Morality without metaphysics

Let’s talk about morality. There is stuff we think is okay to do and there is stuff we think is not okay to do. Human relationships work (when they do work) when we are all more or less on the same page about what stuff is and is not okay to do; as we often are. We all agree, for example, that it is not okay to beat people to death because you do not like the way they dress. We expect others to obey such rules and our relationships with them are shaped by whether or not they do so. We hold each other responsible for what we do in ways that inform how we distribute, on the one hand, our love and esteem and, on the other, our condemnation and resentment. 

This is the everyday world of moral common sense but there are always sceptical voices: perhaps it’s just nonsense. Can there really be truths, proper objective truths about what is and isn’t okay just the way there are objective truths about chemistry and geology? Some people argue that it makes no sense to suppose there are moral truths somehow baked into the constitution of the universe, radically independent of human beings and our moral experience, and so morality is nonsense.

I argue that while that rather grandiose metaphysical picture is indeed false, the best way of understanding our moral common sense presupposes nothing so fancy nor so fanciful. There need only be human beings jointly committed to a shared enterprise of living together in peaceful and orderly moral community regulated by norms of justice and civility that we can justify to each other in a shared currency of reasons shaped by and expressive of our passionate natures. It is not so complicated. For many good reasons, I don’t want to live in a world where we say it is okay to beat someone to death because you do not like the way they dress. Neither do you. So let’s not.

This enterprise is hard and many problems challenge it on every side. Moral consensus can be fragile and imperfect. (Shamefully, some people — the late Mahsa Amini comes to mind — have been beaten to death by people who did not like the way they dressed.) But it is nonetheless not an enterprise whose intelligibility and feasibility require our moral norms to be ratified by any such radically independent domain of moral reality. All the moral reality we need is something far more human, far closer to home, something that, if we get it right, can be as true and as objective as it needs to be. 

Responsibility is another headache. Here the most familiar problem concerns what is often called free will. Can I be responsible for what I do if I am not the author of what I do? It may seem obvious that ordinarily I am. Only a worry sets in. What I do is shaped and determined by me, my choices, my desires, my plans and my values. But I, along with my choices, desires, plans and values, was in turn shaped and determined by the social and natural forces that made me what I am — forces ultimately external to me that were already decisively in play long before I was born. Many are troubled by the pressure of such metaphysical reasoning that seems to rob us of the authorship of our own agency responsibility would seem to require.

I was shaped and determined by the ultimately remote social and natural forces that made me what I am. And yet, that may not always matter. I am no less, for that, the author of these words in these sense that they express what I believe and who I am and I am willing to sign my name to them, to own them, to accept that you act justly and properly in holding me responsible for framing them. 

I don’t, for many good reasons, want to live in a world where it is deemed okay to beat someone to death because you do not like the way they dress. And neither do you. We didn’t chose for our moral sensibilities to have the long causal histories that made them what they are. But we can nonetheless choose now to sign up to them and why wouldn’t we? Of course we don’t want that world. I am happy enough to be in a social contract with you where we undertake to refrain from such sartorial homicides and where I accept my liability to be held responsible should I ever break that undertaking. I didn’t choose to be the person that I am but the person that I am can choose to embrace such a norm, and he enjoys, in normal circumstances, sufficient self control for his choices to determine what he will do. (And the norms that govern responsibility make due allowances for abnormal circumstances.)

The enterprise of making a moral community is still hard. But the difficulties are practical, not metaphysical. The things that we do and say to each other are not arbitrary. We justify them inside the space of reasons. The space of reasons as a whole is expressive of the contingency of who we are and what we are like. Does that contingency entail a kind of ultimate arbitrariness without a strange domain of morality guaranteeing our cheques? Do we just happen to be the kind of animals to prefer justice and kindness to injustice and cruelty? I guess we do but it is a contingent thing we nonetheless cheerfully embrace and own. We did not ultimately choose to be this way, valuing these things, but, being as we are this way, we still sensibly chose to live in a community of responsibility which these values shape. We don’t stop loving the things we love just because it is ultimately contingent that we are the kind of creature that loves the kind of things we do.

_{Featured image by FlyD via Unsplash.}