I am unable to get this paper published. Therefore I'll put it up here. Too many publishers and editors have seen this already, I don't want it to go to waste.

Ethics: Fundamental Error in the Thinking of Past Philosophers and a Suggested Error Correction

Written and submitted by God Must Be Atheist on 2021 03 02

Abstract:

The author will demonstrate why ethics has been an elusive philosophical concept. The great ethicists, from classical Greek to seventeenth- and nineteenth century European thinkers, to present day philosophers, talk about morality and ethics as if it were a probably very clear and well-defined concept. They talk about it as if it were a given that everyone understands what it is. The author will shine light on why this assumption is false and wrong. Then the author will attempt to show how ethics can be easily defined and understood to be what it is by introducing an evolutionary concept of ethics, which distinguishes between autonomous ethics and socially learned ethics.

3079 words

I'll prove the impossibility of finding an all-encompassing rule for ethical behavior; and I shall prove it by illustrating that morality is not a singular system, but in fact two distinct and separate systems that have many commonalities and many differences as well.

The criterion or criteria for morality has not been found yet. Not to misconstrue that morality does not exist; but we can't actually safely and without any doubt in our minds decide what feature in an act makes it moral, immoral or amoral. We rely on our sentiments to decide that; and sentiments can't be used as benchmarks or measuring tools, even for quality of property, never mind quantitative properties.

I will present a few selected ideas of actions what people think moral actions are, and show you immediately on the spot that they are indistinguishable from selected other acts. With this I aim to show that whatever we choose as a feature of an action to be the action's moral ingredient, the same feature is not moral in other actions, so these features of supposed morality are useless in establishing purely using them whether an act is moral, amoral or immoral.

A moral action supposedly is...

-- one that makes the actor feel good and truly happy. Indistinguishable from eating an ice cream cone (makes us feel good) indistinguishable from achieving a goal we had set out and had had doubts whether we could attain it or not. This makes us feel good and happy. Other things that make us feel good and happy are childbirths, weddings, falling in love. Is falling in love a moral act, in and by itself? It's not even in your power when you do it, or when you happen upon it.
-- one that which most people approve of. Most people approve of holding the fork and knife properly, of driving on the proper side of the road, of not kicking dogs. Is not kicking dogs actually a moral act, in and by itself? Is not raping children a moral act? No, raping children is immoral by consensus and by intuition, but not raping them is not moral per se.
-- a heroic act: sacrificing one's own health, wealth, family, even life, for the good of the community or for loved ones. Is working overtime to make a boss's or capitalist inventors' life better, at the cost of destroying your own health, a moral act? No, it is not, yet your action is indistinguishable from the parameters set out: self-sacrifice to help someone else.
-- a type of act that make most or all people feel better, or their lives better, easier, happier. This is indistinguishable from being good or doing good things.
-- when a decision has to be involved; a moral decision. This is tricky, because we can’t rightfully establish the morality in an action, before we find out what exactly it is that makes an action moral. We can’t call a decision a moral decision before we get to establish the true qualifier of what makes an act moral. So this strips the task to just a decision being involved, not a moral decision. We may decide in a set of circumstances to trade fairly. This is indistinguishable from being persuaded to act in a seemingly innocent way. We decide to take advice, and if the advice is by a serpent to eat the fruit of the tree of wisdom, then it is an immoral act; yet the common element in both was that we made a decision. The act of decision making alone does not make a moral choice.
-- serving god. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim sense. Well, the general consensus among Bible-believers is that humans have a free will, and the ethical purpose of it is to use the free will to avoid temptation and to serve god. Your service to your god may include crossing the street at a perpendicular to the line of the curb. Is it immoral to cross otherwise? All authority derives from god, and you are promised to burn in hell if you do cross god, (no pun intended) but crossing the street at an angle is not immoral.
-- when you feel you've done what you ought to have done. This feeling is your inner moral guide, and mostly it is planted in you by your educators or else it is innately your own genetically programmed feeling. "You must say your evening prayer every evening." You know you ought to do this, because others tell you, so you internalize the lesson. If you miss your evening prayer, you feel guilty. Yet they also tell you that people are generally greedy, and you ought to be careful around them with money. Yet you don't feel particularly elated at all when you act carefully with your money around other people.

I hope to have illustrated to you, dear audience, that there is no hard-and-fast resolution among people what precisely is the active ingredient in a moral act. We agree on most acts as to their moral nature. But this is an intuitive process; any one ingredient of value or of psychological effect that points at a moral act can point at a different act that satisfies the required particular parameters just as well, and the particular different act is not what any normal human would call moral. Which leaves us bereft of counsel: what is it that makes an act moral? We have this feeling built into our psyche that helps us tell what act is a moral act and what is not; yet we can't put our fingers on the very essence that our decision hinges on.

