Hi Philip. You say: "Having said that, I have a big complaint against almost all of my fellow non-naturalists: they have no explanation of how we know about these fundamental moral facts."
A lot of them would say they do have an explanation: intuition.
I can see how we would if moral facts were contingent. In that case, they’d need to impact on us in ways analogous to empirical facts.
But if moral facts are necessary facts, then their truth wouldn’t depend on how the world happens to be.
What do you think? Do we need necessary facts to impact on us to have knowledge of those facts? Or do you think of fundamental moral facts as contingent?
I agree with the paper I link to in my post that if it turns out I don't have my moral beliefs because of the moral facts, then I have a defeater for those beliefs.
Yes, that's how I was interpreting the question. No, I don't think we can, if we can't somehow make sense of them impacting on our moral beliefs. Check out very persuasive IMHO analogy in that paper (involving Agent Smith, if you want to search for the relevant bit).
I agree that Neora’s justification for believing in her deity is undermined. I take it you think this case shows justification requires some kind of causal story.
However, this case is also compatible with a phenomenal conservative reading. On that reading Neora is unjustified because she has a defeater, but the same wouldn’t be true for our moral beliefs.
That said, I’m starting to see the force of your general point. I think there’s a general class of facts (modal facts) which we seem to have justified beliefs about but I have no solid story to tell about how.
I see moral facts as a particular instance but I think the same problem applies to mathematical facts and logical facts like the law of non-contradiction.
So I guess the problem for me is bigger than I initially thought.
This is a fascinating topic to explore. My only concern--and a point I suspect you will be addressing in your articles--is making sense of conflicting moral truths derived from different mystical experiences. Surely, we must be able to compare the two, and if so, how? It's complex, especially under non-naturalism.
I'd say ethics should just continue as it is (not easy!). I'm not suggesting we get the mystics to answer all our moral questions. In fact, I want to say we all have direct access to the ground of moral truth, just not in a way that's as overwhelming and evident as in a mystical experience.
"How could the Ultimate Reality encountered in mystical experiences ground moral truths? How exactly do mystical experiences play a justificatory role in our moral psychology?"
If you derive anything from mystical experiences, you need to provide a method for discerning between two conflicting accounts.
Hi Philip, Establishment in the practice of universal moral principles is not the goal of life but foundation for spiritual development, according to spiritual guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. He dictated the book "A Guide to Human Conduct" which is at my website https://richardgauthier.academia.edu/research or downloadable as a pdf file at
https://www.academia.edu/attachments/121717894/download_file?s=portfolio. It describes and elaborates ten universal moral principles which are the foundation of the system of yogic meditation practices. These principles are collectively called Yama (five principles) and Niyama (five more). They date back about 7000 years to the historical Shiva, who first systematized spiritual meditation practices called Tantra.
What do you think about argument from moral agency? Since God is a moral agent, theism entails moral agency. In contrast, the Hypothesis of Indifference (HI) does not entail moral agency. Given cosmic fine-tuning, moral agency is super unlikely under HI. And without psychophysical fine-tuning, moral agency would also be super unlikely under HI. After all, without any psychophysical laws, philosophical zombies might evolve but are not moral agents.
You say that you aren't a fan of a micromanaging deity. But what if God arranged the psychophysical laws such that generations of evolved creatures would be more likely to reproduce and survive in environments with more accurate moral beliefs? So God didn't have to guide evolution. Once the cosmic fine-tuning and psychophysical fine-tuning were done, God can simply watch the Universe proceed to eventually have evolved moral agents with moral knowledge.
interesting, thanks! Fine-tuning psychophysical laws rather than direct intervention sounds better, although I suppose I'd want to hear about the content of the laws.
Phillip, very interesting topic. I see this quest to ground moral truth in mystical experience as dependent on your ability to prove that mystical experience is a gateway to ultimate reality. This question gets all the more complicated when you consider the variety of mystical experiences and the drastically different conclusions people draw from said experiences. I understand the turn Mulgan takes away from "a micromanaging deity" but I worry that the variety of mystical experience throughout humanity takes mystical experience out of the question as a possible avenue to access the objective moral facts in the universe.
Thanks John. I don't think I have to prove this before making my argument, as I'm exploring what follows from a prior commitment to meta-ethical non-naturalism, and I think such a view is already committed to ultimate reality directly impacting us in some way. You can think of it as an inference to the best explanation from that point.
But what you're raising is an important objection. I think much of this can be explained as different interpretations of the same experience. And I don't have to settle on which interpretation is correct to make my argument. Although if true mystical experiences put us in touch with the ground of moral truth, whether the mystical experience leads to moral advancement will be one fallible guide to whether we're dealing with a true mystical experience.
Of course they are. Mystical experiences are results of high, and the right kind of, attention, and truth can only be grasped by states of high, and the right kind of attention.
“natural selection made us value survival; survival happens to be good; hence we end up valuing what is good.”
But is survival good? And is that good objective? Is survival not just what naturally happens as a byproduct of the process of natural selection? I.e. randomly, without value judgement??
It looks good to us because we’re alive but is there a moral benchmark inherent in nature to say being alive is good?
Science would have us believe that there is no meaning (in its purest sense) to anything which obviously includes morality. There’s no point to any of it.
Personally I always come up against this nihilism barrier with ontological explorations…I’m struggling to get past it…which in no way suggests I’m a nihilist…I’m just stuck there at the minute…any help to get round it is most welcome.
David Enoch is an ethical non-naturalist, so he believes there are fundamental objective moral facts. But he doesn't think these facts impact us, so this is his attempt to make sense of moral knowledge in spite of this. This post didn't really get into the arguments for and against ethical non-naturalism...will do this another time...
