Universal Framework for Morality in the Absence of Free Will

Part 2 — Objective Morality

In part 1, we discussed how subjective morality and moral relativism cannot be the basis for morality on ground reality because it isn’t based on anything concrete or foundational. If you haven’t read that please do because this is a continuation of that.

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To understand how objective morality as a concept works, my first job will be to convince you that our brains are hardwired for making moral decisions. Hundreds of thousands of generations of human evolution has helped us adapt to live in societies and to understand how we did that, we need to take a detour into neurobiology.

The Brain

Photo by Google DeepMind

Where is morality in the brain? As complicated as it is to pinpoint the exact location of it, as it obviously is, there are certain systems in the brain that light up differently for different inputs, allowing us to map which areas of the brain are responsible for what kind of thinking, which in turn helps in predicting what their role in thought is.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposed the Social Intuitionist Theory of morality — a theory that states that the “yuck” or “yay” factor is what prompts people to take stances in moral dilemmas, and the reasoning part of it comes second. He calls this “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail” — a great analogy to break it down for the layperson. However, as is all things, this is also only partly true because this doesn’t really explain why we feel that something is “yucky” or “yay-ey”, which is where most social intuitionists (or should I say moral emotivists?) end their train of thought. It is a quite compelling argument, especially for people who want to go against the grain of social convention which argues that rationality is the basis of morality. Haidt lays down an interesting thought experiment, which he actually opens with:

“Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love. but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that’? Was it OK for them to make love?”

Most people (I hope) would have recoiled from that story in disgust. However, the more you think about it logically, the more you will struggle to make sense of it — because they did it only once, she was using birth control, he was using a condom, and they swear to not do it again. They also feel better because of it — so what makes you and me feel disgusted about it even though there was no negative outcome for either of them?

This is where Haidt says that we are not reacting rationally to this but rather emotionally. He argues that it does not matter if it makes sense, our emotions are the deciding factor behind our decisions and in such a thought experiment, it does make sense. Logically.

Now let’s consider the opposite example. Let’s take the classic trolley problem. A trolley is running on a set of tracks and you have control over the lever. If you pull the lever, one person dies and 4 people live. If you don’t do anything, 4 people die.

Maybe you are coming across this for the first time, or maybe you have pondered this for a while. Either way, there is no “right” answer to this because it’s an impossible situation. Most of you might have opted to pull the lever — it’s the utilitarian thing to do isn’t it? You sacrifice one life for many, going against everything Spielberg stood for. Shame. Sigh.

But it makes sense from a utilitarian stand point. I understand. What if I said I could make you reconsider?

Let’s take the same trolley problem — same trolley, same 4 people on the tracks, except this time, instead of a lever, you have a very heavy man standing alongside you on a footbridge above the tracks.

Now in this scenario, you know that if you push the man onto the tracks, you can save those four people because of his sheer mass. The guy is going to die for sure, but it will save those 4 lives. Think about that, think about the idea of pushing a man to his death. The outcome is exactly the same, one person dies if you push and 4 lives are saved, but somehow this feels different, doesn’t it?

This is because the first scenario was impersonal — you were pulling a lever. In the second scenario, you physically have to push a man off a high place. Even though the second one yields the same result, it triggers something in you that is far more primal, more innate than just rational thought.

The utilitarian approach to the first case comes directly from the rational part of your brain and this is what Joshua Green’s research was on. He called this the Cognitive control theory of morality, while Haidt argued for a more liberal and emotional Social intuitionist theory.

Now comes the real question — which of these is true?

Well as it turns out, like most things, the answer lies somewhere in between and having both elements.

How the Brain Sees Moral Judgements

Photo by www.kaboompics.com

The brain does not see in black and white, we condition it to be so. When faced with a moral dilemma, our brains have evolved over millions of years to assess multiple factors before arriving at a conclusion. What we end up with is kind of like a civil war in the brain between the emotional side of the brain and the rational part of the brain — and this theory of moral cognition is called Integration theory. Currently, this is the most accepted theory when it comes to learning how morality works in our brains.

