ten List of Thanksgiving Day Thoughts for Humanists and Nonbelievers"

E.O. Wilson and The New Enlightenment: A Call to Understanding

by Gary Berg-Cross

Biologist Edward O. Wilson’s new book is called ‘The Social Conquest of Earth.’  It’s largely provides a biological perspective on 3 grand philo-cultural questions (famous questions, inscribed by Paul Gauguin in his giant Tahitian painting of 1897):

    ·     “Where do we come from?

•      What are we?
•      Where are we going?” 

 Unlike traditional philosophy or religion Wilson wants to incrementally advance on these from scientific understanding and theory.  He speaks in terms of the relatively rare, eusocial nature of humans and how this might have develop as part of pre-adaption. (Eu-Social means the highest level of organization of animal sociality, and is defined by 3 characteristics: cooperative brood care (including brood care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups).
 While it takes a while to make a scientific case Wilson argues for this approach as better than what we are handed by religion approaches.  It’s of no real help at all  he argues aside from making us feel like we know:

          “mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity”

Contemporary philosophy  also comes up with a backhand irrelevant, having as Wilson argues

 “long ago abandoned the foundational questions about human existence.”

Well maybe and maybe at Harvard, but there are relevant, contemporary folks in philosophy I think.

I largely agree that the most likely approach to answering the 2 above foundational questions is to follow the scientific method as applied by the proper and emerging disciplines.   So we have Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology along with newer disciplines like neuroscience, epigenetics and evolutionary biology.  It’s a wonderful matrix of expanding understanding and especially nice when a master of one or two of these spends the time to synthesize a view understandable to non-experts.  Others in this senior synthesis of ideas worth reading and listening to are Jared Diamond whose last 3 or 4 books are enlightened warning that touches on our eroding environment in an historical context. They are wake up calls such as we have heard too from Richard Dawkins, of course, whose latest book An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist  is autobiographical.

Wilson draws on all these sources to explore the development of human society and some objective self-awareness needed to understand our collective selves. The path has bounced from ancient art, primitive religion, the founding of philosophy, and finally an integrated science perspective. As a Biologist Wilson sees a tipping point in these various views of human nature and such with Charles Darwin's 19^th century theory of evolution by natural selection. Together with other sciences this theory can be applied to understand human behavior and deal with some age old controversies.

Wilson outlines the broad human story and fills in some details to illustrate our new understanding.  Wilson does this, for example, spinning a more complex story than a simple genetic basis for shared individual- and group-level selection factors.  Both selfish and group favoring factors exist. As a result there is intense inter-group competition along with unstable group composition that results in:

 "an unavoidable and perpetual war ... between honor, virtue, and duty ... and           selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy..." 

A payoff is the later section of the book called “A New Enlightenment.” In a sequence of chapters he covers the topics of language (pre-adapted cognition evolved into the ability to create abstractions, and later to use arbitrary symbols for communication, thus leading to the evolution of language)., culture, morality ("The naturalistic understanding of morality does not lead to absolute precepts and sure judgments, but instead warns against basing them blindly on religious and ideological dogmas," p. 252)., religion and art. These provide a much different and nuanced view to approach an answer to the earlier question - “What are we?”,

His warning about the tribal aspects of religion are a meme that one hopes is widely heard. Organized religion, Wilson argues, is a simple expression of an evolution favored tribalism. So the "illogic" of religious belief is not a weakness in traditional human cultures, since it serves a social role of binding a group's members together to the exclusion of outsiders.  You may get to be part of a group by abandoning your differences and converting to the group’s core beliefs. In pre-scientific days creation- genesis stories & myths employed by the early Big religions are all explainable as cultural relics. Wilson does a back hand refutation of "phantasmagoric elements" as the result of hallucinogenic drugs.  This natural explanation, he argues, is a much more plausible as the basis for things like John's “visions” recorded in the Book of Revelation than the idea that god intervention actually happened. The same goes for nomads wandering in the desert.

