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Moral conscience and the instinct to survive

Regular Network Norwich and Norfolk columnist James Knight argues against the belief that morality is a result of a natural instinct to preserve our species. 

Many modern atheist scientists have convinced many non-believers that morality is simply a psychological adaptation - borne out of altruistic survival conduits which result in a natural instinct to preserve our species. But are they really right in saying this? I don’t think so.

Certainly we as a species are very mindful of ecological and environmental issues, and most of us do not look favourably on the wilful destruction of our planet. If agricultural systems, industrialisation and urbanisation have brought about a favourable and (for many) profitable relationship between living organisms and their environment, large parts of the environment are suffering from misuse and overexploitation – and movements that champion conservation and models of innovative thought for future generations are widely approved. Couple that with issues such as soil erosion, acid rain, ozone depletion, pollution, large scale deforestation, climate change, mismanagement of the earth’s resources, and the large-scale burning of fossil fuels, and we can see that this is hardly a peripheral issue for men and women in these times when we are more conscientious than ever before.

Of course, it may well be the case that some of the various atmosphere-changing phenomena are not the fault of mankind – the absorption of infrared radiation by atmospheric constituents, the increase in mean air temperatures, the gradual melting of the polar ice caps and rises in sea level (some of which probably is our fault), and changes in energy balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation, to name but four – nevertheless concern is rife, and we have become a nation that is particularly concerned with preserving our species. We are becoming more mindful of our increased carbon emissions (as individuals we are being asked to be mindful of our ‘carbon footprint’), we have increased taxation on vehicles with higher CO2 emissions, and we are monitoring our usage of nitrogen oxide, ozone methane and chlorofluorocarbons (used in aerosol propellants, refrigerants and solvents). 

If our awareness of preserving the planet and every living thing on it is one indication of our supposed moral decency, the other is our relinquishment of personal liberties for the good of society and a well established government. This is often referred to in philosophy as ‘the social contract’ – and provides justification for nations being governed by a ‘state’. The social contracts of Hobbes, Rousseau and (less hypothetically) Locke have ingrained in our psyche the view that order and decency can be created and developed through systems that are legitimated by the human consensus for a collective contract. This too works for the greater good of everybody concerned and (although not faultless) does at least provide a semblance of a good democratic way of life. 

Having seen how these two mindsets shape our thinking and provide at least a limited analogue of humankind’s caricature of morality, we must now look at how we have used them to bring into being some rather distorted views about our own morality and how our deification of ‘preserving the species’ has displaced that which should be our real priority – awe and worship for God. I am not, of course, denying that it is largely because of people’s disbelief in God that such pride in one’s own moral probity has developed, widened and increased, but that is not the issue I am addressing here. The issue I am addressing is that the belief about preservation of the species that has caused man to view himself in such a haughty way is a spurious belief and is based on a misunderstanding of the bigger picture of morality outside of intrinsic human endeavour – the picture in which God’s plan is the primary concern, and man’s plan is the secondary concern.

What is morality?

In order to help a man come to realise the true power of God’s morality, we must first examine how this spurious belief about preservation of the species has embedded itself in man’s moral skin. To do this we must look a bit closer at what morality actually is. In the first place, morality, to the contemporary atheist, is how a man decides whether something is right or wrong. To many people, morality is there to show a man how a particular act or experience should make him feel, or more precisely, which emotions such acts or experiences should elicit – and the ‘should’ implies something greater than proprietary feelings alone. But if a man does not have a guilty conscience after a bad action, would he be justified in saying that that action wasn’t wrong? Here, already we are arguing about two different things, for if his particular taste or fancy for a particular decision or outcome sways his viewpoint, he can end up making morality a question of taste, which, of course, it is not. If a man’s emotional disposition does not allow him to see a clear moral picture regarding some incident or grievance, you can with some effort talk to him and convince him to change his feelings, but one must see that this is not of matter of taste – after all, you cannot by ordinary processes convince a man to like a piece of music if it is not pleasant to his ears, or convince him to like onions if he can’t bear them in his mouth. Thus although morality is not a matter of taste, we must admit that if a moral standpoint is not pleasing to a man’s ears, we will encounter a problem until we can somehow speak the right words and make it pleasing to him. 

