Genesism

In Defence of Innocence

They thus in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning;
And of their vain contest appeared no end.
Paradise Lost (IX, 1187-89), John Milton

Humanity is in a promising position, in principle. Our resources are so abundant that, unless something goes catastrophically wrong, we should never need to compete to survive. We should be able to choose cooperation at all opportunities and enjoy its profound material and psychological benefits, and to our credit, many of us do. Thanks to cooperation, many societies around the world have achieved unprecedented peace and prosperity, and even in less fortunate places people generally experience measurable improvements to their quality-of-life year over year. And yet, it can still be hard to feel that we are headed in the right direction. The wealthiest countries around the world suffer from growing political polarization, dozens of less fortunate countries are embroiled in costly domestic and interstate conflicts, and as the old world order deteriorates, new powers rise, and our memories of the Second World War fade, the probability of open conflict between great powers is gradually increasing. It seems that history is not done with us yet.

At this point in time, there is only one remaining obstacle to peace. When our resources were not so abundant, conflict may have resulted unavoidably from our competition to survive, but conflict today is not confined to the pockets of scarcity that still exist. Our ability to cooperate may also have been limited by our ability to communicate, since cooperation requires trust and building trust requires open communication, but nowadays our ability to communicate is for all intents and purposes unlimited and we remain eager to throw down the gauntlet. In a world of material and informational abundance, rational people will encounter only one good reason to refuse to cooperate, and that is moral disagreement. People are given to moral feeling, by which I mean people generally take strong positive attitudes toward what seems good and right to them and strong negative attitudes toward what seems bad and wrong. Everyone wants the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose. When we come into disagreement about what is good and right or bad and wrong, our moral feeling drives us to take strong negative attitudes toward each other, and under the influence of these attitudes it is easier for us to bear the costs of conflict than the intimacy of cooperation.

To create the conditions for cooperation, then, humanity must simply find moral agreement. But this seems impossible. People have difficulty agreeing on matters with respect to which there is decisive empirical evidence available. With respect to moral questions, no one has better evidence than their own moral intuitions, and these are extremely and interminably variable. Philosophers have been arguing about the basic principles of morality, the general nature of good and evil, for thousands of years, and far from converging on any stable consensus, they have only multiplied the number of competing moral paradigms. When it comes to the actual application of these principles, the distribution of moral praise and criticism, our opinions diverge even more wildly. It often seems that we could only eliminate moral disagreement by forcefully eliminating every moral faction but one, and even then that it would only be a matter of time before the members of the surviving faction, whatever their initial positions may have been, found new things on which to disagree and splintered into new factions, just as Christians became Catholic and Orthodox, some Catholics became Protestants, some Protestants became Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, and so on ad nauseam.

The problem seems insoluble. We live in a world of abundance, abundance that could grow without end if we were only able to cooperate, but the interminable nature of moral disagreement seems to entail that we will teeter eternally on the edge of war, one faction’s moral crusade being condemned by a second, whose own crusade is condemned by a third, and so on in a spiral of chaos that leads to nowhere at all. But there is another variable in this equation. Moral disagreement can only create conflict when it is supported by moral feeling, by the desire for good to prevail over evil. Without this motivational foundation, moral disagreements could never become more than tepid intellectual exercises. So even if moral agreement is impossible, we could still create peace if we could only abstain from moral feeling. If no one cared whether the good guys or the bad guys win, then the only remaining obstacle to peace in this, our world of abundance, would cease to exist. If everyone acted only in their own interest, pursuing personal happiness rather than moral satisfaction, though people would certainly find opportunities to take advantage of each other and exploit those opportunities, on the whole the indisputable benefits of cooperation would act as a gravitational centre pulling everyone into each other’s arms, and we would find ourselves with no good reason not to stay there.

One could object that cooperation cannot occur without moral order, and that therefore it is wrong to oppose the forces of self-interest and moral feeling as I just have. There is something true in this objection. Cooperation makes us vulnerable. When we live and work together, each of us exposes our lives and projects to the possibility that the others will do them harm. No rational person would willingly expose themselves in this way if rules were not in force that protected their interests, so some sort of moral order, some set of rules and system for their enforcement, must exist for cooperation to take place. One could thus conclude that our compulsion to impose moral order on the world, our moral feeling, is actually aligned with our self-interest, since it would seem to be what drives us to create the structure within which cooperation becomes possible. But this objection is unpersuasive. Granting that cooperation cannot occur without this structure, it follows that the benefits of cooperation should be sufficient to motivate us to create it. That is, since it is generally in everyone’s interest to cooperate, and since cooperation cannot occur without moral order, everyone will generally have reason to participate in the creation of moral order regardless of whether they are given to moral feeling. Though moral feeling can drive the growth of order, self-interest can do the same without also driving people into conflict, so there is no contradiction in the idea that humanity would be better able to cooperate if we abstained from the former and acted only on the latter.

