— Daniel Copeland

There are two major problems with this approach. Firstly, chemical reactions are no more probabilistic inside human brains than they are in, say, laboratory apparatus, or batteries, or tubs of soapy water, or anywhere else where we rely on them working deterministically. More importantly, random chance is at least as bad for “Free Will” as determinism. If our actions are random, then nobody, not even we ourselves, can say why we do the things we do — there is no reason why. But the concepts of purpose and responsibility both depend on us being able to give at least some account of our behaviour.

Clearly, determinism, as such, is not the real issue. In Terry Pratchett’s short story Death and What Comes Next, Death (who speaks in SMALL CAPITALS, without quotes) comes for a philosopher who argues that he is not really dead. There are billions of universes, says the philosopher, and everything that’s possible within the laws of physics happens somewhere in one of those universes; therefore, somewhere, he is still alive, and Death is not such a certainty any more.

THIS IS A CONUNDRUM CERTAINLY, said Death. Once they prayed, he thought. Mind you, he'd never been sure that prayer worked, either. He thought for a while. AND I SHALL ANSWER IT IN THIS MANNER, he added. YOU LOVE YOUR WIFE?
       “What?”
       THE LADY WHO HAS BEEN LOOKING AFTER YOU. YOU LOVE HER?
       “Yes. Of course.”
       CAN YOU THINK OF ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHERE, WITHOUT YOUR PERSONAL HISTORY CHANGING IN ANY WAY, YOU WOULD AT THIS MOMENT PICK UP A KNIFE AND STAB HER? said Death. FOR EXAMPLE?
       “Certainly not!”
       BUT YOUR THEORY SAYS THAT YOU MUST. IT IS EASILY POSSIBLE WITHIN THE PHYSICAL LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE, AND THEREFORE MUST HAPPEN, AND HAPPEN MANY TIMES. EVERY MOMENT IS A BILLION, BILLION MOMENTS, AND IN THOSE MOMENTS ALL THINGS THAT ARE POSSIBLE ARE INEVITABLE. ALL TIME, SOONER OR LATER, BOILS DOWN TO A MOMENT.
       “But of course we can make choices between—”
       ARE THERE CHOICES? EVERYTHING THAT CAN HAPPEN, MUST HAPPEN. YOUR THEORY SAYS THAT FOR EVERY UNIVERSE THAT’S FORMED TO ACCOMMODATE YOUR ‘NO’, THERE MUST BE ONE TO ACCOMMODATE YOUR ‘YES’. BUT YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER COMMIT MURDER. THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS TREMBLES BEFORE YOUR TERRIBLE CERTAINTY. YOUR MORALITY BECOMES A FORCE AS STRONG AS GRAVITY.

But that raises another problem. If what I do is wholly controlled by my brain, and my brain is made of atoms following the laws of chemistry without exception, then — in theory — anybody clever enough could predict in advance exactly what all of them are going to do given various conditions, and then manipulate the conditions in such a way as to control me. Their methods of persuasion would then no longer be just part of the chain of events that determines what I do, but all of it. Well, in theory, sure; but the person in control would have to be far, far cleverer than any human being. Take a look at John Conway’s Game of Life. It’s an extremely simple system, with four uncomplicated laws governing its entire behaviour; but follow the link and see if you can find any way to predict what’ll happen a hundred moves ahead, other than by running the program and watching events unfold. New, complex regularities, stable or repeating patterns, emerge on larger scales than are covered by the simple cell-by-cell rules, but one live cell in the wrong place can blow those patterns apart completely.

As you’ll remember from Part 2, a simple linear arrangement of twenty-four elements has 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000 possible states. A human brain contains roughly ten billion cells, in wildly complicated networks, and is exquisitely sensitive to conditions throughout the body. The sheer number of possible patterns is so mind-bogglingly huge that only an observer with a brain bigger than the universe could figure out exactly what was going to happen next. In other words, they would have to be God — which, as you’ll appreciate, is a rather significant point in this context. According to the Christian doctrine of Free Will, God has given humans the ability to choose our own path. If we do evil things, he is not to blame. But as we have just seen, our choices must be either random, in which case we are not to blame either, or determined by prior causes, in which case our creator is to blame as well after all. Replacing the complexity of the brain with the mystery of a supernatural “soul” makes no difference at all: our actions must still be either random or non-random. And in neither case is God justified in punishing us.

