But it must be confessed that the nature of moral objectivity, if it is not just an illusion, is very different from the fact of Newton’s laws or of 2 and 2 equalling 4. I would instead argue for what I call an evolutionary moral pragmatism, which aims to render the metaethical question of objectivity and subjectivity irrelevant, and strives rather to find the objectively best morality under certain conditions and based on certain premisses which are taken to be reasonable and easily agreed upon, in the same way that the objectively best medical operation is one which most effectively cures the given ailment, regardless of one’s eccentric taste for a different kind of success.  There is nothing in medicine that can impel a doctor to undertake an operation correctly other than the possibility of losing his job, an outcome which medicine itself cannot render undesirable.

If humankind is looked upon merely as a species, subject just like any other to certain immutable natural laws, then it is quite clear that its intelligence places it in a category of one. If we define intelligence as being the ability to transcend our instincts, then we are probably the only animals that possess intelligence. For those animals without such intelligence, it is reasonable to assert that to write out a moral system that maximises their ability to survive would be comparatively easy. It would simply consist of taking into account their other instincts and their physical attributes, and then algorithmically working out an answer. We need not take any moral preconceptions into such an endeavour, because our aim is little more than the selfish aim of all genes. So it is possible to have a species in which the males randomly kill their young, so long as there are other factors which make this not a dominant feature of their lives; and this killing would still not be considered “bad”, because it does not seriously jeopardize survival. It is possible to have a species in which rape is commonplace, indeed in which consensual sex is nonexistent, and such species do happen to exist (for instance, bottlenose dolphins and diving beetles). Again, such rape would not be “bad”, because its effect on the species’ ability to survive is negligible. For a species without the ability to think outside of the inherited framework of moral instincts, we need only prescribe a strong set of instincts, and nothing more is required. For the sake of my argument, an act is “good” if it implicitly works towards the survival of the species involves, and “bad” if it does not.

So far, so uncontroversial. But the development of intelligence is clearly a complicating factor, and bars us from a simple algorithmic calculation of morality. With intelligence comes culture, where culture is understood to be the environment in which intelligent beings cohabitate, along with the concomitant social norms, ethical or otherwise. This environment necessarily must at some point create rules, whether implicit or explicit, regarding behaviour, since intelligence almost necessitates that someone will one day make a convincing argument for killing. These laws thus, in the first instance, attempt to guarantee against the society’s self-destructiveness. The destruction of a neighbouring tribe is of no concern unless it affects the first tribe’s chances of internal peace.

I noted that society’s rules that are appended onto our most basic instincts can be both implicit and explicit. The explicit rules are obvious: these are simply the law of the land. The implicit rules are effectively the society’s culture, and its system of understandings or norms. These are perhaps more difficult to fully understand, or at least to comprehend the full consequences thereof. But they are the most relevant here, since law has no necessary connection to morality, and morality, among intelligent beings, is the same thing as the system of norms.

What is the significance of these implicit rules? I started with the definition that the best morality is the one that best promotes the survival of the species (though cultural norms apply more to society than to the whole species). It is perhaps not obvious that implicit rules have anything of value to say about a society’s chances of survival. After all, this set of rules need not be so sophisticated if it is to merely guarantee survival—all it needs is to be intolerant of murder and other acts that are obviously detrimental to survival, and the survival is, it seems, as guaranteed as can be against all predictable disasters. This set of implicit rules need not have anything to say, for instance, about rape, since if it does not physically harm the victim it cannot affect survival.

But it is possible to argue that in an indirect sense, some acts having nothing to do with binary life and death actually do affect the society’s survival chances in the long term. To assess the survival effects of a particular act on a society, one needs to think about what the long term consequences of accepting or not accepting that act would be. This often requires considering the initial motivation behind the act. In a previous post, I discussed the question of rape, and concluded that, although varied, it is generally an expression of the libido. However, it is an unhealthy expression of the libido, unlike consensual sex and acts of sublimation, like the creation of great art, invention, and (possibly) the practice of philosophy. Given that it is an unhealthy expression of the libido, and thus results in fewer positively productive men, society as a whole will lose out. Society’s consequent stagnation will render it more vulnerable when faced with other, stronger societies.