Have you come across the works of late 19th century American philosopher John Fiske? I recently happened upon his book The Idea of God in the Gladstone library (replete with inscription from the author to Gladstone himself). I think he could best be called an evolutionary moral naturalist; he believed moral values emerge from, and are justified by, the natural and social development of humanity. His other works include Cosmic Philosophy (in two volumes) and Through Nature to God. It’s all very Darwinian via Herbert Spencer with an emphasis on morality as having objective significance, evolution having a moral direction and ‘god’, rather than being personal, being the ground of the universe’s order. I suppose he’s also a teleological naturalist. Whether this ground is synonymous with ‘ultimate reality’ (Herbert’s ‘The Unknowable’) as confronted in the mystical experience is of course difficult to say given that Herbert expresses that we can’t actually know this ultimate reality. But the idea that mystical experience might potentially guide morality is perhaps in there somewhere…
I would echo what others have said here: intuition. Maybe our most fundamental shared values live alongside our grasp of the most basic logical truths, so while intuition does indeed tell us a lot of nonsense, it also tells us things like A = A. Not that this undermines mystical experience as a source, but I agree, there needs to be another form of access for the rest of us. Who knows, maybe they'll turn out to be the same source. I wrote about this here (if you can stand reading a bizarre interpretation of Plato):
Thanks, I'll have a look. As I just said to Lance, we still need an account of how moral facts impact on our intuitions. But perhaps you have this in your piece!
I just re-read your piece here and now I regret sending you to my post on Plato, which might have been a bit too obscure. I do think Plato is relevant, but interpreting him is so hard. I don't think you'll want to get into that. Basically the idea there is, nature itself is value-laden, driven toward the Good. Naturalists mistake the incomplete picture for the whole picture, but the crucial point is that even the incomplete picture must give us some access to truth too. It must be compatible with the whole.
Translating that to this case: the evolutionary picture isn’t actually valueless—removing value might be a matter of methodology for science, which is fine, but it’s a misjudgment on the part of naturalists to take that value-stripped method for the whole of reality. It’s not that natural selection made us value survival which just happens to be good. Natural selection made us value survival because survival is a good, one that allows us to have moral intuitions that give us access to moral knowledge. So in this picture, the physical can be seen as a contributing cause, but not the only cause. Science gives us a partial picture of the teleological reality and so shouldn’t be taken to be in opposition to value. God is not apart from nature. I agree, let’s avoid the micromanaging deity. But then it wouldn't make much sense to argue that the naturalists can't derive moral intuitions from nature; it's that they can't derive it from their valueless take on nature.
But this doesn’t answer your question exactly. I don’t know whether individual moral facts "impact on us" or whether they can be accounted for in a piecemeal way, but maybe the source of our intuitions on the whole, or the structure of it, comes from the world itself—not the valueless stripped down version that both naturalists and some deists seem to assume, but the value-laden world. How does this work? I don't know. My husband wrote a book a long time ago that might be relevant, but it’s very dated. I have zero background in analytic philosophy, as you might have guessed by now, so it’s hard to say whether this would have anything of interest for you. His book deals with the indeterminacy of language and uses Donaldson’s principle of charity (what he calls “generosity”) to make the case that we must have shared truths (meta beliefs). This might be old territory, though?
You say, "We couldn’t know about the empirical world if it didn’t impact on us via our senses." I experience suffering and joy and everything in between. I have a good sense of what causes these feelings (but not always). When I do have a good sense, I see that sometimes it is other people that cause me to suffer. And I can see how I cause others to suffer. In golden rule fashion, it seems very logical that I would be happier more often, and others would be happier more often, if we did things to other people along the lines of what they like and want and didn't do what they don't want. So it seems fairly easy to reason out that if we all sought each other's happiness as best we can without causing ourselves undue suffering, the world would be a much more pleasant place to inhabit. So attempts to maximize general or average happiness of all people seems quite reasonable. Reason leads us to morality based on experience. It doesn't have to be delivered or mandated by God. Nor does math or science have to prove it to us, or mystical experience lead us to truths we can't understand based on simple experience. Sure, we will not all agree on precisely what's moral. But most of us can arrive at a similar ballpark set of ideas about what is moral based on our common experiences. Even if God exists and has ideas about morality, and would communicate them to us clearly and without ambiguity, we would do well to consider carefully what God says (assuming God is wise and reasonable, which is not a given). But still, it is our experience + reason that will have to guide us to what actually works.
Very nicely expressed, but I think you're smuggling in moral assumptions with realising it. What do you mean it 'seems logical'. Throughout history, many people have thought power is the thing to be valued. If I am able to be a cruel dictator, having every pleasure given to me without any threat to my rule, why should I give a shit about the happiness of others?
Well, not everyone is going to agree with or fall in line with whatever someone else thinks is moral. I just don't think there's any way to ground morality (in this life - it may be very different in the next) in the sense that it can be laid out as a set of practices and attitudes that everyone will agree are right or true. For centuries, slavery didn't seem wrong to the vast majority of people including people with excellent reasoning skills and people who had mystical experiences and religious people who felt like they knew God and so on. And then, in a matter of a few decades, it began to shift and then did shift (though it took a war in some countries) and now almost no one will admit to thinking it's moral. What it seemed to take was an opening of or widening of empathy, imagining oneself as enslaved, imagining how one would feel if enslaved, and golden-rule-type thinking won the day. But it will never produce a morality that 100% of humans will agree to. That is just not ever going to happen by any means. I suppose in large part because we don't all want to be treated the same way, and it's hard to know how someone else wants to be treated unless you spend a lot of time with them and get to know them deeply. Still, I think most people can agree on the basics, but that doesn't make it easy to abide by.
Presumably moral truths are necessary (in a way disanalogous to phenomenal facts: there's no minimal nonmoral duplicate of the world in which the moral truths differ and e.g. slavery is good). If so then, given modal rationalism, one need only transparently grasp a moral proposition to have epistemic access to its truth value. It also seems plausible that once humans developed the cognitive faculties that let us grasp non-moral practical reasons ("if I want x I should do y") the idea of moral reasons would come for free ("is there anything I should do irrespective of what I want?") If so, our knowledge of moral truths is explicable without positing any further mystical faculty.
