Ask a Humanist: Is there objective truth or morality?

Yes – I believe there is such a thing as an objective truth. No – I don’t believe in the existence of an objective morality.

Things are true if they accord with fact and/or reality. Meaning, things are objectively true if they can be proven to be true using the tools of science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”  Amen for that. So yes, as a Humanist I recognize that there are objective truths that can be known and it is helpful for us to know what is true.

The reason it is helpful for us to know what is true and what isn’t is because – what is true impacts our moral judgements.

The 2nd part of this question is – is there an objective morality. To me, as a Humanist, the answer is no. Ultimately – in the grand scheme of things and on the scale of the universe – NONE of our actions really matter. We are all going to end up dead and eventually have our atoms destroyed and reborn in a stellar explosion. 

As Rick in Casablanca points out, “I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.”

Some people view this – rejection of objective morality as license to do anything you want. It isn’t. It’s just an acknowledgement of the absurd reality we find ourselves in. On the one hand – morality matters greatly to us in the here and now because of the impact our actions have on us in the here and now. And … they don’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things.

Blaise Pascal once wrote, “A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.”  This is especially true of morality.

We can both understand that our actions don’t ultimately matter and understand that they matter greatly right now.  Understanding that both are true is to be enlightened. It helps you to think and act morally while not being uptight about morality.

Why, given the ultimately futility of all moral activity, does it matter to be moral. The answer is because it impacts your life and the life of others right now.  All lives end at some point. The challenge is – how to live life well and fully. The answer, according to every major religion and philosopher is to live a life of compassion geared towards helping others. Why? Why not.  You are only alive for a short people of time. Why not act in a way that makes your life better and the lives of others better? It sure beats the alternative.

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To learn more – get my book – The Humanist Approach to Happiness – or take my life skills course – Living Made Simpler. 

Make Better Decisions

It’s amazing how much more effective decision making is when it is based in reality.

 One of the things I try to do with this blog is teach people how to think better so that they can make better choices.  The three skills I teach are how to combine critical thinking, compassion and personal responsibility into better decision making. Learning HOW to think better is the key to making better choices that you CAN feel confident about your choices.

The nice thing about the Humanist approach – is it is woo free – no magical thinking required. And this is important because reality based decision making is vastly superior to assumption based or fallacy based decision making. You are just going to have to trust me on this one – but I’m pretty sure if someone ever did do a scientific study on this – I’d be proven right.

(Note: I actually did try to find evidence to back up this assumption that reality based decision making is better, but it’s so obvious that if you base your decisions on evidence of what works and what doesn’t, you are going to have a better chance of success. This is so well understood that a search on “study – reality based decision making” turned up pages of studies on HOW to most effectively integrate evidence based decision making in medicine.)

Regardless, on when making a reality based or evidence based decision – you need to do your homework.  You need to find out what is factually true. What works and what doesn’t to solve your problem.

You see, we humanists are very aware that we have cognitive biases and that these biases can throw us off course. And of course, we also make a LOT of assumptions. To counteract these built in defects in our thinking, we have to work hard to challenge our assumptions and doubt whether what we think we know is actually so, so that we become motivated to find out so that we can base our decision making on evidence, to the best of our ability.

And this brings me to the next bit. You can’t ever have perfect information. It doesn't exist. At some point, you do have to make decisions with imperfect knowledge. And, you need to be OK with that. For me, I do this by accepting that I might be wrong and make a note that if I find out I was, to be humble enough to correct my mistakes. Quickly. Because the only thing worse than being wrong, is continuing to be wrong after you find out.

Finally, my rule of thumb with decision making is to do the most good and the least harm possible. Again, reality based decision making requires me to acknowledge that I don’t live in a perfect world.  All I can ever do at any time is what I think is right (Thoreau said that or something very close to that in case you were wondering).

So – to sum up – reality based decision making, coupled with a commitment to do the most good and the least harm with an acknowledgement that you may be totally screwing up but you are going to do the best you can anyway – oddly enough – leads to good confident decision making.  It really does.

Try it – you’ll see. The more humble you are about what you don’t know – the more effective you become at decision making. At least, that’s how it works for me. Someone ought to do a study to see if my personal experience translates into the rest of humanity. 

Searching for the Truth

While truth is important, searching for it may be a waste of time.

Truth, it turns out, is a very subjective thing. And that’s a weird thing to say given that most of us have some idea of truth as being objectively real. Truth is something that exists outside our consciousness whether we know what is true or believe it or not.

The problem is that we can’t ever truly know what is truly true. Not really. All knowledge we have or think we have is filtered through our rather messy brains and so our thoughts and our perception of knowledge is inherently subjective. We can’t help it.  It’s just the reality we have to deal with, as far as we know.

That doesn’t mean that what is true isn’t important. It is. What is real really matters. The more our subjective understanding of what is true matches what is objectively true the more effective we are going to be. So searching for truth is worthwhile.

The problem is that we can’t ever be truly sure if what we think is true is actually true. To be intellectually honest, we have to maintain doubt regardless of how sure we are that that what we think we know is true.  This requires balance.

We have to seek out truth, but accept that we can never truly know what is true. We can’t use the unending search for truth as an excuse not to act in the present. We have to act to the best of our ability based on what we think we know to be true even though it may turn out to be false.

To help me maintain this balance I like to remind myself of this quote by Thoreau from Civil Disobedience:

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”