Recovering a Lost Morality
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, January 29, 2006
John Crowley
Opening Words/Call to Worship:
The Rev. Georgette Wonders of the UU church in Kenosha has spoken here at
Prairie Circle. In one of her first sermons in Kenosha, she told her
congregation that for much of her life she has been struggling with the question
of a basis for ethics, for action, for religious belief - for all our moral
judgments. "How do we decide what is good? How do we decide what is
right?" she asked.1,2 Rev. Wonders' words at that time continue
to resonate with me, as I, too, have long struggled with this difficult
question.
The inspiration for today's service is found in these words by the Rev. John Cummins, speaking for himself and his congregation:
"May this ministry, gifted with inner light, always look beyond itself with that divine discontent which will never rest until every child of earth is increasingly free from all prisons of the mind and the body and the spirit; until all goodness, justice, and mercy cover the earth as the waters cover the sea."3 (Emphasis added.)
We in the Western world have been made prisoners of the mind and the spirit by an unnatural and corrupting ethic: a system of ethics which a small handful of well-intentioned but misguided moral philosophers founded in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period and which has evolved since then; an ethic that in its present form is deeply mistaken; that corrupts our sense of justice; that burdens and confuses us; and that obscures our vision of what is morally valuable in itself, what we should truly admire or love, and most importantly, what it is good to be.4
Let us take steps to free ourselves of this
burden. And in Reverend Cummins' words, may we never rest until the other
children of earth discover that they, too, can be free, and that all goodness,
justice, and mercy can cover the earth as the waters cover the sea!
Sermon:
Our Unitarian Universalist faith urges us "To affirm and promote the goal
of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all." We ask:
"Can the world ever be like this?" I suggested earlier that we in the
Western world have been made unwitting prisoners of the mind and the spirit by
an unnatural and deeply mistaken ethic - an ethic that corrupts justice itself.
A sense of justice is the cornerstone of every morality and therefore of every
society, whether religious, tribal or secular.5 Today, peoples
everywhere cry out for justice. "Is there… can there be," we ask,
"some uniform sense of justice that all peoples share? What can we offer
them… and ourselves?
Philosophy has gotten bad press - it never gives us concrete answers. But when arguments turn on contentious principles such as justice, fairness and moral truth, philosophy won't go away. Shut the door, and back it comes through the window. It's true that philosophy guarantees no answers. But it does offer us the wherewithal to recognize genuine answers when they appear.
Krishnamurti once remarked that the path toward enlightenment and truth - the one "right" path - is rarely visible to us. Only the many wrong paths are.6
Ancient Greek philosophers thought that our rational faculty - logos, mind, reason - was the key to discovering or constructing a universal morality. But Nietzsche and others have pointed out that we are born into a chaotic universe, not one governed by rational laws as once thought. Perhaps moral philosophers had been looking through the wrong eyes all these years and in the wrong place.
Indeed, late in the last century most philosophers gave up on the idea of ever finding a universal ethic. They concluded that there was no single, coherent morality recognizable by reason which peoples everywhere could rely upon to guide their lives and settle their moral differences. Like the mythical fountain of youth, a universal ethic based in reason didn't exist, they said.7
The truth is, in today's world we have no recognizable common moral compass, yet we keep acting as though we did. We're engaged in an unending cultural war, a war about values. Disputes continue to rage over such issues as capital punishment, abortion, stem cell research, gun control, discrimination, the gap between rich and poor, peace versus war, preserving the environment, and reconciling science and religion. Such disputes are rationally interminable; they can never be settled satisfactorily because we possess no rational way of weighing or deciding among the claims of any one side versus another.8 People go on arguing moral issues from fundamentally irreconcilable premises, each side believing or pretending as though there were some objective and impersonal ethical norms somewhere - or deep inside us as part of our nature - that all should recognize and embrace.9
Thus we are burdened, conflicted, confused, and in perpetual crisis - a crisis felt but not understood, a crisis in morality, a crisis in justice and a crisis in trust. Looking about us, we see there are a number of differing moralities rooted in various places in our culture, some ethnic or religious based on following prescribed sets of rules, such as written on scrolls or stone tablets. Some secular, invoking duty, patriotism, the rule of law, or the notion of a social contract. These rival moralities compete with each other for our allegiance, and often lead to different and conflicting answers. We become confused and burdened. Our society has a morality crisis, a crisis felt but not understood, a crisis in justice and a crisis in trust.