This is one of the two horns of the dilemma that has created havoc among ethicists.

The other horn is the paradox of what seems to be moral behavior, yet the behavior does not satisfy any of the parameters set out as requirements for acting morally.

You see your child drowning in deep water. You don't think, you don't philosophize, you don't debate what it is you ought to do in this particular instance. You don't act to be fair, you don't obey god, you don't care how you feel, good or bad, or how it affects mankind. Instead, you jump in to swim to your child and rescue her. Failing to do so would make you feel guilty ceaselessly for the rest of your life. Not failing, that is, if you successfully save her life, you will feel solemn, serene, and ecstatically rapturous. If the situation presented itself over again, you'd always perform the same action. And so would every other human who were in the same relative situation as that.

This is an act that no human would say "it is amoral, it is immoral". To all this is a truly moral act.

What can we say about this act that separates it from other acts? The most obvious observation is that it contains none of those features which we normally try to hang on moral acts: consideration, decision, god's will, fairness. This is a moral act that is bereft of moral considerations.

We can say also that is a hugely peculiar trait of this act: acting in this situation, you feel extreme elation when you accomplish the task; or alternatively unending debilitating guilt if you don't attempt to accomplish your task and you incur the loss of your child's life because of it.

This reward-punishment reaction system is the hallmark of the moral act. Depending on your action, you are punished cruelly and mercilessly by your conscience or else you are richly rewarded by an overwhelming feeling of happiness and accomplishment. The feature of this system that one must pay absolutely close attention is that both the punishment and the reward are internally produced; no agent outside your identity or self needs to interfere to ensure that you get your just rewards.

Not one of the components are learned, inasmuch as the reaction to immediately risk the self in a rescue mission is not learned but automatic, and the elation-guilt reward-punishment system is not learned and furthermore can't be circumvented or avoided by the individual. I consider beyond this that all humans alive share this reaction system, and thus I am forced to believe that this reaction system is part of unchangeable human nature, an act that has been genetically preprogrammed in every human (and in every individual of other warm-blooded animal species as well, incidentally). The act has enormous survival value for the propagation of the individual’s bloodline, or DNA, or genetic code, because the person acting it out ensures the survival of the person's offspring.

I call the above system autonomous moral behavior. It is autonomous, because it operates independently of the individual's will, of the individual's decision; it is a compelling course of action; and its subsequent ensuing associated feelings are unavoidable; yet all these are internally produced within the person's own emotional and biological boundary, while the person also is incapable of influencing its operation; the system is autonomous.

There are a few other examples of autonomous moral behavior.

One is the moral obligation to kill your rival if you find him or her in an intimate act with your spouse. This helps ensure that the children you raise are your own offspring. Even the laws in some countries recognize this as an involuntary act, and have slighter punishment for it than for murder or for manslaughter.

There is a moral obligation to kill those who have done you awful wrong... tortured you over an extensive period of time, or killed your loved ones, or illegally left you bereft of all your possessions. This type of revenge is illegal in Western societies, but it is condoned by moral standards throughout the world.

There is a moral obligation to sustain life not just in your offspring, but in others' children as well. It is considered hugely immoral to kill innocent, defenseless children.

This reward-punishment system is not learned. It is innate, and it can't be changed in a human.

Yet though it is innate, interestingly the system is not restricted to the autonomous moral system. It is a mechanism that has the capacity to be copied over to other areas of a person's life.

Other areas are those, which we, humans, also call moral acts, yet they are not compelling acts, they can be trespassed.

Let me explain. The parents tell the child "you must say your prayers and brush your teeth at night." Do they teach a moral code? You bet they do. The tooth brushing may be not moral, as the child can be explained in simple, totally reasonable and understood terms, why he or she needs to brush three times a day. But the prayer thing is a bit trickier. There is no tangible evidence to satisfy reason. Yet, for whatever reason the parents feel important, they impel in the child a moral lesson: missing your evening prayer is an immoral act. It is actually a sinful act in religious terms. But in extension, all sinful acts are immoral; a truly religious person will feel guilty (morally guilty) at every sinful act he or she commits in life.

So the child will experience guilt if she or he does not say the evening prayer, yet he or she will also feel slight satisfaction if she or he does say the prayer, as it is the same mechanism as the one inherited from the autonomous moral system: an internally produced punishment at failure of doing an "ought", and a rapturous or even just slightly pleasant feeling of satisfaction of a job well done, so to speak, when the person does do the "ought."

