The Illusion of Morality

Engaging with Friedrich Nietzsche and Jonathan Haidt's criticisms of morality.

The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously referred to himself as an “immoralist” who was waging a war on morality. In this post I am going to briefly explain why Nietzsche wanted to wage this war on morality, with reference to some modern literature that supports Nietzsche’s case. This war on morality led Steven Pinker, in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, to claim that Nietzsche was advocating for “egoistic sociopathy”. Pinker claimed that Nietzsche argued it was good to be a callous sociopath who cares not for the welfare of others. Nietzsche did no such thing, but it is easy to see how a careless and uncharitable reader might come away with that impression. Consider the following quote, which is one that Pinker uses in his condemnation of Nietzsche:

I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it has ever been. (Nietzsche)

If you take this at face value, you may imagine that Nietzsche would love to see a world full of nothing but needless suffering and open malevolence. In fact, however, Nietzsche’s point is that those things we consider evil and the suffering associated with them are inseparable from everything we consider to be good and joyous, such that the attempt to eradicate evil and suffering is so often counter-productive. Nietzsche is advocating for the ancient wisdom which suggests that suffering is necessary for all that can be called great. Nietzsche was rebelling against what he saw as the formation of a “religion of pity” in the European world. He was rebelling against the same ideology that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote about in their recent book The Coddling of the American Mind. Jordan Peterson often refers to this ideology in relation to the mythical figure of the devouring mother, who keeps her children weak and dependent through an excess of compassion. It’s the same ideology that wants to give out participation trophies and outlaw snowball fights at recess:

If you, who adhere to this religion [of pity], have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity; the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together. (Nietzsche, The Gay Science 338)

It is easy for an uncharitable reader like Pinker to cherry-pick quotations in order to make Nietzsche out to be something he is not. Something similar can be said about Nietzsche’s comments on morality. On the surface, his attacks on morality might be taken as meaning that “anything goes” or as supporting a policy of “egoistic sociopathy”, as Pinker accused him of doing. This is wrong. Nietzsche did not want people to go around murdering, stealing, raping, or committing other acts we might consider immoral. Rather, Nietzsche wanted to change how we think and feel about morality. He wanted us to be more realistic about it:

It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool - that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged - but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently. (Nietzsche, Daybreak 103)

Note that Nietzsche begins this passage with the words “It goes without saying…”. This is because he didn’t think his readers would be so stupid and uncharitable as to believe that he was advocating for “egoistic sociopathy”, and therefore didn’t feel the need to constantly remind his readers of this. Nietzsche didn’t see Steven Pinker coming, I guess. 

Why was Nietzsche waging a war on morality? To put it simply, it is because he believed that the way human beings currently think about morality is based on a lie. What lie is that? 

A 2018 paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences makes a very similar case to the one that Nietzsche made. In his paper entitled “The difference between ice cream and Nazis: Moral externalization and the evolution of human cooperation”, Kyle Stanford notes that we often see moral preferences as having both a subjective and an objective component. When I use the word “objective” in this context, I am simply referring to something we cannot disagree about without somebody definitely being wrong. For example, we cannot disagree about whether the earth is flat without somebody being wrong. The earth is objectively not flat. We can, however, disagree about the “best” kind of music without either of us necessarily being wrong. Taste in music is at least partly subjective.

In some sense, we see moral preferences as subjective. They are preferences, after all. In another sense, however, most people do not treat moral preferences as if they are merely subjective. For example, a pro-life advocate does not consider the decision to have an abortion to be a mere preference, in the same way that somebody might have a preference for chocolate ice cream (rather than vanilla) or hip hop (rather than country music). These latter examples are truly subjective preferences and we usually treat them as such. But a pro-life advocate does not treat abortion like that. Abortion is treated as if it is objectively wrong. A pro-choice advocate similarly sees restrictions on a woman’s right to choose as objectively wrong. If you disagree with either of these types of advocates, they do not see you as merely expressing your subjective preference. Instead, they act as if you have gotten something objectively wrong about reality. Even people who would not explicitly say that morality is objective often act as if their own moral preferences are objectively true.

