The Limits of Moral Reflection and How to Respond
In the past ten years, evolutionary studies have created a sustained critique on the traditional understanding of morality. In short, our greater understanding of the mechanisms behind morality’s development continues to open the chasm already opened by the work of post-modern thinkers. This critique is found in works by Sharon Street, Richard Joyce, and others. The following is a summary of their thoughts:
Human moral decision-making and ethical understanding is “thoroughly saturated” with evolutionary influences. Natural selection rewards moral choices that increased fitness, procreation, and maintenance of populations. Street claims that it would be incredibly coincidental and unlikely that ethical considerations based on these tenants would simultaneously track that of independent moral truths. In short, we cannot be certain that our ethical standpoint as whole is able to be reconciled with a transcendental or independent universal moral truth.
I would argue that this limitation or misguidedness as a result evolution does not stand alone. Indeed, it is compounded by the limitations of our sense-perceptions and the limitations of our rationality in crafting moral judgments. History, tradition, ideology, ego, and culture are all transparent veneers that further obfuscate the knowledge of The Thing-In-Itself.
Essentially, our moral beliefs are unresponsive to evidence. We’re either unaware of its existence in the first place or we have blinded ourselves by the sedimentation of history, culture, etc. Picture this: a pair of glasses that are entirely black with only a pinhole to see out of. Then you layer onto these glasses thin layers of colors — red for history, yellow for culture, green for ideology, another red for tradition, and so on. I think we can agree that whatever you could possibly see through these glasses are inaccurate versions of what you would be able to see without these limitations. In ethics, where finding the “right answer” is largely dependent on the facts, tracking an independent moral truth is near-impossible while we have these glasses on.
Darwin wrote a provocative passage that proves insightful to this process which also creates a great example for the intersection between biology and ethics:
“It may be well first to premise that I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours…If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience.”
These bees lack an autonomous reflection on morality, but of course they know nothing of the sort. After all, they’re bees. They cannot comprehend the abilities of their cruel and capricious gods — humans — for their intellect has no capacity by which to understand why humans swat at them or use them for their honey. Their spectrum by which to comprehend the world, and, thus the virtue of the human activity, leaves them wanting and without full understanding.
Of course, moral realists would counter that humans have a distinct ability for autonomous moral reflection that our flying friends do not share. If there were reflective bees — philosopher bees, as it were — they likely would find these traditions deplorable. They would contemplate the meanings of goodness and what it truly meant to be a bee. They could restrict their traditions and find a better life through the triumph of their bee rationality.
But this reply would miss the obvious point so tantalizingly out of its reach. Could the limitations on these bees not also represent humans? “My God, my God, why hath thou taken my honey?” We believe ourselves to be most high and most capable of understanding the totality of moral choice, but why do we feel as such when the predispositions and faults permeating our moral choice are so obvious? If Job has not shown this finitude, certainly an interaction with higher intelligent lifeform would expose this hubris.
Such a deflation of our traditional understandings of what it means to be human is not new. Since Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Heidegger, modern and post-modern philosophers more often “tear down” than they do “build up.” One can, and should, wrestle with the positive political solutions offered by Marx (communism) or by Heidegger (fascism), but it is very likely that, like me, you come up with different conclusions than they do.
That said, it is almost unquestioned that these critiques are so on-the-nose and so pervasive that to be blind to them is folly. To go on without answering them is to be willfully ignorant of the true nature of the human condition. This would include ignoring the limitations of our abilities to make accurate moral choices.
In this “deflationary” era of modern and post-modern philosophy, we are thus presented two choices in which we can find reservoirs of meaning. The first is religion. While it is an easy and final choice, it is also one that has come under considerable scrutiny and is one fraught with peril. For many, Faith in the modern day has become a trust in the Church hierarchy. Though mortal men themselves, they are trusted ultimately. Faith, unfortunately and sadly became the means of enforcing terrestrial authority. A religious reservoir of meaning, while easy and final, is also perhaps the most dangerous as every decree carries the weight of the Almighty.
The other path would be to lean into these unanswerable complexities of human meaning. While this is a disappointing answer to those who want to have a greater meaning or solid answers laid out to them, I believe it is the only accurate and virtuous path apart from a Perfect Religious Answer.
While I don’t have the space to outline all the aspects of what this route looks like, I will quickly say why I believe this is an important path. This path creates two things: a proper foundation of human knowledge and, from that, a distinct sense of modesty in one’s own importance.
Too often, there is an obsession with having one singular right answer and achieving that answer quickly. It often feels like, in post-modern society, that we’re flying a plane while its falling apart around us. When there’s a small hole in the wing, we decide to go faster and patch it up with duct tape mid-flight rather than land the plane and assess the situation. In an era where everything has sped up all too fast, slowing down and admitting exactly how much you don’t know perhaps is the only way to become re-oriented.