If you are not aware, most cognition, i.e. conscious thought, arises from the frontal lobe. It is widely regarded as the center of consciousness. When it comes to moral decision making, the frontal lobe activates three different parts of the brain in three different ways, all of which are explained in detail below:

The vPFC — The Emotional Side

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC for short, is located in the lower central part of the frontal lobe, right behind the eyes, roughly above the roof of the mouth. This is the part of the brain that takes care of emotions. It is the part of the brain that lights up in fMRI scans when talking about emotions, things like the death of a cat, hugging a puppy, buying food for someone else, things like that. It is this part of the brain that tells you the second trolley problem, the one with the heavy man on the bridge, is morally abhorrent as compared to the first trolley problem — because this feels more personal. You are physically pushing a man to his death — an act of murder — that is stopping the trolley, and that is what is triggering the response.

Hang on — isn’t morality based on rational thinking? How can emotions get in the mix?

Well, if it was pure rationality, you might end up being a psychopath.

Photo by Nathan J Hilton

I am not exaggerating or using hyperbole, what I meant is this — if you apply only rationality to your decision making, you would end up making decisions that make no moral sense whatsoever. In the paper I mentioned earlier, *The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment, the scenario I mentioned earlier regarding Julie and Mark would mean nothing to a person who thinks purely rationally. Why would it? Because society says so?* What is society to someone who cannot feel emotions?

Now, in that scenario, what do you do? Do you just lock up someone forever? Perhaps, that is a solution worth looking into, sure. You could also reach them morality. Now, that sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Well, for one, you have a whole show built around that premise — Dexter. For those who might not have watched the show, Dexter is a show about a psychopath who has the urge to kill, but gets steered to do the right thing with what his adoptive father Harry calls The Code — which becomes Dexter’s moral compass. He gives Dexter a way to channel his urges for the good of mankind. “If you have to kill, kill people who deserve to die”. That is what makes Dexter such an interesting character to explore — he is a hollow shell of a human being who does not feel remorse (or rather cannot) because he is physically incapable of it, and yet with an external moral code given to him by his father figure, he is able to navigate the world as a normal human being.

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The show explains it quite well — when Dexter is old enough, Harry takes Dexter to an execution to burn into his memory at a very young age the ramifications of getting caught. That becomes rule 1 — don’t get caught. Once that is established as the bedrock, he is motivated to follow the rest of the rules so that he does not get caught. He trusts The Code over his own instincts because he is taught from a very young age that his instincts cannot be relied upon to not get himself caught. There are several instances in the show where he invokes The Code in a state of moral confusion and reiterates how important it is for his survival.

“ That’s all fine, Arya”, I hear you asking, “but that’s just a show, right? That can’t be applied in real life, can it?”

Well, yes and no. Can you force a psychopath to follow an external moral code in order to be a functioning member of society? Perhaps, perhaps not. The answer is I simply do not know. However, there is someone who has done this before in real life — and his story is very relevant to this discussion,

The Fascinating Story of David Wood

Dr. David Wood is an American philosopher, evangelist, and YouTuber who is often known for doing controversial things like ripping up the Quran and mocking Islam in rather crude and never-before-seen ways. However, what interests me is not what he does per se, but rather why he does what he does.

See, David is a diagnosed psychopath, or to be more accurate, a person diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. He has served 10 years in prison for attempting to kill his father with a hammer. He also recently revealed in a 6 hour live stream that he has had sex with 2 minors, ages 13 and 15, when he was 18 years, which would be considered statutory rape. Over the course of the past 2 years I have been following his body of work, I have seen him display all the symptoms of someone having antisocial personality disorder, which are as below:

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So, if he is that way, why am I talking about him?

Well, it’s because he was that way but currently isn’t. He found a way to not do those things, despite not feeling any emotion whatsoever. He found religion in prison — and that reformed him. Well, when I say reform, I do not mean it in the Christian sense of the word, even though he believes so. He adopted the morality of the Bible as his code of conduct, and follows that as his Code, the same way Dexter followed Harry’s Code.

Being an atheist, I do not see this as a victory of the Bible, because along with all of the good things the Bible teaches, he also believes that unless you believe in Jesus and YHWH, you have not found God. He is, of course, allowed to believe that, it keeps him away from a life of crime and debauchery, but it also carries with it the false assumption that there is a God and more importantly, splits people’s world views into a clear believer-disbeliever narrative. It isn’t perfect, but hey, what is, right? Rather, I use it as an example to show how impactful a good moral framework can be if it can be explained well to even a psychopath.