“.. you can see this especially in the difficulty of harmonizing different religions. We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories. We have bizarre creation myths and each is characterized by assuring believers that theirs is the correct story, and that therefore they are superior in every sense to people who belong to other religions. This feeds into our tribalistic tendencies to form groups, occupy territories and react fiercely to any intrusion or threat to ourselves, our tribe and our special creation story. Such intense instincts could arise in evolution only by group selection—tribe competing against tribe. For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.”

Yes, it is a good explanation and a warning too.

For a good interview with Wilson on this see the Slate article.

For a video interview see BookTV’s Social Conquest of the Earth.

Through Orators Robert Green Ingersoll Speaks

By Gary Berg-Cross

Americans would be wiser and better informed if their reading and education included a good dose of the thoughts of 19^th century freethinker Robert Green Ingersoll. It's a point made before in my blog - Hearing the Voice of Freethinking Robert Ingersoll. As Susan Jacoby illustrates in her new book Robert Ingersoll: "The Great Agnostic and American Freethought" Ingersoll is one of the indispensable public figures.  He not only speaks bravely on the issues of the day, but helps protect the historical record and keeps a deeper, alternative version of history alive. In Ingersoll’s case that alternative history included Tom Paine’s forgotten secular history. In the case of issues from Ingersoll's time these included women's rights, immigration, humanistic literature and evolution.  It is worth noting that these retain their divisive potency in our times.  And it is wonderful to report that these and other topics were on display recently at the 3^rd Ingersoll Oratory Contest held in DC.

While rain forced a change of venue Sunday (to James Hoban's Restaurant ) we had a very nice event. Eleven contestants, traveling from as far as Florida, Indiana, and Delaware competed for 4 prizes.  Steve Lowe served nobly as Master of Ceremonies with assistance from Beth Kingsley, Brian Magee and Suzanne Perry. Links to photographs and videos will be posted on the Ingersoll Oratory Facebook site and now are available, but a random sample of quotes and images is below.

Carol Ardell kicked off the event by a reciting, from memory, Ingersoll’s Twentieth Anniversary Lotos Club Dinner speech(1890). It begins sagely:

YOU have talked so much of old age and gray hairs and thin locks, so much about the past, that I feel sad. Now, I want to destroy the impression that baldness is a sign of age. The very youngest people I ever saw were bald.

                                                    (These and other quotes from Secular Web)

It goes on:

I am perfectly satisfied that the highest possible philosophy is to enjoy today, not regretting yesterday, and not fearing tomorrow. So, let us suck this orange of life dry, so that when death does come, we can politely say to him, "You are welcome to the peelings. What little there was we have enjoyed."

Terrance Madden followed with a reading from “Thomas Paine (with his name left out the history of liberty cannot be written.)”

At the age of thirty-seven, Thomas Paine left England for

America, with the high hope of being instrumental in the

establishment of a free government. In his own country he could accomplish nothing. Those two vultures Church and State – were ready to tear in pieces and devour the heart of any one who might deny their divine right to enslave the world.

This was followed by Mike Schmidtmann who greeted fellow Humanists before reading “About the Bible” & “The Ten Commandments.” Donald Ardell also recited part of Ingersoll’s About the Holy Bible  which starts:

Somebody ought to tell the truth about the Bible. The preachers dare not, because they would be driven from their pulpits. Professors in colleges dare not, because they would lose their salaries. Politicians dare not. They would be defeated. Editors dare not. They would lose subscribers. Merchants dare not, because they might lose customers. Men of fashion dare not, fearing that they would lose caste. Even clerks  dare not, because they might be discharged. And so I thought I would do it myself."

Speaker selected topical talk including:

Jesse Christopherson, reciting “The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child”, 
"There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence."

Cody Smart heartfully recited, “What is Religion” -  Ingersoll's last public address,delivered before the American Free Religious association, Boston, June 2, 1899.

"For many centuries and by many peoples it was believed that

this God demanded sacrifices; that he was pleased when parents 

shedthe blood of their babes. Afterward it was supposed that he was

satisfied with the blood of oxen, lambs and doves, and that in

exchange for or on  account of these sacrifices, this God gave rain,

sunshine and harvest. It was also believed that if the sacrifices

were not made, this God sent pestilence, famine, flood and

earthquake."

and Amelia Vogel read some of Ingersoll's beliefs from, “Suicide and Sanity.”

