The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [50]
Don’t cause gratuitous pain to a newborn baby, especially your own.
Protect your children.
If someone does something nice to you, then, other things being equal, you should return the favor if you can.
Other things being equal, people should be treated the same way.
On the whole, people’s being better off is morally preferable to their being worse off.
Beyond a certain point, self-interest becomes selfishness.
If you earn something, you have a right to it.
It’s permissible to restrict complete strangers’ access to your personal possessions.
It’s okay to punish people who intentionally do wrong.
It’s wrong to punish the innocent.
Some of these norms are so obvious that we are inclined to say that they are indisputably true because of the meaning of the words in them: having a right to something is part of what we mean by the words “earn it.” Other norms are vague and hard to apply: when exactly are “other things equal”? And some norms could easily conflict with each other when applied: would you really treat your children and other people the same? This shows how difficult it is to actually tease out the norms we live by, to list all their explicit exceptions, establish their priorities over other norms, and show how they are to be reconciled when they come into conflict. Almost certainly, the actual norms we live by but can’t state will be somewhat vague, will have a list of exceptions we can’t complete, and will conflict with other equally important norms. But most of the time, none of these problems arise to bedevil the application of the norms of core morality.
The next step in understanding moral disagreement involves recognizing that such disagreements almost always result from the combination of core morality with different factual beliefs. When you combine the uncontroversial norms of the moral core with some of the wild and crazy beliefs people have about nature, human nature, and especially the supernatural, you get the ethical disagreements that are so familiar to cultural anthropology. For example, Europeans may deem female genital cutting and/or infibulation to be mutilation and a violation of the core moral principle that forbids torturing infants for no reason at all. West and East African Muslims and Animists will reject the condemnation, even while embracing the same core morality. They hold that doing these things is essential to young girls’ welfare. In their local environments, some genital cutting makes them attractive to potential future husbands; some sewing up protects them from rape. The disagreement here turns on a disagreement about factual beliefs, not core morality.
Even Nazis thought themselves to share core morality with others, including the millions they annihilated, as the historian Claudia Koontz documents in The Nazi Conscience. Outside of the psychopaths among them, Nazis were right to think that to a large extent they shared our core morality. It was their wildly false factual beliefs about Jews, Roma, gays, and Communist Commissars, combined with a moral core they shared with others, that led to the moral catastrophe of the Third Reich. You may be tempted to reply that it couldn’t be that the Nazis just got their facts wrong, since there was no way to convince them they were mistaken. You can’t reason with such people; you just have to confine them. True enough. But that shows how difficult it is to pry apart factual beliefs from moral norms, values, and the emotions that get harnessed to them. It’s what makes for the appearance of incommensurability of values we so often come up against.
In any case, the argument that we’re developing here doesn’t require that every part of the core morality of every culture, no matter how different the cultures, be exactly the same. What we really need to acknowledge is that there is a substantial overlap between the moral cores of all human cultures. The principles in the overlapping core are among the most important ones for regulating human conduct. They are the ones we’d “go to the mat for,” the ones that