Nathanael on Tom on morality

Nathanael said in response to Tom's discussion of morality: "Tom's conclusion leaves me less satisfied" then quotes the admittedly ambiguous end of Tom's essay:

Now we're at the end, the end of man. The end of man is to act within his nature, just like everything else. It is natural for man to ask questions, seek answers, and create answers, even in the absence of rational justification. It is natural for man to act in his own self-interests, and to determine what those interests are, even those that may require a personal sacrifice. Above all, it is natural for man to propagate, both physically and intellectually. That is the sum of it. All of human morality can be derived from these ends. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to discover how.

Not surprisingly, Nathanael took Tom's "conclusion" in precisely the unfortunate direction I predicted some would in the comments I posted on Tom's essay, though of course, in a more thoughtful way than some might. From Nathanael's post:

Above all, it is natural for man to propagate, both physically and intellectually." The "physically" seems to recommend an African moral universe, where the chief is polygamous and measures his success in the quantity of his offspring relative to his rivals: not, I feel, a good ethical ideal. The "intellectually" (slurred together with "physically" by a clever sleight of hand, luring the reader into a strange and unwarranted feeling that man's propensity to discussing, believe and philosophize is somehow an extension of the physical process of reproduction) I can sympathize with-- that's what blogging is all about!-- but what does it mean, after all, to "propagate intellectually?" If I convince others to believe what I believe, have I propagated intellectually? Is that my end? If so, do I fail to achieve my end when I become convinced that I was wrong and someone else was right? I think, on the contrary, that I benefit more by abandoning my own false belief and adopting someone else's true one, than by persuading someone else to adopt my false belief, or even my true belief. "Intellectual propagation" is not the end, but truth, to which "intellectual propagation" is a means when and only when I have (or think I have) truth that others lack.

Immediately preceding this Nathanael notes: "Tom leaves an unresolved tension between "self-interest" and "personal sacrifice"-- maybe a good thing, since what looks at first glance like self-contradiction is often a recognition of complexity." Thereby he sort of touches on the reason I refer to the last paragraph of Tom's essay as the 'end' rather than the "conclusion" - it intentionally leaves us in ambiguity, with work to do. Like many of the best philosophical positions, it merely sets the stage for doing work rather than doing it, its virtue being in avoiding doing the wrong work. It may be very interesting to analyze a game that's very much like chess but, say, the king can move two spaces in any direction and the queen can also move like a knight. Unfortunately at the end of the day, the hard-won truths toward which the analysis has worked applies to no game anyone plays. Theories of moral calculus can be the same way.

Nathanael takes strongest issue with "the end of man is to act within his nature, just like everything else", not realizing that Tom mentions this as a tautological antidote to idea that the purpose of anything is defined by the intentions of its creator. It's the sort of sloppy phrase that one frequently lets slip when one has gotten too used to talking to other people of like mind. I am far from innocent in that, for sure. The use of the word "propagate" is also misleading, not least because it has a number of meanings. Of course, that sort of smeary semantics can be quite intentional if one wants to bracket the exact form of the answer or if one wants to answer on more than one level at a time, but of course that opens one up to unfortunate interpretations, such as that one's purpose is to have as many children as possible and to convince people of as many of one's own opinions as possible. Propagation occurs in the sense of transmission in time and/or space of patterns, whether genetic code in children or thought processes in brains. The exact form of propagation we choose is not specified, but it's justified by our own existence. Therefore morality is determined in human terms, not the terms of God's (empirically inaccessible) love, Gaia's diversity, or Gouda's... um... odor.

But of course, the difficult task still lies ahead of us humans to work on that determination.