I guess a priori insight into moral truths might itself count as - and feel like - mystical insight into ultimate reality, in the same way as a priori insight into mathematical truths does for Godel and the Platonists.
Why would you think you have insight into what should be done, irrespective of what you want, from analyzing what you can do to achieve your own goals?
You can't know what the goal is to analyze in light of, you're just assuming the goal had by nobody is like your own
Short answer: yes, of course. Consider all of Buddhism. And, consider even moral turns in many people who have had spiritually meaningful experiences with psychedelics.
Human morality is not objective. It is a by-product of the evolution of our species. We have evolved to be far more naturally empathetic and cooperative than our closest genetic cousins, the other great apes. Human infants and toddlers exhibit urges to comfort people in distress and help those struggling to complete tasks that go way beyond what adult apes will demonstrate. The moral differences between us and chimpanzees and the likely evolutionary pressures that produced these differences are well-described in a fabulous book by Michael Tomasello: A Natural History of Human Morality.
Evolution explains why some version of the Golden Rule is found in every human society, even those, like the Piraha in the Brazilian Amazon, with no concept of God or religion.
Human morality is subjective but it is widely intersubjective, based on traits shared by almost all human beings (psychopaths, mutants without an empathy module, being the exception).
Evolution also explains the human tendency to view moral norms as objectively true. We have evolved to instinctively adapt to the norms of our group. Thinking of these norms as facts rather than mere preferences makes adaptation easier. It's a useful delusion. When children invent a new game and then teach it to a newcomer, they will typically say, "This is the way the game is played" and not "These are the arbitrary rules we just made up for a new game." Morality is similar.
Morality is species dependent. Consider octopuses, thought to be as intelligent as cats. Male octopuses die shortly after mating for the first and only time. Female octopuses die shortly after hatching their one and only brood of eggs. A brood may produce up to 50,000 hatchlings, none of whom will receive any parental care and of which less than a dozen will likely survive to adulthood. Now imagine octopuses that have evolved to be as intelligent as us. Is it likely that their morality will closely resemble ours? I think not.
You started out by stating that slavery is objectively wrong. If so, why did it take millennia for human beings to figure this out? The authors of the Bible and the Quran failed to condemn slavery, and a great thinker like Aristotle opined:
"For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule..."
Mystical experiences are simply unusual but natural experiences of the human brain. I've had several: some induced by psychedelics, and others not. There's no need to demean them by calling them "hallucinations". Is orgasm an hallucination? Limerence (falling in love)? Synesthesia?
Consider near-death experiences. Buddhist monks have studied these for over 2000 years, and very experienced Buddhist mediators can reproduce such experiences at will, even in a neuroscience lab. They are natural, not supernatural.
Sure, mystical experiences can make people more altruistic and less self-centered. But human infants are already genetically predisposed to be altruistic. The additive effects of mystical experiences on morality is likely small.
This is a respectable view, but not really relevant to this post. You're offering a naturalistic account of morality. The point of the post is to address a problem with non-naturalistic view of ethics. You can think of it as a conditional: *If* non-naturalism is true, how do we know about moral facts?
Moreover, this is really nicely written, but I don't really see an argument for your view, as opposed to the naturalistic view you support. It took us a while to reach the conclusion that slavery was wrong. So what? It took us a while to learn many mathematical and scientific truths, but that doesn't mean these conclusions aren't objective. Sure, I'm not putting an argument forward for non-naturalism (maybe I will in another post) but that's because what I'm considering here is an implication/problem with non-naturalism, not the case for it.
I don't get the argument of the near death bit. How does the fact that they can be produced at will show they're not supernatural. And what do you mean by supernatural, and how is any of this relevant to my post?
You wrote: The point of the post is to address a problem with non-naturalistic view of ethics.
When one sees people whose views create unnecessary difficulties for themselves, it's only natural (and altruistic) to point out that these difficulties disappear when another view is adopted. Atheism disposes of the problem of evil. Unitarianism disposes of the puzzles about the Trinity. Heliocentrism disposes of Ptolemaic epicycles. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics disposes of Schrodinger's paradox and the puzzle of fine-tuning. Evolution by natural selection disposes of the need to explain God's bad design decisions. Anti-foundationalism disposes of the need to give a special account of how we come to have foundational beliefs.
Moral anti-realism disposes of the need to give a special account of how we come to know moral facts.
You wrote: "It took us a while to learn many mathematical and scientific truths, but that doesn't mean these conclusions aren't objective."
I don't find this argument convincing. Mathematical and scientific progress depend on discoveries, i.e., new facts. There are no new facts that made slavery wrong in the 19th century that were not already known for millennia. Even primitive tribes with no concept of God or religion embrace the Golden Rule. Nobody wants to be a slave, therefore it is wrong to enslave others. Moral progress did not result from the discovery of new truths; it resulted from extending our moral sentiments over more and more beings.
You asked: "And what do you mean by supernatural?"
I'm an open-minded naturalist in the Penelope Maddy mode. The distinction between natural and supernatural is not systematic. Plenty of today's science would seem bizarrely spooky to our ancestors: black holes, dark matter and energy, quantum superpositions, the relativity of space and time, the quantum multiverse, artificial intelligence. I use the word "supernatural" as shorthand for a large and heterogeneous collection of notions that we have discarded as superstitions: deities, faeries, souls, ghosts, the afterlife, reincarnation, astrology, homeopathy, telepathy, astral realms, etc.
It's hard to say much about NDEs when they occur sporadically and unpredictably, i.e., when they are merely anomalies. But once they can be reproduced at will in an experimental lab, it's a different kettle of fish. I see no evidence that the monks in these labs are gaining access to another "realm". They're merely causing themselves to have interesting conscious experiences, i.e., lucid dreams while awake.
