• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Reason is the Most Important Driver of Human Moral Progress?

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Staff member
Premium Member
For that -- and for other reasons -- I think reason is a key player in moral progress.

Thank you for the very gracious reply, and please take your time in getting back to me with a fuller reply! I really look forward to pondering it, as ever with your posts.

I would certainly not deny, and indeed did not actually deny, that reason can be "a" key driver of moral progress. Had that been the question, my answer would not have been nearly as doubtful of the premise.

In my original post, I wrote:


Reason by itself, as abstract logic, can result in very diverse justifications for practices that many of us in the West would regard as grossly immoral but not necessarily irrational or devoid of logic. Reason with empathy has certainly been essential to arguments about morality and changing moral norms, but by itself - no, I don't think so.


The question posed was: is reason the key driver of moral progress, and to that the answer must be a definitive "no" on my part, both in terms of historical record and empirical science.

I think the studies by Haidt, Greene, Morelli and Paxton, among many other experimental psychologists and neuroscientists, have amply demonstrated that there is an intuitive or instinctual response to moral violations - "quick, automatic evaluations", to reference Haidt - and that empathy, or what @Polymath257 calls an increase in "compassion" (rather than logic), is the pre-eminent 'driver' of morality and moral-decisions, including any perceived "moral progress" in social norms.

These intuitive evaluations have been replicated in study after study, and they are to quote Professor Joshua Greene: "implicit and the factors affecting them may be consciously inaccessible".

Such moral intuitions - conscientia or conscience, and founded upon unreasoning, consciously inaccessible 'empathy' with others - come first and are born of emotional activation, before ratio or any operations of the rational, logical mind using controlled thought come into play.

Conscientia is direct, automatic, intuitive whereas ratio is calculating and uses ratiocination or discursive thought (i.e. through the mediation of 'concepts' - the idea of a progress or development in morality being one such example, ironically!).

This does not mean, as one might think if an emphasis upon intuitional morality is taken to an extreme (whereby it approaches mysticism), that ratiocination is entirely excluded from moral decision-making or indeed moral "progress" so to speak.

If one tries to derive morality solely from reason (without that initial intuitiuve, empathetic response - as unfortunately many Greek philosophers believed was the mark of "wisdom" or apatheia), in addition to Polymath's warning above that it starts without any axioms of its own, it often leads to a narrow focus upon maximizing gain or obtaining the most desirable overall outcome (i.e. utilitarianism). This happens because the emotional parts of decision-making are ignored.

The converse, conscientia without reflection, can lead to the kind of situation you describe above - "kill the child-molesters, all of 'em, no one who harms a child deserves life" - because the person, understandably, is empathsizing with the child and automatically places him or herself in the victim's shoes - and sometimes the person subsequently, once they have initially been emotionally triggered, contemplates and comes to a more (ready yourself for this) "reasonable" response.

But @Polymath257 is quite right, in my opinion, that "the fight for women's rights, fights against racism, fights for gay rights" is largely the product of an "an increase in compassion" (in conscientia) rather than an improvement in logic, although I would say the environment is of equal importance in this respect.

As I noted earlier, and I reiterate the point, it is my sincere understanding that reason by itself, as abstract logic, can result in very diverse justifications for practices that many of us in the West would regard as grossly immoral but not necessarily irrational or devoid of logic. Reason with empathy has certainly been essential to arguments about morality and changing moral norms, but by itself - no, I don't think so.

So, while I do readily agree that: "reason [can] be be used to generalize and extend empathy", I must qualify it as 'can' rather than "is". It does not always, nor will it essentially, lead to the 'generalizing and extension of empathy' (as if out of some intrinsic, teleological end or natural outcome of 'reason'). Indeed, it is relatively easy to conceive of reasoned arguments that aren't self-contradictory or illogical but result in the 'narrowing and restricting of empathy' to more contained social groups, or even to the exclusion of individuals and groups. Involuntary euthanasia and eugenicism is an example of this throughout history. Eminently logical and defensible through purely rational means, but only if you ignore intuitive appeals to empathy with the victims of these policies.
 
