Moral Agents Choose Freely

Introduction

While this article may be somewhat redundant, it is important to distinguish morals from mores. In recent books and the news media, I perceive a massive confusion of these two things. This may indicate the common meaning of "morality" is changing, or that the notion of social custom is misunderstood or lost.

I have to insist on the difference, even if it is expressed in a different vocabulary ...

The fundamental issue is whether voluntary choice is required in moral behavior. My answer to this question is definitely "yes." On my view, behavior that is not initiated by voluntary choice is just not moral; it is amoral. Amoral behavior is often expressed as personal habits or social rituals. There are informal, usually unwritten, social guidelines which I have called "mores." Another term for the same thing is "custom."

Merriam-Webster (MW) defines "mores" as

the fixed morally binding customs of a particular group
moral attitudes
habits, manners

MW's non-economic definition of "custom" is

1 a : a usage or practice common to many or to a particular place or class or habitual with an individual b : long-established practice considered as unwritten law c : repeated practice d : the whole body of usages, practices, or conventions that regulate social life

MW's suggested synonym of "custom" is "habit." The plural, "customs," is taken as meaning economic taxes or tolls imposed by an institutional agency such as government.

In reviewing my writing, I found that when I use "mores," I think of that term in MW's third sense: essentially as custom. Fortunately, I don't use "mores" much, and I don't have metaphysical qualms about language. As a firm believer in the querulous Humpty-Dumpty, socialized and generalized, words mean whatever we want them to mean. It easy enough for me to drop the term "mores" at this point, conceding it to those who wish to confuse morality with custom. My meaning is captured in the word "custom" as defined in MW.

Before dropping this small controversy, I note a confusion in MW's definition of "mores" between "moral attitudes" and "fixed morally binding customs." This confusion is not the result of using the word "customs," which is not intended as the economic plural, rather than a more neutral term, such as "rules." MW's use of "customs" in defining "mores" seems intended to point out a set of behaviors, rather than the moral implication or entailment of such behaviors. The "morally binding" in the definition seems intended to apply on the behavioral set; i.e., it is not imbedded.in the set. Otherwise, if there is some implicit morality in customs, "morally binding" would be superfluous. That is, there must be two things: the behavior and the moral binding of (judgement about) behavior. This moral binding must be the same sort of thing as "moral attitudes" in the second definition. Behavior is included in the "habits, manners" of the third definition. Interpreting MW's definitions this way separates behavior and judgements in a way that makes sense of the various uses. That is, the second and third meanings are decompositions of the first meaning, where the most common use jumbles everything together in a fuzzy set.

It is not mistaken to attach morality to voluntary choice, as we can see by considering responsiblity. While it is trivially true that the one who does something is responsible for the act, the physical fact is not a value judgement about the fact. When we say a person is morally or legally responsible, we don't mean only that the person did it. We also mean the person intended to do it. The person selected this particular act from a range of possible acts, and then performed this one. (I use the word "performed" to avoid the question whether what was done was an act of commission or ommission; it could be either.)

We don't attribute moral or legal responsibility in the sense of assigning blame for cause, when someone does what is expected. That is, the person who unthinkingly follows social norms is not blamed Also, the person who could not avoid doing what happened cannot be blamed. If the car goes into a skid during a sudden heavy downpour and crashes into another car, there will be an inquiry, not an instant judgement. If the driver was obeying all relevant traffic rules, the driver's insurance company will probably have to pay off the victim's claims, but no legal citation will be issued. In other words, we might award a claim upon determination that A struck B, but that claim has no further legal or moral entailment because A was, as it were, a bystander in a happening. In that sort of case, both A and B may have a claim against the car manufacturer or service providers, if a mechanical defect or other negligence is identified as the cause of the accident. In this last case, third parties, unseen and not present at the accident, may be morally and legally culpable.

Accidents and obedience to rules show that morality is not a passive business. It is active. Passivity is what exempts rocks, plants and machines from moral consideration. They are just there, being what they are. In the case of plants and machines, they just do what they do, without thought or feeling. Morality is something that requires an active mode, which seems to be the exclusive possession of animals, particularly the very complex animals most recently evolved. Even if we attribute moral action to a nematode, it is not on account of any moral capacity it has, but must be the result of some third party's connivance. That is, we do not believe most simple animals have the ability to make moral decisions, so, if they perform in a moral setting, they must have been put up to it by creatures who are morally responsible. The same sort of reasoning applies to cars that fail, as shockingly documented by Ralph Nader in Unsafe At Any Speed.

