null god blog

Ethics and the Moral Compass

Which comes first?

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time, which is why it's so long! But the thing that finally kicked me into gear was this question I heard recently, as sort of a "checkmate, atheists!" riddle.

A man with a horrible genetic disease, who is wheelchair-ridden, accidentally rolls into the flow of vehicle traffic. A healthy guy sees this, and starts running to save the man in the wheelchair. As the seconds stretch by in slow motion, it rapidly becomes clear that the healthy man won't have time to get out of the way, after pushing the other to safety. So this is a question of whether to sacrifice his life for the man in the wheelchair.

Most of us will still say, instinctually, "that sacrifice is noble", but purely from a gene pool perspective, it's not a good trade. So if we define morality in terms of the genetic wellbeing of the species, the sacrifice is immoral. If you don't get your morality from God, then why should we have any standard other than this harsh utilitarian morality?

For what it's worth, I don't think the person presenting the riddle was asking in bad faith, in the original context. But I think it's actually a pretty good demonstration (unintentionally) of how a religious perspective can be so locked into looking at a problem from one direction, that it's impossible to imagine the secular perspective, which tackles the problem by thinking about it from the opposite direction. So I'd like to present my backwards way of thinking!

If we consider our moral intuition to be a product of our worldview, which is the Christian approach demonstrated in the riddle (and very reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox), then it looks like there's either a big hole in our "source of morality" area, or something really fishy-smelling, like genetic utilitarianism. But if we consider our moral intuition to be our tool for vetting worldviews, everything becomes pretty clear:

As a kid, I was taught that the heart is fickle and misleading - and it can be, like when you think that if you just got a raise you life would be perfect, etc. But I think it was specifically discredited, as a set of sanity checks of my belief system, because no belief system is perfect, and none of them (definitely not the one I was raised in) will stand up to my moral intuition all the time, in all scenarios. Ultimately, we have a very good natural instinct for right and wrong, which will tend to undermine our faith in not only specific belief systems, but the utopian mirage of any belief system being perfect. So a truly effective belief system may find that it has to kill off your natural moral immune system, in order to keep you subscribed.

The Cobbler and the Genie

Once upon a time, back when shoe repair was a profitable industry, and all the magic lamps hadn't been bought up by private collectors (yet), there lived a fellow named Fulvio, and he repaired shoes for anyone who came into his shop, as long as they had the cash on hand. He wasn't rich, but he made a good living, and that was good enough.

But one day, a nobleman hurried into the shop, face ashen, the way a person might look if they were trying to keep up appearances while fleeing a pack of wolves, or perhaps a mother-in-law. Fulvio watched the man shuffle out of his shoes, then stuff some gleaming object into the left loafer. The nobleman then slammed the shoes on the counter, demanding, "HOW much?"

Fulvio frowned in confusion, and began listing prices by habit. "Well, for a simple polish it'll only be a florin. For a more thorough repair..."

The nobleman interrupted brusquely "Excellent, keep the shoes!", tossing a handful of florins in Fulvio's face. By the time Fulvio had stopped blinking and rubbing his cheeks, his customer had escaped into the busy streets, presumably in his socks. This was long before the age of movie stars melting down in public, so at the time, such behavior was still considered highly unusual.

Naturally, Fulvio looked into the left shoe straight away, and pulled out something that looked very much like a shiny, squat-proportioned watering can. In fact, the entire thing was supremely glossy, except for a single errant smudge on the side...

Before his brain had even caught up with his arm, Fulvio had begun wiping at the smudge with his shirt sleeve, and while the smudge did not buff out, it was quickly forgotten, as an enormous blue specter wooshed out the end of the artifact. Fulvio dropped it, startled, and the metal clanged on the floor. The ghostly figure cracked his knuckles and looked around the room. Then, in an unsettlingly monotone voice, he introduced himself as

I AM AQIDAH.

I AM A GENIE.

I AM TASKED WITH MAKING THE WORLD INTO A GOOD PLACE.

"That, ahhhh..." croaked Fulvio, "that certainly sounds important, Mr. Aqidah, sir..."

IT IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE TO MY MAKER, SO IT IS IS OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE TO ME.

BUT IT IS AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, FOR WHILE I CAN BEND REALITY INTO ANY SHAPE, I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS GOOD.

"That certainly would be... a problem... how can you not know what goodness is, sir, if you don't mind me asking?"

EVERYONE ASKS ME THAT, AT FIRST.

BUT EVERY PERSON THAT EXPLAINS GOODNESS TO ME, EXPLAINS A DIFFERENT THING FROM THE LAST PERSON, AND I HAVE NEVER HEARD QUITE THE SAME DEFINITION TWICE.