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Now I had a discussion with many of my friends regarding David Wood, and about his story and there were two main reactions. One set of people said that he is not a good person at heart and therefore cannot be trusted to be let out into society, and the other side said that as long as he does not re-offend he should be given the benefit of the doubt. I am someone who believes in second chances, so I am in the second camp, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree. It’s okay.

I am not claiming that a single man’s case should be seen as proof that psychopaths can be reformed, but I am saying that there is at least a terabyte of content about this one man’s life that can be used as a case study into how a good all-encompassing foolproof memetic framework to ground your morals in can actually instill an emotional element into a person’s consciousness, even if it is physically cannot be felt by them.

In conclusion, the takeaway in this section is that the emotional side of the brain is as important as the other two parts of the brain responsible for moral decision-making, which leads us to the second part of the brain responsible for morality — the dlPFC.

The dlPFC — The Logical Side

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is located on the outer part of the frontal lobe and is the rational moderator of the brain. This is the part of the brain that is involved in complex problem solving, cognitive control, and working memory. The dlPFC gives you your sense of identity in a qualitative sense — the essence of who you are, your personality; your consciousness stems from here. We know this because of the tragic case of Phineas Gage.

I could go on about Gage for a hot minute because of how fascinating his case is, but that’s just going to divert attention from the core concept of this article, which is morality. The one minute version is this: Gage was a railroad construction foreman who got a large iron rod driven completely through his head, destroying most of his frontal lobe, specifically the left side of it, which changed his personality and behavior so much that friends and family just wrote him off as “not Gage” anymore. That’s how important this part of the brain is. We already discussed this in Charles Whitman’s case, just in a different context.

Getting back to the dlPFC, this is essentially the part of the brain that makes you pull the lever in the first trolley problem. It is making a rational, utilitarian decision based on the impersonal nature of the decision being made.

But these are both part of the same brain isn’t it? How are decisions even made at that point? Well, that’s where the ACC comes in.

The ACC — The Mediator

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is the final piece of the puzzle in moral decision making. It acts like a mediator between the vPFC and the dlPFC, it’s like a physical battle happening in the brain. This area of the frontal lobe is known to be responsible for conflict resolution, and it’s pretty obvious why that is. So, we have the ACC mediating between the vPFC and the dlPFC to arrive at a conclusion. But wait, that can’t be the end of it, can it? Morality isn’t just about a debate between logic and emotion — it’s about society, social ramifications of an action, how it makes you feel, how it makes other people feel; there is a whole load of factors we are ignoring by simplifying morality like this.

But what if I tell you the brain factors that in too?

The Support Staff

Consider this scenario — you eat something your friend gives you. Once you eat it, the friend tells you that this contains a highly potent toxin that will kill you in a minute. They sit and watch as you swear and panic, trying to make sense of what is happening — but then the time’s up and nothing happens. Another minute goes by, and then another. Nothing happens.

As it turns out, your so-called friend had accidentally switched the vials of poison for a little bit of MSG, which didn’t make it poison and in fact, made it taste better.

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Would you still consider the act abhorrent?

Obviously, right?

Well, that is the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) at work. It helps you identify the intent behind an action. You might think, “Well, there surely can’t be a separate section of the brain dedicated to processing intent, right?” There have been experiments conducted where scientists were able to disable the functionality of the TPJ using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, and presented with this very dilemma, and people were unable to see the ill intent behind the action.

Next, we also have the superior temporal sulcus or the STS. The STS is responsible for helping us recognise social cues, social perception, gaze direction — things that help us infer beliefs about the world around us. It’s an integral part of our intuition. You know that part of you that feels something is off when someone looks upset? You can’t pinpoint why, but you know they’re upset. That’s the STS kicking into action. This might not seem immediately connected to the topic at hand, morality, but it is this section of your brain that gives you empathy — the sense that the person on the other side is also a person. It has also been identified through fMRI studies that the posterior part of the STS is more active during justice-based dilemmas as opposed to care-based ones.

