On feeling strongly about uncertain moral truths

The challenge of ethics is that we don't truly know what is right or wrong, but we feel very strongly about our moral beliefs and about acting based on them.

We lack moral humility, the self-awareness of the possibility that our ethical values are wrong. Moral humility can often be perceived as morally wrong and hypocritical.

We rely on our strong moral feelings to act with character, integrity, courage, and to act rightly. We don't want, and possibly can't, give those strong moral feelings up.

Right now, I'm not aware of any way out of the challenge of ethics.

My journey into serious academic study on ethics

Everybody has an opinion about what's right and wrong, and we don't always agree on what those are. I'm no different.

I understood intuitively the truth of moral relativity. I believe killing dogs is always wrong; somebody else may think it's right under the right circumstances, somebody else that it's always OK to do it, or somebody else that we should actively do it.

But like you, while I'd understand that opinions differ, I'd think my opinion of what's morally right is probably the "true right."

It's an almost inescapable feeling. I understood some people believe it's OK to lie in some circumstances, or that we should take care of our elders, or that we shouldn't own guns, that we should donate blood, and I also understood others didn't believe those same things.

But I also thought that while yes, people disagreed, it's just that they hadn't yet come around to my own moral beliefs. If I believed that it's never OK to lie, then it's the people who think it's OK to lie under the right circumstances that are the ones to eventually come around.

Not me.

But I knew cognitively, if not emotionally, that in truth, neither of us had any more real reason to believe whether it was ever OK to lie or not. Neither of us had any proof that one was certainly in the right about that moral matter.

And several years ago, I started realizing the gravity of that statement: We go through life without really knowing what's truly, unequivocally, the right thing to do.

I was familiar with some of the classics on ethics, given my interest in philosophy: Socrates, Aristotle, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Cynicism, and knew the most popular authors like Bentham / Mill and Kant, but that was it.

The classics and popular ethics gave me some guidance and food for thought, but hardly any certainty. In fact, they all disagreed with each other.

So I decided to dig deeper. I started reading the modern philosophers and modern texts: finding the roots, trunks and leaves of deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics and contractualism, among other hard names and even harder texts.

Instead of trying to come up with my own ethics and moral values or relying on the ones passed on to me by my parents, friends, community, or the internet, I wanted to find where we, humanity, were on the topic.

What were our most important thinkers thinking about ethics today? What do we truly know about ethics as a society?

After much reading and talking to ethics experts, my conclusion is that we know close to the same as we did when we started 2,500 years ago: very little.

I don't mean there aren't words and information about philosophy available for reading and food for thought; ethics is an active field, and I hope I will be even more active with our advances in AI.

But none of what is written about ethics is scientifically sound like a scientific paper is (or should be).

Unlike in physics, where every paper gets you closer to "the truth" and papers build on top of each other in a particular direction, ethics is like a star where every line of thinking is pushing in its own direction.

This means you can read a text by a utilitarian and believe them, and I can read a text by a deontologist and believe them in turn, or vice-versa, and they will disagree with each other, and neither of us has more certainty about being morally correct than the other.

That's the state of the art in ethics today: we don't know what is truly ethical.

Note that I don't mean that there isn't a right or a wrong, but only that we, humanity, don't really know what it is right now.

But we certainly feel like we do.

Moral cognition: we feel what is right or wrong

Moral cognition refers to our feelings about ethics – what we feel is morally right and wrong.

Interestingly, many of our feelings unrelated to ethics are used in our moral opinions.

For example, we'll say that somebody's action was disgusting, or we'll feel dirty and want to clean our hands after being forced to be around morally questionable people.

NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has studied moral cognition and its relationship with our feelings with some very interesting takes.

For example, in The Righteous Mind, he reports on this interesting Stanford study that shows we make harsher moral judgments if we're influenced to feel more disgusted by an artificial bad smell:

Alex Jordan, a grad student at Stanford, came up with the idea of asking people to make moral judgments while he secretly tripped their disgust alarms. He stood at a pedestrian intersection on the Stanford campus and asked passersby to fill out a short survey. It asked people to make judgments about four controversial issues, such as marriage between first cousins, or a film studio’s decision to release a documentary with a director who had tricked some people into being interviewed.