"man is under no obligation to the imaginary gods; that all his 

obligations and duties are to be discharged and done in this world; 

that right and wrong do not depend on the will of an infinite Being, but on the consequences of actions, and that these consequences 

necessarily flow from the nature of things. I believe that the universe 

is natural."

As to what the 3 judges decided:

1.  Sarah Henry took first place reading from "Improved Man"
2.   Terence Madden took second place reading from Ingersoll's talk about Thomas Paine.
3. 
       
4. Third place was won by Tya M. Pope who chose from two related speeches: "A Christmas Sermon" and What I Want for Christmas".

           4.    Jenniffer Masterson took forth place reading a selection from Ingersoll's "Suffrage Address".

 All agreed that the performances were excellent and left us a bit more thoughtful and perhaps wiser:

‘I believe that all actions that tend to the well-being

of sentient beings are virtuous and moral. I believe that real

religion consists in doing good. I do not believe in phantoms. I

believe in the uniformity of nature; that matter will forever

attract matter in proportion to mass and distance;’….

          Partial answer to QUESTION: What is your belief about virtue, morality            and religion? In Suicide N Sanity

Images

Taken by Gary Berg-Cross at the Event.

Brian - a helper.

What do you think? Is there an Absolute Truth in Morality?

Some christians claim that Truth, as in morality, is an absolute that is revealed by their god.  I am sure that muslims think so, too, as would jewish adherents.  Ditto with Hindu, and perhaps others.

My position is that morality is relative and changing with the society, the geography and the time period.

One can look through history and see multiple examples of this.  Cultures and societies which made and enforced different rules of morality depending on their own unique circumstances of geography and how their own culture's history had developed in the past, both as a result of physical geography's natural density of resources, climate and of how their culture had interfaced with neighboring cultures.

Some cultures glorified battle and conflict.  Some institutionalized it to limit its harm within itself, others  glorified conflict with other cultures, making themselves a pirate or bandit group internationally.  Some allowed homosexuality (Greece, as a male oriented mentor system), others practically ignored it - Europe has excoriated it as harmful in the past, until that changed!

Which brings up the issue of change with time.  Europe used to consider capital punishment to be the norm, and quite useful.  Today, European society has decided that it is no longer right, that it is, in fact, wrong.

The bible itself has shown changes to christian morality.  The very first of the Ten Commandments very insistently demands that one "have no other gods before me".  Textual critics will tell you that this and other passages in that book indicate that the Hebrews used to have multiple gods.  This was a passage that heralded the change into a monotheistic culture, as this passage obviously tells the Hebrews to ignore all those other gods.  It doesn't tell them not to invent fake ones.  The Ten Commandments were seen as so important that this passage was never changed once we began to think of there being only one god.  So, the evidence is still there!

Same with other passages about slavery, for instance.  Once, hebrews could own slaves, and though other hebrews could be owned, they could only be held for seven years.  But outsiders could be held forever!  Just like the Commandment against "killing".  The real translation was a prohibition against murder, which meant only a member of the hebrew tribe.  Outsiders, again, were fair game.

Eventually, even among the jews, this changed and it is now agreed that it is meant as a general prohibition against unjustified killing.  Self defense is allowed, apparently.

So, what do you think?  Is there an absolute morality?

What about religious views?

In Saudi Arabia, you can get in serious trouble trying to convert a muslim to christianity.  But in Europe or the US, that's a perfectly acceptable action, desirable, even, if you are christian.

But which is right?  Is there an adjective, eternal moral that covers that action?  If so, which is it?  Which society is wrong?  They can't be both be right!

Or can they?



