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From the Los Angeles Times

By Sam Harris

by Sean Prophet 

Self-interest is the highest moral principle for an organism which has survival as its central purpose. We must distinguish between short and long-term self interest, and this is where the distinction lies:  selfishness vs. self-interest.

Selfishness would be short term taking advantage of others for personal gain--which would have long term consequences such as loss of reputation, running afoul of laws, etc. In a word, selfishness of this type would be just plain stupid. A person acting this way would quickly become a pariah, and thus lose the benefit of any short-term gain. Reputation is everything.

Self-interest would be looking to gain the maximum advantage while cultivating a community of support through reciprocal altruism. Actions would only be taken that would result in long-term benefit to the individual, which necessarily would include helping others who could help you. In the most expansive view of self-interest, the entire world would need to be considered, along with all possible impacts of any individual action. As a practical matter, most people cannot focus this large, and therefore should concentrate on their immediate community of family and friends. In this way, working for mutual benefit in one's community could be seen as the highest expression of self-interest. It yields the greatest likelihood that others will be there for you, should you have a time of need.

It goes without saying that morality, or ethics (the word I prefer) involves not doing harm to others. Indeed, the highest goal in my view is to see the greatest level of happiness and personal fulfillment possible. In a coercive moral system (collectivism of any sort), this shakes out as a kind of utilitarianism, which ultimately ends up turning self-interest on its ear. In other words, helping others is to be encouraged, so long as it is of a person's own free will. Coercion to help others, whether it be by a 'Robin Hood' or government kleptocracy of high taxation, will end up resulting in systemic collapse and loss of the very goal which the coercion was supposed to serve. We have strong historical evidence of this in the failed 20th century experiment with communism.

Clearly, we don't need this coercion. People naturally help each other in a stable society. Volunteers and private charities abound. In neighborhoods, people have everything to gain from a thriving community.  Ethics are independent of religion or law. A persons' interest is served by serving those in their immediate circle, and humans instinctively know this.

This is sort of a variant on the 'golden rule'. But I think there are times when the golden rule breaks down, especially when people are in any sort of crisis where they have to make a choice for survival at whatever cost, including the cost of future reprisals. Or they may have a mental illness which allows them to externalize their problems and blame the community for their lack of success. It is important for everyone to be aware when someone in their circle may be in this condition, and about to commit a betrayal of the group involving a short-term selfish act. These tendencies are never far from the surface, and it's wise to keep alert.

We need laws to resolve stubborn disputes between people, so there is something to fall back on. But to rely on these laws or scriptural morality implies a lack of well-developed personal ethics--a sad state of affairs indeed.

The next time you hear a theist claim morality comes from God, ask them this question: Would they immediately start raping and killing people if they found out for certain there was no God? If their answer is no, then you have just perfectly and permanently refuted this argument. If their answer is yes....

by Francois Tremblay
 

Although I'd like to lay claim to it, the Moral Razor is not my invention. It is the work of Stefan Molyneux, writer for LewRockwell.com and blogger at Freedomain. I have only clarified and formalized his ideas on the topic.

The most famous razor in philosophy is no doubt Occam's Razor, which states that, when confronted with two hypotheses that explain the same set of facts, the ontologically simplest hypothesis is the correct one. In general, a razor is a simple and clear principle which eliminates a great number of invalid or undesirable positions. Occam's Razor is a simple and clear principle which eliminates a great number of pseudo-scientific beliefs and religious fantasies. Its justification lies in the nature of objective evidence.

The Moral Razor operates in the same way. Its justification lies in the fact that moral principles must apply to all persons, otherwise they are mere cultural belief or opinion. We observe that all persons have the same biological, mental and social needs, and that therefore any moral principle which purports to judge the actions of some people differently than the actions of others, or to elevate the values of some against others, must be invalid.

The Moral Razor is this :
A moral principle or system, or a political principle or system, is invalid if it is asymmetrical in application (to locations, times or persons).

This is easily seen to eliminate large swarths of moral systems. All forms of moral relativism are automatically eliminated, as they are based on the premise that moral judgment somehow differs from person to person or from culture to culture. So are all forms of utilitarianism (including democracy) eliminated, because they imply that the values of the majority are superior to those of the minority, with subsequent assymetry of action.