You, gentle audience, at this point may state: "yes, I see how it works; but not every culture tries to internalize the necessity of the morals of the evening prayer in their children; and even in those cultures, in which it is a well-accepted practice, there are renegades. These renegades fail at the tasks, yet don’t feel guilt, or accomplish the task and feel no elation. How come?"
Excellent question, my dear audience. My theory answers this by saying that the morals that are not innate, are also not absolute. They can be changed; they can be rejected; they are different from culture to culture. Autonomous moral behavior is biological. Evolutionary changes made it so. Non-autonomous morals are always social or societal. Biological evolution made it possible in humans to have the moral effect programmed by societal pressure. Educators in societies shape behavior, or at least attempt to, to make people act according to the rules of their host society. This helps social coexistence and cooperation, which in turn increases the survival chances of society, and in it, of each individual.

The reward-punishment systems in the two: in autonomous morality and in social morality forced on the individual are not identical. Differences exist in intensity and duration. If you contravene an autonomous moral code, you feel guilt-ridden for the rest of your life, you wear the yoke of pain by losing your self-respect, losing your inner self. If you contravene an assumed (that is, acquired and internalized) code of ethics, your guilt will not last forever or as long as you live, whichever comes first.

In their application the reward-punishment systems are also different, without abandoning their original roles in the operation. The autonomous moral code is compelling. The acquired is not compelling, you can trespass its internalized codes. The autonomous is not chosen to internalize; the acquired is for the individual's choosing whether to acquire it or not. The autonomous code can't be abandoned; the social code can. Examples of contravening social moral code may be thieving, cheating on exams, doing unfair trade, trading in slaves. Not everyone can do them, but there are some who are not stopped by their own acquired moral code from doing these things, because they have chosen not to accept them and not to obey them.

Note also please: not every culture has the same set of acquired moral codes. Cultures are different in their needed elements or processes to survive. This is an effect of the varying geophysical and geopolitical nature of survival tactics. Some cultures are abhorred by any one or more of the following things, and they teach morals against them: cannibalism, child- and wife abuse, murder, slavery, incest or inbreeding. Yet all of these features were integral, working, and in some cases, necessarily accepted features of to us known and well-operating cultures. The Roman empire existed on slave labour, and though nobody willingly went into slavery, and all were scared of needing to go, people did not feel guilt over having, operating and disciplining slaves. Cannibalism is still alive and well in areas of the world where animal protein can't be acquired. (I am told that that the practice has stopped when the mad cow disease was linked to species eating their own species' carcasses.) Inbreeding was the call of the day for ruling dynasties in different cultures across most of the entire history of humans: from Egyptian pharaohs, to medieval kings, to modern-day monarchs, panning thousands of years. Murder was a ritualistic necessity in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Woman- and child abuse was a practice only until very recently in human history. "Spare the rod and spoil the child."

What does this tell us? The obvious, I think, would be to say that morals and moral systems can be identified by the self-generated punishment and reward systems. Another obvious thing to say would be, I think, that there are two distinct sets of morals, and the only feature that is common to both, are the reward-punishment system. I assert that the reward-punishment moral system is innate only in the autonomous moral system, and it is transferable and is indeed transferred to the acquired moral system of the individual. If an individual existed outside of society, the individual would never develop, because there would be no need and no venue to develop, an acquired moral system. The unavoidable presence of the autonomous, and the possible presence of the acquired, systems of morals are both results of successful genetic mutations that created them, and since their presence is species-wide among humans, I assert it formed in pre-human android species, perhaps even in pre-warm blooded creature formation in the evolutionary past.

Other obvious differences are: species-wide rigidity in the autonomous system, and species-wide malleability or variety of codes in the acquired system. Another is the difference between actual acts that are considered moral or immoral by cultural norms. Still yet one more difference exists: the innate autonomous system can't be changed, yet elements, even the entire set of elements, of an otherwise well-accepted set of acquired moral codes can be rejected by an individual at his or her sole discretion.

There is one more similarity: both sets of moral codes increase the survival chances of the community and the survival chances of the morally acting individual's derivatives of his or her own DNA.

There are also far-reaching effects of the realization of this duality of moral systems, and knowing their nature. The far-reaching effect is our logical ability to reject the theories attempted to be built by all previous moral philosophers to date, up to, but not including, moral system theories by evolutionary theorists. This means, and I say it with both pride and with a feeling of bereavement, that we can now ignore and dispense with the moral teachings of Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Socrates and Aristotle, to name just the most important ones that had tried to create, rather unsuccessfully, an all-encompassing moral map for humankind. Their efforts were fruitless, and were deemed and doomed to be so; they attempted the impossible to create an in and by itself complete and singular ethical system, because they had not realized the dual nature of morality, and more importantly, they were therefore blind to realize the different requirements for the two systems. Since the two systems are now viewed, as per my treatise here, as similar but with also some nonequivalent elements or features of operation, obviously and in a logical way, not one system of philosophy can be found that applies to both equally. Hence, moral questions will never be subjected to a single, all-encompassing evaluation (and repair) system, since the amorphous nature of the acquired moral codes and the rigid system of the autonomous moral codes make that wholly impossible.