Mr. Moderate

Fundamentalist Christians constantly tout their interpretation of their Bible as the only conceivable foundation for moral values. They quote Dostoevsky’s words from the The Brothers Karamazov: “without God, everything is permitted.” And they plead the argument from design: a moral law implies a moral law-giver.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have postmodernists who claim that no absolutes exist at all, and thus all morality is relative. Under some circumstances or another, any act we might view as immoral would not only be permitted, but required.

Both of these views are clearly wrong. Only a fraction of God’s laws from the Christian Bible are worthy of adherence in modern times, and most of those are moral laws that have equals (or at least, echoes) in most other cultures. The so-called Golden Rule is virtually a universal moral law as some version or another of it appears in virtually every known higher civilization. And the postmodernist assertion that no absolutes exist is also clearly wrong, as I will demonstrate, below.

I will not appeal to the authority of any known religion, but rather to our understanding of evolution based upon scientific inquiry. Of course, the postmodernists can’t be convinced on this ground because they don’t accept that science is a culturally neutral discoverer of “facts.” Postmodernists deny that “facts” exist at all, and claim that scientists find only those “facts” that they are culturally-conditioned to find. Fundamentalists deny all things scientific on the grounds that Science refuses to acknowledge their Bible as the supreme truth that cannot be contradicted. Anybody who refuses to acknowledge that facts must be discovered within the world around us (even facts about the Bible) will never be convinced of anything grounded in experience (even though their knowledge of their Bible is grounded in their own religious experiences). It is possible to view both of these groups as being technically insane since they both deny that “reality” exists outside of their own conceptions of what “reality” actually is.

So, setting aside those extremes, we can legitimately ask: what existed of morality before mankind existed?

My answer is this: before mankind existed, morality was encoded within the genes of the various species in the form of a “will to survive.” Any species of life which lacked a hard-coded “will to survive” would almost necessarily perish rather quickly. For billions of years before humans arose on Earth, all life was driven by some form or another of the “will to survive.” Even if a particular life form lived for only a brief time, its hard-coded “will to survive” would drive it to reproduce before it met its fate. Thus, fruit flies which live for only a very few days manage to rapidly mate and lay eggs before their lives end. Some form of long life and reproduction is guaranteed to be part of the hard-coded DNA within every single surviving species of life.

Thus, we should not be the least bit surprised that even developed human beings have vestiges of these hard-coded DNA attributes that invoke the “will to survive.” We might call it the “fight or flight reaction,” but that is just one aspect of the “will to survive” as implemented by human animals.

The moral code of most animals is hard-coded into their DNA, meaning that most animals do not need to learn moral behavior. Their survival instincts, their urge to reproduce, their mating behaviors, their parenting behaviors (if any) all tend to be hard-coded into DNA and thus innately known to even animals raised away from their own kind. Since humans are evolved from animals, we should not find it to be surprising that many of these same “hard-coded” kinds of behaviors appear in humans.

But a moral code is special in that it is a mental meme rather than a gene-based “hard-coded” attribute of mankind. Still, we can know without much thought that the overarching purpose for any moral code is to enhance the survival chances of the humans who adopt the same moral code. And the most immoral acts which we can conceive of involve the involuntary taking of the lives of other human beings.

The Jewish Holocaust is widely viewed as the most immoral action against a group of people that ever occurred in all of recorded history. But if we take that as a starting point, would it not be more immoral to kill off all white people? And would not that immorality be exceeded by killing off all of humanity? It becomes fairly obvious that human morality is grounded in the same concerns as is the “hard-coded” DNA-based morality of other animals: namely, the survival of our species. Ultimately, it can be said that it is the survival of life itself which is the supreme moral “right” and that no living thing should ever be allowed to exterminate all living things (obviously including itself).

Unfortunately, mankind has gained the power to exterminate all (or at least, nearly all) living things through extreme nuclear warfare. We must recognize that this would be the most immoral of conceivable acts, and it is our moral obligation as living things to do everything within our power to prevent that immorality from happening.

From this discussion, subsidiary moral rules can easily be developed which lead us to an eco-friendly moral code. In other words, we humans are morally required to stop killing off other living species. It will also help our own survival as a species if we maintain a diversity of biological life here on Earth. Consequently, it is clearly in our own best interests to behave in an eco-friendly manner. Whether you wish to argue that preserving our ecology is just “doing the right thing” or if you wish to argue that it is a moral obligation which is naturally imposed upon all humans as the only morally-aware living creatures, either way we know what our clear duty is: promote the survival of all living things, as much as possible.