Morality and Bad Faith

Morality involves two big lies. One is that the interests of society are the interests of the individual. The other is that the interests of society are the interests of the cosmos. The reality is that individuals have their own interests, societies have their own interests, and the cosmos has no interests.

Life is competitive. People compete for resources. However, people can also cooperate. They form social groups, which are based on cooperation. Within those groups, they develop social agreements about how individuals should behave. Solutions to problems of cooperation become social values and imperatives.

For example, most societies prohibit individuals from killing each other. Essentially, the members of the group agree to not kill each other. An individual could benefit by killing others, but he could also be killed by others. He is willing to trade his freedom to kill for protection from being killed. The social value “Murder is bad” emerges by tacit agreement. The members of society then cooperate to impose it on individuals.

See What is Value? and Game Theory and Cooperation.

The prisoner’s dilemma shows the difference between individual and collective interests. In the prisoner’s dilemma, each individual has an incentive to defect, but together they have an incentive to cooperate. In essence, a society is a power structure that converts collective interests into individual interests, thereby solving problems of cooperation.

Social values are the collective recognition of collective interests. Social values emerge from the interaction of individual values in a social context. That is the underlying basis of morality.

Most people would immediately reject the claim that they have a natural incentive to steal, rape or kill. You might believe that you are intrinsically altruistic, and thus you would never commit such acts, regardless of the social power structure. If so, you are self-deceived. That belief is part of the grand deception of morality.

Social values become morality through deception. Members of the society pretend that social values (such as “murder is bad”) are cosmic. They pretend (and believe) that those values come from some external source, rather than from the collective. Often, this external source is a god. Members of the society also pretend that social values are not imposed on them, but are intrinsic to them. In other words, they pretend to be “good”, and most of them believe that they are “good”.

This double pretense is the grand deception of morality. It projects social values onto the cosmos, and also into the individual. It pretends that moral values are both cosmic and personal.

In reality, individuals are intrinsically “evil”. They do not have social values built into them. Like all life forms, the human form was generated by evolution, and evolution selects for reproductive selfishness, not altruism.

The cosmos is also “evil”. The universe is hostile to life. Nature is intrinsically competitive. Physics and biology do not impose cooperation on individuals or collectives.

It is society that creates cooperation. Individuals can organize into a society for their mutual benefit. Within that society, they can define social values and impose them on each other. Social values are not cosmic, and they are not imposed by God or nature.

The ordinary person does not understand the relation between the cosmos, society and the individual. He believes that there is a cosmic moral axis, and that he is internally aligned with it. He believes that good and evil are cosmic, that he is good, that society is created by the goodness of individuals, and that his society is (or should be) good.

That is all delusion/deception.

The big lies of morality require many little lies. The pretense of individual goodness leads to hypocrisy, rationalization and self-deception. The individual must hide his true motives behind a veil. This deception is so deep that it usually becomes self-deception.

The belief that morality is cosmic creates the “problem of evil”, which is the need to explain why the world does not conform to moral values, or in other words, why the world is evil.

The problem of evil is dodged by:

• Claiming that evil is due to evil agents or forces that somehow exist despite the world being essentially good.
• Ignoring or denying the deviation of reality from moral values.

Morality is a collaborative self-deception. It creates a social environment of bad faith.

Hypocrisy is the close companion of morality. Individuals naturally pursue their own interests within society, and those interests are somewhat at odds with collective interests. Individuals profess their moral goodness, while breaking or bending social values to their personal benefit whenever possible. They also lie in various ways to justify their transgressions.

Within society, there is always a competition for social power and benefits. Each individual tries to increase his rights, and decrease his obligations. This struggle often involves competing moral claims. Ironically, although social values exist to solve problems of cooperation, they also create a new layer of competition with its own problems of cooperation. The competition for moral status can be socially destructive. Morality can be a tragedy of the commons.

Just as individuals pursue their own interests within society, societies pursue their own interests within the world. Societies compete with each other, and they extract resources from nature. This is another cause of hypocrisy.

A society must extract resources from nature. To survive and grow, it must kill animals and plants, and destroy ecosystems. A society will also compete with other societies. It will fight wars that involve killing people and seizing resources.

In its external relations, a society must violate its internal norms. It prohibits violence between its members, but it commits violence against nature and other societies.

Also, a society must violate its internal norms to impose them. It uses coercion to impose the social order on individuals, while prohibiting coercion between its members. It prohibits theft, but collects taxes.

A society cannot live by its own internal rules, because it exists in a larger context (nature) that does not play by those rules. It uses violence to create a “nicer” internal environment of cooperation.

Every society pretends that its internal rules reflect cosmic good and bad. However, every society violates its own rules. Another layer of deception is required to justify this hypocrisy.

The double-standard is justified by making a moral distinction between insider and outsider. The insider is worthy of care and protection. The outsider can or should be harmed.

There are different types of moral outsiders, such as food animals, slaves, external enemies and internal enemies. Those that compete with the collective are labeled “evil”, and harming them is considered to be good. Those that the collective uses or consumes, such as slaves or farm animals, are not viewed as evil, but as less worthy of moral concern, so their use or consumption is morally justified.

The moral status of the outsider is based on the interests of the collective, but morality pretends that it is based on the intrinsic, objective nature of the outsider. That is another big lie.

The insider | outsider distinction justifies a society pursuing its own interests in relations with individuals, other societies and nature. Every society claims to be aligned with the cosmic good, and claims the cosmic right to impose order on its members, take resources from nature, and destroy its enemies.

Social power has a pragmatic justification, as does the insider | outsider distinction. But if we pretend that social values are cosmic and built into human nature, then a complex web of deception is necessary to hide the true relationship between nature, society and the individual.

Morality does not make us “good”. Nothing could make us “good” in the sense of being altruistic or aligned with a cosmic value axis, because (a) we are naturally selfish, and (b) there is no cosmic value axis. Social power creates the incentives that align individual interests with collective interests. Morality is a grand deception that justifies social power. It is useful in that way, but it has huge costs.

Morality makes us into liars and hypocrites, as individuals and societies. It generates a complex web of pretense, deception and delusion. This bad faith permeates all social discourse and belief. It prevents us from understanding and speaking the truth about nature, society, human nature and our own motivations.