A New Theory of Ethics

Take the following syllogism:

To kill an innocent human is wrong.
Abortion kills an innocent human.
Therefore, abortion is wrong.

I ask that you put aside your opinions on abortion and consider the following arguments. Does the syllogism’s inherent structure reveal anything about moral truth? Does logical congruence reveal moral verities that are invisible to us in the flow of normal life? Are we immoral if we do not abide by the conclusions that fall on our laps when we plug moral questions into the structures of analytical reasoning? At any point, and for any imaginable syllogism, should we ever stop and go, “Hmm… well, if the syllogism says so, then it must be true that abortion is wrong!”

So much of the ethical discourse I witness every day boils down to the assumption that your moral system is only valid if it is consistent. Even if we have not studied Kant’s moral philosophy, we intuitively point out contradictions in a person’s moral discourse as though it would invalidate their moral perspective. If your moral opinions are regarded as containing analytically incompatible pieces, we consider your moral system to be inconsistent, impossible to enact, and therefore wrong.

But no moral system has ever been without contradictions, for why should it be possible for a moral system to exist without contradiction? And what is a contradiction in morality anyway? If rationality finds a contradiction where the moral instinct does not, why should rationality have the last say? Why must the moral instinct conform to reason and not the other way around? Reason should try and understand the non-contradictory version that the moral instinct is capable of feeling.

Inconsistency can conceal dishonesty and moral immaturity, but we should tackle those problems rather than try and erase them through the interface of reason. Rationality and morality are two separate things. If we want to engage with ethics, we must engage with what it is rather than what reason wants it to be. Just because rationality wants logical consistency does not mean that morality can or should even contort itself to fit its rule.

Rationality can find contradictions just as easily as it can find justifications for any given non-analytical subject. Reason panders will. Thus, rationality is no crystal ball capable of revealing whether a moral determination is “valid”. Morality abides by different rules, and we should try engaging with morality as it is rather than how reason wishes it could be.

Our discourse, however, is infected with inappropriate trust in reason. When we posit hypotheticals to someone, we are trying to test out whether or not their perspectives are universal and whether or not their moral basis can endure being pushed to its limit. Again, this kind of ethical investigation assumes that moral propositions are invalid if they are not analytically consistent. If a person agrees at first but later disagrees as the hypothetical is pushed on, we will conclude that they are being inconsistent, and thus are holding on to a flawed moral conviction.

This assumes that the legitimacy of moral beliefs should come from adherence to rational propositions such as “it is always wrong to kill an innocent human life”. These pure, intangible, semantic blocks should then be applicable to any situation without the adherent relenting, otherwise, can we really say their moral conviction is sensical? This can’t be serious. Right there, in the act of relenting, is the moral judgment; yet we would rather use this façade of reason as the true measure of ethical legitimacy.

What is it specifically about analytical tension that merits us abandoning our moral instinct — the one that might see a crucial difference between the two situations? By subsuming situations under a rational term, we believe we somehow are interfacing with an optimal rendition of moral concerns. Thanks to reason — we suppose — , we protect ourselves from prejudice, inconsistency, dogma, and other undesirable moral habits we are still trying to overcome as a culture. The issue is that rationality does not overcome these reflexes, it merely conceals them. Underneath the gestures of reason operates the same old primitive moral soul no human can defeat.

We believe that morality in its native form is fickle, unreliable, and unfit to define a moral order at the scale of a society. If everyone just followed their private moral sentiments, then would it not be moral chaos? Well, people do not, cannot, and have never followed the rules of ethical consistency; yet, we do not live — nor have we ever lived — in this prophesized state of moral chaos. Reason is nowhere to be found in this achievement.

Morality plays by different rules than the rules that are sung about by the precious apparitions ethicists are wasting their time trying to solve. The kind of rational validity ethicists are chasing does not cure the moral instinct of its inconsistencies; rationality only creates a deceptive parallel world of consistency while morality happens around them.

Your moral beliefs are not and cannot look like “adherence to a rational proposition,” and trying to submit them to this rule only leads to wasting time trying to do the equivalent of teaching a fish how to talk.

