thinking

This idea started with a disagreement.  Last Christmas, a good friend of mine professed his belief in a single universal system of morality, and this felt wrong to me, although I could not articulate a counterargument.  After a little thought, this post is my answer: I present a perspective on morality by which I conclude that there’s something fishy about the idea of a single universal system of morals.

Consider traffic laws.  Cars drive on the right side of the road in the US.  Some intersections have stop lights, some have stop signs, others have yield signs, or are built as on-ramps and off-ramps without any need to stop.  We have a set of rules for dealing with virtually any situation that may arise.  And when something goes wrong, there is often a sense that someone has made a mistake to cause the problem, such as a driver being drunk.

Traffic laws are designed with the global good in mind.  They are designed to be fair, and to help everyone get where they’re going.  Emergency vehicles receive special treatment, since some travel is more important than others.  Cars on a highway receive treatment so that they are never forced to stop while on the highway, unlike smaller roads.  So the rules are designed to maximize a certain function of transportation bliss, and this function takes many factors into account.

These laws have changed throughout history.  They evolve to better serve traffic as it changes.  A small intersection starts with a 2-way stop, and may one day graduate to a 4-way stop, then a stop light, and perhaps one day an overpass with on-ramps and off-ramps.  If many accidents happen at a certain spot, things change to avoid future accidents there — perhaps some warning signs, some yellow flashing lights, or even a change in the physical layout of the road itself.  So traffic laws are built from a history of experience in seeing what works and what doesn’t.

In all of these ways, traffic laws shadow moral laws.  Moral rules tend to be thought of as maximizing a nuanced sense of the global good.  When something goes wrong, we often feel that someone has done something morally wrong.  And we can see that specific (moral) laws have a history – they are created as a reaction to something that has previously gone wrong (to avoid it), or something that has gone right (to encourage it).

Now imagine an ultimate, perfect traffic bible – a single set of traffic laws which, when applied universally, exactly maximizes some absolute sense of transportation bliss.  This idea seems a bit silly to me.  It seems silly for a number of reasons:

1. It does not seem that there really is a single, objective function of transportation bliss to be maximized.  Different people will want different choices to be made.  Should ambulances take precedence over fire trucks or vice versa?  Should mothers in labor going to the hospital get a way to travel more quickly, without having to wait for an ambulance?  It seems that, no matter what choices are written down, there will always be room for reasonable argument.

2. Some laws seem quite arbitrary.  It seems necessary to decide that either all cars travel on the right or on the left side of the road by default.  But who is to say which side is better?  In practice, there does not seem to be a huge difference (between, say, the UK-left and the US-right).  Consistency is important, but we still have a sense that many decisions like this could be made either way, as long as they are made, and everything will be essentially the same either way.

3. Things change.  Once there were no cars on the road.  If the traffic bible existed then, it would have to somehow anticipate cars.  It seems inevitable that the nature of traffic will be so different in 500 years that the traffic laws will also need to change.  It does not make sense that any single set of rules could really anticipate all possible forms of practical transportation.  Even if we do not pretend that this traffic bible will ever be a reality – rather, we think of it as an ideal toward which we aspire – even then, it feels as if only a small fraction of it could ever apply to any one time period.

4. It violates the principle of mediocrity.  And this I personally find to be the single most compelling line of thought: the principle of mediocrity states that there is nothing special about humanity.  The Sun does not rotate around the Earth, we evolved from other animals, and so forth.  This principle can be seen behind many great advances in human understanding.  It is a useful principle precisely because it anticipates the type of mistake we are apt to make: considering ourselves special.  If we thought of traffic as an eternal and omnipresent issue facing all known life in the universe, it feels much easier to embrase the idea of an ultimate traffic bible.  And I do admit that traffic is quite possibly a universal problem, given some flexibility for different contexts.  But I’m guessing the reader will agree that, despite being a common problem, traffic does not feel profound.  It is a mediocre phenomena, and a bible feels out of place.

And this is exactly why I think there’s utility in comparing traffic and morality.  It lets us consider morality without the pomp.  Traffic is one version of morality minus profundity.

So I argue that it makes more sense to see morality from a perspective of mediocrity: we are building a very practical system out of a hodgepodge of past experience.  We have a feeling of universal good, but it is amorphous, and most likely induced by our human tendency to think of ourselves and our actions as special.

None of this is meant to detract from the significance of moral questions.  Indeed, traffic laws are very important in our lives.  Perhaps a bit boring by comparison, but very meaningful.  So we see a way in which a system of laws can be vitally important, have a vague sense of a general good, and be constantly improving — all this without the existence of an ultimate perfection.  Each of the reasons I’ve listed above against a traffic bible can be equally well applied to reasoning about a universal system of morals.  The difficulty is in fighting our own feeling of profundity and superhuman depth we easily attach to moral questions.  If we can see that moral questions are traffic questions in another light, our thinking becomes clear.

Tidiness is nice, but the world is not so tidy; there is no universal system of morals.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2011 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.