But wait, I hear a believer retort. If there’s no God, then what does “evil” even mean? Without at least some kind of Absolute, there can ultimately be no distinction between good and bad, beyond our own personal desires. This, I think it’s fair to say, is why so many believers in God think it so important that everybody else should believe in God as well. And they do have a point. Consider the following sentences:

1. The door is open.
2. Open the door.

• You should open the door.
• You must open the door.
• You’d better open the door.
• You ought to open the door.

• Opening the door would be the best thing to do.
• It is morally right for you to open the door.
• It would be morally wrong for you not to open the door.

• If you want to let the cat in, you should open the door.

We all feel that there are things we ought to do, and things we ought not to do. Peter Kreeft, following C. S. Lewis, argues that this feeling cannot come from our own instincts. Why, after all, should we favour one instinct over another? If a close friend or relative is in danger, for example, why should we favour our instinct of affection over our instinct of self-preservation? Kreeft concludes that our moral conscience is in fact “the voice of God in the soul”, and hence a proof of God’s existence. This is the same mistake that underlies the Argument from Reason: Kreeft defines instinct to exclude conscience, then holds up conscience as proof that there is more to human motivation than instinct. But conscience is, in fact, a function of the brain. In 1848, an accidental explosion on an American railway construction site blew a tamping iron through Phineas Gage’s head and out the other side. Amazingly, he lost none of his motor or cognitive skills; but his personality changed completely. Before the accident he had been a balanced individual, and was regarded as “a shrewd smart business man”. After it he was inconsiderate, impatient, stubborn, foul-mouthed, and completely indecisive. From reconstructions of the damage based on examination of his skull, it seems his ventromedial prefrontal cortex was the site of his conscience, or at least a vital part of it. If conscience is God’s voice, why didn’t God speak to Gage after his injury?

Nevertheless, Kreeft’s question is a good one. Why should we prefer one desire to another? Well, without yet having a complete answer to that question, we can see that there are some general principles which will apply regardless of what ultimate end we eventually decide to consider “good”. For one thing, we must value the long-term good over the short-term good, or we’ll soon enough lose them both — though, of course, that also depends on just how necessary the short-term good is. In a similar vein, we may find ourselves forced to choose between achieving the good end that we want, and sticking true to our moral code in every particular. If the goal we are seeking is any loftier than personal warm fuzzy feelings for having Done The Right Thing, we will have to compromise now and then.

This is, I realize, at odds with a recent, popular philosophy claiming to derive morality from first principles without invoking a God. According to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, the unchanging standard by which all actions can be assessed is found in humanity’s very nature as a rational species:

Reason is man’s only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: man’s survival qua man — i.e., that which is required by man’s nature for his survival as a rational being (not his momentary physical survival as a mindless brute). Rationality is man’s basic virtue, and his three fundamental values are: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Man — every man — is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
       What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.

From the eleventh into the fourteenth centuries, Christians marched or rode to war with the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem. Quite apart from the appalling devastation they caused at the time, they sparked off a tradition of mutual hatred between Christianity and Islam which bears evil fruit to this day. No sooner were the Crusades over than the witch-trials began. At first they were a small-scale affair, but over the years witchcraft became the Church’s most pressing concern. Since witches set themselves against God’s laws of nature, they came to be seen as devil-worshippers; this made them excellent scapegoats for social ills, such as Europe’s high infant mortality. The Reformation sparked a huge wave of witch-hunts in Germany, with Protestants and Catholics striving to outdo each other in eliminating the enemies of God. Suspected witches were forced under torture to accuse others, who in turn would be arrested and tortured, and so on. The inquisitors could act without possibility of flaw. Suspicion was proof. How could it be anything else? God would not have put the suspicion in the minds of his clerics unless it was right that it should be there. As the witch-hunters’ handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum, has it,

...it has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that God will never permit such a thing to happen.
       Besides, He does not suffer the innocent who are under Angelic protection to be suspected of smaller crimes, such as robbery and such things; then all the more will He preserve those who are under that protection from suspicion of the crime of witchcraft.

— Malleus Maleficarum Part II Question 1:11

Extraordinary institutional cruelty such as the Inquisition often seems completely disconnected from the real people we know and interact with. It’s hard to imagine anybody sane torturing somebody to death simply because they were told to. Surely only a few pathological individuals would ever go that far. That’s certainly what Stanley Milgram thought in 1961 when he set up a test to figure out just how powerful an influence authority really is. Volunteers for an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning were sorted into pairs, each pair including a “teacher” and a “learner”. The learner’s task was to memorize lists of words and repeat them, and the teacher’s was to administer electric shocks — mild at first, but increasing in severity up to potentially fatal voltages — whenever the learner made a mistake. Meanwhile the experimenter stood by, instructing the teacher to raise the voltage and continue the experiment. In fact, the “learners” were actors, their mistakes were deliberate, the electrodes strapped to their wrists were inert, and their pain (and eventual coma or death) was feigned. Milgram and his colleagues predicted that, regardless of the authority of the experimenter, less than 1% of the “teachers” would continue the experiment to the point where it was apparently fatal. The actual figures, from repeated experiments in various parts of the world, were 60–85%.

