Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

Inference #2 fromRegarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?: Given that cognitive scientists have found that actual moral concepts are not structured as rules with specific propositional structures (as in the ten commandments or an algorithm for solving all moral problems), but rather moral concepts are based on diverse literal body-based experiential conceptions; and given that morality is fundamentally about well-being at every level of human experience; then virtues, as the most common method of conceptualizing behaviors that lead to well-being, are a universal tool for conveying morality. (references: Moral Imagination by Mark Johnson, Varieties of Moral Personality by Owen Flangan and Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson)

The universality of virtues is a scientifically testable assertion that is based on the reported experiences of the authors of The Family Virtues Guide, Linda Kavelin-Popov and Dan Popov, in the course of having traveled the world teaching about the virtues. Dan Popov is a scholar of world religions and in the course of his studies of seven of the world’s most popular religions he identified several hundred that are taught in all seven, and after co-authoring The Family Virtues Guide and traveling around the world, he has not found any religious traditions that do not teach most of the same virtues. Thus virtues may provide us with a set of tools for the development of universal human values that transcend all barriers to harmony and unity, like the diversity of rules for being religious.

The new three R’s, virtues for a Common Society: Respect is the combination of “re” the prefix for again, and the root “spect” which refers to seeing. Thus, I take the literal core of respect to be about taking another look at a person or situation. In the sense of a virtuous way of being respectfulness is the habit of taking second looks before you make judgments and interpretations about a person or a situation. Specifically, I am suggesting that the second look move us away from our propensity for defensive enemy thinking and intentionally guide towards reinforcing our concepts and habits that assume human unity through the language of virtues.

Responsibility is the combination of “response” and “ability.” Thus I take the literal core of its meaning to be about having the ability to respond. This is in distinction from the habit of reacting, which is what we all do when we are too harried to marshal all of our skillfulness in formulating an appropriate way of taking the most graceful or most respectful actions within our lives.

There were a number of interesting studies done on altruism that showed that even when people are holding in mind morality tales like the Good Samaritan they are not generally guided by the moral content of the story, but rather by what they perceive to be the constraints of their situation. If the subjects of the study felt pressed for time they were less likely to help. Although even some of those who were in the situation of having an abundance of time chose not to help, my guess is that they did so for reasons that would probably indicate they saw some other kind of limitation on their ability to affect the outcome of the other persons situation. I’m saying that when people are passing by someone in need, then it is their sense that they have the time, knowledge and others resources to help that empowers them to offer assistance, not just the emotional experience of compassion and, perhaps, empathy for the person. The compassion and empathy are prerequisite but not adequate to inspire helping behavior.

In order to shape our lives by the virtue of responsibility we have to ensure that we put ourselves into situations and groups that call us to be skillful and the best we can be. In this understanding of responsibility it is not simply a result of willful self-control, but also a product of the community context within which you are embedded.

Resourcefulness is the combination of “re” that prefix for again, again, the word ‘source’, and the word ‘fullness.’ Thus I take the literal core of its meaning to be the experience of being full of your source again. The source of your being, in every religious tradition that I am aware of, would be God, so the idea is to be full of God again, just like you were at some point before. This would be the moments in your life when you experienced grace or joy or bliss. Depending on the tradition, they describe the experience of being full of your source in different ways. In recent research in psychology they have come to refer to these kinds of experiences as optimal experiences or as their subjects, across many cultures and referring to a great variety of activities, have said, “being in the flow” or “fully in the moment.” Thus, even the humanists are referring to the same thing as the other more traditional religions.

Thus, we can all get down to some level of agreement on many, if not most, of the core concepts of what gives us well-being. Things like respect, responsibility, resourcefulness, freedom (lack of physical impediments to movement) or love (a nurturing warmth emanating from a being pretty much like me, only bigger.) My call to unity at the end of Regarding Them is based on the possibility that we can probably find at least a few core values that all people can agree on.

Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Inference from Limitations on Truth from Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?: Because of the universal religious claim that God is inherently beyond human conception, conceptions of God are neither right nor wrong, only different. And those conceptions are entirely exhausted by the four possibilities created by the fact that God has to be conceived of as either personal (having qualities that embodied humans also have) or impersonal (not having human qualities) and either immanent (within the universe) or transcendent (outside of the universe). (In reference to the work of Rev. Fred Campbell.) Thus there are only four possible ways to conceive of god:

1. A personal/ immanent God, (Deism, human qualities within the universe)

2. A personal/ transcendent God, (Mysticism, human qualities outside the universe)

3. An impersonal/ immanent God, (Naturalism, non-human qualities inside the universe) or

4. An impersonal/ transcendent God, (Humanism, non-human qualities outside the universe)

Therefore all conceptions of God are all correct and incorrect exactly to the degree that they constrain God within human body-based conceptions, which are the only kinds of conceptions that we have available. And they are not incompatible with each other, just different ways of getting at different aspects of what God must be since we have consistently postulated that God is beyond human comprehension. Any one person can use any or all of them at their discretion in any combination. Another option is simply not to consider God at all, there is no requirement that one must attempt to conceive of that which is beyond them.