Last edited:

Dan From Smithville

What's up Doc?
Staff member
Premium Member
Religions are living traditions, not narrow literalistic readings of texts though. Christian ideas such as each person having inherent and equal worth, individual moral responsibility, moral universalism, the strong having a duty of care towards the weak, and history being progress (not endlessly repeating cycles) are all obviously present in modern liberalism (and largely absent from pre-Christian thought).

Of course, there are ultra-literalist fundy Christians who pride themselves on being stuck in the past, these people are not representative of the tradition in general (and likely didn't even exist at all until relatively recently).
That latter group seems almost at odds with the morals they claim to uphold and protect.
 

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
Of course, there are ultra-literalist fundy Christians who pride themselves on being stuck in the past, these people are not representative of the tradition in general (and likely didn't even exist at all until relatively recently).
And yet they are the ones who look to the parts of the Bible that have for so long cused great inequalities and horrible violence throughout the past 2000 years. And before, if we are to believe the stories of warmongering Hebrews found in the OT.
 

bobhikes

Nondetermined
Premium Member
[QUOTE="Sunstone, post: 6337734, member: ]

"Reason is the key driver of human moral progress."

Comments?[/QUOTE]

My problems with the video, is that it only links the positives caused by reason and none of the negatives. Also there two comments about how reason can be made positive were a person must be concerned with there well being and be part of a community where people are concerned with there well being. She assumes that most people are like this but there are many people in this world that are not primarily concerned with there well being and the internet has built up artificial communities that allow for personal reason to flourish. In fact I don't agree with the fact the empathy is currently increasing all signs currently show it decreasing and I believe the internet which they never touched on is the main reason. Writing in the past was done by the educated but anyone today can have a pod cast or internet trending story and it does not have to be intelligent (in fact that would hurt it) but just entertaining.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
I find myself inherently, spontaneously, seeing myself in a person involuntarily left to die without care or purposefully being killed by a eugenical policy, and feeling my conscience pricked/emotions moved by the "injustice" of this being done to them.

This is a purely intuitive aversion to seeing another being deprived in a way I would fear for myself, empathy on my part, that comes before I've even subjected that feeling to 'arguments' or 'logic'.

But I could imagine a different Vouthon, reared in a very different material time and culture far removed from my Western, liberal milieu, and having been raised in a different moral universe.

That Vouthon has been raised in a highly aristocratic, stratified society in a pre-industrial age where the common wisdom is that: "pity is a soft, weak emotion that leads one away from the exercise of pure reason", as many of the ancient Stoics and other Greek philosophers believed. To base an action on such affective grounds was, in this culture, to act 'irrationally'. Aristotle argued that women were more emotional and given to an 'excess of pity and compassion' than men, who were the more rational and thus superior gender.

To reference Seneca again in De Clementia Book II, who said that "all good men....":


"...will avoid pity, which is a vice incident to weak minds which cannot endure the sight of another's sufferings. It is, therefore, most commonly found in the worst people; there are old women and girls who are affected by the tears of the greatest criminals, and who, if they could, would let them out of prison. Pity considers a man's misfortunes and does not consider to what they are due...The wise man knows not how to feel pity or to grant pardon...You know that eyes must be weak, if they fill with rheum at the sight of another's blearedness...Pity is a defect in the mind of people who are extraordinarily affected by suffering"

Seneca was by no means 'immoral' by our standards: he very much commended that a wise sage should, as he writes, "restore children to their weeping mothers, loose the chains of the captive, release the gladiator from his bondage, and even bury the carcass of the criminal".

But it is quite incontrovertible that we are in a different moral universe from that which formed New Testament injunctions that one should, "Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15) and "Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured" (Hebrews 13:13).

It doesn't strike me as an outlandish notion that societies shaped by Seneca's philosophy and presumptions will foster an environment and consequent set of moral norms quite distinct from one formed by the latter. One society viewed 'weeping with those who weep' a necessity of being a moral, good person; whereas the other decried it as a defect, a vice of 'old women' and 'girls' for the wise person to have 'weak eyes, filled with tears at the sight of another's blearedness'.

One culture put a premium on empathy, pity and suchlike intuitions - as well as weakness as a strength and superior to the 'strong' - as the greatest good, whereas the other extolled reason (identified with the divine logos, or alleged ordering principle of the universe) as the highest virtue and scorned affairs of the heart as the preserve of womanliness, of the passions of the 'weak' who could not control themselves.

