All moral judgement goes out the window once you accept the world as it is. I didn’t choose to write that sentence. It arrived in my brain, unbidden, all on its own. Same for this sentence, and the next. Imagine the experience of the feeling of freedom that comes from accepting that all that occurs in this world is as it is, that every single outcome (the future) could not have been otherwise. Next, consider putting this proverb into practice in your daily life. Start simple. Try it for one day. Monitor your thoughts closely. Each time you note yourself wanting to render moral judgment of any kind (“that was wrong, and so…“; “it was your responsibility to…“; “you should have instead done…“; blah blah) – stop yourself and consider that whatever this person did or said was not of her “choosing,” and then you might understand why any moral rebuke from you would be silly. After all, if she can’t choose her thoughts, then she can’t choose her actions either, so how can she be held “responsible” for causing the future? And withholding moral judgement cuts both ways. When what someone says or does aligns with a good outcome, to paraphrase Barack Obama, “You didn’t do that.” Withhold your praise. Same goes for someone whose action aligns with a bad outcome. Withhold your admonition. When you come to accept that you don’t think your own thoughts, and come to accept that you can’t do otherwise, then the moral judgement of any human actor (yourself included) is easily seen as a pointless exercise, like shaking your fist at the rain.
Also consider that the qualities of good and bad do not require the prior of a moral constitution. There are plenty of books of philosophy wherein the authors provide a secular basis for good and bad. Smart people have been thinking about this stuff for a very long time now. And I’m not saying good and bad are not subjective. Any given future state of affairs may be good (or bad) for you, consistent (or not) with the purpose of human flourishing, and simultaneously be the opposite for another person, surely. So if the action a person takes directly causes you to experience a bad state of affairs (e.g., she steps into the crosswalk and you hit her with your car), it seems to me it would be a natural and fair human response to say so (fuck, this is bad), just avoid any moral accusations directed at the pedestrian, implying that she could have thought or acted otherwise. This is a really hard way to think about this; I know, I’ve tried. I keep trying. Although I can report that, each time I’ve responded to a person absent the tone of moral judgement, I feel better about myself, like I’ve experienced a kind of positive feedback, even if it’s short-lived.
Personally, I don’t much care what the roots of moral sentiments are in human psychology. Evolution! Maybe. Although I find the conclusion that all physical and mental traits of an organism (humans included), viewed as they are by evolutionary biologists as being nothing more than in service to reproductive success, deeply unsatisfying. While it doesn’t really matter to my point here what the source of morality is, when I have paused to think about the root cause, my conclusion, more a hypothesis really, is that all the moral sentiments expressed by humans are grounded in some way in the religious traditions they practice, and have practiced in one form or another since we started to walk upright. I imagine that when the ancients looked into the night sky, they were both humbled and terrified. Terrified because unlike any other animal, they were self-aware of their own mortality. They thought themselves special. Different from the other animals in some important but hard-to-describe way. So they made up stories regarding their origin, which over time gave way to creeds for proper behavior within the groups they formed, and to guide their various modes of worship. In time, nearly ever human alive became convinced he was special in some way, came to believe all were endowed with free will, that each person had an author up there that directed his thoughts, an author which could realize any possible future, among many, that the free-willer desired. But before long people started suffering moral opprobrium for doing or saying (or not) things they couldn’t possibly do or say otherwise, all because of this ancestral, mythical belief that they could. The rest of it is explained by inheritance, the passing down of these stories and their creeds to subsequent generations of people, right up to today, including the underlying belief that humans can somehow “choose” the future with their minds. And when they screw up, the bad outcomes are their fault, because of course they could have done otherwise, right? And where their supposed “choices” align with good outcomes, well, atta-boys are used to reinforce the myth that I chose my future!
There has to be an unsettling consequence to the conscience of people who really deep down have come to believe the future is fully determined, and the notion that human beings cannot do (act or speak) otherwise to change it (cause it). Because even as I have tried to sustain my responses to people as though this is true, is has set me to experience a kind of cognitive dissonance in my mind. For example, when I speak my order to the ice cream store person – I’ll have chocolate, please – how is that not me changing the future state of affairs from what it otherwise might have been, i.e. a future where I had chosen vanilla or strawberry? The answer, I think, owes to a cultural myth, handed down from my ancestors, reinforced during my upbringing, which gives rise to the intuition that, as a human, I am special in some spiritual way. This is evidently so deeply felt it’s very hard for me (and likely you as well) to try and force my brain to relearn what, in fact, is really going on – understood through modern neuroscience that my brain output (thoughts) cannot, and do not, determine the future. But here’s the thing: If the act of my speaking “chocolate” was fully determined before I spoke it, if that instantaneous state of mind did not produce the future (chocolate vs another flavor), if it only represents the future after the fact of it, ok, but then what is the most immediate prior cause of any future state of affairs? The underlying laws of physics? I’m a science guy, I admit that makes my brain hurt.
A parting thought…
If we humans are merely amoral agents whose brains represent predetermined states of reality – what I call experience – instead of the widely held belief that we are the author of our own thoughts which determine the future, then all our moral sentiments are up for re-consideration. Take pride and forgiveness. Both are sentiments that entail a moral judgement. If a person can’t think her own thoughts, if I’m right she may only experience and respond to the thoughts that come to her unbidden, then whether some future state of affairs is good or bad makes no difference, she is both an acausal and amoral agent with respect to that state of affairs, no different than, say, a tree. And who is proud of a tree for the shade it provides, or forgives it for falling on a car.