Immanuel Kant is more closely associated with duty-based ethics than any other philosopher.  According to Kant you have a categorical imperative to always act in such a way that you could will the maxim of your action to be a universal law.  And you must always treat humanity, whether in yourself or in another, as an end in itself and never merely as a means.  You must always act as though you were both the sovereign and the subject in a kingdom of ends in themselves.  For every action you undertake, the reason on which you act must pass these universality tests.  You must ask yourself, is this a reason that I could will consistently that everyone used in choosing their actions when they are in the same formal circumstances in which I am presently?  Would it make any sense if everyone acted on the reason that I am acting on?

And for Kant, if you realize that an action is ruled out by the categorical imperative, you must not do it.  You have a moral duty not to do it and the only way to be moral is to obey that duty and to obey out of a respect for duty itself and not for any other motive—be it love or fear, the desire for good consequences or for pleasure, obedience to people you love or respect, etc.  The only good motive is to act out of respect for duty alone.

Given Kant’s emphasis in all of this on the unyielding character of duty and the absolute moral necessity that one obey one’s duty, it is at first counter-intuitive to think that Kant is a philosopher who makes his philosophy centrally about autonomy or self-rule.  Kant insists that as rational beings we should only serve laws we give ourselves rather than be subject to any external authority outside our own wills.  So how does this square with his simultaneous insistence that we must be dutiful above all things, respecting and obeying our duty in all things?

The answer is that this absolute duty we have comes to us from our own reason.  The categorical imperative which we must obey is not derived from any source external to our own reason but derives from our proper exercise of it.  But on first glance it hardly looks like there is really much room for self-ruling in “legislating” Kant’s categorical imperative which he thinks all rational beings would legislate the same.  The idea that we would all come up with the same imperative hardly makes it feel like something that involves really deciding for ourselves.  On one level Kant is telling us to think for ourselves and legislate only in accordance with our own reason and will but then he is telling us what our reason should come up with and what we should will.  And so it sure can feel like Kant is trying to impose something on us as a duty we just have to accept, which really does not result from our independent will or ideas.

But the radical thing about Kant is that Kant really is standing up for our right to think for ourselves in a crucial way.  He is arguing that no one can come along and just impose their own arbitrary ideas of what is good on you.  Every rational agent must give reasons to every other rational agent.  No one—not your family, not your peers, not your colleagues, not your friends, not your culture, not your tradition, not your industry, not your government, not your god can tell you to do anything without appealing to your reason.  No one can make a rule for you that is not justifiable according to your reason.  No one can insist that you simply accept their dictates because they are more powerful, because you owe them for some good they’ve done for you, because of the way things have always been done, because they’ll make you afraid if you disobey or loved if you obey.

What Kant is insisting is that your reason gives you the right to veto any demands on you that violate your conscience and that you are not beholden to any authority who does not have adequate reasons to persuade you of the rightness and justice of their dictates.  Yes, you too are bound by reason.  Yes, you too will have to accept that your reason dictates certain actions lead to practical contradictions and so are impermissible.  You will have to accept that it would be hypocritical for you to act by a different standard than that to which you expect all others to adhere and, therefore, you must constrain yourself to act in a way that is formally consistent and in which you would demand others to act.  You must accept that there is a limit on your own ability to force others against their own wills to serve your ends.  These are curbs on your freedom.  But as they are also curbs on others’ freedoms, they liberate you from the tyranny of others.

Your duty is only to answer to your reason and to what can be made rationally clear to you.  There is no arbitrariness in this.  That constrains you from being able to act capriciously irrationally but it also spares you any obligation to others’ capriciousness and in that way liberates you to pursue any end you want which does not entail your being unfair and living in practical contradiction.

So, while this is a philosophy of duty, it’s the exact opposite of a philosophy for forcing anything on other people.  In fact, whenever someone argues that we should not force beliefs or ways of life on people against their will, it is a precisely Kantian spirit which they manifest.  It is the Kantian ethos which says there is something fundamentally unfair about being forced to say or do things which contravene our will.   But force should not be confused with reason.  I may not force my will on you but I may appeal vigorously to your reason because if your reason can be persuaded you will be persuaded.  Reason is the force which most fundamentally opposes violent force.

Often debates about morality and religion take place between people who try to appeal to things other than reason.  They try to bully with threats or fear tactics or manipulate with offers of love and community, they cite arcane and often archaic and fundamentally dubious “authorities” that tell you to believe or do things simply on their unverifiable word that what they say is right.  Reason is precisely the opposite of that and morality founded in reason is the precise opposite of that.  To be a Kantian is to insist that unlike debates between arbitrary assertions that are rooted only in traditions or scriptures and which admit of no independent corroboration, debates about morality should appeal only to the authority of our own reason.  I can force you to accept no arbitrary assertion about what is good or bad, right or wrong.  I can force you to accept no tradition, no scripture, no cultural preference that does not make an appeal to your reason.

There is a worrisome tendency in the west to overcorrect for the danger of violent imposition of ideas and to feel threatened by any adamant insistence on an idea or a moral precept and consider it to be simply an expression of force.  But we should never lose sight of the difference between an argument that appeals primarily to someone’s reason, which does not insist they accept anything arbitrary but only raises for their consideration what their reason can confirm for itself on the one hand and the attempts through emotionalistic, authoritarian, or political power to impose practices and beliefs on people that their reason alone could not be expected to accept were these other forces not at play.

There is a difference between, on the one hand, reasoning passionately and persuasively on the common ground of reasons available to all and, on the other hand, trying to subvert others’ reason by trying to make their will bend to emotional, social, political, and other irrational forces that contradict what their reason would tell them if they were fully informed and able to rationally investigate all the formal implications of what they are being asked to do or believe.

Ironically, although Kant is insistent that we be dutiful, his philosophy does not—contra Nietzsche—create automatons but rather formalizes and centralizes the insistence that all of us bow to no ruler but our own reason.

Your Thoughts?

Now, maybe political partisans and religious partisans should know the boundaries of when it is fitting or civil to actively try to disabuse people of their illusions.  Richards Dawkins has said explicitly that he is not advocating bothering to dispute dying people’s desire to rest on their religious beliefs in the privacy of their death beds.  Both PZ Myers and Sam Harris have talked about how there are numerous contexts in which it is unnecessary, inappropriate, or uncivil to bother getting into an argument about religion. There are plenty of times where it is simply gauche or outright rude or cruel to raise or persist in a debate about religion, politics, or money.  The conventions of politeness which oppose these discussions are sometimes rather justified.

But this is not about the niceties of daily life, it’s about the positions we claim when we speak up, when we are asked to give a viewpoint on important matters of morality, policy, and thought.  It is about which institutions we prop up, how we raise our children, how we conduct our politics, how we give serious advice.  We can allow people their illusions where civility or politeness are at stake.  We must allow people many of their illusions where their rights are at stake.  We should allow them the privacy of their illusions as well.  But wherever truth and policy are at stake, we should stand up for what we really think and not condescend to our neighbors out of our lack of trust in their abilities to handle reality.

In reply to all these considerations, Njustus writes the following (the first paragraph of which I think is superbly put):

one observation i often come back to is that people’s beliefs are a function of their experience. to take it another step, sometimes i see people’s beliefs as an explanation of their experience and existence, and to the most obsessive of us, our ability to state our beliefs is the moment and power of self-actualization that allows us to completely communicate everything we’ve experienced.

what i’m latching onto here then is an analogy you made how a clear-thinking Democrat would not want anyone to think like or be a Republican.
Of course we are all shaped by forces beyond our control, and we do not choose to a large degree much of these events or people who influence us early on. Having been on both sides of the spectrum and now a self-described moderate, the question is how much leeway do we give people for holding onto their beliefs if they seem irrational? Do we take into account their intelligence? Do we take into account personal experiences like “born again” moments or consolation from deaths of loved ones?

I do commend you for breaking this issue down and identifying times when it is appropriate and inappropriate to press the issues. I think it’s impossible to separate an arguer or an argument from this very personal dynamic, though; unless you are playing devil’s advocate (and getting paid for it), who is going to take a stand on this kind of crucial topic if they don’t have some life experience that places a value on that belief? I guess I’m saying it seems impossible to extricate the rational arguments in this area from the irrational authority of experience…which raises a further question of why such a premium should be placed on rationality in discussing these issues.