Why would a perspective be moral only if it is consistent within a broader set of propositions? Why should analytical rules be used for morality? Are we so afraid of morality not being objective that we have to make up rules to delude ourselves into believing we can control it with rationality? Morality is irrational; it has never and will never be solved by rationality. Either we can accept that morality is irrational, or we can keep lying to ourselves intelligently while the true morality underneath our models proceeds according to its own rules, only this time, without our awareness acknowledging or curbing its true course.

Moral evolution has not happened through the study of ethics, but despite it; ethics does not change people’s minds, it does not solve our moral conflicts, and it cannot and will never resolve cultural debates. Moral conditions evolve as a reaction to ever-changing cultural conditions and social pressures. Reason may find it inconvenient that morality cannot be settled into a regiment of ordered and reliable consistency, but I would rather attend to the reality of morality than to a world of equations and other fake substitutes fabricated by reason to realize its impossible dream.

No progress has ever been achieved in the field of philosophical ethics; questions are asked and answers are impossible to provide. That is because we are trying to force morality into a role it cannot fulfill. Morality is intrinsically social; by using analytical logic to correct its inconvenient non-objectivity, we are doing for morality what metaphysics did for physics: nothing. Has logical consistency ever moved a population into conviction? Does logical consistency have anything to do with morality? Are we just wasting our time? Yes, yes we are.

My thesis is the following: Philosophical ethics is wrongfully preoccupied with seeking out objective and consistent moral truths in logic. In this paper, I want to talk about the shortcomings and internal failures of our attempts at trying to solve morality through rationality.

Morality Cannot Be Made Objective

When I hear people bringing up God as a necessity for objective morality I roll my eyes, not because of the mention of God, but because of the implication that an external term is needed to resolve a problem that was never there in the first place. If we observe how morality simply “exists” in our day-to-day activities, we never observe the lofty principles of ethics at play. Morality does not seem to “exist” as it is defined in ethics.

Let us simply look around the communities of the world; if objective morality exists, it sure does not seem like it. The world seems to operate without the need for objective morality, so why should our ethical discourse mandate it? If you make an ethical decision that is not rooted in consistency, what happens? Does the universe crash? Or will you be ethically evaluated by the moral instinct of your community? Objective morality is an a posteriori mental fabrication we use to interface with “morality proper,” namely how ethical judgments are deployed between humans in nature by the moral instinct. However, in this process of abstraction, we have ended up conflating the model with the object.

Contradiction is an overrated problem in general. This does not mean that you should believe whatever you want at any moment in your life for whatever reason. We should not live in moral chaos. We must distinguish between “custom” and “choice.”

We tend to think that if something is subjective then it is a matter of choice, but this is not the case. Customs and conventions are by no means objective; they are often contradictory, fickle, unstable, unreliable, and contextual. One thing they are not, however, is “chosen.” Morality is customary, that much we know, but we tend to believe this while simultaneously believing morality should be rationally defendable and consistent. We cannot believe both, either virtue is customary or virtue is rational. If virtue is customary, it cannot be improved by reason, for it owes its very moral validity to customary opinions.

What is the answer to the trolley problem? Morality cannot have “answers” — it is not a domain in which “correctness” can ontologically cohere. We do have moral modules in our brains, but they are not analytical. Regardless of whether you would pull the lever or not if put in charge, people would most likely understand that it was a tough situation and that, depending on how you reacted after the fact, you should not be blamed. The natural intuitions involved in that moment of social recognition where you are either punished, scolded, warned, ignored, rewarded, or admired comprise the essence of morality. Later, the people will move on to other things and forget about that situation. Meanwhile, ethicists will be burning with inspiration, still writing down arguments as though the true moral essence of the situation can only be truly known on a page. It is as though reason cannot accept that the unreliability of moral feelings is a thing we have to reckon with and not ignore.

In reality, moral good is not determined by moral calculus, but by how things “feel” and by whether actions are accepted by the group. We do not need moral axioms, we do not need God, and we do not need rationality. In every culture in the world, morality exists, regardless of how they conceive of morality. That is the troublesome part for me: We are observing the shadowy limbs of a group instinct manifest in the concrete reality of group interactions, and we would rather talk about our formal models than look at the actual limbs moving actual humans through the machinations of morality.