Asserting the completeness of these four options of God concepts is an assertion that is empirically testable, thus it is a question that science can verify or perhaps falsify. Specifically, cognitive linguists can collect data on conceptions of God and figure out if there are any other actual conceptual structures that occur.

Corollary to Inference #1: Conceptions of “objective” reality are constrained by exactly the same limitations as those of our conceptions of God, but are not contained by an equally simple conceptual structure. Every conception that can be generated by science occurs within a cultural and historical context that strongly influences its content. Thus science as a process of on-going conceptual development has far a greater potential capability to thoroughly explain complex phenomena. (reference: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn)

Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

In my story Regarding Them the refrain, “and if everyone agrees, then it must be true” is repeated many times. Of course, you’re thinking “Just because everyone agrees doesn’t make it true. What about objective reality?” That refrain is not, as this response suggests, a negation of the possibility of an objective reality, but it is an assertion that we human beings are limited in our ability to verify the existence and actual nature of what we refer to as an “objective” reality.

We derive all our possible concepts from literal bodily experiences and a set of culturally determined linguistic formalities to connect them. We imaginatively use the logical structure of our literal experiences, with only the very minimum of reference to the original literal content, to understand other kinds experiences, i.e., How can a man be out of his mind? (reference: Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson)

What separates us from our primate cousins who have successfully learned to communicate via sign language is that fact that we can talk about minds and how to be out of them, whereas Koko the gorilla and other signing apes cannot get beyond the correspondence of symbols with literal experiences. The signing primates demonstrate the communicative abilities of about four year old humans and make no further progress because they cannot maintain the logical structure of a symbol independent of the content of the experiences that the symbol indicates.

When researchers teach apes to sign they do it in mostly the same way we teach children, through an immersion in an environment where language is a very useful and frequently used tool to achieve individual and social purposes. When we want to communicate with small children we are most successful when we are able to use concrete and literal language. A cup is a concrete object and the concept of a cup is understandable to both four year olds and signing primates. Another example of a concrete idea is a room. What cups and rooms have in common is that they share in the logical structure of bounded regions in space.

When we say that a man is “out of his mind” we have utilized several methods of abstraction. First, the abstract concept referred to by the word ‘mind.’ A mind is a cause of behavior. When you are in your right mind, you cause your behavior and are responsible for what results from those behaviors. When you are out of your mind then the behaviors that occur were not really caused by what we consider to be the real you, therefore you are not held fully responsible for the results of those behaviors. Thus, ‘mind’ consists of causal interpretations of different sets of behavioral patterns with normative implications.

Koko and a four year old can both understand that someone can be crazy. It means they are behaving abnormally. But they will fail to understand the phrase “out of his mind” unless it is explained to be the same as being crazy, or in the case of the four year old you can wait a year or two and it will make complete sense. The difference is in how the phrase refers to the logical structure of bounded regions in space to the abstract idea of mind as a bounded category of behaviors within which is normal behaviors and outside of which are abnormal behaviors. Thus the logical structure of bounded regions in space, such as rooms and cups, are applied to the categorization of behaviors into normal and abnormal with implications for the proper assignment of personal responsibility for the results. The apes do not appear to be capable of preserving the idea of bounded regions in space independent of the concrete experiences of cups and rooms, nor to be able to conceive of causal interpretations of different sets of behavioral patterns with normative implications. In other words, they will not understand the word ‘mind’ as a reference to anything real nor how a person can be inside or outside of one. (reference: The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon)

Because the only conceptions we can ever have about Truth are based on experiences of having the kinds of bodies we have, then the only truth that we can ever validate through shared experiences are, based on this fact, those that can be conveyed to others with similar bodily experiences. This does not negate the possibility of experiences that are ineffable, that is unique to an individual and incapable of being conceived of and/or expressed within language. However, if any aspect of “objective” reality occurs in a way that is beyond the scope of body-based conceptions, then we are incapable of sharing them with anyone else and therefore they cannot in any meaningful way be validated. The only kinds of experience that can ever possibly be validated by anyone else would have to be expressed through body-based concepts. Thus I feel obligated to qualify the very term ‘objective’ with quotation marks because it’s normal usage as a form of reality that is collectively validated is in important ways self-contradictory based on this understanding of our existence.

We are, therefore, equally limited in our ability to verify the existence and nature of anything that could qualify as a “spiritual” reality, as well. Thus science and religion are on equally shaky ground with regards to capital ‘T’ Truth. Thus I have drawn the conclusion that universal human agreement is the highest Truth we can ever hope to obtain, and it can, exclusively within the constraints of the logic and extent of bodily concepts, change.

Regarding Them Commentaries:

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Objective Reality?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About God?

Regarding Them Commentary: What About Morality?