What we are talking about here is not so much the values of right and wrong, it is about forming the right judgements in the first place. It is important to remember that decisions about right and wrong actions themselves depend on a sound and reliable formulation of correct judgements regarding right and wrong. If a man feels that a certain action is the right action to take, he would be right to follow that course of action, providing his judgement of right and wrong was sound. It is more important that his judgement is sound than it is that he follows the correct course of action, for the action is dependent upon the judgement. But it should be admitted that many times in a person’s life, he or she is mistaken about right and wrong. The most obvious example is when a man’s reasoning power is tainted by some external factor, or when a man is unaware of all the facts. 

There are different ways in which we formulate opinions about something; we make decisions based on how we receive information. And equally, different people have different abilities when attempting to arrange the necessary information into some sort of moral order. Sometimes people have a muddled perception of both truth and falsehood and indeed right and wrong. Before I am misunderstood, I do think everyone knows the difference between right and wrong, but some have more difficulty than others producing a reasonable method of judgement. If a man fails to see he is wrong and acts badly, he is not generally frowned upon like a man who knows he is going to do wrong but still does it anyway. 

So we have three elements 1) how a man perceives the facts when receiving them, 2) how he acts upon those facts, and 3) the resulting conclusion from his actions. Now so long as there are no obstacles impeding his action, a man can be judged by how he acts upon receiving the facts. And this is largely what morality is in secular circles - whereas in Christianity a greater initial emphasis is placed on the man’s state of mind before he acted. There is, however, one obvious subsidiary point. We cannot say a man acted morally if he was, for some reason, not able to act immorally. For example, let us suppose that A heard something about B, and as a result went looking for B with the intention of killing him. If B had fled the country, we would not then say that A was acting morally by not killing B. We would say that A did not have the opportunity to act immorally. 

Often we meet people who claim that they cannot see our point of view about the bigger moral picture, usually because they have no desire to do so. It is therefore quite hard to get a man to change his moral position unless he wants to. It is difficult to argue a man into new moral territory because he cannot become intuitive by reasoning, because reasoning itself depends upon valid intuition. You cannot correct a man’s faulty moral principles by rational argument unless he wants to be corrected. And if he is in a position where he is open to correction, it is likely that he is not so sure about his own judgement anyway. 

Our reasoning power alone will not always be enough for us to form a rational judgement about facts, particularly what is true and false, and perhaps more likely, what is good and bad. We can become biased; we can reconfigure our judgement in order to suit our needs. Hence the value of our own reasoning power can be questionable. If we had some other authority with which we could measure the validity of our own reasoning power, we would at least be able to align our flawed rationale up against something flawless. And we have to admit at once that no other person (aside from Christ) could possibly provide us with such a thing. We need a Divine standard by which we can say about our conscience that we are either in the right direction or the wrong direction; that we are heading towards sound judgement or receding from it. 

Our moral conscience should not bend the rules of morality at all. If we feel something is right we should strive to be certain that we are right in feeling this way. But if our moral conscience is nothing more than a heady mix of reason, suspicion and feeling - if we have wavering doubts about what is the right or wrong way, it is not our moral conscience that we are obeying, it is our desire for some form of submission. When this happens, a man thinks that this action is probably right, but feels that it would be better to take the alternative action. On the other hand, if a man feels that he is making a moral decision and that no impeding desire is swaying his decision, then he can say that his intuition - that is, his reasoning process - is more than likely to be sound. The more attuned we are to our most powerful moral instincts the more likely we are to make sound moral judgements.

Is preservation a natural instinct?

Now given the forgoing analysis, this leads me to seriously doubt the many atheists’ assertion that our desire for preserving the species is one of our most natural instincts; in fact, I do not think such a contention is very sensible. If we do have such an instinct, it is certainly nothing like our other instincts. If we take the word ‘instinct’ to mean something most natural to the emotions, such as something that elicits feelings of pleasure or fear, as in our instinct for food or sex, or an instinct for fear in a dangerous situation, then we can certainly say that no analogous instinct of preservation exists. In fact, a farmer who relies upon his crops and livestock for a living does not have the same instinct to preserve them as he does an instinct to make love to his wife. It seems very evident that we do not have a desire to preserve our species in that way. When a man desires a woman, the desire becomes a reified desire; he can see what he wants and he can see how he can get what he wants. But any desire to preserve our species only occurs in just the opposite kinds of situation. When one thinks about posterity, one is surely in a reflective mood, pondering the future generations and what might become of them. And this must be as far from being instinctive as it is possible to be. The best we can say is that we are impelled to think of future generations, for their well being, for their future. 

