Random thought: There are many different ways to derive a moral code. Some people believe in moral laws independant of our existence, some believe in the will of God, and some follow the tenants of a political ideology. Some (including me) ignore the whole deal and do what benefits them personally.
Recently, it occured to me that so does everyone else, really. I mean, you can say that it is immoral to murder as it violates a man’s right to his life or God’s will. So what? Even if we have defined certain things as immoral, why not do them? It seems to me that you need to include “and it is in your best interest to be moral” to any moral code to make it relavant. Of course, I have something of a bias towards this hypothesis. So, I put the question to you all: is there any reason to be moral besides self-interest?
Generally, my view is that no, ultimately there isn’t anything other than self-interest that governs our individual actions. I don’t mean that I believe everyone should act only out of self-interest, but merely that they do anyway. So what’s the catch? Why aren’t we all evil, bloodthirsty people? Well, for some reason we are wired with this thing called guilt. When we do things that harm other people, we tend to feel unpleasant. Therefore, we are going to try to avoid doing such things because we want to avoid bad feelings. Even if you take into account religious people, they are still behaving in a certain way due to peace-of-mind considerations.
By the way, I’ve taken a number of philosophy classes, and I’ve noticed that philosophers seem overly interested in determining what we should do, and often overlook considerations of what people actually tend to do and why they tend to do it. In terms of trying to make a better world, I think the latter is more relevant.
Why should anyone do it? BECAUSE IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO. If it weren’t, there would be no obligation to do it.
As for what the right thing is, that depends on the circumstances, so it would be best to examine individual cases. Such detail is ultimately unnecessary in evaluating the OP, though. If morality were truly based on nothing more than self-interest, then rape, theft and murder are only wrong if there’s a chance that you might get caught. I, for one, totally reject such a proposition.
Goody. This will be a short ride, then. Why do the right thing? It seems to me that saying “this is the right thing to do” is meaningless without a reason for doing it.
There are a number of good reasons not to pursue total self-interest. The best one is that you will get back what you dish out. Kill someone and the state will kill you, etc. But that is not the basis for morality.
I can’t explain to you why million of people gave their money, time, and belongings to the victims of 9/11.
or
Why thousands of Tulsans were in Oklahoma City two hours after the bombing to help rescue the victims.
or
Why in war, people give up their lives to save others.
or
any reason why people act irrationally to help others succeed.
But I do know that is the basis of morality. I think it is called love.
Don’t try to understand it, just do it, and enjoy the rush.
liguori, are you seriously suggesting that there is no obligation to do the right thing? If that’s the case, then the act in question isn’t truly “the right thing to do.”
Now, I declared that “morality were truly based on nothing more than self-interest, then rape, theft and murder are only wrong if there’s a chance that you might get caught. I, for one, totally reject such a proposition.” To that you replied, “One what grounds?”
Well first of all, are you truly suggesting that it’s okay to rape, steal or murder, provided that there’s no chance you’ll get caught. There’s a term for people like that: sociopaths.
And second, it’s easy to conceive of cases wherein someone gets away with committing a heinous deed, but this does not make the case any less heinous. If someone hates homosexuals, yet suffers no retribution for that hate, does his hatred become justified? What of a person who kills his wife and her boyfriend, carefully covers the act up, and manages to escape retribution for this heinous act? Does this mean that it’s okay to kill, as long as you plan the act carefully and avoid the terrible consequences?
Heck, there was a time when it was in certain people’s best interest to own African slaves. It wasn’t until some Northern partypoopers objected that the tide started to turn. Was slavery justified in their case, up until other started to voice their moral outrage? If so, then it was the objectors to slavery who were the true criminals, not the slaveowners themselves!
Most of it, perhaps. But in the case of someone who throws herself on a granade to save her buddies, that act of sacrifice (which I assume to be moral) is perhaps an instinctive reaction for some people.
We can act out of the motive of love, but even that leads to our self-interests: I love you and I want to buy you a pony because I enjoy seeing you happy.
