Tag Archives: Morality

Evolution, Morality, Philosophy, Top Ten Posts of 2009

What is Social Darwinism? – #4 Post of 2009

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Social Darwinism is the theory that persons, societies of people, and races develop and evolve in much the same way that biological organisms evolve due to natural selection.  It is frequently described by the phrase, “survival of the fittest,” which was coined by British philosopher Herbert Spencer just a few years after Darwin wrote Origin of the Species.

The theory speculates that those people groups who are superior in intelligence, creativity, and industriousness would naturally overcome their weaker neighbors.  In doing so, they would become more successful as measured by wealth and prosperity.  This view led to a belief in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that human “class stratification was justified on the basis of ‘natural’ inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality.”

The ethical ramifications of social Darwinism are immense.  Following its logic, if nature is removing the inferior races of men in order to preserve the superior races, then mankind ought to cooperate.  Even though this is a clear example of the is/ought fallacy, the social Darwinists employed the theory to justify all sorts of behavior.  At the individual level, there was a moral obligation to not help those people who were biologically unfit.  After all, evolution is attempting to remove these people from the population pool.  If a person is born blind, let her die of starvation rather than fit her for glasses.  If she reproduces, she is weakening the gene pool.

With regard to ethnic groups, there arose an ethical basis for racism and nationalism; if a person’s society is shown to be socio-economically superior to others, then ignoring the plight of the inferior races and societies is completely justified.  “At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies.”

Social Darwinism saw its greatest impact in the Nazi and communist regimes of the twentieth century.  According to Sir Arthur Keith, a strong proponent of biological evolutionary theory, “We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution produces the only real basis for a national policy. . . . The means he adopted to secure the destiny of his race and people were organized slaughter, which has drenched Europe in blood. . . . Such conduct is highly immoral as measured by every scale of ethics, yet Germany justifies it; it is consonant with tribal or evolutionary morality.”

Nazi Germany is generally thought to have exterminated about twelve million innocent people and the regime largely based its policies on the idea that the Aryan race was superior.   It was the duty of the German people to populate the world and eliminate the inferior races.

Marxist regimes also believed that Darwinism could be used to build a legitimate philosophical framework.  Karl Marx was heavily influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin and believed that the dethroning of the bourgeoisie was completely justified to bring about the evolution of mankind that he envisioned.  Marxist governments were responsible for murdering tens of millions of people during the twentieth century.  Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse Tung massacred their own people in order to create a new order that they based ultimately upon the concept of “survival of the fittest.”

Although few people claim to be social Darwinists today, the ideas of social Darwinism still surface from time to time.  Our next post will analyze this theory of ethics to see whether it can be grounded in the seven aspects of morality we discussed in What Do We Know About Morality?

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Abortion

“If You Don’t Like Abortion, Don’t Have One”

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Incredibly, this was the sage advice of a writer who showered us with his wisdom in the letters to the editor section in our local newspaper.  I rarely read the letters to the editor, because they almost never say anything of substance, but in a moment of weakness, I read them and was treated with this gem.

What is the problem with this statement?  Well, for starters, it betrays a complete lack of understanding of the pro-life position.  Those who oppose abortion do not do so because of a personal preference.

We are not saying that we don’t prefer abortion.  We are saying that abortion is morally wrong, and that it is, in fact, the taking of an innocent human life.  A person’s personal preference about an act is completely different from his knowledge of whether the act is morally right or wrong.  One can prefer things that are morally wrong or one can prefer things that are morally right.  Pro-lifers don’t strictly care about what people prefer when it comes to abortion.  They are arguing about whether abortion is morally right or wrong.

If abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, and we routinely pass laws that protect innocent human life, it follows that there should be a law that prevents abortion.  Not because we don’t prefer abortion, but because it is morally reprehensible.

Would it make any sense for me to say, “If you don’t like murder, then don’t commit one!”?  Or what about, “If you don’t like rape, then don’t commit one!”?