One of these rival and competing moralities stands out as dominant in the secular West. It is most influential in the English-speaking countries. It's known as consequentialism. Consequentialism lies at the core of our society's moral crisis, and it fuels that crisis. As such, it stands as a serious obstacle to ever attaining Unitarian Universalist goals and aspirations. It directly challenges us and much of what we stand for. We will look at it closely so that we can avoid its seductive logic and its moral turpitude.
Consequentialism as a theory of morality is the view that the moral value of an action - whether an action is morally right - derives entirely from the value of its consequences, its outcome, its results. If you think about it, consequentialism strongly implies that the end justifies the means. Now if you were raised in the Jewish, Christian or Islamic tradition, you know these traditions teach that in moral affairs - in moral issues - the outcome we may desire, no matter how attractive it appears to us or how good it may be, cannot justify an evil means. The apostle Paul said: "For those who say 'Let us do evil so that good may come,' they deserve God's condemnation!"10 Why did Paul say this? Because if acts such as torture, assassination, ethnic cleansing, and treachery are made acceptable depending on whether they would lead to a favorable result, then all preexisting ideals, such as Jesus' teachings, even basic human rights, come off the table.11 Even our dearest convictions, the idea that all people are created equal, that they have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - consequentialist ethics gravely endangers them all.
We'll look at some examples in a moment, but first I should mention that consequentialism takes two major forms, pragmatism and utilitarianism. Pragmatism is the theory of morality which looks beyond any prior notions of truth, goodness or meaning and determines the rightness or wrongness of an action entirely according to its practical effects. Pragmatism says, if it works, it's good.
Pragmatism has value in human society. In democratic consensus-building processes, such as negotiating a peace agreement, all parties normally want to find something that works, a solution that is satisfactory to all, that all feel is fair and just. This is pragmatism at its best.
But there is a dark side to pragmatism, as you will see in the examples that follow. These are examples of ethical pragmatism. As you think about them, please bear in mind that pragmatism in ethics employs the same reasoning process that we use legitimately in everyday practical affairs when we make non-moral decisions - as homemakers, teachers, parents, consumers. My shoe has a loose sole. I repair it with contact cement. It works, so I say this is "good." We look for what works best in a situation, and we do it. We're deciding and acting this way much of the time: if it works, it's "good." But if we use the same logic in the moral arena, doing what works, we can wind up in quicksand.12 The examples:
How did our culture become this way? Surprisingly, consequentialism as a theory of ethics is less than 300 years old, although its roots trace back to Machiavelli. Early in the 1700s a handful of Scottish and English moral philosophers thought that the logic of consequentialism, which as we have seen we use regularly and appropriately in our everyday practical lives, could also serve as the foundation for a new morality. They wanted to replace the earlier rule-based moralities of kings and popes with something more effective in controlling men's passions. Unfortunately, they had gravely mistaken assumptions,13 and there was no academic history, sociology, anthropology or psychology at the time by which these assumptions could be tested. Such figures as Butler, Rousseau and Kant challenged the new theory, but these challenges failed to persuade.
