Mere Morality; It’s All Really Fake and Gay Right To The Very Bottom

Yes, morality is also quite gay. But not as gay as you.

The goal of this article is to attempt to explain two things; the source of morality for me, the source of morality generally.

There are many theistic arguments that simply boil down to morality exists and is objective, therefore God. This article also tries to disprove those sort of arguments.

However, I must warn that my position in this article is still tenuous, so I'm willing to change my opinion. Let's begin.

A Moral Question

Let's start with a moral question. Do you think it's moral to kill one innocent person today in order to save a hundred innocent children tomorrow?

Forget about the logistics of this for now. Assume that it's set in stone and we are sure that killing a particular innocent person today would save a hundred children tomorrow.

What do you think is the moral choice to make here? Do you think that we shouldn't kill the innocent, under any condition, or do you think it's acceptable to kill innocent people in order to save more innocent people?

If you're like most people you would choose to kill one innocent person to save a hundred innocent people. And if you don't choose to do that, I wonder how you can spin your choice to be the moral one. Perhaps you're a deontologist. I'll deal with your arguments later.

In any case, my point is that our moral positions are mostly utilitarian. When people think of the moral choices they make, they usually think in abstract terms of some greater good. Hence the moral rule itself — like don't kill innocent people for example — matters only in the context of the abstract greater good. If killing innocent people would suddenly lead to more innocent people surviving, killing innocent people would suddenly become a moral thing to do.

Hence, we don't adhere to moral principles because they are good to adhere to. But because adherence to them produces a greater good. (Of course there are many who only adhere to moral principles because of social pressure or indoctrination, but this letter isn't for them).

Another Moral Question

Now, imagine that the innocent person that you're supposed to kill today isn't just some random person but your mother. Or someone you love the most. The answer gets a bit more complex, doesn't it? Can you imagine it? Killing your own mother or brother or soulmate to save a hundred random Pakistani children you will never meet.

Think very deeply in your hearts of hearts. Would you do it?

I am not ashamed to say I wouldn't do it. In fact, I would first of all watch the whole earth and all its nonsense burn before I killed my mother to save it. That's right — if the choice was between killing my mother and saying adieu to the world and all of you reading this letter — then yes, I would say bye bye.

To you, this may be selfish and perhaps immoral. It isn't at all to me. I believe if faced with the same choice, in the privacy of your bedroom, with no one to scold you about it, you would definitely choose as I've chosen given the same rough parameters.

This tells us another thing; morals are only as useful as the emotions we feel towards them. You may say, well, some people would be selfless and choose to save the world. But that only means they love the world more than the person they love the most. It doesn't mean they've chosen differently. It only means that the object of their affection is different from the object of mine.

Even a man who starves himself to feed the poor does feel some good from doing it. This is the same for a man who gives his own life to save that of his friends. He isn't truly being altruistic, as the congregation may say. He does feel some (perverse, I might argue) pleasure from doing it. After all, who wouldn't want to bask in the pleasure of being called the magnificent hero who saves their friends with his own life? Who wouldn't want to be called the selfless man who starves himself to feed the poor? Even if those acts are hidden (as the Bible asks us to), who, after doing all of these selfless acts, wouldn't think in his mind — oh how good am I for doing all of these good things! I am so good!

I am not saying all of this is bad. It's just the nature of being human — the nature of being alive. The human brain is a dopamine optimisation machine, and all it does — all it will ever do — is to search for more clever and ingenious ways to get drowned in dopamine.

Hence we reach another conclusion; it's impossible for humans to be altruistic. When combined with the earlier lesson in this section, we reach this conclusion; human morality is dictated by human emotions, and human emotions are dictated by human self interest.

Objective Morality

Over the past few months I've read two books by C.S Lewis. The first was the problem of pain, and the second was mere Christianity. In both these books Lewis makes a lot of good and bad arguments in favour of Christianity. But most of those arguments hinge on morality being objective.

I'll admit that Lewis's writings were the first time the Christian position of objective morality was steelmanned for me. I'd always thought that even Christians knew that it was impossible to argue for ordinarily objective morality without invoking divine injunction.

Lewis, however, had a different framing of the question of objective morality. He argued that morality is naturally hardwired into the human brain, and the difference of moralities we see in human society is merely a difference of specifics, not a difference of substance. This, of course, was nonsense to me. But the more I read Lewis, and met people who read him, the more I realized that many Christians indeed believe this. Many of them actually think morality is somehow hardwired into our genes, and we somehow always know what the right moral choice is. Importantly, he says this is proof of a good or just God.

Lewis argues that it's like some sort of instinct. One example he makes is that no human society uplifts cowardliness or unkindness. This, he says, is evidence of some God who holds those values to be true.

Regardless of the scientific accuracy of that statement — lets assume it's true. Let us assume that there are some moral principles that every society everywhere follows, like Lewis said.

Could there be a different reason for that than divine hardwiring? I believe so.

Moral Chimps

One way to understand human beings is to consider them to be clever chimps. Chimps are our closest living relatives evolutionarily speaking, so we certainly share a lot of base mannerisms.

