The Objective Morality of Transcendent Experience

Posted on March 9, 2023 by Facilitator

Human Defense Initiative originally published this article in March 2023, in two installments, here and here. A month later I decided that some reorganization would make the argument easier to follow, resulting in the version that appears below.

People have known for thousands of years that meditation offers tremendous relief. Some say that what it offers goes beyond mere relief. Some say that meditation is a path to infinite and eternal bliss. Besides various possibilities of what meditation results in on the subjective side, interpretations of what it results in physiologically, neurologically and cosmologically also vary. One model that would be plausible for the atheist or agnostic would be the idea that meditation is made possible by an accident in the shaping of the brain through evolution. The theory would be that evolution, though favoring a strong sense of self, accidentally left a door through which a human being, by directing his attention in a certain way, can escape for more or less prolonged periods from that sense of self and the suffering it entails (the idea will be further explained a little later).

I will first and mainly try to show that there can be objectively-correct moral principles grounded on the attainment of transcendent experience, and that an example of one is “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself.” I will argue as follows:

1. Many think of transcendent experience as the highest good possible for humans, and it is something empirical, and in principle measurable through advanced brain imaging. So reasoning tells us that a moral principle that can help lead to transcendent experience is an objectively-correct moral principle.

2. The principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” can help lead to transcendent experience.

3. Therefore, according to reasoning, the principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” is an objectively-correct moral principle.

4. An objectively-correct moral principle is not fully established by reasoning, but only if it is supported by a correct moral intuition.

5. The research of Paul Bloom and others indicates that the seeds of beliefs supporting principles similar to “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” are inborn in us. The seeds that are inborn in us will “sprout” into specific beliefs once we have enough information about the world and free ourselves from psychological weaknesses, so the specific beliefs are in effect inborn in us. Being inborn in us, they are intuitions. Their correctness is established if we have successfully established the correctness of the principles that they support, and such objectively-correct moral intuitions exist not only in theory, but in reality.

6. But we have established the correctness of the principles only through reasoning, and they can be fully established only through intuition.

7. If one has an intuition supporting the correctness of a correct moral principle, one will automatically intuit also that the intuition is correct. But that would be a circular proof of the correctness of an intuition. Yet when we try to establish the correctness of an intuition based on the correctness of the principle it supports, we run into 6. above.

8. So the correctness of a moral intuition cannot ultimately be established in any cognitive way. We can, however seek to eliminate, through meditation, and a selfless lifestyle, and a willingness to change, and sometimes psychotherapy, all the mental weaknesses that would cloud our intuitions, and thus find unclouded intuitions. It stands to reason that they will be correct intuitions. If according to this reasoning, added to the reasoning in 1. above, the moral principle “You ought to serve others . . .” is correct, then the intuition supporting it must also be correct.

9. I will also try to explain what a correct moral intuition is ontologically.

Between here and the heading “4. what do right and wrong actually consist of . . .,” I have sometimes paused to explain, in red, the significance that the immediately-preceding text has for the above 1–9 sequence. Thus by reading only the above points 1–9 and the below red sentences A through J, a reader will get a clear outline of the argument in this portion of the article.

Whatever one’s views of what occurs physiologically and neurologically, or one’s metaphysical views of what happens cosmologically (that is, whether we speculate about meditative experiences in the way that materialists do, as purely the functions of neurons, or in the way that spiritualists do, as a deepened apprehension of a non-material soul, or communion with a non-material higher power), those who have experienced the deep peace of meditation usually consider transcendent experience (or some final culmination thereof) to be the highest good possible for humans (“good” in the sense of “benefit” – the highest good being the most positive human experience).¹ And the experiences some people have of the highest good, which I offer as a standard for the determination of morality, are something empirical and measurable (at least theoretically measurable, perhaps through advanced brain imaging). Moreover, those people accept that some meditative technique or other is the best means of attaining such experience.

A step that follows from that is to ask what auxiliary behaviors can create the most conducive conditions for progress in meditation – what behaviors, what lifestyle choices, in terms of diet, hygiene, exercise – and in terms of morality? I think we can identify certain moral principles, adherence to which will best lead us to transcendent experience – that is, they will lead at least the individuals who practice them to transcendent experience. There can be broad agreement that if a moral principle leads a person to the highest good possible for any human being, sustained over a sufficient amount of that person’s life (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result), that moral principle can reasonably be defined as an objectively-correct moral principle, and there is such a thing as objective moral truth. The consensus will be even stronger if that moral principle not only leads its adherent to the highest good, but also leads to many attaining that highest good. (Further defense of this “broad agreement” idea later.)

A. So objectively-correct moral principles can exist, and if a principle that can lead toward transcendent experience for anyone (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result) does exist, it is an example of an objectively-correct moral principle.

(In thinking about transcendent experience as the highest good possible for humans, we should not make what atheist meditation teacher Sam Harris calls “one of two mistakes”: “Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky.”²)

I wrote, “The consensus will be even stronger if that moral principle . . . leads to many attaining that highest good.” The personal good of some individuals cannot be the absolute highest good, objectively the highest good of all, so though a moral principle that leads toward transcendent experience for any individual is an example of an objectively-correct moral principle, its correctness is not as strongly established as a principle which, if any individual adheres to it, will lead toward transcendent experience for many. However, it turns out that attaining that highest good of transcendent experience for oneself positions one to help others also attain that highest good, and in most cases if not all, those who have attained it will go on to help others attain it (and to some extent will automatically help others simply by their example of having attained it using particular methods). Thus if adherence by an individual to a certain moral principle will lead that individual to transcendent experience (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result), that will be an example not only of an objectively-correct moral principle, but of one of those objectively-correct moral principles whose correctness is most strongly established.

B. Those who have attained transcendent experience will likely go on to help others attain it, so if a principle that can lead toward transcendent experience for anyone (without somehow simultaneously doing an amount of harm proportional to the good that will result) does exist, it will be an example not only of an objectively-correct moral principle, but of one of those objectively-correct moral principles whose correctness is most strongly established.

Let’s ask a number of related questions together that will help us get a full picture of objectively-correct moral principles and how they are identified and established:

a. can we identify objectively-correct moral principles in advance (that is, other than by trying them out) – and also apart from identifying them through reasoning – and if so, how?

b. how can one explain the efficacy of those particular objectively-correct principles that lead to transcendent experience – how do they do that?

c. if they are identified in advance by correct moral intuitions, how did those intuitions originate, how to explain their existence?

d. what do right and wrong, the presumed freight carried by those principles, actually consist of – what are they metaphysically or ontologically?

My answers to questions a.-c. will be so intertwined that I will take those questions together.

a. Can we identify objectively-correct moral principles in advance (that is, other than by trying them out) – and also apart from identifying them through reasoning – and if so, how?

b. How can one explain the efficacy of those particular objectively-correct principles that lead toward transcendent experience – how do they do that?

c. If they are identified in advance by correct moral intuitions, how did those intuitions originate, how to explain their existence?

Suppose our moral intuitions support a moral principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself.” (The value of X need not be decided right now.) Since our intuitions exhort us in that way, we will have to follow that principle to get peace of mind, and more importantly, that principle will force us to experiment with selfless actions. We may initially follow that principle only to get peace from our nagging consciences, but then following the principle will become an experiment in which we learn about the further peace that comes from forgetting to worry about ourselves. That lesson will reinforce our intuitions about the principle, but not only that – that newfound calming of the choppy waters on the surfaces of our minds results in our seeing deeper into that “lake” than we had been able to before. As we lose identification with our normal mental ongoings and the “choppiness” they cause, that detachment enables us to see those thoughts, emotions, and perceptions (including our sense of self) as objects that are not really what we are. And then automatically we will want to lose even further our identification with those objects, and we will begin to learn to orient our minds, point our attention, in ways that will further that project – even if we have no meditation teacher. That is, through following that altruistic principle, experimenting with putting others first, we will learn that we can escape from our evolution-given sense of self, and will begin to understand the rewards of doing so. Adherence to that moral principle is one of the auxiliary behaviors that will create the most conducive conditions for progress in meditation.

It is well-known that worrying about oneself makes one unhappy, while self-forgetfulness constitutes a liberation from those worries. As the abstract of a 2008 psychology study said,

. . . we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater happiness both cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey study) and longitudinally (in a field study of windfall spending). Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves.³

We so often hear, correctly, that the main recipe for happiness in life is to lose oneself in a greater cause.

So self-sacrifice leads toward transcendent experience.

C. Behavior that will follow from the intuition “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” will lead toward transcendent experience, and thus the moral principle is an objectively-correct moral principle, and one of those objectively-correct moral principles whose correctness is most strongly established – according to reasoning. According to reasoning, objectively-correct moral principles do exist.