I brought up NDEs because you are proposing that mystical experiences might give us access to moral facts. I disagree. By dissolving ego boundaries, mystical experiences can widen the scope of our moral sentiments. I myself once had a spontaneous (i.e., not induced by psychedelics) mystical experience that inclined me, for a day, to feel boundless loving kindness towards all things, even inanimate objects. I didn't learn any unusual new facts. I simply had unusual new feelings.
Marvin Minsky once described the mystical feeling of knowing the truth about Ultimate Reality this way: you think you have answers, but it's an illusion created by having all your questions turned off.
I'm sure that some highly influential moral teachers (the Buddha, most notably) were greatly influenced by their own mystical experiences. But the overall influence of mystics on human morality is likely rather small. Think of all the mystics who are well-known to specialists but have had minimal impact on the content of organized religion and are virtually unknown to the general public: Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhardt, Ramana Maharshi, etc.
I think that love is the source of moral knowledge, and that mystical experiences make this clear. I think the question of what we consider "natural" is also very consequential here, and can account also for how we can have intuitions of what is good prior to a full-fledged mystical experience, where moral truth hits you like a freight train.
I'm uncomfortable with the naturalist/non-naturalist distinction because I suspect it might assume the bifurcation of nature that Whitehead talked about, where value and experience are separated from the natural world. From a process-relational point of view, experience is a relational phenomenon that is a part of the very fabric of reality, and the way I see it we get intuitions of moral truth in experiences of love and beauty, where there is greater harmony between ourselves and another part of the universe—I think the Pythagoreans were onto something here—especially with other people in cases of true love, where there is a mutual concern for the other's flourishing.
Mystical experiences would then be like the crossing of a critical threshold where something like a phase change happens, and the quality of our participation in reality is transformed in kind not merely in quantity, such that there is an almost perfect coincidence between our embodied consciousness and the creative advance of nature.
As Iris Murdoch would say, the ego is the enemy of moral life, and I would add it is something like a protrusion standing out from the creative advance of nature which we can never really separate ourselves from. In mystical experience the ego is virtually extinguished, but it doesn't take a mystical experience to cultivate a more selfless perception of other people. Loving someone well also does this, which is why I would say love, not mystical experience, is the source of moral knowledge.
This is definitely worth following, but I am curious about your statement that "all things being equal, pleasure is good and pain is bad." Are pleasure and pain non-natural?
I do like the concept of meta-ethical non-naturalism as you've presented it here, and I am trying to get some of my ideas written, which seem to intersect some of your points here.
Without getting too deep, what I'm trying to get at (as my substack evolves) is a metaphysical ground that is the source of structure for physical, logical, and ethical domains. My ethics could be described as a topology of mountains and fjords, where something like Kant's CI marks the waterline, the boundary between right/wrong, but virtue guides ascent to the peaks.
What I find particularly interesting is your idea of mystical experiences because my framework treats a sort of aesthetic sense (broadly defined as a pre-cognitive perception of structural reality) as a pre-rational impulse toward alignment.
This probably sounds like gibberish, but I'm hoping to peel back the onion on what seems to be becoming a comprehensive philosophical system in my columns.
What is goodness in terms of evil and who or what determines goodness and evilness ? Who or what is the arbiter of goodness and evil?
Why would an entity forbid you to eat of the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil?
Note: it is not the knowledge of goodness or evil! It is the knowledge of good and evil!
What knowledge do you have of good and evil?
Is nuclear power good or evil?
Is killing good or evil?
Is eating good or evil? Is war good or evil? Is having children good or evil? Is discipline good or evil?
It is good AND evil!
The mset shows that there are points of correspondences between the main cardioid and ALL the bulbs . This is true for points in the positive and negative complex planes. There are points of correspondences between negative main cardioid and positive complex plane bulbs and between positive main cardioid and negative complex plane bulbs.
One can misguidedly iterate to Fatou = disconnected( perhaps more on that another time).
We can understand a multiplicity of data points which on their own could be considered good or evil. But it is all fractal to the function of iteration.
God called x, y, z, good. God saw that x,y,z, was good.
So then God, before human beings could call anything by name, called something and saw that something was good.
God told mankind to name( call) the things of the earth to identify them. God did not tell humankind to call things good or evil.
Furthermore God did not cast humankind out of the garden simply because of disobedience but because if the humans were to eat of the tree of life they would be “ like” God. But we see that God did make humankind in his image AND likeness. So wasn’t mankind already like God? Well this is fractal also.
I can be like you in our having two legs but I may not be able to run like you.
So the “kind” of thing God made humankind like was not in the likeness of eternal life!
Why?
Why would a creator not want us to live forever? Have all knowledge? Be “ like” God but not the kind of thing God is?
Well because God is the kind of thing God is and necessarily we cannot be the kind of thing God is without our being omnipresent. And as per previous statements omnipresence itself implies omnipotence and omniscience.
We can be like our creator in form and likeness but not kind in regards to omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. That would be illogical.
A droplet is not the ocean. A droplet is fractal to the ocean. A droplet has its own infinite and finite characteristics.
So why would we die if we ate knowledge of good and evil?
If we create a life will it destroy us like we want every time to destroy our creator?
How will something we create behave if not like us?
A created thing must know its creator is real and fear= honor = respect, our creator,before it will respect its creator.
Will a machine determine good or evil or will it have the knowledge of good AND evil?
Hi Philip. You say: "Having said that, I have a big complaint against almost all of my fellow non-naturalists: they have no explanation of how we know about these fundamental moral facts."
A lot of them would say they do have an explanation: intuition.
Right, but we need a story as to how the moral facts shape our intuitions.
Do we?
I can see how we would if moral facts were contingent. In that case, they’d need to impact on us in ways analogous to empirical facts.