Robert Ahrens
The Cybernetic Atheist

Theism is an existence claim

By Mathew Goldstein

Janet Daley, writing for the British newspaper Telegraph, cites the "clash between President Obama and the Roman Catholic Church over the matter of whether Church institutions should be obliged by federal statute to provide free contraception. There can be no question of where the Constitution stands on this issue: if a case should ever come to the Supreme Court, it is the Church that will win." in her article "A good week for the smiting of the ungodly". Did Janet Daley miss the news that the Obama administration granted religiously affiliated Institutions an exemption that allows their employees to acquire the contraception coverage from the insurance companies without employer subsidies? Any lawsuits would now be against the contraception coverage subsidy required for institutions not affiliated with a religious institution. Legal precedent says that government can enforce a "neutral law of general applicability" that conflicts with some citizen's religious beliefs provided that the law can be shown to benefit the general welfare of citizens.

She then points out that there are questions whose answer is not based on evidence such as: Is it wrong to hurt people unnecessarily? She correctly points out that it is a mistake to require evidence for "those kinds of belief that do not rest on empirical evidence but which are still central to human experience." She then incorrectly concludes that theists are therefore correct to believe without evidence. That final therefore is incorrect because theism is not one of "those kinds of belief" that is exempted from the need for empirical evidence. Claims that theism has moral benefits are derivative, they come after acceptance of the existence claim. Therefore theism is not a moral axiom like the axiom that it is wrong to hurt people. Theism is an existence assertion like the claim that God the Holy Ghost exists as part of a Holy Trinity. So atheists are correct to look to evidence for evaluating the merit of theism.

She then calls it "a very odd kind of obtuseness in people who clearly see themselves as possessing superior intelligence. Do they really not understand what it is that it is so unsatisfactory about “scientific” accounts which reduce life to the ticking over of sensory apparatus?". This is also mistaken. First of all, atheists really do understand that both theists and atheists posses a full range of intelligence. The difference here is that atheists are applying their intelligence better on this question. Secondly, accurate explanations do not "reduce" that which is being explained. Life continues to be exactly the same phenomena, neither enhanced nor reduced, by the availability of previously unavailable explanations for how it originated and evolved. The obtuseness here is on the side of people like Janet Daley who have this very odd notion that an explanation should be rejected if it is subjectively deemed to change the value of that which is explained in a direction that some people decide is undesirable. We are obliged to follow the evidence wherever it takes us. Since we are not the creators of the universe we don't have carte blanche to redefine the explanations to match our preferences. When a preference conflicts with the evidence the proper way to resolve the conflict is to abandon the preference.

Janet Daley then asserts about Dawkins "Most to the point was the comment that he had failed to “understand the nature of faith”. It is that incomprehension which is perhaps the weakest element in the scientific rationalist atheist case." On the contrary, the irony is that it is the atheists who understand faith better than those who live by it. If the people of faith acknowledged how vacuous this reliance on faith is as a source of knowledge about what exists then they wouldn't be so proud to publicly assert their beliefs are faith-based as if that was a positive attribute or sufficient justification.
.
In defense of faith, Janet Daley returns again to questions of morality, asking: "Why do they, and we, feel such unbearable compassion even for those unknown to us – even, indeed, for hypothetical tortured children who have been invented for the purpose of argument? Why is sympathy, and revulsion at the pain of others, such a characteristic feature of our condition that it is actually called “humanity” and its lapses regarded as “inhuman”? Presumably, the Dawkins lobby would say it arose from the need to preserve our collective genes. What an impoverished view of life and its moral complexity, that is.". Having previously mischaracterized the correct insistence that evidence be provided to support the existence claims intrinsic to theism as " facile atheism", it is actually Janet Daley who is the one being facile here. The explanations for moral sensibility, and life, provided by biology are rich. They combine a deep simplicity with incredible complexity, have broad implications, and are anything but "impoverished". Most to the point, we are justified in believing that this "view of life", unlike theism, is true because the evidence tells us it is true. And that is what counts here, everything else is hot air.

Who Needs Morals, Anyway?

The most-often-asked question when debating morality with theists is, "but where do you get your morals?" Of course, if the theist says "I get my morality from the Vedas/Quran/Bible/Dianetics", that doesn't help, since it just raises the question that Matt Dillahunty posed at his debate at UMBC: let's say some being comes along and says, "I am a god. Here's a book with my moral system", then so what? How do we decide whether the system in the book is any good?