I think you might be missing the point of the OP (or maybe I am). I don’t think he’s exactly asking what is and is not ethical, but rather in the real world, what is it that motivates us to “do the right thing,” whatever we might think that is? Why is it that people find morality (SOME kind of morality) to be binding? I think the answer to that question does come down to self-interest, but not necessarily in the narrow way that the term is usually understood. If we were like machines and tended to live life as if at war with everyone else, any concept of a moral code might not even occur to us. We would just brute-force our way into doing whatever seemed most beneficial to us personally at any given moment. However, because humans have the capacity and the tendency to see things through the eyes of others, things are more complex. We tend to become those around us to a certain extent. When we see people suffering or experiencing discontent, and we understand the source of those feelings, they rub off on us. This has got to be just a biological effect of how our brain is wired (in fact, it’s probably an evolutionary advantage). This feature is what compels us to develop personal ethics – because when we see others being harmed, we feel a portion of that harm ourselves, and therefore we want to avoid it just as we want to avoid direct harm.
By the way, think about what happens when someone, for whatever reason, loses that capacity to feel the pain of others. That’s where you get people like Hitler and Saddam. They are the kind of people most commonly associated with moral bankruptcy, and they also clearly do not have the kinds of empathetic feelings that the rest of us do. I think those feelings are really the biological basis for our desire for fairness and morality. So, since those feelings are intrinsic to each of us – and if we didn’t feel them, we would lose our sense of moral obligation – this shows that in a way, our desire for morality derives from our self-interest.
This is quite different from asking what might motivate somebody to do what’s right. The correctness of a moral code is an entirely different matter from people’s motivations in following it.
My point is that self-interest is NOT necessary in order to make a moral code relevant. A moral code is relevant because it codifies the right thing to do, as opposed to what personally benefits somebody. Any code which is motivated purely by self-interest is sociopathic, and not at all moral.
But the point of my post is that any moral code that people are actually going to follow must be based upon self-interest. Now, if you are a politician trying to make laws, you would not want to make laws that are in your self-interest per se; that is, you don’t introduce a bill that says, “People named ‘Sen. Jon Corzine’ no longer have to pay any taxes.” But in a way, you are acting in your self-interest by not doing things like that – because you only keep your job if the people keep voting you in. Most politicians will vote for anything if they think the people will find it agreeable and re-elect them.
My point is that in the real world, legislators are among the few people who have an incentive to invent moral codes that do not contain an explicit self-interest motivation – because they are not adapting these codes themselves (well, they have to pretend to, but that’s another topic)! They are just promulgating them for the rest of us. When you’re talking about personal morality, there simply is no reason why anyone would, in practice, actually follow a moral code that they believe violates their self-interest.
I believe that human moral codes ultimately are about pleasure. That which gives pleasure is Good, that which does not give pleasure is Evil. This is called Hedonism, but I hesistate to use that word because most people associate it only with bodily or corporeal pleasures when more times than not, it involves pleasures of the mind (such as the pleasure from not causing others harm, or the pleasure of giving money to help the poor).
I think this is the fundemental of morality. We refrain from killing or raping becuase it is incredibly unpleasant (in most cases [see below]) to do so. I’m not sure WHY it is unpleasant to perform theses acts, I am pretty sure that it is not because of a god or a power from without (as there is no evidence of any such power existing).
So why would we kill a man to keep him from killing us? If we do so, according to Hedonism, it must give us pleasure, right? Indeed it does, for pleasure is not always immediate. In this case we gain pleasure from killing becuase it allows us to continue our life-- something which we are definitely inclined to find quite pleasurable.
Which is a different matter from whether that code is relevant. (As I quoted, the OP declared that its relevance is dependent on self-interest.)
Moreover, that simply isn’t true. When a man rushes into a burning building to save a stranger’s child, he’s presumably acting out of love and self-sacrifice. It would be in his best interests to stay alive, rather than risk everything to save a total stranger – yet his action is entirely moral.