We have just found, through reasoning, an example of an objectively-correct moral principle. Another way, apart from such reasoning, to know whether any such moral principles do exist (and thus that an objective morality exists) is to identify one or more of them by trying to live such principles and observing the results. But it would be better if we can identify such principles in advance of trying them out. And if we can in any way identify such a principle, that principle will be priceless for us because it will help us attain transcendent experience. So is there any way that we can identify objectively-correct moral principles other than by trying them out – and also apart from identifying them through reasoning?

Moral Intuitions: I subscribe to an intuitionist view on moral issues, and think not only that moral intuitions are a way that we can identify objectively-correct moral principles in advance, but also that ultimately, correct moral principles of any kind (not only leading to transcendent experience) can be known only through correct moral intuitions (at the link, see especially Appendix B). The example we have given of a moral intuition is the feeling supporting the principle “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself”. “Right” and “wrong” are feelings, and reasoning, rational argumentation, is not a vehicle that can carry feeling. A moral intuition, correct or incorrect, is a pre-logical and pre-verbal sense of right or wrong that comes out of our unconscious, as a form of qualia, in some way we cannot understand. When we experience a feeling supporting a principle such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself,” we certainly can’t fully understand the origin introspectively, and the world can’t yet understand it neurologically. Our unconsciouses were likely influenced by the rational arguments we have heard, but ultimately we don’t know what shaped or influenced our unconsciouses. “Yes, through moral intuitions” is the answer to a. above.

D. Objectively-correct moral principles do in fact exist if we can identify some of them, and we would be able to come close to identifying some as meeting the reasoned criteria that I have given, but as I have now explained, ultimately we would be able to identify them only through correct moral intuitions.

Now regarding the origins of correct moral intuitions , I think that their seeds are inborn. Psychology researcher Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, said in an interview⁴ that while some moral ideals “are the product of culture and society” and “not in the genes,” “there also exist hardwired moral universals – moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality . . . that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.” Even if Bloom overestimates the role of the genes in the “hardwired” moral senses, and underestimates the role of culture in those moral senses, and overestimates how universal those moral senses are across cultures, it would be safe to say that most of us do have senses of right or wrong that come out of our unconsciouses in ways we cannot understand. Those senses are also sometimes called moral intuitions, or simply a conscience. And as Bloom shows, the principles identified by those moral intuitions are often altruistic in nature. And we have already seen that behavior proceeding from an altruistic intuition such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” will lead toward transcendent experience.

E. There are good scientific reasons to think that the seeds of moral intuitions (including any that support objectively-correct principles) are inborn and include some that support altruistic moral principles. And we have already seen that behavior proceeding from an altruistic intuition such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” will lead toward transcendent experience, the highest good.

The most obvious explanation for any universally-inborn moral intuitions of any kind would be Neo-Darwinian: that such intuitions are, or at one time were, of value in humans’ survival, or more specifically are or were of value in certain individuals’ propagating their genes (propagating all their genes, not only those behind all kinds of intuitions). Evolutionary success alone might not mean the success of any persons other than one’s own descendants, but in fact as we have seen, our inborn intuitions often identify principles that are altruistic in nature. Yet Bloom only seems to argue for altruistic principles or any principles that might promote the mere survival of others, and does not discuss the possibility of principles aimed at what I have called “the highest good possible for humans”, transcendent experience. I think our inborn moral intuitions of all kinds are indeed of value in humans’ survival, and it seems that some of them support principles that are altruistic in nature, but are there any intuitions that are also of value in the maximization of transcendent experience? Inborn intuitions programmed in us by some Neo-Darwinist process might largely answer the questions “how can we identify in advance principles that will lead us to live longer, more fertile lives” and “how did those intuitions originate,” but what about the questions “how can we identify in advance principles that will lead us to transcendent experience” and “how did those intuitions originate?”

We have seen how self-sacrifice teaches us new things about our minds that lead toward transcendent experience. And it’s reasonable to think transcendent experience, even if humans first only stumbled across it, is evolutionarily adaptive (in terms of natural selection operating at the group level, which we will get to), primarily because it serves as a reward for altruistic behavior, whose value Darwin defended (and perhaps secondarily because of the presence of beatific individuals in the society, offering moral guidance oriented toward altruism).

Researcher Bloom opens his book with:

a writer living in Dallas heard that an acquaintance of hers was suffering from kidney disease. . . . Virginia Postrel . . . flew to Washington, D.C., and had her right kidney transplanted into Sally’s body. . . Virginia and Sally were not even close friends. . . . while I admit that I retain both of my kidneys, I have sacrificed to help others and taken risks for causes that I felt were right. In all of these regards, I am perfectly typical.⁵ [I quote this for the sake of the examples it provides of altruistic moral intuitions that we do have, not necessarily of those we should have.]

But were those moral intuitions inborn? In Bloom’s experiments, three-month-old babies, for instance (too young, he suggests, to have learned the attitudes from their parents), show a preference for a cartoon character who is serviceful (and automatically to an extent sacrificing) over one who hinders.⁶ For myself, I have had such intuitions for as long as I can remember, coming out of my unconscious in some way I could not understand – even if I have often not been good at listening to them. There is a very good basis for believing that many or all of us are born already with the seeds, for instance, of “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself.”

So we are likely indeed to have intuitions and genes for self-sacrifice that will lead us to seek and eventually find transcendent experience, which is the highest good, the grounding for an objectively-correct moral principle.

I am trying to show not only that the intuition supporting “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” would be a correct moral intuition if anyone had it, but that it is a correct moral intuition that is actually to be found within each of us, or at least most of us. (I think it is to be found in seed form within everyone who has the altruistic intuitions that Bloom speaks of). Above I have spoken of the “seeds” of correct moral intuitions, and Bloom in his book says that his experiments “suggest that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior” (italics added). Below we will refer to Jonathan Haidt; Haidt speaks of “moral foundations”, and, quoting Gary Marcus (The Birth of the Mind), uses also the term “first draft”. There is very good reason to believe that some general moral senses – generalized moral intuitions – are inborn in us. But “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” is more specific as a moral principle. I have said “ultimately, correct moral principles . . . can be known only through correct moral intuitions,” and though there may be very good reason to believe that some generalized moral intuitions are inborn in us, I have not yet shown that there is good reason to believe in the specific moral intuition supporting that principle. Yet I think there is good reason to believe in it.

In fact, I am not arguing that that specific moral intuition is within each of us fully formed from the start, but I think that it is present as a seed that is sure to sprout given the inborn foundation, the general intuition, supporting altruism, and given that a person will eventually understand that “You ought to serve others . . .” will lead toward transcendent experience for many in society.

Haidt quotes Marcus as saying, “Nature provides a ‘first draft’, which experience then revises.” Since people’s experience is different, their later drafts are different. But I think that given that common general foundation, then if any two persons were both free from what I will below call “psychological weaknesses” and had the same information about the world, they would both find within themselves that specific intuition. So everyone would be able to find it if they were able to go deep enough in themselves, and had enough information about the world. (See below under ii. where I discuss the role of psychological weaknesses, and also see ii-D. where I say “their moral intuitions will increasingly converge.”)

F. So since scientific research indicates that inborn in us are seeds of correct intuitions – correct intuitions identify in the best way, better than reasoning, moral principles that lead one to the highest good – and since such seeds will sprout when we free ourselves from psychological weaknesses, we have established that there are in fact such principles. Such principles are objectively-correct moral principles. Objectively-correct moral principles do in fact exist.

A few objections or questions might arise.

First, if some of our inborn intuitions are as I have described, then they will indeed “identify in advance” principles that will lead us to transcendent experience. But why, in the first place, would our evolutionarily-constructed inborn moral intuitions tell us to adopt behaviors (such as “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself”) that would seem actually to jeopardize our survival? Such behaviors on the part of individuals might indeed jeopardize the survival of those individuals, but natural selection might more importantly be operating here at the group level. Yaw (Mike) Amanpene has written:⁷

Darwin’s reasoning for the existence of altruistic behaviour could be conceptualised as follows. Given two groups, one comprised of selfish individuals and the other consisting of altruists, the latter would prosper better than the former – that is, they would be favoured by natural selection operating at the group level. This view is intellectually captured by Darwin (1981, 166) as follows:

“There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves, would be victorious over other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”

Reminder: “selected” means that tribes which accidental mutation had endowed with few if any such people were more likely to die off (if they survived, it was because they had other good genes).

G. But the question will arise why our evolutionarily-constructed inborn moral intuitions would tell us to adopt behaviors that would seem actually to jeopardize our survival. The idea of natural selection operating at the group level answers this question.