Collectivist worldviews, such as religions, with their sacrifice of individualism in the name of a higher ideal, are also threatened by the Razor. One saliant feature of such worldviews is the strict adherence to a moral system which is usually memetically utilitarian in nature. But this is an inherent asymmetry, and a rational Christian (if there was such a chimera) would be in his right to ask why he is to be considered good only when he follows a set of - to him - arbitrary rules, when only a small subset of people actually benefit from his obedience. And there is also the pesky little problem of believing in an entire moral system ostensibly because it is designed by an all-powerful being, and the inherent asymmetry in this moral master/slave relationship.

Obviously, universality is necessarily egalitarian. And egalitarianism is necessarily individualist. They all go together like glove and hand. The individual can only flourish in a social and political context where everyone is allowed to flourish, and such a context can only exist if everyone is equal under morality and the law. You cannot dissociate the two.

It's not surprising that the most murderous social systems, the most collectivist societies, those of communism and nazism, are predicated upon a strong ruling class that exerts both economic and ideological control. There is nothing less conductive to religion and politics than the firm conviction that everyone should be equally free to express his own values.

The Razor, in its initial form, also applies to a great deal of public policy. Often, the only reason for their perceived universality is the failure to consider where the benefits are going as well as the costs. Take taxation, for example. True, everyone has to pay taxes, but only the ruling class is free to accumulate and use tax money - under utilitarian considerations, as for any other collectivist system. So taxation is asymmetrical.

One easy way to figure out assymetry is to ask whether anyone can act in the same way. No other citizen can raise his own police and force people at gunpoint to pay them tribute (except perhaps the mafia, but they have to contend with the government's guns). The same applies to policies such as eminent domain, censorship, and other governmental initiations of force. If the government does not open itself to the same restrictions, then the policy is necessarily asymmetrical (compare for example victim disarmament and growth in military spending).

There is one exception, and that is when we are looking at scenarios where a valid rule was already broken. Arresting someone when no crime was committed is asymmetrical, but arresting someone who initiated force is a different scenario. In this case we are looking not at a political principle - which is what the Razor is about - but rather at the consequence of breaking such a principle. In that case I would argue that, as long as no other asymmetry is present, singling out initiators of force should not be seen as breaking the Razor a priori.

This leads us to the other use of the Razor, which is the relational level. Here we're looking not at the application of a moral principle, but rather at the relational results. Suppose we say, for example, "theft is universally good". This is problematic since theft is a relational asymmetry : the right of property of the thief subsists (otherwise he would not be a thief at all but rather a hired goon, for one thing), but that of the victim is taken away, creating a contradiction.

We can generalize this idea and say that all coercion implies relational asymmetry, as coercion implies the existence of a perpetrator and a victim, with inherent asymmetry contained therein. So we can say the following :
All moral or political principles based on coercion have relational asymmetry, and therefore imply contradictions in rights.

Since there are only two basic relational modes, coercive and voluntary (the Trader Principle), we see that this principle eliminates a great deal of principles and ideologies as well. The Trader Principle, on the other hand, is inherently symmetrical : everyone gives and receives value at all times. Gift-giving is not an exception to this rule, but rather a confirmation of it, as the gift-giver sees self-interest in doing so. For some people, giving gifts is even more pleasurable than receiving them. If someone is acting of his own free will, then he necessarily sees benefit in his actions, and the Trader Principle cannot be violated.

From Goosing the Antithesis

What society loses when it discards Judeo-Christian faith and belief in God is something far more difficult to replace: the value system most likely to promote ethical behavior and sustain a decent society. That is because without God, the difference between good and evil becomes purely subjective. What makes murder inherently wrong is not that it feels wrong,but that a transcendent Creator to whom we are answerable commands: "Thou shalt not murder." What makes kindness to others inherently right is not that human reason says so, but that God does: "Love thy neighbor as thyself; I am the Lord."

--from Jeff Jacoby, Townhall.com December 14, 2006

God cannot be the basis of morality. But if that is so, then what IS the basis for morality? Or, as my protagonist asked me in the title of one of his responses, “If not from God, then where?”

The surprising answer is evolution. Ironically, it is the very thing that fundamentalist theists rail against as promoting a might-makes-right, dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed world that is responsible for our most tender feelings of love and respect, mercy, and forgiveness.

But how can this be so? Isn’t evolution survival of the fittest? To answer that is going to require a bit of explaining.

