Finding Truth In Value

In my previous posts, I have focused on the philosophical underpinnings of radical relativism. I would like, now, to turn to some more practical implications, namely, how the lack of absolute truth in any form would affect decisions about the human condition. If even the things we were taught to be absolutely true are not, then what can we possibly claim to know about that we always knew were subjective? It can seem daunting at first.

In fact, many people dismiss any thought process that calls itself "relativism" for the simple reason that they misconstrue the word to mean anarchy, or even hedonism. If truth is subjective then how can anything one desires be morally wrong? The mistake in this dilemma is in assuming that "subjective" means "whatever I want it to be." Unless you live alone on a deserted island, you are part of some sort of culture and all of us who live in a culture (voluntarily or not) abrogate a part of our autonomy to that culture. It's part of the deal.

There have been lots of attempts to try and simplify the complex relationships between individuals and the societies of which they are a part. More or less, those attempts have all come down to an argument that is sometimes summarized as "my right to swing my arm ends at another person's nose." The gist of this is that, so long as you are not hurting anyone else, you probably ought to have freedoms to do what makes you happy or what feels right. Naturally, societies rarely work this way and, as usual, the devil is in the details.

Let's begin with what it means to hurt someone else. If I don’t know what I know and what I don’t, what do I know about when someone else is harmed? I have talked about so-called objective facts. I have talked about things that we "know" because we can observe them. They supposedly are or are not, as a matter of fact, not because someone has a preference about them. Obviously, I am referring carefully to facts, and objectivity because I have already explained why I do not really think there are such things, but most people at least consider them to be more real than things like feelings, and welfare, and quality, and value, all these subjective things that science mostly stays away from.

So what about those softer things? How do we know that Wagner wrote great opera given that so many people I know cannot stand it? Why am I not justified in declaring with certainty that lima beans taste awful? I am sorry, but they do!

How do we decide that something someone does is right or that something someone does is wrong? Right and wrong. Good and evil. Greed. Lust. Power. Pain. Cruelty. Violence. Death. Terrorism. Genocide. What makes those words so hard to say and to hear? Are we genetically wired to despise those things? Obviously not, because so much of human history has been defined by the pursuit of the deeds those words describe.

If we cannot know anything that is supposedly factual, what prayer do we have to presume to know, for sure, whether a piece of art is beautiful? How can we judge a fine wine; the elegance of a skyscraper; the inspirational quality of a speech; the vileness of an act of cruelty? Ironically, the answer may just be that these things are easier to judge accurately simply because they hold no pretense of objectivity. The only standard that counts in your judgment of the things that affect you is your own set of values, or more properly, the collective set of values you possess jointly with the other subscribers to whatever culture you happen to be a part of.

I need to go off into some realm now that makes some uncomfortable.

What does it mean to like something. Let’s say I have a favorite color. I like red. I have a lot of red things in my house because I like red. Red makes me happy. What does that mean: red makes me happy? Biochemically, I can explain it as, perhaps, the release of a certain dopamine in my brain stimulated by the way my cerebral cortex is wired. Those pattern-matching algorithms up there are just wired to release more of it when I’m around red things perhaps.

But, more metaphysically, what is really happening? Is "happy" really just a convenient shorthand for what I just wrote? Maybe. It could be as simple as that. I have pleasant memories, wired into me from when I was young, perhaps because I had a lot of red toys, or my mother wore red when she comforted me, or whatever. But those explanations still seem to relate to some metaphysical sense of pleasure: I enjoyed playing with those toys. I liked being comforted. Again, those could have just been wired, as instinct, perhaps from some evolutionary survival mechanism. All perfectly plausible.

That, too, though, implies a sort of value, doesn’t it? That humans, or any species, would evolve a technique for survival seems to suggest a value of survival. That to exist is preferable than not to. Of course, one can take a purely rationalistic approach, and say that the way the universe operates simply is, that there is no implied good associated with its particular nature but simply that its nature is that it leads to evolution of these pockets of higher order including living species like us.

Well, that may be true. I will have to admit, though, that I do kind of prefer existence to non-existence. In general, there does seem to be a preference for existence, for a tendency towards these pockets of order that comprise the solar system, our ecosphere and the beings that occupy it. That preference seems wired into the very nature of the universe. So my question is, what is cause and what is effect? Is it that the nature of the universe to favor survival causes us to prefer survival? Or is it our preference for existence that gives the universe that nature?

