Cats and Frogs

I was recently asked why we non-theist/atheist types maintain that it is not necessary to “prove a negative”.  The challenge emerged after someone had asserted that:

            (the atheist) argument is based on two premises

1.    There is no evidence for God

2.    Atheists are not under any burden to prove no God exists

Here’s my response:

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It's not so much about proving a negative as proving something that is not falsifiable. Say we had a very large number of boxes in front of us. Before we open any, I make the claim that at least one of the boxes contains a cat. You, on the other hand, say that you don't know what is in the boxes. We then open 100 boxes and not one of them contains a cat. Instead each and every one of them contains a small frog.

We now reassess our predictions. You say that the boxes might all contain frogs, while I stick with my cat theory. Then we open a thousand more boxes. They all contain frogs.

We both have the opportunity to reassess our theories. You say that the boxes probably all contain frogs, while I stick with the idea that one box contains a cat.

We open a million boxes and they all contain frogs. Hopefully, you get the idea now. I'm now sounding a bit silly to still be hoping for a cat.

How many more boxes do we need to open to prove that I am wrong about the cat? All of them?

Ah, I say, but perhaps there was a tiny cat inside one of the frogs, we don't know for sure that that is impossible. So we start cutting up the frogs. How many frogs do we need to dissect? All of them?

Ah, I say, but do we know that that was all the boxes? Perhaps there were boxes that we didn't see or that got moved while we were paying attention to the ones we were opening.

So long as I stick to my guns, you can't prove that none of the boxes contains a cat, and I haven't even started redefining what cat means yet.

Now think of "cat" to mean "god" and "frog" to mean "nature or rational science" and perhaps you'll understand why we don't feel obliged "to prove a negative".

I really do hope this helps.

The Return of the Moral Animal

In The Moral Animal, I raised the apparently controversial topic of moral agency in animals (I discussed the minor controversy in Some Musings on the Moral Animals of reddit).  My fundamental argument was that there are absolute minimum requirements for moral agency – comprehension and volition – and that some animals meet these absolute minimum requirements.

That’s all well and good, you might think, but why was an article about moral agency in animals the first article in the Morality as Playing Games series when it focuses entirely on humans?  I just want to very quickly point out that the reason is that the series sketches out how survival concerns can drive the development of an ethical structure which in turn would produce the very sorts of moral systems that we observe in human communities around the world and would explain our frequent departures from those moral systems.

Implicit in this argument is the idea that our morality emerged during our evolutionary development and there is, as a consequence, some fuzziness regarding precisely when that morality emerged.  A challenge that might be mounted by a “moral sense” or “objective moral values and duties” theorist could revolve around a variation of the chicken and egg dilemma: which came first, moral agency or morality?

And as with the “chicken and egg” challenge, the answer is quite simple: moral agency came first.  At some point when we were pre-human ape-like animals, we would have met the absolute minimum requirements for moral agency, much as one could argue that a dog today meets the absolute minimum requirements for moral agency.  (The egg came first.  It was laid by a bird which was very similar to a chicken.)

Given a capacity for moral agency and the evolutionary benefit that can be derived from an ethical structure, the emergence of a morality much like what we have today was therefore merely a matter of time.

Physical Survival and Legacy Survival

While we play a variety of "games" in our life, they are all dependent on a single game that we play from conception right up until shortly after our last breath.  It's a game we must inevitably lose – the game of survival.

It is possible to take the idea of survival one step further than our own physical survival and consider the survival of our legacy (what I will term legacy survival, to distinguish it from physical survival).  Note that legacy survival relies on us having sufficient physical survival in the temporal sense – if we die before cementing a legacy, then any potential legacy dies with us.  Legacy survival does not imply that we ourselves have continuing involvement after death, although our descendants or other agents may act on our behalf, but instead it should be understood that the ramifications of our actions in life may continue to be felt for a considerable time after we have retired from the playing arena.

The importance of physical survival is something which we generally feel quite keenly.  We will fight for physical survival in situations in which it seems nonsensical.  People who have lost the ability to move any part of their body other than their eyes will signal that they nevertheless wish to live.  People fight for survival despite horrible pain and scarring after suffering terrible burns.  Those with life will go to extreme lengths to preserve it with some animals even chewing off their own limbs to escape a trap or other entanglement.  Not having such strong jaws, humans will nevertheless also go to similar extremes, such as in the case of Aron Ralston who severed his right arm with a pocket-knife in order to free himself when he found himself pinned by a boulder with little chance of rescue. 

That said, humans and animals will sometimes deliberately put themselves in situations in which they will almost certainly die.  In most cases, it can be shown that these are acts of legacy protection rather than of self-destruction, and when they are acts of self-destruction they are driven by an awareness (or perception) that a temporary extension of survival would bring with it more suffering than is bearable.  Natural examples of where legacy protection concerns supersede those of physical survival include risking death to protect one's young (such as when wild pigs will divert attention from a litter by breaking cover and enticing away a predator), risking death in the act of mating (such as with the mantis, the female of which will often try to eat the dismounting male) and dying to feed progeny (such as with the female Stegodyphuslineatus which is eaten by its young).  In humans, however, legacy protection can be more complex and symbolic.  Ensuring that a child is educated so as to have a better chance of not only survival but wealth and success in adulthood, ensuring that a company thrives and ensuring one's good name is maintained are all examples of efforts to promote legacy survival.