But if moral facts are necessary facts, then their truth wouldn’t depend on how the world happens to be.
What do you think? Do we need necessary facts to impact on us to have knowledge of those facts? Or do you think of fundamental moral facts as contingent?
I agree with the paper I link to in my post that if it turns out I don't have my moral beliefs because of the moral facts, then I have a defeater for those beliefs.
I suppose the question was whether we can be justified in our beliefs about causally inert necessary facts.
I think we can.
If moral facts are like that, then we can have justified beliefs about moral facts.
Do you disagree?
Yes, that's how I was interpreting the question. No, I don't think we can, if we can't somehow make sense of them impacting on our moral beliefs. Check out very persuasive IMHO analogy in that paper (involving Agent Smith, if you want to search for the relevant bit).
Thanks for the pointer to the agent Smith case.
I agree that Neora’s justification for believing in her deity is undermined. I take it you think this case shows justification requires some kind of causal story.
However, this case is also compatible with a phenomenal conservative reading. On that reading Neora is unjustified because she has a defeater, but the same wouldn’t be true for our moral beliefs.
That said, I’m starting to see the force of your general point. I think there’s a general class of facts (modal facts) which we seem to have justified beliefs about but I have no solid story to tell about how.
I see moral facts as a particular instance but I think the same problem applies to mathematical facts and logical facts like the law of non-contradiction.
So I guess the problem for me is bigger than I initially thought.
This is a fascinating topic to explore. My only concern--and a point I suspect you will be addressing in your articles--is making sense of conflicting moral truths derived from different mystical experiences. Surely, we must be able to compare the two, and if so, how? It's complex, especially under non-naturalism.
I'd say ethics should just continue as it is (not easy!). I'm not suggesting we get the mystics to answer all our moral questions. In fact, I want to say we all have direct access to the ground of moral truth, just not in a way that's as overwhelming and evident as in a mystical experience.
I understand your point, but you said this:
"How could the Ultimate Reality encountered in mystical experiences ground moral truths? How exactly do mystical experiences play a justificatory role in our moral psychology?"
If you derive anything from mystical experiences, you need to provide a method for discerning between two conflicting accounts.
Hi Philip, Establishment in the practice of universal moral principles is not the goal of life but foundation for spiritual development, according to spiritual guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. He dictated the book "A Guide to Human Conduct" which is at my website https://richardgauthier.academia.edu/research or downloadable as a pdf file at
https://www.academia.edu/attachments/121717894/download_file?s=portfolio. It describes and elaborates ten universal moral principles which are the foundation of the system of yogic meditation practices. These principles are collectively called Yama (five principles) and Niyama (five more). They date back about 7000 years to the historical Shiva, who first systematized spiritual meditation practices called Tantra.
Richard
Thanks Richard!
What do you think about argument from moral agency? Since God is a moral agent, theism entails moral agency. In contrast, the Hypothesis of Indifference (HI) does not entail moral agency. Given cosmic fine-tuning, moral agency is super unlikely under HI. And without psychophysical fine-tuning, moral agency would also be super unlikely under HI. After all, without any psychophysical laws, philosophical zombies might evolve but are not moral agents.
You say that you aren't a fan of a micromanaging deity. But what if God arranged the psychophysical laws such that generations of evolved creatures would be more likely to reproduce and survive in environments with more accurate moral beliefs? So God didn't have to guide evolution. Once the cosmic fine-tuning and psychophysical fine-tuning were done, God can simply watch the Universe proceed to eventually have evolved moral agents with moral knowledge.
interesting, thanks! Fine-tuning psychophysical laws rather than direct intervention sounds better, although I suppose I'd want to hear about the content of the laws.
Phillip, very interesting topic. I see this quest to ground moral truth in mystical experience as dependent on your ability to prove that mystical experience is a gateway to ultimate reality. This question gets all the more complicated when you consider the variety of mystical experiences and the drastically different conclusions people draw from said experiences. I understand the turn Mulgan takes away from "a micromanaging deity" but I worry that the variety of mystical experience throughout humanity takes mystical experience out of the question as a possible avenue to access the objective moral facts in the universe.
Thanks John. I don't think I have to prove this before making my argument, as I'm exploring what follows from a prior commitment to meta-ethical non-naturalism, and I think such a view is already committed to ultimate reality directly impacting us in some way. You can think of it as an inference to the best explanation from that point.
But what you're raising is an important objection. I think much of this can be explained as different interpretations of the same experience. And I don't have to settle on which interpretation is correct to make my argument. Although if true mystical experiences put us in touch with the ground of moral truth, whether the mystical experience leads to moral advancement will be one fallible guide to whether we're dealing with a true mystical experience.
Of course they are. Mystical experiences are results of high, and the right kind of, attention, and truth can only be grasped by states of high, and the right kind of attention.
“natural selection made us value survival; survival happens to be good; hence we end up valuing what is good.”
But is survival good? And is that good objective? Is survival not just what naturally happens as a byproduct of the process of natural selection? I.e. randomly, without value judgement??
It looks good to us because we’re alive but is there a moral benchmark inherent in nature to say being alive is good?
Science would have us believe that there is no meaning (in its purest sense) to anything which obviously includes morality. There’s no point to any of it.
Personally I always come up against this nihilism barrier with ontological explorations…I’m struggling to get past it…which in no way suggests I’m a nihilist…I’m just stuck there at the minute…any help to get round it is most welcome.
David Enoch is an ethical non-naturalist, so he believes there are fundamental objective moral facts. But he doesn't think these facts impact us, so this is his attempt to make sense of moral knowledge in spite of this. This post didn't really get into the arguments for and against ethical non-naturalism...will do this another time...