The above might be seen as a sort of sociological plea for what is now a commonsensical view: that we should express our energies positively and foster a healthy attitude to sex. Another view that is generally accepted now (and possibly throughout history, though it didn’t seem to find much expression in the period between classical Athens and the seventeenth century), is that all individuals have the right to be free. Perhaps this is necessarily a modern idea, because it requires a certain maturity of statehood to revert to our natural state[1]. But the question of its inherent rightness is irrelevant, since we are only judging to be good those things that aid the survival of the species. It is quite clear, then, that freedom is better than bondage, and that more freedom is better than less. This works both politically and economically. A curbing of freedoms is likely to lead eventually to frustration, revolt, unrest, instability, and social weakness; whereas the granting of freedom allows the existence of an intellectually flexible society able both to change more easily and withstand pernicious ideas more efficiently. Greater freedom also creates faster-moving economies better able to generate wealth and thus stronger against outside forces that might work to destroy the society.

None of the above deals with the question of is and ought, but it does shift the parameters slightly. Perhaps one can never go from an is to an ought in a strictly logical sense, and ultimately one cannot invent an argument so rigorous that a would-be murderer would be convinced not to proceed. Samuel Johnson, in Adventurer #137, imagines a moralist who publishes a book giving such an argument. But “let us look again,” he says, “upon mankind: interest is still the ruling motive, and the world is yet full of fraud and corruption, malevolence and rapine”.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned at the beginning, one need only grant a few premisses to see that an objective morality is possible in principle—it is the one that is objectively best for the survival of humanity.

The argument can be expressed as follows:

(1).  Our deepest instincts are rooted in the survival of the species.

(2).  Intelligence in a species is potentially self-destructive, as it makes a “mathematically perfect” system of moral instincts impossible or near-impossible.

(3).  Societies evolve cultures which foster certain understandings and instincts with the (implicit) aim of countering the potentially self-destructive consequences of intelligence.

(a).  A “negative” culture is one whose culture implicitly promotes little more than the society’s survival.

(b). A “positive” culture is one which seeks implicitly to thrive. These are more inured than negative ones against potentially damaging factors.

(4).  The survival of humanity is a thing to be desired, at least from humanity’s point of view.

(5).  It follows that we should, as far as is reasonably possible, foster a positive culture in which those instincts that promote society’s thriving and survival are vigorously encouraged.

The above argument is certainly not watertight. It does not prove that the survival of society is a thing to be desired, and the argument does not really work without it. Nor does it go to great lengths to show that a “positive” culture really is better than a “negative” one at surviving damaging influences. But it may provide a basis for a potential objective morality.

Is theft really so bad? Perhaps, but only if ownership is so good.

In the last discussion, it did not appear to take too long, or require too much marshalling of evidence, to conclude that no moral system can sustain the instinct to murder: either the species dies out, or the instinct does. However, it turns out that this instinct may be the only one that can be dealt with so summarily, since it is the only one that deals directly with survival. When dealing with theft, we are instantly confronted with a problem of definition. The connotations of the word “theft” are too strong to use without question. It would perhaps be more accurate to think of theft as one kind of taking, and specifically one which implies the existence of, and tacit social agreement to, the idea of ownership.

Our task might be simplified if we split the world of objects into different categories, according to their relation to the wellbeing of the species as a whole. This appears to be necessary, because we can think of at least two kinds of taking: of objects that are absolutely necessary to their “owners”, and those that aren’t. It is quite obvious that, if somebody is starving to death, and they chance upon an edible loaf of bread, while at the same time I am perfectly full, it would be wrong to take the bread from them. This is true if we accept the conclusion of the previous post, since this action is the same as murder. If, however, I too am starving, it seems to be of entirely no value to speak of whether my taking the bread is good or bad. Since I have equal right, by the laws of nature, to live as the other does, there is no sense in which any one of us can lay claim to ownership of the bread. At this stage, we are assuming nothing about the nature of the species in question other than that it must eat to live—we are not assuming that it has any established system of ownership. Even if the species did have an established system of ownership, the basic fact that denying a starving person a loaf of bread, if you can possibly help it, is the same as murder, trumps any such system. So we can tentatively say that there exist at least two kinds of object, those that are directly necessary for survival, and those that aren’t.

But this doesn’t take into account all kinds of object that play a part in human life. The second category might be further split into two: those objects that only serve for our pleasure (defined in the broadest possible sense), and those that are used as investments for some future benefit, whether that be pleasure or security. With these two types of object, it is not obvious that the instinct to take them would doom the survival or advancement of the species. After all, at this stage it is still possible to speculate that the instinct to take another person’s pleasure object (say, a book), if the “owner” did not have the wit or could not devote the effort to protect it against such taking, might trump the total good granted to the species as a whole by the “ownership” of these pleasure objects. Investment objects are slightly clearer. A farmer’s tools, as well as his land, are some of his investment objects, and it is apparent that taking these would severely restrict his ability to survive, but would not kill him, so we can’t say that it is tantamount to murder. The only way to assess the moral value of theft is first to consider the idea of ownership, and to answer the question whether it redounds to the good of the species, or otherwise.