In humans, even symbolic legacy survival, as distinct from survival of one's genetic legacy, can be perceived as more important than physical survival.  This is not to say that physical survival is actually unimportant, merely that in a psychological sense we may consider the conception that we have of ourselves as being more important than our physical embodiment.  Our perception tends to be such that our body is where the phenomenon of being takes place, and therefore while our body is an important part of our being, it is not perceived as being the totality of our being.  And, to the extent that we are social animals, our sense of being is interwoven with our place within a community.

In some cases, we reify our sense of being more than our physical bodies and our conception of self into a soul and then imbue it with immortality.  When we do so, our legacy survival efforts can be expressed as an array of efforts to protect this immortal soul.  While the reality of a soul may be questioned, the psychology of someone who believes in such things will be largely unaffected by the doubts of others and efforts to preserve the good standing of one’s soul generally seem indistinguishable from efforts to maintain one’s good name.

The bottom line is that, quite often, it should come as no surprise that humans will occasionally sacrifice physical survival for legacy survival, whether that be survival of their progeny, their reputations or their souls.

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This article is one of a series. It was preceded by Towards a Rational Origin of Ethical Structures and will be followed by Morality as Playing Games. It all started with the first prelude, Saving the Dog.

Some Musings on the Moral Animals of reddit

There have been some interesting responses to The Moral Animal although unfortunately not in the comments section of the blog.  You can find them at r/philosophy and r/atheism.  I chose those two areas of reddit.com because ethics is a school of philosophy and because I am curious to know what, in general, atheists think about the moral agency of animals.  Of course, the volume of responses I got doesn’t really give me any indication of the general view, but it was interesting to see people who identify themselves as atheist defending some sort of top-down version of morality.

When I use the term “top-down version of morality”, I am referring to statements like:

“basic morals are inherent”

“lower species are … morally superior”

“there is a substantial difference between morality and trained behaviour”

These all seem to imply that there is a morality which we can identify in ourselves, and possibly in other animals, but which is not a human invention.  Now, I might be misreading this, since it is possible that these people simply mean to imply that humans invent this idea of morality, define it in some meaningful way, and then look to see if we and other animals demonstrate it (an example being monogamy, a state that ducks are accused of maintaining).

There were a couple of responses which implied that the morality of animals is (or perhaps should be) defined in terms of their interactions with humans.  For example, the dog who mauls a toddler to death would have done something that is morally wrong.  Dogs who rescue children are morally righteous.  An orang-utan who rapes a girl is morally wrong.  (I’m editing this in Word and the grammar checker tells me that I shouldn’t use “who” when talking about a dog, anthropocentric bias seems to be built into at least Microsoft’s version of English!)

Other responses framed the question of morality more in terms of intraspecies interaction, so it’s not all bad.  For example: house cats rarely kill each other (although they certainly fight and male lions kill their rival’s cubs), other apes practice reciprocal altruism and dolphins commit a form of gang-rape.

Perhaps the major thread in the responses was my own fault.  The headline at r/atheism spoke only of animals being moral, rather than being moral agents.  The r/philosophy headline was better phrased, but even there, there was a heavy focus on “what is moral?” at the expense of the question addressed in The Moral Animal, “can animals be moral agents?”

However, much as it was my own stupid fault, in one comment thread despite repeatedly stating that I was only considering the absolute minimum requirements for being a moral agent, rather than whether animals are moral, my interlocutor seemed unable or unwilling to take that onboard.  The final comment from this chap, who has the handle okayifimust, was so full of assumptions that I could not do it justice in that comment thread.  So, I’d like to address it here.  I’ll reproduce a little section of thread, first me (as wotpolitan), then okayifimust (for the earlier discussion and anything following, see r/atheism):

wotpolitan

Absolute minimum requirement for moral agency. I've said it a few times.

I think animals have it. I think there is evidence to support the idea that they have it.

Furthermore, given the vagueness associated with the terms "right" and "wrong" (for which a definition is required to use the wiki definition of moral agency in any sensible way), I think that animals can be moral agents. I define for my dogs what right and wrong is, and they know in the specific context of that interaction what right and wrong is. And they act "morally" in that context. Now, like humans, they will act "immorally" if they think they can get away with it. Unlike humans, however, they aren't that good at working out what they can get away with. That means they appear less moral than humans, but I think that's probably an anthropocentric illusion. I may be wrong on that, but it's another discussion.

okayifimust

| Absolute minimum requirement for moral agency. I've said it a few times.

Agreed. But since it's not a sufficient condition for moral agency - what is the point?

| Furthermore, given the vagueness associated with the terms "right" and "wrong" (for which a definition is required to use the wiki definition of moral agency in any sensible way), I think that animals can be moral agents.

Yes, we have to define "right" and "wrong" somehow. But in order for X to be a moral agent, all we have to do is agree that X is somehow aware of the concept; we don't have to agree with it, even.

| I think that animals can be moral agents. I define for my dogs what right and wrong is, and they know in the specific context of that interaction what right and wrong is.

But then a dog who doesn't shit on your carpet is equally "moral" as a dog who mails toddlers to death, just as long as that is what you train them to be. The dogs lack any consideration of morality, they just fear punishment.

| And they act "morally" in that context. Now, like humans, they will act "immorally" if they think they can get away with it.

