My efforts to persuade through reason are unavailing, according to this rational understanding, because I am attempting to put into the conclusion an element (moral truth) that is absent in the elements (statements of factual reality) from which I am trying to derive it. The Reason of the Enlightenment says that this cannot be done, that no amount of understanding of what "is" will allow me to say anything about what "ought" to be. Evaluative statements are, therefore, inescapably subjective: they express only the value that we place on what is true, but they are not true or false in themselves.
The perception of this seemingly unbridgeable chasm between objective truth and subjective evaluation led a major strand of modern philosophy --known as logical positivism-- to brand as "meaningless" all moral statements. Whatever cannot be disproved, the logical positivists asserted, has no real meaning. The assertion that "Murder is bad" tells you only about the speaker's merely subjective attitude about such killing; as a statement about murder itself, apart from the subjectivity of the speaker, it tells you nothing whatever. The value a person places on things is only subjective, and has nothing to do with reality.
One can readily see how the moral relativism of my college students and my counter-culture Internet interlocutors fits together with such philosophical reasoning. If everything a person thinks about what is good and right is "merely subjective" in the way the positivists deduced, then there is no bedrock, no basis for asserting that any one moral judgment is better or truer than another, that any of my moral beliefs can have any standing stronger than "true for me."
The young man we left in his Berkeley apartment, his moral foundations shaken, wrestled with these questions. And I think he found an answer. It's still "true" for me, but by true I mean a lot more than true just for me.
<em>The emergence of value. </em>
I didn't fight in Vietnam, but during those years I was involved in a war nonetheless. What that war produced was a book, eventually published as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution. That work represents the fruit of the profound alienation I felt from civilization at that era of my life. (Like most wars, it was a war for a young man to fight. When I think now of all that I took upon myself to think through and work out to write The Parable of the Tribes, it feels as over-ambitious to my fifty-year-old body as the way, when I was in my teens, I used to jump over picnic tables and fences just because my legs felt the impulse.) And one of the key pieces I felt called to articulate was a fundamental flaw I discerned in the positivist rejection of "values" as meaningless and mere subjective idiosyncrasy.
At the time, my thinking was deeply entwined in an evolutionary perspective. How things develop seemed to offer the key to understanding. I was aware of myself, and of my fellow human beings, as being borne along by two evolutionary currents operating simultaneously, but not harmoniously. One was the current of biological evolution, which had created us; the other the current of the evolution of civilization, which as I then saw it, was spinning destructively out of control. My allegiance was clearly with the biologically evolved systems that created us, that designed our inherent needs and nature.
The specific task that impelled me to break through the chasm of is-vs.-ought, fact-vs.-value, had to do with buttressing the standing of the theory of the evolution of civilization I was then developing. On the one hand, I was offering an explanation of what had happened to our species. On the other hand, I was also determined to subject the social evolutionary dynamic I was describing to a powerful moral critique. The validity of that moral critique was impressed as deeply on my soul as the truth of the more "objective" explanation. But for that moral critique to be valid in the way I thought it was, there had to be some bedrock in which the difference between the good and the not-good is real.
It was in contemplating the unfolding of cosmic evolution that I finally saw it. In the scientific account, in the beginning there was a lifeless universe. This is not, of course, the only way of looking at cosmic evolution. In addition to the view in which there is a Creator behind the whole process, and whose presence makes the universe not lifeless, there are those who believe that everything that exists has a degree of life and consciousness of some sort. But the scientific perspective is useful here, as its very coldness helps to illuminate how "ought" emerges from "is."
In this presumed lifeless universe, over billions of years, something new emerges in the cosmos: life, and not just life but eventually creatures that experience their existence with feelings, with joys and sufferings and needs and terrors. Of especial interest to me in the context of the argument in The Parable of the Tribes was the way that the evolution of life had structured those feelings and motives in the service of life's perpetuation, that the most fundamental choice designed into biological systems and creatures was that of life over death. Each creature is built to seek the perpetuation of its life, or more comprehensively, the life of its kind, over death.
Even in a purely mechanical Darwinian view of life's development, "therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy, 19:30) is the inherent bias of the process. What survives is chosen by evolution to contribute to the design of the future. If the inherent bias of the evolutionary system is life, so also are the creatures designed to make the choices that are conducive to survival. "Choices" may begin as purely mechanical reactions, virtually at the level of chemistry. But soon, an experiential dimension enters into the choosing process, and therefore into the equipment for survival.
As sentience emerges in the evolutionary process, creatures are designed to place value of a positive or negative valence on various experiences according to whether such experiences have evolutionarily been helpful or hurtful to the chances for survival. Eating nourishing food is satisfying because this has served life. Sex gives pleasure because it has perpetuated life. Fear feels distressing and it serves life by driving us to protect ourselves, either by fleeing or by disabling what might harm us, this eliminating the unpleasant feeling. Cutting our flesh causes pain, which we'd rather avoid. And so on.
In a lifeless universe, in which there is nothing to experience one thing as being in any way preferable to any other, there is no question of value. No outcome is "better" than another. Whether a star explodes or not, whether a comet crashes into a lifeless planet or not, makes no difference. To whom would it make a difference?
Life changes that. If all living creatures were without experience, without feeling, indifferent to one eventuality as opposed to any other, then the universe-with-life would be as indifferent as was the lifeless universe. But that is not the way life has developed. Value has been designed into sentient creatures --such as human beings, but obviously not only us. Indifference is gone. From the point of view of creatures that experience, some things --experiences, outcomes, courses of events-- are good and some are bad. Value is necessary for creatures that behave, for value is the basis of choice, and a creature that does not experience value will not know how to choose: do I eat the fruit or the rock? am I attracted to the female of my species or to a tree trunk? would I rather be stroked or bashed on the head? And if a creature does not know how to choose well, its design will not survive to help construct life's future.
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