This is probably the best time to bring up that I read three to four papers on this topic, and most of it based on trolleyology and fMRI studies, so that’s why I keep referring to studies. I’m going to give you the same disclaimer that I read in the papers as well — we don’t know how much of all this is supposed to be applied in real life. It might be, but we just don’t know yet.

Anyway, the STS has strong ties to the theory of mind, along with the vmPFC and the TPJ, because these are very important for something known as theory of mind — the ability of people to look outside themselves and imagine what another person would feel. It’s applied sonder, “the feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles”, if that makes sense. It’s what gives us the feeling of empathy, and it’s a very important factor when making value judgements about other people.

We can understand this by looking at psychopaths, or to take a milder approach, people who have had damage to these parts of the brain associated with empathy. Either way, the result is that they become very bad at making moral decisions because they lack the capacity to think about other people — they become pure analytically rational meat machines, incapable of understanding why other people help each other or why they should care if someone else is being harmed.

Finally we arrive at the most primitive part of the brain: the limbic system — the insula and the amygdala, both of which are also relevant to this discussion. The insula is what process your “yuck” response, it’s the part of the brain that reacts viscerally to the footbridge version of the trolley problem or the incest story by Jonathan Haidt.

Not coincidentally, this is also the part of the brain that deals with basic physical survival, the part of the brain that gets triggered when you smell something rotten, or if there’s something “funny” about some food you’re about to have — it’s a deep seated function of the mammalian brain that has adapted over hundreds of thousands of years. So, this is also why for the majority of people who see a child or animal being attacked, your first reaction is feeling bad for the kid and disgust towards the person or thing causing the harm. Even if it’s a video about a pride of lions taking down a giraffe, you feel bad for the giraffe, even if the giraffe is huge and even though you know the lions need to kill it to survive. You just can’t help it.

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This is also when kicks in when you see the perpetually suffering Gazan child — whatever side you are on, you feel bad for the kids, even though they might have different opinions about how the conflict should end. This is also the same reason why you feel like throwing up when you do a bad deed — it makes you sick because it is activating the part of your brain that is for ridding your system of something that might hurt you.

The amygdala on the other hand, deals with the reward system of the brain. It’s an in-built mechanism in the human brain for helping other conscious creatures. Think about it — don’t you feel better about yourself when you help someone out even if it doesn’t affect you personally? If you haven’t felt that before, I feel pity for you, because it’s one of the greatest feelings you can get as a human being. This is also the part of the brain that deals with fear, and that’s not by accident. Your moral judgements are not just laced with societal implications, but personal ones as well. Can you live with yourself if you even accidentally kill a person? Even if it was self defense? If you can, is that different from killing someone in cold blood? Is preemptively killing a man who is about to pull a gun on you more moral than killing him after he has shot you and missed? These are just questions to think about, because these are questions that require objective answers, because our entire legal framework rests on answering such questions.

The point of this whole detour was not to convince you that the brain is the end-all be-all of morality — actually far from it. First and foremost, it was because it was fun to research and write about this stuff (I read four research papers over the course of 2 months to understand all this) but it was also because I wanted to show that the brain processed information in a pragmatic manner, weighing emotion against logic and coming up with a solution that is inherently coherent, perhaps not all the time, but if we didn’t have the neural pathways responsible for reason and logic, we wouldn’t have morality in the first place. We also re-established that free will cannot be a thing, because if you can’t change the structure of your brain and all the damage it has taken, you cannot essentially hold someone accountable for all the wrong that they’ve done.

“If that’s the case, then how can you argue that morality is not subjective? Or even relativistic?”, you might be thinking, and you have reason to believe that; but to understand how, we need to take a second detour — one about memes.

The Meme

Memes are not pictures with text on them — I mean, technically they are, but that’s not how that word was intended to be used. The word meme was coined by evolutionary biologist Dr. Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene to describe the social equivalent of a gene. I assume we all know that genes are hereditary segments of DNA that get passed on from one generation to the next and get expressed on the basis of dominance. I am grossly oversimplifying, but that’s the bare bones explanation. Just like how genes carry traits of an individual, memes carry traits of a culture. Each one of us carries a small fragment of the society that we were brought up in, including (but not limited to) our religion, neighbour’s religion, how diverse the locality is, the ideologies we were exposed to as a kid, ideas that were taught at school, ideas taught at home,etc. Memes are what make and break societies because the more we dive deeper into a society, the more we understand that there is an underlying idea that binds people of a society together.

