Institutions Made Us Moral, Philosophers Just Wrote About It

I watched two young atheist commentators spend an hour debating whether God provides a basis for morality. They argued well. And somewhere in the second half I noticed that the question itself was the problem, because people have been asking it for four thousand years and the asking has changed almost nothing.

Consider the list of attempts at a foundation for morality. Hammurabi's code. The Ten Commandments. The Sermon on the Mount. The golden rule. Natural law. The Enlightenment's rights of man. Kant's categorical imperative. Utilitarianism. Rawls's veil of ignorance. The modern literature on moral dilemmas, and on the moral status of animals. That is a partial list and it spans most of recorded history.

Now ask what each of these did to actual behaviour. Very little. The evidence for where moral change comes from points somewhere else entirely.

Where the Change Actually Came From

The large moral improvements we can document, the end of slavery, the decline of judicial torture, the fall in homicide, the extension of rights to women, the collapse of religious persecution in the West, do not line up with the publication dates of moral philosophy. They line up with changes in institutions and shifts in power.

One can argue that the institutions changed because someone had first read the philosophy. It is a comfortable story and there is little evidence for it. Institutions changed when the balance of power shifted: when a new class could no longer be ignored, when a state became strong enough to monopolise violence, when an economy stopped needing the labour arrangement it had been defending. The philosophers arrived, as often as not, afterwards, to explain why the new arrangement had been right all along.

And there is a simpler test. We live in the most literate age in history, and most people could not name three items from the list above. If moral progress ran through moral philosophy, it would have had to run through people who never encountered it.

The Physics Analogy

I think what happened to morality is what happened to physics, and the parallel is exact enough to be useful.

For two thousand years philosophers did physics, and they did it badly. Aristotle's account of motion was a foundational theory: it told you what motion really was. It was also wrong about nearly everything a falling object does.

Then people came along who did not care about foundations. Galileo did not ask what motion really was. He rolled balls down inclined planes and measured. Newton famously declined to say what gravity is, and gave the equation instead. Physics took off at exactly the moment its practitioners stopped demanding a foundation and started producing results that worked.

Nobody today thinks physics is in crisis because we cannot say what energy really is. The question is interesting; it is not load-bearing. You can have a fully functioning science without having settled its metaphysics.

Morality is in the same position, and the endless search for its basis is the equivalent of refusing to roll the ball until Aristotle has been vindicated. At this point in history you will do far more good by feeding someone, or by removing a church's veto over contraception, than by producing one more account of where obligation comes from.

The Old Answers Are Goals, Not Solutions

Look again at the list, and notice something about its contents. Religion, Kant, Rawls, Marx, the rabbis: all of them talk about morality, and none of them actually deal with it. What they do is state goals. Do not kill. Treat others as ends. Choose the rules you would accept from any position.

Goals are the easy part. Nobody is confused about whether we want less killing and more fairness. The hard part, the part that actually moves the numbers, is the arrangement of incentives and institutions that produces the behaviour, and about that the tradition has almost nothing to say. "Do not kill" is not a theory of how to reduce killing. It is a wish, and the fact that it was carved in stone does not make it more than that.

The Problem Has Moved

There is a further reason the old approach is exhausted, and it is the one I find most important.

The tradition of moral philosophy is about how one person should treat another. That is not where our moral problems are anymore. Between individuals, in ordinary life, people behave reasonably well and always have; the small-group instincts that produce cooperation are old and reliable.

Our moral problems are how institutions behave. Corporations, states, churches, armies, bureaucracies. These are the agents that poison rivers, start wars, conceal what they know, and extract from the many for the few. And they do not follow the behavioural patterns of a human being. A corporation has no conscience to appeal to and no small group to be ashamed in front of. Rawls's veil tells it nothing, because the corporation is not a person who could stand behind the veil.

So the question that would actually advance morality is an engineering question: how do you design an institution so that its incentives point where you want its behaviour to go? That is the great moral revolution still ahead of us, and it will not come from philosophy departments. It will come from the same place the last one did, from changing who holds the power and how it can be used.