In experimental ethics we finished up discussing The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce. It's a truly great book which I'd recommend to anyone. For one thing, it debunks the notion that human beings are "naturally evil" by explaining how our morality enabled us as a species to survive, and how our intensions are inherently moral ones. I knew most of that stuff already (thanks Kropotkin! - as you would figure) but it was quite fun to hear it being reinforced by a contemporary author. What Joyce concludes though is that, because human beings already have a sense of morality inside them, what we call "moral facts" are no longer necessary. In other words, debating standards of ethics is pretty useless. What a change from these fundie Christians, fundie Muslims, and fundie statists who all insist we need a stick over our heads (be it God or the state) to stop us from killing each other! We spent the last half hour of class debating this very notion: is ethics ultimately obsolete? A friend of mine, who happens to hold similar political views to myself, argued the opposite, that human beings do need to come up with moral outlines and standards of right and wrong since human beings have done pretty shitty things to each other in the past. And he is right about that. In a sense, I don't think that the answer to this lies with looking towards certain ideologies or laws, but rather institutions. Yes, I know I sound like Chomsky, but it makes perfect sense. What I think back to is Zimbardo's prison experiment, which we talked about earlier in the course: good kids did horrible things when they were given a certain role. The same is true of our society; our morality is still there, but as soon as we're placed in a role which gives us dominance over others, say, our moral judgement will be fucked up beyond belief. Put people in a system where greed is the bottom line, or power is the bottom line, and they will do extremely harmful things to others which they wouldn't have done if they were living in an environment based on mutuality and reciprocity. Building new institutions appears to be a much better idea than trying to shove your philosophy down others' throats for one thing. Although within this I will admit that I do hold my own personal beliefs on ethics: instead of always striving to do the "right" thing, we should be focused on shaping our relationships with others around us and what our behaviors and decisions mean within that context (at least in my view anyway). Maybe that's another reason why our society has been going down the toilet for centuries: we're always trying to appease that "stick" instead of looking at each other.But the fundamental question which we were nearly getting at is much greater. It's actually a question we talk about all the time: will science - natural or social - eventually replace philosophy (or religion)? Does evolutionary psychology or anthropology show us that we don't really need to be going over ethics since we already know what we ought or ought not to do (for example)? Or do the natural sciences really explain the world so well that we no longer need to talk metaphysics and ask why things exist or exist in the manner they do? I tend to think of it like this: what makes philosophers different from anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, economists, mathematicians, and those who study the natural sciences like biologists and physicists? I'd say it's the simple fact that philosophers go beyond and try to see the deeper meaning in everything. It's one thing to study nature and human society; it's another to take a look at nature and human society and ask what the deeper implications of our societal makeup and behaviors are (which is the main reason I'd highly suggest that everyone in higher education - especially those studying the social sciences - study philosophy as well; you will start seeing the world through a much different lens). The natural and social sciences may tell us how certain things happen, but they may not tell us why; that age-old question about the "meaning of life" can never be fully answered. And let's face it: as we continue to study the social and natural sciences we are always finding ourselves with way more questions than answers. All the time we encounter phenomena we can't explain using traditional scientific methods. It's crazy!
3 comments:
In your endless tired restatements of Socialist dogma, you have often cited the "immorality" of property.
I found this which points out the immorality of trying to ban property, and I thought that maybe you might read it.
http://mises.org/daily/5738
Once again, Rothbard's arguments are completely ridiculous and rely heavily on semantics. I hate resorting to anthropology (and therefore naturalistic fallacies) but did he ever consider the fact that societies held lands in common since the beginning of eternity and took care of the lands much better than absentee landlords do?
No one is trying to "ban" property. Anarchists simply want to change the standard of ownership from one of entitlement to one of occupancy and active personal use. Tell me how you'd be able to hold on to 10 acres of land without a state there to grant you the "rights" to own and exclude others from that land. Granted, my views would change if you could find me a few stateless societies which had absentee landlordism.
"Stateless societies also tend to be without markets." - David Graeber, "Debt: the First 5,000 Years" pg. 50
By the way, for my senior philosophy thesis I'm actually writing about the way a money and private property-driven society results in us holding pretty shitty epistemological paradigms and does a lot to destroy our natural morality (much like what I talked about on this post). Once again, I hate to resort to anthropology and is-ought arguments but I'd try taking a look at the values and worldviews held by gift cultures and then compare them to the views our society holds.
And once again about the Rothbard article: pretty much all the anarchists I know aside from the Chomsky-worshipping reformists (who are essentially just libertarian marxists or extremely radical social democrats) view taxation as a form of theft as well. Property tax is just paying rent to the state.
For the record, I should add that New Hampshire's extremely high property tax combined with its lack of income tax are part of what keeps the poor out of the state. The fact that the state charges you so much for merely living there prevents working people from establishing themselves in the area and keeps those who do live there as permanent rent-slaves to landlords (part of the reason Nashua's poor have no way out). Whenever I hear shit like, "poverty in NH is going down," I tend to think "gentrification"/"exodus", not the extremely delusional, "oh my god NH is a totally free market capitalist society and this helps the poor like soooo much!!!"
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