There is an extent to which we humans find ownership natural, and feel strongly that those possessions we have are truly ours, and that it would be a great injustice if they were taken from us. This might give us the impression that we have evolved to have this feeling—and indeed, this might be the case. But if that is so, then it is not easy to argue that this feeling, this natural tendency towards ownership, is in any way good for us as a species. After all, the wide majority of nature is perfectly happy without such a feeling, and indeed there are those, such as sharks, who are so perfectly well adapted to their environments that it is difficult to see how ownership could in any way be useful to them. Moreover, if we imagine that the Great White community were tomorrow to develop an instinct for ownership, we might even guess that they would be too preoccupied with settling the consequent issues to give their full attention to daily hunting, and this might even be harmful for them. At any rate, it is hard to see how their comfortable position would improve.

It is also hard to see how even those species that are very low on the food chain would improve their plight if they developed an instinct for ownership. On further reflection, it seems apparent that the instinct can only develop once the species in question have become sufficiently masters of their environment to turn their attention inwards in such a way. The precise way in which we developed this instinct is not obvious. Perhaps it actually came about in the days in which we were still struggling against the elements, when we first invented tools which we thought should never fall into the hands of rival tribes. These tools would have been effectively owned by the whole tribe, but once we had mastered our environments the instinct remained, and since we had no need for it in its group from, we turned it in on ourselves. However it developed, we can be reasonably certain that it can only develop once the species is relatively comfortable, and once it is reasonably intelligent. Once it has established itself, its uses become apparent. We want to own things because we perceive there to be some utility or value in them. We might be wrong, but we are right enough of the time that the cumulative effect on our species is a good one. We make tools that make agriculture possible and then more efficient, that make hunting relatively risk-free, that allow us to build houses—I need not bore the reader with the full list. All of this is possible without ownership, but ownership gives us the incentive to employ our fullest efforts in this regard. It might be argued that the inevitable psychological effect of all this is that we place too high a premium on ownership, and only rarely does it have real value, which means that we have an inflated anxiety about possessions. But the uses of ownership clearly outweigh such psychological drawbacks as there may be.

Be this as it may, it does not mean that the ownership instinct is unambiguously good, in the way that the (indiscriminate) killing instinct is unambiguously bad. Given that we are taking survival as the ultimate bedrock of any morality, there are clearly considerations that can supersede the ownership instinct. If you are rich and a poor man steals from you out of necessity, is it right to react with outrage? Is it possible to say that the thief was morally wrong, when survival is the most important thing of all? In a milder case, what if you can find a considerably better use for something than its current owner—would it be wrong to steal then? If you are correct in your assessment, then stealing is better for society than not stealing. There are other considerations, too. If the “institution” of ownership is generally a good thing for society, then there might be times when non-ownership is better for society. If, for instance, a reclusive billionaire buys Picasso’s Guernica only to hide it in a dark lair for his amusement alone, we have a case where the needs of culture at large are being set aside for the sake of private ownership, where non-ownership might be better overall.

We can conclude with some certainty, then, that the ownership instinct is good for society so far and only so far as it serves society. Alongside this ownership instinct must come a natural respect for the ownership claims of others, if the instinct is to have any positive effect at all, and this means that stealing, as a general rule, runs counter to the good of the species. However, it is not difficult to concoct cases in which stealing has a positive effect for the species. If we are only slavish respecters of our instincts, then, we might be blinded to the original purpose of those instincts.

I just took a look at Sam Harris’s now-slightly-infamous TED talk (above), and had a little flick through a subsequent piece in the Huffington Post, and was rather interested in what he had to say. Interested, because I had thought it was the cast-iron consensus among educated peoples to speak of morality in relative terms, or at the very most to concede that it is such a difficult subject that we can’t reasonably hope to get to the bottom of it. Even if this were the correct view, I have always thought it a somewhat frustrating one—if you cannot prove you are right, on what basis can you assert that you are right? Clearly, relativists must think this too, but opt for a different route at the fork.

