The moral craft

 

This was in my pipeline, but I´m not sure where it´s from, except that it´s Richard Carrier (again). Be that as it may, here goes!

>>>Ultimately, Brierley’s naivety (echoed by all the Christians he quotes and references in this same chapter making the same naive assertions) fails to grasp that he is operating from a false dichotomy throughout, one he endorses with the words of another Christian radio interviewee: “morality is something we discover like archaeologists, not something we build like architects” (p. 62). In fact it’s both. And it is terminally naive to not realize that. If you get hung up on thinking it has to be one or the other, you’ll never realize the truth: morality is just one more craft tool in the human arsenal, no different from agriculture, surgery, diplomacy, pedagogy, business administration—and indeed, even architecture. 

>>>In all of these domains of craft knowledge, we are inventing things—tools, procedures, standards and practices. Yet at the same time we are also discovering truths when we invent these things and test them out: we are discovering, by hypothesis and experiment, the most effective ways to grow food, perform surgeries, maintain a healthy international peace, teach skills, run businesses—and build bridges and offices and homes. So there is a truth we are gradually discovering in all these domains—but it’s one that is fully entailed by the causal properties of reality. 

>>>The same is true of morality, which is just a behavioral tool for social and personal contentment. Ergo, the moral system that most effectively obtains social and personal contentment is simply for that very reason the true one—as in, there is no other alternative tool we should be adopting instead, once we accept that our primary goal is social and personal contentment. And as I’ve already pointed out, factual reasons that this should indeed be our principal goal are abundant. 

>>>Which all means that even if God himself told us to adopt some other moral system, one that was less effective at optimizing social and personal contentment—one that led to dissatisfying, dysfunctional minds and societies instead—we would have no reason whatever to agree with him. Which means his claim that we ought to would simply be false. 

>>>And this is in fact why the entire Western world has abandoned every actual Biblical morality (radical pacifism is actually immoral; criminalizing blasphemy and sexuality, immoral; endorsing the entire Torah law code, immoral; subordinating women, immoral; slavery, immoral; condemning or executing gay people, immoral). Those moralities, we found, are simply dysfunctional. And we have extensively proved that empirically, acorss countless sad lessons of history.