Chatterton on Morality.

957 Chatterton has a post up titled, "What is Morality?" Well, that's an excellent question and since here at Atheist Morality, I haven't touched on that subject for quite some time, I suppose I'll feature this post.

In the post, he describes what he believes a moral system is made of: "sympathy, empathy, and reciprocal altruism; that it is reasoned and argued for the purpose of figuring out how best to maximize happiness and minimize suffering."

I agree, but I think that it is too broad a statement. Maximize who's happiness? Minimize who's suffering? This will inevitably lead to thought experiments such as "Should you kill the fat man?" It gets a bit fuzzy when you start balancing the happiness of the greatest number of people with whether or not it is moral to use a person for a purpose without their consent. In general, though, I think it's a pretty good guideline for a moral system.

Chatterton adds support to his assertion by describing morality as a social science. Now that is interesting! He writes, "It’s the very fact that we can make determinations of what causes the most happiness and least suffering that renders morality a subject for social science." Can we, though? Are the examples he listed, such as ending slavery and freeing women of oppression objectively and measurably "causing the most happiness and least suffering?" What if the population of women was only 13% and the rest were men and all of those men had long tradition oppressing women. Wouldn't a law forbidding such a practice actually cause suffering in a larger amount of people than the status quo? Just something to think about.

He goes on to assert that this kind of moral system makes revenge and retribution invalid forms of justice. He calls for rehabilitation and restitution as forms of justice. I mostly agree with this. There are some people who will never rehabilitate or carry out restitution, but I do believe that with practice, our societies can move away from our sordid prison systems into one that turns criminals into justice-seekers. I heard an excellent talk about Restorative Justice on MLK Jr Day in Davis this year. The concept is that victim and perpetrator can come together to reach an agreement over what the criminal should do to make up for their crime. Hearing a story of how a mother sat down with her daughter's murderer and told him he'd have to do twice the good in the world because of the good her daughter would have done was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Even this latest Stubenville rape has got me thinking that if our society could turn those boys into activists for the protection of young people and awareness about consent, we could maybe gain something positive from it.

Chatterton backs up his definition by saying that no other definition of morality holds any real purpose for us, and that may be true, but I think that it still makes that a belief rather than a quantifiable fact. I'm not saying that he's not on the right track, I'm just not convinced it's specific enough to cover all of human behavior. Still, it's a damn good start and a lot better than trying to gleam a moral code from a stone-age religion.