But, is this not in conflict with the Nurembeg Rule, that following orders is not a sufficient defense against a charge of criminal liability? The escape valve is this: if the actor does not have the ability to make moral decisions, it may be exempted. The driver trapped in a runaway car, most animals, plants and rocks are not morally liable for damages, because they are only involved in processes over which they have no substantial control. They are, in effect, naive bystanders in a world run amok. Nevetheless, those judging the situation might alter or terminate those passive participants. For example, a car might be sent to the crusher if it has an irreparable steering mechanism, or a man eating tiger mght be imprisoned or slaughtered. The trapped driver's insurance company is going to raise premiums, not because of guilt, but because of the fact of claims. The moral logic of punishment handed out in these cases is that intelligent agents are entitled to limit damages to themselves (pursue their own survival) by controlling the factors inimical to them. That is, this is a defensive reaction against things estimated to cause harm in the future. People who followed wicked orders without thinking about them fall in this category. The Nuremberg defendants were considered morally and legally culpable to the extent that they knowingly committed crimes, but they were still punishable, even if not culpable, to the extent that they constitued a future danger. Thus, Goering, knowing his guilt and unrepentant, committed suicide, others were hung, and many others served prison sentences. Responsibility is measured and allocated by degrees.

This assignment of responsibility by degrees is one source of the confusion in mores of custom and morality. There is what is done, and then there is responsibility for what is done. When one just behaves unthinkingly according to custom, it might be like the case of the trapped driver. The custom might be immoral; for example, anti-semitism has been a widely held attitude in Europe and Russia that often led to pogroms. But the judgement of morality remains different from the act itself, reflecting that morality applies to moral agents, not their doings.

It is unfortunate that, in considering Moral Agents, we are reduced to a sort of duality, a duality of physical, observable Nature and mental, subjective processes. I think this is unavoidable, but that is the way we are made, the way it is. Our consciousness, intelligence and ability to make choices are unavoidable facts of Homo sapiens, which implies those things are also part of Nature. One important difference between the mental and the physical is that the physical is observed by the mental; i.e., some physical things can be so constructed as to record the doings of other physical things. Conscious beings can even observe themselves, if only truthfully with difficulty. We can use the reports of others to gain knowledge of ourselves, provided we have the ability to evaluate those reports. (Remember, moral agents can do wrong and tell lies as well as do right and tell the truth.)

The subjective-objective duality need not be parallel universes, as in Descartes' cogito or religious teachings or superstitious beliefs about souls. After all, your subjective is my observation: I can see and hear and feel what you do. It is only I or you or other subjective beings who are confused by the self-conscousness "I." That "I" seems to have a privileged position with respect to what I do. It gets reports presumed to be direct, immediate and undeniable of what's going in and around myself. But that presumption is possibly arrogant or even false, as Freud and others discovered. The conscious ego is only one component of the psyche. There may also be an id and superego, or the pysche may be composed of different elements in ways we have not yet discovered. There is still no need to posit a mental being corresponding to the "I," as we are on our way to "explaining away" that I. The difficulty is reflexivity, not mental processes. In the last few years, neurophysiologists have been conducting experiments that show that how our brains process different situations and feelings. We are getting to the point of explaining my seeing red as the co-ordinated activity of millions of neurons in my brain. In the same way, my feelings of love or hate correlate with neural activities. This does not mean that the particular neural pattern is the some thing as red or green, right or wrong, as those qualities and values are concepts in their own languages. The neural pattern generates and processes that language, including the higher order organizations we call concepts. This is a difficult distinction, but the duality of the mental and physical is not a duality of our biology, it is not observable by taking pictcures of brains in action. The mental is a derived characteristic of brain behavior, a theory about how the brain works. What makes this hard to understand is that it is the brain itself which formulates the theory.

When our neurons present the world to us, we see it as one thing. We don't see a collection of chairs, tables, doors, cars and roads taken separately. We see them integrated into a single continuous picture. Based on our scientific knowledge, that picture must be a lie because at the bottom of everything are only quantized probabilities. It would be more accurate to see my computer as clouds of things (whatever they are) buzzing about, coalescing at times into familiar outlines. In the same way, our brains present ourselves as the integrated whole, the I, rather than as e.e. cummings' booming, buzzing confusion. The argument here is simple enough: I, You and It are trompe d'oeil, concoctions of neurons in the brain.

There is just one metaphysical reality, the being of the Universe in which we are included. One subset of that Universe functions in a peculiar way, making it seem there is another, mental Universe. This is not unusual at all. One way to think about it is our brains live in a Hall of Mirrors. Even though the images we see in the mirrors seem distorted in ways we cannot even guess, and we are unable to grasp them or ourselves, it is still useful for ourselves to talk about what we see and hear. It is useful to play along with the joke, as long as we maintain a sense of humor about our reality.

Introduction
While this article may be somewhat redundant, it is important to distinguish morals from mores. In recent books and the news media, I perceive a massive confusion of these two things. This may indicate the common meaning of "morality" is changing, or that the notion of social custom is misunderstood or lost. I have to insist on the difference, even if it is expressed in a different vocabulary ...