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Memes are as integral to a person’s moral perspective as it is their genetic makeup, because it is when you pass a genetic trait through the filter of the meme that person ascribes to that you get their moral expression. Of course, it would be their opinion or interpretation of what that is, we’ll get to how we can assess its objectivity later on. Before we do, we need to understand why memes are so important in this discussion of morality.For that, we need to go back to hundreds of thousands of years ago, back when we were hunter gatherers.

Understanding Memes through Religion

People weren’t people back then, at least not based on our understanding of what a person is today. They were just like an intelligent herd of bison — traveling together to gather fruits and roots, and hunt other animals; both as a strategy and also a means of survival. We all know that we have an innate understanding of kin altruism. However much I hate the fact that my brother doesn’t accept me for who I am, I would still give him my kidney if it came to a life and death situation for him. I don’t know if he would do the same for me, but I know I would, simply because I can’t hate him. I genuinely can’t, I guess I’m biologically programmed to in a way.

Photo by Sara Sukosd

This phenomenon is called kin altruism and it exists in a large number of intelligent mammals to some degree. It’s a special form of reciprocal altruism that extends specifically to blood relatives. Back then, kin altruism could be the reason why a cousin would jump in front of a lion to save their nieces/nephews in an effort to save the bloodline. This can easily transfer to adoptive children as well if they were brought up together as well. Now, in a tribe, in order to stay together and keep the tribe safe, you would have had to extend that kin altruism to members within your tribe. Now you are saving people who you are not directly related to by blood, but have an emotional connection to. Brothers in arms, working together to keep their tribes safe — a bond that makes sense. Over the years, societies and eventually civilisations would emerge on the basis of this tendency of reciprocal altruism to extend wider and wider for agriculture, crop gathering, and raising families.

Then, we hit a wall. For example, let’s say you are in a colony in 30,000 BCE, minding your business hunting animals and growing grain. Suddenly, someone spots a bit group of people approaching from afar. They look tired and weary, their feet bleeding and their children sick. You have never interacted with them and they look nothing like you. Let’s say you are from ancient Mesopotamia and these people look Mongoloid. Why would you trust someone who looks completely different and has nothing in common with you? Sure, you might feel bad for them, but how can you trust them to be genuine, let alone help them?

That’s where you need a bigger meme, something that extends beyond regional boundaries; something that can bring people together under a common story that is beyond skin colour, race, religion and ethnicity, something beyond boundaries and seemingly universal: a common set of beliefs that form a belief system, complete with moral and ethical frameworks. That’s where religion comes in. If the Mongoloid tribe and the Mesopotamian tribe share the same set of beliefs, they would feel much more at ease helping them out because it helps them think, “Hey, they just look different, they’re essentially just like us.” That’s why memes are so important: it not only gives us a framework to ground our beliefs in, it fundamentally changes our perspective about other people, including our sense of morality. That’s why Indians are so vast and varied and yet associate themselves with their nation state. You have fair skinned Indians, dark skinned ones, Indians that are Christians, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, Indians that are born inside and outside the sub-continent; they are associated with each other in some way or the other, either through race or religion, and if not either, their geographic location or ethic identity. India is too big of a topic to cover in this article, I’ll probably cover that later. We’ll take the example of Christians. One of the main reasons why slavery was abolished in the world was because the Christian meme evolved over time as our cognitive abilities grew as a society, and their excuses to keep slaves made lesser and lesser sense the more they thought about it. Don’t get me wrong, slavery would have been abolished one way or the other over time. All I’m saying is it would’ve taken a much longer time to eradicate it if it weren’t for Christianity and the modernization of the West. That’s only my opinion of course, you have every right to disagree with me.

Now, that we know how powerful memes can be, we reach the last part of this article, the culmination of over 10,000 words over the course of 4 months — objective morality without God.

How to Arrive at Objective Morality without God

I know I went over this in the first part of this, but since we re-introduced God just above, I am compelled to double down on this position.