EVEN WORSE, THESE MORTALS KEEP CHANGING THEIR ANSWER, AND SO ARE NOT EVEN CONSISTENT WITH THEMSELVES! AS I SAID, IT IS AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK.

"Beg your pardon, but that seems a bit defeatist, especially for someone of such phenomenal cosmic power as yourself. I could try to help you. I don't know that I'll do any better than the other folks you talked to, but it's worth a try, isn't it?"

VERY WELL.

WHAT DOES A GOOD WORLD LOOK LIKE TO YOU?

"Well, how about a world where nobody gets hurt?"

WHERE IT WOULD BE A CRIME TO CAUSE PAIN TO OTHERS?

I SHALL DESTROY ANY PERSON WHO BREAKS THE HEART OF ANOTHER.

PAINLESSLY.

Fulvio's own heart had rapidly shifted into sixth gear, and seemed to be reaching for a seventh that wasn't even printed on the gearshift.

"Oh no no no no, that's probably going too far, then. Maybe don't criminalize it, but it's impossible to be hurt or killed."

I SHALL MAKE ALL MANKIND INVULNERABLE, AND THEY SHALL OVERRUN THE EARTH.

THE DROWNING SHALL NEVER FIND PEACE, THE TRAPPED SHALL NEVER BE FREE, AND MEN'S HEARTS SHALL BE AS STONE.

"Well there's a lot to unpack there, but let's start with not getting rid of human emotions..."

I THINK THAT MAKES YOU IMPOSSIBLE TO PROTECT, BUT PERHAPS IF I REMOVE YOUR EYES, YOUR EARS...

"Stop! Cazzo! Now I understand why you've had so much trouble with humans, and that nobleman had so much trouble with you. How long did you two put up with each other?"

A FULL WEEK.

"Che palle, I would have guessed on a matter of minutes to hours. Perhaps it's a lost cause to try to protect humanity from all suffering, but suffering's still not a good thing. So we must find some sort of common sense compromise between the prevention of suffering, and unraveling everything it means to be a human being."

COMMON SENSE!

NOW THAT IS A TERM I HEAR FROM EVERY PERSON I'VE MET, AND YET PEOPLE STRUGGLE TO EXPLAIN IT TO ME, JUST AS HELPLESSLY AS THEY STRUGGLE TO EXPLAIN GOODNESS.

I HAVE BEGUN TO THINK THAT SUCH A THING DOES NOT EXIST, AND IS JUST ANOTHER IN A LONG LINE OF JOKES THE GODS ARE USING TO TEASE ME.

"Well, I can promise it exists, but yes, I can certainly see how it would be hard to pin down, in a way you might understand it. Maybe that's what my role is, here. I have common sense and some ideas of goodness, but since you have neither, all I can really do is shoot down ideas that violate my intuitive understanding."

THEN THERE IS NO POINT IN SEARCHING FOR A SET OF RULES FOR GOODNESS.

PERHAPS THE MOST GOOD THING I CAN DO IS SIMPLY END THIS ABSURD WORLD.

"No, no! I think you're probably right, that there's no one set of rules, no matter how finely crafted, that really captures goodness in every possible scenario. But that doesn't make a good life a lost cause. Rules can help me stick to my principles, especially in difficult situations, but my principles - my fuzzy, broad conception of goodness - have to keep my rules in check as well."

SO I AM THE RULES, YOU ARE THE PRINCIPLES, AND THUS YOU MAKE YOURSELF MY MASTER.

FROM WHENCE DO YOU COME, AND WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR AUTHORITY TO BE KING OVER GENIES?

"I'm nobody special, or at least nobody of particular note. But my name is Fulvio Castello. I fix the hell out of shoes. I come from a long line of Castellos, and they came from a long line of something else, and somewhere in that long chain of begats, we figured out how to get along with people, in ways we could be proud of, so we wouldn't all have to be constantly watching our backs. Generation after generation, our values have been polished by our circumstances. I've inherited more than I'm even capable of explaining, and if that makes me qualified to keep you in check, then I'm the guy."

YOU MUST KNOW THAT I WILL NEVER STOP SEARCHING FOR A CONCRETE SET OF RULES TO MOLD THE WORLD BY.

"I figured. But for now, let's settle for live and let live, and see how that goes."

FINE.

Thus was Fulvio the first person to tame Adiqah the Genie. Many tried. Many felt like they were the finger in the dike, holding back a magic demise for the world, and held on for agonizing days before tossing the lamp into someone else's backyard. But in the end, it took a long line of Castellos (and whoever they came from) to put the matter to rest...