For example, chimps have an extremely complex social arrangement. They have clear hierarchies and often cooperate in complex ways to achieve common goals. They even form political alliances during male power struggles.

The thing about chimp societies is that they are remarkably similar, even across different subspecies. There are the Western chimpanzees, the Nigerian-Cameroon Chimpanzees, the Eastern chimpanzee, and the Central chimpanzee. All of these subspecies have markedly different biologies and have been separated by thousands of miles for thousands of years by nature.

Yet, these chimps all have striking similarities in their behaviour. This shouldn't really be a shock to us. We know that genes influence behaviour, and this striking similarity between chimpanzee behaviours and societal formation is merely due to them belonging to the same species.

So how do these behaviours that chimps have develop? We also know the answer to that. It's called evolution. Chimps that behave in certain way get to live long and pass on their genes. They become sexually successful and are also successful in keeping their communities safe. Chimps that don't behave in that way don't become sexually successful and hence don't live long.

It therefore means there's a certain behavioural formula that helps certain species thrive in the jungle. The jungle being what it is doesn't offer a developmental blank slate. There are certain things that must be present for survival against the elements and other predators to be possible.

Chimps that hate cooperation, for example, will find it difficult to hunt and survive especially when they come up against other gangs of chimps. Hence cooperation amongst chimps will become the norm since all the none cooperative chimp would have died off. That's one way certain values can quite literally replicate themselves in certain chimp societies without coming through divine mandate.

What I've just explained is what happens in human societies. Human beings have certain values — such as courage, kindness, justice — in common because they are part of the necessary formula for human societies to thrive. Societies that didn't have such values simply didn't survive to become discussion points in Elewa's newsletter.

Let's take a value like courage, for instance. A band of human hunter gatherers who were unwilling to fight back against other hunter gatherers simply perished. They perished over and over and over again everywhere they found themselves.

Ones that were brave enough to fight other tribes and win simply survived and reproduced. Which allowed their genes survive over and over and over again everywhere it found itself.

Suddenly, all societies that didn't think courage was important was wiped out, and everyone that thought courage was important survived. If this is so, you may wonder, why aren't all societies murderous robbers, since murderous and psychopathic behaviour would have allowed bands of hunter gatherers survive even better in the wild?

But isn't that what all armies are? Human wars are exactly that — one band of murderous robbers against another band of murderous robbers. Every human army you can think of robs and pillages, even till today. If you give the average man a gun and a sanction to kill, he will turn into the worst beast you've ever seen.

However, nature also had limiting principle for that sort of behaviour. Even murderous psychopathic robbers had to cooperate with one another. They had to raise their children in a roughly sane environment. They had to have wives, and they couldn't spend all their time protecting their families while in the gang.

Hence, societal moralities and norms are born. Gangs that didn't find an amicable solution to living and existing together simply died off. Therefore only groups who knew how to be extremely aggressive to outsiders and still balance that aggressiveness within the in-group survived.

We see evidence of this societal structuring in every human society. Cannibals often ate outsiders, groups that sacrificed people often sacrificed outsiders, and groups that genocide others often found self restraint when it came to internal skirmishes.

Perhaps an even clearer example of this sort of in-group/out-group framing is obvious in our behaviour towards animals. From the point of view of animals, we are nothing but crazy murderers. The pain we inflict on animals is obviously incompatible with the liberal shibboleth which essentially makes all of us medical doctors by chanting the slogan “do no harm”. We obviously inflict a lot of harm on animals, and there are many organizations dedicated to showing us that.

But we simply don't care, because we don't consider animals to be part of the in-group to which our rules apply. It's the same way the Binis wouldn't have cared about the agonies of their neighbours, or the Romans would have ignored the screams of non-Romans. It's for that same reason that a Southern Evangelical may be a raging racist but still a fairly good Christian. He understands the principle of “love your neighbor” — he just doesn't think the Chinaman, or the Jew, or the Nigger, is his neighbour. (Or worthy of being his neighbour, at any rate).

This is exactly what we would expect of morality if it were merely an in-group survival tactic.

This isn't a novel idea. The consensus amongst evolutionary psychologists is that human morality is a result of evolution. Humans value bravery because cowardly societies die off. Humans value kindness because unkind societies internally combust. Humans value selflessness because without it men would be unwilling to give their lives for the society.

These common strands of values that all human societies have isn't evidence of a divine lawgiver, just as common strands of behaviour that Chimpanzees have isn't evidence of a Chimp God.

Here is a practical example. Human mothers are extremely protective of their children. Every human society has, in some way or the other, norms and values that uplifts and praises the labours of child birth. Every human society understands the special relationship that exists between mother and child. Hence, every human society views mothers who kill their new borns as evil.

To someone like C.S Lewis, this is merely evidence that God doesn't want women to kill their children so he gave them human beings instincts that prevents that. However, when one looks at it from an evolutionary perspective, the reason is obvious; societies that don't encourage women to give birth but instead encourages women to kill their children will soon disappear. One can only assume that a few societies such as that may have existed. But it's obvious that they will not stick around for long. That's evolution for you.