Look, if you keep putting every word in quotes that we absolutely need to be very, very clear about, we might as well stop discussing it.

And, no, humans will not always try to do things that they can get away with. Humans can be moral agents, they can decide that an action is "wrong" as opposed to "likely to result in punishment if i am found out".

Okay, responding as I must:

I’m not, at this point, talking about moral agency per se. Earlier in the discussion I had highlighted a passage from The Moral Animal:

The absolute minimum requirements of moral agency … are an ability to understand and predict the consequences of action/inaction (comprehension) together with an ability to make decisions and act on them (volition).  Note that at this point I am neither assuming nor proposing any definitions of right/wrong, or good/bad, or moral/immoral.  An actor meeting the absolute minimum requirements of moral agency merely is able to choose between at least two predictable consequences of action/inaction.

The redditor okayifimust was surprised that I wanted to “claim ‘moral agency’ without considering the distinction between moral/immoral”.  I directed okayifimust’s attention to a response to another redditor, NukeThePope, in which I had written (clarifying edits in brackets):

Like I say (elsewhere), I am only talking in (The Moral Animal) about moral agency, by which I mean the ability to make a decision and act upon it while understanding the consequences of potential choices. Perhaps it would help to think about it in these terms - before we've decided what is right and wrong, even before we've decided on the basis (bases, perhaps) upon which we would make the decisions regarding right and wrong, we can consider moral agency. In other words, presuming that there is a morality with which we (and animals) may interact, what must we have to be able to interact with that morality?

Taking the viewpoint of some theists for a moment, say there is a god who either by its existence or by divine decree establishes a range of things that are right and good, and a range of things that are wrong and bad. Say further that the only creatures capable of interacting with this divinely inspired morality are humans. Therefore, in such a world, there is something different between animals and humans. What is that something?

Some theists, although not all, put that down to a soul, some element of likeness to their god. These people are saying, in a way, that the soul is the tool which determines for us what is moral. (I may be horribly simplifying a brilliantly exquisite point of theology here, but it is not my intention to attack theists on that point.)

Now, what I am saying is that I agree that to be a moral agent, we … must be able to work out that something is in some way wrong - that can be because it is against the rules, or something else, like an inbuilt moral detector, tells us it is wrong. Furthermore, we … must have volition - which theists along with many atheists would put down to free will.

I'm not saying anything about empathy, or needs and desires of others, I am just saying that my dogs know that if they take certain actions, then there will be certain outcomes, and they do have the volition necessary to choose one action over others. I'm not saying that they thinking morally, pondering on the action that will cause minimum suffering to those around them, but I am saying that they have the skill set necessary to act morally, if they had the ability and inclination to consider the potential suffering of those around them.

I really am just talking about the absolute minimum requirements for moral agency here.

I’d like to expand on this a little.  Imagine a situation in which a moral question must be answered, it could be anything, but I’m not particularly interested in a situation which has no clearly correct resolution (so that eliminates dilemmas such as the trolley problem).  Let’s use the finding of a large sum of money instead.  You come across a briefcase in which there is $1,000,000 along with a letter which indicates that the money is legitimately owned by a Mr Smith of 1 Smith Street, Smithton (and that it is not associated with any criminal activity).  That address is just around the corner, you are not busy and it’s on your intended route (you’re even walking so it’s no bother whatsoever to drop it at Mr Smith’s house).  However, it’s late at night, no-one is around, no-one knows that you are in this area, and $1,000,000 would make a significant improvement to your standard of living.  No-one would ever know if you just continued on your way and took the money home.  What is the correct course of action for you?

Now, the morally correct answer is pretty clear: you should take the money to Mr Smith’s house, returning it to the rightful owner.  But let’s look at you as a moral agent for a moment.  Say that you walked right past the briefcase without noticing it was there.  Would you in that case have had a moral obligation to return it?

I would argue that you would not, the obligation had not been triggered.

Say instead that you saw the briefcase, you opened it, and found that it contained scraps of meaningless paper, all about the same size in nice bundles, with another meaningless paper with various squiggles on it.  Would you then have a moral obligation to return it to Mr Smith, noting that in this situation you would not know that it belonged to Mr Smith (because the letter explaining the money and detailing his address was unreadable to you)?

Again I would argue that you would not.

In order to have a moral obligation, you must be cognitively aware that an obligation exists.  You must have comprehension.

On the other hand, suppose that you do become aware of an obligation, but when you try to lift up the briefcase, you find that it is incredibly heavy, or stapled immovably to the pavement.  Do you have an obligation to drop the briefcase at Mr Smith’s address?

I don’t think so, since you can’t lift the briefcase.  You might have the will, but not the ability to act.

Alternatively, perhaps just as you realise what you should do, you are knocked unconscious and carried home.  In this situation, it is surely ridiculous to expect that you have a moral obligation to return Mr Smith’s money while you are being carried home in a stupor.  You don’t have volition.

Even as a human, I argue, in order to be a moral agent as an absolute minimum you must have comprehension and volition.  Taking that a little further, it occurs to me that animals also have comprehension and volition, which means that they satisfy the absolute minimum requirements for being a moral agent.

Yes, we have to define "right" and "wrong" somehow. But in order for X to be a moral agent, all we have to do is agree that X is somehow aware of the concept; we don't have to agree with it, even.