If abortion is truly the taking of an innocent life, then telling people not to have one if they don’t like it is as asinine as telling someone not to murder if they don’t like murder.

We don’t tell people not to produce acts of evil if they don’t personally like a particular evil act.  We tell them not to commit acts of evil because evil is morally wrong, and we ought not do what is morally wrong.

Morality, Philosophy

Where Is European Morality Headed?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

We have discussed, on this blog, the idea that a person’s religious beliefs and worldview have a direct effect on their moral behavior.  Worldviews not only affect people, but entire nations.  In the March 2009 publication of First Things, Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote a brilliant article which examines the decline of European morality.  Here is a powerful excerpt:

Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so many arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic about human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose (or would have chosen) to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. A new protocol for euthanizing newborns with disabilities is institutionalized in the Netherlands, and the doctor who authored the protocols, Eduard Verhagen, tells us how “beautiful” it is when the newborns are killed, for, at last, they are at peace.

The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred will be definitively put to rest by 2040. It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that by that moment “life unworthy of life” will routinely be destroyed—in the name of liberal humanitarianism and compassion, and even cost-effectiveness, rather than the triumph of a master race. It is a softer nihilism than the past’s, but it is nihilism all the same.

In an interview for a British magazine during the summer of 2005, Singer said that if he faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save the animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child’s death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value.

This is the entirely consistent result of the view that human life no longer possesses an innate dignity, that we are only meat walking around, and we can be turned easily into means to the ends of others, just as we may turn others into means to our ends. It is the old master-slave scenario come to life, even as we congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment.

Ideas matter, and Europe is headed down a depressing path.

Morality, Philosophy

Waterboarding: Does the End Justify the Means?

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Recently, in the news, there has been much discussion of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding.  This technique simulates drowning and some have called it torture.

But most of the discussions I’ve seen on this topic do not debate whether waterboarding is torture or not, but instead debate whether waterboarding of certain terrorists was successful in obtaining key intelligence that foiled terrorist operations.  In other words, did waterboarding work to extract vital information?

I am deeply troubled by this line of questioning because it clearly misses the point.  Whether waterboarding works or not is hardly the issue, especially if you are a Christian.  If you say that waterboarding is acceptable because it generates crucial intelligence, then you are claiming that the end (gathering intelligence) justifies the means (waterboarding).

There are two major categories of ethical systems: deontological (duty-centered) and teleological (end-centered).  Christian ethics are deontological.  Utilitarianism is a form of teleological ethics.

Christians believe that the end does not justify the means (utilitarianism).  We believe that certain actions are morally wrong, and therefore we avoid them; we believe that certain actions are morally right and we have a duty to fulfill them.  The results of an action do not determine whether it is moral or not.  If waterboarding is truly torture, and we as Christians believe torture is wrong, then it does not matter what results it obtains!  It is still wrong.

I am not going to comment on whether waterboarding is torture, as I have not given it enough thought, but that is the key question that Christians ought to be asking.  We should not be talking about whether the results of waterboarding were successful or not.  That is a clearly non-Christian view of ethics that needs to be avoided by all of us in this debate.

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 7

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In the previous post, we found significant problems with survival ethics, the ethical theory which claims that “morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.”  But there are more problems.

Survival ethics are merely descriptive, not prescriptive.  They describe the behaviors of the past that led to survival of the human species.  I may be thankful that people followed these rules in the past, but how am I to decide whether I ought to follow these rules in the future? 

As Francis Beckwith explains, “After all, some people in the past raped, stole, and murdered. And I know of many people today who have feelings to rape, steal, and murder. Perhaps these behaviors are just as important for my existence and the preservation of the species as the ‘good’ behaviors.”  Unless there is an objective moral law that is over and above survival ethics, there is absolutely no possible way to determine which behaviors that have been produced by evolution are the good ones and which are the bad ones.