I thought I'd step back for a moment and ask, what if there were no morals?

Maybe there are no rules, or no one to give them. Maybe there are rules, but nobody knows them. Maybe the rules are known, but they're ignored, and there is no mechanism for enforcing them, not even a twinge of guilt. What then?

I don't think anyone has any trouble imagining this sort of world: theft and lying are rampant, people will kill each over a can of beans and not feel remorse. In fact, there wouldn't be any cans of beans, because the industry required to produce them couldn't exist without some kind of stable society and the ability to form long-term associations. A world where you're constantly looking over your shoulder, lest your own child stab you in the back.

Okay, so this vision may not be accurate. Maybe some combination of game theory and psychology can show that there might be amoral societies where life doesn't suck as much as what I described.

But I think it's safe to say that the vision of a world without morals that I described above, or the one that you imagined, represents our fear of what would happen without some sense of morality.

If you're with me so far, then presumably you'll agree that then morality is a way of avoiding certain Bad Things: living in fear, being killed or seeing your loved ones killed, and so on; and also of being able to get some Good Things: establishing trust, assuring some level of stability from day to day, and so forth.

We may not agree on anything. You might want to security cameras on every street corner, to make the risk of being robbed as small as possible, and I might feel that the feeling of not being watched all the time is worth the occasional mugging. But if we can agree in broad outline that certain outcomes (like being killed) are bad, others (like knowing where our next meal is coming from) are good, then morality reduces to an engineering problem.

That is, it's simply(!) a matter of figuring out what kind of world we want to live in, what rules will allow us to get along, and how to get there.

Obviously, this is a thorny problem. But nobody said this was going to be easy. Well, nobody who wasn't trying to sell you something. As is the case with every engineering project ever, not only are there conflicting requirements, but they change over time. Everyone wants to put their two cents in, and everyone thinks their personal pet cause is the most important one of all. Finding a solution requires political and diplomatic negotiation, and convincing people to give up something in order to strike a deal. It's enough to make your head spin.

But this strikes me as a huge problem, not an intractable one. We can tract this sucker. We have enough history behind us, and enough data collection methods, that we can see what works and what doesn't, which sorts of societies are worth living in and which aren't, and try to figure out how to get where we want.

Saying "I get my morals from an old book" is a lazy cop-out. It's the response of someone who doesn't want to look at the problem, let alone try to solve some part of it. And if you're not going to help, the least you can do is stay out of the way of those who are trying to fix things.

Subjective/Objective

Here's something that occurred to me recently. It's nearly-trivial, but I found it interesting.

The reason a subjective statement, like "Beethoven's ninth is his best symphony" is subjective is that a) it refers mental state, and b) that mental state can vary from person to person.

But it can be turned into an objective statement by simply saying whose mind it refers to: "Smith thinks that Beethoven's ninth symphony is his best". This is an objective statement, and its truth or falsehood can be ascertained simply by asking Smith. In a few years, maybe we'll even have scanners that can read the answer in Smith's brain.

Or instead of specifying a particular subject to whom the statement applies, we can specify a class of people, e.g., "Most music critics think that Beethoven's ninth is his best", or "Nobody likes being humiliated" (vs. "humiliation is bad").

One consequence of this is that it helps put morality on a reality-based footing: a question like "should the US intervene in the Ivory Coast?" seems hopelessly subjective, but we can at least ask questions like, "how many Americans think the US should intervene?" and "how many Ivorians want the US to intervene?". These questions, and their answers, are called polls, and they're used all the time. (I'm not saying that complex moral questions should be decided by polling. But polls can provide an objective underpinning to moral arguments. For instance, if 98% of Ivorians hated Americans and wanted the US to stay the hell away, that would undercut arguments like "we should move in: we'll be greeted as liberators".)

Secular morality is often attacked for being too subjective. I hope the above helps correct that perception. The whole point of having a system of morality is, presumably, to improve the universe in some way, and hopefully allow us to be happier and get along with each other in the process. What "better" means, above, is subjective, but at the very least we can see what people think, and what most of us can agree on.

