TOK 1.

7 SR2: The nature and origin of ethical knowledge

The frog, the scorpion and ‘thou shalt not’

FROG: I have a feeling of déjà vu, swimming across the river, with you on my back, Ms Scorpion. I guess I shall come
to a sticky end - well, a wet and drowning end.

SCORPION: I fear you're right, Mr Frog; but ’tis kindly of you to be carrying me to the other side.

FROG: Remind me, though: why do you sting me before we’re safely across the river? It’s most odd as it leads us
both to a watery demise.

SCORPION: It’s in my nature. It’s something that I cannot help.

FROG: Never been sure of this tale, often misattributed to Aesop, for it is surely not in my nature to give lifts to
scorpions. Still, there it is. If only, Ms Scorpion, you could control your nature ...

SCORPION: At least until I safely reach the other side instead of dooming me as well as you. No doubt there’s an
evolutionary explanation for these things.

FROG: No doubt - and I note your revisionary thought that evolution should have delivered you a better sense of
self-interest, with your reaching the other side before stinging me. But, self-interest to one side, have you not heard
of morality, of kindness, of fairness? Of how morally you should treat me well, instead of using and abusing me?

SCORPION: You’ve been listening to those human beings, haven't you, Mr Frog? Yes, they burble on about such
matters - though without much concern for scorpions and frogs - but from whence does that morality derive?

FROG: Good question. After all, we non-human creatures ack any sense of morality. Ah, but we are mere
evolutionary products of natural selection.

SCORPION: And humans are not? They're as much part of the natural world as are we. And you’re right, Mr Frog:
there's no morality in nature. Witness my forthcoming sting.

FROG [shuddering}: Perhaps those human beings are right - those who insist that they're made in God's image.
Perhaps the moral sense is a spark of the divine. It cannot be a spark of nature, for nature tells us how things are, not
how they ought to be.

SCORPION: Forget about divine sparks. Human’s moral sense is just another product of evolutionary advantage. If
you listen to evolutionists’ babble, they increasingly explain how creatures of certain types, possessive of moral
concerns, are more likely to flourish than others. Well, their genes are the ones more likely to proliferate.

FROG: You mean that, in the end, acting morally is just natural instinct, accounted for by certain genetic survival
advantages.
SCORPION: Yes, a species - and hence its genes – is obviously more likely to flourish, if the members tend their
young, help others, and show special concern for close relatives. Even we small creatures do that to varying degrees.
And think of ants and bees and meerkats: self-sacrifice appears to happen, but there’s no morality there. They aren’t
judging that helping others is what they ought to do. It’s just what they do.

FROG: I see. There are no moral oughts in nature, even human nature.

SCORPION: At bottom, human kindness, self-sacrifice and appeals to justice, are no more divine, no more
supernatural, than my natural instinct to - well, I'm sorry about this - but to sting ... [splash, glug, glug]

From whence comes morality?

Morality puzzles many people, even those who feel that the existence of the universe has no need for God or gods.
The existence of moral truths - of what we morally ought and ought not to do - leads many, though, to turn to a
divine source such as the Bible’s Ten Commandments: thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery, and so
forth. In fact, there are numerous more divine commandments, but they tend to be overlooked.

Morality, it is judged, is a matter of God, the divine law-giver, telling us what we ought to do. Human beings - in
contrast to frogs and scorpions - possess the privileged capacity to understand the divine law. So, the assumption up
for challenge is:

If there are objective moral truths, then there must be God who commands them.

With that assumption, the argument goes one of two ways. Either you believe that there are objective moral truths,
hence you conclude that God must exist - or you reject God’s existence and so you reject the existence of objective
moral truths.

Must the assumption be accepted? The answer is ‘No’. There may be a third way - a third way between morality as
divine and morality as delusion. First, let us look at the divine answer and then turn to whether there is a third way,
distinct from the delusion.

Consider the proposal that goodness (including rightness) is what is commanded by God: to say that protecting
innocent human life is good is to say that God commands it. The idea is that goodness is determined by some
supreme authority which we should obey. The natural question that follows is: how does God determine what is
good and hence what to command? Here, we have two possible answers.

One answer is that goodness exists independently of God - and so God, being of a certain character, chooses to
command the good. On this understanding, God commands the good because it is good; the good is not good
because God commands it. If we follow this path, objective moral truths do not ultimately depend on God. It is
therefore possible that we human beings can uncover those truths without any need for God.

The other answer is that what counts as being good is fixed by God. Whatever God ordains as good is, by definition,
good. Were he to command killing the firstborn – allegedly did he not once command such in Egypt? - such killing
would be morally good. Were he to command men to treat women as slaves, then to do such would be good. The
objection to that line of argument is that it gives an outrageous understanding of what morality could be. The reply
by godly believers is, of course, that God could never ordain such things - because he is all good. That reply, though,
swings us back to goodness being identifiable as something distinct from God.

Sometimes it is proposed that God is identical with Goodness. This, though, ends up explaining the source of
goodness as being Goodness, which is no good explanation at all. If the response is, ‘But God also cares about human
beings,’ then the puzzle becomes how Goodness could have such personalized characteristics.

Tying morality to God, it should be noted, does not help us to know what is good, what is bad. Ancient texts deemed
‘holy scriptures’ lead to conflicting answers: witness the disputes between religions and within a single religion. ‘It is
written thus’ is no reliable means for discerning morality.

If the divine theory is rejected - we have given only a flavour of the debate - are we left with objective morality as
delusion, as outlined by Ms Scorpion?
 * * *

The proposed third way is that moral truths need be neither divinely grounded nor delusory. Truths exist about
climate changes and the Earth's orbit of the Sun. Such truths are objective and independent of what humans think.

Now, it would be most peculiar if, in nature, there existed empirical facts such as ‘Killing is morally wrong’ or ‘You
ought not to break promises.’

We should, though, stretch our eyes and minds. Think of mathematical truths, usually treated as independent of
human beings, yet not necessarily pointing to God. They are objective necessary truths; yet when wandering through
forests, we meet trees, beer cans and rabbits, but not numbers, right-angled triangles and abstract syllogisms.
Maybe, as with mathematical truths, moral truths can yet be objective, without divine resort. True, moral truths,
unlike mathematical truths, tell us what we ought to do, but that just is their character. True, we are sometimes
blind to morality, but there is much of the natural and mathematical worlds to which we are blind.

The many disputes in morality may indicate lack of objectivity, but the disputes usually concern applications of
morality; and disputes also arise about the application of mathematics to the world. Many, many people, from many
different societies, see that, other things being equal, innocent people ought not to be killed, promises should be
kept, and people should be treated fairly. Dilemmas arise when circumstances bring such principles into conflict and
when facts are in dispute - for example, whether a human foetus is a person, whether fox-hunting is cruel, and
whether you should break a promise if it would ease someone's pain.

In contrast to scorpions and frogs, we are intelligent creatures who can reflect, reason and plan for the morrow:
such attributes provided us with evolutionary advantages. Possessive of intelligence, we can also spot abstract
mathematical truths and discern moral truths. Now, the ability to uncover such truths mayor may not aid survival.
Evolutionary explanations can account for what is advantageous – but the advantageous may carry features
unrelated to survival.

There is no doubt an evolutionary explanation concerning the survival value of our having the ears that we have. An
added feature of ears is their ability to support the arms of spectacles; but the evolutionary explanation for the
existence of ears says nothing about spectacle-supporting functions.

Source: Peter Cave, Do Llamas Fall in Love? 33 Perplexing Philosophy Puzzles. 2010. pp.140-147.