I take your central observation to be that we form our beliefs through a lived process, rather than through inferences made in a vacuum, and that that’s where, inevitably, we do a great deal of intermixing irrational factors into our processes of belief-formation.  Probably because religion is a way of life and/or an identity, it takes root in one’s life and does not stay a matter for the brain alone.  This is also complicated by the fact that the vast majority of us are indoctrinated into our religion when we are children and especially intellectually vulnerable to deception.

As a result of the interaction between faith and life (and, not to mention, the interaction between lack of faith and life), people’s personal narratives play an integral role in why they believe what they believe.  And unlike abstract positions to which people come through abstract persuasion and against which they would therefore be receptive to abstract dissuasion as well, faith beliefs did not come to most people through abstract persuasion and so, in many of these cases, are immune to abstract dissuasion.

If psychologically someone came to assent to certain belief claims as part and parcel of their allegiance to family or friends or in response to an emotional trauma or as part of finding acceptance in a loving church community, etc. then psychologically the choice to believe feels right, no matter how much people throw abstract arguments their way which show problems with the abstract contents of their beliefs.

We are not first and foremost rational creatures but adaptive ones and most of our use of reason involves adapting ourselves to our circumstances.  Good abstract, careful and formally defensible reasoning is frequently an advantage to us and so quite frequently, even usually, we reason accurately because it is in our interests to do so.  But as soon as a psychological adaptation to the world or a relationship, etc. rests on some self-deception, rationalization, unjustified belief, or prejudice, then our minds will naturally tend to and cling to these various strategies.  And our minds will cling to them even in the teeth of evidence that we are being self-contradictory, hypocritical, self-deceiving, or irrational in any of a number of ways.

So, given all of the points you raise and the ones that you’ve inspired me to think about, we face the question of how and when should we approach debating these questions.

First, I think it is simply important to embrace the reality of human psychology and it’s tendencies to intermix good reasons and bad and to use reason as a tool for rationalization rather than truth-seeking.  We need to own up to the fact that this is the way our minds work.  We seek to confirm our biases and we seek to maintain our identities and our relationships and we do all of this because we are hardwired first and foremost to adaptively flourish in our environment and not to have disinterested truths or ones that would thwart our purposes altogether.

While I think we should find ways to cut through the psychological thicket that protects people’s beliefs about metaphysical realities (like God), epistemic justification, (like that faith is a good grounds for accepting a belief), and morality, I think we should remember not to blame others for their psychological process of belief-formation.  It’s nobody’s fault that this is how our minds operate and that we form beliefs about these most important matters in rationally inconsistent ways.

I think that with this awareness, we can help people pay attention to the roles that non-cognitive factors are illicitly affecting their abilities to be honest or objective.  I think that there is a place for making emotional appeals like shaming and ridiculing the most ridiculous examples of irrational religious thinking.   This is controversial of course.  I am queasy about being cruel, disrespectful, or belittling.  But I know that in my own case, Nietzsche’s emotionally aggressive attack and his mocking tone of dismissiveness played a key psychological role in telling me to “cut out the bullshit and face what you already know to be true.” Having spent all my thinking years in a project of rationalization of faith beliefs, I needed Nietzsche to call me out so unequivocally on what I was doing if I was ever going to be deprogrammed.

So, there is a place for highlighting religulousness as Bill Maher does, for getting people through humor and through vigorous emphasis on the contradictions of the fringe’s beliefs to get them to associate religious contradictions with silliness and stupidity.  Maybe they will still want to hold on to the more mildly irrational aspects of their faith or to pare down the number of irrational things they will stick by.  Last week I posted an interview with an esteemed astronomer who is a Catholic priest and the week before I debated a Greek Orthodox priest on this blog, and both of them were willing to eschew many aspects of biblical literalism but still felt the need to stick with the ressurrection (and in Father Coyne’s case, the virgin birth) if nothing else.  So, some believers will pare down the unsupported claims to just a couple key ones like that.

All of that is progress at least, even if rationalists like me cannot completely convince people to abandon faith, since they experience it as too inextricably interwoven into their personal narrative and identity, we can at least participate in the tug of war and contribute towards pulling them further and further towards the middle of the rationalist spectrum.

And, so, appropriating an old phrase from my evangelical days, my goal is to meet people where they are, empathize with the interconnection of their faith with their life since that’s an experience I have had and can identify with, and to focus on getting them to see what I think is irrational about what they are thinking and saying in a way that appeals to our common ground of reason, experience, evidence, etc.  In this context, one can easily focus on the contradictions of religious faith and on religious faith’s inherent dimensions of arbitrariness.  And from there it is a matter of driving home the conflicts between arbitrariness and reason and between arbitrariness and political freedom.

When should we bother to do this?  Well, for New Atheists like Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Myers, etc., they should do it all the time professionally since they have a role to play as public defenders and advocates for atheism. That’s why it is absurd that people whine because they have the temerity to make forceful arguments against faith.  Faith is eminently vulnerable to philosophical challenge and regardless of how individuals feel about hearing it attacked, the public discourse should not make faith off limits in any way to criticism.  It is a legitimate target and having strong, clearly reasoned, non-violent opposition to it is not “mean” nor “militant” but philosophcially appropriate in every way.  These are public debates about both truth, science, politics, philosophy, and morality and those are serious enough matters that they should not be worried about people’s feelings as long as their arguments are sound and their personal comportment is decent.

This does not mean that every atheist must take up a public charge like the New Atheists.  It only means that wherever the topic comes up, they should not feel like pariahs or bad people or like they have a disease they should fear infecting others with.  For most people I imagine it will rarely come up, and that’s fine.  A raised atheist consciousness among atheists does not require that we all become evangelical about it and go out and try to change our neighbors’ minds.  All it means is that people who really do not believe should stop feeling like they should send their kids to church to appease their families or because it’s a moral thing to do.  It does mean that when one does wind up in a debate about religious matters and it’s a reasonable time to debate, that one have some backbone to stand up against erroneous thinking, etc.  It does mean that atheists should look for ways to create constructive places for fellow atheists to meet some of the needs that most people turn to church for.

In my case, I do philosophy and my interests are in ethics, Nietzsche, and the epistemology of faith, so I see it as my place to be involved in actively and publically making the case against faith.  Primarily I am a philosopher, more interested in philosophical arguments than in being an atheist.  My dissertation is on ethics, for example, not atheism.  And when I teach my focus is on helping my students develop their critical thinking skills and not on getting them to think like I do.  What I think personally is 99% of the time irrelevant to me and to them in the classroom.

But I also think that one of the philosopher’s main social contributions is to be a defender of reason against her culture’s irrationalism and insofar as I think that faith is the root of irrationalist authoritarianism in thought and politics, here on the internet and among receptive friends with philosophically open minds, I see my role as one of promoting intellectual scrupulousness, rationalism, philosophical inquisitiveness, and freedom of thought and practice.  And, to my mind, promoting those things involves countering faith, irrationalism, and authoritarianism, and so that’s what I do.

On a one-on-one level, with those who would only be ultimately injured by what I have to say or with whom arguing would be futile, as Nietzsche writes in the case of Zarathustra and the old hermit, it’s better in those cases just to pass them by.

I hope this addressed your criticisms and concerns adequately.  Please let me know if I missed something or am wrong in some way.

Your Thoughts?

You must forgive a philosopher here for musing about history a bit (and I welcome any corrections from historians and anthropologists whether or not they have any consequences for the overall plausibility of my philosophical case in this essay).  But to give a crude story (which I welcome those better informed than I to correct) when I look at human history, what I see is a long struggle to overcome primeval ways of thinking that were evolutionarily useful for overcoming in the harsh struggle for scarce resources against ever-present natural threats.  In such a context, it makes sense to me that human beings needed to develop “fictive kinship” relationships in which they associated others in their tribe as though they were family members in order to foster their willingness to cooperate with them.

It makes sense also why they had to develop a profound mistrust of outsiders and what was unfamiliar in order to protect themselves from competitiors for resources and the violent possibilities of other humans.  It makes sense that they developed taboos to avoid poorly understood threats and why they often enforced their codes through measures so violent as to be barbaric by our lights.  The tribe suffers harm in connection with a certain action and so prohibits anyone else from risking that harm again.  And the penalties are harsh because there is serious concern for survival at stake.

So, yeah, someone got sick eating mixing meat and cheese or off of eating shellfish and so there must be prohibitions.  If someone contributes to such dangerous behavior, then the strongest lesson is the most severe.  You rule by fear and the strongest fear is the fear of death, so you rule by the fear of death.  So, you stone people for violations of health codes, for disobeying their parents, for disobeying pretty much any authority, because tribe cohesiveness is most essential to ordering yourselves for survival and untamed humans are violent, dangerously curious, and not to be trusted to freely do the right thing.