Another question: I have said “it’s reasonable to think transcendent experience . . . is evolutionarily adaptive” (helping to establish that moral intuitions leading to it are inborn). As mentioned earlier, most people who have attained transcendent experience will go on to help others attain it. And they will do so partly by teaching them altruistic moral principles that Darwin considered adaptive. But even if transcendent experience in a sufficient number of members of a group were not evolutionarily adaptive, our inborn intuitions might support moral principles that would be conducive to transcendent experience, due to an evolutionary mistake (not the same as the possible evolutionary accident I have also referred to): One might expect prima facie from basic natural-selection theory that an evolutionarily-programmed moral intuition goading one toward choices to act “for the common good” would goad one to act for the common good defined as the common survival, and the general fitness of people’s reproductive systems. But it seems clear that in terms of one’s individual survival and health, natural selection has provided us a steering mechanism designed for the attainment of those goals, and that steering mechanism is happiness. Overall it seems to be true that what tastes good will also be healthful for us (though there may be some serious pitfalls in relying on this). One eats a bunch of grapes thinking not “I must do this in order to survive,” but thinking rather “I’m sure getting a lot of fun from the taste of these grapes.” In short, the steering mechanism consists in assigning happiness as a “placeholder” for survival, a placeholder for “evolutionarily successful”.

So it seems quite likely that our innate moral intuitions goading us toward choices to act for the common good would interpret the maximum happiness, overall, of the tribe as the common good of the tribe – maybe even in situations where it did not represent the common survival good of the tribe. And “those who have experienced the deep peace of meditation usually consider transcendent experience (or some final culmination thereof) to be the highest good possible for humans,” the most positive human experience, the greatest happiness. So our innate moral intuitions would interpret the maximum transcendent experience of the tribe as the common good of the tribe.

H. Even if transcendent experience in a sufficient number of members of a group were not evolutionarily adaptive, our inborn intuitions might support moral principles that would be conducive to transcendent experience, due to happiness functioning as a “placeholder” for survival.

A third question: We may have shown that some moral intuitions lead toward the highest good for humans, but is that enough to show that such moral intuitions are necessarily philosophically correct? I claimed to have shown that they are through the reasoning “there can be broad agreement that if a moral principle leads to the highest good overall for living beings, that moral principle is indeed an objectively-correct moral principle, and there is such a thing as objective moral truth, and I added “Further defense of this ‘broad agreement’ idea later.” I will now first present that defense, which is also of a reasoned kind, and then get back to the topic of the limitations of reasoning.

There is and can be no scientific proof that happiness is morally better than misery. Though everyone may value their own happiness, at least, over their own misery, values are not a subject of science. So on what would a philosophical claim that happiness is morally better than misery rest? What we can say is that there is no one who subscribes to a philosophical school of skepticism or nihilism who manages to really live their beliefs. A nihilist is forced by his own beliefs to say there is nothing really good about being a nihilist, but he obviously thinks that it is good. No one can prove that a society abounding in transcendent experiences is morally better than a society of unending misery, but if we have to assume anything, we can assume that. So however our intuitions came to assert that maximizing happiness is good, which may have been due to the evolutionary “placeholder” mistake that I have posited, I think we should consider those intuitions correct.

Should the idea that intuitions promoting the maximization of transcendent experiences in society are correct intuitions be categorized as utilitarianism? I don’t think so. Utilitarianism may trip up because happiness of a kind, even a happiness widespread in society, can come about in very dubious ways, but transcendent experience is a kind of happiness that does not depend on any thing or event that is of the external world, and hence could not be attained by seeking anything in the external world

So if our unconsciouses, as constructed by evolution, consider happiness a good value and generate moral intuitions accordingly that support moral principles that lead to happiness and transcendent experience, I think it would be a cerebral academic exercise to debate with them. There is indeed an objective morality, and the compass as to that morality that we are all born with – our moral intuitions, a sense of right and wrong, a conscience – is correct.

I. Our early proposition “If a moral principle leads to the highest good overall for living beings, that moral principle is indeed an objectively-correct moral principle, and there is such a thing as objective moral truth,” until now supported only by the “broad agreement” idea, stands up to further philosophical examination.

And now let’s get back to the topic of the limitations of such philosophical examination, of reasoning, in answering the question whether I have adequately shown through reasoning that moral intuitions are necessarily philosophically correct if they lead toward the highest good for humans. I think that everyone is, most fundamentally, correct to follow their intuitions to seek happiness, but a kind of happiness can result for different people in very diverse ways. So though we have found there to be an objective morality, there is rampant imperfection in the actual expression of it when it comes to the many specific moral decisions we have to make, and there are dramatic disagreements among people about some principles that I would call objectively-correct. How to explain this? Let’s think about three factors.

i. We are still largely animals. Evolution hasn’t overcome the animal tendency toward selfishness. We have only begun to develop self-sacrifice.
ii. I have been referring to correct moral intuitions, our moral compass. But humans are certainly not endowed with correct moral intuitions only – many humans have incorrect ones. To get at our real compass for moral principles leading to transcendent experience, or even just to get at our most correct intuitions for the success of the species, we may have to peel away layers of ego protection in the forms of various psychological weaknesses – tribalism, projection, neurotic emotional needs, denial – in order for our consciences to emerge. Only those who are free from such weaknesses can have the really high level of moral sensitivity inherent in a really healthy mind, that we need to apply to any situation in life that may arise . (Ideally, our moral intuitions should operate and guide our decisions unique-situation-by-unique-situation.) We realize, not surprisingly, that peeling away those layers and moving toward transcendent experience go hand in hand. And in fact it will be impossible to fully abandon those mental mechanisms, which keep our cherished egos intact, until we start to taste the transcendent experiences that are the rewards for that abandonment – so that our own physical security, worldly pleasures, and self-congratulation come to seem cheap by comparison.

But this is the tough part. It may be that transcendent experiences can be explained entirely by certain patterns of synaptic firing in the physical matter of our brains, but nonetheless, such experiences are notoriously hard to come by because they require an escape from ego, an escape most reliably brought on by “a lifetime’s death in love, ardor and selflessness and self-surrender.” Meditation is the first part of the solution, but psychotherapy is often a more direct way than meditation to correct the downstream effects of childhood traumas, which both damage us psychologically and distort our perceptions of practically everything – right and wrong being not least among those things.

The developmental framework I have used here is the framework used by depth therapy, that is, a kind of psychodynamic therapy that tries to help the person reconnect with and thus get substantially free from childhood traumas. But though I have described this issue using this framework, I will not weigh in here on whether some form of depth therapy, or some other psychodynamic strategy, or some directive strategy, might work best for most individuals.

We can summarize as follows a path to find within ourselves, and to live out, the most correct moral intuitions:

ii-A. Correct moral principles are the principles supported by correct moral intuitions.
ii-B. The most correct moral intuitions are the moral intuitions of the most morally-developed people. Only a moral person can deeply understand morality.
ii-C. Anyone can develop morally through a determination to do so and a willingness to change, and constant thinking and discussion about morality, and a selfless lifestyle, and meditation, and psychotherapy. If there are no confounding factors, one’s moral development will proceed hand in hand with progress toward the deepest transcendent experiences.
ii-D. Morally-developed people will tend to recognize each other, and their moral intuitions will increasingly converge as they develop.
ii-E. Morally-developed people will not be reliably able to convince others through any rational process. The only way to the surest kind of knowledge of moral truth is as in ii-C above. Knowledge of moral truth does not require philosophical dexterity so much as it requires character.

My proposal has some strong similarities with virtue ethics, but also some dissimilarities. I won’t elaborate on this here.

iii. Evolution hasn’t always brought about specific, well-defined moral intuitions, therefore much depends on upbringing. According to moral psychology researcher Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, we are all born in innate agreement with six moral judgments which he calls, because of their lack of specificity, “moral foundations”. Two examples are, in my words, “Care is good and harm is bad,” and “Fairness is good and cheating is bad.” (Note that those two principles may sometimes work against each other.) So at bottom, the foundations, as I understand them, are a source of agreement of opinion among people, rather than a source of disagreement. But then what happens, Haidt says (as at 7:51 of this TED talk⁸), is that the first, inborn – and unifying, not dividing – “draft” of any child’s moral foundations gets “revised” by parental and community influences that differ from other parental and community influences into a new “draft” that will differ from those of other people – resulting in disagreement, division, and discord.