Now before you accuse me of a god complex, I am not suggesting that I, or you or even all of us together created the universe. First of all, I wouldn’t say such a thing even if I believed it because that would require me to claim to know something. But I am saying that we have no reason to believe that there is any sort of reason to assume that the nature of the universe precedes our fondness for it. If we live in a universe of paradox, where something can be both true and false, maybe we avoid that paradox by choosing which side of it to live on.

Maybe there is a physical universe out there in this metaphysical river that allows knowledge paradox that is an absurdly reduced universe where contradiction happens and every possible proposition is true. Whatever beings might exist there might just prefer it that way. Personally, it sounds boring to me, but I happen to live in a universe that I find much more interesting. I live on the side of the paradox that values consistency over contradiction and existence over non-existence.

It does not really matter whether you believe the nature of the universe causes our preference for survival or the other way around, or whether the nature of the universe and our fondness for it are a happy coincidence. What does matter is that in a universe where to claim we know something forces us to accept paradox it is absolutely reasonable to say that our values and the universe we find ourselves in are closely related. We value survival. It’s programmed into our being, not just at the level of our DNA but at the level of physical laws that caused quarks to form protons and electrons and them to form hydrogen atoms that once collected through gravity until stars combusted in fusion furnaces that created heavier elements that combined to form molecules and coalesced into planets with enough energy and chaos to spawn early amino acids that organized into the first cells that over billions of years evolved into pompous amateur philosophers like me.

We know that there is a part of the universe, over there somewhere, where we know we can’t know anything. But the beauty of paradox is that you only have to look at one side of it at a time, so over here, this side of the universe, where we accept that we can know things, we also accept that we value existence. It’s sort of one of the requirements for membership to the club of knowledgeable entities, that we value existence. There are some things that we all have to value to coexist in this knowing, paradox-avoiding state we choose to live in. Valuing existence requires valuing the laws of nature that allow existence, things like three major dimensions, the forward marching of time, the laws of gravitation, the consistency of math and logic.

These things that science and philosophy tend to treat as absolute truisms are really only true on this side of the knowledge paradox. The knowledge paradox says they are also all false on the other side. If there are living beings able to exist over there I won’t speculate, but it is the kind of beings we are that we value existence and accept the laws of physics. Our shared truth allows our shared universe to exist.

These sorts of basic truths are essentially core values. Some philosophers have tried to derive values from truth, claiming, for instance, that a pursuit of happiness was an inherent quality of existence and therefore that happiness was a sort of absolute value. Of course, those efforts always failed because, in the real world, pursuit of happiness often involves conflict, so you get into questions of whether it is better to value collective happiness over individual happiness which is, itself, a question of value.

So I’m saying something different. I’m not saying that values derive from truth but that value, like truth, is not absolute. Knowledge is paradoxical because you cannot know what you don’t know and so truth is subject to your willingness to accept that you know it. Your willingness to accept that you know something is subject to whether or not you value that knowledge and the truth that is the subject of that knowledge. Truth and value are related, but not the way most people think they are. Truth is subject to value, not the other way around. The reason value is subjective is not because it is unrelated to truth. The reason value is subjective is because truth is subjective.

Some values, those strongly core ones, the ones related to the laws of the universe, seem more absolutely true because they are true for all of us. They have to be for us to exist in the same realm. Other important values, like those that prevent us from stealing and killing and generally lead us to act as civilized people are the most core of the values that we actually recognize as values. They are no more or less absolute than the real core values, but they are less-widely held. There are people who think it’s okay to steal. Different people have different views about when killing is justified. So we recognize that there are values at play there.

But if we accept the knowledge paradox we are given to the conclusion that our acceptance of the universe and its laws are as subjective as our tastes for color or food. It just happens that a taste for universal laws as we understand them is necessary to live here. And just as it is necessary for us to accept physical laws to live in the physical universe, it is also necessary for us to accept certain social laws to live, successfully in the structures of civilization. Now, within our physical universe, even here on our tiny little planet, we’ve managed to allow different civilization structures to exist with different sets of these social laws. Some of the differences are trivial, like whether or not you can turn right on a red light. Others are pretty significant, like whether consumption of alcohol is to be celebrated or punished by death. But, even with these significant differences, we manage, with some difficulty at times, to all survive in the same universe, and, at least for short times, even in each others’ civilizations.