One response available to evolutionists is that those societies that have allowed atrocities, such as Nazi Germany, have not survived, and so evolution did indeed cull them out.  This response fails for two reasons.  First, brutal and tyrannical regimes have existed since the dawn of mankind and they continue to exist today.  People of the nineteenth century were basking in the afterglow of the Enlightenment and were confident that mankind’s scientific discoveries and progress were leading them to a golden age.  Yet within the first half of the twentieth century two world wars were fought when brutal regimes rose to power.  To argue that we are now reaching some sort of evolutionary nirvana where corrupt governments can no longer arise seems incredibly naïve, to say the least.  History is replete with dictators and despots and there is no end in sight, unless you are a Christian theist who knows that Christ himself will usher in the end of times. 

Second, if the evolutionist uses the failure of brutal regimes as evidence they are morally wrong, then this indicates that any brutal regimes that do survive are proved morally right.  In other words, only survival is a criterion for rightness, but this lands the survival ethicist right back in social Darwinism, which survival ethicists decry.

A second possible response to the point that evolution has produced those who rape, murder, and steal is to say that we should only rationally obey moral feelings that the majority of people hold.  A few bad apples are not to be heeded.  Here again, there are numerous counter examples that can be given. 

The majority of Europe was under Nazi rule during World War II, so by this criterion Europeans should have adopted the majority view of German nationalism. 

During the heyday of the Soviet Union, millions lived under its brutal hegemony, so it would have been impossible for anyone in that nation to hold the view that their government was behaving immorally. 

Slave ownership was an almost worldwide phenomenon just a few hundred years ago, so how could a person living during that time claim that owning slaves was morally abhorrent?  They could not unless there was an objective and universal moral law that was true for all people at all times; survival ethicists deny this view, however. 

More examples could be given, but neither moral truth nor any other truth is determined by a vote.  If everyone in the world believed that two plus two equals five, then everyone in the world would be wrong.  No philosophical theory can overcome the laws of mathematics or our intuitive knowledge of right and wrong, so we should always be cautious when we are told that whatever the majority says must be right.

Conclusion

Evolutionary ethical systems suffer from numerous problems that are not easily resolvable.  In stark contrast stands the ethics of Christian theism.  Christian theism holds that the universe was created to glorify God, that history has a purpose and that it is moving toward a climax where good will defeat evil once and for all. 

God created human beings to have intimate relationships with him.  Out of God’s perfect moral nature flow his ethical commands to love him and to love one another.  He is the transmitter of moral laws; he has the authority, as the ultimate standard of good, to demand obedience; he has placed an innate knowledge of morality in us; our conscience seers us when we disobey his laws; he knows our motives and intent even when other humans do not; he is spirit and has created immaterial souls and values for his creatures.  Every single moral intuition we have is explained logically by God’s existence.  In fact, if there is even one objective and absolute moral law, God must exist.

The nineteenth century German atheist Frederick Nietzsche pronounced that God is dead and he predicted that the twentieth century would be the bloodiest on record.  He understood that any ethic without God as its source would lead to moral chaos.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, the famous Russian novelist, has said that if God does not exist, then all things are permissible.  It was obvious to these men that without God, ethics have no foundation.  A house with no foundation collapses into rubble and morality is no different.  How can a perfectly holy, just, and righteous God be replaced with a mindless, irrational process such as evolution without devastating consequences?

The contemporary western world is unaware of the danger of evolutionary ethics because it is living on the borrowed foundation and capital of Christian theism.  Evolutionary ethicists maintain a following only because  their theories cloak themselves with a veneer of Judeo-Christian morality.  Take away that veneer and their ethical systems collpase.  Our only hope is to hold tight to the one who made us, the Alpha and the Omega, the Creator of all things, the Lord Jesus Christ.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 6

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Have you ever heard someone say the following?  “Morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.”  If so, read on because this post will evaluate this position to see whether it can really explain morality.  If you would like to understand a little more about the theory before reading the critique below, read the previous post first.