Hm.  I might not really understand where okayifimust is going with this one.  I think he means that for X to be a moral agent, then X must have some sort of concept of morality, even if we don’t agree with that morality.  For example, X might be moral if X kills every second red-haired person she meets, because that’s in her moral code (“Yea verily, I say unto thee, thine brothers and sisters with hair of red that are without souls are an abomination to me, let the first walk freely but smite every second that thee doth meet so that I may glory their suffering, for I am a vengeful and capricious God.  So sayeth the Lord.”  [Leviticus 17:12].)  We don’t have to agree with her morality, but if she follows her convictions, we could say she is acting morally.

Personally, I don’t agree with that.  Perhaps there are people out there who consider that people who follow their own convictions are moral no matter how depraved their actions are in terms of what the rest of us think, but I do doubt it.  Anyway, I’ve talked about moral cowardice elsewhere.

That all said, can such people be moral agents?  Well, I think they satisfy the absolute minimum requirements for being moral agents, sure.  And I think they can be moral agents, but I still think that their morality needs some work.  And they could be retrained to exhibit a more widely accepted morality – which is to say, I am not convinced that there is a substantial difference between morality and trained behaviour.

But then a dog who doesn't shit on your carpet is equally "moral" as a dog who mails toddlers to death, just as long as that is what you train them to be. The dogs lack any consideration of morality, they just fear punishment.

This is just a total misunderstanding of the point.  If a dog comprehends what is right and what is wrong (in terms dictated by a human owner or the pack) then, if that dog is free to act (has volition), then it may be a moral agent in that it may choose to do what it knows to be right or it may choose to do what it knows to be wrong.  If an owner successfully teaches a dog that mauling toddlers to death is good, then it’s just doing the right thing in the same way as righteous humans in history have performed many acts that we today see as abhorrent.

I agree that we fear punishment, along with dogs.  However, certainly for humans, that punishment does not need to be external.  I think that punishment is also internalised in other social animals, albeit to a lesser extent.  Certain domestic animals exhibit guilt, perhaps that is fear of punishment or fear of disapproval, but then again humans are also conditioned by similar considerations.

Look, if you keep putting every word in quotes that we absolutely need to be very, very clear about, we might as well stop discussing it.

And, no, humans will not always try to do things that they can get away with. Humans can be moral agents, they can decide that an action is "wrong" as opposed to "likely to result in punishment if i am found out".

Well, okayifimust, I put quotation marks against the words “morally” and “immorally” because I was using an unusual definition of the term.  Returning to ducks, who are accused of being monogamous, I’ve seen a female duck being mounted by a drake who was not her partner (that partner was right alongside her looking as distressed as I’ve ever seen a duck look).  The assertion that life-long monogamy is morally good is somewhat arbitrary, particularly when applied to ducks.  They tend to be monogamous, but whether that is morally good or just is, well, that is another question.

Humans do act “immorally” by being unfaithful or only serially monogamous, you might want to argue that that is morally bad, but please argue that case – don’t just assume that your assumption is correct and that everyone agrees with you.  I’m not saying you are necessarily wrong, I’m just saying that we have perhaps arbitrarily defined life-long monogamy as moral despite the fact that the vast majority of people don’t actually practice it.

And yes, I agree, humans don’t always try to do what they know to be wrong if they think they can get away with it.  I do get a little deeper into that in the series of articles of which The Moral Animal is only the first.  Hopefully things will become clearer to okayifimust once the relevant articles have been published.

The Moral Animal

This article is the first in a series.  All will be linked by the tag “Morality as Playing Games”.

There are some "preludes" to the series, Saving the Dog, Being Bad and The Problem with Sam, which may be of interest, but aren't essential for understanding what follows.

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It is virtually, if not in fact literally, impossible to consider ethics without considering "moral agency", the quality embodied by a moral agent.  We can think of a moral agent as one who can make moral decisions or determinations and who can subsequently act upon those decisions or determinations.  In other words, we can think of a moral agent as one we could justifiably blame (or praise) for what they do.  Before arriving at a definition of the minimum requirements of moral agency, let us consider the practical application of moral agency considerations.  More specifically let us consider "blame".

 At one end of the scale we have inanimate objects, for example, a rock that we cannot justifiably blame for anything.  While we might curse the rock on which we stubbed our toe, we are well aware that the toe was stubbed by us, not by the rock.  Further up the scale, there are humans who we do blame (or alternatively praise) for their actions.  We do not, however, attribute blame to all humans equally.  If a child hurts a cat, for example, most of us would intervene and chastise the child, but we would understand that the child is not fully responsible for his actions.  If an adult hurts a cat, so long as the adult does not have any impairment which would otherwise lead to diminished responsibility, we hold that person to be fully responsible for their actions.  We will attribute levels of blame which correspond with the level of responsibility we accord them.

But what is this “diminished responsibility”?  In the case of the child, we might presume that he either doesn't understand that his actions hurts the cat, or that he doesn't understand that hurting an animal will lead to chastisement.  In some cases, it might be because the child is not able to fully control his actions, for example a toddler might not intend to hurt a cat he is attempting to carry, but might be unable to manage a comfortable arrangement for the object of his attentions.  Once we have chastised the child, however, if he is to hurt the cat again in the same way, we will accord higher levels of responsibility and attribute higher levels of blame, until such time as he reaches adulthood when we no longer assume any lack of knowledge or understanding about the consequences of how he handles an animal.