The Vouthon raised in Seneca's cultural milieu, would have been inculturated from the day of his birth and then in interactions with my peers to understand what is moral in a different way, to view my own emotions and feelings in a different way, and so my view of eugenics may well have cohered with Seneca's - that it was: "a work of reason, to separate the sound from the worthless" even though the idea of this parallel universe "me" is profoundly disturbing to me!
Um, did youvanswer my q?
 

Audie

Veteran Member
Oh, I've thought it through. I guess I was just taken aback that an educated young woman such as yourself seemed oblivious to the concept I was raising. If you really wanted a thorough explanation, all you had to do was just ask.

Let's get back to the initial question I posed to you in post #39:



Your answer was to play coy, as if to insinuate that you never heard of the concepts known as "greed" and "selfishness."

Rather than getting sucked in to playing that game, I chose to posit a second question which (if you truly were a thinking person) should've made you think more about the first question.

But instead of giving a thoughtful reply to either question, you instead chose to believe that I was unable to answer your question and erroneously concluded that I didn't put much thought into this.

Looks like at least a match for wrong conclusion,
I will get back to it later tho.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
I would certainly not deny, and indeed did not actually deny, that reason can be "a" driver of moral progress. Had that been the question, my answer would not have been nearly as scathing towards the premise.

Confession time. I goofed here. In my haste this morning, I did not phrase Newberger-Goldstein's thesis as well as I should have. Consequently, I have sent numerous respondents down the wrong road. Naturally I apologize for such a gross mistake. Here is an edit I have just now inserted in the OP:

EDIT: A more accurate summary of Newberger Goldstein's thesis might be, "Reason deserves the greatest credit for whatever moral progress we have seen and see in the world." Or -- not "reason is the key driver of human moral progress", but rather "reason is the single most important driver of human moral progress."
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Those allemands could have really used a guy like
Hawkings.

What is "fit" is more complex than muscle tone.

EXACTLY! And there are some extremely important questions about whether humans are both foresighted and disciplined enough to wisely practice eugenics on a grand scale. Knowing humans, we're more likely to drive ourselves to extinction via eugenics on a grand scale than bring about a golden age. BUT -- everyone who selects someone to mate with with an eye on what kind of children he or she will father or mother is either practicing eugenics or practicing something not all that far from eugenics in principle.
 

Vee

Well-Known Member
Premium Member

"Reason is the key driver of human moral progress."

EDIT: A more accurate summary of Newberger Goldstein's thesis might be, "Reason deserves the greatest credit for whatever moral progress we have seen and see in the world." Or -- not "reason is the key driver of human moral progress", but rather "reason is the single most important driver of human moral progress."

Comments?

Our brain is divided in two: the rational brain and the emotional brain. The rational brain thinks it's in charge, but many times that's not the case. People tend to be emotional and do stupid, sometimes despicable things because of the emotional baggage created by the emotional brain.
Ideally, they should work together but in reality that's not what happens so we need to make a great effort.
The thinking brain can't work all alone because then we would become machines without a sense of "why" and we wouldn't care about anything anymore. But the emotional brain can't be all alone either because it will do all kinds of nonsense.
 

Dan From Smithville

What's up Doc?
Staff member
Premium Member
Many disagree with me on this, but that is ok :)
We kill each other less than we used to. Though more efficiently when we do. I think there has been a general trend toward a better grasp of morals and adherence to them, but it is not perfect.
 

Dan From Smithville

What's up Doc?
Staff member
Premium Member
EXACTLY! And there are some extremely important questions about whether humans are both foresighted and disciplined enough to wisely practice eugenics on a grand scale. Knowing humans, we're more likely to drive ourselves to extinction via eugenics on a grand scale than bring about a golden age. BUT -- everyone who selects someone to mate with with an eye on what kind of children he or she will father or mother is either practicing eugenics or practicing something not all that far from eugenics in principle.
As a personal practice, it may have some limited utility for individual lines, but on a broader scale, eugenics would seem to need the support of authoritarianism and be highly subject to bias and abuse. Someone or group would have to be selecting who got to be with whom or at all. It would subvert individual rights, at least in reproduction. But how long would it take to go from that arena to new areas of human existence. Selecting for the right religion, the right politics, the right mind set, conformity, compliance, etc.
 
Top