Are the people reacting to moral situations with intuition engaging in absolute ethical failure? Are people amoral when acting outside the supervision of ethical calculus? Or is it that, in the Western world, we value explanations and logical formalizations as the gestures that legitimize thinking? Unless you can “explain” your beliefs in a “rational” way, then your thinking is deemed invalid. But in the concrete experience of reality, “explanations” do not reveal the correctness of a pre-explained thought. Rationality is a customary epistemological regiment, not a discovered program lodged in our brains that outputs truth statements. Communities that do not use our kind of rationality are not intellectually incomplete, thus their moral systems can function without rationality.

This is not to say that chaos and incoherence are legitimate, it simply means that logic is not a valid authority over ethical matters. There are many things between logic and chaos. Custom is between logic and chaos; it is not objective nor is it a matter of choice — there is order in customs. This previous situation (trolley problem) showed morality at its purest, uncontaminated by the foreign pathogens of formal systems.

Rationality is Flawed

Our obsession with rationality is troublesome for two main reasons:

1. The real world is happening underneath the interface of reason. Feelings, experience, morality, etc. are all actual things in reality, and their formats are not flawed and in need of rational representation to be valid.
2. Rationality can bend to justify itself. It is easy for rationality to find a formulation that justifies, excuses, or legitimizes a bad desire or a bad action. As Hamlet says, “Reason panders will,” and as Pope says, “To copy instinct then was reason’s part.”

As for the first one, let us begin with an example; imagine your partner is sad. Now imagine you ask them why they are said and they reply: “It’s weird… I want you to leave, but I don’t want to be alone.” Now, imagine you answer, “But these two things contradict each other,” would you really have gotten to the bottom of their feelings? Feelings are never wrong; feelings do not contradict each other — feelings cannot contradict each other, they lack the ontological features involved in invalidity. Certainly, our judgment about our emotions can be wrong, but your brain is talking to you and we defer to the misunderstandings of a single voice to ignore an entire section of our brains.

Rationality will always give us a response; this does not mean it is correct. In the case of feelings, rationality finds patterns and then performs calculations on these patterns, not on the feelings themselves. Feelings simply “are”, and reason is just a blind man who uses his smell to confidently but incorrectly identify colors only to tell you to distrust what you see with your own eyes. These rational conclusions are comparable to a program being fed unexpected garbage data, which results in an output nonetheless.

We should resolve things on their own terms rather than through the terms of reason. If you feel a certain way but your feelings seem contradictory or nonsensical, what you are hearing is rationality getting confused. Instead of dismissing your feelings, you need to look past the contradiction: your feelings always make sense, otherwise, they would not exist. We should not stop our investigation at the contradiction, we should try to solve it. Obviously, your feelings have an opinion, so why not try to understand it? No, instead we would rather manufacture rational categories to explain the feeling and then watch as contradictions appear between those categories.

The same goes for moral feelings. If a contradiction appears as a person states their moral opinions, did we find a failure in their feelings or a failure in the rational formalization of their expressed feeling? The answer is undoubtedly the latter. Someone could be lying or lost while telling their feelings — that is possible. But if we are attentive to our feeling and genuinely express how we feel, then no contradiction can occur.

We need to stop avoiding the world “as it is” by consulting reason. Instead of invoking rationality in moral concerns, why not simply look at morality as it exists? Why do we need conceptual abstractions when the world is right here? If we look at morality itself, we find a reactive sentiment that changes depending on context, group composition, and mood. This may sound inconvenient and unreliable, but this is, has been, and will always be the moral compass of mankind. At this very moment, every single human is operating through this moral instinct. Rationality can complain all it wants about its dream of a morality that abides by its preference, but morality is none of its business.

It is tempting for ethical arguments to invoke hypothetical scenarios to test someone’s consistency. If a person states support for abortion up until the point at which the baby can feel pain, then the ethicist may reply “What about if a grown adult could not feel pain, would that mean you should be allowed to kill them?” This argument assumes that because we can find a commonality between these two scenarios, then that commonality is real and consequential. If my moral instinct supports one and not another, why is it wrong? How do we know rationality’s partitioning is correct? Is it not more likely that moral feelings can find a difference that rationality cannot identify?