An extreme form of obedience to authority is hypnosis. The tricks stage hypnotists do with pendulums and swirling lights are largely misdirection. The real trick consists of persuading subjects, bit by bit, to abandon their power of choice to the hynotist, generally by starting with broad commands such as “Relax”, then becoming more and more specific (“Look into my eyes...”). Brain-scans of hypnotized people instructed to hallucinate objects show a reaction as if the objects were really there, whereas the brains of subjects not under hypnosis, who are merely asked to imagine the objects, do not react in this way. The hypnotist’s instructions become almost as strong an influence on the brain as the subject’s own senses, so that not only their actions but their perceptions are under the hypnotist’s control.

In short, people can and do strongly influence one another’s brains. Physiology and sociality cannot be disentangled, which is just as well, because that tangle is our individual self. Watch children learning to socialize. They first interact spontaneously with other people, then begin to respond to themselves as they do to others, and only then become conscious of their own individual existence. (Often, this can be quite comical; one small boy of my family’s acquaintance used to tell himself off loudly when he was about to misbehave.) Usually the process happens too early in our lives for us to remember, but there are instructive exceptions. Helen Keller, deaf and blind from an early age, was unaware of her own existence until the age of eight: “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am.” She was taught to communicate by touch, and “Then consciousness first existed for me.” The self is a product of social living.

So it should be no surprise that our standards of good and bad come from other people — from society, from our culture and its traditions. In childhood we need to learn too much, too quickly, to pick it all up by personal experience, and so we must get it from our elders and contemporaries. Knowledge passed on in this fashion is called culture. This is not to deny the individual’s power of choice. Every culture is constantly changing, and the choices its members make are the mainspring of that change, just as mutations are the mainspring of genetic change. Each of us contributes our own ideas to our society’s future. But it is impossible to discard or ignore our cultural background. If we could, the result would be not freedom but powerlessness, because interacting with others necessarily involves a system of arbitrary rules about the meaning of words and actions. There is no rational answer to the question “What is the best way to show someone that we love them?”, any more than there is to the question “What is the best combination of sounds to designate a tree?” But you do have to have a societally agreed answer on both those questions, or you can never express love — or talk about trees.

The prospect of being completely dominated by another person, whether by hypnosis or by simple authority as in Milgram’s experiment, is, of course, rather frightening. To some extent it is a consequence of an unnatural situation. Only since the invention of agriculture less than ten thousand years ago — a blink of an evolutionary eye — have people been able to gather resource surpluses large enough to effectively dominate others. The submissive response that surfaces in such circumstances is extremely primitive. Normally, the perception that someone else is controlling our lives causes our serotonin levels to drop dangerously low. Dangerously, because low serotonin results in a tendency towards aggression and violence; another example of the entangling of physiology with sociality. While serotonin deprivation is by no means a complete explanation of crime among disempowered sectors of society, it goes a long way towards one. Hunter-gatherer societies, which all our ancestors lived in until agriculture came along, tend strongly towards egalitarianism. There is a sound evolutionary reason for this:

Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power of mine was a harmless anomaly, that it was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanently sunk into every man’s mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity.

— G. K. Chesterton, The Vote and the House

Similar transactions are characteristic of the primates. Monkeys and apes form tightly knit groups. They do not merely seek to be near others of their own species, as herd animals do, but to interact socially with one another. Members of these groups do each other favours all the time. They gang up on rivals, they alert the group to dangers (thereby making themselves conspicuous), and some species even share food. You will have spotted the problem. What if one animal receives favours, but does not return them? Then that individual would get the full benefit of its own efforts, and a share in the rewards of others’ efforts as well. Such a strategy would be hugely successful, and the cheats would thrive and multiply at the expense of the others — until they became a majority, at which point there would no longer be a co-operative group. The solution is to remove the advantage inherent in cheating behaviour by refusing help to those who have employed it. To pull this off requires the ability to remember past offences and past favours, and readily identify the parties involved. A long memory for faces is an essential tool, and relationships within the group must be fairly stable. Sure enough, primates are intelligent creatures, and they value their social relationships highly. Monkeys and apes who fight often go out of their way to make friends again afterwards. Many even extend this attention from their own relationships to the group as a whole, transforming reciprocal altruism to community concern.

