Eve responds to my post on morality without God, and is not entirely convinced:
I do think they’re right to say you can’t get teleology from undirected nature–you need a Creator–and that most moral arguments do rely on teleology. Most moral arguments rely on an account of human nature which is about what humans should be, not what humans demonstrably are. In fact I’m not sure how you’d get a moral, “should” argument from a bare evidentiary “are” claim.
I think that the problem here is the assumption that, if you say nature as a whole has no direction, nothing within nature can have a direction. But I don’t believe that’s the case.
Consider how your existence started out: as DNA. It was not you, but it set you on a certain course. You progressed from being a zygote to a fetus to a baby to child and so on until you eventually grow old and die. Various things can influence, frustrate or even halt this process, of course. But the point is, it doesn’t just proceed randomly with no direction. You don’t have an equal chance of waking up tomorrow being physically a day older, and waking up having regressed to age six.
Also, to say that it’s natural is not to say that it doesn’t take work. You can’t just sit there like a plant, and grow. At the very least, you have to feed yourself, and protect yourself from the elements and so on. You have a drive to do these things, and wherever you have a drive, you have goals. You want things to be a certain way that they are not right now. And so, being human isn’t a fixed state, it is a process of becoming. That process is itself largely fixed, but it also takes some effort on your part.
There’s also a mental component to the process, and this is where we get to the matter at hand. If I had to posit a single source of a secular-humanist telos, it would be the assumption that the human mind is also set on a certain course from birth, but it is likewise a fragile process that requires some work to fully develop. And so, we get norms: there are some actions you can take that further this course, and others that pervert it. As with getting food (for most of humanity anyway), this can be difficult and frustrating, and the satisfactions only temporary. But still, the course is there.
The experience I described in the last post — seeing yourself, and judging yourself, as if you were another person — is a case in point. This capacity is something that babies don’t have, and that children develop only gradually. It takes effort, it competes with your other desires, and a few people seem never to develop it at all. That doesn’t make it unnatural, just difficult. But the very fact that it’s a struggle gives it direction. You can’t just sit there like a plant, and be just; you have to aim for justice.
Also, though I’m talking about individuals here, there’s nothing to say that groups can’t have a natural telos. Ant colonies, for instance, have life cycles resembling those of single organisms. Since people are also social beings, it’s reasonable to think such things happen with human societies as well, though it may be difficult to tell while it’s happening. So, it’s possible to have secular versions of these, “Is society headed the right way?” types of discussions.
I think that may relate to Eve’s question later in the post: “But within this human-scale morality, can we ever say you should love someone you don’t? Can we say to the Spartan citizen that he should see himself in the face of the helot?” That’s an interesting question, because I think most of us have a very unmystical familiarity with the feeling that we ought to love, or at least like, someone we don’t: a difficult relative, usually, or someone that everyone else seems to love but who just doesn’t do it for us. If that mandate doesn’t come directly from heaven, it generally comes from an ideal vision of social relationships: families love each other, friends like each other’s friends, etc. It’s also, I suspect, just a matter of identity: we are who our people are, so finding someone unlikeable within one’s group can be as distressing as finding someone unlikable in the mirror.
Now, the second part of Eve’s question: how do you convince someone to love someone who’s not in his group? The type of instinctive empathy I wrote about earlier does depend on an assumption of similarity, which is why a great way to start a fight among scientific materialists is to start talking about innate group differences (between genders, races, or whatever). Still, the funny thing about our modern world is that, although we encounter a lot more outsiders than in the past, this also makes us more likely to be outsiders in some situations, and so paradoxically identify with people precisely because of their otherness.
But really, the honest answer to what I’d say to Spartan is: I don’t know. Like I said before, I’m not saying this is the most fabulous grounding for a moral code. Because natural selection is about good-enough rather than perfection, it’s possible that human moral capacity has a very low ceiling. There’s also an obvious limit to how much justice we, as humans, can enact, which is why I find Marvin’s reason for believing rather more powerful than Fish’s. I’m also not saying it allows you to persuade nonbelievers of whatever you want; I don’t doubt that, to agree with every point of Catholic morality, you have to convert to Catholicism. What I am doubting, though, is Fish’s contention that there’s no way for a truly consistent scientific materialists to have morals. You might disagree with them, but there is something to disagree with.