And we’re extremely hierarchical, rank-conscious creatures that function through such disciplinary strictures quite well.  We need those sorts of boundaries psychologically.  So historically reinforcing them in brutal fashions was better than the other option—humans left to their own devices ignoring the accumulated wisdom of the tradition, tradition which embodied the conclusions of the tribe’s experience.  In this context, the most important thing to survival of the tribe is not only conformity but whatever conduces to creating humans more prone towards conformity itself (which is John Richardson’s brilliant exposition of what Nietzsche means by “the herd instinct”).  The more we adopt not only traditions but the propensity to obey traditions because they are traditions (which I will call traditionalism), the more we become able to internalize received cultural wisdom and the survival benefits that such inherited techniques bring with it. This also reinforces our general attachment to the tribe and our mutually beneficial cooperation.

In this context, conformity is a highest good and individuality is a serious threat.  There is little “existential” anxiety, no wondering “who am I?” or “what if our gods are not the ‘true’ ones?” or “how should I live?”  There’s a healthy dose of racism too because the tribe’s rule is enforced as absolute and felt in one’s bones (so bred to be conformist) to be absolute that the outsider represents something incomprehensible.  They’re not even human they’re so outside of the cultural categories by which you understand human life.  Their codes are evil, their language is jibberish, etc.

This is a crude sketch, subject to many particular corrections by anthropologists, historians, and sociobiologists, of course.  The gist of it though is that human traditionalism has origins in harsh conditions in which reinforcing social instincts was paramount to respecting things like liberty and individuality for particular members of the herd.  Inculcating codes based on experience was more important than allowing individuals to develop their own sensibilities.  Traditionalism, an ingrained inherent respect for tradition qua tradition, was far more vital to survival than free thought and forms of questioning that demanded every tradition give account of itself.

It has taken free thought centuries to overcome traditionalism and get us this far to the crucial point at which citing tradition is no longer an acceptable reason for a belief or for continuing a particular practice.  And for a long time challenging prevailing tradition or pointing out its inconsistencies made you not only “wrong” but godless.  Not only Socrates but Jesus was accused of atheism, that’s how tightly bound tradition, morality, and religion were in the ancient mind.

Now in all things, a first instinct towards respecting established conventions and traditions is still advisable for the some of the same reasons as it was back in ancient times:  what is known is usually immediately less risky than what is unknown.  And even where you might be choosing between evils, “better the devil you know” is sensibly the first inclination.

So, now, gay marriage.  Thousands of years of human tradition are against it (or, more accurately, didn’t even contemplate it) and so we need to ask what implicit reasons did they have to oppose or restrict homosexuality or to not institutionalize it in marriage, and are they reasons that matter today?  If they don’t matter today, then we should abandon them.  We do not need to be slaves to tradition and reinforce traditionalism for its own sake.  You would have to make a really sophisticated case to me to accept that we must do something like that.  I think civilized 21^st Century human beings can handle the nuance of balancing respect for tradition’s accumulated wisdom with an ability to reinvestigate and revise its contestable or outdated claims and practices and to correct for its omissions.

So, when looking at marriage, what are reasons that it was never between gays?  This is a historical question, again about which others likely know a great deal more than I.  But taking a stab at it, there are a number of factors that go into rejection of gay marriage historically.  We can start with irrational disgust.  It’s part of an animal’s sexual orientation to be inclined towards certain animals as sexually attractive and others as sexually repulsive and certain sexual acts as attractive and others as repulsive.  In other words, as a heterosexual human male you are overall inclined towards being sexually attracted to human females but not human males, baboons of either sex, peacocks of either sex, etc.  This orientation of course need not be absolute as a given person might have a wider range of sexual attraction than another.  All that is important to establish is that there are sexual attractions, indifferences, and repulsions, be they biologically or socially created, encouraged, or discouraged.

Now, there is some really interesting neuropsychology from people like Haidt and Greene I have recently been reading and writing about that links our feelings of disgust with our inclination to call things immoral or wrong.  Like, for example, they put test subjects at a disgusting desk filled with used tissues and other garbage, a sticky table, etc. and found their moral judgments were harsher.  They hypnotized suggestible patients to find an innocuous word like “raises” to be disgusting and then after awaking the patients asked them to evaluate the morality of a city planner who frequently raises issues to the city council and the patients suspected he was immoral, they rationalized the response by saying they thought something was “fishy” about someone who does that.  They interpret their disgust with a word into a moral judgment.

But these experiments are not needed to make the point more simply—the ugly, the odorous, the misshapen, the deformed have long been more suspected of evil.  In art if one wants to evoke the sense of evil, repulsive physical traits are the trick because our minds tend towards indiscriminately lumping together aversions.  There are not adequate psychological boundary lines separating morally neutral deformity and immorality by morally defensible criteria.

On the flip side no scientific proof is needed to establish our tendency to believe the best about the moral virtues of those who look good, smell good, feel good.  While we are able to override these aversions and attractions based on reason when it comes to individuals, these are our natural tendencies.

And when it comes to dealing with those who look different or whose practices are different from ours, there are aversions that we are prone to rationalize in moral terms.  We’re more likely to believe that foreigner is up to no good than someone who looks familiar to us and often it’s a race based aversion that we’re rationalizing into a moral distrust.  Of course it’s not always that way.  Some people of other races and nationalities are bad and some practices not only do repulse us but should repulse us.

Nonetheless, I suspect most moral aversion to homosexuality is a rationalized form of physical aversion to it by heterosexuals.  It’s as natural to a heterosexual to be repulsed by the sight of two men engaging in sex as it is for him or her to be attracted to the sight of a heterosexual couple having sex (at least when in the right frame of mind).  That’s because of the particularity of heterosexual sexual orientation, it is towards one thing and (at least sometimes) strongly averse to the opposite.  And there’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong with those aversions and attractions as they occur to us psychologically.  But they are themselves proof of nothing but how our minds work and, possibly, what kinds of aversions and attractions aided us in survival in our more nakedly animal stages of species development.

But then the gay marriage question becomes a more specific one.  We can (theoretically at least) posit that we can end adverse treatment of gays based on aversion without outright reconceiving of marriage.  Can our society “accept” gays while still nonetheless not changing the definition of marriage.

The question though that arises here is what is wrong with changing a definition?  We do so in science all the time when we have a new account of a thing which more adequately describes it and accounts for its relationships to other things.  The word “mass” doesn’t mean the same thing in Einstein’s physics as it does in Newton’, for example.  The definition changed to get a better handle on a phenomenon.

Marriage is an institution, not a natural property of course, so changing this definition is not about more accurate description in the same way that changing the word “mass” is.  Marriage is a normative concept, one undertakes a set of cultural norms when one participates in the institution.  But this norm cannot be laid down willy-nilly either.  It would be silly to say I’m married to my computer (in anything but an analogical sense.)  It would also be silly (or just a banal metaphor) to say that the peanut butter marries jelly when you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or that when I throw my book against the wall the book and the wall “marry each other.”  We cannot just define the word to mean anything, it has to have something to do with a relationship of commitment and  institutional support.  But does it have to be between one man and one woman?  Can it be between multiple people?  Can it between more than one species?  Can it be between people of widely varying ages?  Can it be between people under 18 years old?

Historically, we see some options.  We see marriage largely as a tool for merging families.  This makes sense in terms both of economics and primal tribal unity concerns.  Marrying between families tightens their bonds to each other, reinforces the fiction that they are kin to each other by creating kin that actually do belong to both families.  So procreation is a high value served by heterosexual marriage.  Another prima facie reason for homosexuality to be discouraged is that it produces no kin (at least not directly or inherently).

Economic gains from marriage are to be had both on the local and the broad cultural levels too.  There is a partnership with another family with economic gains and the more children you have means the more hands you have for the farm.  And in primal times and throughout most of human history (when life is nastier, more brutish, and shorter) the tribe needs as many children as it can get because so many die through miscarriages, during childbirth, etc. and only live to 35 even if they do survive longer.  We’re animals, we need to reproduce ourselves and this is a high priority no one needs to explain or seriously defend.  So, our social norms still wind up privileging heterosexual sexual unions for this purpose, even in cultures where homosexual sex is understood to happen in other contexts with varying degrees of social approval.

