Morality versus Niceness: Winner Take All

[Purple Knight]

Question for Debate: Does morality provide any advantage whatsoever over niceness?

This is something I'm posting in the Christianity rather than ethics section because I've thought quite a lot about it and decided that the religiosos are right and any useful morality absolutely has to come from God (or some other moral authority) no bones about it.

Morality here meaning the sort of codified rules that tell you that you can't (for example) murder people. Without absolute morality you absolutely can kill people, though of course you can still choose not to. Morality for the purposes of this discussion means you absolutely may not (for example) kill people under any circumstances it's wrong no room for discussion and that's that. Yes, you need an absolute moral authority for non-relative morality. That's inescapable.

And people are generally fallible so choosing a person gets you nowhere and choosing a government gets you Nazis. Besides, you may say this person is an absolute moral authority and someone else may simply disagree, so yes, it pretty much has to be God, and God pretty much has to have been imbued with that moral authority as a function of the universe. Also unfortunately if there is no such being, absolute morality doesn't exist, because nobody has that authority and people thus may always disagree.

But let's abandon morality for a moment and talk about niceness. In other words, doing what the other person wants you to and not what he doesn't, just to be nice to him. This has problems because perhaps he wants something unreasonable like both your kidneys, but this is already knowable and absolute because this other fellow exists and if you're trying to be nice to him, and he lies, he's only hurting himself.

Morality can solve the problem of people being unreasonable, but only because morality is a codified system that tells you when you may permissibly hurt someone and that's the bloody problem with it! If you may never hurt anyone, you're stuck doing what they want and that's a problem if they're unreasonable, but this problem isn't really a problem unless there's a moral rule that tells you that you have to be nice. And there obviously isn't.

So doesn't niceness have the same problem as relative morality in that it's useless? No. Niceness is still useful because two people may agree to be nice to one another, and as long as they abide by that agreement, and are both reasonable, they both benefit. I would argue they benefit more than if they're both pouring over a holy book trying to find permissible ways to hurt one another, or delighting in making complicated agreements and castigating the other person when they break them.

Remember, agreements aren't morally binding in this system; they are a tool to facilitate niceness and should be discarded when they cease to serve that purpose. The person who breaks the agreement is not automatically wrong and the person who kept it is not automatically righteous. If we're trying to be nice it's about avoiding hurting the other person. If someone always cries that they're hurt by you no matter what you do, well, you can't avoid hurting them, but again, nobody said you had to. Niceness isn't like morality: It's not mandatory. It's just something we do to make our lives easier.

But what about the problem of knowing what you may, and may not do? Shouldn't that be consistent? Well, if there's no morality there's nothing stopping a government from making good laws that benefit the society and there's nothing stopping people from following them. In other words, without morality, laws - if they help a society rather than hurt it - are by default legitimate. You don't have to follow them but if you break them, it's not wrong when you get punished. And we can even be nice by punishing people if the actions we're punishing are hurting others. In other words, it may not be nice to the murderer, but it's nice to future potential victims to lock up or even put the murderer to death.

So TL;DR: I don't see what advantage morality has that niceness can't go above and beyond. Niceness doesn't define people into wrongness on technicalities. Niceness doesn't castigate people who are trying. And if niceness fails, well then, don't be nice. It's a tool, so stop using it when it doesn't work.

[theophile]

If so, what makes you think there's no anchor point (what I called before a fundamental value) informing God's goals? I can logically tie back anything that's been said so far, like the destruction of the Amalekites (to free life from their oppression), or the choosing of Israel (to be a light to the other nations), or the giving of the law (to guide Israel in a time of moral immaturity).

I'm sure there is an anchor point but it's going to be difficult to live my life by, "Does this help or hurt the Jews?" because 1) I actually don't know and 2) this is far-off from my natural center as I'm not a Jew. It's about as natural as living my life by, "Does this action help or hurt the Queen of England's pet goldfish?" Well I don't know for one, and the goldfish doesn't figure in my life at all for two.