Studying the Development of Morality

Doug and Don have laid out their positions on whether morality is objective or subjective. There are a lot of these dichotomous views of things. Is knowledge innate or learned is one of these and perhaps a bit related to what Doug and Don where debating. Sometimes it is useful to take a different stance and see what makes sense. I wanted to add a few words on the morality issue coming from a different direction which sort of comes down in the middle of this. The perspective is ask where does (human) morality come from? Or put another way - how does it develop in us”. We might ask if we can objectively study its development. This understanding might tell us a bit about how we want to describe it based on the ingredients that make it possible.
There are some recent studies on both human infants and non-human animals that lead people to describe "morality" as predisposed and constrained (if not exactly innate). Paul Bloom (Yale) for example has studied the "Moral Life" of young (1 year old) babies who haven't had much time to be instructed in the cultures ideas so this gets at the origin of human ideas of right and wrong. In a NY Times article last year he described how researchers "watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html - see the 5 minute video on how infants are studied). The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head. "

There were lots more studies with lots more babies but the key point of the article was to summarize the growing body of evidence which suggests that:

"humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be."



So I would make a suggestion that we can objectify some understanding of where human morality comes from, but I want to add that it develops and is influenced by personal experience and culture. In this view there is a degree of morality that is constrained by the species evolution.

I also want to add that this comparative topic of where ours and other species "morality" comes from is also under study. Professor Frans de Waal, a primate behaviorist at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, has a good book on the evolutionary basis of morality and there are several others. De Waal summarizes his belief on the origin of human morality this way:

"Human morality was not formed from scratch, but grew out of our primate psychology. Primate psychology has ancient roots, and I agree that other animals show many of the same tendencies and have an intense sociality."

Here is an example about ownership, which it seems, has old primate roots. In decades of observations at the Yerkes colony, de Waal has noted that if the chimpanzees are given shareable food (like a big watermelon) they will race to get their hands on it. This, he believes, is because whichever chimpanzee gets the watermelon first, even the lowliest cur, will be respected as the owner of that morsel by the most dominant chimpanzee. De Waal concludes this seeing that even if mates beg and whine for some of it, no one will take the food away.

You can read more in his recent book "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society" or see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal

Below is a bit of the argument. I want to stress that this is an organized argument with hypotheses and some data, which researchers are working on. So this isn’t established but an empirical form of some version of this may become a well supported “theory”.

The basic idea is that some substrate for morals tendencies are "inherited” in mammal brains through evolution. These were selected to provide a "social glue" that allowed some mammals (often aggressive and competitive animals, E.g. wolves) to live together in groups. Group life provided advantages so the social glue factors gets selected. During play, dominant wolves for example, will "handicap" themselves by engaging in roll reversal with lower ranking wolves, showing submission and allowing them to bite, provided it is not too hard.

One formulation is that what we might loosely call "moral codes" are species specific, (wolves social cohesion may have been selected in different ways than chimps for example) making them difficult to compare with each other or with humans. In this view there are moral nuances of particular cultures or group swill that make them different from another.

Various ethologists have compiled evidence from around the world that shows how different species of animals appear to develop a sense of thing we generally label as “ fairness”. Behaviorally they display empathy and help other animals that are in distress. One example people may have seen in film are displays of elephants concern for an injured elephant. But experience and culture plays a part in how intelligent species express their concerns. They are organized in different ways that we human describe as moral codes...a cultural phenomena.

So you can see some of the resulting perspective on morality expressed by Frans de Waal,:

"I don't believe animals are moral in the sense we humans are – with well developed and reasoned sense of right and wrong – rather that human morality incorporates a set of psychological tendencies and capacities such as empathy, reciprocity, a desire for co-operation and harmony that are older than our species."

Does view this make morality objective or subjective? Well to me the answer is not exactly either, but the question of how morality develops in individuals and its phylogenetic origins is a question we can study objectively.