Of course, these differences don’t exist simply between civilization boundaries. Even within our own country, we continue to have ongoing battles over what ought to be our social laws, over whose values should prevail when they conflict. Remember the abortion conflicts back in the ‘90s, when antiabortion activists were bombing abortion clinics and assassinating doctors that performed abortions? Talk about a conflict of values! What these activists were doing was fomenting rebellion. They believed that abortion was morally wrong in an absolute sense. They equated this belief with their belief in gravity. Immutable.

Of course, most people are uncomfortable with abortion. A large majority say either that they would never have an abortion themselves or that they would have one only under extreme circumstances. Yet, as strongly as most people feel, personally, about abortion being wrong, a solid majority also feel it should be legal. Inherently, collectively, as a culture, we seem to accept that personal values should be the arbiter of this very complicated and divisive issue. Not everyone agrees, of course, and the political importance of one’s opinion about abortion is still high.

We engage in a lot of double-think around the topic of morality. Most people seem to believe that there are moral absolutes. They hold their personal values dear and consider others who don’t share them to be backwards, or selfish, or maybe hedonistic. Yet, we live in a country that celebrates that diversity of values. We actively encourage immigration from countries that institutionalize significantly different values about life and sex and education and while we ask, as a condition for their immigration, that they integrate in language and behavior, we never ask them to abandon their values. As strongly as we may feel about our own values, one of our deepest-held values seems to be a respect for others’ different values.

If there are moral absolutes, why wouldn’t we insist on a one-world government that figures out what these absolute moral dictates are and enforce them on everyone? Would that not be the moral thing to do? The difficulties with such an idea are so obvious that I do not even need to discuss them, but as one key point of thought, the people out there who actually advocate for such a thing are some of the scariest people you will ever encounter.

It is tempting, certainly more convenient, to think that the notions of quality, beauty, taste and goodness are somehow written into the fabric of the universe. Countless philosophies and religious traditions have attempted to justify our human values in terms of some metaphysical absolute, from a Ten Commandments to a struggle between order and chaos. But, to date, no one has found a stone tablet, metaphorical or otherwise, that lays out, with credibility that is accepted by even a significant minority of the world’s population, what these absolute values are. Even if we found evidence of absolutes in values, how would we really know we had found them? Even if the evidence was absolutely compelling, though I have to admit that I don’t know by what standard such compulsion would be judged, we are still limited by our knowledge paradox. The absolute best we could ever do would be to place that newfound knowledge in the same category as our knowledge of other physical laws.

Of course, the best reason to believe that will not happen is that it seems necessary for us to agree on physical laws even to exist. Clearly, agreement on moral laws is not, as we seem to exist even without this agreement, and even coexist with those who disagree with us. We value existence more than we value agreement on issues like abortion. Our values allow us to disagree on issues like abortion. They don’t allow us to disagree on physical laws.

Another good reason to believe that we won’t find a credible source of moral absolutes is that our sense of moral absolutes changes over time. Much has been made of the cultural change that occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries when writers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau started writing about equality of men and social contracts and, in so doing, started challenging the conventional social order that allowed for kings to be anointed by God and those in their domain to be essentially their property. The emergence of the American and French revolutions stem directly from the changes that were occurring during that time.

What exactly were these changes?

It is really not a coincidence that this time of Enlightenment was occurring at the same time as the Industrial Revolution. The advancement of science and technology led directly to a broader intellectual class, one that had the ability to reason and think about what ought to be. Up until that time, the values of the people were the values of their king. They were not empowered to think, to develop their own perspective, to consider their own needs and sense of fairness relevant to society. Once that changed, once the people of Europe and the New World had developed that capacity, the cultural change was inevitable.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote of inalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, what he was really talking about was a set of rights that thinking people then demanded because they knew they finally had enough power to obtain them. It is popular amongst the absolutists in this country to claim that the phrase "all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights" constitutes some religious basis for the country’s laws. Even if Jefferson weren’t on record as denying this, which he was, I would still argue that the idea of inalienable rights and the equality of men came not from a creator, but from the intellectual development of western civilization that was occurring naturally at that time. That development created a new value for freedom, self-government and individual rights.