Meanwhile, ordinary folks came to realize intuitively that consequentialist ethics, such as pragmatism, rides roughshod over our fundamental moral sensibilities, and it can't consistently differentiate between right and wrong. This insight came too late. Consequentialist ethics had become the norm in economics, in government, in the business world, in our social institutions, and even in medicine. Ideas of a universal, normative concept of justice and principles of goodness became eclipsed or abandoned. Consequentialism had driven them into exile and put in their place a recipe for moral depravity.14
Here is how the theory falls apart. We'll look first at pragmatism. People everywhere use a ruler, or a tape measure, to find out if something is too long, too short, or just right. The ruler works - it's a useful tool. Similarly, any theory of morality, to be useful and valid, has to be able to distinguish between what is moral and what is not. Pragmatism cannot do this. One of Plato's characters, a foil for Socrates, defines justice this way: justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies.15 Pragmatism has no difficulty with this, if helping my friends and harming my enemies works out favorably for me in practice. The problem is, pragmatism admits this idea of justice no less easily than it does ideas that stand in opposition to it, such as the Golden Rule. Why? Because getting a favorable outcome is pragmatism's litmus test for moral rightness. In this example pragmatism cannot differentiate between two conflicting ideas of justice, one patently immoral ("help your friends and harm your enemies"), the other moral ("do unto others as you would have them do unto you"). Pragmatism as a moral theory, when called upon to distinguish between right and wrong, therefore fails by its own standard for moral rightness -the theory itself doesn't do what it claims to do. Unlike the trusty ruler or tape measure, pragmatism itself doesn't work! This flaw is fatal to the theory.
As a theory of morality, then, pragmatism is bogus. Since few people understand this, many continue to be misled by those who wish to deceive us into something immoral. Here's how the deception plays out, typically. Let's suppose I'm a political leader or a corporate CEO. (I'm neither, never have been, and wouldn't want to be.) First I calculate what I want to happen in a particular situation, the outcome, the result. Then I try to steer others to look at the situation in terms of the outcome I desire. In other words I portray the results I want to achieve in the most favorable terms, using seemingly-rational, pragmatic arguments that will effectively persuade others to agree with me. I get them hooked on pragmatism's familiar logic so they'll overlook my immoral premises. The Nazi leaders duped the German people in this way. And America's leaders in 1945 told the people: "You wanted us to end this war soon, didn't you? That's why we had to nuke Hiroshima." Favorable result: ending the war early. Evil means: incinerating tens of thousands of civilians.
Pragmatism's twin, utilitarianism, is the theory that the right choice in a situation calling for moral judgment is the one that maximizes total or average utility, welfare or "happiness." It seeks "the greatest good for the greatest number." It strives for equity in the distribution of scarce resources, and as such it is the underlying ethic of modern economics and cost/benefit analysis. But as a theory of morality it is no less flawed than pragmatism.16 Contrast these two hypothetical examples, which highlight the problem of double effect:
Research with subjects shows that most would agree that, in the first example, the worker should throw the switch, but in the second example the surgeon should not seize the healthy person and kill him to excise his organs.17 Like pragmatism, utilitarianism cannot reliably differentiate between a patently moral and a patently immoral action.
Utilitarianism has been criticized on other grounds: the practical difficulty of adhering to the principle that the welfare or good of any one individual is of no more importance than the welfare or good of any other and there are no other basic ethical considerations besides this first one; that it tends to leave out justice because it tends to sacrifice one man's interest to the aggregate; that the theory forces us to consider the world from a perspective outside our own lives, and that therefore to define right action only by reference to whether it produces a good state of affairs necessitates a fundamental clash between an agent's moral character and that allegedly right action -- thus utilitarianism creates a double standard and the moral agent becomes conflicted, which conflict directly leads to the extirpation of the agent's moral character from any utilitarian standard of right action.
This last example of consequentialism has strong utilitarian undertones:
Over the past 2-1/2 years, the ABC News/Washington Post pollsters have been asking people this question: "All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war with Iraq was worth fighting or not?"
"Was the war worth fighting?" the pollsters ask.
In 101 A.D. the Roman emperor Trajan opened the Dacian wars. The kingdom of Dacia, today modern Romania, was rich in mineral wealth, especially gold. Rome conquered Dacia and made it a province. Now if any of us could have asked the typical Roman soldier returning from battle whether the Dacian campaign was worth fighting, he may have answered something like this: "I killed three Dacian spear throwers and was honored by my legion. I took a Dacian wife and two slaves. The Emperor gave me land, money, and a fast track to Roman citizenship. For its part, the Empire got 50,000 captives, 1.5 billion denarii and the gold mines.18 I can live with this shoulder wound. Of course the war was worth it."