Harris’s thesis is similar to one I very vaguely formulated myself a little while back, and centres around the idea of mental states. He asserts that there are—to put it crudely—good mental states and bad mental states. A good moral action, then, is one that results in a good moral state. Clearly, this is not an assertion that can be made without much qualification, and he goes to great pains to do so. Mapping out all possible states would be a gargantuan, and probably impossible, task. If it is impossible, it will be because there are literally an infinite number of possible distinguishable states. Eating ice cream while at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street on a sunny day produces a different state than doing the same thing at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 33rd on the same day, even if both are pleasurable.

If we imagine a “family tree” of possible mental states, such that each state requires for its achievement some combination of having experienced certain other states and a certain “brain structure”, we might get some idea of the possibilities of experience. Such a family tree can be asserted without any recourse to morality at all: it’s just a scientifically described set of possible experiences. No single one of these mental states could be equated with happiness, but rather there will be a certain set (perhaps infinitely large) of states that all belong to the group “happiness”, and there will be certain common features of this group such that if a new member were to be discovered, it could be easily identified as such. Most importantly, we may also be able to assert (and this can in principle be empirically tested) that a certain mental state, or more precisely a certain set of mental states (e.g. happiness or regret) may be out of reach for a certain person with a certain brain structure. Such an assertion would provide an obvious way to deal with an obvious objection—the objection being, “what if a madman finds contentment in evil deeds?”; the retort being, “madmen are incapable in principle of being content”.

Clearly, the origins of our potential for behaving morally—our empathy, our sense that all humanity is fundamentally the same, and our reason—arise from the complex tale of our evolutionary past. With this in mind, it seems to me that if we intend to draw the family tree of sets of possible mental states, we can only then assert with some measure of impartiality the superiority of one state over another if we understand their origins. So we can say that mental state Z439126H, which is a member of the “happiness” set (which in turn we can give a completely nondescript name so that its appellation provokes no controversy), arises because the circumstances that attend it are good for the survival of the genes that make up Homo sapiens. Similarly, we can say that mental state Y129087A, which corresponds to the feeling that a madman gets on committing a particular evil deed, is not connected with a state of affairs that promotes the survival of the genes of Homo sapiens. So we can claim that Z439126H is superior to Y129087A from the evolutionary perspective.

This leads us into an apparent conundrum, because there is no obvious reason to say that the evolutionary foundation is a good one for morality. But there are many assumptions which we make in ordinary life, which we all agree on, and which none of us feels the need to justify. We all agree that the proverbial table and chair exist, and it would be silly to have to prove this in order to prove some larger point. However, the evolutionary foundation is not so experientially self-evident as the existence of solid objects. Even if most reasonable people believe that we are the product of evolution, nevertheless it has not yet been proven beyond doubt that evolution has conspired to make us moral.

Perhaps the most we can ever say, then, is that the general survival of the species is the fountain from which all our behaviours spring. When our instincts do not work to this end (even in some indirect way), then there is something functionally wrong with them. Now it might be objected that from this point of view there is nothing really wrong with killing one person, since this is pretty negligible compared to the six billion people on earth. However, if we were not repulsed by murder, this would mean that our own gene-preserving instincts would be diminished, and humanity would be slightly the worse for it.

Sam Harris has made a bold first step in producing the case for a science of morality. But people have not yet converted en masse, and that is largely because such a science is in its very inchoate stages. In the near future, the instruments currently at our disposal will seem positively blunt, and we may well be able to talk in vastly more precise terms than we can now. At the moment, an objective morality only feels like a safe bet, but it cannot yet be asserted without very reasonable arguments to the contrary.

It is easy, and probably true, to talk of Shakespeare and Cervantes and Michelangelo and Mozart as creators of timeless art. It is certainly true that we still appreciate them now, and that that appreciation is not so much dependent on any historical fascination they might hold, but on their intrinsic merits, which speak to us just as powerfully as they ever did—and indeed which invite constant streams of new and inventive interpretations and understandings.

However, it’s also true that this idea of timelessness can all too easily become mythologized and metaphysicised, and their creators nearly deified as a result. Since most of us mere mortals are incapable of properly grasping why exactly it is that they have stood so solidly against the ravages of time, we are inclined to feel that these great artists spend only half their time here on earth, and the other with the gods on Mount Olympus, privy to some higher knowledge always and eternally beyond our reach. We imagine that the spans of time that have tested these works are long. One hundred years, some say, is the amount of time beyond which one can easily say, “this is a classic, and this is not.” But what about in ten thousand or a hundred thousand years? Will Shakespeare still be revered then?

