Universal Framework for Morality in the Absence of Free Will

Hi, if you are here from my previous articles, great! Read on, but if you are new here, first of all, hello, and secondly, please read my five part essay on why free will cannot exist, because this article is the aftermath of those.

[embed]Free Will is an Illusion Chapter 1 — Introductionmedium.com

[embed]Free Will is an Illusion Chapter 2 — Charles Whitman and his “Choice”medium.com

[embed]Free Will is a Illusion Chapter 3 — Regrets & Realizationmedium.com

[embed]Free Will is an Illusion Chapter 4 — The Food Conundrum & Falsifiabilitymedium.com

[embed]Free Will is an Illusion Chapter 5 — What’s Life Like Without Free Will?medium.com

If you were convinced by my arguments that free will is in fact an illusion, you might have gone down two completely different rabbit holes — one being that of existential nihilism and the other one being that of “Well how does it matter if I experience free will?” I do have answers to both of those in the next chapter, but I think an argument about responsibility needs to be made first.

If you’re still unsure about the free will debate, the main thing holding you back about it would be the aspect of holding people accountable for their actions. How do you hold criminals accountable for their actions if they actively took a knife to a pregnant woman’s belly even as she cried out “Please let me live, so that I can have my baby” and the killer had no remorse for it whatsoever, and on the contrary said “Look bitch, I don’t have any mercy on you, you’re gonna die” and stabs her brutally to death? You could say “They definitely deserve a punishment for their actions, but if they have no free will, how can they be held accountable for this heinous and irredeemable crime? You can just explain away their actions as pre-programmed actions” You have a fair point and I agree 100% that the people responsible need to be put behind bars, but how do you make it philosophically consistent?

For this, you would have to establish a framework of morality that is distinct from free will, and that is exactly what I will be doing in this piece.

This will be long, as my arguments need to be air-tight, and so I will be splitting this into 2 parts — first establishing a need for the metaphysical basis for objective morality through a deconstruction of subjective and relativistic morality, and second, proving that morality has nothing to do with the choice of a person and hence establishing a universal moral framework. With that, let’s get started with Part 1 — deconstructing moral relativism

So we start by defining what moral relativism and moral subjectivism is.

Part 1 — Wrongs are Wrongs

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Moral Relativism is the worldview that a person’s or culture’s morals and ethics are relative to the time and contexts that they arose in, as well as the derived logical understanding that the correctness of those morals are self-referential, meaning that if you were to judge the morality, you would have to look at it from the perspective of that culture/individual. Moral subjectivism goes even deeper and argues that morals are not just culturally relativistic, they also vary from person to person and are completely subjective in nature.

Now, I know the majority of you would not really ascribe to the latter, but moral relativism is something that I have seen being applied on a political and cultural level quite a lot, especially on the left. However, the right is not immune to the phenomenon either, it’s just that moral relativism is a major talking point and a serious motivator of morality in left-wing circles. This can be best illustrated when it comes to controversial topics such as female genital mutilation.

Is the Islamic practice of female genital mutilation morally reprehensible? Without getting into the grizzly graphic details of how it’s done, I’m just going to say that it is done with the specific intent of making women less sensitised to the pleasure of sex. It is a horrendous practice by all means and needs to be stopped with immediate effect all over the world. Is it an Islamic practice? Well, scholars often debate whether it is sunnah (recommended) or mustahab (allowed, but not mandatory), but the fact remains that it is not outright banned. That is why people in Africa and Southeast Asia still practice it. Yes, it did exist before Islam but the advent of the religion definitely didn’t make it go away. If anything, it has promoted this practice.

Okay, let’s move to something much more obvious — slavery. Is it wrong to buy and sell people like cattle or like commodities under any circumstances? I would assume that 100% of people reading this would rightfully say yes. However, all religions, Abrahamic, Dharmic or otherwise, slavery is often condoned, or at the least, not condemned. I’ve seen people try to rationalise the same in different ways, saying that that’s not what it means or that it’s not eternal, or that it was out of context and this is what it actually means, and so on — but the point is that for people back then, slavery wasn’t a bad thing. They considered it part of everyday life back then, and yet we know today that there is no conceivable way we would consider this normal or moral.