J. Having looked at the fact “there are dramatic disagreements among people about some principles that I would call objective” and shown that it does not undermine our argument, we can take stock as follows –

Questions a.-c. have now been answered (how to identify objectively-correct moral principles, how to explain the principles’ efficacy, and how do the moral intuitions supporting them originate), and we are ready to get back to our original conditional proposition (“if a moral principle leads a person to the highest good possible . . . that moral principle can reasonably be defined as an objectively-correct moral principle . . .”) and conclude that there are indeed moral principles that lead to the highest good overall for living beings, and that therefore those moral principles are objectively-correct moral principles, and that there is such a thing as objective moral truth:

If I am correct that attainment of transcendent experience is the highest good; and correct that a moral principle that leads to that attainment by many in society is an objectively-correct moral principle; and correct that “You ought to serve others at the cost of X degree of hardship for yourself” leads to that attainment; then that principle is an objectively-correct moral principle – according to reasoning – and by definition an intuition supporting that principle would be an objectively-correct moral intuition, also according to reasoning. If I am correct about the foregoing and correct that an objectively-correct moral principle is not fully established by reasoning, but only if it is supported by a correct moral intuition; and correct that scientific research shows that the seeds of beliefs supporting principles similar to “You ought to serve others . . .” are inborn in us; and correct that a seed that is inborn in us will “sprout” into the specific intuition once we have enough information about the world and free ourselves from psychological weaknesses; and correct that the correctness of an intuition is established, to the extent reasoning can establish it, if we have successfully established the correctness of the principle that it supports (and if we have in fact established, in the previous sentence, such correctness for the principle “You ought to serve others . . .”); then the “You ought to serve others . . .” intuition is an objectively-correct moral intuition that exists not only in theory, but in reality. But if I am correct that the correctness of a moral intuition cannot be fully established through reasoning nor through intuition about the intuition, then it cannot ultimately be established in any cognitive way. We can, however seek to eliminate, through meditation, and a selfless lifestyle, and a willingness to change, and sometimes psychotherapy, all the mental weaknesses that would cloud our intuitions, and thus find unclouded intuitions. It stands to reason that they will be correct intuitions. If according to this reasoning, added to the reasoning in 1. above, the moral principle “You ought to serve others . . .” is correct, then the intuition supporting it must also be correct.

I think that the moral intuitions of those who make the effort to acquire enough information about the world and to free themselves from psychological weaknesses will increasingly converge, and that such people will recognize each other, regardless of their ability to convince others about the correctness of their intuitions.

A thought that is related but not necessary in order to arrive at the above conclusion:

“One model that would be plausible for the atheist or agnostic would be the idea that meditation is made possible by an accident in the shaping of the brain by evolution.” The idea would be that evolution favored the survival and success of humans who had a strong sense of self. Such a sense, though the self is illusory in terms of corresponding to any actual unitary brain function, would have an obvious survival value; and yet mystics have long understood that that sense of self is simultaneously the source of all our suffering. The theory would be that evolution accidentally left a door through which a human being, by directing his attention in a certain way, can escape from that sense of self for more or less prolonged periods – or maybe natural selection favored those in whom that door had been left open? It is undeniable that we can point our attention in ways that cause us to lose our identification with our mental objects, especially our sense of self.

d. What do right and wrong actually consist of – what are they metaphysically or ontologically?

I wrote above, “by following the principles we learn about the further peace that comes from forgetting to worry about ourselves.” I think it’s an empirical fact that selfishness is both the root of all wrong, and the root of all mental confinement and impoverishment – two aspects of the same thing.

I would argue that all human actions fall within a binary framework: some actions help us escape from the sense of self, some increase the sense of self. We all continually long for happiness. We all have a sense that there is a perfect and enduring and fulfilling happiness that is just out of reach, that just eludes our grasp. When our inborn moral intuitions or some other factor cause us to experiment with self-sacrificing actions (as discussed under b. above), we learn that such actions nudge us toward the attainment of that happiness. This creates in us a desire to escape from the sense of self, while at the same time most of the instincts from our animal pasts tell us to look out for number one, thus increasing the sense of self. I think that that binary is a fundamental dynamic of our minds. So there is in us this constant tension or tug-of-war. And within that binary, our moral intuitions, our moral compass, as discussed under b. above, tells us that the selfless actions are also morally right actions. Escaping from the self correlates with good, moral actions. Falling within a tighter grip of the self correlates with selfish actions. Selfish actions are at best morally neutral actions that strengthen the ego and sustain our suffering, and at worst, when they are harmful to others or confining or degenerating to ourselves, are bad, immoral actions. Thus actions which help us escape from our egos are right actions, and those actions which strengthen our egos AND also harm others (or confine/degenerate oneself) are wrong actions.

The instincts that tell us to look out for number one, and the motivations for self-sacrificing actions, are both forms of qualia proceeding from our unconsciouses and presumably underlain by certain neural mechanisms, certain patterns of synaptic firing. Those neural mechanisms have not yet been identified, but they are in principle identifiable and measurable.

So right, I think, is a multiplicity of natural phenomena – all those phenomena that consist of mental objects, objects that 1) are forms of qualia underlain by certain neural mechanisms that are in principle identifiable and measurable; 2) are caused by the force of selflessness, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms, operating within human minds; 3) can be characterized as psychically liberating and enriching, and 4) can be recognized by one’s own conscience, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms, or by the consciences of others (to some extent) – or (as an abstract noun) the concept of all that.

The idea that there is such a thing as objective moral truth is a view of moral realism, and the idea that right and wrong are natural phenomena is a view of moral naturalism.

And wrong, I think, is a multiplicity of natural phenomena – all those phenomena that consist of mental objects, objects that 1) are forms of qualia underlain by certain neural mechanisms that are in principle identifiable and measurable; 2) are caused by the force of selfishness, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms, operating within human minds; 3) can be characterized as psychically confining and impoverishing, and 4) can be recognized by one’s own conscience, also underlain by certain neural mechanisms or by the consciences of others (to some extent) – or (as an abstract noun) the concept of all that.

Footnotes

[1] http://interfaithradio.org/Story_Details/Sam_Harris__The_Full_Interview 01:06: “Spirituality really relates to the far end, the far positive end, of the continuum of human experience, so the deepest states of well-being, personally or collectively, that we can experience. I think that the project of finding out what those are and how to access them can be called spirituality. So we’re talking about experiences like self-transcendence, unconditional love, etc. Bliss, rapture . . .”

[2] Sam Harris, Waking Up, first chapter.

[3] Science 21 March 2008: Vol. 319 no. 5870 pp. 1687-1688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150952. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5870/1687

[4] https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-roots-of-good-and-evil

[5] Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (Broadway Books, 2013), p. 1.

[6] Ibid., p. 26.

[7] Yaw (Mike) Amanpene, “Is Developmental Systems Theory a Better Way of Seeing Evolution Than the Selfish Gene View?”, https://www.academia.edu/40858025/Is_Developmental_Systems_Theory_a_better_way_of_seeing_evolution_than_the_selfish_gene_view/

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc&list=PLFeEchalQAKqi_TOmk_IS6_IuN8SWVAQm

Pro-Life: Expressing the Highest Ideals of the Left

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Facilitator

Courtesy of Life Matters Journal. The first installment of this essay was first published, with illustrations, in Life Matters Journal Volume 5 Issue 8 — October 2017.

Thanks to Val for a lot of research, and for the good feedback on the writing.

1. What Happened to Liberals’ Hearts?

“How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism?,” Frederica Mathewes-Green asked in 2016. Just a little later that year, pro-choice advocate Camille Paglia wrote, “Progressives need to do some soul-searching. . . . A liberal credo that is variously anti-war, anti-fur, vegan, and committed to environmental protection of endangered species . . . should not be so stridently withholding its imagination and compassion from the unborn.” Conservatives have sometimes derided the left as “bleeding-heart liberals,” but what happened to liberals’ hearts regarding the unborn?

Explaining the shifting positions of liberals on abortion seems to be a tale of oppression, altruism, and – in the case of many liberal leaders – opportunism.

The oppression I refer to is the horrific oppression of women for millennia, which naturally led to a backlash that was overdue and highly justifiable for the most part, but that in at least one important way—attitudes toward abortion—went out of control. Altruism, or compassion, is a character trait that is stronger in some people than in others; and even between people of equal compassion, some have more tendency than others to try to translate that compassion into governmental responsibility. That tendency leads people to gravitate toward liberal politics. Altruism can be directed both toward pregnant women and their unborn children, but liberals tend to direct it disproportionately toward pregnant women for reasons I will explain below. And opportunism? The opportunism of some pro-choice politicians and other leaders is related primarily to the out-of-control aspect of the backlash and secondarily to money.

Jon Haidt, who researches in moral psychology, likes to list six possible dichotomies that various thinkers have argued about in trying to ground a secular morality. He says that liberals try to ground right and wrong overwhelmingly on the foundation of care/harm, whereas conservatives appeal also to the foundation of liberty/oppression and four other foundations. Whether or not liberals are naturally endowed with any more compassion than conservatives, I think they are much more inclined to try to translate their compassion into governmental responsibility.

In the history of liberal politics, the forces of oppression, altruism, and opportunism played themselves out against the backdrop of what I see as the main psychological source of the divide between pro-lifers and pro-choicers. That sharp divide seems to stem mainly from differing perceptions of the unborn. Are the unborn full-fledged members of our human family, or are they something much less significant? A greater liberal emphasis on caring for the underdog would seem clearly to lead to a pro-life position if liberals see the unborn as full-fledged members of our human family. If, however, they see them as something much less, then understandably their caring would focus instead on pregnant women, they would see no need to pay any regard to the unborn, and they would become pro-choice. I personally am strongly pro-life, but if I were to perceive the unborn as insignificant, I would find it abhorrent to try to restrict what a woman can do with her body.