Alex stood right next to a trash can he had emptied. Before he recruited each subject, he put a new plastic liner into the metal can. Before half of the people walked up (and before they could see him), he sprayed the fart spray twice into the bag, which “perfumed” the whole intersection for a few minutes. Before other recruitments, he left the empty bag unsprayed.

Sure enough, people made harsher judgments when they were breathing in foul air. Other researchers have found the same effect by asking subjects to fill out questionnaires after drinking bitter versus sweet drinks. As my UVA colleague Jerry Clore puts it, we use “affect as information.” When we’re trying to decide what we think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling. If I’m feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant, that must mean I don’t like it.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind (p. 60). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

While we like to believe our moral judgments are grounded in logic, our feelings affect our moral judgments. So much so that we often evaluate how we feel before we judge the situation instead of the other way around.

When we say, "This doesn't feel right," we mean it. We literally feel something is not the right thing to do.

Of course, different people, born with different genes and raised in different cultures by different families, will feel differently about different things.

So "do what feels right" has no hope of giving us a fundamental moral right unless we are all identical or we accept it's morally right to act the way you think is right, no matter what it is – which is hard to accept.

After all, look at all those other people doing what they feel is right when I feel that what they are doing is totally wrong.

Right?

Moral humility – Are we the baddies?

"Are we the baddies?" is a satirical quote asked by an SS officer to another in the show That Mitchell and Webb Look.

A similar mechanism is often used in movies, cartoons, and other stories, where a character thinks he is doing the right thing, only to find out otherwise later.

We talk about it in stories because we see it a lot in other people: surely they are morally wrong; of course, they are! How could they believe that was right? They will either eventually realize it, or they'll die morally ignorant – poor them.

But this questioning is much harder to do with our own moral beliefs, though. While others' moral beliefs seem fragile and flawed, ours is rock solid.

This happens to every human, no matter how simple or sophisticated our education, knowledge, culture, or intellect.

In fact, even professional philosophers, our top intellectuals and sages about ethics, don't have a good answer about how come other professional philosophers, all those other otherwise brilliant people, disagree with each other on ethics.

I know I certainly don't have an answer to that.

But the problem is that if we are lax in our moral judgment because of moral humility, displaying our uncertainty through actions, we actually come across to ourselves and others as lacking integrity.

And nobody who cares about doing what's right would willingly display a flaw in integrity, which means it's extra hard to be morally humble.

Integrity – acting according to our values

Integrity is one's ability to act according to their values. Integrity is independent of the correctness of your values.

The opposite of integrity is not evil, but hypocrisy.

But if your moral values are good, and you don't act according to them, you're not just a hypocrite but also evil.

This creates a huge challenge for exercising moral humility. If you aren't sure that your moral values are correct, and none of us are, you're still required to act according to them to not be an evil hypocrite.

Also, we need the guidance of our moral feelings to act rightly. Not only does not acting according to our values make us hypocrites, but it also makes us feel like hypocrites.

If you think it's always wrong to X, then doing X because maybe it's not always wrong will still make you feel terrible.

Ultimately, I know of no sure way of practicing moral humility. We're stuck with a cognitive awareness of our moral limitations, but with never deliberately going against what we think is right.

So what to do? How to act?

In this philosophical text, geared to my audience of non-philosophers, I tried to defend 3 points:

• We don't truly know what is right or wrong. By we, I mean all of humanity. Literally nobody knows for sure what is right.
• Despite this moral uncertainty, we feel really strongly about our moral beliefs. That's the challenge of ethics.
• We can't practice moral humility, the explicit acknowledgment of moral doubt through action, because that makes us evil hypocrites and also makes us feel like evil hypocrites.

If you are not a philosopher and are looking for more guidance on how to act, this text will have few. But here are some takeaways:

• Be careful about feeling certain about your moral beliefs. Virtually nobody who has studied ethics seriously as a career does.
• Realize that how you feel about something being right or wrong may not align with your actual moral values and that unrelated external factors, even a bad smell, may influence both your feelings and ethical judgment.
• If someone cannot be flexible in aligning their moral beliefs closer to yours because they're uncertain, remember that's extremely hard to do because they'll feel both evil and like hypocrites when doing it.

I wish I had more answers for you, but this is what we know about this.