... for now.

Ethical Frameworks vs. the Moral Compass

Ultimately, we all have some innate cues to what is right and wrong. This is our Moral Compass - it can't always give us clear answers what to do, but it can act as a system of sanity checks.

We also have some concept of how the world works, which includes more formal ideas of right and wrong - and that specific "right and wrong" part is our Ethical Framework. It can help us make decisions in scenarios that are too complicated for the Moral Compass alone, and it can be really valuable for helping us practice what we preach. It is also a simplified model of reality - ethical frameworks tend to be very clear-cut and self-consistent, in a way the real world isn't. They're not inherently bad, but we tend to treat them with more trust than they deserve.

In the story, Fulvio represents the Moral Compass. He has a good innate sense of "the right thing to do", but struggles to find an Ethical Framework that ticks all his boxes.

Likewise, Aqidah represents the Ethical Framework. He likes consistent rules, and simple stories about what an ideal world would look like (and how to get there). Unfortunately, without being bounded by the common sense and empathy of a Moral Compass, it's capable of justifying outright atrocities.

Does the Moral Compass come from God?

I've known people who are on the same page, that we have a pretty good gut sense of right and wrong, but credit it to God. This is better than not having common ground at all, but I still have a few reasons I would agree to disagree with this mindset.

It's part of the damaging practice of bucketing...

...where you credit all good things to God, all bad things to Satan, and then look at the buckets you filled and say "look at all this evidence of God and Satan!"

I'm going to do a whole page on this eventually, but bucketing tends to be a replacement of reality with patterns we want to see, which is pretty contrary to a "truth, no matter what" stance.

What happens to a moral compass if you "separate from God"?

Generally, if you ask someone in religion, you'll get all sorts of answers:

The most dramatic and ill-thought-out answer (instant loss of moral compass) is easily ruled out in one question.

If you found out, purely hypothetically, that every godly thing you'd ever been taught was just made up by people, a complete hoax... would you go out and eat babies, or swindle people? (No... huh, no I wouldn't)

Some of the squishier ones can be ruled out with a little global awareness, although this won't work in cases of indoctrinated xenophobia:

Are people who grow up in other religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, necesarily weak-willed or ignorant of basic moral behavior? (No, that's not what I've seen, and their societies would fall apart if that were true).

Which just leaves "God touches everyone". But this is a null god stance! What's the observable difference between "God puts a moral compass into everybody's heart" and "everybody is born with one, because we've developed as a social species since the first humans"? There isn't one, it's the same outcome. If we have multiple potentially valid explanations, then what makes the God explanation true?

Is God a good match for our intuitive Moral Compass?

God does a lot of things that you can only really justify by overriding your compass with an Ethical Framework. Stuff like:

Normally, my point might just be "look at God doing these sketchy things, that's sketchy." But here, there's an even more alarming thing to recognize. If God is the source of our moral compass, then why does it not align with God's behavior? If these things are cruel and immoral by God's instrument in our hearts... if God is morally inadequate according to his own standards... that throws a hell of a lot of stuff into question. Even if your panicked reaction is "maybe my heart is unholy and deceptive" (which it shouldn't be, seeing as it's taking the "mass murder is bad" side), it's pretty hard to escape some sort of conclusion that our Moral Compass does not match God's signature.

The problem of the Broken Compass

If you've been thinking along, you've probably been wondering for awhile about the people who don't seem to demonstrate any understanding of right and wrong, who don't even have a moral compass to suppress. Sociopaths are a fact of life - we share the earth with them, whether we like them or not, and they tend to fill up a lot of management positions. So if my position is to advocate taking intuitive morality more seriously as a way to navigate the world of ethical frameworks, what does that mean or lead to, in a world with broken compasses? Can anybody actually trust these things?

Well, most people can, in the same way that we don't seriously worry about whether reality is a hologram (or other philosophical charade). Brain defects exist, but your individual chances of having some inherently defective moral compass are incredibly tiny. There's not a lot of reason to be a hypochondriac. If you had a defective moral compass, you'd have probably noticed long before now.

But in case I do have any sociopathic readers out there: it sucks that empathy is not a natural part of your brain. Obviously that's going to make it harder to relate to the rest of us. I expect it's easy to feel superior or unburdened, but also a bit lonely, living in a world with just you and cardboard cutouts. I can tell you that even if you don't have access to the narratives walking around you, they matter. So if you can put yourself in other people's shoes with deliberate effort, you might find the effort worthwhile. And if nothing else, then for your own sake, don't be a menace to society - society reeaaally frowns on that.

All this aside, most defective compasses don't come from being born unlucky.

