Do I believe in conscience?
Yes but moral intuition is a
mental process of the conscious, human mind rather than something we can really derive from nature or natural selection. I agree with Michael Huemer, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, that: "
(i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know these through an immediate, intellectual awareness, or 'intuition'; and (iii) knowing them gives us reasons to act independent of our desires." (
2005).
I always fear there is a logical difficulty in any attempt that aims to tie morality to '
nature' or '
genetic' inheritance of traits. It runs into the impenetrable "
is/ought" dilemma or "
fact/value" distinction.
To my point of view, our values - ethical judgements - cannot be reduced to natural properties such as needs, wants or pleasures. None of these are prescriptive. Human beings are so much more than our needs, wants or pleasures because we are capable of conscientious reflection upon our acts and the harm, or benefit they can bring to others. We aren't just blind automatons driven by and at the mercy of our desires and inherited traits. If we were, then "
epigenetics" and "
neuroplasticity" would not be such burgeoning fields of scientific inquiry right now.
Simply put, it may be the case - to take one instance - that natural selection favours social hierarchies among primates, whereby one alpha-male competes with others and assumes precedence over them, giving him more access to females (and thus the capacity to procreate); the privilege of being groomed first before other animals and the same with regards to food consumption. Since human beings are primates, someone might say, "
well, nature predisposes us to submit to the social dominance of an alpha-male and give him first place in everything, therefore I think we should appoint a dictator for life!"
Starting from this sort of premise, evolutionary psychologists have long struggled to explain why there is a near-universal tendency among human hunter-gatherers to practice egalitarianism. It is highly atypical for primates and yet human beings foraged in such mobile social groups for nearly 200, 000 years until we brought back dominance hierarchies with the birth of modern states headed by their kings.
Once upon a time, proponents of absolute monarchy pointed to the nebulously defined category "
nature", to justify kingship as a 'natural' and thus morally upright institution. The argument is, of course, fundamentally inane since we could equally point to the
Queen Bee as justification for matriarchy. Or, we might point to the Black Widow Spider as justification for the idea that if a woman is displeased with a male lover, she has the right to kill and eat him.
The natural order is intrinsically
amoral and
purposeless. When we look at inherited traits or behaviors in nature, whether of animals or of ancient humans (i.e. cannibalism), we are describing what
is in the objective, scientific sense of the term. What we do not do, is derive any prescriptive value judgement therefrom. This is because what we
should do morally speaking, cannot in my opinion, in any ultimate sense be derived from nature.
Now, that doesn't mean that I don't believe in
some universal, moral norms. I certainly do. Practically every culture, whether primitive or modern anywhere in the world (a few egregious instances aside, like Pharaonic Egypt), proscribes incest with a strong cultural taboo. You might attribute this to natural selection i.e. inherited traits predisposing us, instinctively, to avoid the potential for our kids to have a higher percentage of recessive alleles and birth defects due to inbreeding but again that would only describe the
is and not the
ought of whether we should or should not have sex with our sister. (But we may say: it is cruel to the child to inflict potentially recessive alleles upon it because of an act of procreation by the parents, perhaps). There's applicability here to the morality of incest, certainly, but it's more complicated.
Most sociologists and anthropologists explain incest avoidance by means of one or another type of functionalist argument, such as the so-called
family disruption theory. Basically, it holds that sexual competition among family members would foment so much rivalry, jealousy and tension that the nuclear family could not function as an effective unit, which since our hunter-gatherer past has been essential for cooperative survival. The unity of each family was necessary to protect it against wild animals and to carry out large hunts.
Because the family must function effectively for society to survive and indeed to thrive, society has to curtail competition within the family. The familial incest taboo is thus imposed to keep the family intact. Incest taboos therefore have high cultural fitness because of their advantages in preventing competition and disruptive relations between family members.
Invariably, more often than not, moral norms arise from human reflection in the context of social groups. We discover what harms other individuals and the group and what benefits individuals and our group. In other words, a huge element of social construction is involved. But this need not mean that we just invent the truth for ourselves. I definitely
do not believe that to be the case. I'm a moral realist. As with the incest taboo, we often discover that human beings employing a mixture of reason, experience and empathy, have reached similar conclusions in different, causally disconnected cultures about what
should and
should not be acceptable.
This is bound up with human consciousness and the mystery involved in the self-perception of
qualia. Morality and value judgements are the prerogative of the human mind, because morality and meaning come into the universe through the human mind in its interaction with the world. The natural order has no purpose and no morality to offer us. That comes from our consciousness. We don't understand the experience of consciousness yet, nor it's neural correlates nor if it is even an epiphenomenon of the brain at all or something more fundamental. So there are no easy answers here.
I just seriously doubt that we could ever infer the
should from nature. I think we need to start with the "
ought" and just run with it, rather than try and derive prescriptive values from descriptive facts.
