Oh for Christ’s sake, mswas. First principles?
Thing is, no one creates a moral code out of first principles. You theists don’t either. You may imagine that God has laid down a set of principles for moral behavior, but the trouble is, those are simply axioms of behavior.
You can claim that they must be true because God commanded them to be true, but what does that mean? What it really comes down to is that you assert them to be true, because–get this–God didn’t talk to you. You read a book by a guy who claimed God talked to him, and the book convinced you. You talked to your friends who read the same book, and your friends convinced you.
So you didn’t base your morality on God. You based it on what your friends thought, and what you thought. You didn’t base a God-damned thing on first principles.
Do you think murder is wrong? Why is murder wrong? Because God said so? But why does God saying “murder is wrong” make murder wrong?
Why is it that you imagine that your day to day behavior and the behavior of all the atheists you’re arguing with is so similar? Is it because they secretly believe in God, or that God gave them a moral sense even though they don’t believe in God?
The thing is, there is no absolute morality. There are no first principles. Human life really is meaningless. All we are is dust in the wind, dude. We’re born, we live, we die, it means nothing.
Except funny thing is, most human beings don’t act as if human life is meaningless. But let’s ask shy that is. Why do humans care if they live or die? Why do they care for their children? Why do they care for their friends? Why do they care whether Susie in homeroom likes them or likes them likes them? Why do they care about being happy? Why do they care about not feeling hungry, not feeling thirsty, not feeling lonely, not feeling pain?
And when we start thinking this way, the answer is obvious. We care because we are animals. And animals that don’t avoid pain and hunger and thirst, that don’t strive to live and reproduce are animals that don’t tend to survive. They don’t tend to reproduce. And animals that do struggle to survive tend to be overrepresented in the next generation.
You are the product of 650 million years of animal evolution, and every one of your hundreds of millions of animal ancestors over those hundreds of millions of years shared one remarkable quality: they all lived long enough to reproduce at least once. And most of their contemporaries cannot say the same, they failed to do so, and so their potential descendants never existed. Animals that have no interest in avoiding pain, or finding food, or finding mates don’t leave many descendants. And to the extent that the desire to avoid pain and find food and find a mate is heritable, such traits are constantly reinforced over and over and over again throughout the eons.
And so here you are. You’re an animal that was born, willy-nilly with certain inborn inherited traits. You have certain preferences that you didn’t choose. You want food, you want water, you want a mate, you want to be part of a social group, you want to avoid pain. These traits are meaningless. It means nothing to the universe that you want to live. Your birth, life and death mean nothing. Except you don’t care, you want to live anyway, because that’s the sort of creature you are, because creatures who don’t care about their lives won’t last long.
So you want to live. And you’re a social mammal with a very long developmental cycle, you require parental care for years. Some animals are born knowing how to do everything needed to complete their life-cycle, but many mammals are not, including humans. You were born completely reliant on your parents to teach you how to live. But of course, your parents aren’t infallible, they just got here themselves, and it’s easy to make mistakes. They tell you a mushroom is good to eat, but it turns out they were wrong, it was poisonous and you die. Too bad. But your death means nothing…except to them, because they’re the sorts of creatures who care about such things, if they weren’t they wouldn’t have even tried to teach you which mushrooms were poisonous and which were edible. So if you live, you’ll be the same sort of creature…unless you aren’t.
But the thing is, if you turn out to be a nihilist creature who doesn’t care about anything, the other creatures who do care are going to find it difficult to live with you. You aren’t interested in cooperating and living and raising children and avoiding pain like the other creatures, and so when you cause trouble for them they’re going to try to get you to cooperate with them. Since they don’t like pain, maybe they’ll hit you when you annoy them, on the theory that since they don’t like pain, you probably won’t like pain, and so you’ll avoid the behavior that annoys them. But if you don’t dislike pain, their theory will fail. Eventually they’ll end up killing you or driving you away, because they are compelled by their natures to fulfill their biological imperitives.
So why should you care? You don’t have to care, it is meaningless if you care or not. It all depends on whether you want to live in a social group or not. Whether you want to avoid pain, or not. Whether you want to live or die. If you don’t care whether you live or die, then what meaningful consequences can that social group impose on you? But you’ll end up dead, and then we discover something interesting, only the animals that want to live are still alive.
And so that’s the first principles of morality. How can I fulfill my biological needs? It doesn’t matter that my biological needs were not freely and logically chosen by me, because whether or not I freely chose them or not I’ve still got them. I live in a social group with other humans because I’m a social animal. If I were a badger I’d be happy living alone, but I’m not a badger, I’m a human. And so I’m compelled to live with other people, and somehow avoid pain and suffering as much as possible. Luckly it turns out that other humans are mostly the same as I am. And so I agree not to murder my neighbors, they agree not to murder me, and we all agree that if somebody murders someone else, the rest of us get together and punish the murderer somehow, on the theory that this will lead to a lower likelyhood of getting murdered in the future. And on and on and on, until we have rules about driving on the left side of the road and the correct salutation for a thank you letter.
Of course, some people really are nihilists and sociopaths in the sense that the typical biological imperatives that motivate most people don’t seem to be present in them. But so what? If they can live by the same rules as the rest of us, we don’t care, because they don’t harm us. If they don’t live by the same rules, then we typically try to modify their behavior in a way that would motivate normal humans. If that doesn’t work, they eventually find themselves locked up or dead. And now their sociopath and nihilist genes tend not to get passed on to the next generation. And it all means nothing…except to those of us that care. And our caring is meaningless, just like a snowflake is meaningless. But we don’t care that our lives are meaningless. Meaninglessness is meaningless. If the universe is meaningless it doesn’t matter a whit that the universe is meaningless. The meaninglessness of the universe doesn’t change my behavior at all, because my behavoir isn’t determined by the meaning of the universe or by God, it’s determined by the sort of creature I am. And that’s fine with me. If there were some objective moral compass, you could find the meaninglessness of the universe appalling, but there is no such objective moral compass. It doesn’t matter. I want to live even though my life doesn’t matter, just the same as a bug or a worm wants to live. And so what?
But the point wasn’t really to prove me wrong, it was to convince me that there is a valid reason to accept morality. The argument was made for morality, but not love.