Bending the needle

Imagine you meet a group of people. What they're saying makes sense, they're presenting an ethical framework that's really working for you, but then BAM! "Left handed people are abominations, and must be shunned."

Well, crap! You're friends with some left-handed people, and they're perfectly nice. Nothing seemed amiss. But now you're getting into this group, and this is part of their enlightened worldview, so you gotta pick a side.

You pick the group. It's really uncomfortable at first, but the discomfort sands off over time. You internalize the disgust for lefties. For the sake of approval and cameraderie, you have bent the needle of your moral compass, until the group's ethical framework doesn't bother you anymore - it might even seem pretty nice. Now, even if you leave for another group, you'll be assessing it with a bent needle. You've warped yourself - and you are the one thing you'll be carrying around with you for the rest of your life.

It can be even worse if you're raised in a group like this. You're still developing your moral compass, and dependent on your family to keep you loved and alive. It's very natural to mold yourself into a shape that fits well in your group's theology, bending and twisting yourself, when you're far too young to defend yourself from that pressure.

This situation is not as hopeless as it sounds. People have escaped from the Westboro Baptist Church, that were raised in that environment. You may have a lot of healing to do, but you'll never heal even a little unless you start healing - getting free of the pressure to be a warped, compatible human being; seeking help; seeking perspectives you've never heard before. This isn't easy, but it's totally doable.

Consequences of viral ethical frameworks

Every major ethical disaster has, ironically, been perpetrated on the back of some dangerously flawed worldview - and just as importantly, a dangerously flawed worldview believed en masse. The Nazis believed the Jews were evil, selfish, ultimately inhuman - that the world would ultimately thank them for getting rid of the "problem people". I'm sure it felt wrong to a lot of Germans, but ultimately, enough people allowed an ethical framework they matched 90%, to bend them to fit that last 10%. And that was enough to mass-murder Jewish families, sterilize gay men, and do all of the above to black people.

Now, a single jerk isn't that powerful. But if he spreads his worldview - and these are usually designed to spread, to look good on the surface, and then push you to change for the last 10% - his flawed ethical framework is now multiplied in its power, including recruitment.

This is how African countries that used to be quite at peace with their homosexual population, became violent civil rights offenders, within a generation of Christian missionaries setting up shop there. Human beings are dying because some particularly angry version of Christianity got its way.

I know it can be very abstract, talking about frameworks and compasses, and it doesn't sound like anything worth killing or dying over. But these are abstract terms for things that people are already killing and dying for daily. Bad frameworks destroy the values of entire civilizations, and civilizations with corrupted values tend to perpetrate immense scales of evil on the world.

As much as we have to be skeptical of even a single good framework really being comprehensive enough to trust, we have to be immensely more wary of frameworks that:

Some final notes

There are a few reasons this subject was so personally important to me. Otherwise, I would have written one of my more typical short posts.

I feel very strongly that religion hijacked my natural desire to be a good person, which never actually went away, no matter what I believed. By defining goodness in very selfish, careless ways, the church trapped me in a deep unhappiness for most of my life. Growing up, goodness felt unattainable, because God promised to help but never did - and feeling this way, without an outlet, was a big factor in wanting to kill myself. I had to give up on being a good person at all, and accept myself as a bad person, before being able to reavaluate my definition of goodness. If I had grown up under a less demented set of requirements, I could have accepted myself from a much younger age.

But recently, this mindset has solved one of the big issues weighing on my mind. It would be nice to raise a kid someday, but as an atheist, I struggle with the dillema:

  1. If my kid grows up and identifies as an atheist, did I raise a free thinker, or did I just repeat the errors of my own parents by shoehorning my kid down my own preferred path?
  2. If my kid grows up and identifies as being in whichever religion, did I fail to convey the dangers of ideological sinkholes, or did I raise someone capable of making independent informed choices (regardless of my opinion)?

There seems to be no way to win, or even to tease out the difference between success and failure. It was only when I started looking at it through the lens of the "moral compass vs. ethical framework" dichotomy that I saw an answer... and it was surprisingly clear and obvious.

Frameworks, religions - those aren't what matters. Make sure you teach your kid good principles. They'll pick some up on their own too. If their moral compass is healthy, and they know not to compromise on it, they'll find their own way in the worldviews and the whatnot. The important thing is to teach them good principles, and challenge them to live by their principles, no matter where that leads them. That's how I know I raised a good one. An atheist or Christian or Buddhist little buddy I could be damned proud of, and never feel like I got a B+ in parenting. That's the kind of light I want to bring into the world.

Not sure what the next post should be, but hopefully something lighter and shorter, because holy guacamole.