We return to the original question. Justice is the cornerstone of morality, and as Unitarian Universalists we yearn to create a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.19,20 If philosophers have been looking through the wrong eyes and in the wrong places, how and where else can we look?
Recent research in the cognitive sciences, building on moral philosophy, may have made it possible to resolve the ancient dispute about the origin and nature of morality. Studies in evolutionary psychology point to a striking revelation: we humans are hard-wired in our DNA not for logic, but for detecting injustice. Logic and reason do not lie at the heart of human society. Instead, trust and the detection and punishment of injustice do. They are so important that people will actually harm their own short-term interests to punish those they regard as behaving unfairly. The studies suggest further, as one researcher puts it, that "we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong, interacting in a variety of ways with the local culture."21,22 This insight is fatal to consequentialist ethics, which cannot reconcile an agent's prior moral feelings, inclinations or convictions with the goal of maximum utility, welfare or result.23 Philosophers, it turns out, had been searching for universal rules or formulas when they should have been searching for universal dispositions - dispositions or inclinations to feel and to act in particular ways.24
Anthropology supports these findings. Cultural anthropologists are always looking for the sacred in human community. They see that when there is trust, trust engenders love and the two reinforce each other. They see there was something about nomadic forager societies, gatherer-hunter bands and tribes, something that was both functional and sacred - whatever they did just worked for them, both materially and spiritually.
Christopher Columbus and later European explorers, on first contact with the New World's peoples, saw them as virtuous and mild, gifted with a natural intelligence, egalitarian, generous, friendly, and trusting. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists found these same qualities in some of the pre-modern societies they studied, such as in Africa, Australia and Polynesia. Many of these societies were non-hierarchical, the people including the chiefs were mutually dependent on one another, crimes of passion were rare, and they had no codified moral rules. They placed enormous value on family and community.
There's an estimate that 99% of our human ancestors lived free of the kinds of hierarchical social structures of domination and control that characterize what we call civilization. We're genetically wired the same way they were. We are endowed by nature with the same moral faculty that our ancestors had, except civilization's complexities may have obscured this faculty from our conscious awareness. How can we reconnect with it?
"Take courage," said Pythagoras, "The human race is divine."
Some individuals - Jane Austen, Søren Kierkegaard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to name a few - each in their own way have been able to see how when we rationalize our moral judgments we alienate ourselves from our fundamental moral sensibilities and we must not allow this to happen.
Last November, Congressman John Murtha and decorated ex-Marine, tears in his eyes after visiting wounded soldiers in their hospital beds, reversed himself and went public, saying America's war in Iraq was "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion" and the U.S. should immediately bring its troops home.
Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mahatma Gandhi, Congressman Murtha and others, let us penetrate the deception all around us that would distort our moral vision. Let us look very deeply within ourselves, not with reason but with our hearts, not for standards of goodness but for the innate human impulse toward goodness.25 When we are able to trust, love, and play with one another again in beloved community we will know we are drawing nearer. Then shall we take courage that we are at last on the sacred path in "the ancient journey of the soul back to its source, from separation back to union with the Divine."
Closing Words:
"We together - or any one of us - can in principle return at any time to
our true nature, wild, whole and free. This, it seems to me, has been the
message of every true prophet. Whether through acquaintance with our 'inner
child,' through meditation, through wordless play with small children or
animals, or through a deep encounter with the wilderness, we can choose to
activate the part of ourselves that still remembers how to feel, love, and
wonder…
"We share a sense of possibility, an assurance that we do not have to invent Paradise so much as to return to it - an assurance that at our core we are pure, brilliant, and innocent beings. Our task is not to create ever more elaborate global structures to enforce social and environmental justice (though I sympathize with the motives of people who work toward that end), but to strip away the artificiality that separates us from the magical simplicity that is our birthright."26
Endnotes:
1 - Rev. Georgette Wonders, The Days
of Awe, Sunday service sermon given on September 15, 2002.
