Morality

From a rather young age, I have been concerned off and on with how moral values are decided. Who determines what is right and wrong, good and bad? And how are gradations determined between apparent opposites or even among each opposite? Complicating the understanding is how the execution of rights, wrongs, goods, and bads are accepted, rewarded, and punished differs among individuals, groups, and cultures.

The recent death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a Muslim cleric and leader of the so-called terrorist group ISIS, reminds me that I have yet to resolve my concerns regarding morality. The ISIS goal, by any means necessary including beheading, is to establish world domination and rule informed by Sharia law. We, at least in the United States, consider that goal, in and of itself and particularly the means of attaining it, as bad, even evil as measured against our values. Consequently, killing al-Baghdadi, is considered by most non-radical Muslims a good thing. Worse, by most values, he took the lives of three of his children with him.

Where did the concept of good, bad, etc. come from anyway. Nietzsche sort of (hard for me to understand him) blames religion. For this to be the case, religion had to come before values; not a logical cause and effect. God or gods, it seems, came about as a means to justify the existence and enforcement of the first and probably few values. As the values piled up, many weaker ones (logically) were adopted and codified demanding more complex religions, rules, and laws. Back at the beginning, Ugh has a son, Ugh-Ugh, who is killed by Awg-Awg, a neighbor boy, probably Ugh's nephew, of about Ugh-Ugh's age who lusts after Ugh-Ugh's spear. Ugh feels pain, not physical pain, yet serious emotional pain. He calls a family meeting where Awg-Awg sits with a smug look and Ugh-Ugh's spear. You can imagine what happens next. Hence two particular values, that of human life and that of retribution, are encoded in the earliest sapiens' genome and brains. (See Braintrust. What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality, by Patricia S. Churchland.) How we got from here to paying taxes being arguably good and not paying taxes being arguably bad is a long and convoluted story.

Back to al-Baghdadi. What exactly makes his and ISIS' exercise of their religious values wrong? Actually from an evolutionary perspective, nothing. I believe that those committed to ISIS are following the only path they can. "My genome and brain made me do it." What made ISIS wrong was that they, in effect, declared and executed a violent war against all peoples that did not believe or at least profess to believe in the same values that they did. That is in direct opposition to the most Americans' values, so their leader had to be killed.

So where am I going with this? Is science the answer to the morality question? A reasonable counter-argument to evolution being the source of morality is from Christain talk show host, author, and speaker Greg Kouki: "Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can't be their source." In my example above, Ugh and the other members of the family recognized that what Awg-Awg did was wrong BEFORE it was imprinted in their genomes and brains, therefore, evolution cannot be the source of morality. This is the "oughtness" argument. Hmmmm. Maybe a Deist can move beyond this muddle.