Another example is psychopathy. Psychopathy probably evolved as a means for certain humans to prey on their societies (it could also be a naturally occuring human defect that's just advantageous), but despite the advantageous properties of psychopathy it's difficult to find a society where psychopaths are the majority. That's because a human society full of psychopaths basically doesn't survive past a few years. Everyone kills everyone else in search of narrow individualistic goals.

This mechanism is probably how humans evolved empathy. Most of human morality, or moral instincts, as it were, is tied to our ability to empathize with others. We find it hard to get violent without moral justification because we don't want people to get violent without moral justification at us. It's like Jesus and many others have said; the golden rule is to do unto others what others do unto you.

Almost every human society that you can think of has a version of this rule. But this isn't because a golden law giver wrote it into our genes. It's because human empathy evolved in humans to allow us build large societies. It also probably helped parents go through the tedious work of raising a child to adulthood. Humans that didn't have the ability to empathize with their children and/or be patient with them would probably kill said child before adulthood, therefore failing at reproduction. Hence, humans that could empathise with their children were more reproductively successful and had more children.

Therefore, the probable evolution of human morality has an even better explanation for our so-called shared moral baselines than a divine law giver. We weren't given divine law by a God — we evolved certain attitudes to deal with the logistics of being human. You'll notice that this ties up with the points of the previous sections.

Human morality is inextricably tied to human emotions, which is also tied to human self-interest, which is a product of human evolution. We follow and invent moral rules because it helps our species survive better in this jungle of a world. In that sense, even moral principles themselves are utilitarian in nature. The principle didn't evolve, as it were, in a vacuum. It evolved because it helped.

Cavalier Beliefs and Some Questions

This section should be obvious, but I'm writing it because this is the last I want to write on this matter. It's ordinarily obvious that human societies don't have the same moral laws. Despite what I've written in the last section, human moral laws are dramatically different. In some societies it's the worst thing in the world to slap a woman, and in others you can slap one on national television. In others women develop slowly and are only ripe for sexual adventures at 18, and in others you can jolly well have your way at 9.

You may wonder that if morality merely describes attitudes that are evolutionarily successful for humans, why do so many human societies have such different ones. And what do some of these attitudes have to do with surviving? Some, you may say, seem actually quite useless indeed. Another question you may ask is that human morality has seen a lot of changes in the past hundred years (with the Geneva suggestions and all that); does that make any difference in our ability to survive?

First, the fact that human society evolved morality to deal with one another in an amicable manner doesn't mean that human morality will be the same. There are essentially limitless equations that can give you X = 100, and many of them are needlessly complex and, perhaps in your estimation, quite retarded. But that doesn't matter as long as they arrive at the same answer.

Secondly, human societies don't just exist to live, drink, eat and fuck. Different societies are optimized for different goals. And their norms will reflect that. Societies thay believe in white supremacy (or supremacy of any race, really), will view race mixing as immoral and so on and so forth.

In essence there are just too many variables involved for morality to be defined solely as norms that are evolutionarily successful. Yes, all moral norms are generally evolutionarily successful, but evolutionary success isn't always the reason why certain societies choose certain norms. Some are chosen by mistake, some are chosen because certain subgroups in society have power, and others just continue because no one has the balls to put an end to them.

Morality Is Ultimately Fake (and Gay)

Now that I've done the hard work of explaining all my premises, it's time to make my point.

There is no such thing as objective morality. Moral rules are generally speaking inventions of society based on evolutionary need. We feel strong moral urges, not because God has hardwired our brains to feel them, but because we've been indoctrinated into them and because genes optimized for those rules were passed on to us by our ancestors.

As such, it's stupid to worship those moral rules themselves. What's important, in my estimation, is the consequences of those rules. Since those moral principles were invented for utilitarian needs in the first instance (and the ones that weren't can be safely ignored).

That's why I'm a moral utilitarian. I follow moral principles because of their consequences. Once the principle doesn't lead to the goal, I abandon it. (For instant why should I be honest to dishonest people? I will be crooked to crooked people, and I will defraud fraudsters). The end, to me, will always justify the means.

But what about my moral goals? Simply saying I'm a moral utilitarian doesn't explain how I reach my moral values. For example, why do I think that a genocide or rape are bad things? The answer, again, is simple.

These things are A) unpalatable to me by virtue of genes passed onto me by thousands of years of evolution B) years of social indoctrination have done their work on me and C) my brain is still a dopamine optimizing machine, and I know that for me to get the most exotic sort of dopamine I can get out of this life, society has to exist in some way. Since I am smart enough to know that moral principles (generally speaking, of course) have the utilitarian purposes of building functional societies where people like me can pursue certain goals in peace, I have a lot of incentives to have the same moral goals dictated to me by society (or such societies that I believe help me achieve my goals).

To round up, let us consider this moral question by Twitter idiot Richard Hanania.

For the utilitarian (depending on whether they believe prosperity is more important than underage sex), the answer is simple; yes, this should be legal.

For the deontologist, the answer is simple; no, this shouldn't be legal.

For me, the answer is simple; no, because even though the child and the parents may gain from this arrangement, it creates a society where the richest can nakedly pay to commit whatever crimes they want, and this will ultimately be bad for social cohesion.

There's no quote for this newsletter.