There are several objections that can be leveled against the theory.  First, we have an intuitive moral duty to help the weak, the elderly, and the disabled.  This would seem odd since weaker individuals would tend to be eliminated by evolution.   If anything, evolution should have caused feelings of hatred or contempt for those who are biologically unfit.  Moral feelings which cause us to help these people are exactly the opposite of what we expect to find. 

When confronted with this challenge, some evolutionists offer that helping the weak must somehow be worthwhile and that our ancestors found value in it.  In other words, our ancestors decided that evolution did not provide adequate answers for morality and so their rational minds began to work out morality at an individual and societal level.  It seems, however, that at this point human beings discovered an objective moral law – it is morally virtuous to help the weak and disabled – but this moral law is now referring to something universal and absolute that exists outside of survival ethics.  They are referring to a transcendent moral law that has no ground, which is an admission that survival ethics is inadequate. 

The other common answer to the challenge is that helping the disabled must somehow help us to survive, but we just do not know how it helps yet.  This view at least attempts to salvage survival ethics, but it is a circular argument.  We are asking how certain behaviors evolved, so to assume that a behavior did evolve when answering the question is circular reasoning.  

There is another serious problem with this explanation.  Francis Beckwith asks:

Because it is clear that not every human being has a moral sense that he or she has a duty and incumbency to help those less fortunate, on what grounds could the evolutionist say that these human beings are mistaken in their moral viewpoint?  After all, people who lack this moral sense have existed all over the globe for generations, and if they too are the products of evolution, perhaps having such people in our population is necessary for the preservation of the species.

The only escape for the survival ethicist is to claim that those who feel no compulsion to help the weak are morally unfit.  But again, a morality outside of evolution is being invoked which demonstrates that survival ethics does not have adequate explanatory power.

More to come on survival ethics tomorrow.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 5

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The final ethical system we will analyze is known as the immanent purpose view.  This view holds that “there is no reason why something rather than nothing exists, that there is no purpose for human history, that there is no life after death, and that humans are the result of a blind process of evolution.”   The major difference between immanent purpose and optimistic humanism is that immanent purpose seems to hold to objective moral virtues.  Within life, there is objective good to be attained and total moral relativism is false.

The objective good, however, is not what Christian theists would consider to be the objective good.  Some proponents of this view believe that values exist and are part of the “furniture” of the universe, but these values are floating and unattached to any deity.  Others propose that the objective moral good can be “defined by or reduced to natural, scientific properties which are biological, psychological, sociological, or physical in nature.”   The following discussion will focus on a particular view within the immanent purpose umbrella which I call survival ethics.  

Followers of survival ethics claim that what is morally right is what furthers human survival; it is a utilitarian ethic which places the end (as in ends and means) of survival in the seat of absolutism.  Whichever behaviors contribute to human survival are considered virtuous and whichever behaviors do not are morally repugnant.  They argue that every person wills life and not death and that survival is therefore foundational to the human animal.  Since all types of animals naturally reproduce and populate the earth, this behavior must be the cause of morality. 

Why be moral?  If we are moral, then we will survive and survival as a goal is wired into humans and all other animals.  Journalist Robert Wright explains that “if within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population.  The result (obviously) is that the species’ aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.”  

According to survival ethicists, morality is easily explained by evolution and the tendency for biological life to survive and reproduce.  Although this view sounds almost identical to social Darwinism, followers of this view, such as Robert Wright, tend to recoil in horror if they are compared to social Darwinists.  They claim that even though evolution caused morals to develop, a person has a moral duty to rise above the brutality of nature and follow a more virtuous path.

In our next post, we will examine whether immanent purpose, and in particular, survival ethics, can explain what we know about morality.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 4

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Continuing our critique of optimistic humanism, we find that proponents of the view are unable to speak about the subject of morality without contradicting their own ethical system.

Proponents of optimistic humanism admit that ethics are relative and changing over time.  They assert that there are no absolute, objective moral values that are true for all people at all times and in all places.  Their view is that humans just make a subjective choice to be moral and that there is no rational justification for this choice.  Morality is a useful tool for man to develop, but nothing more.  Oddly, though, optimistic humanists seem to frequently lapse into absolutist speech which undermines their system.