The phrase, “survival of the fittest” was first used by Herbert Spencer BEFORE Darwin published his first edition of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin adopted the phrase in a later edition of his book as a simple but vivid description of his proposed mechanism of evolution, NATURAL SELECTION. Perhaps that was a mistake BECAUSE of the vividness of the phrase. It DOES cause people to envision a might-makes-right, dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed world. But it doesn’t have to. Let’s take a close look and see how it REALLY works in nature.

Survival of the fittest. The first question to ask is what determines fitness? It is here that most people immediately think of might, aggressiveness, skill in combat, etc. But to find correct answer we need to go back to Darwin’s original term … natural selection.

Natural selection …  nature selects! In other words, it is NATURE that determines fitness. It is not necessarily might, aggressiveness, skill in combat, etc. that determines fitness, it is the ENVIRONMENT that the organisms lives in that determines fitness. Characteristics like might, aggressiveness, skill in combat will only be selected for in environments that such characteristics help the organism survive and reproduce. In environments that such characteristics are not helpful, these characteristics will not be selected for and may be selected against.

So to determine what characteristics are actually beneficial requires a close look at the organism’s environment. What is the most important component of our environment that determines our reproductive success? I suppose that if you asked different evolutionary biologists that question you would get several different answers. Here is my answer … other people.

We are STRONGLY social animals. We live with other people about us all the time. We depend on other people all the time. Our ability to survive depends on us getting along with other people. And it has been this way over evolutionary time. Our early ancestors lived in social groups going back millions of years. They too counted on each other to survive. Cooperation was a necessity or they wouldn’t survive. This environment sets the stage such that any inheritable trait that promotes cooperation is a prime candidate for positive selection.

So contrary to the fundamentalist doctrine of “original sin”, we are not born with a predisposition to be selfish and do bad things, we are born with a genetic predisposition to cooperate and do good! If that is the case, then why do we ever do bad?

The reason we do bad is because our behaviors are not fully controlled by genetic factors. Our behaviors are also learned. Learning is a very adaptive trait. It allows us to discover things about novel situations. Overall it is BIG PLUS for us. So it too is selected for. We have genes that affect our ability to learn, but I do not think we have genes that affect our ability as to WHAT we learn. Without some type of inheritable trait, natural selection will have nothing to work on. In that case we will always be able to learn bad things as well as good things.

Some people are bound to learn that taking unfair advantage of others gives them a short term reward. So then, why doesn’t THIS behavior dominate our society? Because our society IS our environment. It can’t exist that way and without society those behaviors do not produce those rewards.

To see this, let’s look at a hypothetical society. I’m going to use my protagonist’s question, “Is it OK to murder people?”, as an inspiration here. Let’s suppose in our hypothetical society is perfectly fine to do just that. If you have something I want it is perfectly expected and acceptable to everyone for me to try and kill you to take it. What kind of society would that be?

Well, the first thing I would have to note is that if it is OK for me to do that to you, it must also be OK for you to do that to me. I don’t think either of us would trust the other. In fact, NOBODY could trust anyone else. Why would I do anything for anyone else? At best, I might get something in return from them that would motivate someone else to kill me to get it. In that case, there would be no goods and services in that society.

So what could I do? The best I could do in such a society is to carve out as much land that might have enough resources on it to keep me alive and if lucky attract a mate. I would try my best to protect this territory from others. It would turn out that killing them probably would require more of my resources than running them off, so in most cases there wouldn’t necessarily be killing.

Are there any “societies” like this? Well, sort of. Grizzly Bears. But we normally call them “solitary” animals.

It turns out that the only society in which a person is likely to be rewarded for killing someone else is a society in which such behavior is rare. It also turns out that the only societies that are stable are societies in which such behaviors are rare.

So, our societies and behaviors have a feedback relationship to them. The structure of societies affects behaviors and behaviors affect the structure of societies. Stable societies tend to be societies in which the vast majority of people practice acceptable behaviors. That is … good morals.

So where does that leave us? We evolved as social animals. That required us to cooperate. Genes predisposing us to cooperate were selected for. Thus, we have a genetic predisposition for such cooperative behaviors allowing a strengthening and stabilization of society. Societies and behavior reinforce each other ensuring a majority of people practice good morals. Or at least that is my view on the subject.

From Darwin's Beagle