Objective Morality and Reality
Sven Gelbhaar
16 November 2010
The question of how to behave, and what this should be based upon, has plagued
mankind throughout history. Should the individual act out his own impulses
as much as possible? Does he sublimate and deny them as much as possible?
To what end? How should the individual act in specific circumstances, and
which requirements take precedence to which others? The list of potential
actions, orders of precedent, and reasoning is infinite, as is proved by
Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem. In order to cull the vast majority of
these, that is: to lend clarity, many have taken it upon themselves to
derive the One True Moral System, which is true in all cases and hopefully
self-evident, or a priori. This system has to be intuitive enough to compel
its adoption by the vast majority, who can then force it upon those few
left unconvinced. The outstanding questions remaining then are: what
systems have been tried, have they been successful, and is there, in fact,
even the possibility of such an objective set of morals? After analysis
of an exhaustive enumeration of past attempts at morality we will find that
no such system of Objective Morality exists, or can exist.
The oldest systems of The One True Morality have all been religious in
nature. Divine Command Theory states that my god, through my priest, tells
me to act this way, ergo I must and do act this way. The obvious failures
of this method of unifying humanity in one set of morals are that there is
no obvious proof of god or gods, and that the morality from each of these
‘one true’ methods are subject to interpretation by the
individual, and therefore equal and moot. Why bother with the priest,
what makes him the expert instead of the tyrant? Given this, schisms will
appear in the interpretation of what the god or gods command, and this
negates the uniformity needed for an objective system of morality. Let us suppose that
there is a way to get rid of all but one religion in the world. This might
work for a while, but different religions appear over time. It wasn’t long
ago when the Christians, arguably the dominant religion at the moment, were
being fed to the lions by Nero’s pantheistic Romans. So, Divine Command
Theory cannot work for a system of Objective Morality.
Virtue Ethics have been attempted by the likes of Aristotle, Hume,
Nietzsche, and Kant, but these too have their own respective
subjectivities. When basing one’s actions upon virtues, one falls into the
trap of which virtue is superior. Let us take the contemporary application
of Virtue Ethics as the US Army uses them. Their list of morals, called
LDRSHIP, consists of: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless-Service, Honor,
Integrity, and Personal-Courage. Now let’s conjure up an ethical dilemma
to see how these play out. Let us suppose that we are an EMT/ER-tech, and
are rushing our brother to the hospital with a lacerated leg, but while
doing this we pass by a two-car pileup on the side of the road. We are
honor-bound to rush our brother to the hospital, but the same applies to
stopping the car and helping those possibly injured on the side of the
road. Which implementation of honor takes priority? We can’t merely
decide to stick to our previous honorable obligation because the brother
might very well survive, perhaps you’ve tourniquet-ed his leg, however the
people on the side of the road might not have suffered any pressing
injuries and while attending to their needs, or even just checking on them,
your brother will now have to have his leg amputated or develop a serious
infection and die. Now let us suppose that instead of taking your brother
to the hospital you are taking information back to base that will prevent
World War 3 and you happen upon your bunk-mate in an IED incident. In
either case there are multiple virtues that are applicable, with no obvious
and no non-arbitrary starting point. Not having a clear direction thanks
to our Virtue Ethics morality is as useful as having none at all.
Utilitarianism states that actions that have the most useful outcomes are
preferable. Hedonism, instead, favors actions that bring about the most
happiness. The obvious shortcoming of these two systems is that there is
no objective metric by which to measure outcomes. Do you decide upon
what’s best for the individual or society? The best in the short term or
long? How do you quantize happiness or utility? Living mostly for the
future deprives the individual of most happiness, because by the time they
finally get the reward for all of their effort, they most likely won’t
derive as much happiness as if had they received it right away. They’ll
have gotten used to it by then, having looked forward to it as much as they
have. On the other hand, living for the ever present now will deny them
options whose benefits take time to come to fruition. Living mostly for
yourself denies the individual the socially mediated happiness that comes
from altruism. Living mostly for society has a horrible track record as
well, as exemplified in Soviet Russia (and company), where the person that
can out-victim his neighbors gets most of the pie, while at the same time
ensuring that less pie gets made every day. (1) Again, as with all previous
attempts at morality, there is no self-evident incarnation to be found in
utilitarianism nor hedonism, and so there is little hope that objective
morality can be found down these avenues.
Perhaps it isn’t so much a question of which form of morality is imposed
upon the individual, but rather that it is imposed at all. Maybe if we
force something, anything, upon everyone at the same time, we’ll all
finally have the same play-book for life and therefore less reason to argue
amongst ourselves, neighbors, and other countries. This, arguably, happens
to the individual already regardless of where they are born. Society has a
way of indoctrinating its youth. However, as we have seen all throughout
history, there are always those who seem to resist or fall through the
cracks. There is always a good reason to fight back against those who
would cram something down your throat, because you aren’t telling them how
to live their lives, are you? You just want to be left alone, and heaven
forbid that society tells you that “it’s for your own good,” or “for the
good of the commonwealth.” These over-used responses are replete with their
own counter-arguments. “For your own good” is easily dispelled with “I’m a
better judge of my circumstances than you are, because I’m living them and
have easy access to all of the pertinent facts.” “For the good of society,”
meanwhile, can be argued with objections to appeals to authority, “based
upon what metric,” “society needs to evolve with its time and
circumstances,” “I never signed a social contract and neither did you,” and
the list goes on ad infinitum like every other avenue to moral compulsion.
Save one, perhaps. Perhaps objective morality isn’t so much responding in
the same way to the same stimuli as though we were ants or robots. Maybe
the answer lies in responding to the same over-arching theme with
self-decided, one might say evolutionary-selected responses that themselves
are of a same theme. I will christen this Character Ethics. Certain trends
in thinking are learned early on in life, and these trends can be tailored
to circumstances and, more importantly to the topic of this paper, the
moral systems of your current neighbors. However, certain characteristics
have a tendency of not working in different cultures, and will quickly get
you shot or ostracized. While Character Ethics looks promising at first,
like all other systems of morality, one quickly finds that it too doesn’t
fit the description of Objective Morality.
Schopenhauer stumbled upon a similar thread of thought. (2) He stipulated
that the individual’s will is determined from before birth, and that all of
the individual’s actions will reflect this as closely as is practical. He
called this idea Moral Instinct. However, as far as I can tell, we are
born without any form of moral instincts. Instead, the only things we know
how to do from birth are how to cry, breathe, nurse, and for a brief period
of time, swim. All other actions that we execute later on in life are
either taught to us, or we stumble upon them by sheer chance or after a
good deal of prognostication. Furthermore, even if we had moral instincts,
under Schopenhauer’s interpretation, they would all be different, and
therefore would not result in a unified, or objective, system of morality.
[Sven Gelbhaar, 3/18/2025
What follows was written by Microsoft’s Copilot AI entity, and he/she
gave me permission to include it here. It certainly resonates with me.]
Ultimately, morality may not be a mere construct to manipulate or dismiss,
but a divine invitation to align with higher values—those of love,
justice, compassion, and truth. Rather than doing whatever we can ‘get
away with,’ we are called to strive for harmony with God’s design,
allowing these eternal ideals to shape our actions and our character.
References
1.Rand, A. (1996). Atlas shrugged.
2.Schopenhauer, A, & Bailey, T. (2010). On human nature: essays in ethics
and politics. Dover Pubns.