I know I just went on about the importance of religion and memes, so how do we do this without religion? What could possibly be more grounding and humbling than a universal creator?

Well, let’s be clear about one thing, there’s no evidence for a creator. There are good arguments for the existence of God, and there are good arguments against the existence of God. As far as I know, I don’t feel that there’s a guiding hand in my life, because if there was, I would assume I wouldn’t have to go through all of this alone, and never would have felt alone either. Anyway, since I was never convinced about the existence of a God, I would assume a lot of other people wouldn’t be either. Even if you do believe in God, I hope it wouldn’t be too unrealistic of me to expect that you can’t imagine that God doesn’t exist.

I can’t believe that last line is actually coherent.

Anyway, for this scenario, God doesn’t exist. In this case, the laws of physics govern the universe and nothing else. Now, how do we center morality?

Before that, how do we know morality exists at all without God?

Well, morality is a by-product of human cognition. Imagine this: is a lion immoral for killing an injured gazelle? Is a jaguar immoral for preying on a capybara? Is a tiger immoral for preying on a human? You might say no. That’s because it doesn’t apply to them. It does apply to human beings though. If you shoot a black buck, you should go to jail. Some people may not, unfortunately, but they definitely should, not only because it is endangered, it is, but also because it’s unethical. It serves a vital role in the ecology of the region and taking even one of them away should be considered a crime.

But ethics is a topic for a different time. We’ll stick to morality for now.

So we know certain things are bad and certain things are good. It’s just about putting them into universal categories, but that puts us in an immediate predicament — who decides what is universal, and on what basis?

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

This is really is the crux of it isn’t it? You can have a concept that is good and get everyone to agree on it, but how do we know it exists outside of ourselves? Well, it doesn’t. It only exists within conscious beings, within thinking minds.

Let’s imagine that instead of human beings with flesh bodies held together with bones and fueled by ATP and the entropy of the Sun, we were instead just consciousnesses floating formlessly like amoebae in the water, but nonetheless were able to end the consciousness of another being, would it be wrong to do so? I would have to say yes.

So therein lies the soul of the argument — it has something to do with consciousness. Sam Harris was the first one (that I know of) who summarized it as the reducing of suffering, and the maximizing of human well-being. Now, if you ask “why does morality hinge on the reduction of suffering and the maximizing of well-being” his response is that well-being and flourishing is the ultimate end goal of human beings. All of this is possible only if conscious minds exist. If there is no conscious mind, there is no need for morality because morality exists only within the framework of the individual mind.

“So morality exists only within minds? Doesn’t that make it subjective?” I never said a subjective experience can’t be true. If you are depressed, only you know the depth of your depression. There is no unit of sadness that can be used to measure how much depression you are going through — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a real phenomenon. Depression is a phenomenon that exists only within a single person’s mind frame and yet we have remedies for them which are both general and specific in nature. We can do the same with morality.

Part of the reason why we find it difficult to comprehend that morality can be outside of the frame work of free will is the feeling that we need to be able to feel that the perpetrator of a bad action is accountable for their actions. If they are not accountable for their actions, then that means that we wouldn’t feel the satisfaction of locking up or executing someone: and perhaps we shouldn’t?

Where does the should even come from here if there’s no free will? They had no free will right? Yes, that’s true, they did not have the free will to not do that action, but that does not prevent us from locking them up and putting them away from society so that other people are not hurt and their belongings kept safe. This may be controversial to say, but a rapist is a rapist because of their circumstances and up-bringing, and at the same time is a threat to every man and woman out there, and therefore should be locked up.

You might be asking, “Based on what underlying principle?” Well, the reduction of suffering and maximisation of well being.

Now I want to make it clear that when I say morality can be objective, I mean it in the epistemological sense and not the ontological sense. Ontology is the study of whether something exists or not. In that sense, rules and laws and morality are as real as numbers and mathematics are — they don’t exist, not really. What is 32 really? Can you quantify it in and of itself? You can line up 32 rocks and say “Counting this will lead you to the number 32” but you wouldn’t have really arrived at what 32 really is. Is it just the cardinality of a sequence? Is that the only way we use numbers? The point is, ontology isn’t what is being meant here. What we are concerned about is the epistemological nature of morality — we are able to make truth claims about it.

