Religion, Politics, and Moral Philosophy

Why are there no Kantian weddings?

Religion, Politics, and Moral Philosophy are all competing to provide us with moral guidance: what is right and wrong.

They each have their trade-offs, their strengths and weaknesses, which we'll explore together next.

Religion: a complete moral system

Philosophers and would-be philosophers who are atheists or agnostic will sometimes talk down on religion with:

"If there is a God, how come all these religions disagree with each other? Only one of you can be right. How do you know your religion is right, and not somebody else's?"

Of course, the same thing said about religion can be said about politics and moral philosophy: there are many disagreements, and nobody can quite prove their position. That may not necessarily prevent us from making moral progress, though.

Many religions have stood the test of time for millennia.

One important characteristic of many such religions is what I call a complete moral system: a system that supports us in navigating life, morally speaking.

A complete moral system generally gives us a sense of identity, community, rituals, and purpose.

You can notice identity when you see people refer to religion as something they are rather than something they have. They'll say, "I'm a Christian" or "I'm a Muslim."

With religion, there is also often a strong sense of community. People of the same religion know each other and refer to each other as part of the same tribe because of their shared religion.

Additionally, religion is often filled with rituals. From home rituals like a daily prayer, to fasting, to church-going on Sundays, to weddings and funerals, religion builds rituals we participate in throughout our lives.

Finally, religion often provides a sense of purpose. It attempts to answer the big questions such as "Why am I here?" and "What must I do?"** Accessibility is a critical part of it — having an answer to these questions is an effect you can reasonably expect by just being religious.

The result is that religion can be quite integrated into a religious person's life. Rather than concerning yourself with trolley problems, religion is actually a part of your day-to-day.

Religions aren't perfect as a moral guide, though. Because religion is often based on sacred texts that are both prone to subjective interpretation and protected from being changed, it can lead to both a lack of guidance on modern ails and abuse by bad actors.

The guidance a religious person will receive about how to conduct their family life, community, and even what to eat can be quite specific, but guidance for global warming, AI and social media usage will be generic and subjective to a preacher, no matter how useful such moral guidance could be.

What that means is that whether a religion will have guidance on our current affairs, be it abortion, gun rights, stem cells, pandemics or genetic engineering can be hit or miss.

The reliance on ancient texts can also potentially hinder moral progress or debate due to a lack of guidance on modern human inventions. A position on napalm, nuclear arsenals or drone usage in war is more likely to be faced with "I don't know" than "good" or "bad." when the moral guidance is only religious.

There's another moral framework that helps us make moral sense of modern affairs though: Politics.

Politics: Up to date moral beliefs

Politics assigns us moral values for current events.

Through our political affiliation, we gain critical guidance on what to think about modern ails: abortion, gun rights, climate change, stem cells, pandemics, genetic engineering, will all have some direct and specific guidance on how to be interpreted by us.

This guidance from politics on modern ailments is extremely helpful. While it won't necessarily affect one's daily life, it does help us make sense of the world and our place in it.

It's unrealistic to expect everybody to have an informed opinion on every modern dilemma through reasoned thinking alone. There are too many modern ails, they're too complex, require erudition most of us don't have, and life is too full of other challenges to allow such pursuit. And yet, we still must know how we feel about them.

While politics does not provide us with rituals and only subtly with a sense of community and purpose, it does provide us with an identity.

In America, people often identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, or as Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Progressives, Socialists, etc. This gives them a framework for deciding what is right and wrong when organizing society.

One interesting characteristic of obtaining our moral guidance from politics is that our moral positions will fluctuate even if our identity won't, as our political affiliation updates its moral guidance based on current affairs.

Like a sports team that changes its players but keeps its fans, a particular political party can change its guidance on economic intervention, foreign policies, or environmental laws but keep its name.

This means that while Americans are almost fully composed of Democrats and Republicans, I suspect many of them couldn't correctly and precisely define what is a democracy, what is a republic, or how they differ. And in a way, that doesn't really matter.

A similar effect will happen on other political terms such as liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc. They'll just become an agglutination of modern affair moral beliefs, slowly drifting from their classical meaning.

Politics aren't perfect as a moral guide, though. Not only are they not a complete moral system, and so will lack the day-to-day guidance we need, their frequent editing can subject them to inconsistencies, and they can build in us rigid beliefs across unrelated affairs.

Because politics has no foundational text like religion, it has no canonical source of current beliefs. We will guide our beliefs on our previous understanding, politicians' recent speeches, and in large part on what we read on the internet to keep our moral beliefs up to date.

Like a sort of crowdsourced moral belief system, by design this model will create a number of inconsistencies. So we'll see a primary debate where two politicians of the same party disagree on a stance, and us being of that political party, will be unsure about what is right.

Likewise, political moral beliefs come in packages. No matter whether you believe in individual rights or government control over critical matters, you're likely to have your opinions about gun rights and abortion align with your party's instead of against it.

This, again, is a feature of political moral values. Political morality is not a buffet, and the identity component of our political affiliation can quickly lead us to shun others if we simultaneously believe in the moral values of opposing parties.

But this rigidity in beliefs also makes it easy to make sense of the world while we attend to other important life matters. It's the price we pay to make sense of the world without the unrealistic investment of thoroughly understanding it.