It is necessary to expand on my conception of the self-interested individual. On this conception, the self-interested individual is one who has performed something like a return to the state of innocence we lost when we ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In this state of innocence, one pursues only whichever possible outcomes would bring one pleasure. As an aside, we seem naturally disposed to desire such outcomes regardless of whether we might actually live to enjoy them, as a mother might desire that her children flourish regardless of whether she herself might live to enjoy their flourishing. Since this disposition does not seem to stem from moral feeling, I would count it as an innocent one, though it is not self-interested in the usual sense of the word. Continuing on, innocents only react negatively to the experience or possibility of pain, in a broad sense that includes all mental or physical distress or discomfort, or to growing threats to the possibility of the positive outcomes of which they are in pursuit, just as a farmer might react negatively to the spread of pests or blight throughout his crop. To approach the same point from another angle, innocents may experience negative emotions like frustration, distress, or grief when their projects are threatened or thwarted, but they do not allow these transient emotions to instill in them any lasting negative motivations, or what you might just call hate. This is the constitution of the innocent.

Though they might not have any hate in their hearts, innocents will not be incapable of wrong-doing. No matter how we structure society, situations will inevitably arise where one person’s loss is another person’s gain, like opportunities for theft, and innocents will exploit these zero-sum situations if nothing disallows it. But because they will have no hate in their heart, innocents will also see no reason to refuse to cooperate with others insofar as it is safe to do so, and the benefits of cooperation will generally drive them to contribute to the growth and preservation of the moral order that makes cooperation possible, which will in turn disallow their exploitation of the aforementioned zero-sum situations. Though their innocence may create a problem, since it generally entails a motivation to do wrong by others when it benefits them, it also creates the solution to that problem, since it generally entails a countervailing motivation to create moral order. I do not mean to suggest that a world of universal innocence would be perfect. We could never patch every crack in the moral order through which wrong-doing might slip by unimpeded. But for as long as it continues to be beneficial to deepen our cooperative ties, which could well be for the remainder of our existence, in a world of innocence we would continue to find reasons to try.

In our world of universal moral feeling, where everyone wishes for good to prevail over evil, the interminable nature of moral disagreement entails interminable conflict no matter how great may be the benefits of cooperation. In a world of universal innocence, we would have no real reason to come into conflict, and the benefits of cooperation would suffice to motivate us to create and preserve moral order and peace. The second world seems to be much better than the first. Thus, moral feeling itself appears to be immoral. If one person succumbs to moral feeling and takes action against what they deem to be evil, the immediate consequences may be good, but in doing so, they would be acting on and thereby tacitly endorsing a rule that will entangle us in chaos for as long as we all follow it, and they would risk encouraging others to do the same, stymieing the transformation of this world into a better one. For good to prevail over evil, one after another we must all stop wanting it to do so. If moral feeling arises in us, it should itself immediately drive us to extinguish it.

Of course, this is a moral claim, which raises a problem. If lasting moral agreement is as impossible as I say it is, then it is hard to see how universal innocence could be possible, given that it would seem to require everyone to agree with my claim that moral feeling is immoral. There is an argument to be made that my claim is an exception to the rule that agreement is impossible. The idea that we can unconditionally pursue our own happiness with a clear conscience seems like something people will want to be true, and people are specially disposed to believe what they want to be true. But I am inclined to grant that universal agreement on the immorality of moral feeling is impossible. If humanity ever achieves universal innocence, it will be because we found other reasons to abstain from moral feeling. Some who remain unconvinced by my argument may be convinced by other arguments, like any number of skeptical arguments against the reality of moral facts or free will that I will not reproduce here, that might similarly justify abstinence. Most will probably decline to abstain until their happiness begins to depend on it. It may happen that they take pleasure in the prospect of global unity and peace and abstain for its sake, or that they enjoy the radically open and accepting company of innocents and abstain just to fit in. The growth of innocence and the community that results may become the multi-generational project that gives their life meaning and purpose.

None of these are likely outcomes, of course. Moral feeling is deeply rooted in the soil of humanity, and the world we live in, teeming as it is with villains, perverts, idiots, and other inspirations for contempt, is very well suited to its nourishment. The world of universal innocence will be a long time coming, if it comes at all, and at every turn the world will present to us some new species of degradation to tempt us off the path on another crusade. But the path lies open to us, and all the others seem to lead to nowhere. I leave it to the reader to choose which to take.