Rational Morality and the problems it generates...

I have had this discussion with a wide variety of people, but I suppose I am just going to throw some stuff out there, because I really want to write something to get in the habit, but I also really want to go to bed. Oh yeah, and sorry about the prolonged absence.

Many atheists make the claim that if we cannot construct a purely rational morality, then we do not deserve to exist as a species. That is, if we rely on the mythological/spiritual urge to undergird our sense of morality, we are selling ourselves short as a species. I have enumerated a few issues with this before, but I will now make an example of what it would be like to create morality from pure rationality - assuming that there is no soul, no spark of divinity, no creator - simply a random universe where a series of random events has lead to our creation and evolution.

Let us take a very simple moral principle; one should not kill other persons. Of course, one may argue that there are situations that arise that make the taking of a life necessary, but that does not make it good. Again, without splitting too many hairs, most moral theory has some sense of human life being important enough to preserve except in special cases (one might even use the word that human life is in some sense sacred, but we cannot use that in a purely rational argument).

So in the rational construction, we should look at a few different things - principally, what constitutes a person, and why is killing a person wrong. Assume that by person we mean human being - where does that lead us. What rationally is it that fundamentally distinguishes us from other animals. From a scientific perspective, the difference is genetics - 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. Of course, this means that anything with those chromosomes is human, anything else is not. Therefore a zygote should be preserved, but a person with Down's Syndrome might not qualify (Down's Syndrome is trisomy 13, I believe - that is an extra chromosome 13 due to chromosomal nondisjunction in the meiosis process). Of course, that is a distinction that is uncomfortable, so we should adjust it to having the 23 pairs that constitute homo sapien within deviations of normal chromosomal abnormalities. Still a very basic definition, that fits rationality very well, but it disrupts the whole pro-choice issue very badly.

A rational approach might not choose the scientific definition of humanity, even though it is the most hard and fast logical approach. The chromosomal issue forces someone who may want to be pro-choice into a pro-life stance, so most modern atheists would discard this and go for other ways of defining humanity. One big one is brain function/consciousness. The problem with this is that it gets very arbitrary. When does brain function start? We have certain medical devices that indicate levels of brain function, but what constitutes consciousness? If you stick with a very simple definition based on brain scans/brain activity, this justifies the abortion end, but could also justify destruction of significantly impaired adults. Again, this is not a big deal for many, but it may be a sticking point. The problem with the brain activity argument is that it is arbitrary. Since we cannot truly know (right now) what is going on inside a person's head, any threshold is arbitrary, which means that we could arbitrarily shift it up or down - I think below a certain level of intellect is "sub-human" therefore I could find a rational justification for defining "humanity" in that way. I could make a number of other examples, but the further away from the chromosomal distinction what gets, the muddier the waters get.

And all this is still defining "person" - and still not touching whether an animal can be a "person". If not, why not. There are tests that show that certain of the great apes have a number of different intellectual capabilities that put them on par with extremely developmentally disabled humans. But beyond that - if it is okay to kill an animal, what makes it not okay to kill a person? Of course, some may argue a distinction between animal and human, but this collapses with pure rationality, as there is nothing particularly special about us, we are just another link in an evolutionary chain. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a rational reason that killing is wrong. Try giving me one, and I bet I can come up with logical flaws.

Of course one might say that killing any animal is wrong, but provide a rational basis for that. What is special about life? Or, to put it more bluntly, is life sacred at all? There is no rational reason for it to be sacred - surely a random and disordered universe has no particular love of life - in fact, one might say that nature favors non-life over life given the abundance of non-living things as well as the tendency for living things to not remain so. But even attributing favorable status via nature verges on natural law arguments which presuppose some kind of deity (in my humble opinion).

Another major flaw with rational morality is the necessity of convincing the polity of its veracity. That is you must either convince enough people to buy into it, or you must have enough brute force to make people adhere to it. This either leads to tyranny or excessive plurality... an example that may chagrin one of my friends (I guess I'll call you the oregonian, since I don't know if supergoober dubbed you with a nickname. If he did, or if you want another one, just say the word and you can have it). The problem with tyranny is obvious, but rationally it is the most efficient system ever created for government - come up with a rationale for freedom, and perhaps we can get rid of tyranny. Of course, plurality could lead to the result that we saw here in California - convince enough people that something is wrong, pass a law, then it is wrong - that is where rationality gets you - and using enough sophistry to convince an ignorant mob, and your logical or rational morality doesn't even need to be sound, you just need to speak well - which is where we enter the realm of the Sophist, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, etc. Plurality is simply tyranny of the mob, and can easily turn a supposed democracy into tyranny very rapidly.

Rational morality always descends to one of two places - might makes right, or mob rule. Neither one is an acceptable solution for social difficulties, and try as you might I defy you to argue for those. Well, actually, they are very easy to argue for if you are truly committed to an atheist perspective. Most atheists do not like this so they actually have morality that either mirrors most conventional morality with pseudo logical rigor, or they just degenerate into agnosticism to cover up the gaps in rationality. The trap that most atheists fall into is that they think men and women will always act like they currently do, forgetting the centuries of moral structure that lead to where we all are today.

Does that mean all moral structure should remain rigid and unchanging? Of course not. That is the convenient thing about divinely inspired morality - as we become more sophisticated, we can come to terms with wrong acts in the past and reevaluate morality based on current interpretation of the so-called "natural law". To my mind this is why Voltaire went with the line, "If God didn't exist, it would be necessary for us to invent him."

Seriously, I know this is incomplete, but I am going to bed. If anyone wants to comment, feel free, but be really careful with your logic if you are going to argue this point from a truly atheist point of view. Ta-ta.