“The sharp divide seems to stem mainly from differing perceptions of the unborn” is my own conclusion based on countless discussions about abortion with a range of people. And following from that conclusion, I naturally think that in general, the two-thirds (or so) of rank-and-file Democrats who identify as pro-choice must think of the unborn as something fairly insignificant.

When I say that the sharp divide “seems to stem mainly from differing perceptions of the unborn,” some may ask, what about bodily-rights arguments, which concede for the sake of argument that the unborn is indeed fully human, yet claim a right to kill it nonetheless? But I think that the understanding that the preborn is a full-fledged member of our human family is, in fact, virtually sufficient to entail a pro-life position. Viewing the ranks of pro-choice apologists, I get the impression almost always that those who concede for the sake of argument that the unborn is truly a human being, yet claim a right to kill, make that concession only for the sake of argument. Very few of them – perhaps only Camille Paglia, mentioned above, and Naomi Wolf – have made that concession in their hearts. I think that almost anyone who really sees the unborn as our little sisters and brothers, will quickly dig a little deeper and discover the weaknesses in bodily-rights arguments.

Charles Camosy, relying significantly on the writings of Kristen Day, president of Democrats for Life of America, relates an historical account[1] that I would summarize as follows:

As of the 1968 general elections, neither major party could be called pro-life or pro-choice. Events at the 1968 Democratic Convention led to activist groups of different kinds, in the aftermath of that convention, gaining more control than they had had before over party policies; and pro-choice activists succeeded in initiating their party’s tilt toward the pro-choice position.

This created an irresistible opportunity for the Republican Party to appeal to pro-lifers (just as if the Republican Party had been the first to tilt either way, it would have created an irresistible opportunity for the Democratic Party to appeal to the voters opposite to the tilt). And things have continued to polarize ever since. For his 1972 re-election, Republican President Richard Nixon used pro-life sentiment to successfully begin attracting Catholics away from the Democratic Party.

“In 1976,” according to Daniel K. Williams, author of Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade, “the pro-life movement was still overwhelmingly Catholic and mostly politically liberal . . . but by 1980, there was a new group of pro-life activists: evangelical Protestants [overwhelmingly Republican].” But as we will see, the biggest spike in liberal conversions from pro-life to pro-choice – which is our focus in pondering what happened to liberals’ hearts – seems already to have occurred in the 1968-1972 period.

Ideologically, the pro-choice movement might have found more affinity with the Republican Party than with the Democratic. A key factor, possibly the key factor, in the way things fell out seems to have been that the pro-choice activists, as activists with a new party policy to propose, simply found the Democratic power structure easier to break into. I won’t insist on this view, but it’s consistent with the contributions of Democrats to the pro-life movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which indicate that as of 1972 the Democratic Party had not long been pro-choice in ideological terms.

In fact the pro-life movement that opposed the late-1960s calls for abortion rights (calls that foreshadowed Roe v. Wade) was led importantly by stalwarts of the civil-rights movement and of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and by liberal politicians. Jesse Jackson was both a civil-rights leader and a politician, and was at first vehemently pro-life. The priests Daniel Berrigan and John Neuhaus were co-founders of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam; both were pro-life, and Neuhaus was the keynote speaker at the first pro-life rally to be held on the National Mall. Edward Kennedy wrote an open letter in 1971 opposing abortion on demand. Williams finds even more significant the fact that the pro-life movement used the same ideological framework and language of human rights as those earlier movements.

As Democratic Party policies shifted in favor of abortion rights, liberal politicians shifted with them. Nat Hentoff wrote of Jesse Jackson: “But as Jesse Jackson decided to run for president in 1984, his fiery pro-life rhetoric suddenly subsided.” Hentoff didn’t expressly accuse Jackson of hypocrisy, but he concluded his article as follows:

I then asked Jackson about another form of execution. I told him that in speeches I often quote what he wrote as a pro-lifer. He looked uncomfortable. I asked him if he still believed what he said then. “I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. He hasn’t yet.

The opinion of Nat Hentoff, alone, is not enough to convince me that any individual politician is a hypocrite. We can’t know, simply through the images we find in the media, what is in any one person’s heart. But I can see how politics would have a special appeal for those whose ambition overrides their integrity, so I feel sure that in the cases of many politicians, if not in Jackson’s case individually, the conversions to a pro-choice position of Democratic leaders must have been opportunistic. Outside of elected office, also, any movement that offers a chance to become a hero to a large, vocal group or to cash in financially is sure to attract some who have such banal motivations (this would not exclude the pro-life side). The appeal of pro-choice feminists as a huge and motivated voting bloc or audience would have been hard to resist.

While opportunism might explain the shifting positions of Democratic leaders, however, rank-and-file members of the Democratic Party would not have felt the same compulsions of allegiance that politicians did, and it seems that many of the rank and file also must have undergone a conversion to pro-choice. The Washington Post of Aug. 25, 1972, reported that when Gallup asked whether “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician,” 59% of Democrats agreed (among Republicans agreement was at 68%), and that “support for legal abortion ha[d] increased sharply” since the previous survey five months earlier. The report did not explicitly say that Democratic (liberal) support had increased since the previous survey, and I could not find earlier surveys asking exactly the same question or giving a breakdown by party. A Gallup poll in November 1969, however, had found only 40 per cent of all Americans in favor of a law “which would permit a woman to go to a doctor and end a pregnancy at any time during the first three months.” Such a huge number of pro-choice converts must have included many who would call themselves liberal.

Let’s try to find the inner reasons why people might have been converting to pro-choice during the years 1968–1972. First, few people would have been converting due to bodily-autonomy arguments. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” was not published until 1971, and it takes time for academic thinking to trickle down and affect popular opinion. I believe that pro-choice arguments leading up to Roe v. Wade were largely arguments about women’s attaining career equality with men; about controlling population growth; about the fear that if a woman does not have access to a safe abortion she will seek out an unsafe one (the “back-alley abortion” argument); and, for seven Supreme Court justices, about a rarefied argument concerning privacy under the Constitution. Moreover, some people may have come to take the abortion-rights movement more seriously as women took over the leadership that had previously been held by men.

But few people would say that anyone should have the right to kill a full-fledged member of our human family for a job, or to control population, or so that killings of such persons can be carried out in safety, or to protect the privacy of the killer, or because of who recommends that right. Thus the above arguments would not fully explain how Mathewes-Green’s “hideous act” became a cornerstone of liberal politics. I wrote before, “if liberals . . . see [the unborn] as something much less [than full-fledged members of our human family], then understandably their caring would focus instead on pregnant women, they would see no need to pay any regard to the unborn, and they would become pro-choice.” For this reason, I think that many liberals around the 1968–1972 period must have actually found in themselves different intuitive perceptions of the unborn than they had held before.

Would that have been psychologically possible? Well, I get the impression that with people who have not thought much, in an individual capacity, about the nature of the unborn, their perceptions are extremely malleable. After all, except for a few surgeons, no one has ever seen an in utero fetus with their own eyes, and even if we saw an early fetus, that would not help us much to assess its moral value without some deep thinking. So if those who have not thought much about the topic are told repeatedly that the unborn has a soul, they will believe it has a soul. If told in secular terms that it is “a distinct, living and whole human being,” they will believe that. If told it is just tissue, they will believe that. I think that the last of those is what happened to liberals’ hearts – or perhaps not exactly to their hearts but to something in their minds closely related to their hearts.

The above arguments for abortion rights gave people incentives to find in themselves different perceptions of the unborn that led in the direction of dismissiveness. These arguments also gave incentives for the crystallization of a dismissive perception of the unborn where there had been no clear perception before. I think that psychologically such changes would in fact have been possible given two factors that were then present: first, the fact that many people were just beginning to think about the matter for the first time; and second, what seems to have been a concerted effort at dehumanization by pro-choice feminists. People’s still-formative perceptions were influenced in the direction of dismissing the unborn.

Pro-choice advocate Naomi Wolf has explained that “Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the foetus isn’t a person. . . . An account of a pre-Roe underground abortion service inadvertently sheds light on this: staffers referred to the foetus – well into the fourth month – as ‘material’ . . .”

That would be consistent with the picture that we get from Daniel Williams. Williams relates that in 1967 the National Organization for Women decided to demand women’s full control over their bodies, and that their adherents undertook to justify that control by claiming that the unborn were less than human. (I assume that they chose that course because they then had no other means of justification; Thomson-style arguments that claim to establish such a right to bodily control even if the unborn are fully human were not yet available to them.) Their adherents proceeded to develop what Wolf calls “a lexicon of dehumanization.”