Why do we tend to see morality as objective? Stanford’s (2018) answer to this question is very similar to Nietzsche’s answer. I will quote Stanford at length here:

… it seems eminently plausible to suppose that among creatures who go in for cognitively complex forms of representation at all, the most fundamental division embodied in their experience will be that between representations of how things stand in the world itself (e.g., “the cat is on the mat”)–from which others cannot dissent without somebody being wrong about something–and our subjective reactions to those states of the world, like pain or the desire for ice cream, that are intrinsically motivating but carry no such demand for intersubjective agreement. This fundamental division was surely the background phenomenological and conceptual framework into which moral norms, demands, considerations, and commitments had to be shoehorned by the conservative, tinkering process of evolution; and this in turn explains why we find their curiously hybrid character so endlessly puzzling. (p. 13)

 As Jonathan Haidt argued in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, morality works to bind people together. We cannot allow people to openly disagree about moral norms if they are to effectively serve this binding function. Stanford argues that if we want to discourage people from disagreeing about moral norms, we can’t just see them as mere preferences. An effective strategy for discouraging disagreement is to treat moral norms as being essentially objective. We cannot disagree about whether the earth is flat without somebody being objectively wrong. Similarly, a pro-life/pro-choice advocate acts as if we cannot disagree about the morality of abortion without somebody being objectively wrong.

As Nietzsche pointed out, cultures have a variety of strategies for making their moral values seem objective. For example, moral values can be made to seem objective by construing them as being woven into the fabric of reality (e.g., Karma), as being revealed to us by a transcendent God (e.g., Christianity or Islam), or as being deduced from “reason” (e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative or Bentham’s utilitarianism). Different groups have used different strategies for objectifying their own morality, but every large group treats their moral norms as being objective in one way or another (smaller pre-agricultural groups don’t necessarily do this, but that is a story for another time). 

Jonathan Haidt describes morality as a “matrix”. Just like in The Matrix movies, the illusion of objective morality blinds people from seeing the truth. What is the truth that morality blinds us from seeing? The truth is that other people see their morality in just the same way you see your own — as indisputably righteous and true — even when their morality is incompatible with yours:

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.  (Haidt, 2012 pp. 129-130). 

The strategies we use to construe our morality as objective end up blinding us from recognizing the coherence of alternative moral frameworks. For example, if our transcendent God gave us a set or moral propositions to adhere to, then your incompatible moral propositions handed to you by your God must be false (and the heathen God who handed them to you must be false as well). Basically, however we go about construing our morality as objectively true, it will necessarily rule out the possibility that other moralities can be true.

Moral objectivity is the lie that Nietzsche wanted to expose. Moral norms are not woven into the fabric of reality. They are not imposed upon us by a transcendent God. They cannot be deduced via “reason”. They are not objective in the way that people generally think they are. In fact, systems of morality are products of cultural evolutionary processes that take place over thousands of years. This does give evolved moral systems some authority, for the same reason that all long-lasting traditions have some authority. I will have to save a full discussion of the evolutionary/cultural origins of morality for another time, however.

Why was Nietzsche so concerned with exposing the lie of objective morality? In large part, it’s for the same reason that Jonathan Haidt is concerned with exposing it. Nietzsche is primarily concerned with uncovering the truth, whatever that truth may be, and he sees (as Jonathan Haidt has seen) that this kind of morality is antithetical to the honest pursuit of truth. As Haidt put it:

Morality binds and blinds. This process may be helpful for groups that require a great deal of cohesion, such as military units, but it is devastating for communities whose purpose is the pursuit of truth. (Haidt, 2013 p. 293)

If we are to create truly scientific communities, focused on the honest pursuit of truth, we must find a way to shed ourselves of the lie of objective morality. Does uncovering this lie mean that anything goes? Are we now free to go about murdering, robbing, raping, pillaging, and committing all kinds of moral atrocities? No. This was not Nietzsche’s intention, despite Steven Pinker’s misinterpretation. Nietzsche is concerned with re-orienting the way we think and feel about morality, not with eradicating it. He wants us to see morality as an ongoing process, not as a static set of eternal moral propositions. 

How can we understand morality as a process without rendering it impotent? This is a big problem, and one for which I don’t think Nietzsche had an adequate solution. The problem is that we (i.e., those of us who have experienced modern nihilism) have discovered the “shabby” (i.e., non-objective) origins of our moral values, and this makes the world seem meaningless. This is the problem that Susan Wolf discussed in her great book Meaning in Life. She argues that we experience meaning in life when we are subjectively attracted to something that is objectively attractive. The problem of modernity is that us modern people have a hard time seeing anything as being objectively attractive.

But Nietzsche regarded this period of nihilism and meaninglessness as only a transitional stage, to be eventually replaced by a new worldview that re-enchants the world without needing to invoke the lie of objective morality:

The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when they were very hard on him and exacted a high price—these social values were erected over man to strengthen their voice, as if they were commands of God, as “reality,” as the “true” world, as a hope and future world. Now that the shabby origin of these values is becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value, seems “meaningless”—but that is only a transitional stage. (Nietzsche, The Will to Power 7)

It is my opinion that Jordan Peterson put forward a viable solution to this problem in his first book Maps of Meaning. He conceptualized morality as a process without rendering it impotent while simultaneously re-enchanting the world in a scientifically coherent way. Peterson’s project is not complete, however, which is why the book I am currently (and slowly) writing is in large part an extension of the thesis from Maps of Meaning. But Maps of Meaning made a great deal of progress on this difficult problem.