Writing in the January-February 2005 edition of Humanist magazine, former American ambassador Carl Coon says the following:

[Ethical] principles constitute a structure of interlocking behavioral guidelines that have been growing organically since our ancestors first became human, if not earlier.  These standards and principles didn’t descend to us from on high as some revealed truth from an intelligent being greater than ourselves.  We worked them out through a long and arduous evolutionary process marked by many wrong turns and much social discord.  Indeed, the structure is still imperfect and we continue trying to make improvements.

According to humanists like Carl Coon, ethics evolved from a purely natural and physical process with no intelligent agent guiding their development.  Ethics are relative in time and relative to man’s evolutionary development; they are not absolute in any way.  Ambassador Coon emphasizes in the the article that basic morality has changed over millions of years and that moral norms have been building from one period to another.

But notice the words he employs to describe morality: wrong turns, discord, imperfect, and improvements.  All of these words indicate that morality, over time, has been moving in a direction from worse to better, from bad to good, from imperfect to perfect.  But how is it possible for the ambassador to judge the morality of the distant past if all morals are relative?  How can he say that morality has taken “wrong turns”?  How do we know ethics are improving over time if no two time periods can be compared? 

The trap to which optimistic humanists succumb is that they cannot help but utilize absolutist language when they describe morality.  The only way one can say that ethics are going from bad to good is if there is an objective standard to which all ethics are compared, but this standard must stand outside of the ethical systems being evaluated.   A man cannot know a crooked line unless he first knows what straight is.  Optimistic humanism does not ever provide knowledge of a “straight line” and, in fact, denies that “straight lines” objectively exist. 

There are no absolute ethical standards in relativistic evolutionary ethics, so either Carl Coon is referring to a fictitious standard, which renders his description of morality incoherent, or he is busy sabotaging his own theory.  If we take his words seriously, he has introduced an absolute standard and has totally undermined his ethical system.  An ethical relativist can never compare the morality of one time period or one culture, or even one person, to another.  The moment they compare, they are invoking an absolute and objective moral law, the very thing their theory forbids.

Given the problems chronicled in the last few posts for optimistic humanism, we must reject this theory as a reasonable explanation for morality.  Our next post will analyze another ethical system based on evolution – the immanent purpose view.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Atheism, Evolution, Morality, Philosophy

Does Evolution Explain Morality? Part 3

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We continue with our analysis of optimistic humanism.  In the previous post, we found that optimistic humanism is incapable of condemning obviously immoral acts as objectively or absolutely wrong.  In addition, this ethical system cannot explain the “oughtness” inherent in moral norms.  But there are additional problems for optimistic humanism.

Morality seems to require humans to possess a robust form of free will that allows them to make moral choices.  We often praise good moral acts and condemn bad moral acts as if the people we are judging have some control over their actions.  If there is no free will, then moral choices are completely determined by the laws of chemistry and physics, and it makes no sense to praise or criticize anyone because they are acting according to deterministic physical laws. 

Our uniform experience, however, is that we naturally judge others as if they do have control over themselves, as if they possess free will.  C. S. Lewis helps us by pointing out:

The truth is, we believe in decency so much – we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so – that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.  For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations.  It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.  

Humanism, however, denies the existence of true free will because free will requires that non-physical properties such as the mind, consciousness, and moral values exist.  Physicalist Paul Churchland has this to say:

The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process.  If this is the correct account of our origin, then there seems neither need nor room to fit any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical accounts of ourselves.  We are creatures of matter.  

Thus optimistic humanism, as well as all other evolutionary ethical systems, must reject the existence of free will and therefore the rational thinker must reject optimistic humanism.  In the next post, we will review one final and serious problem with optimistic humanism: its adherents find it nearly impossible to talk about morality without contradicting and undermining their own theory of morality.

[quotation references can be provided on request]