2 - The form of the question "How do we decide…?" implies that we arrive at moral truth by way of a mental, intellectual or cognitive process or activity. In fact, the knowing of moral truth involves "not only the intellectual knowing of the mind, but also the emotional and empathic knowing of the heart, the sensual and somatic knowing of the body, and the visionary and intuitive knowing of the soul…" Jorge Ferrer, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, 2002. SUNY Press, p. 121.
3 - "A Prayer for All True Ministry" by Rev. John Cummins, taken from the UUA Worship Web. Source: 1997 UUMA Worship Materials Collection
4 - Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 1989. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 23, 49, 76-86.
5 - Plato's project in the Republic has
been called "a justification of justice." Alasdair MacIntyre, A
Short History of Ethics, New York: Macmillan, 1966, Touchstone edition,
1996, p. 48. The abiding concern of the Republic is justice conceived as
one's own good versus justice conceived as the common good. Alan Bloom, ed., The
Republic of Plato, 1968. Basic Books, Interpretive Essay p. 317. Justice for
Aristotle occupies a key position among the virtues: justice is given force by
practical reasoning, and no one can be practically rational who is not just. For
Aristotle, it is impossible to judge justly, and consequently impossible to act
justly, unless one can also judge correctly in respect of the whole range of
virtues. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University
of Notre Dame Press, 1988, pp. 103, 106.
Socrates' portrayal in the Republic (ref: §503b-540c) of the perfect
society founded in a uniform conception of justice is revealed to be a perfect
impossibility. The thinkers of the Enlightenment through Kant and Marx preserved
Socrates' goals but forgot his insistence that nature made them impossible for
men at large. Bloom 1968, p. 441.
6 - J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known, 1969. New York: Harper & Row.
7 - Perhaps the most prominent philosopher in America who has articulated this view is Richard Rorty. He says, "The ideal of philosophical ability is to see the entire universe of possible assertions in all their inferential relationships to one another, and thus to be able to construct, or criticize, any argument." Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, 1982, p. 219. Rorty denies that there is anything like a "core self" or an inherently human quality. Therefore, he asserts, there is no way for us to say that some actions are inherently inhuman - there can be no universally answer to the question, "Why not be cruel?" Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. xv, 189.
8 - Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 8.
9 - MacIntyre 1984, p.2, pp. 6-11. MacIntyre concludes: "Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable" (p. 11).
10 - Romans 3:8
11 - Exception: "rule" utilitarianism permits a particular act on a particular occasion to be adjudged right or wrong according to whether it is in accordance with or in violation of a useful rule; and a rule is judged useful or not by the consequences of its general practice. J.S. Mill has sometimes been interpreted as a "rule" utilitarian, whereas Jeremy Bentham and Henry Sidgwick were "act" utilitarians.
12 - The assumption that the same presuppositions and evaluative processes for the making of non-moral judgments in the world of everyday life are valid when making moral judgments is reductionist. In analytic philosophy, a reductionist holds that the facts or entities apparently needed to make true the statements of some area of discourse are dispensable in favor of some other facts or entities. Reductionism is not necessarily error; however the person making a reductionist argument bears the burden to show that it is not.
13 - Influenced by the Newtonian science of their time, they began with a purely instrumental view of the physical world which only recognizes efficient causes and which led them to argue that the standard of moral goodness was the promotion of happiness of others. They rejected the Aristotelian idea of telos, a purposeful life directed toward a final cause, "the good for man." They also rejected the idea of given moral truths, such as contained in sacred scripture or tradition, in favor of the Gnostic idea that the unguided individual has an innate knowledge of what is good (cf. "moral sense"). Influenced by the trend toward radical individualism which arose in the 12th century, they succumbed to the notion of the primacy of the individual, that the individual is sovereign in the making of moral judgments abstracted from the society in which the individual is embedded. Finally, they compounded the Greeks' error in believing that we are primarily rational beings living in an orderly cosmos. Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza laid the foundation for consequentialism; Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith built upon it, climaxing in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, and the pragmatism of C.S. Pierce, William James and John Dewey.
