On an External Source of Binding Force and Authority for Morality

The Rabbi’s Opening Post

On an External Source of Binding Force and Authority for Morality

Posted on 20/2/2006

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On an External Source of Binding Force and Authority for Morality (for Yevusi)

Yevusi wrote in the old thread that was bumped up about the morality of religious and secular people, as follows: I said that on the theoretical plane there is indeed no good explanation for morality without an external source of authority, whereas on the behavioral plane, in my opinion, every social system will stabilize around a method that educates toward a certain kind of cooperation and consideration. More precisely, systems that do not stabilize around such a method will be overcome by systems that do develop cooperation. Together with built-in emotional mechanisms such as the bond between children and parents, you get a system in which the likelihood of mutual cannibalism is very low, or at least one in which mutual cannibalism is regulated by social arrangements. I also tried to argue that the internalization of social rules is easy to achieve through the education, or conditioning, of children, whose minds are easy to shape and whose bodies are too weak to resist such conditioning. That was my answer to the question of what will prevent mutual cannibalism, not to the question of what spiritual justification there is for cooperation or altruism.

These remarks raise several questions for me: 1. Is the only basis for morality (in its non-utilitarian sense) indeed the assumption of an external source of authority? I am inclined to think so, but it needs to be defined more precisely why this is in fact so. Is this agreed upon by everyone? At first glance, most of the world does not conduct itself this way, but that does not necessarily indicate disagreement about this principle itself (see below). 2. Can someone who feels that morality contains more than mere utilitarianism (and also understands that utilitarianism is insufficient, since the immediate advantages of moral transgression are obvious; see the examples in the thread on asparagus) be satisfied with a conditioning-based evolutionary explanation? After all, the fact that we are aware of evolution’s blessed effects on us should lead us to shake off its nonsense and behave in the rational and reasonable way, that is, the utilitarian way. In other words: is there something paralyzing in the awareness of evolution? If I know that morality contains nothing beyond animal conditioning, then why should I act in accordance with the commands of morality? What can be said against someone who does not do so? Moreover, is there in fact such an argument, only I cannot explain it to him, or is there no argument against him at all? True, one can say that condemning and punishing him are also the result of a kind of conditioning. But we are aware of that too, so why does the emotional sense of condemnation still dwell within us (the punishment itself, of course, has a utilitarian logic). 3. If we accept the above assumption (that an external source of binding force is required), and in addition if we indeed think that there is something in morality beyond utility (which is probably the assumption underlying the previous one), then two possibilities are open to us: a. to abandon it (at least when utilitarian considerations are absent). b. to accept the fact that there is an external source of authority. This is Kant’s claim, who in the end proved God’s existence on ethical grounds. And I do not mean some stupid pragmatist argument of the sort, ‘If we do not believe in God, there will be no morality, and that would be a pity’ (or, in the language of the moralists: ‘If there is no God in this place, they will kill me’ [cf. Genesis 20:11]). I mean a logical argument that says that the sense of obligation to morality, and the unwillingness to detach ourselves from it despite awareness of its evolutionary-animal source, indicate that we are probably implicitly assuming that morality has an external source of binding force. 4. And here I come to the final question: why do many people in the enlightened world choose neither of these two options, even though these are the only ones available (given Yevusi’s assumption, which in my opinion seems reasonable to most people, that morality has no real binding force without an external source, and which is itself based on the assumption that there is something in morality beyond utilitarianism).

Source (the "Stop Here, Think" forum): http://www.bhol.co.il/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=1813396