The absolute minimum requirements of moral agency, it would seem, are an ability to understand and predict the consequences of action/inaction (comprehension) together with an ability to make decisions and act on them (volition).  Note that at this point I am neither assuming nor proposing any definitions of right/wrong, or good/bad, or moral/immoral.  An actor meeting the absolute minimum requirements of moral agency merely is able to choose between at least two predictable consequences of action/inaction.

This definition should not be immediately controversial, it should make some intuitive sense.  A rock comprehends nothing and is incapable of volition.  A rock, we could therefore argue, has no capacity for moral agency.  We could posit a Being with limitless comprehension and completely unconstrained volition, which indeed some people do.  This Being, we could say, has as maximal moral agency.  Now while I have not addressed what constitutes wrong/right and so on, we can safely assume that a Being with limitless comprehension will know what is right and wrong by virtue of that limitless comprehension or, alternatively, will be able to develop concepts of right and wrong from first principles.  For our purposes, however, we can say that no matter on what basis such a Being would make decisions, this moral "super-agent" would be able to make those decisions with a full comprehension of the circumstances and be able to act without constraints, so the consequences of any action or inaction would therefore be selected deliberately.

As moral agents, humans can be found somewhere in the middle, unable to claim the ignorance and helplessness of a rock, but also lacking in the knowledge and predictive power, and freedom of volition that a moral super-agent would have.  This too should make intuitive sense, in part because we make similar sorts of observations when attributing responsibility to others for their actions and explaining levels of responsibility for our own actions, including but not restricted to "moral responsibility".  When I explain why I ran a red light, I might point to the factors which were outside of my control.  I could not brake in time, the cars behind were too close.  The description of such constraints would be intended to convey that I am less culpable for what occurred than I would have been if I simply decided to drive through the intersection.  This is a contributor to attribution bias, the cognitive bias by which others tend to be considered more responsible for their actions than we are for our own.  If I were to describe a similar event in which someone else ran a red light, I would tend to assume that the other driver was less constrained than I would have had to have been to have done the same thing.

The same applies to comprehension.  Again, while explaining the running of the red light, I might explain that I didn't actually know the exact details of the traffic regulations.  The rules are a little vague when it comes to weighing the risks associated with passing through an intersection when it had just turned red and the risks associated with braking suddenly with cars behind, especially when I didn't know for sure that the driver behind me was paying attention.  If I have less than total comprehension of the possible consequences, my culpability is reduced.  Attribution bias, by the way, rarely permits me to assume a similar level of confusion on the part of others who run red lights.

Limits on comprehension and volition allow us to give considerable latitude to young children.  We know that young children do not fully understand the consequences of their actions.  We afford similar latitude to our pets.  This again should not be controversial although some (such as Helene Guldberg in Just Another Ape?) do question whether we should ascribe any moral agency to animals at all.  When most of us consider our own pets, however, we do at least appear to ascribe a level of moral agency to them.  We attempt to train them so as to know what is permitted, and what is not. 

In my own case, I have taught my dogs to sit while I fill their food bowls and to not start eating until I give them express permission (which is particularly useful on a rainy day, if I am to avoid being covered in mud).  In the terms of the minimum requirement of moral agency, the dogs certainly appear to have some understanding of consequences of their actions, if it is only that I get angry and they don't get fed if they fail to obey the rules, and they exercise some measure of volition by sitting and waiting patiently until given the command to eat.  Behaviorists might argue that the dogs are merely responding to stimuli with no cognitive processing, but the behaviour of one of my dogs indicates that this is not the case.  If I give the command to eat to this particular dog, and only to him, he will exhibit confusion and won't eat until both dogs have been given the command to eat.

A dog is essentially a domesticated wolf.  My overly polite dog, who won’t eat until the other also is given the command to eat, is the submissive of the pair.  It could be argued that this is an example of canine morality; he knows the rule about not eating before a dog that is further up the hierarchy and complies with it.  It is true enough that this canine morality is neither as rich nor as complex as human morality, but it seems clear that non-humans are capable of at least some level of moral agency.

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This article is one of a series.  It was preceded by The Problem with Sam - The Final Prelude and is followed by Ethical Prisoners.

Saving the Dog (A Prelude)

One evening not too long ago, I was on the homeward stretch of a six kilometre walk with my two Siberian Huskies when I noticed that a dog was on the loose.  At the time I was walking along a footpath with a relatively busy road on my right and a park, or commons, on the left.  Across the road was a residential area.

I couldn’t see the dog as clearly as my Huskies could since the location was poorly lit and the dog’s coat was dark, but I did see that it darted dangerously across from my side of the road towards what turned out to be its home.  I immediately felt an emotional response, in part because it reminded me of an earlier incident, a few weeks earlier, when another dog had crossed the same road in the opposite direction, at about the same time of night, to challenge my dogs and was struck by a car.  That dog was fortunate in that the car that struck it was not travelling as fast as most cars do on this section of road, the dog was more easily visible and the car was able to brake sufficiently to prevent any major injury.  There was no guarantee that this dog was going to be as fortunate.