14 - In Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2000), author Jonathan Glover sets out a terrible indictment of war and other atrocities in the 20th century. Example after example testifies to the failure of consequentialism - by then long established in the Western world - as a normative system providing a standard by which an individual ought to act and by which the existing practices of society, including its moral code, ought to be evaluated and improved.
15 - Republic 331d - 336a. The speaker is Polemarchus.
16 - Consequentialism in both its versions, pragmatism and utilitarianism, collapsed during the 20th century into emotivism. It was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who brought to a conclusive end the 2000+-year search for universal moral truths grounded in human reason, "natural law," "intuition," or some innate "moral sense," the search which in the West probably began with Protagoras (c. 490-c. 421 BCE). In his After Virtue (ref: Note 8), Alasdair MacIntyre, citing Nietzsche (ref: The Gay Science §335), argues that all theories of ethics grounded in the 17th-18th century "Enlightenment project," when deconstructed, collapse into emotivism. Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments -- more specifically all moral judgments -- are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character (After Virtue,p. 12). MacIntyre summarizes the underlying structure of Nietzsche's argument as follows: "If there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness of the greatest number" (After Virtue, p. 113). Support today for Nietzsche's striking conclusion can be found in history, cultural anthropology, evolutionary psychology, depth (archetypal) psychology, and neuroscience.
17 - Marc Hauser & Peter Singer, "Morality Without Religion." Free Inquiry, Dec. 2005/Jan 2006, p. 18. Hauser and Singer make the point that their subjects chose the utilitarian outcome in the first case (the worker should throw the trolley car switch) but rejected it in the second case (they opined that the surgeon should not kill the healthy person for his organs).
18 - Kenneth W. Harl, Tulane University, Rome and the Barbarians, 2004. The Teaching Company. Notes to Lecture 24 "Trajan, the Dacians, and the Parthians."
19 - Contemporary moral/political philosopher John Rawls is not optimistic: "Given the fact of reasonable pluralism, a well-ordered society in which all its members accept the same comprehensive doctrine is impossible…" "Thus I believe that a democratic society is not and cannot be a community, where by a community I mean a body of persons united in affirming the same comprehensive, or partially comprehensive, doctrine. The fact of reasonable pluralism which characterizes a society with free institutions makes this impossible. This is the fact of profound and irreconcilable differences in citizens' reasonable comprehensive religious and philosophical conceptions of the world, and in their views of the moral and aesthetic values to be sought in human life…" "We must abandon the conception of social unity founded in the ideal of a political society united on one (partially or fully) comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine. That conception of social unity is excluded by the fact of reasonable pluralism. It is no longer a political possibility for those who accept the basic liberties and the principle of toleration that are basic to democratic institutions. We must view social unity in a different way: as deriving from an overlapping consensus on a political conception of justice. As we have seen, in such a consensus this political conception is affirmed by citizens who hold different and conflicting comprehensive doctrines, and they affirm it from within their own distinct views. Political liberalism holds that this provides a sufficient as well as the most reasonable basis of social unity available to us as citizens of a democratic society." John Rawls, Justice As Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 2001, pp. 3, 9, 81, 198-199.
20 - Dr. Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool studied two dozen species of primates and found that for each, there was a specific average group or community size. This size was a function of what he called the neocortex ratio, a measurement of the brain's physical size. He found that as the ratio increases, community sizes grow. Analyzing the size of human brains, and extrapolating from the two dozen primates he studied, Dr. Dunbar concluded that the largest community or group within which a human should be able to maintain consistent relationships was 150 people. Indeed, looking out at the world of human interactions, he found that a number over and over again as typical clan sizes - from Australian Aborigines to Native Americans. Even Brigham Young, when he was organizing the first Mormon communities in Utah, "divided [his early Mormon followers] into smaller groups that could operate independently of each other and coordinate the activities of their members with maximum efficiency." The group size Young chose was 150 people. This is also consistent with the observation that communism (with a small "c") works well on an Israeli kibbutz with 100 residents, but failed in the Soviet Union with 262 million people… Dr. Dunbar's research suggests that we have the ability to know and maintain relationships with up to 150 people, but our brains can't handle more than that. Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, 2002, pp. 33-34.
