Beyond ‘Good’ Evil
When people are presented with the idea that we might be better off without morality, they immediately imagine the collapse of civilization. They seemingly forget the crimes against humanity committed by the catholic church (Inquisition, pogroms, pedophile priests, etc) and they forget about genocides, like the Jewish Holocaust of WWII. All of these were driven by morality.
Morality is potentially very dangerous, but it is rarely treated as such. The reason is that the word evokes the listener‘s definition. Morality is good, as long as it is the listener’s morality. There is no ‘differing’ morality. There is simply morality and immorality; therefore morality is unquestionably ‘good’. This is an unresolvable craziness; it’s no wonder that so many wars are triggered by it.
The second problem lies in the origin of the listener’s morality. From where did it come? For the most part, one inherits morality. The notions that one acquires as a child are largely left unanalysed in adulthood. The result is that beliefs that might have been useful at some point in history are propagated into a future in which they are potentially dysfunctional. It is the repetition of moral statements which makes them seem true. The more often one hears a belief expressed, the truer it seems.
What is a reasonable substitute for morality? First, morality arguably needs no substitution — in a modern state, it is a problem, not a solution. There is really only the question of predictability, namely, what is a given person likely to do in circumstances of interest. For example, does a person handle institutional funds reliably? Does a person treat certain groups with respect? Predictability is not difficult to achieve. If honesty is part of one’s ‘brand’, then one acts accordingly, and actively reports incidents that demonstrate that. The idea is that one cultivates a place in a network of honest people.
Nothing about this type of association precludes the formation of networks of liars. However, such networks already exist and are bolstered by morality. For example, the leaders of the US Republican party are uncontroversially considered liars — there are no slander trials whose plaintiffs are Republicans — and their lies are tolerated or even celebrated by their support base because those lies are perceived as serving a higher moral purpose.
The question is whether networks free of morality may legitimately form. An existing example is the scientific community. Scientific work is not based on morality. It is based on replicability and explanatory power. Scientists whose work is not replicatable lose standing. In this den of amorality, one might expect scientists to be involved in abuses of trust. But, in fact, Christian church leaders are much better known for pedophilia than scientists. Again, morality is the problem — it is a solution for exactly nothing.