As I approached the property which was apparently the dog’s home, I noted that a neighbour was standing in her yard looking mildly distressed.  During a brief exchange, yelling across the road, it became clear that the neighbour and her husband were both afraid of dogs, but worried that the loose dog would get struck by a car if nothing was done.  While the neighbour didn’t specifically ask anything of me, it was obvious that I had a decision to make.  Clearly I was not afraid of dogs, having two relatively muscular examples straining at their leashes, so could and should I help?

I want to use this real scenario to investigate the nature of the moral issues involved, how I might have identified the issues as moral issues and the mechanisms by which I came to a decision with regard to the moral issues.  From there, I will investigate whether an absolute morality is achievable.

The first issue that comes to mind is involvement, should I have got involved at all?  When first recounting the tale of my little moral adventure to someone who considers herself quite moral, I was awarded with a little approval but was also told that a lot of people would have just kept on walking.  This is true, for a number of reasons, one of which is an implied neighbourhood rule along the lines of don’t get involved in other people’s business.  The dog on the loose was not mine, nor was it my neighbour’s since I was still half a kilometre or more from home.  Add to that the fact that I was already dealing with two dogs of my own and I would have had a good case to not be involved.

However, there was an element of immediacy meaning that I was aware that the dog was on the loose and I was aware of the distress of the woman standing in her yard across the road from me.  I had been tacitly invited to get involved by means of our brief interchange and an expectation had been generated.  Effectively, I had missed my moment to walk on with minimal moral consequence, which I could have done if I had not engaged the woman in conversation.  However, even if I had not talked with anyone, I would still have been aware of the straits in which the dog found itself and would have felt some moral obligation to assist.  A primary concern to me was that I did not want another dog to get struck by a car – if there was something I could do to prevent it.

So, I found myself crossing the road and handing control of my dogs to a woman who had only just finished telling me that she is afraid of them.  Should I have done that?  It was a strange decision in retrospect, I was putting my own two dogs at risk, since if they had a mind to they could easily have overpowered a woman who had no experience with handling dogs, it was dark, the road was poorly lit and my dogs could as easily be struck by cars as anyone else’s.  It would have been safer to have tied them to a tree, but the woman did ask whether I wanted her to hold them.  If I were to have said no and that I’d prefer to tie them to something, it would have taken me more time, time in which the other dog could have bolted across the road and been struck. 

More importantly, however, the woman clearly wanted to help even if she was not confident to enough to deal with the situation on her own.  By tying my dogs to a tree rather than letting her hold them, I would have been denying her an opportunity to do something useful.  While I know that my dogs are strong, I also know their personalities well enough to gauge that the risk of them either hurting the woman or breaking free from her and running off at that time was rather low (mostly because it is rare that they are handled by complete strangers in this way and they were fascinated enough by what I was doing to prevent them running off).

So, now someone else was holding my dogs and I was seeing what I could do get to the escaped dog back into its yard.  I could see that the dog had managed to peel back a section of aluminium plating on the gate in such a way that it was acting like a one-way, dog-sized valve – getting out was easy, getting back in just wasn’t going to happen. 

At first I was struck by a couple of purely technical and administrative issues.  Could I grab the dog, hold it with one hand and hold back the aluminium plating sufficiently far with the other hand so that I could then stuff the dog back where it should be?  That was a definite no on the first count, since the dog was skittish and a probable no on the second count.  Could I reach over the gate and open it from the outside?  Apparently I could not.

Could I reach far enough to open the gate if I stood on the bonnet of the car left parked in the driveway?  While this was for the most part a technical issue, there was a moral aspect to it as well.  My standing on the car’s bonnet could have damaged it.  The owners might have been pleased to have their dog rescued, but not particularly happy if I damaged the car in the process.  Did I have the right to risk damaging someone’s property, even if I was taking that risk to save their dog?  As it was, the decision was taken out of my hands, since my reach was not going to be sufficient even if I did stand on the bonnet.  Instead, I was forced to climb over the gate.

I was aware, as I pondered how best to scale the gate, that it was possibly not legal to do so.  The fencing of a private property, as I understand it, conveys an enforceable assertion of exclusivity.  If I entered the property without an invitation, it was possible that I would be trespassing.  I was, however, also aware that (or rather felt that) my intent justified my action.

I was also acutely aware – when I was half way over the gate – that I was not as lithe as I used to be.  This little act of mercy on my part was actually putting me at risk of damaging myself.  Fortunately, I managed to land nimbly enough to prevent injury.  Once the gate was open, the dog immediately ran back to the relative safety of its yard and the adventure was as good as over for both of us.

To be able to use this as an example of moral decision making, I need to establish that there was no single logical and obviously correct course of action available to me.  The correct method is contextually dependent on intent and in this case my intention was to save the dog from injury and, to a lesser extent, prevent harm to any driver who might be involved in an incident involving the dog.  Was this an obviously correct intent?

It felt like a good intent to me.  One could even say it was intuitively right.  It’s not difficult, however, to imagine someone saying it was a stupid thing to do and, consequently, not right or good (or obviously correct) at all.  For example, the dog wasn’t mine, I was busy, I had no obligation to sort out other people’s problems and to attempt to do so was mere interference on my part, people have an obligation to take care when driving so even if the dog did get hit, it would be their fault not mine, so on and so forth.  All these smack of excuse making to me, things I might say if challenged later if I were not to have helped out.

