Morality is as real and unreal as any other software.

[nemorathwald]

Watch on YouTube

This is a video of Richard Dawkins conducting a Q&A, mostly with students and faculty from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

The Christian interlocutors persistently repeated a slightly different question than Dawkins seemed to think they were asking. There are two questions about morality in their context: "First, does any such thing exist at all?" and second, "Once having settled that there exists a distinction between right and wrong, why do any humans abide by it?" Dawkins offered a persuasive explanation from evolution for the existence of a moral sense motivating us to be nice the same way lust motivates us to have sex.

What they really wanted to hear was whether "moral" and "immoral" are distinguishable; whether these are words with any measurable referent. I can show that they are. I've discussed this with Dr. Dawkins over internet relay chat with Universists, but I'm not sure he was sufficiently convinced to start offering it to audiences. In any case, it satisfies me.

In one sense, morality exists; in another sense, it doesn't. Morality exists in the same form that economics, linguistics, and chess exist. It is as real as they are, and also sort of unreal by the same standards by which money and language are partially unreal. These are all systems of rules that people invent, within which they can conduct transactions.

Rule sets are as real and unreal as any other software. Processors juggle electricity from circuit to circuit according to software rules, in a set of transactions. We can observe and measure them, so they're real, but when the electrons stop moving in the circuits, where did the calculation go? It was never "there." It was never any place in particular.

The English language was not floating out there in some metaphysical form, waiting to be discovered by the first English speaker. Neither was the rule set of chess. We can even invent alternatives to them. Neither does morality have independent existence. And yet I hardly think a theist will carry the argument through, and say we have no ability to tell, within broad limits, whether someone is measurably practicing "correct" English and "correct" F.I.D.E. chess.

"I can just carry on hurting people as much as I want" is like saying "I will speak my own language to myself that no one else knows, and play my own chess-like game against myself." Rule sets are not objectively real, and subjectively they can be whatever you want if you never make any interpersonal transactions with them; but intersubjectively they are as real as bedrock. You can carve bedrock, but you can't wish it away. Believe me, I have some experience with artificial languages, chess variants, and artificially-designed religions. You still have to know English, and you won't get many people to play any chess-like game other than Chess.

You can even say "I don't particularly like morality and I don't want to participate in that system", and still meaningfully tell more or less whether someone is doing it.

We have chess pieces, dollar bills, writing and sound waves as physical representations of rule sets. But that's all they do-- represent information systems the way the logic alphabet serves as cognitive ergonomics for formal logic. These are just prosthetic devices to help us measure, the way an abacus would help our primate brains perform arithmetic. I'm not sure there is any such equivalent physical device for moral reasoning, which could be where some of the confusion of godbotherers is coming from.

Yes, we can observe and measure morality without fleeing into irrationalism, the same way we can do so with economics. As with so many Christian philosophical "solutions", their solution utterly destroys what they were using it to support.

Take the argument from First Cause, which they also addressed to Professor Dawkins. The premise is that everything must have a cause. Therefore the universe must have a cause. Therefore that cause is God. But what caused God? An intelligence fully-formed at the beginning of the universe is, as Professor Dawkins so eloquently described, massively more implausible than even the weakest explanation of the Big Bang from physics. Infinite complexity can arise incrementally from simple rules through blind, purposeless evolution, but doesn't spring to life fully-formed. Our primate brains are only familiar with complicated things making simpler things, but that instinct of our primate brains is wrong.

If we are willing to make an exemption to causation, it's less ridiculous to say the universe itself is uncaused than God. At least we know the universe exists, and Occam's Razor says not to multiply entities unnecessarily. I wish Professor Dawkins had replied "Wait a minute. Either everything must have a cause, or not. You posited everything must have a cause, therefore, if that is so, God must." But that is precisely the kind of double standard used by religious apologists. They only find God more plausible as a first cause because matter and energy, time and space aren't the Alpha Monkey in the tribe, to whom our primate brain seeks to give up our responsibility for thinking.

So it is with their own reasons for declaring morality to be a meaningful, measurable distinction. It is; just not for their reasons. The problem is that the primate brain doesn't see right and wrong coming from the suffering of the victim, but coming from the Alpha Male Monkey. Just as in the First Cause argument, God results from an abdication of personal responsibility for reasoning. Right and wrong are whatever the Alpha Male Monkey say they are. The suffering of the victim doesn't matter to an obedience-based morality.

Just as doing all arithmetic with a calculator leaves one innumerate, looking up rules on a list doesn't practice moral reasoning and leaves one morally illiterate.