To be sure, it doesn’t seem as though people blindly follow the laws of substance in everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another one of those illusions that science is forever exposing. All the social sciences, including anthropology, were founded on the bed-rock metaphysical belief that these physical cause-and-effect laws of human behavior exist. Moral laws, if they can be said to exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with the real nature of the world. A moral person acts conventionally, watches out for the cops, keeps his nose clean, and nothing more.
In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn’t come up. To the extent that one’s behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one’s behavior is free.
The Metaphysics of Quality has much much more to say about ethics, however, than simple resolution of the Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. The Metaphysics of Quality says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.
It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, static patterns of value and moral judgment are identical. The Laws of Nature are moral laws. Of course it sounds peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary to say that hydrogen and oxygen form water because it is moral to do so. But it is no less peculiar and awkward and unnecessary than to say chemistry professors smoke pipes and go to movies because irresistible cause-and-effect forces of the cosmos force them to do it. In the past the logic has been that if chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms and if atoms follow only the law of cause and effect, then chemistry professors must follow the laws of cause and effect too. But this logic can be applied in a reverse direction. We can just as easily deduce the morality of atoms from the observation that chemistry professors are, in general, moral. If chemistry professors exercise choice, and chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise choice too. The difference between these two points of view is philosophic, not scientific. The question of whether an electron does a certain thing because it has to or because it wants to is completely irrelevant to the data of what the electron does.
So what Phædrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they’ve done so because it’s better and that this definition of betterness — this beginning response to Dynamic Quality — is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based.
When this understanding first broke through in Phædrus' mind, that ethics and science had suddenly been integrated into a single system, he became so manic he couldn’t think of anything else for days. The only time he had been more manic about an abstract idea was when he had first hit upon the idea of undefined Quality itself. The consequences of that first mania had been disastrous, and so now, this time, he told himself just to calm down and dig in. It was, for him, a great Dynamic breakthrough, but if he wanted to hang on to it he had better do some static latching as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
13
Latching was what was needed all right. Historically every effort to unite science and ethics has been a disaster. You can’t paste a moral system on top of a pile of amoral objective matter. The amoral objective matter never needs this paste job. It always sloughs it off as superfluous.
But the Metaphysics of Quality doesn’t permit this slough-off. It says, first of all, that amoral objective matter is a low-grade form of morality. No slough-off is possible. It states, second of all, that even if matter weren’t a low grade form of morality there still would be no metaphysical need to show how morals are derived from it. With static patterns of value divided into four systems, conventional moral patterns have almost nothing to do with inorganic or biological nature. These moral patterns are superimposed upon inorganic nature the way novels are superimposed upon computers. They are more commonly opposed to biological patterns than they are supportive of them.
And that is the key to the whole thing.
What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. In the Metaphysics of Quality there’s the morality called the laws of nature, by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the law of the jungle where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, the law; and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society. Each of these sets of moral codes is no more related to the other than novels are to flip-flops.
What is today conventionally called morality covers only one of these sets of moral codes, the social-biological code. In a subject-object metaphysics this single social-biological code is considered to be a minor, subjective, physically non-existent part of the universe. But in the Metaphysics of Quality all these sets of morals, plus another Dynamic morality are not only real, they are the whole thing.
In general, given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution, is more moral. An example of this is the statement that, It’s more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient. The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he’s at a higher level of evolution.
Taken by itself that seems obvious enough. But what’s not so obvious is that, given a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality, it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient. This is not just an arbitrary social convention that should apply to some doctors but not to all doctors, or to some cultures but not all cultures. It’s true for all people at all time, now and forever, a moral pattern of reality as real as H2O. We’re at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before.
In the moral evolutionary conflict between the germ and the patient, the evolutionary spread is enormous and as a result the morality of the situation is obvious. But when the static patterns in conflict are closer the moral force of the situation becomes less obvious.
A popular moral issue that parallels the germ-patient issue is vegetarianism. Is it immoral, as the Hindus and Buddhists claim, to eat the flesh of animals? Our current morality would say it’s immoral only if you’re a Hindu or Buddhist. Otherwise it’s OK, since morality is nothing more than a social convention.