It seems to me a more reasonable argument to say that we are impelled, by temptation, to think of the here and now. Is not most man’s natural inclination to live the best life he can and, apart from perhaps his own family, not care too much about future generations? For those who think it is not, I put forward the following question. If this generation were told that they had to go without earthly pleasure, that is, they had to make sacrifices that would render their lives deeply boring and uneventful, but in return, all future generations would prosper profusely; how many men and women of this present age would undertake such a position with unadulterated pleasure? I think the answer is none. Some good natured and kind hearted souls might think the sacrifice worth making, but it is perfectly obvious that if this feeling was part of their natural instinct, they would meet the prospective sacrifice with enthusiasm from the start. It seems to me that the only ‘natural instinct’ a man has towards the preservation of the species is preservation with regard to his own family. 

Of course I acknowledge that the preservation of posterity is, ultimately, more important than any individual’s personal desires or preferences. But we only think about the preservation of our unborn grandchildren and great-grandchildren in an abstract way - in fact, the further into the future we go the more diluted our desire actually is. It seems to strongly suggest that the instinct is for the here and now, not for preservation of the species. Of course we will no doubt continue to try very hard to ensure that future generations have a better life than we have, but when we allude to this we are certainly not talking about our deepest and most profound instincts.

It is easy to see how the modern atheists have got it wrong; they are distracted, primarily, by the whole drama of progress, and secondarily, by their flawed hypotheses regarding instincts. If you were asked to die in order to save the lives of future generations, you might well acquiesce and do so dutifully; your compulsion to do so would be one of moral rectitude or moral incumbency.  But only a fool would say that it was part of your instinct to do this. Would not the first emotion you feel, the very first, be one of doubt, reluctance and apprehension? We all know (if we are thinking clearly and rationally) that a moral law exists and I would strongly suggest that any thought given to preservation of the species, aside from our God-given care and solicitude, and the auxiliary political expediencies, is a thought that exists as a mere appendage to the moral standard by which we try to live our lives. In hierarchical terms, any instinct to preserve the species would be rather low down, certainly below most other spontaneous impulses. All we are really doing is arranging certain types of compulsion and hierarchically ordering them by a system which judges them by their distance of proximity from the moral law. 

There have been many people throughout the years who have claimed that man’s need to preserve the species is all bound up in the fundamental laws of a Godless nature – often referred to as ‘natural causes’, but notice that all those men who have propounded such a contention have no way of explaining how, or indeed why, these random laws should yield such concern, consideration and solicitude. The same applies to socialist or liberalist contentions - I might agree with some of their views, but I can only agree by accepting a moral standard in the first place. 

There is another point I should make, one which does taint the overall efficacy of the sceptics’ beliefs. It is very easy to argue a lost cause if your mind is not set right on the job. After all, it is often the people who can do most harm in the world who are the ones arguing for peace. Often the man who is extolling the virtues of good manners at the dinner table is the one who is incapable of seeing other people’s point of view. 

And with this in mind, I can turn the naturalists’ argument round the other way. Is not their desire or compulsion or (more accurately) their caringly minded diligence to preserve the species tainted by their unconvincing arguments regarding existence, an immutable moral standard and reliance on flawed human logic? When we are dependent on something that is not wholly assuring, are we not naturally preoccupied with rectification through some other means? When we are distressed about our bad relationship with our husband or wife, do we not find other ways to counteract that anxiety? Yet it would be foolish to suggest that we are acting upon instinct by averting our attention for the problem, for in fact, our natural inclination is almost always towards the problem. If we are sick, our natural instinct is to get better, if we are hungry our natural instinct is to eat, if we are scraping the floor for pennies, our natural instinct is to desire money.

Perhaps now it is easy to see how the desire to preserve the species came about and also, how the intensity of the desire has fluctuated according to circumstances. Who could say, in all honesty, that their desire to preserve the species was any stronger than, say, a desire for better coastal barriers during the aftermath of the tsunami, or the desire for better policing after a spate of street crimes, or a desire for better transparency after the debacle with MP’s expenses recently? No, the natural desire is for what is right, for what is in accordance with the moral law. If preservation of the species is encompassed within that impulse, it is simply because the need to think of future generations is a constituent part of the overall moral standard by which we live our lives. If we are able to help people with their perceptions of morality, we will then be able to help them see that the distance between themselves and righteousness is quite a bit further than they perhaps first envisaged.