There are even less seemly aspects to historical definitions of marriage.  They often denigrated women to the status of property and reflected chauvinistic virtues.  Even where sex between men has been approved, there have been misogynistic attitudes towards not being the “receiving” partner because it would make you like a woman.    Similarly, numbers of wives have varied in different cultures.  The Bible is littered with people with approved polygamous marriages—they are treated as an unquestioned norm.  One of the ten commandments is not “There shall only be one man to one woman.”

King David wasn’t even rebuked for having sex with someone other than his wife.  Nathan attacked him for being someone so wealthy in wives who nonetheless stole the only wife of a guy with just one.  We’re told God loved polygamous old David otherwise, with not a hint of criticism of his lifestyle—when he’s not stealing the “property” of a poorer man and murdering him.  In fact, in Deuteronomy we learn that you HAVE to take on an extra wife if it’s your brother who has died and his wife is going to be a widow.  Why?  Because the number of people in a marriage wasn’t important.  Economic and social wellbeing, looking out for family, THAT’S what mattered, pragmatically enough.

Finally, another reason there was never “gay marriage” before is that the whole idea of homosexuality as a defining characteristic of someone is a very recent invention, historically speaking, as Michel Foucault argues.  Classifying someone on the basis of such a thing was not the way the ancients or even the medievals or early moderns thought.  We are in a new time in whichviews on sexuality have been drastically influenced by culture and science in a number of ways.

In all of these circumstances there are a lot of economic and social reasons for heterosexual marriage that are all open to reassessment unless we are to genuflect before tradition as blind traditionalists who assume it is always wise and never in need of revision.

So, to me, the relevant questions are, what do we want marriage to mean to us?  What roles do we want it to serve?  What virtues do we want it to teach people and reinforce in the culture?  What are its best social contributions worth promoting and what harmful effects should we teach people to reject from our historical (or present) versions of it?  And then when it comes to gays specifically, the questions are manifold:  Would these full and equal citizens of the country be helped or harmed or unaffected by inclusion in this institution?  How would they affect marriage’s ability to promote the virtues we want it to promote?  How would their marriages affect the social order?

In 21^st Century America, we reject arranged marriages for the most part and on principles that I think are rationally defensible for the most part.  The reason is that we believe that love relationships are so important to human emotional, psychological, and ethical health that the economic and social benefits of marriage should not be sought where this is not present—at least at the start.  We may value staying in marriages which have lost their love for the sake of the benefits to children of having two parents and we may promote endurance for the sake of virtues related to commitment more generally.

But we are also a no-fault divorce culture that thinks that the less people who are harmed by one’s divorce (and the more people made happier by it), the more acceptable (and even preferable) a divorce becomes.  And in our present day culture, many are persuaded that “staying together for the sake of the kids” only harms the kids more anyway by role-modeling unloving dysfunctional marriages and by making them live with unhappy, unfulfilled parents.  And there is recent evidence for this view, but that’s a digression.

What is important to establish is that our contemporary view of marriage understands it as part of the pursuit of personal happiness and not as subject to socio-economic concerns.  Your own interests are paramount in your choice of a partner.  We could go back to the historical model and marry for socio-economic stability of the larger people or for the sake of our families but what ethical reason is there to do that when in our scenario we can both have love, with the happiness and virtues associated with it, and by default create socio-economic stability just the same through being married?

While we’re at it, we can end this nonsense where people like me are unmarried at 30 and get on with possibly more socio-biologically efficient practices of marrying and procreating as soon as we can to replenish the species as much as we can.  We can go back to the days of forming families in our teen years.  Why not do this?  Because, again, in our culture we believe that happier people make for a better society.  We also believe that nearly all people should be educated at least 4 years into their mentally and physically mature (childbearing) years and a good number should be educated even as long as 8 years in order better to fully maximize their mental powers as human beings and to advance our civilization technologically and culturally.

For a significant of number of us who want to be professionals, schooling is to take even longer into our adulthood, usually as many as 12-17 years past the onset of puberty.  During periods of schooling and other forms of career grounding, it is harder to be economically stable enough to provide a secure foundation for children.  But we put these other goods, the advancement of our collective learning and innovation ahead of having kids at 14-15 and going to work on the farm.

So, our definition of marriage is changed.  It’s not to be entered into just to make babies or primarily to provide socio-economic stability.  My personal socio-economic stability can now be delayed as long as I like as long as I am not endangering any dependents by doing so.  I may marry as late as I like or not at all, I shouldn’t marry someone I do not love, if I marry I have no obligation to produce children and I certainly should not have them with the primary intention of producing laborers.  If I marry, my partner is not to be treated like property but like an equal and is not to be forced into the arrangement but to participate willingly.

Marriage is supposed to make people stable, provide a healthy environment for children, to encourage virtues related to commitment, love, responsibility, mutual support, kindness, generosity, and self-sacrifice, and to contribute directly to the individual happiness of those in the marriage and everyone directly affected by the marriage.  Indirectly, it is encouraged because it tends to create people who are more grounded, who are less flighty due to their increased responsibilities, and who have a greater personal investment in the well being of the community now that they have more people in their lives who belong to the community—a partner, children, etc.

Now, if I’m right in my encapsulation of the nature, benefits, and virtues of marriage I have here listed, my question is what does any of it have to do with heterosexuality or homosexuality?  Homosexuals can love, can commit, can be responsible and stable (on average they make more money than straights at present), can self-sacrifice, can have a mutually recognizing relationship (assuming they’re both of age) that doesn’t treat the other merely like property.  And, contra-anti-gay-propaganda, gays are no worse with children than anyone else.

Gays can a far better shot at happiness if they can marry who they like than if they are socially coerced into sexual relationships that go against their inclinations and which would be unfair to their spouses and children.  But homosexual marriages don’t create children!  But unless you force gays to procreate with people they’re not inclined towards (a rather cruel demand no heterosexual would ever accept herself as it is a form of social rape!) they’re not having children anyway.  Within gay marriages, homosexuals can more stably raise children or opt not to, just like any heterosexual couple, and through the advances of modern technology (and even through old school “biblical” means of creating surrogates) can even have children of their own.

And gays are not going to vanish by pretending they don’t exist.  They’re here, they’re queer, we need to get used to it!  But they can adopt and give children two loving parents where there might otherwise have been none or only one or even two unloving heterosexual parents.  And even where all things are equal, if there is love and wisdom in parents, what difference is it to their parenting skills the sex of the person they sleep with?  What matters to good parenting is not whether you’re gay or straight but your emotional intelligence, your character, and your love.

How does opening marriage to gays affect the larger society?  Well, at present we are under no threat of extinction and, so, the option of forcing gays into heterosexual sex is not a fire extinguisher we have to seriously consider employing.  There can be, as there always have been, non-procreating homosexuals with or without gay marriage.  This does, however, increase the number of possible homes for children however which is a key social benefit (especially for those of us concerned with providing alternatives to abortion through increasing the number of potential adopting parents).  And it does make gays more likely to both procreate (through modern technological means or by holding their noses) and also to have marriages to which they can commit more completely body and soul.  Sounds win/win to me.

More importantly, gay marriage reverses the prejudicial and demeaning messages that (a) homosexuals’ inclinations are only about sex when they are just as much a combination of lust and love as any heterosexual attraction is.  When gay relationships are associated with an institution of love and commitment and are not merely relegated to infamous bathhouses, then the truth about gay LOVE will be taught to the larger culture.  It is a truth that prejudicial institutions have long suppressed.

When we use an institution to treat people like slaves, it is a lot easier to call them subhuman.  As long as we exclude gays from what our culture treats as one of its absolutely most central and “holiest” institutions, we send the message that they are second class citizens and that their love is illegitimate to the culture—that it neither stems from nor creates virtue and that it does not serve the public good.  Those are falsehoods.

Homosexual love is just as capable of virtue and vice as heterosexual love.  Excluding that love from institutional recognition is prejudicial and deceptive.  It reinforces irrational, biological disgusts of some heterosexuals that reflect more their own sexuality and social conditioning than any moral truth, and reinforces a crude fear of otherness barely any different than the primal fears of foreigners, other races, or menstrual blood.

We are no longer living in barbaric cultures.  It is time to let go of our evolutionary distrust of the Other.  Xenophobia, racism, homophobia—-these are all socio-biological responses to primal triggers.  In centuries BC, it is more understandable that people lept straight from their disgusts to moral claims.  But this it the 21^st Century, you need to correlate a trait with its demonstrable causal connection to vice or great social ill before you can say that it is a cause for denigrating or downgrading the rights of someone who has it.  People’s crooked noses only reveal them as villains in cartoons, not in the real world.