Ditto for the man who hurls himself onto an exploding grenade. Self-interest would dictate that he run away and leave his comrades to die, yet he chooses the better and more moral route.
(Note: My views do not revolve around Christian concepts of morality.)
So, is there any reason to be moral besides self-interest? Not that I can see. A friend I put this question to gave the reason of ‘social interest’: we adhere to moral values in order to our keep society functional. This doesn’t wash with me. After all, what’s the ultimate end of a social setting? To fulfil the self’s needs for social contact, esteem, protection, etc etc. So we’re right back to square one, which is self-interest.
Now, some of the people here have brought up the concept of altruism to show that people act for reasons other than self-interest. Let’s take the example mentioned earlier about someone saving another man’s child from a burning building at risk to his own life. A truly commendable act. However, had he stood outside, afraid for his own life, and let the kid perish, would you call him immoral? I don’t think so. In saving the child at risk to his own life, the man did something that is above normal. But morality is definied with the masses in mind, that is, according to what is socially accepted as being normal. Most people would have been too scared to plunge into the building. So, in my opinion, a lack of altruistic behaviour does not constitute immorality. Which leads us back to the idea that morality is ultimately about self-interest.
Well, imagine a moral code in which you didn’t put your own self interst first. That would mean that you lived for the purpose of someone else, no? And why is that moral vs living you life for yourself primarily? Life is an end in itself. It is not a means to someone else’s end.
Humans, as far as we know, are the only animals that can consciously choose our actoins. Our moral code is what we use to choose one action over another. If your life, and what is important to you in your life, is not the primary basis upon which decisions are made, then what is the point of you being alive in the first place?
Maybe not immoral, but it would certainly be MORE moral to save the stranger’s child. So even then, we see that some morality is not based on mere selfish interest.
Besides, if that is your objection, then let us use a different example. Suppose that a mother suddenly decided that her six-year-old child was a financial burden and a hindrance to her career. Let us also suppose that she lives in some part of the world where adoption is not available. It might be in her best interests to abandon the child, but that would be decidedly immoral.
Additionally, what of a father whose child is drowning in a deep swimming pool. It would be safer for the father to stand by and do nothing, but this would be an act of cowardice and parental irresponsibility. Heck, if this all occured in secret, behind closed doors, then nobody would be the wiser – but it would still be wrong. Doing nothing would be in accordance with his own self-interests, but it would also be morally reprehensible.
More moral? More admirable, definitely, but more moral?
**
Actually, I believe that in such an example, it is social repercussions that prevent an immoral action. One can be thrown in jail, one can be socially vilified and ostracised. All not very nice things. Self-interest thus leads to moral behaviour. In fact, there are lots of cases of women selling off their kids for drug money, of mothers abandoning kids on garbage dumps and so on. It’s a question of risk assessment, don’t you think?
**
Risk assessment again? How about value judgement along the lines of prior mental, physical, emotional, and monetary investment in the kid versus letting the kid drown? How about it being an instinctive, evolutionary process along the lines of kin selection? I would say there are various reasons that could possibly explain the father’s actions than merely the concept of moral right or wrong.
I would posit that either a) a person running into a burning building is acting on instinct, and cannot have moral judgements made about his actions, no matter how noble, as he is not a free agent at the time, or b) the person has weighed risk of death against guilt, shame, grief, etc., and has decided that for them, possible death is the better fate. Of course, these are only the reasons I could see for running into a burning building.
That is your assertion. You need a bit more of an argument before it’s a point. And from where we sociopaths sit, “A moral code is relevant because it codifies the right thing to do.” ranks up there with “because I said so”.
Lemme rephrase this argument slightly. JT, you and others believe in an actual, non-relative moral code. Even if people conceded the existence of such a code (which we don’t), why should people obey it? (For the love of axioms, please don’t say because it’s the right thing to do.)