An evolutionary morality, on the other hand, would say it’s scientifically immoral for everyone because animals are at a higher level of evolution, that is, more Dynamic, than are grains and fruits and vegetables. But the moral force of this injunction is not so great because the levels of evolution are closer together than the doctor’s patient and the germ. It would add, also, that this moral principle holds only where there is an abundance of grains and fruits and vegetables. It would be immoral for Hindus not to eat their cows in a time of famine, since they would then be killing human beings in favor of a lower organism.
Because a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality is not tied to substance it is free to consider moral issues at higher evolutionary levels than germs and fruits and vegetables. At these higher levels the issues become more interesting.
Is it scientifically moral for a society to kill a human being? That is a very big moral question still being fought in courts and legislatures all over the world.
An evolutionary morality would at first seem to say yes, a society has a right to murder people to prevent its own destruction. A primitive isolated village threatened by brigands has a moral right and obligation to kill them in self-defense since a village is a hig
her form of evolution. When the United States drafted troops for the Civil War everyone knew that innocent people would be murdered. The North could have permitted the slave states to become independent and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But an evolutionary morality argues that the North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body, and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation. John Brown’s truth was never an abstraction. It still keeps marching on.
When a society is not itself threatened, as in the execution of individual criminals, the issue becomes more complex. In the case of treason or insurrection or war a criminal’s threat to a society can be very real.
But if an established social structure is not seriously threatened by a criminal, then an evolutionary morality would argue that there is no moral justification for killing him.
What makes killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not even just a defective unit of society. Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value. Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.
And beyond that is an even more compelling reason: societies and thoughts and principles themselves are no more than sets of static patterns. These patterns can’t by themselves perceive or adjust to Dynamic Quality. Only a living being can do that. The strongest moral argument against capital punishment is that it weakens a society’s Dynamic capability — its capability for change and evolution. It’s not the nice guys who bring about real social change. Nice guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the bad guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution. That was the real moral lesson of the brujo in Zuni. If those priests had killed him they would have done great harm to their society’s ability to grow and change.
It was tempting to take all the moral conflicts of the world and, one by one, see how they fit this kind of analysis, but Phædrus realized that if he started to get into that he would never finish. Wherever he looked, whatever examples came to mind, he always seemed to be able to lay them out within this framework, and the nature of the conflicts usually seemed to be clearer when he did so.
* * *
And as a matter of fact that looked like the answer to Rigel’s question that had been bugging him all day: Does Lila have Quality?
Biologically she does, socially she doesn’t. Obviously! Evolutionary morality just splits that whole question open like a watermelon. Since biological and social patterns have almost nothing to do with each other, Lila does and Lila does not have quality at the same time. That’s exactly the feeling she gave too — a sort of mixed feeling of quality and no quality at the same time. That was the reason.
How simple it was. That’s the mark of a high-quality theory. It doesn’t just answer the question in some complex round-about way. It dissolves the question, so you wonder why you ever asked it.
Biologically she’s fine, socially she’s pretty far down the scale, intellectually she’s nowhere. But Dynamically… Ah! That’s the one to watch. There’s something ferociously Dynamic going on with her. All that aggression, that tough talk, those strange bewildered blue eyes. Like sitting next to a hill that’s rumbling and letting off steam here and there… It would be interesting to talk to her more.
He stepped forward to the hatchway and looked down. It looked as though she was sleeping on the bunk down there. He could use some of that himself. Tonight she’d probably be wide awake and raring to go. He’d be all zonked out.
Phædrus saw that an approaching buoy was slanting slightly toward him and that at its base was a little wake from a current running against him. The river was flowing backward now and it would be slow going. It would be dark soon too, but fortunately they didn’t have far to go.
The position of a barge up ahead indicated his boat was getting too far over on the New York City side of the river. He brought his bow back a few degrees so as to stay out of any oncoming traffic. On the big expanse of water before him he saw a barge being pushed from behind by a tug-boat. The barge had pipes along the top that meant it was probably carrying oil or chemicals. It was heading toward him and although he figured there was no danger of collision he set a course anyway that would give it an even wider separation.
