| | Joe, you wrote: Steve, I think this is part of a longstanding disagreement between us on the role of moral status.
[You quoted me saying:] "A parallel would be the use of measurement. Engineers make a goal of measuring the dimensions and angles in construction of a product, but it is a goal that is fully subservient to the higher goal of the optimal construction of the item, and not as a purpose in itself."
[And gave your reply:] This is a good example. The measuring of dimensions and angles in this case is entirely subsumed by the goal of the optimal construction. You need those measurements to ensure success. They are necessary steps. They are points along the same line.
Moral status is different. It isn't a necessary goal in the pursuit of living your life. It doesn't move along the same line. I think it creates an alternative, competing goal. You act in order to feel good about yourself (and that feeling is based on the achievement of the moral status). The actions taken aren't to improve your life. That is a very accurate summary of our differences. I would say that I'm not focused on moral STATUS as such, but on what morality is and how it helps us in pursuing our self-interest. The status becomes secondary - it becomes a measurement of less importance than many others. I would agree that people who adopt a morality in order to serve it - i.e, who are acting towards "an alternative, competing goal" - are missing the point - they are misusing morality. Moral status should be defined as simple means of checking to see if we are serving our self-interest through properly using morality, or if there is a malfunction we need to address (bad principle, logic error, evasion, etc.)
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Here are a few of the ways in which we are in agreement: - Morality and self-interest should not conflict. If they do, there is an error to be found.
- There are many people who adopt the goal of achieving a moral status in a way that makes it the end goal. That is a mistake on their part. Moral status should never be primary goal.
- Those people who adopt moral status as a primary goal in their life will most likely, as you point out, become rule oriented in a way that divorces them from their self-interest, and tend to adopt changes to morality that make this goal more attainable. They are seeing the pursuit of life through a warping prism.
- "Morality is required by every person because we have to weigh choices. You are constantly confronted with choices in life. You have tons of options."
- "Evaluation is the fundamental concern of morality."
----------------------...[W]e aren't stuck with just two choices. We have many possible options. We have to choose among all of them. And so we can't be asking simple Boolean questions like is this okay or not okay. We need to weigh the choices. We need to measure all of our options on a single scale and determine which is the best. What is that scale? For Objectivists, that scale uses you life as the standard. You weigh the options based on their expected impact on your life. In other words, you weight he costs and benefits. I agree with all of that. But I see different implications.- Methodology: I don't see that we have to pile every single option on the scale each time - at the same time. We have some things we have already weighed and examined and accepted. If there is no current evidence that they need to be re-weighed, re-examined, then we already know what they weigh (in similar contexts).
- Our Capacities: The process of weighing is such that we can't hold everything on the scale at once (i.e., in consciousness at once). We summarize, encapsulate, and weigh anew only what the current context calls for examining. For example, I don't have to reexamine the rationality for using life as a standard with each and every choice. But if I were in excruciating pain that could not be eliminated due to a disease that could not be cured, then I would have to ask how having a standard of life applies to my self-interest in that context because the option of suicide needs to be weighed. It is the very existence of the many possible options - millions of them - that means we need means of summarizing them, categorizing them, and then - with good methodology - it becomes possible to make choices. I'd say that not using a moral code where we have created 'rules' it would not be possible to avoid letting emotions decide which option to choose.
- The Process: We need to use a rational methodology (a set of principles rationally derived for this area of knowledge) to establish those things that could be seen as "benefits" and to understand what the "costs" are in a context. I maintain that we have to establish and maintain our code of values as the tools that we manipulate in the process of establishing a cost-benefit analysis for a given set of options.
- Universality: Some values can be derived from human nature, and therefore apply to all humans and that is of value in formulating things like individual rights which in turn are (make that should be) used to derive objective laws that will help make an optimal environment for all people to pursue their self-interests.
Theoretically, there are three approaches, within the context of our disagreement, to making moral choices.
- 1. A massive (and impractical) number of hard rules that must be obeyed, and we are guided by 'moral status' - we both agree that this one is wrong. It is very concrete bound. Examples of this are the Bible study groups that spend enormous amounts of time trying to decipher all the possible moral rules and understandings from interpretations of scripture.
- 2. Your approach of making morality not so much a field of knowledge and principles as it is the understanding of the fact that self-interest, guided by the standard of one's life, is the way that each of many options available are examined. And that there are no universal rules that should be followed because that will never make for an improvement over the cost/benefit analysis of self-interest and often makes things far worse. (Let me know if I am mis-stating your position).
- 3. Morality as a body of knowledge that derives the standard for values, the methods and principles to apply and those values that are universal due to having been derived from human nature. That we must have a way to summarize, as much as possible, all possible occurrences (by context) into usable rules (and categories) so that we can manage the otherwise unmanageable task of intelligently handling the huge number of options that are present for each person, each day. Moral status is simply a minor guide to tell us if we are within the bounds of the rules we have accepted AND still pursuing our self-interest. A negative reading on our behavior might be a sign of failed integrity (a conflict needs to be resolved), or that we have adopted a bad rule (our self-interest isn't being served), or that we are making an error in the application of a rule (context understanding failure?), etc.
We pursue the application of science in the same way - we grasp the nature of the subject matter, formulate principles - discover laws - and then we attempt to make use of this to get a result that we want. Without all the condensation of all of the layers of knowledge into workable rules we couldn't engineer productive activities based up that knowledge. A savage can't convert his grasp of reality in workable actions that further his self-interest for more than the tiniest bit - he can't create a constitution, structure rules of evidence for a court, evaluate long-term options requiring complicated risk analysis. We need a science of morality to enable us each to be better at operating it - it is the car, self-interest a generalized statement of where we want to drive it, and we have to study and understand what is required to be able to drive a car from here to there.
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