I agree it's not easy. An implicit point all along is that it's hard (e.g., my suggestion that rules aren't good enough, and that not even God is perfect and needs our help). I also think you're too focused on understanding individual impacts. While the Queen's goldfish is life, and as such to be valued as much as any other, the chances of your action impacting it are negligible, so let it go.

It might help me decide the big stuff and I have no problem (for example) voting more power and freedom to the ADL, and for harsher anti-discrimination laws that specifically target whites as discriminators because whites are the modern-day Amalekites who always seem to be at odds with the Jews and hurting or slandering them somehow. I might even have an understanding that a law aiming to limit white reproduction is good.

But this is all big stuff and has an effect on one thing I do every two years. This tells me next to nothing about how I ought to behave toward everyone in the everyday, which not only doesn't require the big picture, but constant zooming out may bring important things out of focus. Similarly, zooming in may be bad, and I may decide that by the general affirmation of life, and applying that to the everyday, the person I'm helping is an Amalekite who goes on to hurt Jews and now I've actually contradicted the main focus of morality. Or maybe not helping him because he's an Amalekite and trying to hurt him instead causes me to be alienated from a large group of others who now (though they wouldn't have otherwise) perceive the Amalekite as the good guy.

Do you see how the focus being on something that is irreducibly two or three steps away from me is tough and likely to backfire? God is even one more step away than the Jews are. I can't live my life trying to please somebody I don't know, whether it's God or somebody's goldfish on another continent.

Affirming life doesn't mean you live to please someone else, or that you don't take risks. It means you want every kind of life, yours included, to have place in the world, to be and to grow. (It means taking what you could call a beautiful risk.)

So I agree that it helps with the big stuff -- it makes things pretty clear in my mind at least. For example, we should be enflamed by our destruction of the environment. Or by the subjugation, discrimination, and suffering of various peoples. There should be no 'analysis paralysis' on any of this and wondering what our action means for dear old Elizabeth's goldfish. (By which I mean, not that we shouldn't be deliberate, but that we can't let deliberation or perceived risk stop meaningful action.)

But it helps with the small stuff too. It's as trivial as helping an old lady cross the street. Or yes, helping the Amalekite because they needed help in that moment, even if the next moment we need to stop them, or perhaps even harm them, because they refuse to turn from their hateful ways.

And again, to be clear, it's not just about others. Affirming life means live your life as well. It means express yourself. Be / become what you were meant to be and take joy in it all. Like the lilies of the field. (Another gross affront, methinks, is our disconnection from meaningful, life-affirming work, and from doing what we love. Which is unfortunate, because there's no reason we can't marry the two, such that what we love to do benefits the world around us, like seeking knowledge, developing new technologies, creating artful expressions, teaching, healing, serving...)

It suggests something not far off from your turn to human institutions of government. i.e., an assembly with shared values constantly working out and implementing the path to salvation for all.

I do think a society must have shared values and that pluralism doesn't work. I think pluralism - the diversity of values - is bad, and requires cognitive dissonance. Instead of everyone being encouraged to fight for what they believe is right, everyone must simply ignore what is wrong and pretend that this is okay.

I tend to agree. While I respect difference and believe that difference is essential to making it all work (what I'm trying to paint here after-all is a world of differences in harmony), I think we all need to be rooted in the same grounding force / motive (whatever you want to call it), and then let differences abound from there.

For me that grounding, harmonizing force is the affirmation of life. (More popularly known as the Word of God )

[theophile]

If the law against killing is rigid, then why would God kill? Or is God immoral or above morality in your view?

The law seems, to me, to be for people and not God. Either that, or it somehow isn't technically murder when God does it.

I'm actually not one of the people who objects to this. If such a being exists, so powerful that it could author morality, so powerful that because it has every power, it has the power to commit any action and have it count as moral, we can't possibly object to anything it does on a moral basis.

However, the question then becomes, how useful is morality?

