A long-standing argument of absolutist-minded folks has been that moral goodness requires absolute and unquestionable laws that are founded not on any earthly principles but on cosmic conspiracies of one sort or another.
The argument in a nutshell has two prongs:
-people are selfish, therefore people cannot make moral choices when they involve altruism, therefore an absolute law is needed to provide morality which is apart from self-interested self-preservation.
-relative moral laws are subject to change, therefore they are not really moral laws at all and could be stood on their heads tomorrow. We need absolute laws not subject to change to create a lasting moral framework.
On the one hand there are several issues that can be raised with this reasoning, and on the other there are people who believe both tenants and still do not believe in absolute moral law, which leads them to reject all moral reasoning as merely pragmatic evolutionary thinking.
I don’t want to go into a lengthly discussion on either of those points, so I’ll just throw out there that a careful distinction must be made between self-directed and selfish actions when discussing the first point (of course we *want* to do the things we do, unless we’re suffering from some form of possession, but that does *not* automatically make our actions selfish) and that I believe that morality has evolutionary origins since it almost certainly preceeds moral reasoning (unless we assume vampire bats, for example, exhibit moral reasoning on an intellectual level) but that does not mean that we cannot also find rational foundations to underlie our moral reasoning.
I do think there is a rational basis for rationality, and it is the magical gift of empathy (courtesy of evolution, yes) that makes it possible. Sociopaths out there, you’re going to have trouble following.
1) Through experiencing our own emotions, we know that we enjoy pleasure and dislike suffering.
2) Through empathy and science, we know that many other beings also enjoy pleasure and dislike suffering.
3) On a scientific and empirical basis, we know that we are not in any way special above and beyond all other living beings. We are in fact quite ordinary all round.
4) Given that we want to give ourselves happiness and prevent suffering, and given that we understand other living beings that have no inherently greater or lesser worth than ourselves have the same desires, we should seek to bring happiness and prevent suffering to other living beings. Given that we also have an understanding of many of the mechanisms that make people happy or make them suffer, we also have the tools to bring happiness and prevent suffering.
5) If we demand happiness for ourselves and do things to bring it about, yet we accept suffering for others and do not prevent it, we are hypocrites. We are not being consequent in our reasoning by preferring ourselves simply because we happen to be the one looking out of this body’s eyes.
There are many possible retorts to this argument. Many will go along the lines of “Other people don’t care about me, I don’t owe them anything” or “I don’t expect anyone to help me, so sod those losers. Let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”. I believe this kind of argument to be dishonest; of course we strongly desire help when we are needy, even if pride or fear sometimes prevents us from asking.
And of course there are people who really have very little time to worry about us and help us, but if those people happen to be unable to do so because of their own terrible situation while we are living lives of relative wealth we are still being hypocritical. Would we really be happy being born into a dire situation, brought up poorly and forced to do idiotic or unsavory things for our daily bread? If not, then let us not be hypocrites and pretend we owe them nothing because they owe us nothing.
There is one important offshoot from this argument, however. If we desire happiness for ourselves and happiness for others, and desire the abolition of suffering for us both, then we have little responsibility if we are in the situation of being far less happy and far more suffering than the person. Conversely, if we are in the superior position, we have a great responsibility. Note that it is not good enough to pick out someone better off to be able to free ourselves of our burden; we may not have to give to Bill Gates (though who knows, I’m sure everyone can use a hug or a kind word) but merely having the time and tools to think about moral reasoning probably means there are countless people out there who we owe our help to.
The truth is that hypocrisy is with us all; none of us will yield our comforts easily to help someone in need. This is not a call for poverty and renunciation leading to disillusionment or depression, but rather a request to consider on a case-by-case basis whether this is an opportunity to be a little less hypocritical on the question of human happiness.
Credit goes to: This argument is not one of my own construction, of course. Thanks go out to the Golden Rule as espoused by the ancient Greeks, Buddha and Jesus among others, and to Utilitarianism as proposed by Bentham and expanded upon by philosophers like Peter Singer.
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