Inasmuch as every member benefits from a unified, co-operative group, one expects them to take care about the society they live in and make an effort to improve and strengthen it, similar to the way the spider repairs her web and the beaver maintains the integrity of his dam... I do not necessarily mean that animals make sacrifices for their community, but rather that each and every individual has a stake in the quality of the social environment on which its survival depends.

— Frans de Waal, Good Natured

Note, however, that reciprocal altruism in social species is conditional: inasmuch as every member benefits from a unified, co-operative group. Which leads us, alas, to politics. I don’t pretend to have a Utopia all figured out to present to you, but I do have an idea of what a truly moral society would look like. For each individual to benefit, resources would have to be fairly evenly spread. There would be no gap between rich and poor. However, if this scenario conjures up for you the image of a gigantic centralized state doing the spreading, you have misread me. Centralization, whether in a state or a corporation, necessarily means concentrating control among a privileged few; and if one individual, or a small sub-group, has control over all the resources, what would they gain from co-operating with anyone else? This is why humans, and that minority of the world chimpanzee population not living in solitary confinement in medical labs, keep an eye on our leaders. The dominant male in a chimpanzee troop cannot truly dominate the others. If they are unsatisfied with his leadership, they band together and overthrow him. So he makes an effort not to be overthrown: he breaks up fights impartially and shares food generously. Humans are even brighter than chimps, and we don’t follow leaders until we are convinced of their worth. Not even religion is immune to this scrutiny. As Jim Flynn says, “God may be our judge, but we judge God to satisfy ourselves that God is a worthy judge.”

For this reason, highly unequal communities are unpleasant for those on top of the heap as well as those underneath; they have to spend all their energy on retaining their power. Totalitarianism has proved a failure largely due to the cost of the enormous security systems the dictators need to protect them from the wrath of their subjects. This logic still applies, although more subtly, when it is a whole sector of society that is lording it over the rest. If “We” are to keep “Them” in line, we must surround ourselves with behavioral restrictions so that the boundary is never blurred. Thus, while our sexist and homophobic culture undoubtedly does give straight men an advantage over other groups, it also forces them to stand on constant alert against anything that might cast doubt on their sexuality — whether it be the colour pink, pulled-up socks, or a taste for poetry. Ethnic discrimination likewise forces us to partition ourselves off from other communities, to say nothing of the violence it engenders. So far, we have been speaking of “the community” as if it were cosily isolated from the outside world, but this is not the case. We cannot block out the physical environment, and we cannot block out our neighbours. Concern for our own community dictates respect for both of these.

Communities, on any scale, cannot exist without mutual respect between their members. Respect for other people in practice means acknowledging them as equals to ourselves. This requires an admission that their faculties of thought are more or less equal to our own. And this, in turn, means that when we find ourselves in disagreement with them, we cannot simply steam ahead on the assumption that we are obviously right and they are stupidly wrong. The temptation is particularly strong when they and we come from separate cultural backgrounds with strikingly different world-views. We must practise relativism. This does not mean a woolly-minded belief that everybody is right about everything, all at once. Nor does it mean that “we have no right to disagree with other people’s cultures”. Quite the contrary; that statement is, effectively, a patronizing refusal to engage in dialogue with them. Relativism does mean that we must seek to understand other people on their own terms. It means that if our ideas and theirs differ, we must consider the merits of both fairly, and that even if we do prove to be completely right, that doesn’t make their whole way of thinking worthless. It also means that all actions, including evil ones, are prompted by motives which seem reasonable to those who do them. This is not the same as saying that those actions are not evil at all.

Understanding something is not the same as approving of it or excusing it. Often we are repelled by unfamiliar cultural practices when we first encounter them. Sometimes when we understand these practices better, we change our minds... But the opposite may also be the case. We may understand perfectly the cultural rationale behind such practices as slavery, infanticide, head-hunting, or genocide — and still refuse our approval. We may not be persuaded by the reasons offered to justify these practices, or we may be aware of alternative arrangements that could achieve the desired outcome using less drastic methods. Moreover, it is likely that any cultural practice with far-reaching consequences for human life will have critics as well as supporters within the society where it is practised.

— Emily Schultz & Robert Lavenda, Anthropology

Some argue that premarital sex cheats your future spouse out of their rights to your body. But what rights does anyone have to another person’s body, let alone a person they may not even have met yet? And couldn’t one equally argue that you should have sex before marriage, so as to develop the skills you will need to please your partner? Ah, says the Christian, spotting an opening, but why should the partner be disappointed unless they had previous experience to compare it to? Won’t people feel contempt for those lovers that don’t measure up? Only if they’re judgemental, the relativist replies; and, of course, a consistent relativist will not be judgemental.