Have you come across the works of late 19th century American philosopher John Fiske? I recently happened upon his book The Idea of God in the Gladstone library (replete with inscription from the author to Gladstone himself). I think he could best be called an evolutionary moral naturalist; he believed moral values emerge from, and are justified by, the natural and social development of humanity. His other works include Cosmic Philosophy (in two volumes) and Through Nature to God. It’s all very Darwinian via Herbert Spencer with an emphasis on morality as having objective significance, evolution having a moral direction and ‘god’, rather than being personal, being the ground of the universe’s order. I suppose he’s also a teleological naturalist. Whether this ground is synonymous with ‘ultimate reality’ (Herbert’s ‘The Unknowable’) as confronted in the mystical experience is of course difficult to say given that Herbert expresses that we can’t actually know this ultimate reality. But the idea that mystical experience might potentially guide morality is perhaps in there somewhere…
Overlap with neo-platonism?
possibly...
I would echo what others have said here: intuition. Maybe our most fundamental shared values live alongside our grasp of the most basic logical truths, so while intuition does indeed tell us a lot of nonsense, it also tells us things like A = A. Not that this undermines mystical experience as a source, but I agree, there needs to be another form of access for the rest of us. Who knows, maybe they'll turn out to be the same source. I wrote about this here (if you can stand reading a bizarre interpretation of Plato):
https://open.substack.com/pub/philosophyandfiction/p/the-continuum-of-becoming?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thanks, I'll have a look. As I just said to Lance, we still need an account of how moral facts impact on our intuitions. But perhaps you have this in your piece!
I just re-read your piece here and now I regret sending you to my post on Plato, which might have been a bit too obscure. I do think Plato is relevant, but interpreting him is so hard. I don't think you'll want to get into that. Basically the idea there is, nature itself is value-laden, driven toward the Good. Naturalists mistake the incomplete picture for the whole picture, but the crucial point is that even the incomplete picture must give us some access to truth too. It must be compatible with the whole.
Translating that to this case: the evolutionary picture isn’t actually valueless—removing value might be a matter of methodology for science, which is fine, but it’s a misjudgment on the part of naturalists to take that value-stripped method for the whole of reality. It’s not that natural selection made us value survival which just happens to be good. Natural selection made us value survival because survival is a good, one that allows us to have moral intuitions that give us access to moral knowledge. So in this picture, the physical can be seen as a contributing cause, but not the only cause. Science gives us a partial picture of the teleological reality and so shouldn’t be taken to be in opposition to value. God is not apart from nature. I agree, let’s avoid the micromanaging deity. But then it wouldn't make much sense to argue that the naturalists can't derive moral intuitions from nature; it's that they can't derive it from their valueless take on nature.
But this doesn’t answer your question exactly. I don’t know whether individual moral facts "impact on us" or whether they can be accounted for in a piecemeal way, but maybe the source of our intuitions on the whole, or the structure of it, comes from the world itself—not the valueless stripped down version that both naturalists and some deists seem to assume, but the value-laden world. How does this work? I don't know. My husband wrote a book a long time ago that might be relevant, but it’s very dated. I have zero background in analytic philosophy, as you might have guessed by now, so it’s hard to say whether this would have anything of interest for you. His book deals with the indeterminacy of language and uses Donaldson’s principle of charity (what he calls “generosity”) to make the case that we must have shared truths (meta beliefs). This might be old territory, though?
You say, "We couldn’t know about the empirical world if it didn’t impact on us via our senses." I experience suffering and joy and everything in between. I have a good sense of what causes these feelings (but not always). When I do have a good sense, I see that sometimes it is other people that cause me to suffer. And I can see how I cause others to suffer. In golden rule fashion, it seems very logical that I would be happier more often, and others would be happier more often, if we did things to other people along the lines of what they like and want and didn't do what they don't want. So it seems fairly easy to reason out that if we all sought each other's happiness as best we can without causing ourselves undue suffering, the world would be a much more pleasant place to inhabit. So attempts to maximize general or average happiness of all people seems quite reasonable. Reason leads us to morality based on experience. It doesn't have to be delivered or mandated by God. Nor does math or science have to prove it to us, or mystical experience lead us to truths we can't understand based on simple experience. Sure, we will not all agree on precisely what's moral. But most of us can arrive at a similar ballpark set of ideas about what is moral based on our common experiences. Even if God exists and has ideas about morality, and would communicate them to us clearly and without ambiguity, we would do well to consider carefully what God says (assuming God is wise and reasonable, which is not a given). But still, it is our experience + reason that will have to guide us to what actually works.
Very nicely expressed, but I think you're smuggling in moral assumptions with realising it. What do you mean it 'seems logical'. Throughout history, many people have thought power is the thing to be valued. If I am able to be a cruel dictator, having every pleasure given to me without any threat to my rule, why should I give a shit about the happiness of others?
Well, not everyone is going to agree with or fall in line with whatever someone else thinks is moral. I just don't think there's any way to ground morality (in this life - it may be very different in the next) in the sense that it can be laid out as a set of practices and attitudes that everyone will agree are right or true. For centuries, slavery didn't seem wrong to the vast majority of people including people with excellent reasoning skills and people who had mystical experiences and religious people who felt like they knew God and so on. And then, in a matter of a few decades, it began to shift and then did shift (though it took a war in some countries) and now almost no one will admit to thinking it's moral. What it seemed to take was an opening of or widening of empathy, imagining oneself as enslaved, imagining how one would feel if enslaved, and golden-rule-type thinking won the day. But it will never produce a morality that 100% of humans will agree to. That is just not ever going to happen by any means. I suppose in large part because we don't all want to be treated the same way, and it's hard to know how someone else wants to be treated unless you spend a lot of time with them and get to know them deeply. Still, I think most people can agree on the basics, but that doesn't make it easy to abide by.
