Philosophy class
Jan. 17th, 2008 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaSo I'm taking another philosophy course, and am being reminded of exactly why I don't like philosophy.
There's something deeply...wrong about a situation where a philosophy described as "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" is automatically dismissed. One of my peers trotted out the trite quip about it "disregarding individuals". In comparison to what? How were the three "do good because invisible sky daddy orders it" systems before it paying more attention to people as individuals? And it's all very well to say utilitarianism disregards the minority in favor of the majority, but the only alternative is to disregard the majority in favor of the minority. THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE OBJECTING TO HERE. I'm all for supporting the minority, but there's lovely middle ground between not ignoring them and not giving them sole priority.
What's weird is that I have a really visceral reaction to pretty much every philosophical framework so far. Part of this is easy - there's a lot of sloppy reasoning because of too many assumptions, some of which aren't even necessary (all the logic chains that start off with "god says..." can have that chopped off without problem - if there's innate good, it don't matter if that's a fundamental property of reality or of God or of the invisible pink unicorn) and a lot of others that rely on tautology (it's good to do good works because good works are good) or nonsense logic (the universe is rational because god is rational, and we know god is rational because he created humans who are rational. Which logically means that animals, plants, and pebbles are also rational, having been created by god. You know, sometimes I think about how awful it was back when they could try you for heresy and stuff, and then I realize I could argue rings around them.)
But part of it was harder to nail down, because faced with explicit religion reasoning (this is right because God says so) I have nowhere near as bad a reaction.
Here's the thing - I believe people are innately moral because what we consider "moral" is what we instinctively feel. In other words, if you sit a bunch of people down and say "make a list of things it's wrong to do" they're going to start listing stuff like murder and stealing and otherwise harming others all on their own. Depending on what time you do this and their social structure, you'll have problems with this ("it's wrong to murder unless it's those guys in the other valley over there"), but they won't be fatal to society (either the two valleys generally avoid each other, at which point there's little harm done, or they get to know each other and consequently update their social code).
But - and this is really important - people won't rationally know why. Human moral codes are largely instinctive, and it's usually very hard to articulate why a given thing is wrong, because there isn't actually any objective yardstick. Our moral codes are based on what works. As fate has it, what works is "living together in a social cooperative setting", so we instinctively try for that, but it's often not clear how. We don't think "killing this person is wrong because I know him, which is generally a trait of people found in my social group, and having a large social group is important to my own survival and those of my relatives, and replacing any member of my social group is exceedingly hard, therefore I shouldn't kill him" any more than we think "I should not have sex with this person because s/he is someone who I often saw my mother raising, indicating I am likely related and therefore at risk of having unhealthy offspring should we produce children". And "I just feel this is true" tends to come out as "God says so shut up."
One of the really interesting things about religion is virtually all of them can be described as "startlingly progressive for their time". That is, you read about "an eye for an eye" and think it's horrible, then you hear that before this, it was "a life for an eye, a family for a life, a tribe for a family", and realize that the code isn't meant to be a strict punishment, it's meant to be a strict limit on punishment. Most of the traditionalist/fundamentalist problems arise from people in modern times trying to follow very old codes that are now outdated, but religion itself usually turns out to be the best attempt to articulate moral codes of the time, and it usually builds on itself. And even if a particular moral code is grossly misinformed, you can be assured it's not deadly so long as there are still believers around to tell you about it.
Philosophy tends to discard the entire framework, and that's what's dangerous.
Human morality, both genetic and cultural, is basically formed by trial and error. What works remains, what doesn't disappears. (See Christianity. From suicide cult to the Catholic Church.) Philosophy is kind of like deciding to discard billions of years evolution in favor of designing life from scratch. You'll get better results something completely random, but far worse than anything refined. People make the mistake of assuming moral codes are random, but they aren't.
So learning morality as philosophy is like one big reducto-ad-absurdum argument. Almost all of them are some vaguely moral thing where the ramifications are utterly awful, because they're designed based on rational thinking and morality isn't rational, so you either have desperate justifications for your morality, or end up with amorality. Sometimes both. You can create a rational moral framework if you accept this, but not if you delude yourself into thinking that morality is rational and objective, because then you're basing your ideas on nothing, and your reasoning starts and ends in a void.
There's something deeply...wrong about a situation where a philosophy described as "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" is automatically dismissed. One of my peers trotted out the trite quip about it "disregarding individuals". In comparison to what? How were the three "do good because invisible sky daddy orders it" systems before it paying more attention to people as individuals? And it's all very well to say utilitarianism disregards the minority in favor of the majority, but the only alternative is to disregard the majority in favor of the minority. THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE OBJECTING TO HERE. I'm all for supporting the minority, but there's lovely middle ground between not ignoring them and not giving them sole priority.
