Is Our Moral Sense Lopsided?

I’ve stumbled onto a theory of why people can’t get away from moral dilemmas, despite centuries of thought. It all started on a bus browsing a book about arguments (I bought it because it was $2). The chapter: moral arguments; the topic: abortion. I rarely see a full discussion of “formal” arguments for/against it. The book presented 2 important papers. It was illuminating to see both arguments side by side — to see how bad they all are (bad summary begging the question.

“Shouldn’t be a surprise,” I thought, “since all morals in the end come from unprovable emotions. It’s not like they can ever be broken down to simple matters of fact which merely describe the universe (hat tip Dave!)”. Each side in the debate is simply acting out an argument built from different emotional building blocks — almost different physiological responses to the same facts (I know the 2 sides of the abortion debate don’t agree on many facts but even the ones they agree on are interpreted differently).

So I got to thinking. These emotions that our morality is built from are evolved. This is a very inefficient way to design something: full of redundancies, waste, contradictions. A human body has contradictory processes: eg. as a foetus it attacks the mother’s immune system only to turn into a mother years later and attack the foetus (more). Why wouldn’t we have the same kind of contradictory emotional responses in the foundations of our moral thinking?

We do. The best example is the trolley problem — if you don’t know about it, check it out. Moral dilemmas usually happen when we can’t prioritise two basic emotions (in the trolley problem sleeping man version it’s desire-to-minimise-suffering vs. aversion-to-involving-”innocents”). But if they’re inherently contradictory at the atomic level we might not have a way out. And since from a contradiction you can derive anything we could be screwed, morally speaking. Our ideas about facts refer to things that have a separate existence. We can experiment/verify/falsify etc. Ethics is different since it doesn’t reside outside the brain in the “real world” (see Dave once again).

Where does this leave us? If you have 2 contradictory emotions in your foundation but tend to use one or the other, many times your reasoning will be ok (in arguments where you didn’t use the “false” premise). Maybe we’re at this stage: it’s unlikely people’s morals are all nonsense. Still, the fact that we have contradictory evolved emotions and use them to build ethical systems is a big problem. Not just some philosophic wank but something affecting every second of our life. Solutions very welcome!