Ninety-nine percent of all moral problems are caused by mistaken selfishness
"Socrates, Butler and the Stoa"
"Apologies for not responding to comments directly--
our system is shut down for "improvements", so I can't
access any of my mail at the moment.
The Stoics believed that the vast majority of
human beings utilize seriously flawed reasoning, and
consequently make frequent wrong choices. (And, hence,
they fail to achieve or even approach eudaimonia.)
Why? Of course, the obvious answer is that
there are multiple reasons. People, through lack of
training and interest, are very poor at reasoning in
general. (They don't understand statistics, they
don't give serious thought to the credibility of
sources, they spend virtually no time thinking about
the attitudes and interests of other people and so
they do a poor job of anticipating their reactions, etc.,
etc., etc.) But given the recent thread, I wish to
concentrate on only two sources of error--a) confusing
social norms with genuine moral norms, and b) mistaken
selfishness.
Steve (and others) evince great concern about
the former, and no doubt it does occur. As such, the
person making progress needs to take this source of error
into account and make allowances for it. (I still think
that most of these cases actually involve cultural beliefs
about non-moral principles, such as religious matters,
and so they aren't really examples of moral confusion
at all. But I'll put this aside.)
The problem is, in my experience 99% of all moral
problems are caused by the latter. By mistaken selfishness,
I mean assenting to the impression that the things that
please you (and the things your culture tells you are
good for you) are really good. Grab a newspaper and read
the accounts of local people who have been convicted of
crimes. It's the same sort of list every day, in every
community, for the same reasons. Person A stole something.
Why? Because she didn't believe that it was wrong to steal?
No, because she desired the object she stole (or the object
she was hoping to steal), and her assent to the proposition
that it would be good to have that was allowed to over-ride
her clear knowledge that it was wrong to steal. {Unless,
perhaps, she has allowed these desires to override that
knowledge so often that the knowledge has been pushed into
the darkness.} B was manufacturing illegal and dangerous
drugs to sell. Why? Because he thinks money is good. C
raped someone. D committed murder. This happens a million
times a day...a billion times a day.
My view that this is the source of virtually all
wrongdoing may of course be mistaken...but I can take
comfort in knowing that the Stoics shared it. Read their
writings, and you will find that when they discuss a moral
problem they virtually always diagnose it as resulting from
a person assenting to the idea that something that they
_like_ is good. They virtually never discuss moral faults
that result from a person who thought they intuited that he
or she was doing the right thing. The predominant Stoic
view is that we have little problem knowing what we ought to
do, but we have a big problem making ourselves do it because
it conflicts with our desires.
So this, I think, is the great problem. It's not
kamikazes or suicide bombers. In just the US last year 15,000
people were murdered. That's a substantial _decrease_
from past years. But it's vastly higher than the number of
people killed around the world each year by suicide bombers.
Add in the "ordinary" rapes and thefts and beatings, etc.,
and this is the great moral problem around the world. And
it's caused not by the norms of some culture, but by the
simple desire for sex, money, power, etc.
So Steve asks what the danger is of taking moral
norms not as certainties but as merely provisional guidelines.
And the danger is the danger Butler pointed to--given that
my desires are fundamentally disfunctional, I will always
attempt to twist any provisional guideline to my advantage.
There are two dangers--trusting my intuitions too much and
blinding myself to a culturally-induced error, and trusting
my intuitions too little so that I engage in vice when it
appears to be in my self-interest. Since I think there are
a million wrongs that stem from the latter for every wrong
that stems from the former, I think it's far better to
concentrate all our energies on it.
Butler gives an excellent discussion of the relationship
between conscience, benevolence, and self-love, and the best
discussion in history of the confusion between self-love
(self-interest) and particular desires. Not everything he
says is compatible with Stoicism, but the vast majority
of it is, and some of it is far clearer than the writings of
any of the Stoics on those matters. This despite his being
an Anglican clergyman.
Now why is Socrates in the title? Because we've
also had discussion of Socratic skepticism. But if you
read the dialogues, you find that:
a) by no means all of the dialogues feature Socrates
claiming complete ignorance, and
b) even the ones that do feature Socrates denying
knowledge aren't talking about knowledge of very basic
moral truths like "all other things being equal, one ought
not steal". He denies knowing the general definition of
Virtue (etc.) from which one could deduce the right thing
to do in every situation. That is, he denies having the kind
of universal, perfectly-integrated knowledge that the Sage
possesses.
Now I agree that the Stoics show very little skepticism
about cultural norms, and that sometimes they may have too
little skepticism. (As Jan, for example, has argued for years.)
I'm just saying that since I am not yet a Sage, nor even a
short step away from being a Sage, I am in far greater danger
(I think) from going the other direction. I don't need anything
in my life that will make it easier for me to think that murder,
theft, adultery, rape, lying, breaking promises, etc. might
be OK. My desires push me to try to rationalize these things
all the time--they don't need any help. The more vividly I
depict to myself the wrongness of theft, the easier it is for me
to remember that the thing that I want to steal is not truly
a good at all.
But maybe that's just me (and a few billion other
people). If you don't struggle with this, then indeed you
may be in a position to worry more about excessive acceptance
of supposed intuitions. I hope that's true, because it will
mean that you're nearly a sage, and the world needs more
Sages. But I think Butler speaks for most people.
Regards,
Grant
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