Finally, there is the health argument: having multiple sex partners puts you at risk of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Well, that’s what condoms are for. Certainly, condoms don’t quite reduce the risk of disease or pregnancy to zero; but then, car seat-belts don’t reduce the risk of road death to zero, yet how many people refuse to drive for that reason? For that matter, waiting until marriage doesn’t reduce the risk of disease to zero either, unless you can be absolutely sure that your partner has done the same — and people lie about this more than pretty much anything else. Especially if they love their partner and don’t want to lose them.

Let’s be clear. While abstinence from sex is the most effective way to avoid pregnancy and disease, promoting abstinence among young people is the least effective way to protect them from those ills. Lust, along with hunger, anger and fear, is among the basic emotional drives which, when strong, may override our ability to reason. Having got into an intimate situation that triggers its full power, we find ourselves rationalizing the actions it prompts in us with arguments that, in retrospect, seem completely idiotic. This is never more true than in adolescence. Many teenagers accordingly consider it pardonable to have sex in a moment of passion, but depraved to plan on it. Needless to say, only people planning on having sex stock up on contraceptives.

No, I tell a lie. The least effective way is to tell them nothing, and hope their peers, and their own developing bodies, will keep quiet too.

Some reader is bound to point out that I still haven’t addressed the core of morality. The community concern ethic is all very well, but if it arises purely from a consideration of the benefits that the community can give us, then it’s not moral but mercenary; a commercial transaction, where we perform good deeds in exchange for rewards. It doesn’t address character at all. By contrast, when people become Christians, their moral character improves dramatically. Isn’t this evidence of God at work in their lives? Well, assuming the phenomenon to be genuine, let us consider the alternative explanations. First of all, now that Christianity is one option among many, people most often adopt it in response to crises of self-awareness; that self-awareness might easily account for the change in personality. It is surely relevant here that the average age of conversion to Christianity is about sixteen, an age when social conscience often blossoms. Additionally, new converts come under the scrutiny of the Christian community. They are anxious to please their new friends, including God, and to demonstrate the moral superiority of Christianity over the secular world, and their behaviour reflects this. What’s more, in some areas of life Christian standards are quite different from other people’s. The moral “improvement” must be at least partly due to adopting those standards. Suppose, for example, a young man becomes a Christian, and thereafter stops having sex with his girlfriend. From a Christian point of view, his behaviour has improved; the rest of us would think he was being rather inconsiderate.

The mercenary charge won’t stick. The community concern principle hangs on long-term relationships. It would indeed be mercenary to become someone’s friend in the hope of financial gain; such a relationship could not be called friendship at all, because one party is planning on dissolving it once they have what they want. On the contrary, we befriend others so that we may share the benefits of friendship indefinitely. The same is true of moral behaviour; we do good so that our community may be a good one for as long as we live in it. If you must have a financial metaphor, it’s better to think of a joint savings account than of a simple transaction.

Furthermore, relativism, in conjunction with community concern, can bolster moral character, in principle, by removing one of the great evasions to which Essentialistic thinking tempts us. If immoral acts are motivated by an Essence of Evil possessed only by Villains, then we can safely ignore our own faults, comfortable in the knowledge that we are not Villains. On the relativistic view, however, there is no such thing as a Villain. Others’ actions always seem reasonable to them, even when bad; it follows that our own actions may be bad, even when they seem reasonable to us. I don’t know about you, but I’ve done a number of things in my life that I later regretted deeply; not because of the consequences to me, but because of the kind of person that they showed me to be. If I allowed such actions to become habits, my friends would be sure to shun me. For the sake of my friendships, I must change those parts of my personality. Whether I have succeeded, I do not know, but I continue to try to improve myself.

Even in a purely relativistic moral system, then, the concept of “evil” does not lose its meaning, and the Problem of Evil remains. Meanwhile, it now seems very unlikely that God, who has no community and no needs, could be moral at all. But the believer will still have one argument left. Since any action embarked on in defiance of God’s will, supposing there is a God, is ultimately doomed, we can add obedience to God to our list of principles that will hold regardless of what “good” end we hope to achieve. And God knows better than we do what is good for us, so we may base our morality purely on obedience and let the rest take care of itself. But where is the evidence that those who obey God are better off? And when, exactly, has God ever told us what to do? The Christian answer to both these questions is “In the Bible.” We turn now, therefore, to the Bible, to examine the Arguments from History and from Authority.

Last updated: 21 March 2007