Presumably moral truths are necessary (in a way disanalogous to phenomenal facts: there's no minimal nonmoral duplicate of the world in which the moral truths differ and e.g. slavery is good). If so then, given modal rationalism, one need only transparently grasp a moral proposition to have epistemic access to its truth value. It also seems plausible that once humans developed the cognitive faculties that let us grasp non-moral practical reasons ("if I want x I should do y") the idea of moral reasons would come for free ("is there anything I should do irrespective of what I want?") If so, our knowledge of moral truths is explicable without positing any further mystical faculty.
I guess a priori insight into moral truths might itself count as - and feel like - mystical insight into ultimate reality, in the same way as a priori insight into mathematical truths does for Godel and the Platonists.
Very interesting! Need to think about this...
Why would you think you have insight into what should be done, irrespective of what you want, from analyzing what you can do to achieve your own goals?
You can't know what the goal is to analyze in light of, you're just assuming the goal had by nobody is like your own
Short answer: yes, of course. Consider all of Buddhism. And, consider even moral turns in many people who have had spiritually meaningful experiences with psychedelics.
I think imagination is the source of moral facts, as in they're make believe
Human morality is not objective. It is a by-product of the evolution of our species. We have evolved to be far more naturally empathetic and cooperative than our closest genetic cousins, the other great apes. Human infants and toddlers exhibit urges to comfort people in distress and help those struggling to complete tasks that go way beyond what adult apes will demonstrate. The moral differences between us and chimpanzees and the likely evolutionary pressures that produced these differences are well-described in a fabulous book by Michael Tomasello: A Natural History of Human Morality.
Evolution explains why some version of the Golden Rule is found in every human society, even those, like the Piraha in the Brazilian Amazon, with no concept of God or religion.
Human morality is subjective but it is widely intersubjective, based on traits shared by almost all human beings (psychopaths, mutants without an empathy module, being the exception).
Evolution also explains the human tendency to view moral norms as objectively true. We have evolved to instinctively adapt to the norms of our group. Thinking of these norms as facts rather than mere preferences makes adaptation easier. It's a useful delusion. When children invent a new game and then teach it to a newcomer, they will typically say, "This is the way the game is played" and not "These are the arbitrary rules we just made up for a new game." Morality is similar.
Morality is species dependent. Consider octopuses, thought to be as intelligent as cats. Male octopuses die shortly after mating for the first and only time. Female octopuses die shortly after hatching their one and only brood of eggs. A brood may produce up to 50,000 hatchlings, none of whom will receive any parental care and of which less than a dozen will likely survive to adulthood. Now imagine octopuses that have evolved to be as intelligent as us. Is it likely that their morality will closely resemble ours? I think not.
You started out by stating that slavery is objectively wrong. If so, why did it take millennia for human beings to figure this out? The authors of the Bible and the Quran failed to condemn slavery, and a great thinker like Aristotle opined:
"For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule..."
Mystical experiences are simply unusual but natural experiences of the human brain. I've had several: some induced by psychedelics, and others not. There's no need to demean them by calling them "hallucinations". Is orgasm an hallucination? Limerence (falling in love)? Synesthesia?
Consider near-death experiences. Buddhist monks have studied these for over 2000 years, and very experienced Buddhist mediators can reproduce such experiences at will, even in a neuroscience lab. They are natural, not supernatural.
Sure, mystical experiences can make people more altruistic and less self-centered. But human infants are already genetically predisposed to be altruistic. The additive effects of mystical experiences on morality is likely small.
This is a respectable view, but not really relevant to this post. You're offering a naturalistic account of morality. The point of the post is to address a problem with non-naturalistic view of ethics. You can think of it as a conditional: *If* non-naturalism is true, how do we know about moral facts?
Moreover, this is really nicely written, but I don't really see an argument for your view, as opposed to the naturalistic view you support. It took us a while to reach the conclusion that slavery was wrong. So what? It took us a while to learn many mathematical and scientific truths, but that doesn't mean these conclusions aren't objective. Sure, I'm not putting an argument forward for non-naturalism (maybe I will in another post) but that's because what I'm considering here is an implication/problem with non-naturalism, not the case for it.
I don't get the argument of the near death bit. How does the fact that they can be produced at will show they're not supernatural. And what do you mean by supernatural, and how is any of this relevant to my post?
You wrote: The point of the post is to address a problem with non-naturalistic view of ethics.
When one sees people whose views create unnecessary difficulties for themselves, it's only natural (and altruistic) to point out that these difficulties disappear when another view is adopted. Atheism disposes of the problem of evil. Unitarianism disposes of the puzzles about the Trinity. Heliocentrism disposes of Ptolemaic epicycles. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics disposes of Schrodinger's paradox and the puzzle of fine-tuning. Evolution by natural selection disposes of the need to explain God's bad design decisions. Anti-foundationalism disposes of the need to give a special account of how we come to have foundational beliefs.
Moral anti-realism disposes of the need to give a special account of how we come to know moral facts.
You wrote: "It took us a while to learn many mathematical and scientific truths, but that doesn't mean these conclusions aren't objective."
I don't find this argument convincing. Mathematical and scientific progress depend on discoveries, i.e., new facts. There are no new facts that made slavery wrong in the 19th century that were not already known for millennia. Even primitive tribes with no concept of God or religion embrace the Golden Rule. Nobody wants to be a slave, therefore it is wrong to enslave others. Moral progress did not result from the discovery of new truths; it resulted from extending our moral sentiments over more and more beings.
You asked: "And what do you mean by supernatural?"
I'm an open-minded naturalist in the Penelope Maddy mode. The distinction between natural and supernatural is not systematic. Plenty of today's science would seem bizarrely spooky to our ancestors: black holes, dark matter and energy, quantum superpositions, the relativity of space and time, the quantum multiverse, artificial intelligence. I use the word "supernatural" as shorthand for a large and heterogeneous collection of notions that we have discarded as superstitions: deities, faeries, souls, ghosts, the afterlife, reincarnation, astrology, homeopathy, telepathy, astral realms, etc.
