Moral Agents

It's Your Fault

My starting point is, as always, to dispense with crazy explanations of moral behavior. The reason for this high-handed approach is simply that we will never discuss my proposals (or any other reasonable proposal) if we are forced to deal with every nut that comes along. Who are "nuts?" Unfortunately, most people: those who believe in authoritarian, supernatural or religious catechisms. I eliminate those folks from this discussion for another simple reason: they are just following their orders. There's no sense in arguing with 10 or 100 million followers of Mohammed or Jesus. They are only repeating what they think those fellows said, often hopelessly muddling the doctrine in the process. It is much simpler to deal directly with original sources.

What Jesus and Hitler have in common is their assertion that they know what is moral; that they are moral agents. In fact, what all authors of morality have in common is their self-proclaimed status as moral agents. My view is that anyone who is a moral agent starts by declaring oneself so. I think it cannot be otherwise. The empirical basis of that assertion is there is no one else around to make it so. In witnessing the moral exhortations of myself and others, I have never observed the presence of anyone or anything other than the exhorter. There are no observable gods or demons, puppet strings or ethereal connections present when someone makes an ethical decision. There is just the agent who makes the decision; i.e., the moral agent.
 

Because I fail to sense the presence of anything but the moral agent when moral matters are in process, I find it very difficult to credit those who attribute their decisions and acts to a guru or supernatural force. I believe people who make such attributions are either deluded or brainwashed. They are not "in touch" with themselves. Of course, it is possible that their "internal construction" is so different from my own or what I surmise exists in others, that they do have the claimed contact with invisible characters and forces. In this last case, it is still impossible for me to deal with them, as I am lacking the sort of equipment (translator?) that would enable rational communication.
 

In any event, I think the foregoing discussion would be avoided, and my point commonly granted, if moral agency is restated another way. In our common dealings with others, we assume each person is the author of their speech and acts; i.e., we assign responsibility to individuals. We do not blame the gods and punish Zeus for what Ziggy did last night. We do not shut away Athena and Venus because Helen said something smutty. Both in formal, legal processes and informal inter-personal relations, we hold the person accountable. The supernatural is only involved in exceptional cases when something unusual has happened. That supernatural presence has greatly diminished since ancient times, as more and more natural causes are discovered. Thus, Julius Caesar's fits were once thought signs of godly affliction, but now we know them to be epileptic seizures (a brain disorder). In modern times, it is very, very rare to allege non-natural intervention (supernatural causes) in anything that happens. This implies the gods are not imminent in our world, and that we do not expect moral behavior to be explained by supernatural intervention. In other words, the manner in which we handle our ordinary social relations rests on the assumption of personal responsibility. The de facto premise of moral agents is that they alone make their decisions. Unless they make a difference in the application, gods, demons, souls and the supernatural are dispensable per Occam's Razor.
 

Ethical Evolution
 

In my pragmatic, materialistic world, it would be very desirable to fit ethical theories with scientific theories and observations. For example, the rise of ethics should in some way be associated with the evolution of our species, generalizable to the evolution of any intelligent species. If moral agency is associated with biological evolution, there should be stages of it. Superficially, that appears to be true, as we do not usually ascribe moral behavior to animals other than ourselves. Since moral behavior is preceded by voluntary choice, it cannot appear in creatures that are fully programmed. It can only be displayed in those beings which have some discretion. Several "higher" mammals are judged so because they sometimes appear to make choices. Still, it is not customary to consider a dog's choice to chase a stick as moral in nature, as we believe it lacks an ethical component. A dog might chase the stick to please its master, or because it enjoys running about, but, as far as we can determine, it does not chase the stick because it is the right thing to do or because running is good. Our nearest relatives, chimpanzees, might make decisions based on more general considerations, but, as of this writing, that hypothesis is untestable one way or the other. It seems likely that our remote ancestors were like the chimpanzees with respect to this capacity, but this proposal is beyond our means of testing. What we do know is that creatures at earlier stages of evolution apparently did not make moral choices, and living creatures lacking our cortical organization do not make moral choices, but we believe ourselves capable of moral choices.

The foregoing paragraph is about another instance of moral agents declaring themselves, If our early ancestors were incapable of moral choice, but we now demonstrate that competence everyday, sometime between then and now we must have learned how to do it. But, did this competence appear in a day, or was it a more gradual innovation? I don't think this question can ever be answered conclusively, because there are no extant contemporary records about the discovery or invention of moral choices. Still, I think it more likely than not this competence was gradually developed in parallel with language and art, so its roots probably lie in primitive familial societies over 50,000 years ago.
 

The records we do have concerning ethics begin well after the establishment of civilizations in China, the Middle East and around the Mediterraneum. Before the likes of Socrates and Confucius, people just made their decisions without reflecting on them. If Pharaoh ordered worship at a new temple, as did Ahknaton, people just did it because Pharaoh had the power to enforce his will. The inconsistency of Ahknaton throwing out the old gods, and, later, the priests throwing out Ahknaton's deity, was not debated as it would be today. Through the ages, we have become more adept at making ethical decisions, perhaps because there is an ever-increasing accumulation of cases. The keeping of records makes possible review and exegesis, as well as preservation of differing opinions. (Records in themselves pose a further historical and ethical problem: which are true or factual, and which are opinion or possibly lies?) Thus, we can learn how people of different ages and societies solved an ethical problem, which leads to classification and generalization. The same sort of process has gone on in every other intellectual endaevor. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps.
 

It should be evident that, if ethics evolves, what rules apply at one time and place are not necessarily those applicable at another time and place. In other words, if we tie ethics to evolution, it must be relativistic. This point is easily accepted by anthropologists and others familiar with many different cultures, but often rejected by people of provincial demeanor.