A question that then arises is why did it feel like a sufficiently good intent to me as to justify my actions, where it might not have to others?  Perhaps I am better at discerning some moral absolute, or maybe I was just mistaken about moral obligations that I am subject to.  This leads us to another question, are there any absolute moral principles, or obligations, or perhaps even moral virtues which were applicable?

Before I proceed, it is worth considering what “absolute” means in relation to principles, obligations and virtues.  Absolute in this sense means that the principle, obligation or virtue in question applies irrespective of context or intent.  We will return to this once we have extracted some examples of principles, obligations and virtues from the scenario.

Moral principles and moral obligations are quite similar and can, in some cases, vary in no more than form.  In a sense, one could consider that moral principles are guidelines whereas moral obligations are rules, one of which may be to abide by moral principles.  A moral principle which I could be said to have been using to guide my behaviour is minimising harm is good.  This could also be expressed as a moral obligation: if you are aware of the potential for harm and are able act so as to minimise harm without undue cost, then you are morally obliged to minimise harm.  Due to the similarity between moral principles and moral obligations in practice and because it is a assumption that if one has moral principles one has an ipso facto obligation to act in accordance with those moral principles, I shall use the term “moral imperative” to cover both.

Virtues are positive qualities which morally good by definition and which, if one possesses them, make one morally superior to those who lack them.  Virtues are traditionally arrived at either dogmatically or empirically.  Dogmatically derived virtues are those which are held to be positive qualities, in and of themselves.  If I were a virtue ethicist, for example, I could hold that courage – the willingness to put oneself at risk – and altruism – the willingness to devote time and effort with no expectation of reward – are positive qualities.  Empirically derived virtues are those discerned by observation, by either the observation of or conception of an admirable person.  If I were to compare two people, a great leader who was courageous and altruistic and a lesser being who was craven and selfish, then I could determine that courage and altruism were virtues.  A virtuously moral person would act with virtues in mind, either by attempting to maximise the virtue content of their actions or by emulating exemplars of virtue.

I have identified an imperative in accordance with which I was acting (minimise harm) as well as virtues which are favourably aligned with my behaviour (courage and altruism).  However, these do not address the full range of potential imperatives or virtues (or indeed vices, where a vice is a negative quality and hence the opposite of a virtue).  A detractor, on hearing my tale, might point to a number of alternative imperatives and virtues or vices, for example obey the law as an imperative and wisdom as a virtue which would have been demonstrated by letting other people deal with their problems and not putting myself or my dogs at risk unnecessarily or meddling as a vice, as demonstrated by a person who interferes in the business of others.

Returning to the question of absolutes, is the imperative I identified or that of my possible detractor absolute?  It certainly feels instinctively correct, in the first instance, to consider minimise harm as an absolute right.  The opposite, maximise harm, feels like an absolute wrong.  Obey the law is more questionable, not just because it is my detractor’s position but also because “the law” is indistinct.  Not all laws are equal, some laws are counterintuitive (if not actually contradictory) and legislation is subject to change.  Additionally, laws are not necessarily moral themselves, for example the laws governing the keeping of slaves in South Carolina mandated the flogging of escaped slaves on their recapture.  As stated, obey the law cannot be an absolute moral imperative if it is possible that the law which one is being exhorted to obey is itself immoral.  The fact that a proposed moral imperative is not absolute is, however, not proof that there are no absolute moral imperatives.

  Virtues do feel more absolute as a class, so long as one agrees with their individual derivation.  That is to say, once I agree that courage, altruism and wisdom are virtues and meddling is a vice, they remain so irrespective of context.  However, when one looks closer problems are exposed.  When does courage become recklessness, or altruism fecklessness?  What exactly constitutes meddling, since meddling is unwarranted interference – how much interference is warranted?  Who decides what is wise?  Surely these are all based on prudent judgements which must be made in context, thus making it impossible to consider these virtues as truly absolute.  Prudence itself is considered a virtue, but is more accurately described as a meta-virtue since prudence is an ability which is applied in order to determine what actions contain the right blend of virtues under the prevailing circumstances rather than being a virtue itself.  The associated moral virtue is making prudent decisions (or acting prudently) and even this virtue is balanced against a negative quality which could be characterised as timidity.

On retrospect, it should come as no surprise that virtues should be poor candidates for absolutes.  Dogmatically derived virtues are considered to be virtues because they are held to be good qualities, begging the question of what constitutes a good quality.  The determination of a good quality could be entirely arbitrary, as could the “correct” balance of opposed virtues and vices.  Empirically derived virtues are subjective, based on the nature of people one takes to be admirable.

I still have one moral imperative which seems like it might be an absolute, the injunction to minimise harm.  There is a question which remains open, that being whether one is obliged to obey a moral imperative.  This may sound nonsensical given that a moral imperative is effectively a moral obligation, but the question does not revolve around the implication that a moral imperative is obligatory if one wishes to be moral, but rather the assumption that there is an obligation to be moral.  In a sense there is a moral obligation to be moral, but this is circular in the extreme, it is an obligation which locks you into morality once you have been convinced that you should be moral – and returns you to morality after you have strayed.  One must first, however, be bootstrapped into that commitment to morality.

