Humility

Apr 03, 2006

Bertrand Russel:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

George Bush, I will assert, is not evil. By that I mean that I don't think he has any intention of destroying the world. I don't think he wants to hurt people. I think he genuinely thinks that he is doing the right thing. In fact, I think that everyone in general thinks they are doing the right thing. Our tendencies to think we are smarter than others and correct in our judgements is well documented, but I think that this hubris tends to stretch beyond the intellectual and social domain and into the moral domain as well. People think that their assessment of what is best is true, even as they make decisions that may hurt themselves and others.

The last couple of days have been frightening. Mealtime is a subject of some apprehension - initially attributable to fears of indigestion (which hasn't happened), but then out of a stronger deeper fear, one that I would have liked to claim wasn't there. I am afraid that dropping veganism takes away my moral high ground. I am dropping the most extreme (in its effects on those around me, at least) expression of my morality and joining the unwashed masses of meat eaters.

But so the question remains - how can we ever be sure that we are right? How do we know that a moral choice we make is the right one? How can we know that our political opinions in fact reflect what is best for the world? These are questions that have been batted around forever. Since the dawn of the enlightenment, philosophers have been trying and trying to prove that their morality is obligatory ("Normative", in the lingo) for all of us. DesCartes claimed that it was because God exists and He's perfect and wouldn't lie to us. Kant claimed that it was because there is a universal, transcendental "reason" that governs the whole universe, and any "reasonable" being will arrive at Kant's version of morality. Rawls claimed that the ultimate goal was to maximize the good of humanity.

Will Roby, the clear source of authority on matters of morality, offers this summary:

Look, there are two schools of ethics, a duality that replicates itself in every time from the Greeks to the current era. One we can call the utilitarian perspective: this view holds that it is the effect of one's actions that determine their moral value. The other stance we may call the Kantian viewpoint: this holds that it is the intent that decides whether an action is good or bad. Now, if you don't eat meat, you know that the actual effect of your refusal is insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and that the number of cows or pigs or whatever that suffer is not noticeably changed by your stance. But from a Kantian point of view, if you would not subject an animal to the sort of suffering that they go through under our current capitalist regime, then you should not support anything that even implies causing that sort of suffering.

Sooo... since these two schools of ethics are both seemingly true, and yet fundamentally irreconcileable... why not split the difference? Why not say, I'm doing my symbolic duty by not eating meat, but since I recognize that this makes no recognizable difference in the operations of the real world, I'm not going to deprive myself of dairy and eggs, which taste sooooo damn good and make me feel so goddamn fucking good.

From here the field of moral philosophy rapidly crumbles into back and forth arguments and nitpicking details with very little to say to advise you in actual decisions. Noone has yet managed to satisfactorily offer an account of why any moral system should be obligatory.

Lindsay McLeary:

The very concept of morality already supposes some sort of objective criteria for judging right and wrong. Otherwise what you have isn't morality...it's just FEELINGS. And `feelings', as I'm sure we can all agree, are just an evolutionary biproduct of the fight-or-flight response. They are a "vestigial tail", if you will. I'm sure that once our species leaps over the next evolutionary hurdle, we will find ourselves without these disgusting "feelings"; all of our actions will be decided on the basis of pure logic and twenty-sided dice. And on this day we will all castrate ourselves and become vegans.

So if we are left with just feelings - no objective criteria - how can we impose our views on others? How can we proselytize in good conscience? Even this moral claim, that one shouldn't preach, will likely fail under scrutiny. As right as I think I have made myself, I am no more right than anyone else. I feel like I need constant reevaluation, and a mind as open as I can possibly pry it to try to keep it from getting stale in there. Ego and hubris have a way of creeping in insidiously, as much as I would like to think otherwise.