Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

Torture is wrong. Female circumcision is wrong. Are these necessary universal truths or expressions of opinions and personal feelings or something else? Is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights an agreement by most countries to abide (or attempt to abide) by some general principles of how to treat each other as opposed to the protection of necessary human rights?

Ethical relativism is dismissed by most as advocating “anything goes” morality. “What about Hitler and the Holocast? He thought it was okay. Therefore I suppose you don’t think it was immoral?“, is the common response from the critic. Most introductory philosophy books dismiss relativism as the short-term obsession of philosophy 101 students who confuse relativism with cultural and social tolerance. They often refer to the in-built contradiction of believing in relativism as a ‘universal’ principle.

However the opposite position of universal truths seems unsupportable for a naturalist. How can we get any necessary moral truths in a physical world? For a long time I rejected relativism but have observed many cultural and social variations of behaviour that highlighted my prejudices. What made my opinions correct and how can there be any universality to moral behaviour?

A naturalist needs to be highly suspicious of a priori knowledge. Unfortunately, experience is always particular and only leads to generalised, probable knowledge – contingent by nature. We can have universal knowledge in artificially constructed systems with fixed rules – games like chess, mathematics, logic, and so on. But it is hard to see how moral rules or laws can be separate from the processing of humans within a physical world,  surely not Platonic forms? So a naturalist needs to question the actuality of many ethereal concepts like human rights and objective moral rules (or worse still, laws). Perhaps the most a naturalist could accept is that we evolved deep seeded pre-dispositions about fairness and empathy for others for survival. Given our social nature then knowledge is likely to be really socially-based agreements and understandings. Recent researches in behaviour seem to support this.

Ultimately we still want to assign higher motives or qualities to our behaviour – human rights, moral laws, consciousness, free-will, concept of independent self – that keeps us closer to the divine and farther away from the mundane physical world. We may have developed more sophisticated ways of being ‘more than animals’ but it is still very much illusionary.

Alex McCullie