It seems likely, if only because even if writers eventually surmount him, that is no reason for his work to be considered of lesser value. Shakespeare superseded Chaucer, but we still read the latter. But what about in millions of years?

An interesting fact about literature that sets it apart from other mediums is that it rests upon a pretty arbitrary foundation stone—language. Almost all classics are considerably weakened in translation. Although there are great translations that rival the originals, it is safe to say that to fully appreciate a great work of literature, you have to read it in the original language. But no language lasts forever. Even though it is likely that English, for instance, will survive a few more centuries, and even if it undergoes less change than it did over the past 1,000 years, it can only survive if the geopolitical situation of the world doesn’t drastically change. It is not even possible to say that that will be the case in a hundred years’ time, let alone a thousand. It may be a cliché to say, but if China continues its rise to world domination, Mandarin may take the place of English as the world’s most spoken language, and English may eventually become a minority and thus become extinct. It may even be replaced with “Panglish”, a variant of English that contains so many international contributions as to be virtually unrecognisable.

You might object, of course, that hardly anyone apart from classical scholars speaks Ancient Greek nowadays, and yet the works of Sophocles still survive, and are still loved. That will probably become the situation with Shakespeare soon enough, as it already is with Chaucer. But we are still relatively close in time to the Ancient Greeks. It is still quite easy to see their cultural influence upon us, and therefore it makes sense that people should want to learn Ancient Greek. But will this still be the case in hundreds of thousands of years? It’s quite possible, but it seems that the further away we get from Ancient Greece, the less likely it will be.

Can we truly say that something is timeless if it rests on such an arbitrary foundation as language? We probably can, but only if we say that language itself is not arbitrary, it is only individual languages that are. Instead of thinking of Shakespeare’s works as he wrote them as the “original Shakespeare”, perhaps it is more useful to think of them as translations of Shakespeare—the best ones available, but translations nonetheless. All writers struggle to formulate the words to best express what they want to say, so in that sense when Shakespeare wrote he was only translating into English the thoughts that he and his characters had.

But there is another, perhaps more serious objection to the idea that a work of literature (or art generally) can be timeless. Our appreciation of art depends on human nature being as it is. But what if it were to change significantly?

This is a question that would undoubtedly baffle even the greatest of evolutionary biologists. Is it even possible to assert that, no matter how much we might change, there may still be some crucial aspects of our nature that will never go? It seems hard to imagine, for instance, that we will become less intelligent. The converse is not true, either: it’s not obvious that we will become so much more intelligent, because we don’t all choose partners solely based on their cognitive faculties. So while it is not obvious that we will become more intelligent, it seems unlikely that we will become less intelligent, and virtually impossible to conceive that we will become so much less intelligent that we are unrecognisable as humans.

Suppose we become considerably more intelligent. Imagine a world where each of us could individually prove the Riemann hypothesis in five minutes at the age of two. Would Shakespeare eventually seem backward? It’s quite possible, but in any case rather difficult for such a backward homo sapiens as myself to contemplate. Some might recoil at the image conjured, and picture a lifeless society where such things as love don’t exist. But there is no logical reason to think so. After all, emotions exist for a very good reason. Indeed, they must be more important to the continuation of human life than intelligence, because even if we were all born with full knowledge and understanding of the fact that we must procreate, from whence would come our inclination to do so?

To imagine that the appreciation of Shakespeare is a solely cognitive task is to wildly swerve from the truth. Shakespeare’s plays are intelligent, but they do not require the mental effort that quantum mechanics asks of us, and in any case there are playwrights like Beckett and Pirandello who are arguably more sophisticated, at least in a non-dramatic, conceptual sort of way, than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s brilliance (as well as that of other writers at his level) is in his insightful portrayals of the lives of people. Even if we become more intelligent, would our lives become significantly different that these portrayals, as insightful as they are, might just become fascinating relics and records of a period in our evolutionary history?

It is, perhaps, impossible to say. For all that we might speculate, there are countless ways that the human species might evolve, and it’s difficult to tell whether any one of them will have a significant effect on our relationship with art. But perhaps it is fair to say that our instinct tells us that we won’t change so dramatically. When we look at our relatives in the animal kingdom, we are fascinated not just by the ever-surprising variety of nature, but also by the similarity to ourselves. For the most part they do not experience the pain and pleasure of their existence like we do, yet there is a sense in which, that one difference aside, their lives are fundamentally the same as our own. So perhaps timeless art is not just timeless for human beings, but for all equivalently intelligent animals? Or perhaps that’s just something that someone in the infancy of his species’ evolution would say.