My Road to Unbelief Part VI

My Road to Unbelief

Part VI: Moral Models

Model Theory is essentially what I used as a child to evaluate morality (although I obviously didn't know any model theory, and I was being extremely primitive). However, now I had the concrete idea of a Model, so I could construct them based on simple rules. I found the idea of morality to be vague at best. Now I could make it more concrete by comparing what we find in the model to what we refer to when we say "morality."

So let's look at some possible models:

God is the Moral Authority

The so-called morality that religious people claim to use. I call bullshit on this. There are obviously rules in the bible that we do not follow, but, more importantly, there are rules that we follow that are not in the bible. The idea that "sexism is bad" is nowhere in the bible, and yet people seem to use it. Hell, the entire idea of "equality" is not a biblical idea at all, and the bible far from suggests that people are "equal" in any way. Oh, and don't forget the whole 'slavery' business. (Even worse, consent is not actually in the bible, especially for women).

I'm also a little skeptical of the objectivity of this model. It's kind of a weird style of 'objective.' If the rule was "Hitler was the moral authority" I guess that would be objective, but it's based on a somebody's point of view. It's like partially subjective or something. I don't know. In this case, why would you necessarily take the viewpoint of God? Because he has power?

It's ironic I think that a lot of Christians claim that "Well if you aren't ruled by God then you're ruled by whomever has the power at the time," despite the fact that God is the best example of that.

Harm is bad.

This is a very simple model. It's good because it's pretty objective. Harm is not a really a subjective idea. It may seem pretty good at first, but there are issues. What about a tattoo? What about a piercing? What about BDSM? I don't think you can argue that this isn't harm or damage. It obviously is.

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

The Golden Rule. I think most people are aware of the problem with the Golden Rule: Sadomasochism. A rapist may enjoy getting raped, for instance. However, there's an easy fix for this problem: just throw in Consent.

The Golden Rule + Consent Requirements

Now, I think this is a surprisingly good model. I don't actually know of a direct counterexample to this (although I'm sure there is one). I think the main problem is that it just doesn't cover larger problems beyond people's personal lives. Obviously Consent Laws are a bit vague: You have things like "age of consent." You have ambiguities with permanent damage and assisted suicide. Permanent consequences lead to complications with rules of consent. Personally, I found this model to be pretty good, though. I do like the idea of Consent as being an integral part of morality, because where consent is ambiguous, the morality of actions seem ambiguous.

I would say that as a practical deontological model goes, this is one that most good people use in their daily lives. When we refer to morality, this seems to be pretty close to what we mean (with maybe some Enlightenment ideals thrown in).

The Advancement of Human Well-Being

I didn't come up with this. I heard the phrase actually from Sam Harris. I think this is the an almost-correct model. This seems to be nearly exactly what people refer to when they talk about "morality."

This is a consequentialist model. It's not based on rules (deontological), but based on consequences. If something has good consequences then it is good, and if something has bad consequences then it is bad. And if something has mixed consequences it is mixed. It seems a little arbitrary when you first think of it, but eventually you realize it works surprisingly well, even for "the ends justify the means" situations (after all, the 'means' is a consequence).

"Well-being" seems ambiguous. This is actually a good thing, because this leaves very easy ways for humans to be wrong. Humans will not have perfect information, and will not know precisely what is the best thing for human well-being. This makes it a knowledge game. We want to know as much about our world and as much about ourselves as possible so that we can better ourselves, others, and all of humanity. Knowledge is inherent to morality.

I don't think this model is perfect though. The main issue is the word "Human." What about animals? What about my cats? Animal cruelty certainly is somewhere in here. I'm not exactly sure how to include it though, but clearly our idea of "morality" does not confine well-being to just humans.

So this is how I applied Model Theory to moral ideas. However, that's not the only thing Model Theory is useful for...