The banks of this sea were far away but he could see that the buildings and shore installations were metropolitan. No hills rose back of them, only a dull industrial haze. He looked at his watch. Three-thirty. A couple of hours of sunlight yet. It looked like they would get to Nyack before dark. This boat had really made time today. All the hurricane flood water on top of the tides on top of the natural river current had done it.
Anyway that was the answer to Rigel’s question. Phædrus could relax now. Rigel was just pushing a narrow tradition-bound socio-biological code of morals which it was certain he didn’t understand himself.
As Phædrus had gotten into them he had seen that the isolation of these static moral codes was important. They were really little moral empires all their own, as separate from one another as the static levels whose conflicts they resolved:
First, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of biological life over inanimate nature. Second, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the social order over biological life — conventional morals — proscriptions against drugs, murder, adultery, theft and the like. Third, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the intellectual order over the social order — democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Finally there’s a fourth Dynamic morality which isn’t a code. He supposed you could call it a code of Art or something like that, but art is usually thought of as such a frill that that title undercuts its importance. The morality of the brujo in Zuni — that was Dynamic morality.
What was emerging was that the static patterns that hold one level of organization together are often the same patterns that another level of organization must fight to maintain its own existence. Morality is not a simple set of rules. It’s a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patterns evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.
It’s out of this struggle between conflicting static patterns that the concepts of good and evil arise. Thus, the evil of disease which the doctor is absolutely morally committed to stop is not an evil at all within the germ’s lower static pattern of morality. The germ is making a moral effort to stave off its own destruction by lower-level inorganic forces of evil.
Phædrus thought that most other quarrels in values can be traced to evolutionary causes and that this tracing can sometimes provide both a rational basis for classification of the quarrels and a rational solution. The structuring of morality into evolutionary levels suddenly gives shape to all kinds of blurred and confused moral ideas that are floating around in our present cultural heritage. Vice is an example. In an evolutionary morality the meaning of vice is quite clear. Vice is a conflict between biological quality and social quality. Things like sex and booze and drugs and tobacco have a high biological quality, that is, they feel good, but are harmful for social reasons. They take all your money. They break up your family. They threaten the stability of the community.
Like the stuff Rigel was throwing at him this morning, the old Victorian morality. That was entirely within that one code — the social code. Phædrus thought that code was good enough as far as it went, but it really didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t know its origins and it didn’t know its own destinations, and not knowing them it had to be exactly what it was: hopelessly static, hope
lessly stupid, a form of evil in itself.
Evil… If he’d called it that one-hundred-and-fifty years ago he might have gotten himself into some real trouble. People got mad back then when you challenged their social institutions, and they tended to take reprisals. He might have gotten himself ostracized as some kind of a social menace. And if he’d said it six-hundred years ago he might have been burned at the stake.
But today it’s hardly a risk. It’s more of a cheap shot. Everybody thinks those Victorian moral codes are stupid and evil, or old-fashioned at least, except maybe a few religious fundamentalists and ultra-right-wingers and ignorant uneducated people like that. That’s why Rigel’s sermon this morning seemed so peculiar. Usually people like Rigel do their sermonizing in favor of whatever they know is popular. That way they’re safe. Didn’t he know all that stuff went out years ago? Where was he during the revolution of the sixties?
Where has he been during this whole century? That’s what this whole century’s been about, this struggle between intellectual and social patterns. That’s the theme song of the twentieth century. Is society going to dominate intellect or is intellect going to dominate society? And if society wins, what’s going to be left of intellect? And if intellect wins what’s going to be left of society? That was the thing that this evolutionary morality brought out clearer than anything else. Intellect is not an extension of society any more than society is an extension of biology. Intellect is going its own way, and in doing so is at war with society, seeking to subjugate society, to put society under lock and key. An evolutionary morality says it is moral for intellect to do so, but it also contains a warning: just as a society that weakens its people’s physical health endangers its own stability, so does an intellectual pattern that weakens and destroys the health of its social base also endanger its own stability.
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 18