(b) Gays should have the right to marry and not merely have civil unions (or, better, we should all simply have civil unions and make marriage entirely personal) because the government should not be in the “separate but equal” business.  It’s unconstitutional and with good reason.  Separate is not equal.  Marriage is a social institution and a whole class of people from it is not acceptable, even if a consolation prize is offered.  Such practices send the message that some people are second class citizens worthy of only second-rate recognition of their relationships.

The government cannot tell you what church to get baptized in.  It can’t tell you who you can or cannot marry.  Both certificates are filed with the government.  How would the religious feel if the government rejected their baptisms because it decided Presbyterian baptisms don’t count—only Lutheran ones or Catholic ones?  It’s a matter of conscience where you are baptized or if you are at all.  And it should be a matter of conscience who you marry or if you do at all.   The government should not be in the business of judging validities and invalidities here unless there are issues of harm to parties—coerced spouses, underaged spouses, animals and others unable to consent as spouses, spouses who resulted from sale.

Ironically, throughout history being sold into marriage was often the norm.  Now it’s an abhorrence.  I think such changes in conception of marriage were for the better.  And, remember, the idea of separating church and state—given the enormous equation of people with their culture’s religion was once an anomaly in human history.  Every modern advance away from racism, monarchism, theocracy is a pull away from primitive human inclinations and the practices of most centuries of human societies.  It takes a training in suspicion of traditionalism to pull against all that socio-biological force of traditionalism to get away from these tendencies.

The net sum gains of gay marriage:  More marriages, more commitment, fidelity, love, self-sacrifice, responsibility among homosexuals.  More stable homes for children.  Less gays in sexually doomed marriages to straights with the concomitant divorces.  No exclusion of citizens based on morally irrelevant factors from participating in cultural institutions.  No “separate but equal” standards that make for second class citizens.  Love and commitment are more clearly defined as the core of marriage rather than degrading economics or social transaction concerns that disregard individual happiness.

All of this is increase in freedom for all to pursue their own happiness.  It’s a further strike against slavery to our overly-ingrained tendencies of our species to be traditionalistic and fearful of Otherness.  It’s a teaching instrument for us to overcome our irrational disgusts and learn to separate knee jerk aversions from moral repulsion, which is an increase in our abilities to assess issues fairly, rationally, and only according to relevant distinctions.  It means less promiscuity (if decreasing promiscuity is a good you want), decreasing the chances of sexual diseases and emotional and relational instability.  Mainstreaming gays, makes them happier, cuts down on their suicides, gives young people who are gay more confidence that they can be accepted for who they are in the larger culture and that they can pursue their dreams and consummate their loves just as well as it they were straight.

If you care about the alarmingly high rate of suicides by gay teens, if you care about the disproportionate bullying gay kids suffer, I don’t see how you could oppose using our institutions to send the message that no class of people in the culture is made up of second class citizens or will be shut out from institutional support for their pursuit of happiness of full human fulfillment.  And I care far, far more about those kids and the adults they grow into being than about being consistent with the long series of brutalities and irrationalities that make up the human history of fearing and suppressing otherness within societies and just across their borders.

Your Thoughts?

Haidt also argues that to dismiss foreign cultural practices which find their justification through reference to concern for these goods is to be chauvinistic about Western values.  We cannot assume that, for example, Muslim women who embrace the veil as part of the moral concern for purity are merely brainwashed victims of an oppressive, misogynist culture who would most certainly adopt Western attitudes towards women’s clothing were they able to think freely about the matter.

In reply to this, Tyler remarked as follows:

Just from reading this article, with little prior knowledge, I like Haidt’s approach. Questioning traditional moral cognition can lead to a fuller life experience by developing and sharpening the apparatus through which the world is perceived. But this desire only creates a sixth moral foundation (if it doesn’t fall under Ingroup/Loyalty already).

It seems moral systems are most often deemed “good” based on accepted moral practice (circular) or “good” as in “serving a desired end”, and ends, even in the case of Nietzsche and “maximizing our power as individuals”, require a moral judgment of what is best. Perhaps the only objective evaluation of moral systems requires they not be labeled “good” by either definition but “good” from their stand-alone power as systems; as in their ability to propagate, and defend against other systems. Haidt’s questioning of those living beneath these systems is a way of measuring control, devotion and the ability to combat the pull towards personal gain (why forced burqa should be evaluated differently from slavery).

I’m with the author in thinking moral systems dedicated to improvement, personal power, progress, and separate from the traditional moral foundation are best, but I’d hardly claim judging a society’s moral system based on its success at fulfilling these goals is objective.

To this I replied:

(1) I think we can escape the moral circle by referencing a non-moral standard of evaluation, say of human excellence as construed in categories that go beyond merely the moral ones.

(2) I am puzzled by what you mean by judging the moral systems by their abilities to “propagate and defend against other systems,” because these remarks sound like you are conceiving of the moral systems as entities unto themselves. There may be something to this in Dawkins’s “Selfish Gene”/Meme terms and it’s a provocative suggestion. But while moral systems may be in a de facto competition with each other for domination, our assessment of which ones we want to promote and which ones we want to discourage (or, more usually, which possible moral alternatives we are interested in) has everything to do with their use to us and not their own propagation. Or as William Frankena put it much more simply, “Morality was made for man, not man for morality.”

To which Tyler astutely replied:

By definition, morality involves the judgment of human character; aka: what is human excellence. It seems that even when nontraditional, any standard of evaluation remains circular unless stripped of its assumptions of what is beneficial.

In other words, I suggest that if a truly non-moral standard of evaluation can exist, it must be based on the scientific method and the semi-measurable qualities of devotion, longevity, propagation, and so on. All of which are things Haidt appears to evaluate in his research.

I think Tyler and I are quite close in our thinking here.  I think that when Tyler defiens morality as “the judgment of human character” and its identifies the key criterion by which to judge human character to be “what is human excellence,” he is agreeing more with me and with the traidtions of Aristotle, Nietzsche, and (most recently) Thomas Hurka and not necessarily with Jonathan Haidt.

Here’s why.  There is a difference between holding morality to be a good unto itself on the one hand and on the other hand to see it as inherently instrumental to our flourishing and as only partially constitutive of our fundamental ethical good.  In other words, you can define morality in such a way that its interests do not necessarily line up with our material success or our excellence in all our powers.  For example, one might conceive of morality as Kant does, whereby morality is narrowly defined as being concerned only with our autonomy, rationality, and our ability to have a dutiful will that does the good only because it is the good.   For Kant, we act morally as long as we sufficiently realize our rational nature.  And realizing our rational nature in actions means only that we act according to principles which we could consistently recommend that every other rational agent follow as well.

On this view morality is indifferent to whether we achieve supposedly morally neutral goods such as happiness, wealth, friendship, pleasure, aesthetic satisfaction, etc.  And there is no particular moral merit or demerit in whether we develop the allegedly non-moral excellences like those of intellectual, artistic, or physical prowess, for example.  While we have moral duties to seek such intrinsic goods and to cultivate our talents, we are not morally assessed by how successful we are in actually being happy or brilliant or physically powerful.  In other words, we do not judge your character by how excellent a specimen you are in terms of all your human powers.  Judging you morally is only a matter of judging you by how fair you are to others, whether you hold yourself to rules that you expect others to be held to, and whether you act out of a concern for duty, rather than out of various enticements to do the good from ulterior motives.

Many moral philosophers are similar in seeing morality as only being about whether you are fair to others and do not harm them without justification and they hold nearly the whole realm of skills and material successes in life to not be matters of ethical interest (except insofar as we must be constrained by concerns for fairness and harm.)  On such views, morality is completely not interested in whether you are successful but only in whether your success is tainted by injustice and/or unjustifiably increases the suffering of others.  If you’re a failure and don’t flourish excellently as a human being, morality will not judge you any worse and it will give you no credit for being intrinsically powerful.

So, when I contrast morality and ethics, I am defining morality as sets of rules concerned with acting from concern for being good itself, with justice for its own sake, with prevention of harms for its own sake, with obedience to authorities for their own sake, with “purity” for its own sake, with traditionalism for its own sake, and with “ingroup loyalty” for its own sake (to refer to Haidt’s modules and a couple other key moral priorities I think he should further incorporate).  I see “morality” as the tendency of the brain to fetishize these various goods as not only intrinsically good but as necessarily and absolutely overriding the importance of all competing goods that do not fall under their domain.