I don’t think that a spike in conversions to pro-choice between 1969 and 1972 following upon an apparent intensification of the push for dehumanization in 1967 was just a coincidence.

In a 1980 article in The Progressive, “Abortion: The Left Has Betrayed the Sanctity of Life,” Mary Meehan wrote:

…it is out of character for the Left to neglect the weak and helpless.

The traditional mark of the Left has been its protection of the underdog, the weak, and the poor. The unborn child is the most helpless form of humanity, even more in need of protection than the poor tenant farmer or the mental patient… The basic instinct of the Left is to aid those who cannot aid themselves – and that instinct is absolutely sound.

As we saw earlier, liberals are, if not the voters who care most, then those who try hardest to translate their caring into governmental responsibility. So Meehan is of course right that liberals should be pro-life – if the unborn are perceived as full-fledged members of our human family. If they are perceived as something much less, the contention would not be true. But I have discussed elsewhere why I am confident that the former perception will prevail.

2. The Highest Ideals of the Left

I would call myself a member of the left, if we have to use such simple concepts. I volunteered with the Delta Ministry briefly in Mississippi in the summer of 1965. I was evicted by police from a university building in 1969 in an anti-Vietnam War protest led by Students for a Democratic Society. A few days later I marched to free Huey Newton, defense minister of the Black Panther Party (though I soon came to realize I had little knowledge of whether he was innocent of the charges). I support universal health care, as long as it is real health care and not abortion or other forms of killing. I think that eventually most industry should be owned by cooperatives or by governments.

To explain my view on abortion in relation to the ideals of the left, let me go back to that 1969 Vietnam protest, with the understanding that I don’t want to start an argument about that war. I have much humility about my understanding of history and geopolitics. I have great respect for American Vietnam veterans. All that matters here is what my perception of the war was at the time I protested it. What motivated me to join that action in 1969 and other anti-war events was a sense of outrage at what I perceived as a devastatingly violent onslaught being perpetrated by the strong against the weak, in another part of the world. Entirely innocent and entirely defenseless sisters and brothers of mine in Vietnam seemed to account for untold numbers of the slaughtered, while those who seemed to me the worst aggressors operated with complete impunity.

Abortion, if we don’t euphemize, is a devastatingly violent onslaught by the strong and relatively strong against the very weakest and most innocent of our sisters and brothers, all over the world. Legal abortion is not the moral equivalent of imperialistic aggression (if the Vietnam war really was imperialistic aggression, as I saw it then), but it is by definition slaughter of the innocent and defenseless with impunity, and the numbers of victims are on a scale that cannot be compared with the relatively modest numbers of victims in mere military wars. Abortion is one more human manifestation of might makes right, and it awakens in me much of the same sense of injustice and outrage as did Vietnam. Not only do present laws (which call for a unilateral decision) mandate might makes right, natural circumstances are also conducive to might makes right, because a woman and a doctor alone have the physical capacity to carry out the abortion. I think that if the balance of might were different and therefore state power were required to carry out the death sentence, the unborn would get a much more equitable hearing (a day in court), and therefore many outcomes would be different. The ease of abortion obviates the deeper and more soul-searching assessment of the justice of the situation that would occur if the intended target were someone who could resist. Thus those already born are flatly taking advantage of the helplessness of those not yet born.

I think that the impulse to defend the weak is one of the highest human impulses. Defense of the weak is normally undertaken without thought of personal gain and hence with minimal thought of self. It is altruistic. And as a species, we have gradually been learning that happiness for an individual involves identification with something greater than oneself. As the abstract of a 2008 psychology study said,

. . . we hypothesized that spending money on other people may have a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. Providing converging evidence for this hypothesis, we found that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater happiness both cross-sectionally (in a nationally representative survey study) and longitudinally (in a field study of windfall spending). Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves.

Atheism advocate and neuroscientist Sam Harris recommends and teaches meditation. Meditation is a technique other than altruistic conduct through which one can lose one’s sense of self. Harris says that through meditative exercises, “[Certain] people have lost their feeling of self, to a great degree, and with that loss [have] come incredibly positive experiences.” He suggests that there is “a connection between self-transcendence and living ethically,” because self-transcendent experiences can involve “forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. . . a phrase like ‘boundless love” does not seem overblown.”[2] (See also “Sonder: The Key to Peace?” The word “sonder” has been coined for a state of mind out of which consistent affirmation of life in all one’s actions must inevitably flow.)

The loss of the sense of self, however it is achieved, will have some of the same effect for ethical living that Harris claims for meditation.

Harris and most other scientists are confident that such mental states must have an adequate neurological explanation and do not require the religious explanations formerly ascribed to them. Whatever explanation for them may eventually be found, I think of states of transcendence, self-sacrifice and universal love as the highest good that human beings can aspire to. And I think that whatever may be the failings of liberal politics, the liberal principle of defending the weak is the one principle, not only on the left, but anywhere on the political spectrum, that is most conducive to going beyond our normal pettiness and our ordinary boundaries.

Some voices will say that while the unborn are indeed weak and defenseless, they are not human beings, or not persons, and are not deserving of our compassion. But I think those voices have been sufficiently dealt with elsewhere. However great the tragedy of the abortion issue, it is a transformative opportunity for society.

We need to be clear: The quality of a civilization can be measured by the respect it has for its weakest members. (Jerome Lejeune, “the father of modern genetics”)

[1] Charles C. Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), hardcover, pp. 22-24.

[2] Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 14.

You may leave a reply, if you wish, without giving your name or email address. If you do give your email address, it will not be published. Back up your work as you type, in case of accidents.

Some future posts:

Life Panels

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes Too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World

The Psychological Morass of the Abortion Issue

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Facilitator

This essay was first published, with illustrations, in Life Matters Journal Volume 4 Issue 3 — February 2016.

morass: 2. a complicated or confused situation

Think of all the array of views related to abortion that you have ever encountered. It’s a lot, isn’t it? And now let’s try to imagine all the array of those contradictory views related to abortion as they have inhabited all the minds of all people through all of history. That array must be staggering. How could such a plethora of mutually exclusive ideas have originated? I think it is largely explained by the psychological morass on moral issues in general, and this issue in particular, that the human race somehow goes on living with. What we are up against is more about psychology than it is about dispassionate philosophy. Recognizing and trying to escape this psychological morass can allow us to find the truth about the morality of abortion.

In making this assertion, I am assuming that there are indeed moral truths to be found about abortion and other moral questions. Certain answers to the question of whether abortion is right or wrong, just or unjust, can be identified as truer or better than others. Further, I would argue that the answers to moral questions—the moral truths—must ultimately be found through our intuition rather than through intricate arguments or philosophies (although these are certainly a useful part of the process).

Psychology professor Paul Bloom, author of the recent Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, has offered some justification for an intuitive basis of morality. In an interview, he commented that while some moral values “are the product of culture and society” and “not in the genes,” “there also exist hardwired moral universals – moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality . . . that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.”[i] With this kind of psychological understanding as a basis, I will make one further assumption to start with: that not only are there indeed moral truths to be found, but that identical truths are to be found deep within all of us. (I discussed this in “Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate.”[ii]) In a similar vein, the journalist Christopher Hitchens described his understanding of human moral intuition in his work God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

Like murder and theft, this [incest] is usually found to be abhorrent to humans without any further explanation. . . . [the Golden Rule is] a sober and rational precept, which one can teach to any child with its innate sense of fairness . . . . [The Rule] is gradually learned, as part of the painfully slow evolution of the species, and once grasped is never forgotten. Ordinary conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it. . . . [C]onscience is innate. . . . Everybody but the psychopath has this feeling to a greater or lesser extent. . . .[iii]

Despite this conscience, or intuitive moral sense, that humans possess, an array of psychological factors obstruct our intuitive grasp of moral truths. This is a vast topic, but in this article I have selected twelve psychological factors that might work against our finding moral truth on any issue, as well as three factors that are specific to the abortion issue. I think of this article as sketching the broad outlines of how psychological factors interfere with moral intuition. My aim is to provide a basic framework to be filled out by further research.

The psychological factors are as follows:

1. The mental longing for simplicity. No elaboration is needed here. (I can keep it simple!)

2. Upbringing. In the long-standing nature-nurture debate, I would take the following position: we are born with intuitions of certain moral truths already within us in latent form, but various actions or inactions by parents and teachers can undermine the development of those moral intuitions, or create an overlay of false values, or both. Even a casual look is enough to show us the importance, in the development of our attitudes, of background and upbringing.

3. Tribalism. Even someone who switches, for example, from pro-choice to pro-life or vice-versa may immediately start demonizing the side they had just been on.

4. Projection. We expect others to view some things and value some things just as we do.

5. Neurotic emotional needs. Such needs can affect one’s moral and political views in a number of ways. One way – certainly not the only way – is when the needs result in commitments, sometimes fanatic commitments, to groups or ideologies.

