I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:
- Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced by the fact that biologically similar people living in different places and epochs have different ideas of what's right.
- Therefore many of my values originally came from the society that raised me.
- Society's values were strongly influenced by Christian values, and many of our core moral prohibitions are inherited from Christian tradition.
- The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.
- Also my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values.
- A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
- That means editing my values to more closely match Christianity. QED.
What do you think?
I think this is an argument for having your values written down somewhere, and maybe even for getting them from a source that is not original to you, but I don't think it is a good reason to base your values on Christianity. The Bible itself does not closely match most modern persons' values, is not internally consistent, and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
Here's another, unpolitical scenario about pulling back values
Major issue: Christian ethics aren't stable. Polygamy, genocide, and slavery were all perfectly normal parts of life at various times during the development of the modern Christian faith. Those practices are frowned upon currently, at least in polite company. While many Christian ideas have in some way shaped current moral beliefs, their direct influence is much smaller than it is usually given credit for. And consider the CEV proposal. Early Christians thought that women and individuals of other races were not nearly as morally important as the males in their culture, but intelligent early Christians probably would have found the idea of gender and racial equality weird and moderately disconcerting, but not terrible. It might perhaps be analogous to if I told you that a few centuries from now, it would be regarded as a horrible, immoral belief to hold that a human's life was any more important than a Chimpanzee's (ie Trolley problems with two chimpanzees vs one human). That idea is weird and semi-disturbing, but it doesn't seem terrible. Drift of your moral feelings is fine. Just make sure you put some thought into what sort of direction you want your drift to be in.
Check out this puzzle of mine as well.
Counterargument:
People don't get their morals from books (much). Christians included.
The trouble is that there are multiple meanings of "moral values" here. There is the human instantiation, and the ideal decision agent instantiation. The ideal decision agent instantiation is used in 5. and a bit in 4. The human instantiation is used elsewhere.
Though usually these are pretty close and the approximation is useful, it can also run into trouble when you're talking specifically about things humans do that ideal decision agents don't do, and this is one of those things.
Specifically, 5. doesn't necessarily work for human values, since we're so inconsistent. People can go into isolation and just think and come out with different human values. How weird is that?!
Mostly, I think my ability to evaluate this argument is distorted beyond reliability by including the word "Christianity." So, first, let me try and taboo that word and generate a more generalized version of the argument:
1/2. My values are primarily learned from society, not innate.
- There exists some tradition from which society's values were primarily derived.
- Those (harmful) modifications can be countered by revert
... (read more)4/5. My values, once learned, can be later modified. Most such modifications are harmful from the perspective of those values.
When scrutinizing an argument, one good heuristic is to focus on vague words like "many" and aim for a more robust version. The argument has several such words: "many" in #1, "strongly" and "many" in #3, "full of" in #4, "most" in #5.
For instance, does "many of my moral values" stand for 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99% of your values in that argument? How strong an impression does the argument make on you depending on which of these rough quantifiers you substitute for "many"? (Subsid... (read more)
The argument assumes change is necessarily for the worse. People can aquire new values whilst seeing them as an improvement. If it is possible to m... (read more)
Hm, at this point it sounds similar to the point Phil Goetz was making in "Reason as memetic immune disorder".
There is moral error and moral disagreement. If your values change because of moral disagreement between your past and future self, that is something you'd want to prevent. If, however, you are simply correcting your moral error, this should be encouraged. In this case, your future self is acting more moral than you are by your current belief system, since he understands it better.
I think most of my change in morality will be due to correcting moral error. As such, in a matter of dispute, I trust my future self over my present self.
As Alicorn says, provided you are averse to values drift, this is an argument towards writing your values down and using that as a periodic anchor. Not only is it not clear what Christianity's values actually are (witness the tremendous proliferation of interpretations among Christians in outright defiance of other interpretations,) making this change itself constitutes a shift in your values to satisfy someone else's agenda in ways that are harmful with respect to your current values.
The argument has merit, but the conclusion (7) needs to be replaced with something more appropriate in light of (3). You should edit your values to more closely match an amalgam of the many influences that affected you. Or better yet, as Alicorn says, have your values written down somewhere. Including your acceptance of rational change - which puts an interesting twist on the whole deal.
Can anyone explain why, in a rapidly changing world, we need "absolute" and "eternal" morality?
First of all, this may be an attempt to change your value system and I want you to bear that in mind while reading this post.
1: Seems to be a statement of fact which there is a lot of evidence for and I don't have a problem with.
2: Seems to be a reasonable conclusion from 1.
3: Seems to be a conclusion for people living in the United States which has SOME evidence backing it, but there do exist counter arguments against that such as here But rather than sidetracking this, I'll just link a google search and let you draw their own conclusions.
4: I feel like o... (read more)
I think the argument is interesting and partly valid. Explaining which part I like will take some explanation.
Many of our problems thinking about morality, I think, arise from a failure to make a distinction between two different things.
Morality of daily life is a social convention. It serves its societal and personal (egoistically prudent) function precisely because it is a (mostly) shared convention. Almost any reasonable moral code, if common knowledge, is better than no common code.
Morality as an idea... (read more)
Isn't there a hidden problem with values taking other values as their arguments? If I can value having a particular value, I can possibly construct self-referential paradoxical values like V = value of not having value V, and empty values like V = value of having value V. A value system including value W = value of preserving other values, W included seems to be of that kind, and I am not sure whether it can be transformed into a consistent decision algorithm.
On the other hand, look at what happens if we avoid self-reference by introducing distinct types o... (read more)
True. And that drift would be beneficial from the perspective of your new, drifted-to values.
But neither of those statements have any bearing on whether value drift (in general or any specific instance thereof) is good or bad.
All values, wherever they come from, need to be re-examined on their own merit. At one point slavery was thought to be acceptable by a lot of people. If you grew up in that society, you would probably inherit that belief as well. There are very likely similar beliefs that you have right now, that were given to you by some source you find credible (society, the Bible, or LW) that you might be better off not having. That's why you need to examine every single belief that you have aside from its source. You can't assume they are automatically correct because ... (read more)