It's hard to say much about NDEs when they occur sporadically and unpredictably, i.e., when they are merely anomalies. But once they can be reproduced at will in an experimental lab, it's a different kettle of fish. I see no evidence that the monks in these labs are gaining access to another "realm". They're merely causing themselves to have interesting conscious experiences, i.e., lucid dreams while awake.
I brought up NDEs because you are proposing that mystical experiences might give us access to moral facts. I disagree. By dissolving ego boundaries, mystical experiences can widen the scope of our moral sentiments. I myself once had a spontaneous (i.e., not induced by psychedelics) mystical experience that inclined me, for a day, to feel boundless loving kindness towards all things, even inanimate objects. I didn't learn any unusual new facts. I simply had unusual new feelings.
Marvin Minsky once described the mystical feeling of knowing the truth about Ultimate Reality this way: you think you have answers, but it's an illusion created by having all your questions turned off.
I'm sure that some highly influential moral teachers (the Buddha, most notably) were greatly influenced by their own mystical experiences. But the overall influence of mystics on human morality is likely rather small. Think of all the mystics who are well-known to specialists but have had minimal impact on the content of organized religion and are virtually unknown to the general public: Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhardt, Ramana Maharshi, etc.
I think that love is the source of moral knowledge, and that mystical experiences make this clear. I think the question of what we consider "natural" is also very consequential here, and can account also for how we can have intuitions of what is good prior to a full-fledged mystical experience, where moral truth hits you like a freight train.
I'm uncomfortable with the naturalist/non-naturalist distinction because I suspect it might assume the bifurcation of nature that Whitehead talked about, where value and experience are separated from the natural world. From a process-relational point of view, experience is a relational phenomenon that is a part of the very fabric of reality, and the way I see it we get intuitions of moral truth in experiences of love and beauty, where there is greater harmony between ourselves and another part of the universe—I think the Pythagoreans were onto something here—especially with other people in cases of true love, where there is a mutual concern for the other's flourishing.
Mystical experiences would then be like the crossing of a critical threshold where something like a phase change happens, and the quality of our participation in reality is transformed in kind not merely in quantity, such that there is an almost perfect coincidence between our embodied consciousness and the creative advance of nature.
As Iris Murdoch would say, the ego is the enemy of moral life, and I would add it is something like a protrusion standing out from the creative advance of nature which we can never really separate ourselves from. In mystical experience the ego is virtually extinguished, but it doesn't take a mystical experience to cultivate a more selfless perception of other people. Loving someone well also does this, which is why I would say love, not mystical experience, is the source of moral knowledge.
This is definitely worth following, but I am curious about your statement that "all things being equal, pleasure is good and pain is bad." Are pleasure and pain non-natural?
I do like the concept of meta-ethical non-naturalism as you've presented it here, and I am trying to get some of my ideas written, which seem to intersect some of your points here.
Without getting too deep, what I'm trying to get at (as my substack evolves) is a metaphysical ground that is the source of structure for physical, logical, and ethical domains. My ethics could be described as a topology of mountains and fjords, where something like Kant's CI marks the waterline, the boundary between right/wrong, but virtue guides ascent to the peaks.
What I find particularly interesting is your idea of mystical experiences because my framework treats a sort of aesthetic sense (broadly defined as a pre-cognitive perception of structural reality) as a pre-rational impulse toward alignment.
This probably sounds like gibberish, but I'm hoping to peel back the onion on what seems to be becoming a comprehensive philosophical system in my columns.
What is good?
What is evil?
What is knowledge?
What is knowledge of good and evil?
Is goodness relative? Subjective? Objective?
What is goodness in terms of evil and who or what determines goodness and evilness ? Who or what is the arbiter of goodness and evil?
Why would an entity forbid you to eat of the tree with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil?
Note: it is not the knowledge of goodness or evil! It is the knowledge of good and evil!
What knowledge do you have of good and evil?
Is nuclear power good or evil?
Is killing good or evil?
Is eating good or evil? Is war good or evil? Is having children good or evil? Is discipline good or evil?
It is good AND evil!
The mset shows that there are points of correspondences between the main cardioid and ALL the bulbs . This is true for points in the positive and negative complex planes. There are points of correspondences between negative main cardioid and positive complex plane bulbs and between positive main cardioid and negative complex plane bulbs.
One can misguidedly iterate to Fatou = disconnected( perhaps more on that another time).
We can understand a multiplicity of data points which on their own could be considered good or evil. But it is all fractal to the function of iteration.
God called x, y, z, good. God saw that x,y,z, was good.
So then God, before human beings could call anything by name, called something and saw that something was good.
God told mankind to name( call) the things of the earth to identify them. God did not tell humankind to call things good or evil.
Furthermore God did not cast humankind out of the garden simply because of disobedience but because if the humans were to eat of the tree of life they would be “ like” God. But we see that God did make humankind in his image AND likeness. So wasn’t mankind already like God? Well this is fractal also.
I can be like you in our having two legs but I may not be able to run like you.
So the “kind” of thing God made humankind like was not in the likeness of eternal life!
Why?
Why would a creator not want us to live forever? Have all knowledge? Be “ like” God but not the kind of thing God is?
Well because God is the kind of thing God is and necessarily we cannot be the kind of thing God is without our being omnipresent. And as per previous statements omnipresence itself implies omnipotence and omniscience.
We can be like our creator in form and likeness but not kind in regards to omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience. That would be illogical.
A droplet is not the ocean. A droplet is fractal to the ocean. A droplet has its own infinite and finite characteristics.
So why would we die if we ate knowledge of good and evil?
If we create a life will it destroy us like we want every time to destroy our creator?
How will something we create behave if not like us?
A created thing must know its creator is real and fear= honor = respect, our creator,before it will respect its creator.
Will a machine determine good or evil or will it have the knowledge of good AND evil?