How to Derive a Moral Order

If there ain't no such things as objective moral facts, how can we ever build a moral order together?

Let’s go on a philosophical walk today. Hopefully, you have considered the above statement. It is not a moral claim, though it resembles one.

The resemblance is purposeful.

You see, there are no such things as moral facts. My saying so is not a claim about moral reasoning per se. It’s an ontological one. So, if I were to say chairs exist, quarks exist, or black holes exist, I am making an ontological claim. If I said She was wrong to cheat on her husband, I would be making a different kind of claim—either a claim about how I feel about her infidelity (which is affective) or a claim about the destructive tendencies of infidelity in general, which usually terminate in questions about how it makes people feel (which is also affective).

Reasons and Feelings

Some would argue that there are good reasons why such affective responses flow in response to certain kinds of acts—and both reasons and feelings can hang together in a strong justificatory web. So far, so good. But reasons and feelings don’t add up to “moral realism” in metaphysics or ontology (also known as metaethics). Such has a bearing on whether moral claims can be said to be true or false, in the same way Max is sitting in a chair is true or false.

Some think a fundamental linkage exists between our affective responses and moral good/bad. Jeremy Bentham was one such person. He offered the greatest happiness principle along these lines. But a monomaniacal commitment to such a principle leads to absurd results. For example, some of us think our lives and earnings shouldn’t be sacrificed to some aggregate welfare calculus. Yet, intuitively, we know we can’t dismiss questions of aggregate welfare completely.

Another way of putting all this is that even if there were moral facts or properties—which is doubtful—people would be terrible at knowing them. Matters get more confusing when there seem to be competing moral claims, whether or not these are metaphysical “facts.”

This is another reason I frequently insist that persuasion and coercion are the only two forces of social change in this world that matter.

God Spells and Rights Talk

Certainly, making philosophical arguments about the nature of moral claims is a form of persuasion. And sometimes it works! There are, after all, a lot of people who accept the Lockean theological justification for rights. For example:

Our rights come from God, not government. It says so in the Declaration of Independence!

Still, think about all the godless heathens like the miserable authoritarian Politico writer Heidi Pryzbyla, who thinks that rights come from government officials. Even though she’s mostly wrong, the effect of that kind of thinking makes her right by default. Don’t believe me? Try not paying taxes next year.

My position on the matter is as follows: If you’re sitting around with either John Locke or Heidi Pryzbyla wondering where rights come from, you’ve already lost those rights—at least in this life.

In other words, rights must be derived, not discovered. And deriving rights is about moral spellcasting, solidarity, and subversive innovation.

The Moral Spellbook

Imagine a situation where Henry Ford is pumping out horseless carriages. Everyone is driving around willy-nilly, often crashing, often in traffic snarls. You can cast a spell for half an hour with a single rule. Zimzalabim: Drive on the right side.

Everyone does. Suddenly, there is order.

People quickly learn the benefits of that order so that they transmute the rule into a moral statement: We ought to drive on the right side!

Now, let’s return to our original epigraph.

The repetition is handy because we’ll break it down. Let’s call it the Proto-Pledge. As I have said, morality is mostly about our affective responses, as well as reasons we might feel such responses.

Recently, I argued that we need to learn to speak in different moral languages, and in many respects, this is a follow-up to that post.

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First, notice that our Proto-Pledge is not an ethical maxim per se but rather a general statement of instrumental rationality. In other words, with the formulation: If you want x, then you should do y formulation; we appeal to A) one’s self-interests and B) a plausible way of fulfilling those interests. (A parallel example is: If you want to live longer, abstain from smoking cigarettes.) Again this is a claim of instrumental rationality designed to appeal to your subjective valuation, not objective morality.

Still, let’s think of the language of traditional Western ethical systems as spells to be taken from a spellbook. In other words, our spellbook has four major categories of moral reasoning, each of which has strong intuitive appeal.

• Deontic or Rules-based Ethics

• Virtue Ethics

• Contractarian

• Consequentialist/Utilitarian

Most philosophers spend endless hours fighting over which is correct, which is the master ethic, and which system they will adopt to justify their positions. But in doing so, they tend to narrow their moral vocabularies. Such “foolish consistency” can be a “hobgoblin,” particularly if the world runs solely on persuasion and coercion—and, spoiler alert, we want to forego initiating harm or threatening the innocent.

To repeat, we begin with the form If you want x, then do y form—an appeal to a given person’s interests—which we call the instrumentally rational approach. Then, we break the rest down thus:

• Deontic or Rules-based Ethics - abstain from initiating harm (obey a rule)

• Virtue Ethics - join others willing to do the same (practice with others)

• Contractarian - lock arms in solidarity (i.e. form an agreement)

• Consequentialist/Utilitarian - happiness, harmony, and prosperity (find desired ends)

Now, we have put five different ingredients into a single, powerful spell to tailor our appeal.

But it is an appeal. Not everyone will bite, especially those who perceive an immediate or greater benefit from initiating harm against others (e.g., sociopaths and politicians).

Rights are derived instead of discovered or delivered.

The Pledge

From that appeal, which we called the Proto-Pledge, we can derive a Pledge.

Because I seek happiness, harmony, and prosperity, I will refrain from initiating harm against others, join others willing to do the same, and lock arms with them in solidarity.

Such a Pledge might be the basic requirement for membership in a fraternal organization (such as The Grey Robes) or the basis for a multilateral contract (such as the Constitution of Consent 1.0).

Upon such bases, people can reverse-engineer a society. They could establish, for example, grounds for membership or enforcement respectively. Such offers signatories the architecture of their own community, their own morality, and their own law. It also lets them delineate, with concentric circles, those within and without and who is more an enemy by degree.

1. Signatories (those who take the pledge)

2. Aligned non-signatories (are sympathetic)

3. Neutral non-signatories (keep to themselves)

4. Political non-signatories (partisans and pundits)

5. Authoritarian proxies (bureaucrats and police powers)

6. Authoritarians (politicians)

Currently, the world is composed of one signatory to this Pledge (Yours Truly), so it’s of now use. But the idea would be to swell the ranks of 1-3 until momentum behind Asymptotic Anarchism reaches a tipping point.

The rather dispiriting point is that building a moral order is a numbers game: The more people are willing to deal morally, the more they can cluster together—for the ends of happiness, harmony, and prosperity. Morality, as such, is more about solidarity than it is about syllogisms. That said, if your syllogism can bring others to pledge their commitment, go with God.