21 - There is much recent work in the field of evolutionary psychology aimed at understanding the roots of moral inclination and moral behavior. See, for example: Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, 1994; and James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 1993.
22 - Samuel M. McClure, David I. Laibson, George Loewenstein, and Jonathan D. Cohen, "Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards," Science, October 15, 2004, pp. 503-507. Discussed in: "Why Logic Often Takes a Backseat: The study of neuroeconomics may topple the notion of rational decision-making," Business Week, March 28, 2005; "Can studying the human brain revolutionise economics?" The Economist, January 15, 2005, p. 71; "Human Evolution: The Concrete Savannah: Evolution and the Modern World." The Economist, December 24th, 2005, pp. 9-11; Marc Hauser and Peter Singer, "Morality Without Religion." Free Inquiry, Dec. 2005-Jan. 2006, p. 18. Such research supports the idea held by figures such as Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Lacan and Kristeva that our real motives often are unconscious, and human behavior is, for the most part, determinate.
23 - Utilitarianism purports to take no cognizance of a man's conscience before or after his having performed the utilitarian act. Moral feelings are viewed as extraneous irrational states that do not figure into the calculation of the best state of affairs. Like the irrelevance of the agent's identity, the irrelevance of his moral feelings flows logically from the primacy of states of affairs. But in practice utilitarianism finds that it must attempt to smuggle into its calculus the agent's non-utilitarian-based moral feelings. It must do this in order to get the agent to act. That is, because the agent resists compromising his moral integrity, utilitarianism must somehow attempt to compensate for the influence of his moral inclinations while maintaining its viability as a moral theory. But in smuggling in non-utilitarian-based moral feelings, utilitarianism's own principle of impartiality toward the agent is violated. In principle, the utilitarian may only make the calculation of the best state of affairs and then passively accept without evaluation what the agent chooses. In principle, any evaluation of the agent destroys the alleged impartiality utilitarianism claims as its central principle. This, of course, makes utilitarianism a completely impracticable code of ethics, because it demands the agent's self-destruction (and utilitarianism's self-defeat). Neil Erian, "Off the Precipice into the Gorge: Why Utilitarianism Can't Save Us," Fordham University Symposium, spring 2003.
24 - Contemporary political philosopher James Q. Wilson argues that there is a universal "moral sense." For Wilson, people's natural moral sense is formed out of the interaction of their innate dispositions with their earliest familial experiences, and it emerges as naturally as their sense of beauty or ritual. The innate dispositions that underlie people's natural moral sense are universal. Wilson 1993, pp. 2, 25, 225. Alasdair MacIntyre condemns the generally understood meaning of "virtue" as a disposition or sentiment which will produce in us obedience to certain rules, and that agreement on what the relevant rules are to be is always a prerequisite for agreement upon the nature and content of a particular virtue. But, MacIntyre points out, prior agreement on which rules to follow is "something which our individualist culture is unable to secure," and "Nowhere is this (inability) more marked and nowhere are the consequences more threatening than in the case of justice." MacIntyre's conception of true virtue is Aristotelian. He writes: "The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good." MacIntyre 1984, pp. 244-246, p 219.
25 - Aristotle held that all human activity is by nature directed toward an end which he called "the good for man," the "good" being "that at which all things aim" and which for Aristotle is happiness. Ethics, I-1, I-7. Hobbes' rejection of the Aristotelian telos was perhaps the laying of the first brick in the edifice that became consequentialist ethics. Evidence from the cognitive sciences (see notes 21 & 22) leans strongly in support of the Aristotelian view or something like it.
26 - "Memories and Visions of Paradise" by Richard Heinberg (1995). From Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, John Zerzan, ed. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2005, p. 196.