The Possibility of an Objective Morality

My friend, Doug Drake, in his competing post titled Of Morality, Objective and Subjective quotes many authorities to demonstrate his thesis that humans are emotional animals. Given the persuasive nature of his arguments I now live in despair. I now know that all of objective truths of physics and chemistry are but illusions constructed by the silly scientists who fail to acknowledge the subjective quality of their explorations. I now know that we can know nothing of the nature and distances of the stars we see in the sky. My passionate fondness for the postulates and axioms of geometry mean that it is impossible for me to break free of my subjective prison and objectively prove any postulates of geometry. Alas, all claims to an objective understanding of anything has been demolished by Doug's impressive analytical onslaught.

Obviously, Doug in his essay did not say that his analysis proved that the domains of physics, chemistry, astronomy and geometry held no objective truths. However, The above paragraph is making a serious point. His failure was that he made no attempt whatsoever to look at truths which are universally acknowledged to be objective and ask if similar techniques could also be applied to moral reasoning.

I do not want the reader to take my argument as a flip dismissal of the point that Doug legitimately makes. I would assert that all valid dismissals of false claims of are in fact made within the context of our emotional nature as animals. We have learned about critical thinking and the scientific method. Actions and thinking that conform to what works by those criterion become associated with a positive emotional valance. As we learn about how to identify logical errors and unscientific thinking those become associated with some degree of negative emotional feeling. Thus we become rational beings while still being emotional animals.

I not only accept my emotional side, I celebrate it. We should feel free to bring the same joy of battle over the big questions of life as the marauding Vikings of centuries past. We should be free to use our tools of critical inquiry to wage war on any weak and unsound ideas that invade our social spaces. If a given understanding about our world survives the onslaught of our various tools of inquiry, it is much more likely that we can have confidence in it.

I would go even farther and suggest that much of the failure of secular humanists, atheists, agnostics and other secularists to have a political impact is due to the unfashionable style of discourse assumed by scientists as they make presentations or carefully hone the wording of their published papers. Our respect for the scientific method seems to convey an equal respect for the passive, third person, voice that is typically used in their communications. If we constrain ourselves to this type of stylistic “objectivity” then we will not resonate with the wider public. That said we obviously need to use the techniques of science to insure that our passions do not define or distort the findings of an objective inquiry.

Doug differs with Sam Harris when Harris asserts, “…most right-thinking, well-educated, and well-intentioned people – certainly most scientists and public intellectuals, and I would guess, most journalists – have been convinced that something in the last 200 years of intellectual progress has made it impossible to actually speak about “moral truth.” Not because human experience is so difficult to study or the brain too complex, but because there is thought to be no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever right or wrong about questions of good and evil. My aim is to undermine this assumption, which is now the received opinion in science and philosophy.”

Unfortunately Sam Harris is correct and Doug is wrong on this point. This is most certainly the received opinion in science and philosophy. Doug did not include in his list of references to support his case G. E. Moore and his 1903 book Principia Ethica. In it Moore coined the phrase 'naturalistic fallacy' to describe any attempts to equate the term good with any natural property. As with all the other opinions cited by Doug G. E. Moore never proved any general principle. All he did was show that specific historical attempts to equate good with a naturalistic property such as pleasure did not work. He conceded in his book that it was entirely possible for someone to find a valid equivalence between good and some naturalistic property at some point in the future.

Doug did correctly include David Hume in his list of philosophers supporting his position. However, he left out the major argument made by Hume. Hume was famous for his conceptualization of the is-ought problem as a category error. Hume asserts that an ought or an ought not were entirely different from statements about what is. According to Wikipedia this complete severing of "is" from "ought" has been given the graphic designation of Hume's Guillotine.

This principle was communicated in a single, somewhat off the cuff paragraph, by Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature. This was quite extraordinary because to me there is a simple and obvious mechanism to link the is and the ought. From a prior essay of mine, “Presume that we know that if we perform action A then we will have a consequence B. If we wish to achieve B then we can say that we "ought" to perform action A. The ought derives from the goal.” If there is to be some reason to select a given description of facts as an "ought" there must be something such as the seeking of a goal to provide the reason for that selection. I note that Wikipedia now has something very similar in its entry on the Is-Ought Problem.