If I feel differently about both scenarios, then surely they must be different, and it should be the goal of reason to identify rather than suppress that difference. Rationality believes that the adjectives and relationships it applies to phenomena are actually real. Hypotheticals assume that rationality’s adjective construction of reality results in a more correct reality than the real one. Reason then applies its rules of non-contradiction upon this manufactured substitute world and concludes that any contradiction found therein should be consequential in the real world. This is madness. Kant’s ethical tyranny must be abandoned. Morality is outside rationality; listening to rationality is not listening to morality. Morality is an intuition, and while you may not want it to be one, it is. You can either ignore it or accept it, but you cannot change it.

As for the second one, we tend to think of rationality as though it were a computer inside our minds, and that is completely wrong. Whatever is in charge of rationality is made of flesh — just like the rest of our brains. Rationality is opinionated, it is not a repository of correct calculations. Rationality is merely the cross-cultural valuation of impulse control but with the Western features of platonic rationalism.

Why is rationality important? Our first instinct is that rationality tames the base instincts and that, by listening to it, we may avoid making rash decisions we will later regret. This kind of “impulse control” rationality is observable in most if not all cultures. The rationality of “consistency”, however, is quite a different kind of rationality.

Why is the rationality of consistency important? The idea is that, in a large population, it is important not to allow any disparate group to operate by their own respective moral standards. This way lies complete moral anarchy. We must standardize morality to bring everyone into an operational collective, and this way we may benefit from the privileges of civil life. In doing so, however, we force morality to bend according to rules extrinsic to its proper existence.

By thinking of rationality in the way we do, we conclude that all validity originates in the judgment of an epistemologically fabricated cultural fiction that separates the primitive baseness of animals with the rational dignity of civilized humans. But while we obsess over the objectives of reason, the world is happening irrationally all around us. If we look around us, we will find that morality is not regimented by the laws of consistency and that we are not living under moral anarchy. We are living under moral customs, which neither are anarchic nor consistent. Morality reality happens at this level, and our obsession with rationality prevents us from engaging with moral reality proper.

Let us take veganism as an example. Vegans can make a perfectly rational case for why meat consumption is bad, but most people do not feel moral disgust when thinking about meat consumption. Meat consumption does not disgust us in the same way a woman being told to “submit to her husband” feels for most of us. That is the end of the moral question. If we do not feel moral disgust at X, then X is not immoral. Making a rational case for the objective immorality of meat consumption proves something to rationality, but not to our moral center. Our ethical discourse should engage where morality happens, not where reason thinks it should happen.

A Better Version of Ethics

The ethical world is, in actuality, a set of competing moral paradigms that exist at the macro and micro levels of cultures. Instead of trying to solve morality through reason, moral discussions should try and convince people of what is best with ethos and pathos. Ethics should consist of the production of moral paradigms to articulate and animate the moral sentiments of a population.

Like good art, good ideas, and good humor, moral statements create affiliative spheres that mobilize populations. Cultural morality is a kind of cultural spirit populations are proud of and convinced in their heart to follow. Consistency could never produce this.

Given that this is the terrain upon which the ethical world happens, the study of ethics should consist of the cultural examination and production of moral paradigms — not an analytical examination. Note that I am not proposing an abstract and theoretical study of ethics, I am merely optimizing our strategies around the way morality is and will always be.

Conclusion

In conclusion, morality is not adequately investigated throughout the usual philosophical discussions. Ethics as a discipline is still preoccupied with this phantom of “the objective good,” and I wonder if the reason why we have made no quantitative progress in matters of philosophical ethics is because we are trying to solve rational apparitions rather than the “actual thing,” much like how metaphysics for over 2,500 years was toiling over rational illusions. It may be that “actual morality” is not something upon which we can achieve epistemological progress like medicine for example.