6. Denial. We see only what we want to see. Or sometimes we see something, but compartmentalize it away from the part of our mind that would reject it.

7. Lack of introspection. If it is true that intuitions of moral truths exist within us and that they began to form in us before we were capable of rational analysis, then it should be clear that to find them we must look within and that this search within will not be a process of thinking up new ideas, but of rummaging through what is already there. We may need to make such efforts frequently, and with patience, over a period of time.

8. An excessive faith in the efficacy of logical argumentation to resolve moral issues. This faith seems to be borne out of a psychological need for an orderly understanding of our environment, perhaps borne in turn out of an illusion that such conceptual order gives us some kind of control over our environment.

(This is certainly not to say that there is no place in moral investigations for logic. I think that all the thought experiments and probing for inconsistency and arguments that go on are indispensable, but they are indispensable because they nudge us toward more accurate moral intuitions, which are not essentially based on logic.[iv])

9. The manufacture of perceptions. As just one example, if you hear “My body, my choice” enough times, and are not presented with alternative views, after a while you will come to really believe that there is only one body involved in an abortion.

10. Doctrinal baggage that comes along with the valuable elements of a religion. Atheism advocate Sam Harris has described a transcendent experience that he once underwent sitting by the Sea of Galilee. He writes:

If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms. . . . If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman. . . . If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the “dharmakaya of emptiness.” [v]

The meditative and devotional techniques of various religions can bring about in us these transcendent states, arguably the most wonderful states we have ever experienced. Although Harris and others strive for totally non-religious forms of meditation, it must be admitted that religions are, today, still ahead of conventional science in the knowledge of such techniques. As a result, when someone experiments with such “religious” practices and discovers that they constitute a certain specialized wisdom that science seems to be lacking and that most directly leads to happiness, they are likely not only to adopt that valuable meditative practice, but also to buy the whole religious package, including whatever that religion teaches about astronomy and evolution—and the ensoulment of a newly-conceived baby. If the religion teaches that ensoulment does not take place for the first three months, for example, and that abortion before that point is permissible, then even if that teaching happens not to be correct, they will believe it.

This psychological factor is different from factor 5 above, in that I think it can occur even in a psychologically very healthy person.

11. Limited human intelligence.

12. Unlimited human ego. A big percentage of discussions about moral issues comes down to a garden-variety contest of egos. Discussions become more about winning, belittling, and mocking than about trying to understand clearly. People write on any topic partly because they want attention. It has been said, “More people write poetry than read it.” Similarly, it may be that more people talk than listen.

Most of the 12 factors listed above can contribute to different forms of cognitive dissonance: we sense a contradiction or incompatibility between the beliefs psychological factors move us toward and the beliefs our moral intuitions move us toward. We cope with cognitive dissonance by adopting ideas that violate our natural intuitions, and then shoring those ideas up with techniques such as confirmation bias.

Among the psychological factors that work against intuitively finding the moral truths within, there are also some differences of perception that do not come into play in relation to most moral issues, but do come into play in relation to the abortion issue:

13. Incorrect intuitions about the unborn. Some people see the unborn, especially the early unborn, as a snapshot, and some see it as part of a process. If a small embryo were to remain just as it is, frozen in time (a snapshot) we would have to say quite fairly that its life would not have much value.

Both ways of looking at the unborn are scientifically useful for different purposes. It is not science, but only pre-logical intuition, that identifies the unborn as an organism with little moral value or an organism with great moral value. If there are indeed moral truths to be found, however, one of these two intuitions must be less correct than the other.

14. Incorrect intuitions about the importance of bodily rights. One important source of variations in intuitions about the importance of bodily rights is different cultural senses of the relative weights to be given to the individual and to the collective. Almost the greatest relinquishing of bodily right imaginable is when a person submits to being conscripted into an army, where he or she will risk all his body organs being blown to bits. Different cultures vary greatly in their acceptance of military conscription. Yet if there are indeed moral truths to be found, one particular moral truth about bodily rights must be correct—not all of the diverse intuitions about bodily rights can reflect that truth. (I have written elsewhere about bodily rights.[vi])

15. Incorrect intuitions about what’s wrong with killing. Among all who get involved in discussions about moral issues, killing and violence seem to have, in general, a bad name. One would think that that would give us some common ground. But it turns out that although killing is universally disreputable, it’s disreputable in a nebulous way. We disagree on exactly what is wrong with killing.

My moral intuition is that what is most wrong with killing is that it deprives an organism of its future life. But in discussions about abortion, I have often encountered expressions such as this one: “I can’t imagine caring one way or the other being aborted if I didn’t possess a fully functional nervous system.” Here any harm to be done by killing seems to depend on the organism’s caring, at the time of the killing, about its future life (this view does not, after all, contest the fact that a currently unconscious embryo will have a fully functional nervous system soon and will eventually care about its future life). This view seems to exclude the possibility that any harm can be caused by depriving an organism of its future life, whether the organism deprived of life cares about it at this moment or not. Thus the only real harm that this view is willing to consider is the harm of frustrating a desire, on the part of the organism, to live.[vii]

This is one example of how there are different intuitions about what is wrong with killing. Yet if there are real moral truths to be found, then not all the intuitions can be correct.

By identifying 15 different psychological factors that interfere with moral intuition, I have tried to develop a kind of checklist. I think that if anyone can go through the checklist and neutralize in themselves each of the above-mentioned psychological factors, their thinking will become clear. Their minds will become cleared of endless clutter. And when other people encounter a clear mind like that, they in turn become forced to clear their own minds.

This clarification process (along with scientific progress) will decide the abortion issue. The grip of all the psychological factors enumerated above will be loosened. Arguments, thought experiments, and other philosophical approaches will play a part in breaking their grip; I think that the part that they will play will be a significant one, but not, alone, a decisive one.

Personally I expect that the truth that we will find through moral intuition will be mostly a pro-life truth. I expect that the issue will be decided to an important extent by the fuller recognition of the humanity of a previously dehumanized group. (The importance of psychological factor 13 above cannot be overestimated.) Do I expect all this due to some psychological blinders of my own? Time will tell.

[i] Sam Harris, “The Roots of Good and Evil: An Interview with Paul Bloom,” Sam Harris (blog), November 12, 2013, http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-roots-of-good-and-evil

[ii] Life Matters Journal 4 Issue 1 (June 2015): 24-29, also available at http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/moral-intuition-logic-and-the-abortion-debate/

[iii] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2008), 53, 213-214, 256.

[iv] “Moral Intuition, Logic, and the Abortion Debate” in Life Matters Journal, Volume 4 Issue 1 (June 2015): 24-29, and http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/moral-intuition-logic-and-the-abortion-debate/

[v] Sam Harris, Waking Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 81-82.

[vi] “Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument,” July 8, 2014, http://www.NoTerminationWithoutRepresentation.org/dismantling-the-bodily-rights-argument-without-using-the-responsibility-argument/

[vii] For a discussion of this issue, see Kelsey Hazzard and Acyutananda, “What Babies Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Them, Right?,” Secular ProLife (blog), January 4, 2016, http://blog.secularprolife.org/2016/01/what-babies-dont-know-cant-hurt-them.html.

Further thoughts on the above LMJ essay:

1. Psychological factor 4 above is “Neurotic emotional needs. Such needs can affect one’s felt or at least expressed moral and political views in a number of ways. One way – certainly not the only way – is when the needs result in commitments, sometimes fanatic commitments, to groups or ideologies.”

I think it would be safe to say that in the context of the abortion issue, the groups or ideologies most concerned in this way are the Catholic Church and evangelical churches on the pro-life side, and the pro-choice feminist movement on the pro-choice side. My point here is not to take issue with any Christian teachings as such, or with pro-choice feminism as such; and certainly not to say that commitment to either can stem only from neurosis. My point concerns unquestioning belief. I think that it is human nature always to question, but that those Christians who happen to be fanatic about their religion due to some psychological need, will be prone to believe that abortion is wrong without further examination, just because their religion says that that is God’s command. And I think that those pro-choice feminists who happen to be fanatic about their ideology due to some psychological need, will be prone to believe that protection of the unborn is wrong without further examination, just because their ideology teaches that it is somehow part of a system of oppression of women. (By the way, pro-life feminists have offered at least some clues as to how that belief became the majority belief within the feminist movement, which, apart from the embrace of abortion rights by its majority, must be the most inspiring revolutionary movement the world has ever seen. See Serrin Foster’s speech “The Feminist Case against Abortion.”

