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There is no morality, or rights anywhere written into the universe.

As humans we don’t like this, for fairly obvious reasons. The obvious point is what is to stop someone from killing us, if there is no morality or agreed on rights?

However, the only arguments in favour of human rights and morality, come out of ‘human nature’ and pragmaticism. There are no universal axioms of morality.

‘Human Nature’: Empathy

Basically ‘human nature’ involves competition and co-operation. We appear to have a natural longing for relative equality of treatment, or fairness, as well as a longing to do the best for ourselves (whatever that is – it is not written into the universe either). Most people quickly discover as children, that the opposition between co-operation and competition is not a real opposition. A functional human being normally does better for themselves, and enjoys themselves better, through co-operation. We can compete with others through co-operation with a ‘team’ or ingroup.

This and ‘empathy’ leads to morality. We feel others’ pain, and unfairness to others, and usually do things about it, to fix things up (the more, the better we know the person and like them…) Perhaps we don’t feel others’ pain as strongly as we feel our own pain, but most children feel for others. There are few societies in the world in which what is considered in-group injustice is not condemned, even if secretly because it is too dangerous to do otherwise, and people support their own ingroups’ morality pretty fiercely.

The point is that empathy can be extended or limited by conventions around social categories. Out-groups can be separated from normal morality, as is clearly happening politically in the US where people in the ‘other’ political category receive little in the way of empathy, and much in hostility. Empathy can also be extended or limited by experience of someone’s behaviour and this can also feed into social category separation, as again is happening in the US and elsewhere.

These dynamics of separation and connection are not stable, and change moralities.

Pragmaticism

Humans have morality for pragmatic reasons; in that societies work better with some kind of morality. Everyone knows what to do. People can co-operate with reasonable security that they will not always be completely ripped off. Hence things appear to function better than they would without it. Societies survive, the more agreement there is that the morality, expresses human nature and has good results.

However, no system of morality can always guarantee that only ‘good’ will result from ‘good’ actions. We live amidst a complexity which can undermine our intentions, so we have to pay attention to results, and sometimes adjust our behaviour.

Conclusion

Human rights etc don’t exist, but they arise from normal human processes and their pragmatic benefits.

This does not mean that all moralities are necessarily ok…. but its hard to have a moral argument which does not rely on either a view of human nature or of the consequences of not having the morality.

Tags: ethics

This entry was posted on November 24, 2022 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.