By ethics, I refer to questions of the overall good of a human life and the most excellent characters we can develop.  As far as I’m concerned, ethics should encompass both moral goods and many of the goods which morality (as I defined it) treats as irrelevant.  I think that ethics should rank the various priorities of our moral concerns and the non-moral goods, without a default preference for moral aims at the expense of non-moral aims at every turn.  In other words, I think we should assess people and peoples not only in terms of whether they actualize moral goods but whether they live overall flourishing lives in terms of all the human powers.

In that context, a culture that instantiates the mind’s concern for purity in such a way as to utterly stifle its people’s abilities to flourish in aesthetics or autonomy does more harm than good.  A culture which translates that natural obsession with purity into a practical hygienics that aids the larger life’s ability to flourish in aesthetics, autonomy, etc. by aiding our health does a far better job at encouraging our flourishing and is ethically better.  To use a more concrete example—the purity module should be more concerned with preventing the spread of STDs than with pronouncing everyone promiscuous as inherently “impure” in some sense of being mystically “tainted” (with often brutal socially-enforced emotional and physical consequences).

You can reconsider the quotes I selected from Haidt in my post or read him in his entirety to judge whether I’m adequately representing him, but my take is that he is saying we should not judge a culture for simply acting on its inherent psychological modules in ways that genuinely aim at the goals towards which those modules are directed and the culture’s practices are in turn felt as valuable by those who live according to them.  In many ways he is a psychologist saying that you cannot blame a people for instantiating our common, evolutionarily selected, moral tendencies in a different way than we do without being chauvinistic.

I, however, want to come in as a normative philosopher and figure out how to evaluate what we should do with more nuance than Haidt does—being as he is primarily concerned with expositing and understanding what we actually do and what motivates us to do it.  I want to say that, regardless of how natural and understandable our various moral modules are their justification comes in whether they help us live fully flourishing human lives and not whether they merely fulfill their own purposes.

In other words, the “in-group” module is interested only in our having strong ties to our own group and with our being willing and able to put concern for our group over outsiders and even over ourselves when necessary.  It is only interested in this goal and we can live satisfying lives when this inclination of ours feels fulfilled. Similarly we can feel like our world makes sense and our lives are meaningful when living in ways that satisfy our concerns for equality, harm avoidance, purity, authority, tradition, dutifulness, all according to our culture’s prescriptions for instantiation and having these psychological needs well-met feel content with life, and yet live worse intellectual, aesthetic, and physical lives than we could.

My point is that the moral modules are prejudiced towards their own fulfillment and will lose touch with the more fundamental goods that they should serve.  This is not to say that human flourishing does not intrinsically involve the powers to be fair, to be loyal, to be responsive to duty, to be well-motivated, to be caring and control violent impulses, etc.  Fulfilling certain moral goals involves certain intrinsic human excellences.  But if moral tendencies and moral goals turn oppressively against our other excellences and our other intrinsic goods and are systematically preferred to them, then morality becomes tyrannous and holds humanity back.

I don’t think in such a case it is simply chauvinism to criticize a given culture if it is more obsessed with fulfilling its moral inclinations for their own sakes and in instantiated forms that restrict all sorts of other possibilities for objective flourishing.  Such a culture may be following out natural psychological tendencies which are minimally necessary for maintaining unified cultures which survive.  But they may not be maximizing the possibilities for cultural or individual realization of powers and can be criticized on those grounds.

This is not to say that Western liberal societies are always better than more morally rigid ones at achieving human flourishing.  I leave it as an empirical question whether some more restrictive cultures throughout history or co-temporaneous with our own have been culturally richer and produced more wonderful instances of individual human lives than our own.   It is quite conceivable that the pressures of moralistically forceful cultures might produce harder and more glimmering diamonds than softer more laissez-faire societies whose moral laxity goes hand-in-hand with a general congeniality to mediocrity.

Nonetheless, even as I think that two very different cultures could prove comparably excellent means to human flourishing and even as I concede that cultures other than our own may very well outstrip us in creating one or more excellence—I want to argue more clearly than Haidt does that the criteria for judging a culture go beyond whether or not they are satisfying only moral interests (which seems to be the limit of Haidt’s willingness to judge).

Your Thoughts?

I had an argument a few years back with someone over this. She thought I’d go to hell for not believing in Jesus, even thought she thought I was a great person. I found that troubling. It doesn’t matter to her why I am good person? To me, it’s morality that counts, not the source. And in my opinion, there are at least two paths toward being a morally sound person.

One is to pursue it because you feel that what is good is good. That’s the secular approach.

The second is to pursue it because of a belief enhanced by your spiritual background that what is good is good. That’s the religius approach.

The difference is whether or not you believe there is a moral God. If you do not, it doesn’t mean you have no moral compass. In fact, those who use a secular-based morality face a MUCH harder path, and if they remain dedicated to it, religious folks should be respectful.

Those who are religious face a choice — follow a code of morality for the reason that the rock band Rush calls “kindness that can kill” (fear of God’s might); or do it because they feel that a particular code of ethics in a religious tradition enhances a sense of morality they would feel regardless of what source it came from.

If the code you follow is one that is inherently along the lines of your personal belief, a choice and not out of fear, then does it matter who the author is?
Well, think of it this way: God may be reaching us in different ways. Should you and I believe in the same set of values, you through a secular search and me through a religious one (or in my case, a secular search that ended up enforcing my religious upbringing), then neither of us should condemn the other for believing in the same thing!

Following God out of fear is cowardice. Ignoring morality out of failure to believe in God is cowardice. Those who seek morality, whatever the method, are those truly blessed.

Thanks so much for this reply, Aaron.  I think it raises some interesting issues.  I think when Christians tell Jews (in your case) or secularists (in mine) that without Jesus we cannot attain heaven that they are (1) adhering to New Testament claims that our sins are all that matter to God and that without allying ourselves to Jesus we cannot have those sins forgiven and (2) psychologically they are expressing their priority of a moral community over a moral action.

So, what is happening here?  I think the natural human tendency is to make our world fit together as well as it can.  And I think that religion and conspiracy theories thrive for their ability to fill in all the blanks for us.  And morality is a place where this comprehensive attitude logically manifests for several reasons.

(1) Morality relates to our fundamental values and so it needs to be related to the rest of our identity in a consistent way or we will be in great cognitive dissonance, which our minds abhor.  So, it is crucial that we understand our lives as consistent with our abstract values and we will go to all manner of lengths to rationalize our actions rather than deal with the unsettling disharmony between our behavior and our ideals.  This is why it is really hard to apologize and part of why I think the sin-redemption, fall-forgiveness narrative of Christianity is such a psychological hit.

Within a Christian interpretation of your failings, it’s not just an inconsistency between your biology and your various psychological drives and your express ideals.  Rather, it’s your fallen nature that makes sense of your failures.  Now you might interpret our biological and psychological limitations in our ability to do what we think is good as a scientific way of saying “fallen nature” but the problem is that insofar as this is just our faulty hardware, people are afraid there’s no culpability possible.

So, that doesn’t reinforce the moral identity.  If I feel at odds between my psychological and biological impulsions and my abstract values, there is not a priori reason to blame the biology and psychology rather than the values.  In other words,  sometimes I might have to revise my values and sometimes I might have to subject my biology and psychology to counter-disciplines because I recognize that my value judgments are good ones and worth adhering to.

For the Christian, however, the biology and psychology is just fallen and, according to the doctrine of Original Sin, we are culpable for this.  So the Christian does not have the cognitive dissonance problem and there’s no threat to reigning value paradigms.  They do not ever need reconsideration and reinterpretation when they don’t fit our biology and psychology.  We just need to ask forgiveness.  And when we inevitably fail again, we just rinse and repeat.  And the fundamentalist evangelical homosexual who accepts this account of the world never lets her biology and psychology be evidence for reevaluation of the values that counter her biology and psychology.  Rather, she tries to repent endlessly.

I, from outside the Christian paradigm think that if our values start to harm our abilities to flourish they need reassessment.  If someone’s homosexual orientation is incompatible with a value system that only prioritizes heterosexual relationships, and this person’s love needs, their ability to fully participate in institutions and community, and their abilities to integrate their minds are harmed by their received values—then they have to reassess those value judgments and do the difficult work of creating new paradigms for looking at sexuality which carve out a space in which they too can flourish.  And this is the remarkable and admirable journey that the LGBT community has been on in the last however many decades.