Here’s the thing — moral relativists would have to argue that slavery back then was right for the time in which it was practiced even though they know instinctively that the idea itself is wrong on a basic human level. They would have no choice but to argue that slavery was a cultural phenomenon that existed as a part of civilization and that removing that from that society would have meant its destruction — and all of that may as well be true. The claim that slavery is wrong simply becomes a subjective truth claim, which immediately brings into question the very basis of subjective/relativistic morality because there is no logical way you can argue your way out of it if you fully commit to moral relativism/subjectivism.

Now, there are people, actual living people with university degrees, celebrated academicians, who say that we are not ones to judge other cultures for their practices and that each culture needs to be understood from their unique historical lens for context. However, I have no problem admitting that I do not subscribe to that moral framework. There is no historical or cultural context that justifies female genital mutilation, slavery, burning women after the death of a husband, honour killings, sacrificing children for the possibility for rain, and pedophilia — there is something inherently wrong in this, and not just causally, but morally.

Part 2 — Dismantling David Hume’s Is-Ought Gap

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The most common argument for the case of moral subjectivism is David Hume’s is-ought gap. I will first steelman the case for it and then prove categorically that the assumption being made in the argument is wrong to begin with.

For people who are not familiar with David Hume’s is-ought gap, it is the philosophical idea that one cannot derive an “ought” (a moral statement) from an “is” (a factual statement). In an extremely simplistic way, the is-ought fallacy can be described as “Just because things are the way they are, they should be the way they are.” A very common example people who support this proposition bring up is the consumption of meat. “Just because we have eaten meat in the past does not mean that we ought to do so today.” Similar is-ought fallacies can be “70% of college students have admitted to cheating on exams, so we ought to as well” or if retorting to “We need to end this war” with something like “Oh this war has been going on for several years now”. The is does not define the ought in these instances, and so, it cannot be used to justify morality in general. In summary, what David Hume is trying to say is that just because there is a scientific fact that backs a moral claim doesn’t mean that it justifies the scientific fact.

This might not sound intuitive at first, but I’ve seen a lot of people on either side of the political spectrum use this fallacy way too often. Right-wing people have often used the is-ought fallacy to morally corner homosexuality and transsexuality. At first, it was “Oh homosexuality is not natural and therefore should not be allowed in society.” Later when they found that homosexuality is quite prevalent in pretty much the entirety of the animal kingdom, they’re currently doing it with the transgender community. “Oh no animal exhibits transgender behaviour and therefore, should not be allowed in society”.

Statue of Scottish Philosopher David Hume, Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

So I hope that you have understood what I meant by the is-ought gap or the is-ought fallacy by now. So in this scenario, how do you reintroduce the ought? We surely need oughts so that systems such as the justice machinery function smoothly and objectively right? How do we do that if we have established that facts cannot be a reliable metric for measuring morality?

Here’s where we reintroduce it — we establish the baseline for morality as “the well being of conscious creatures.” Now, you might ask, “How is that objective? If anything, isn’t that subjective?” to which I say, fair point, but you’re not quite there. There are subjective experiences that are so universal that they cannot be thought of as subjective anymore — it transcends the realm of subjectivity and enters the objective plane. Sam Harris in his book the Moral Landscape illustrates this with the example of a hot stove. If you put your hand on a hot stove, it will harm you irrespective of where you’re from, who you are, what ethnicity you are, or even what animal you are. A hot stove would even kill a plant. So the baseline here is the well-being of a conscious creature that comes in contact with a hot stove.