Another implication of the question regarding the obligation to be moral is whether there can be absolute morals if there is no absolute obligation to be moral, and whether that is logically consistent.  I can illustrate the latter conundrum by comparing it to an imaginary list of by-laws, which could possibly be posted on signs along the pathways through the park along which I was walking my dogs the evening that I saved the dog:

·                     Rule 1 – All dogs must be on the leash at all times and under all circumstances

·                     Rule 2 – Without exception, all droppings must be collected and placed in the bins provided

·                     Rule 3 – Dogs are never permitted to leave the paths

·                     Rule 4 – None of these rules need to be obeyed

There is completely no power vested in the first three rules, which can be compared with absolute imperatives, because the fourth indicates that there is no obligation to follow them.  Rule 4 could be reworded to “These rules can sometimes be disobeyed”, but this has the effect of making the apparently absolute imperatives arbitrary.  With “These rules can be disobeyed in dire circumstances” the rules are, by extension, conditional on context and no longer absolute.

A semi-paradox ensues if Rule 4 reads “None of these rules are ever to be obeyed” since if you disobey the first three rules, then you are obeying Rule 4, which means you are disobeying Rule 4.  It’s a semi-paradox because you can escape by simply ignoring Rule 4.  However, if you ignore one rule, why not ignore them all?  You can ignore the first three rules and act according to your own will without a need to worry about obeying/disobeying the paradoxical Rule 4 since you are ignoring it along with the others.

The only logically consistent rewrite of Rule 4 is “All of these rules must be obeyed at all times”.  The problem is that, while making them a satisfying set of rules, the rewording of Rule 4 does not make it any more binding than the previous three.  You only are obliged to obey Rule 4 if there is an inherent absolute obligation to obey rules in general, in which case an “obey the rules” rule is redundant.  If there is no absolute obligation to obey any rules, that obligation will extend to rules about obeying rules, making such a Rule 4 redundant.

Unless there is an absolute obligation to be moral, there is no real power in moral imperatives, even if they are absolute.  If the search for absolute moral imperatives is going to be of value two options present themselves: identify an absolute obligation to be moral or assume that there is a yet to be identified absolute obligation to be moral.  For the purposes of this discussion, let us temporarily assume that there is an absolute obligation to be moral so long as there appear to be possible absolute moral imperatives.

The moral imperative to minimise harm, as previously discussed appears to be absolute.  However, even if this were factually true, then I would still only be obliged to prevent as much harm as I was able to predict.  This would present me with a problem because, being human, I have only limited predictive powers.  Whose harm should I minimise?  That of the escaped dog, that of my dogs, my own, that of the woman who was afraid of dogs or perhaps that of drivers in the area?  Quite possibly the escaped dog, if I didn’t intervene, was going to curl up in the front yard of its home and await the return of its owners.  Therefore, my actions would have done nothing but increase the likelihood of harm: by potentially damaging myself, the mildly cynophobic woman, my dogs and any driver who had to contend with two Huskies running amok.  Even if the moral imperative were absolute, its application would be relative – relative to my ability to gauge the situation and act accordingly. 

So far, we’ve only considered a single moral imperative.

If I were to consider obey the law to be another valid absolute moral imperative, then I would be presented with a choice between moral imperatives.  Is it correct to: obey the law unless to do so is inconsistent with minimising harm; or act so as to minimise harm unless to do so is inconsistent with obeying the law?

Simple moral imperatives, it seems, do not appear to be absolute. 

It may, theoretically, be possible that the construction of a  single, complex moral imperative from a number of simple moral imperatives would result in one absolute moral imperative, but attempts to frame such a composite moral imperative quickly dissolve into confusion.  How does one reconcile differing forms of harm across a range of different subjects in concert with various forms of law?  Perhaps obey criminal law unless to do so is inconsistent with a high likelihood of minimising harm to many humans in the long term or a smaller number of humans in the short term or with minimising harm to a very large number of animals which humans generally hold to be more important than others, unless the act necessary to minimise harm to those animals, as well as being contrary to criminal law will have more than a moderate likelihood of causing harm to humans … but of course, this wording is already relative, I’ve not even managed to move beyond criminal law or distinguish between physical and emotional harm – and I’ve only considered two moral imperatives.  As we start adding more moral imperatives, it soon becomes impossible to clearly determine the morally correct course of action in even the most simple of situations.

So, virtues don’t lend themselves to absolute morality and there’s no obvious method by which one might derive an absolute morality from simple moral imperatives, even if those imperatives are absolute in and of themselves.

In my dog saving scenario, there was no feasible absolute morality that I could appeal to in order to guide my actions.  The only moral imperative that appears to be applicable and has even the remotest possibility of being absolute, minimise harm, can’t be applied absolutely because it’s subject to my interpretation of what constitutes minimum harm.

It seems to me that moral absolutism is inherently irrational, because there is no viable foundation on which an absolute morality could be constructed.  The only type of scenario in which moral absolutism would not be irrational is one in which there is a clearly expressed set of binding moral imperatives which must be obeyed by everyone at all times without exception.  Unfortunately, such a set of rules does not exist.

Or, as it would perhaps be more accurate to say: Fortunately, such a set of rules does not exist.

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This article is the first of two preludes to a series of articles tagged "Morality as Playing Games", the other two are Being Bad and The Problem with Sam.