What's weird is that I have a really visceral reaction to pretty much every philosophical framework so far. Part of this is easy - there's a lot of sloppy reasoning because of too many assumptions, some of which aren't even necessary (all the logic chains that start off with "god says..." can have that chopped off without problem - if there's innate good, it don't matter if that's a fundamental property of reality or of God or of the invisible pink unicorn) and a lot of others that rely on tautology (it's good to do good works because good works are good) or nonsense logic (the universe is rational because god is rational, and we know god is rational because he created humans who are rational. Which logically means that animals, plants, and pebbles are also rational, having been created by god. You know, sometimes I think about how awful it was back when they could try you for heresy and stuff, and then I realize I could argue rings around them.)
But part of it was harder to nail down, because faced with explicit religion reasoning (this is right because God says so) I have nowhere near as bad a reaction.
Here's the thing - I believe people are innately moral because what we consider "moral" is what we instinctively feel. In other words, if you sit a bunch of people down and say "make a list of things it's wrong to do" they're going to start listing stuff like murder and stealing and otherwise harming others all on their own. Depending on what time you do this and their social structure, you'll have problems with this ("it's wrong to murder unless it's those guys in the other valley over there"), but they won't be fatal to society (either the two valleys generally avoid each other, at which point there's little harm done, or they get to know each other and consequently update their social code).
But - and this is really important - people won't rationally know why. Human moral codes are largely instinctive, and it's usually very hard to articulate why a given thing is wrong, because there isn't actually any objective yardstick. Our moral codes are based on what works. As fate has it, what works is "living together in a social cooperative setting", so we instinctively try for that, but it's often not clear how. We don't think "killing this person is wrong because I know him, which is generally a trait of people found in my social group, and having a large social group is important to my own survival and those of my relatives, and replacing any member of my social group is exceedingly hard, therefore I shouldn't kill him" any more than we think "I should not have sex with this person because s/he is someone who I often saw my mother raising, indicating I am likely related and therefore at risk of having unhealthy offspring should we produce children". And "I just feel this is true" tends to come out as "God says so shut up."
One of the really interesting things about religion is virtually all of them can be described as "startlingly progressive for their time". That is, you read about "an eye for an eye" and think it's horrible, then you hear that before this, it was "a life for an eye, a family for a life, a tribe for a family", and realize that the code isn't meant to be a strict punishment, it's meant to be a strict limit on punishment. Most of the traditionalist/fundamentalist problems arise from people in modern times trying to follow very old codes that are now outdated, but religion itself usually turns out to be the best attempt to articulate moral codes of the time, and it usually builds on itself. And even if a particular moral code is grossly misinformed, you can be assured it's not deadly so long as there are still believers around to tell you about it.
Philosophy tends to discard the entire framework, and that's what's dangerous.
Human morality, both genetic and cultural, is basically formed by trial and error. What works remains, what doesn't disappears. (See Christianity. From suicide cult to the Catholic Church.) Philosophy is kind of like deciding to discard billions of years evolution in favor of designing life from scratch. You'll get better results something completely random, but far worse than anything refined. People make the mistake of assuming moral codes are random, but they aren't.
So learning morality as philosophy is like one big reducto-ad-absurdum argument. Almost all of them are some vaguely moral thing where the ramifications are utterly awful, because they're designed based on rational thinking and morality isn't rational, so you either have desperate justifications for your morality, or end up with amorality. Sometimes both. You can create a rational moral framework if you accept this, but not if you delude yourself into thinking that morality is rational and objective, because then you're basing your ideas on nothing, and your reasoning starts and ends in a void.
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Date: 2008-01-18 01:27 am (UTC)Anyway, what you're saying kind of reminds me the book I had to read for last unit, which was The Science of Good and Evil. It has some pretty big flaws and the author goes off on a lot of tangents (which I actually enjoyed, because I found a lot of the tangents really interesting), but it's essentially about the evolution of morality. Dunno, kind of a cool read.
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Date: 2008-01-18 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-18 05:54 am (UTC)Out of interest, how many people in your philosophy class are religious? Nothing is more infuriating than arguing with a theist.
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Date: 2008-01-18 09:18 pm (UTC)As to theism, not really sure yet, but with luck, we'll all be able to sidestep what people believe is morally right in the real world because of GOD GOD GOD GOD and just stay happily in the realm of theoretical.