So what was the point of this thought experiment? In Harris’s words, certain experiences “really and truly suck”, not just by cultural or societal standards, but universally. When I say that putting your hand on a hot stove is a universally bad experience, what I mean is that any conscious creature would find that to be an experience that they would not want to replicate. We do not want to

He says that morality can be defined on a scientific basis, and the foundation of that basis is the concept of well-being. Harris defines morality on the fundamental axiom of the well-being of conscious creatures. Let’s take human beings as an example and build it up from there. Human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. It is only logical to derive through inductive reasoning that those affect everything that we perceive. This is not to say that we have an equation that can account for the parameters of literally everything and help us maximise human well-being, but it is a framework that lays down the foundation upon which we need to build a moral landscape, one where there are peaks and valleys — the peaks representing increases in human well-being and valleys representing human suffering.

Part 3 — God…?

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What is the point of this? Aren’t we just borrowing the idea of Good and Evil from religion and superimposing them into these “peaks and valleys”? Well, good question.

The answer is no.

The Moral Landscape, just like any other scientific framework, is built on the axiom that well-being is what every human strives for. If you want to contest that axiom, you would have to counter that with a claim that well-being is not every human being strives for, and every single action every human does cannot be derived, with the why question, down to well being. Morality only applies to human beings, which is why I do not mention animals here.

If you want to contest that, think about this — is it moral for a lion to kill the cub of its rival? From the human perspective, yes, of course, but we aren’t talking about a human killing a human child, we’re talking about a lion. What morality is a lion supposed to have? It’s a lion. That’s why it doesn’t factor into this equation.

Now we get into the final section, which is God.

Why can’t God be the ultimate objective arbiter of what is right or wrong? Every culture has a God of some sort that portrays either the ideal way to live, or multiple gods and beings that depict what is right or wrong in the form of stories and parables that are passed down as memes.

The problem starts with the assumption that God exists.

If God does not exist, then it cannot be that God gave rise to morality. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that God is a thing that exists. Let’s say God created the universe and us, however ridiculous of a notion that may be (it is to me anyway). Even if that is the case, who are you going to follow? YHWH, the God of the Judeo-Christian faith pantheon that condones slavery, places the Israelites as the chosen people of God and condemns people who do not believe in him to eternal damnation full of smoke and hellfire? Or his son Yeshua who “died for our sins on the cross” while also not condemning slavery (Leviticus 25:44–46).

Photo by Wyron A on Unsplash

Perhaps it is Allah, one of the Gods of Arabia that was unfortunate enough to be picked as a favourite by Mohammad who claimed to be his messenger? Allah considers women to have half the intelligence of a man, and so only deserves a third of the inheritance of the parents. Allah is the God that told his followers to follow in the footsteps of Mohammad who later went on to marry a six year old girl.

Photo by ekrem osmanoglu on Unsplash

Maybe it is Agni or Vayu or Indra or many of the thousands of other Vedic Gods, or perhaps it’s Vishnu or Shiva or Brahma or one of the many post -Vedic Gods, all of whom have stories of them being unfaithful, arrogant, deceitful — all of whom are ultimately human in nature.

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All of these Gods are reflections of the times they existed in, the rules they established were for those times, and they probably did, but this is the 21st century and we cannot rely on what some bearded man 2000 years ago to be the law of every land everywhere. Religion is a meme that is a necessary evil, I will explain in another essay, but it is an evil that needs to be regulated and modulated to keep society adhere to standards set objectively. Since the Gods are those cultures’ reference points, they cannot progress as a society if cultural relativism is the baseline ideology because they would not be able to compare one another and hence what is right for a culture is right for them irrespective of what they do to one another, which means that everything from human sacrifice to racism can be explained away as “their culture, their rules.”

Summary

So, to summarize, if we are to say that morality is subjective or even cultural, we come face to face with the stark realization that not all cultures are equal. If cultures are not equal, then we do not have a standard that we can compare them to, hence meaning that every culture is subject to itself — which in turn means that we cannot criticize a culture. However, with the examples given above (slavery, female genital mutilation, etc.) it is quite evident that there are aspects of every culture that need to be criticized because it actively harms people needlessly. If a person subscribes to moral subjectivism or moral relativism, they would not be able to do so because there is no objective foundation upon which they can base their rights and wrongs on other than their culture, which is where objective morality takes its root.

Stay tuned for Part 2 to understand Universal Framework for Morality in the Absence of Free Will (and God).