All life has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. We have the goal to live and prosper in our ecosystem. The Darwinian principles of this process has honed every aspect of our existence including the goal seeking behavior implicit in all subjective understandings of moral value. Note that there is a substantial difference between the goals of an individual and the moral principles that are agreed to by a society of people working together. Any such wider agreement within groups of people on principle is still honed by the millions of years of evolutionary history. It is not arrived at by a purely subjective process even if subjectivity appears to be a central element of all of our moral responses.

Doug decries Sam Harris's use of emotion in his presentations when that is irrelevant to the central question that must be addressed. We know that many fields of science and mathematics have well defined definitions for objects of inquiry and the methods to determine the truth or falsehood of given propositions concerning those objects. The question then becomes whether or not Sam Harris and others who wish to develop a scientific analysis of the moral landscape can present the formal structure and tools so that others can replicate their findings. If findings can be replicated in a way that is analogous to fields we accept as objective then we have a new domain of objective inquiry.

I consider Sam Harris to be a bit of an amateur at the game of moral reasoning. He has done a remarkable job in publicizing the possibility of an objective morality. I commend him for that. However, Doug was able to read him without getting the salient principle that morality is an attempt to codify the goal seeking behavior implicit in human life itself. Doug cannot suggest that goal seeking is not objectively real. Doug suggests that Harris is saying “Anyone who doesn’t agree with him is consigned to outer darkness, without appeal, certainly a good way to deflect criticism if rather dubious as a means of approaching the truth.” However, Doug is the one that is doing this. He assumes without any justification that if he can point to any subjective experience in the cognition of those who claim moral principles that then he has demonstrated that absence of an objective reality. He does not realize that physics and chemistry are not real sciences by this criterion. All findings of objective fact rests on underlying emotions which value the tools which make those findings.

Yes human life does have goals. “Human flourishing” is a decent first attempt at a general term to capture that general goal. And yes those who somehow reject that goal seeking behavior as an objective fact worthy of systematization in a science of morality fully deserve the outer darkness they earn by that rejection. Such people are denying both the physical reality of the built in goal seeking behavior or the possibility to understand and systematize it into a system of morality. There is a very real link between the is and the ought.

Let's take the next step and demonstrate the required nature of any investigation of morality based on “human flourishing.” I think a needed first step is to recognize the limits of our cognitive tools to understand complex systems. I have gratitude to Gary for his excellent post titled Towards Understanding Rationality and its Limits Regarding Complex Issues. He presents cogent reasons why we need to limit the scale of the questions we ask to those where empirical evidence is either available or possible. That does not mean that we cannot ask complex questions but to be objective we need to reconstruct and document the extremely complex networks of causation that are needed to fully understand complex social systems.

Is it moral to use vaccinations against influenza viruses? We have empirical data to answer this as a moral question using the human flourishing criterion. Humans are not flourishing when they are sick and they certainly are not flourishing when they die. We have the objective evidence to demonstrate that vaccinations reduce instances of both sickness and death.

Doug had the legitimate concern that “(Secular delusions) in their most pathological manifestations, they can spawn secular religions such as “scientific” Communism, whose adherents believed just as fondly as Sam Harris that it would lead to a future of unprecedented 'human flourishing.'” We can dismiss this as a possibility if we respect the limits of our tools to assess objective facts as suggested in Gary's essay.

That does not mean that we cannot or should not push back when right-wing or left-wing ideologues propound positions that are not supported by the facts. It does mean we should do it with a bit of humility and the knowledge that we will not be able to unambiguously prove the morality of complex actions that should be taken.

I have a more robust treatment of a formal approach to ethics in my essay A Theory of Ethical Value published on-line here: http://secularwisdom.blogspot.com/2005/11/theory-of-ethical-value.html

I do want to express my gratitude to Doug Drake for his very literate and informed essay starting this discussion.  My hope is that our discussion of the issues will bring a deeper understanding to our community.