Instead of trying to assess whether abortion is “good” or “bad” — which will never be accomplished — , perhaps we could be having a more fruitful conversation about how people are not wrong or stupid for finding things morally agreeable or morally disagreeable. If we care about results, then we should try to convince people rather than preoccupy ourselves with formal distractions that only ever help us pretend as though we are doing more than just persuading other people into believing what we think. Even if reason could say “the truth” by weaving together internally consistent propositions, human beings only follow “the truth” insofar as it persuades them. For the truth is nothing but that which persuades, especially when it relies on arguments. Thinking that something is true yields the same reaction regardless of whether it is true. If those we try to persuade remain inconveniently not convinced, then we must recognize how pointless it would be to summon forth rational ethics to try and resolve the issue in an act of superstitious sophistication. We simply have to accept that morality will not be solved and that bad things will happen whether reason is there to try and prevent it. Moral cultures have, do, and will exist in conflict — we win nothing by conjuring a few rational spells to wish this truth away.

I do not know how we might assist our civil predicament in its ethical concerns, but the hyper-rationalization of morality is most certainly illusory and an anti-solution. Discussions about ethical matters should concern themselves with persuading others of what is good and how to implement it. People who believe the wrong thing according to one moral standard are not wrong, they are simply not convinced.

Ethics would benefit greatly from studying persuasiveness; not rhetoric, but instead why and how people believe what they believe as well as how or if these values are subject to change. Instead of searching through the dialectic of consistency for every possible hypothetical that can only ever portray what you must already believe, we could study insofar as it is believed and the laws of persuasion to which — as a belief — it is subject to. From this, we can imagine a dystopian future where we have discovered the totality of arguments that will immaculately and immediately convince anyone into uniformity of opinion. If this is dystopian, then the aims of rational ethics are dystopian.

If morality cannot be bent harmoniously to the preferences of reason, then we should stop trying and instead spend our rational energy on a different strategy altogether. If morality is cultural, then we must put down the idols of reason and start anew our study of morality where it is actually happening. As it currently stands, ethics has not given us and will never give us the answers we want — it is a proto-science of morality, a waste of time, and a complete scam.

Post-Conclusion: The Origin of Morality

Our platonic conception of a universal “good” is incredibly flawed. The idea is that morality exists somehow independently of human communities, geographical conditions, societal conditions, population size, political conditions, cultural conditions, spiritual conditions, and historical conditions. We see universalities across cultures, but even when cultures appear different, they are not “different” essentially — we are simply observing the very same human instinct changing its priorities in light of its context. Communities with a lower population have religions with Gods that are quite unconcerned with human affairs, while communities with higher populations have religions with watchful, judgmental, and scornful Gods. Conditions bring out different concerns, anxieties, and neuroses upon which culture will set out to relieve.

The fact is that morality would not exist if we lived alone. While we can observe our moral instinct anticipate the evolutionarily acquired “archetypal group” in our readiness for shame and in our ready-made priorities such as our psycho-symbolical valuation of children, just like an electrical outlet awaits an electrical plug for the current to circulate, without a group, we lack the environmental means needed to exert and activate these reflexes. Moreover, without a group, we lack the pre-conditions to develop the full breadth of the “oh, they didn’t like that” reflex which is so essential in morality.

As soon as an isolated human meets another human, then the moral module will enact whatever the evolutionary moral reflexes are: fear, curiosity, desire to share, cooperation, and even an instinct that leads them unknowingly into activities that will make both develop trust for the other. In this respect, morality is very much like language; while we have an instinct for language, there exists no language prior to human society. As soon as humans begin to interact with each other, they will instinctively gravitate toward codes, references, modes of interaction, and moral language. This moral language is typically axiomatized as originating in “pain” and “pleasure” or in “convention” and “habit,” but I think we can go further.

Faced with fearful, beautiful, or generally significant events, groups may enshrine their terror/appreciation in a ritual or a custom of some kind, which becomes a priority made incarnate in the language of culture. If you fail to recognize this priority and its customary sanctity, then you present yourself as an antagonist to the group’s values — what it considers to be important. If your culture actually believes that a child sacrifice will appease the Gods and you were raised around people who “treated” the event as important and ethically significant, then those priorities and their forms will trickle down to you.

This does not mean morality is made from the ground up by culture. Just like language, morality has an abstract and formless potential that awaits cultural particularization. Not everything can be used as a language, and not everything can be moral. You could not convince a culture to love pain unless you made pain instinctively palatable by regimenting it under the notions of status, self-restraint, and nobility that accompany “pain-tolerance” — this can be observed in various cultures. As such, we may recognize that customs must appeal to moral dispositions. In the case of child sacrifices, the symbolic ingredients involved in the ritual have to weave together something that our moral instinct recognizes.