I agree that the law is for people (basically training wheels in my view). So my previous response definitely breaks down on that front and only applies if we define morality by the law (per the OP).

This changes though when we think bigger, and go to the source of the law, which is the Word / Spirit. That is our true aim (and the aim of the law), and marks union with God once achieved. Like Jesus: His will is God's. His words and actions are God's. So there is a common morality once we traverse that gap -- one that God is just as beholden to as us, even if God is the author of it.

I get your further analysis though as much as I take no joy in it. It's a caricature God. A popular but biblically unsound view prone to massive criticisms. There are some obvious counterpoints, too, where biblical heroes do object to God and gain ground. Abraham (when he argues for Sodom). Job (when he argues against his treatment). Moses (when he argues for Israel after the golden calf).

It all speaks to some deeper principle / value that they all share and are trying to live by. God included.

The question really is, whether the Spirit is to be found by going back to religious texts and regard the present 'Law' and everything that follows on as 'training - wheels' or whether the Holy Books were the training wheels of human morality - codes (aside from pretending to be the authorities for it) and the 'Law' of ethics and moral philosophy is putting an engine into it, so to speak, and the 'Spirit' is not to be found by going back to old religions, but realising the essentials of morality and what it actually is.

Cue: "But that's human morality which is imperfect! God's morality is perfect!" Thing is that wishful thinking and ideals aren't always what we get in nature. And maybe what we have to do is try to make the best of the hand that evolution dished out to us rather than insist that we can have a perfect flush if only we believe in it hard enough.

The bible and any other religious trappings are all conditional language, stories, rituals, what have you. There's nothing necessary about any of it, or that can't be had, found, or conveyed through other means.

But that doesn't mean it is wrong.

No, it doesn't. For that, you have to use different arguments. It's why I look at history and internal text. I only appeal to other sources of inspiration and ethics to counter any special claim for the Bible on that particular basis.

'Right and wrong' are relative -- there are too many kinds of 'truth'. So near impossible to say whether the bible is absolutely right or wrong. We can only say it is right or wrong from a certain perspective. Like that of science or history, to your point. (And using those two examples, it is definitely wrong for the most part!)

But morally? A much tougher nut to crack, and it's still going to come down to personal conviction methinks.

For the sake of argument, we can't say that the bible (or anyone else for that matter) is wrong for the core values they hold. That is personal conviction and what I've been arguing gives us a moral sensibility in the first place. (Our moral compass is relative to that chosen north.) We can only say it is wrong in what it says follows from those values, i.e., if its words or actions are not consistent. Or we can try to sell what we think is a superior value-system...

Hence I would further suggest that most of the time spent arguing against the bible is misplaced. It's either spent attacking specific words or actions conveyed by the bible, without tying back to the core values giving rise to them (i.e., context-less arguments that presuppose other value-systems). Or it's attacking the God-concept, as if that's what gives weight to what the bible says...

This I think is key: What gives weight to God (to God's words / the bible) is not God but the values God holds. So that is where all argument should be focused, IMO, should we want to dislodge the bible from our conscience.

This is the problem.Yes right and wrong is relative, and obviously that is because it is human. The underlying principle (what benefits humans plus the principle of reciprocity = empathy is also human, and if it isn't easy to work out what we should do let alone how to do it, it solves nothing by tuning to a particular religion or Holy Book or god -concept to make it work let alone make it work perfectly. We have a better chance of being able to push on to a better level of human ethics by understanding the principle, not using a mythological explanation, never mind trying to mytholygize morality and ethics in order to try to prop up religion.

Yes, but. Story can be more powerful than reason. Especially when capturing the popular imagination and conscience.

[TRANSPONDER]

Of course, but that doesn't make stories more right than fact. Lord of the Rings has inspired (one might say) me from the first time I read it. But that doesn't mean it's right even in its' message worldview and prejudices, never mind it not being true. We have to be very careful of not being swept away by demagogues, story -tellers and spin - doctors. Just as with Myth and legend.