So if people with different values can coexist and values can change over time, it is a hard case to make that certain of them, the ones some would like to cast with the name "morals," have the same sort of absoluteness that we tend to ascribe to our physical laws. It is important to reiterate, though, that the lack of a stone tablet announcing absolute right and wrong to civilization does not imply a lack of a right and wrong. In fact, if anything, it makes more real and more important our individual sense of integrity to those values that we do hold.

So if we accept that values differ, and there are no easy, stone-written laws to rely on, how can we resolve complicated issues like abortion aand bioethics or even less acute but still murky social issues like gay marriage? Is there a way to get past our different values, respect that people’s values are deeply held, and still move forward on complicated issues like the ones we face today? I believe so.

I think the values surrounding these issues are much more common that we care to admit. We tell ourselves that these questions are mystical, unsolvable by mere mortals, because they deal with questions like the meaning of life and purpose. Why are we here and who are we to mess with the divine plan?

I don’t mean to belittle those questions. They are important. I just do not think they are so hard. You do not really think they are hard either. In fact, I am betting you have some pretty strong feelings about those things.

Let’s take that meaning of life question. Or more precisely, the question of what constitutes life. Or even more precisely still, what constitutes human life? We tend to think of this in pretty binary terms. Look at someone you happen to see in the room with you (or make one up if you are alone). That person is human and, hopefully, appears to be alive. Now look at the chair your are sitting on. It is definitely not a living human. Those are the easy cases. It gets harder when we talk about embryos, fetuses, children, people with severe mental handicaps, people in unrecoverable comas, even soldiers and criminals. The fact of the matter is, we do not consider any of those things to be as human as your (possibly imaginary) friend with you in your room. We will not admit it, but it is true. Just look at the way we treat them.

I submit that the question is not what is a living human and what is not. The question is how much of a living human a thing is. And I would further submit that our test for how much a living human a thing is is this: How free are they to develop their own set of values, independent of those of the people around them. The more we allow them to object to the way their close culture treats them, the more we allow them freedom to move out of it or rebel within that close culture, the more we consider them to be a living human.

Why do I say this? Again, look at how we treat them. We keep babies locked in cribs at night. How cruel is that? We keep dangerous schizophrenics confined to hospitals. We tell our teenagers they can’t have opposite-sex friends in their room in blatant defiance of their hormones. We execute people convicted of capital crimes, but, interestingly enough, only after they have proven they are not really human by having demonstrated that their process for developing their own values has gone awry.

Consider this: we give parents an awful lot of rights when it comes to setting the values of their children as they grow up. Parents take pride, actually, in indoctrinating their kids in their value system. "Look at me, my kid’s a big toothless ignorant hick like me. I’m so pleased!”

Now you may be thinking, “We don’t let parents do whatever they want. We don’t let them to abuse them, for instance."

Why do you suppose that is the case?

“Because it’s cruel to the child,” you might propose.

According to whom? Who’s values are deciding that it was not okay to knock those teeth out of his brat son?

Values? Society deems it wrong. Not the parents. They may well think it is okay to smack their kids whenever they feel like. Hell, they were probably smacked around themselves. The reason we do not let them do it is because, while that child is a part of the close culture of that family, he is also a part of the larger culture of their parents. Their parents have a lot of leeway to instill their values in their children, but only insofar as they don’t violate the inviolable values of the culture of which the whole family is a part. We will let him teach his kid to be a hate-mongering bigot, but we won’t let him teach him that it is okay to hurt those he foments against.

So while we may disagree with those parents about whether it is okay to instill a tolerance for domestic violence, what we all agree with is that the kid is not ready to make up his own mind about those things.

Think about this, too. There are lots of things that we will allow parents to do to their kids that some of us think are, in fact quite cruel, but we will grant the parents’ right to do those things because those things are themselves based in a cultural tradition that, while not sanctioned by all of society, are recognized as legitimate value differences. Like circumcision. I think cutting off a baby’s foreskin only a few minutes after he’s born is an incredibly inhumane thing to do to a living human. I would never inflict that on my children. Various forms of body mutilation of children through various phases of their growth is actually a pretty frequent theme throughout human societies. We let our sons and daughters get their first tattoos and piercings pretty young these days. We let cultural traditions justify parents depriving their children of food in religious rituals.