But why is there resistance to such values reconsideration?  Because morality is both psychologically experienced and socially inculcated in terms of strong rules.  Our very natural need for moral intergration is often going to want to be able to interpret the moral feeling of absolute prohibition and the moral feeling of non-negotiable obligation as having a categorically binding character on us.  To participate in a moral discourse and practice is most organically possible when morality is taken as an inflexible guide.

When we are playing baseball the whole game wouldn’t work if there was any possibility that someone might change the rules midway.  Since moral principles are means for both adjudicating disputes and for self-regulation, moralists of all eras have suspected that any questioning of received moral tradition is the questioning of all values whatsoever.  They have integrated their particular instantiation of moral tradition as identical with morality itself.  This makes for the most consistent integration possible and for the easiest way to accept the rules.  They’re binding on everyone and they’re absolutely binding.

This means I can’t make myself an exception when circumstances favor me and it means that you have to respect the rules when you act towards me, and so I am both restrained and protected by these rules and I get sure guidance from them that saves me existential anxiety about what my obligations or freedoms are.  So, these are great benefits that most people feel from taking morality as universal and unrevisable.  And moralists fear that reinvestigation into particular moral judgments relativizes moral obligation altogether by treating what are supposed to be the rules by which we judge as things subject to investigation and reassessment themselves.

And then, the question from within the reigning moral paradigm to which one is obedient becomes, “who are you to presume to start rewriting these rules we were all supposed to follow?  how is that fair?” etc.

So, this is a major component of my theory of normal moral psychology and the first causes of a moralistic attitude that is highly judgmental, traditionalistic, and inflexible.  Now, the next component is group identity.  The functioning of morality as I have theorized it above requires a group that is all on the same page.  And, of course, historically, group identities and moral communities were formed on ethnic lines.  Hence, the Old Testament Jews are a unique moral community formed around an ethnic identity. And the neighboring peoples?  They are totally outside the moral community, God’s not even interested in them, they must even be obliterated altogether.

Why?  Well, I think it’s partly this thinking about the need for the belief in universality which guides integrated practice.  If you’re not part of our community with our absolutes, we cannot tolerate you lest you corrupt our standards and make us feel less necessarily tied to and integrated with our practices.  We have no room for such pluralism.  This continues to today, of course, with each culture looking at the neighbor and as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra puts it (in the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustrat titled “The 1001 Goals”) we see in one culture called evil what is “decked out in purple” in another.  The burqa is not just a cultural difference between the West and Muslim world.  It is a sign of utmost piety and moral self-discpline and scruple in many Muslim quarters while the West does not just shrug at it but sees it as an affront to our most core defining values of equality, liberalism, and self-determination.

So, culturally this remains with us, this tendency to cluster ethnically around moral systems at odds with our neighbors’.

What Christianity does though is it opens up its morality beyond the borders of its original Jewish community and turns group membership into a matter of belief rather than national origin.  The Other is now the unbeliever, not the neighboring tribe.  The Other is a sinner who has not joined the community and so is wicked and trapped in sin.  Only group membership and participation in group rites can make one clean.  To keep Christian moral integration from falling apart, the wall between world and church has to be erected.

Even the more liberal Christians who tolerate more values evolution will seize on some point of identity marking difference.  Something must remain “corrupt” about the world and Other about it or the line between Christian and outsider will be nonexistent and then with no Other to Christianity, there is no Christianity.  It has no definition without an Other that is not it.  That’s the paradox of community.  Inclusiveness requires exclusiveness.  Hospitality assumes the precondition of the possibility of hostility (as I believe Derrida explicated provocatively—or at least that’s what I took away from an explication of him by John Caputo).

Christian moral identity is structured in such a way that its categories for self-assessment and moral integration, its narrative of fall-redemption and sin-forgiveness, requires rejecting those who have not submitted to the life-guiding rituals as out of the loop of salvation.  The rituals themselves are (usually) what matter because they make the Christian’s moral life meaningful.  At least this is the case for the fundamentalist ones who need a strong identity between abstract value and their tradition’s particular conceptions and instantiations of moral practices.

So, yes, you and I, without Jesus, outside the community and its rituals and its practices of moral integration, simply cannot be genuinely moral no matter how conscientious we are.  We cannot erase the stain of Original Sin (out-group status) unless we accept Jesus (and join the in-group, with its internally intricate categories for identity formation.)

Now, I for one am very, very sympathetic with you in your view that what matters is not whether one’s behavior is moral but why—and not where the why is answered in terms of a belief answer like the fundamentalist Christian might demand, but where why is a reflection on whether you (a) have a good will and (b) express the opposite of cowardice—bravery, power, human flourishing, in that behavior.

I see a morally infantalized conformist who is good because he has no courage to test a limit to be contemptible.  Similarly I also find contemptible a moralist who cannot handle the challenge of personally investigating and integrating her values in a process with some indeterminacy.  And I find a moralist who cannot make judgments about the relative room for others to work out their conception of the good life with some flexibility to be potentially dangerous.  And the person whose behavior conforms with expectations out of fear of punishment alone is a coward.

But, I do understand the bonding problems psychologically when we stop being all on the same page with our values.  And there are genuine dangers of lax personal standards growing in the less scrupulous.  And there is greater room for people to slide from values pluralism to a rationalizing form of convenient relativism which gets them off the hook in their minds from having to strive for any higher ideal.  So, I get why the moralists are worried.

As a multicultural and values-pluralist society, we have great challenges and risk great tensions as we let competing moral frameworks and value hierarchies intermingle amongst each other where cultures gone-by demanded far more uniformity for the sake of social cohesion and moral clarity.  We have wonderful benefits to our diversity and we are a rich people for it but we also have to tend to the task of cohering everyone around common rallying points and core common values or we will not be able to contain so much multiplicity indefinitely.  Figuring out how to do that is the great American experiment in a nutshell.

I also understand that someone’s false religious beliefs do not hinder the cultivation of many virtues. My favorite example of this is the Samurai.  I don’t think I am a more excellent specimen of a human being just because I think more truthfully and less mythologically than they did.  They can be braver, more disciplined, more powerful, self-mastering, honorable people than I even if they are wholeheartedly deluded or if some of their practices would be offensive to my culture’s ethical priorities.

So, in light of all this, I, as a convinced secularist, can cede that it is quite possible that even though I think your religious beliefs false in content that they can both as myth and as discipline provide you with a comparable or better set of virtues than my own (assuming that the disadvantages of intellectual vice don’t detract from your gain in virtues over me) and also as long as your participation in religion which is edifying to you does not promote institutions which are for others the route to intellectual vices and spiritual confusion. I think it’s incumbent on tolerant, moderate religious people to make a concerted, active effort to combat bad intellectual and spiritual habits of their more fundamentalistically inclined fellow religionists.

For more on those last two views, I kindly encourage you to click the links provided and to engage the ideas therein in the comments sections underneath those posts.

Your Thoughts?

I don’t really blame him but just make a few observations on the lessons for all of us.  As Jonathan Haidt says repeatedly (including in the link I posted, just before this post, to a radio show in which he appears and makes this point) we live our lives acting and then becoming the defense attorney to come up with reasons after the fact to explain why we acted as we did.  And of course, this is an old Nietzschean and Freudian point, likely made by plenty of others as well.

It is interesting in this case to see how in a strange way Sanford’s biblicizing of everything indicates, at least to me, that he genuinely does believe in the biblical narratives—or at least in the contemporary Evangelical constructions of them and of sin and of redemption, etc.  And as narcissistic as anyone from the outside can see that he is being—comparing himself to King David, rationalizing that his children will learn more if he can be a redemption story than a scandal-ousted governor, declaring that his affair was a “forbidden” “tragic” “love story”—all of this is intricately compatible with a genuine belief in and appropriation of his religious narratives.

I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s simply not a neat line between people’s real thoughts and their actions.  The hypocrite in practice is not someone who is proved to not really believe what he says which his actions contradict.  Maybe in some cases that’s the way it goes.  But most real people, I would guess, are not nearly self-aware enough for that.

And the sheer clumsy, hole-digging character of Sanford’s attempts to romanticize himself and justify his refusal to take responsibility takes a strikingly sincere form.  If he had cunning wits about him he would stop digging and start shamelessly grovelling—however disingenuously.  But I think this is really the way he thinks.