A child must surely natively signify something to us in our evolutionarily acquired symbolic repertoire, and experience must provide us with the material to confirm that instinctive symbol. Thus, it is easy to imagine that the murder of a child can carry with it notions of purity, virginity, innocence, “new to life,” vulnerable, etc. all of which are potently symbolically reactive to the idea of “murder” and “death.”

When we look at “why” child sacrifices were/are performed, we will see that motives were/are nearly universally the result of quasi-scientific theories about how the specific ontology of children made/makes them better offerings to appease the gods than adults. In some cases, the child was chosen because his soul was believed to still be connected to the pre/after-life; in other cases, children were chosen because they were deemed to be the most precious things their community could offer to the gods; etc. One must still wonder what symbolic order orchestrated the narrative catharsis — how “children,” “death,” “for the community,” and “for vengeful Gods” all came together to weave something that brought them relief when enacted. Not being able to hear the symbolic harmony between these ingredients — which these communities could hear — , we are left incapable of viewing the practice as anything else than barbaric. In reality, we find this practice barbaric not because, unlike them, we are not deluded with superstitious symbolic harmonies, but because our own symbolic orchestra of the same elements sounds dissonant.

As we can see, we may formally conjure customary and superstitious solutions to anxieties, fears, priorities, concerns, and anything we find beautiful, humorous, and important such that the aesthetically enshrined concern can be used as a kind of allegiance ritual. We begin with directly shared experiences, and as our population increases, we must recourse to customs to connect people on a basis of shared values, priorities, tastes, and standards. These customs must express a group’s priorities, and they often do so through the symbolic significance of their content. For example, the fact that a culture commits child sacrifices reveals a lot about how circumstances and habits created an anxiety in the cultural spirit that is efficiently remedied by that practice. Every culture is faced with circumstantially induced neuroses that it mends with appropriate customs. Amidst this variety, we can observe different regards for practices we would deem immoral according to our own culturo-neurotic composition.

Morality then can be understood as compliance with shared values, which we learn about and acquire through experience, exposure, and consent. These elaborate rituals are simply ways that cultures test allegiance and express their values at scale. In performing these rituals, populations can be brought together under a spiritual unity — under an umbrella of shared values.

But, what about murder then? Sure, different practices will be seen as okay in certain cultures because of their cultural conditions, but what about the pure act of murder — surely that is always wrong, right? Without the attachments that occur in a community, what is left of our opposition to murder and what is left of our support of war? Murder never exists without context or habit, but the symbols involved in murder have a definite scope: if the category of “he is the enemy” is triggered, then our feeling of “he is getting what they deserve” can be activated. Notice that, in this example, the instincts anticipate a social formation. Murder cannot be seen as immoral unless we know who the person being killed is and if we do not have a group to make us feel shame or virtuous.

If we observe something that horrifies us to which a group is not reacting as much as we would, we will only clutch on to our values if we trust that a group elsewhere is backing us up in spirit. Socio-cultural paradigms govern legitimate morality, not rational consistency. If we witness a murder, our moral sentiments will be the product of how our instincts, which have been given shape by culture, react given the current group dynamic. Morality is not a strict network of pure rational truths, it is approximative, emotional, and socio-cultural.

Without the conditions to be judged by a community, without moral shame or moral pride, and without the arbitrary codes to particularize the moral instinct in its cultural fruition, what remains of morality is as shriveled and deficient as thoughts are without language: vividly present but incomplete. Empathy, being impressed, wanting something, and other isolated sentiments about the outside world are the ingredients of morality, and once they are prepared, blended, and cooked by the mechanisms of a social order, they evolve into something customary: morality.

As such, the notion of a pre/post-cultural objective morality is as ridiculous as seeking out our pre/post-cultural language; it is a fascinating archeological pursuit, but what we discover should not be treated as a superior object to its cultural instantiation. Morality is supposed to be this way. If we bend it against its intended form, it will be made deficient. What is most likely — which everyone can observe for themselves — is that people will simply enact the intended and natural form of morality while philosophers bother with impossible alternatives.