Where I am going with all this is to point out that the things we do not let them do are not things we think are cruel from the child’s standpoint. The things we do not let them do are things we think are cruel from our standpoint, the standpoint of society, the larger culture of which those families are members. Anyone who stands up and says "I do it for the children" is lying. They are doing it for themselves. Their own sensibilities. Their own values.

Where does that take us? Is an embryo a living human? How about a full-term fetus? We allow abortion under certain circumstances and not others. We let doctors create and destroy embryos under certain circumstances that we deem justifiable and not others. Our decision about when to allow a pre-birth human to be terminated seems to have little to do with our sense of welfare for the pre-birth human. We, society as a whole, clearly place the value of post-birth humans higher. Why is that? Why do we allow some parents to make that choice for themselves? What are we saying to them?

We are saying that society as a whole is unclear on the right ethical stance to take about abortion. In fact, we are terribly divided about it. Since we ca not make up our minds, we are leaving it to you, parent, to make this decision, using your values. As we have seen in my previous examples, we inherently believe that the child of a parent, born or otherwise, is subject to the ethical whims of that parent, so long as those whims do not conflict with the values of society as a whole. We condemn that pre-born human to the fate that parent chooses for it, even if that fate is death, assuming that is the worst outcome from the child’s perspective, since it is fair to point out that it is not always obvious that it is. We will also let a parent make the decision to try to bring a very sick baby into the world even if we are inclined to think abortion might be the more merciful option.

Whatever that parent may think about the humanness of their unborn baby, society has deemed it virtually unhuman by saying it does not have even enough independence of value even to object against its own termination. We consider embryos very inhuman. We consider second trimester fetuses a little more human, as there are more cases where we step in and prevent abortion. We consider it more likely that the fetus, if it were asked, might object. At full term, we are very uncomfortable. I mean it is old enough that you feel like you almost could ask if it would object. And, of course, by the time it takes that first breath, by the time you can hear your baby cry, you’re hearing the objection loud and clear. You hurt your baby then and you are going straight to jail. Circumcise him if you must, but you have to keep him and spend the next twenty years worrying about him.

When is abortion wrong, then? On the one hand, it seems like we can’t decide. But in truth we already have. We have decided that it is wrong in certain specific situations that society has decided it is and – I need to emphasize the and – and when the parents own values tell them it is. Notice I am not saying that we are simply leaving it to the parents to decide when it is wrong. We are saying that it is in fact wrong when the parents decided it is. The values of the fetus are, by definition, the value of the parents because we have deemed that the fetus does not get a vote. Just like the poor little baby boy does not get a vote about his foreskin. Just like the bigot’s son doesn’t get a vote about whether to be bigoted, at least until he grows up and hopefully returns to the real world.

So if some parents believe it is wrong and some do not, who is right? They all are, of course. Remember how we started. There are limits on what we can claim to know, even in the so-called concrete world. It’s utterly impossible to say that we know what God would want. What we can most certainly know, the only thing we can know, is what our conscience tells us about it. If that comes from God, so be it.

What is the right thing to do? Exactly what we are doing. That is why we have a political process, so we have a means of establishing what the compelling societal values are that we feel are necessary to maintain social order. While we dictate those values that we hold collectively to certain who may not like them, we deem them to have agreed to make that sacrifice by remaining a member of that society. Those things we don’t feel we need to dictate collectively we leave to individual conscience, not simply because we ca not agree, but because we believe that what is right is to follow that conscience.

Many of those dissenting voices out there, the ones who claim to speak for some divine order, who say that, say, stem-cell research is equivalent to playing God, while entitled to their say, should be put in perspective. They ca not possibly speak for what is right and wrong for society, but only what is right and wrong for them. They can try to persuade you, but do not let them bully you or scare you into an irrational belief that there might be some horrific consequence because we have offended their particular deity. I may not fully believe in the credibility of rational thought, but I am certain I do not believe in the credibility of irrational ranting like theirs.

Each person's life is lived one instantaneous moment at a time. You can use your sense of knowledge to try and influence the course those experiences take but the only thing you can control with certainty is your reaction to those experiences and that takes your value system, which you are always growing and, hopefully, driving to whatever esteemed state you seek to find.