In a previous post I discussed the importance of adhering to tradition in light of the science of cultural evolution. Generally speaking, moral norms are products of cultural evolution and as such should be given the same respect we give to other culturally evolved traditions. The importance of adhering to tradition is something that Peterson recognized in Maps of Meaning. But as Peterson argues, adherence to tradition (and the morality predicated on that tradition) must always remain subordinate to the process that updates the tradition and the morality. This means that we must always recognize that morality is transitory (i.e., the current morality is not baked into the fabric of reality; it is not immutable). We must always be open to the change and chaos that comes about as a result of updating that morality. We must continually find ways to reconcile the tension between the need to be grounded in a binding tradition and the need to update our traditions in the face of an ever-changing world.

It is that process of update, which occurs at the border between order and chaos, that is of ultimate value. Too much rapid change and we fall into chaos. Too little change and we stagnate (and eventually fall into chaos anyways). Peterson argued that throughout human evolution we have observed people who are best able to embody this process and encoded the pattern that governs their behavior into the stories we use to organize our social lives (i.e., religious and mythological narratives):

All specific adaptive behaviors (which are acts that restrict the destructive or enhance the beneficial potential of the unknown) follow a general pattern. This “pattern” – which at least produces the results intended (and therefore desired) – inevitably attracts social interest. “Interesting” or “admirable” behaviors engender imitation and description. Such imitation and description might first be of an interesting or admirable behavior, but is later of the class of interesting and admirable behaviors. The class is then imitated, as a general guide to specific actions; is re-described, re-distilled, and imitated once again. The image of the hero, step by step, becomes ever clearer, and ever more broadly applicable. The pattern of behavior characteristic of the hero – that is, voluntary advance in the face of the dangerous and promising unknown, generation of something of value as a consequence and, simultaneously, dissolution and reconstruction of current knowledge, of current morality – this behavioral pattern comes to form the kernel for the good story, cross-culturally. (Peterson, 1999 pp. 148-149)

In a previous post I discussed a recent paper published in Human Nature which suggests that religious personification is a cognitive strategy for reasoning and communicating about complex patterns. In accordance with this idea, Peterson suggests that each manifestation of the mythological hero figure (e.g., Marduk in Babylon, Horus in Egypt, The Buddha, Jesus Christ) is a personified representation of this process of cultural update, which we have abstracted out by observing people who actually updated their cultures in this way. Marduk, the primary Babylonian deity, for example, confronts chaos (represented by the great dragon Tiamat) and makes the world out of her pieces. That is what we do. We go out into the unknown, into chaos, and we cut it up into manageable pieces and we make our worlds out of it (metaphorically speaking, obviously).

That voluntary confrontation with chaos is one aspect of the process that updates culture and morality. It is that process, and not its products, that we ought to see as being objectively true and valuable. The products of this process are the specific moralities that have been adhered to by different people at different times and places. These specific moralities are transitory. They had a beginning and therefore they have an end. But the process that updates them is eternal. In essence, it is a manifestation of the same process that underlies all increases in complexity in nature (e.g., phase transitions, major evolutionary transitions). I briefly discussed the science and metaphysics of this process in a previous post, but I will expound upon it in more detail some time in the future.  

Nietzsche was on the frontier of these ideas. As he was among the first to break through the illusion of morality, he often speaks about it in poetic language. The visionaries at the cutting edge of culture are trying to articulate (or at least make explicit) ideas that have never been articulated before. Poetic language is often the only mode of communication suitable for that task. I end this post with a quote from Nietzsche’s poetic masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, articulating his attitude towards morality and the process that updates morality: 

“There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself; but out of the esteeming itself speaks the will to power.” Thus life once taught me; and with this I shall yet solve the riddle of your heart, you who are wisest.

Verily, I say unto you: good and evil that are not transitory, do not exist. Driven on by themselves, they must overcome themselves again and again. With your values and words of good and evil you do violence when you value; and this is your hidden love and the splendor and trembling and overflowing of your soul. But a more violent force and a new overcoming grow out of your values and break egg and eggshell.

And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.

Let us speak of this, you who are wisest, even if it be bad. Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

And may everything be broken that cannot brook our truths! There are yet many houses to be built! (Zarathustra, II. 12)

May everything be broken that cannot brook our truths. Amen to that.