Tuesday, February 05, 2008

What is the justification for morality?

What is the justification for morality? Is it reciprocity? Is it self interest? Should we only consider behaving morally with respect to those who can reciprocate appropriately, ignoring the poor and the weak who cannot reciprocate in an adequate way? Or, does being moral require that we protect and provide for the weak and the poor? Why or why not?

Here's why I ask this question: if morality obligates us to care for weak and the poor, then why does this obligation not extend to all living things rather than just to people? Nietzsche said something like 'one negotiates with equals; one does not negotiate with inferiors, one simply takes what one wants from them'. This would be a description of motivation from self-interest, I think. If our sense of obligation extends only as far as people, then how can we criticize a rich and powerful person who restricts their range of obligation to only those who are nearly as rich and powerful as they are?

Thinking about this right now, it dawns on me that the poor are powerful in large numbers, as the reign of terror during the period of the French revolution shows. Is that it? Is the principle that morality should be based on the idea that we are only obligated to those who can affect us significantly? Or, is morality a "custom": patterns of habitual behavior which form our personality? In this case, few effect the individual as much as the individual affects him or her self. By our behavior we set the de-facto "rules" of the game called "Existence" or "Life" or "Civil Society" because others see our behaviors, or the effects of our behaviours, and follow suit to compete for survival. Here morality might be providing us with rules for cooperation so that we are not distracted from work, sleep, education and the other endeavors that we would not be able to undertake if we had to spend all our time protecting our interests from others who are not constrained by the rules of morality. Again, this is self-interest. It is mutually beneficial, but still motivated by self-interest. But if self-interest is the principle in play, why don't the superior individuals gang together with only other superior individuals and play as a team against the poor and weak?

Again, the reason I am asking this is because I think we have moral obligations to all living things, and not just to our equals or just to people. The problem I am having is determining whether this is grounded on good principles which can be logically determined or is this just a sentimental impulse, perhaps some vestigial instinct left over from our evolutionary heritage, as per Steven Pinker's "The Moral Instinct" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5089&en=18a8d2d348782cdb&ex=1357880400&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss, a very interesting article from the New York Times online.

Please note, I am not looking for mere agreement that others feel obligated to care for the weak, poor, inferior or other species; I am looking for *reasons* why this is so, reasons that even a machine could understand; i.e. logically explicable.