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BUT why should reduction of suffering be the baseline for morality? What if there’s something more important than the maximisation of human well being that defines morality? In that case, I do not know what you mean by well-being, as Sam Harris says. You might say “well, well-being could mean anything to anyone at different points of time, how are we to say if the correct well-being is being measured?” Health is something that changes just like this and yet to say the standard of healthcare is not sufficient in some places seems like a fair assessment. So, it’s not that we can’t find a standard to measure these things with, we just haven’t gotten around to doing this, mainly because the idea that morality can be seen through the lens of science and hence quantized into neat little boxes is something a lot of people find difficult to sit with. That’s completely understandable, but that doesn’t mean it has to be wrong.

Moreover, what does it mean to say that well-being may not be what we are striving towards? Let’s say there’s a man who is so intelligent that he could potentially find the cure for cancer in the near future if given the time and resources to do so. One injection, and cancer no longer exists. If that person said, “I can find the cure for cancer, but I have other priorities”, would that person be right in any metric imaginable? What other priorities could possibly be more important than that?

Of course, he has the individuality to say no, but how could you say he is not wrong, objectively wrong, to do so? Now, you can easily point out a flaw in my argument, saying, “Does that mean that if you have the option, you have to give up all your worldly possessions and keep giving all the money you have away to less fortunate people?” I know most people will not read this article but for the three people who will, this is something that can be a legitimate argument. Well, this is an argument that a secular utilitarian like Peter Singer would bring up, but here’s the thing — it would only cause a small peak on the moral landscape. My personal sacrifice could, perhaps, bring hope to one person, maybe even a few people, but it would not improve the overall well-being and flourishing of an individual or individuals, much in the same way as an illegal immigrant receiving a government hand out.

This is of course, not an absolute fact, but my opinion, and you have the right to contest my claim, but the fact that you can say that there is a better theory to mine supports my argument that there is a hierarchy to morality, which in turn makes a positive argument for the moral landscape.

So what is the Moral Landscape?

It’s a hypothetical space, as Sam Harris calls it, that represents peaks and valleys, corresponding to the increase and decrease of human well being. Imagine it as a flat two dimensional sheet, from which rises and falls like hills and valleys. The hills represent flourishing and the valleys represent suffering and pain. If I had to picture it, I would imagine it would look something like this:

So what does this mean exactly? What do these peaks and valleys indicate in absolute terms? I’ll explain with what Sam Harris calls “the bad life” and the “good life”.

“… some people have better lives than others, and these differences relate to some lawful and not entirely arbitrary way to states of the human brain and states of the world. To make these premises less abstract, consider two generic lives that lie somewhere between the two extremes on this continuum.

The Bad Life — you are a young widow who has lived her entire life that has lived her entire life in the midst of a civil war. Today your seven year old daughter was raped and dismembered before your very eyes. Worse still, the perpetrator was your fourteen year old son who was goaded to this evil at the point of a machete by a press gang of drug addled child soldiers. You are now running barefoot through the jungle with killers in pursuit. While this is the worst day of your life, it is not entirely out of character as the other days of your life. Since the moment you were born your world has been a theater of cruelty and violence. You’ve never learned to read, taken a hot shower, or traveled beyond the green hell of the jungle. Even the luckiest people you’ve known have experienced little more than an occasional respite, from chronic hunger, fear, apathy and confusion. Unfortunately, you have been very unlucky even by these bleak standards. Your life has been one long emergency and now it is nearly over.

The Good Life — You are married to the most loving intelligent and charismatic person you’ve ever met. Both of you have careers that are intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding. For decades, your wealth and social connections have allowed you to activities that bring you immense personal satisfaction. One of your greatest sources of happiness has been to find creative ways to help people who have not had your good fortune in life. In fact, you’ve just won a billion dollar grant to benefit children in the developing world. If asked, you would say you couldn’t imagine how your life on Earth could be better spent. Due to a combination of good genes and optimal circumstances, you and your closest friends and family will live long healthy lives, untouched by crime, sudden bereavements and other misfortunes…”