But there is a way to make this unrealistic investment in understanding the world to create moral values: moral philosophy.

Moral philosophy: analytical understanding of morals

Moral philosophy is the study of what is truly right and wrong.

Let me start by telling you the current academic consensus about what is truly morally right and wrong: there's no consensus. But each academic is really confident in their own view.

What moral philosophy does that religion and politics doesn't is to try to bring rigor to its claims, be it logical, scientific, or sociological.

While religion asks that you take some things on faith, and politics claims things through current public opinion, philosophers often give you the information they've used to arrive where they did and try to show you the manual so you can arrive there yourself.

But moral philosophy is hard. Like really, really hard.

In fact, here's a funny thing I've only seen in moral philosophy books: rebuttal books. Books will be published about what other people think about other people's books, and so on. It's like the internet, but where comments are at least 30,000 words. Sometimes, the rebuttal is published inside of the original book!

So moral philosophy is one big conversation about what is right and wrong, a big debate. While it doesn't quite land anywhere, or at least doesn't land everybody in the same somewhere, it builds a lot of good habits on evaluation of our morality.

Moral philosophy isn't perfect as a moral guide, though. Besides the heavy erudition investment required to understand it, which few of us have the ability or inclination to pay, it suffers from fragmentation, from a lack of a complete moral system, and often (but not always) a glaring lack of pragmatism and application.

A quick comment on erudition: moral philosophy can be very, very hard. Because they often won't sell you on the pitch without showing you how the sausage is made, it's not unlike to run into stuff like this:

Other Reductionists might require that R have a reliable cause, or have its normal cause. To postpone this disagreement, consider only cases where R would have its normal cause. A future person will be me if he will be R-related to me as I am now, and no different person will be R-related to me. If there is no such different person, the fact this future person will be me just consists in the fact that relation R holds between us. [..]

Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pag. 262

This book is from one of my favorite authors and favorite books. Still, the fact that I knew I could just open the book at any random page and grab the first paragraph I put my eyes on to illustrate my point of moral philosophy's inaccessibility is telling.

Then there's fragmentation. Moral philosophy is not only fragmented, it's distinctly fragmented.

Most modern moral philosophy adds what seems like its own flavor, but its requirement for rigor requires that you can't pick multiple ones. A moral philosopher saying, "I'm a utilitarian but also a virtue ethicist," is like saying, "I'm all blue, but I'm also all yellow." In contrast, a person saying, "I have some conservative and some libertarian values" or "I'm kind of a liberal but also kind of a socialist" can sometimes be OK, like saying, "I'm striped blue and yellow." – it depends on the colors you choose and the rhetoric of the moment.

While often moral philosophers will talk seriously about 2, maybe 3 schools of philosophy: Consequentialism (including Utilitarianism), Deontology (Kantism) and Virtue Ethics (Aristoteleanism), in practice they can fall into a myriad sub-systems.

So saying "I'm a consequentialist" is like telling someone, "I love baseball." – your interlocutor's reaction is not "Oh cool," but "Which team?" So a John Stuart Mill utilitarian is slightly different from Bentham, different from Sidgwick, different from Moore. And then there's long-termism, effective altruism, or hedonism, preference utilitarianism, and this train goes on.

This mix of fragmentation and requirement of rigor can make it quite difficult to build a complete moral system with identity, community, rituals, and a sense of purpose. While you'll find identity and a sense of purpose, the fragmentation and rigor limit your communities, and the analytical nature limits any rituals.

That's one reason why you won't find any Kantian weddings. The other is you won't find that many Kantians, hehe.

Finally, save for a few variants of moral philosophy like Effective Altruism or Stoicism, it's hard to put some types of philosophy into practice. The notorious positive psychologist Martin Seligman complains about this lack of pragmatism by illustrating the topic of his philosophy senior thesis:

My senior thesis in philosophy solved a small puzzle. It was a careful analysis of the difference between “same” and “identical,” a step on the road to undermining the thesis that mind and body are identical, because “identical” entails having the same spatiotemporal coordinates. Mind and body have the same temporal coordinates (they occur at the same time) but not the same spatial ones (they do not occur in the same place). So mind and body are not identical. QED. My thesis even won the philosophy prize at graduation.

Seligman, Martin. The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism . John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.

Sounds nit-picky, but moral philosophy can be full of stuff like this.

So some moral philosophies, either ancient ones seeing some resurgence like Stoicism, or some brand new ones like Effective Altruism, try to be pragmatic and give people day-to-day guidance, but these are rare and, sometimes, unsuccessful. And so figuring out how to live them in your day-to-day is left as an exercise for the reader. And I hope you like reading.

So, after this exploration of religion, politics, and moral philosophy's trade-offs, we're left with one critical question:

Who's right?

But what is truly right and wrong??

I don't know.

Each of us will have our own guides for moral truth: our religion and preachers, our politics and politicians, our favorite philosophy and philosophers, and our own ideas and feelings on what is right and wrong.

I can't say which of these 3 options is truly right or, within them, which is the correct religion, politics, or moral philosophy for you to choose.

While some of us are really sure that we have the right answer to what is truly right, I don't. All I have to show, after much studying, is some opinions. You won't find any guarantees from me.

And perhaps, if more of us can keep open minds about what's truly right, we can make more moral progress together as humanity.

Or perhaps not.