Again, to say that people who have neurotic emotional needs (more so than the fairly neurotic average in society) – angry people for instance – gravitate toward a particular movement does not necessarily reflect at all on the movement itself. Many of the most psychologically healthy, or even radiantly healthy, people I have met are to be found among the ranks of Catholics and evangelicals; and it’s likely that some of the finest people may be found in the ranks of pro-choice feminists also. The position of the latter on abortion rights may be based not on moral blindness, but simply on blindness about the reality of the unborn. And regarding Catholics and evangelicals, I am awed by what they have done in holding the line against abortion, as much as it could be held, for all these years.

2. Above I said, “I will make one further assumption to start with: that not only are there indeed moral truths to be found, but that identical truths are to be found deep within all of us.”

Slavery in the US was never proved to be morally wrong. If after all the years of harsh exploitation of the slaves and bitter strife among the whites, a formal paper in some philosophy journal had finally convinced everybody that slavery was wrong, that document and its philosophical proof would now be more famous than the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Thirteenth Amendment. But there was no such paper; rather, undoubtedly there was a multiplicity of contradictory papers, all of which together played only a modest role in the process. The collective moral sense simply evolved. Uncle Tom’s Cabin probably played a bigger role than any formal proof.

The politics – not least war, that “continuation of politics by other means” – and economics involved in the end of slavery were very complex. But moral evolution must have played its part. The chains of people’s psychological complexes faded over time so that the chains of slavery could more readily be broken. People who were incorrigible vessels of outmoded thinking died off.

And I said above:

“A similar process (along with scientific progress) will decide the abortion issue. The grip of all the psychological foibles enumerated above will be loosened. Logical syllogisms, thought experiments, and other philosophical approaches, within or without formal papers, will play a part in breaking their grip; I think that the part that they will play will be a significant one, but not, alone, a decisive one.

“Personally I expect that the truth that we will find will be mostly a pro-life truth. I expect that, as in the case of slavery, the issue will be decided to an important extent by the fuller recognition of the humanity of a previously-dehumanized group. (The importance of 13 above cannot be overestimated.) . . .”

Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Facilitator

Clinton Wilcox of Life Training Institute was kind enough to read the semi-final draft of this post and provide a brief but insightful critique. This does not mean that he necessarily endorses any of the final contents. However, I wish to take this opportunity to thank him.

The strongest argument for abortion rights is usually considered to be the bodily-rights argument. Perhaps the most effective variation of it that I have seen appeared in a (negative) comment under Kristine Kruszelnicki’s March 11, 2014 guest post on the Friendly Atheist blog:

They [both mother and unborn child] are entitled to their own bodily rights. So exactly how does a fetus have the right to co-opt another person’s body without consent?

Let’s say for example medical science has progressed to the point of being able to transplant a fetus into another human being. In an accident a pregnant woman is injured to the point of immanent [sic] death, does that fetus have the *right* to be implanted into the next viable candidate without consent?

The commenter was arguing, in other words, “A woman who is a candidate to be made pregnant in that futuristic way would have a right to refuse to let her body be so used – everyone would agree. Therefore, why should a woman who has become pregnant in a more usual way not also have a right to refuse to continue the pregnancy?”

In the context of the abortion debate (and, significantly, in hardly any other context), the term “bodily rights” comes up often. Synonyms still more commonly used are “bodily integrity” and “bodily autonomy,” but I will say “rights” because it is rights that have practical consequences. If anything can help determine the practical outcome “Woman goes through with abortion,” it is a right, not an abstract “integrity” or “autonomy.”

The above fetus-implantation version or any version of the bodily-rights argument could be rebutted by pointing out that most pregnant women voluntarily engaged in a sex act that caused the pregnancy in the first place, and therefore have a responsibility for the child (the “responsibility argument”); but this rebuttal does not work in cases of rape, and is not convincing to some people in any situation – for reasons which I need not discuss here but will refer to in an appendix. Thus the argument remains logically strong. But is it logic alone that makes an argument strong or weak? I would like to approach this from the perspective that an argument is an instrument for changing some of another person’s brain circuitry, and the ideas that correlate with that circuitry, to resemble part of one’s own circuitry and ideas, and that some value-related circuitry and ideas are better for us as individuals and as a species than others. I will contend that though logical demonstrations (such as the above thought experiment) and their rebuttals have an important place in the debate about bodily rights, there is no clear logical resolution to the debate one way or the other; that in seemingly logical demonstrations there are psychological factors at play apart from factors which are purely logical, and that those factors sway us from our normal intuitions; and that those factors can be neutralized by understanding them and by other techniques.

I would like to see people question where their convictions come from, because I think that the more they examine where they come from, the more they will move toward better convictions.

I would like to proceed according to the following outline:

1. Morality and moral principles, including our moral principles about when morality should be backed by legislation and when it should not, derive ultimately from intuition.

2. The intuitions of many people, particularly of most pro-lifers, say that the unborn children of pregnant women should be legally protected against abortion in some (not all) situations.

3. The intuitions of most pro-choicers differ from ours in the first place and say that the unborn children of pregnant women should not be afforded any legal protection.

4. There are some people who are, in terms of moral intuitions, “on the fence,” undecided.

5. Some people’s moral intuitions are better than those of others; in this particular area of moral investigation, the intuitions of pro-lifers are better. (Keep reading!)

I think that just as “there is no clear logical resolution to the (overall) debate one way or the other,” the correctness or incorrectness of any moral intuition cannot be logically proved, but that logic can nudge us toward correct moral intuitions, that is, help us find the correct moral intuitions within us. Under this point 5 below I will include a long section analyzing logically the concept of bodily rights. It is designed to nudge us toward more correct moral intuitions about the importance of bodily rights.

6. Though the intuitions of most pro-lifers say that unborn children should in many cases be legally protected against abortion, the intuitions of many pro-lifers also agree with pro-choicers (as do the intuitions of many undecideds) that a woman who is not pregnant (as in the above thought experiment) should not be legally subject to the forcible implantation in her of a child she did not conceive, even to save the child’s life. (And our intuitions also usually say that a violinist to whom we are hooked up should not be given legal protection from unhooking; and our intuitions also agree with various other pro-choice thought experiments designed to reject, in certain situations, legislative enforcement of a broad right to life.)

7. Human logical powers are limited, and therefore a particular situation, situation A, may seem parallel to another situation, situation B, in all the important morally-relevant ways that the human mind can think of, without the two situations necessarily being morally equivalent.

8a. The situation depicted by a thought experiment always includes some imagery of greater or lesser vividness, and some emotional content. If to our logical minds (momentarily or over a longer term) some outrageous situation, A, depicted by a pro-choice thought experiment, does seem parallel to situation B – a legal prohibition on abortion in a normal pregnancy – then the imagery and emotions of situation A get temporarily transferred to situation B. Let’s call this a process of “outrage transfer.” (Below I will touch on the search for an understanding of how events such as outrage transfer might actually work neurologically.)

b. Moreover, if we are subject to an over-fascination with logic, which many people are, then our consciences/intuitions will work with wrong information (the belief that logic can completely prove or disprove the moral equivalence of two situations) and may tell us that if there seem to be strong parallels between the situation of a pro-choice thought experiment that militates against legal protection of some living being, and the situation of pregnancy, then we should discard legal protection of the unborn in pregnancy – in spite of our earlier intuition supporting such legal protection.

8a and 8b are what I had earlier called “psychological factors at play apart from factors which are purely logical.” I had said that those psychological factors “sway us from our normal intuitions” and I had gone on to say, “those factors can be neutralized by understanding them and by other techniques.”

9a. The effects of outrage transfer will fade over time. Moreover, the outrage transfer of a pro-choice thought experiment can be offset or more than offset by pro-life thought experiments such as those involving the separation of conjoined twins, or the “Cabin in the Blizzard” thought experiment of Stephen Wagner et. al. (It can be “more than offset” if only because our minds are impressionable and are always most strongly affected by the imagery and emotional triggers that stimulated them most recently.)

b. Though human logical powers are not sufficient to tell us conclusively about the moral equivalence or otherwise of two situations (as mentioned in 7 above), they are sufficient to convince us of said insufficiency, and thereby to free us from an over-fascination with logic and restore our original trust in our intuition that the unborn deserve legal protection.

Someone will say that I am discarding logic and that moreover I am saying that a pro-life position can only be defended by discarding logic. But that is not what I am doing. We should always apply logic to the fullest extent possible, and there are good logical rebuttals to the forcible-implantation and other pro-choice thought experiments, and I will discuss them in brief; but we should not think that logic, even on a base of intuition, can give us final answers to all moral questions, specifically the question of whether a right to life overrides bodily rights in the case of pregnancy.

Continue reading →

No Termination without Representation

raising consciousness about the unborn, and awakening our consciences about the rights of the unborn

Tag Archives: Sam Harris

The Objective Morality of Transcendent Experience

Footnotes

Pro-Life: Expressing the Highest Ideals of the Left

The Psychological Morass of the Abortion Issue

Dismantling the Bodily-Rights Argument without Using the Responsibility Argument