I don’t say all this to pick up a pitchfork against him since I mistrust the moralistic knee jerk reaction to tar and feather people for being as flawed as we all are.  But the nature of our narcissisms, our processes of constructing narratives to serve them, and the intersection between sincerity, narcissism, and hypocrisy deserve some real scrutiny beyond moral scorn and simplistic Manichean assumptions that sincerity and hypocrisy are polar opposites.  They may be conceptually, but I suspect that in the boarding house of the psyche, sincerity and hypocrisy spend the most time playing cards together and might even be sleeping with each other.

Here’re quotes from Sanford’s Twitter account and interspersed with brief remarks from Lucy Morrow Caldwell at the National Review which are less sympathetic than mine.

Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign — as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword. A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise – that for God to really work in my life I shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride. They contended that in many instances I may well have held the right position on limited government, spending or taxes — but that if my spirit wasn’t right in the presentation of those ideas to people in the General Assembly, or elsewhere, I could elicit the response that I had at many times indeed gotten from other state leaders.

In other words, he’s willing to stay on, against his own impulses, because he believes it’s God’s way of punishing him for committing adultery? Either Sanford’s speechwriters are having an off-week, or this man has actually deluded himself into believing that the governorship is more about Mark Sanford’s personal life than about the interests of South Carolina voters.

The drivel actually gets worse, as Sanford goes on to appoint himself reformed poster boy for family values:

Accordingly, [these friends] suggested that there was a very different life script that would be lived and learned by our boys, and thousands like them, if this story simply ended with scandal and then the end of office — versus a fall from grace and then renewal and rebuilding and growth in its aftermath.
How lucky for the thousands of Americans who will benefit from Sanford’s brave decision to remain governor.

I’ll have more thoughts on the nature of hypocrisy in future posts, sooner or later.

Your Thoughts?

I’ll have it soon and hopefully will get the chance to review it here.

As a conservative Christian psychologist, Throckmorton has supported the right of counselors and ministries to offer ex-gay therapies. Earlier in the decade, Throckmorton worked with PFOX in their efforts to oppose sex education curriculum in a suburban Washington, D.C. which was friendly to gay students, and he produced the video I Do Exist which promoted ex-gay therapy.

And now, here’s a very cool update.  There is an anti-gay propagandist, Scott Lively, author of Pink Swastika who is running around trying to argue that Nazism was an essentially homosexual movement and that the present day gay rights movement is a fascist one.  Here’s how Throckmorton responded:

Grove City College professor Warren Throckmorton has undertaken a remarkable series of posts which methodically dissects The Pink Swastikaand looks at the historical distortions behind it. Many LGBT people might find Throckmorton’s work in this area a pleasant surprise.

And for his own words, here are excerpts of Throckmorton rebutting this dangerous nonsense and standing up for Nietzsche:

On Nietzsche:

it is unthinkable that Nietzsche would have approved of National Socialism. One Nietzsche scholar, Stephen Holgate at Warwick University, believes Nietzsche would have been critical of how the Nazi’s applied his writing, saying, “Nietzsche was not anti-Semitic or a nationalist, and hated the herd mentality.” However, Nietzsche’s sister was quite enamored with the Nazis and promoted her brother’s works in that context. Writer Ben Macintyre, who Lively and Abrams quote to support their views, dismissed the notion that Nietzsche was sympathetic to National Socialism.

Nietzsche’s views about the ideas later embraced by the Nazis is not conjecture. Clearly, what the Nazis embraced was the edited version of his work packaged by his racist heterosexual sister. Nietzsche’s sexuality — whatever it might have been — cannot be held to have anything to do with the selective use of his philosophy by his sister and the Nazis.

Given the presumed influence on the Nazis, Lively and Abrams need to prove Nietzsche was homosexual for their argument to seem plausible. However, the evidence that Nietzche was a homosexual is quite sparse and speculative.

On Lively’s thesis of homosexually motivated Nazis in particular:

In Uganda among Christian groups and government leaders, and encouraged by Mr. Lively, homosexuality is considered the root of society’s evils. Two of the American “experts,” Lively and Brundidge supported the notion of toughening laws against homosexuality with compulsory “treatment” considered an option. Treatment protocols are being readied now.

Scott Lively encouraged the Uganda church leaders to view the tiny gay movement in Uganda as related in some way to the same movement that propelled the Nazis to power in Germany. However, if one looks for similarities in rhetoric and policy positions, one can more readily find them by noting how the government in power then in Germany and now in Uganda regarded homosexuality. In The Pink Swastika, Lively discounts the Nazis’ public rhetoric and policies as a means of distracting attention to the homosexuality in the ranks of Nazi leaders. What might the same rhetoric and public policy objectives mean in Uganda?

I think any parallels between Nazi Germany then and homosexuality now will lead to mostly inaccurate conclusions, including the similarities in rhetoric I point out here. Many groups, including gay and Christian activists, have used Holocaust metaphors to frame rhetoric in a way that will sway public sentiment. In truth, gays were not victimized to the same degree that the Jews were, but they were victimized. Christian advocates such as Mr. Lively, who want to make sinister linkages between Nazi Germany and gay people must be prepared to explain why more obvious rhetorical and policy similarities, such as noted above, are not indicative of equally nefarious intents.

This rhetorical sword cuts two directions and without any benefit to the Gospel. These analogies are not only factually challenged but have the woeful effect of hindering the Gospel.  When Christians make spurious comparisons to the Nazis, they should not be surprised when the targets of those comparisons lash back and consider them hateful. There should be little wonder why they don’t feel the Love.

There are many more such posts linked at the bottom of the Nietzsche post and through Box Turtle Bulletin.

It’s a combination of two images in Nietzsche.  The camel comes from “The Three Transformations,” a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  He is there describing transformations that the “spirit” must undergo.  First it must become a camel.  The camel represents austere, ascetic, obedient commitment to moral ideals, especially truthfulness.  The camel’s truthfulness though leads the camel eventually to understand the conditional character of morality, that it has no divine origin and that his camel like subservience is not justified.

The camel stage ends when the spirit must become a lion to do what the camel cannot:  defy the “Dragon of ‘Thou shalt’” with the counter-answer of “I will,” therewith rejecting the authority of all those who claim that all values are unalterably fixed.  The camel’s obediently, reverentially, ascetically moral endeavor of utmost truthfulness itself leads him to discover the responsibility to reject belief in immutable, absolute bases for obedience.  Yet if he is to actually reject this precondition of his quintissential activities, the camel must become a different kind of animal, a lion.  It is the lion that confronts the “Dragon of Thou Shalt.”  The Dragon of Thou Shalt tries to claim that there can be no new values, no moral reimagination but only fixed, preexisting commands.  Only the lion has the defiant courage to say No to the Dragon of Thou Shalt.

But the lion’s self-assertive freedom to say no to the old values is not the end.   The lion must transform into a child with an innocent ability to say “yes.”  Freedom must evolve from the lion’s negativity and rejection, its form as freedom from the sway of another’s law, to an affirmative freedom not characterized in terms of what it opposes.  The lion can only be creative negatively as a creative destroyer of the false and as such is always in a dialectical dependence on that which he is no-saying to.

So the lion must become a child: an affirmativeness that has no conscious need to reject anything.  Nietzsche describes the child as “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’”  Not continuing to say “no,” the spirit now forgets he ever had to say no.  This is a new beginning, in some way distinct from a merely altered continuation.  This spirit is not responsive to external determinants, for the law that the camel reverentially obeyed and which the lion summoned its courage reactively to oppose is no longer influential.

As a camel, Nietzsche demand the hardest burden of truth he can, which will lead him to reject moral dogmatism with lion-like defiance, and finally then to advocate the child’s innocent, affirmative approach to life—no longer worried about overturning the previous morality but simply creating without reference to it.

In my dissertation I make the claim that “The Three Transformations” encapsulates Nietzsche’s project and his goals.  I argue that understanding Nietzsche’s prima facie conflicting remarks often depends on whether he is writing from the perspective of the camel, the perspective of the lion, or the perspective of the camel, so to speak.  His “camel” remarks are those within the language and assumptions of traditional morality.  His “lion” remarks are those which are critically attempting tear down the lies and errors of traditional morality and Christianity.  The “child” remarks are those where Nietzsche is valuing positively–sketching and celebrating the various possibilities for a genuinely affirmative new ethics based on an embrace of reality rather than an otherworldly morality’s disdain for this world.

The hammer comes from the subtitle to Twilight of the Idols, “How One Philosophizes With A Hammer.”  The hammer to which Nietzsche refers is a tuning fork.  The metaphor he employs is that he is striking idols with this tuning fork in order to test them to see what sounds they make.

But I also like the other connotations evoked by the image of a hammer.