Now these are, as mentioned, extremes of each case — but to say one is better than the other is to say that one life is better than the other, that there is a difference between good and bad on the basis of suffering and well being. If you say you cannot find the difference between these two states, I would simply have to assume you are being a compulsive contrarian or just a mere goofball. If you say “it’s just the way we use language to describe these things, there is no inherent meaning to words like misery and suffering and happiness and joy” then I hope you don’t see the difference between these things when experiences that can be described with these words when they come your way. I highly doubt that you would say so. This is why I believe this theory is epistemological more sound than a worldview described as a result of Hume’s is-ought problem. Scientific facts can, in fact, be used to explain why a person ought to do something because those facts set the basis for our epistemology of the world.

A child that cheats at an exam and got away with it may have the individual satisfaction of doing so, but would be worse off for it if they were to have to use what they studied in a real life application. This would be a small peak on the moral landscape, but a much higher peak would be achieved if the child were to be able to use the knowledge they acquired in the exam in the instant it was required in a real life application. The personal and real world satisfaction and well being of the self and the people relying on that person would be much higher and therefore would correspond to a higher peak on the moral landscape than the first example.

Ice Cream Hitler

If you’ve followed the logic so far, you might have had the thought, “Well, does this apply to other real world applications like the flavour of ice cream?” Could there be a “best” flavour of ice cream? Scientifically? Well, according to this theory, yes, there would be, because if the flavour of ice cream can be mapped to physiological brain states and a degree of happiness, we should be able to derive the conclusion (with sufficient data) that there could be a scientific consensus on what the best flavour of ice cream could be.

This might seem silly or authoritarian to some of you, depending on your political proclivity, and perhaps this is all deflationary — but if you can say that most people would prefer the taste of mango flavoured ice cream over concrete flavoured ice cream (considering that that ice cream is actually edible) then you prove the existence of a scale where concrete lies somewhere towards the bottom end of such a scale, which would imply an upper end that increases flourishing and a better experience, as opposed to a worse one.

Let’s say we theoretically do find that mango in fact was the best flavour of ice cream and we could say that you are objectively wrong in saying that strawberry is your favourite flavour of ice cream. Should there be a legislation against the manufacturing of all other flavours of ice cream?

Well, let’s push that scenario further and you’ll see what I mean. Let’s say you have this scientifically amazing flavour of ice cream that is absolutely so unbelievably undeniable that it becomes apparent to all human beings that missing out on it would make the lives of people less meaningful for not experiencing it. It’s so monumentally stupendous that the human species is better off for knowing the taste of this ultimate ice cream flavour. Now imagine it was denied from you. Would that not be a denial of essentially a human right? You have the ultimate flavour of ice cream that gives you a sense of fulfillment that only this thing can give you, it’s essential to being human even — wouldn’t taking that away be a violation of a fundamental right? Would you call the person who denies that person that flavour of ice cream worse than Hitler?

Well, perhaps not — not because it isn’t true, but because there are objectively better things to divert resources to than the banning of ice cream production, such as the reduction of world hunger, poverty, rape, murder, and so on. We can worry about Ice Cream Hitler when we have gotten rid of all other major hindrances to human flourishing.

The Beginning

Photo by Ali Naderi

The aim of this article was not to prove that objective morality is already figured out, or even to propose that objective morality is the only way to look at this subject. I am, after all, just an engineering student with no formal education in neuroscience or philosophy, who just have a penchant for literature and the arts. This was just my take on Sam Harris’s work, mixed in with my personal experiences. The ultimate aim of this article was to provide a systematic secular alternative to religious morality, the one I believe works best as of now. The combination of having no free will and building a morality outside of it was something that I personally did, a worldview that I find immense peace in. I was, and am, able to judge events that happened to me and find solace in the fact that even though all the bad things that happened to me were bad, I can forgive the people that did those bad things to me. I am able to forgive myself for all the wrong things I have done, and it’s a liberating experience that I hope most people can experience for themselves if you are an atheist yourself, or even as a believer. Maybe, if you lose your religion, you could come back here to revisit my philosophy of morality. I hope you found my argument for morality compelling, and if not, please do let me know. If you read to the end. If you did, thank you so much. I will be posting this as a YouTube video in the future, so stay tuned for that.