Scarcely a week goes by without hearing about a new species becoming threatened with extinction. Even media giants Sky are riding on the bandwagon, partnering groups like the WWF in the Rainforest Rescue campaign. If this tells us anything, it’s that conservation is box office in charity appeal.

But has anyone stopped to question why we allow these conservation charities so much of our attention? If we are causing the problems which are resulting in the deaths of these individuals in other species, then we should be worried. But is there a chance that we are getting carried away with looking at pretty animals?

The campaigns themselves tend to focus on species where there are relatively small numbers of individuals left. There is nothing necessarily irrational about that; after all, just because there is only one elephant does not mean we should care less about her suffering. The problem is that if these groups are genuinely concerned about the suffering of these magnificent creatures, why aren’t they just as concerned about smaller ones on farms?

The answer, of course, is that there are fewer individuals in the species left. There are billions of pigs raised and killed every few years whereas, for example, there are only around 15,000 jaguars left in the wild. However this in turn leads to an interesting conclusion. If we are bothered more by the fate of jaguars than pigs, just because there are less of them, then we’re valuing something other than individual suffering. Namely we seem to be valuing the variety of species and striving to maintain that variety. The most common reason for doing so is that it is more aesthetically pleasing.

Cue two embarrassing criticisms: how moral would Oxfam look if they saved human beings for that reason? It’s not particularly ethical to save anyone (human or animal) so you can look at them. And in a world where funds are increasingly sparse should we be spending huge amounts of money on preserving human made categories of animals when thousands more of these arbitrary categories die out each year, entirely naturally?

 

Is it really about aesthetics? Yes.

This aesthetics reasoning is only one theory, yet the others make even less sense. Namely these consist of the ‘utility’ arguments, which go something like this: ‘without these creatures, the world would be poorer in terms of agricultural, medicinal or ecological tools’. The argument seems logically redundant, forgetting that each of these species has been reduced right down to the last few thousand without causing global or ecological catastrophe. Similarly, as already mentioned, thousands of species die out every year without causing problems (or even any concern, in most cases). Species extinction is, in fact, an ecological necessity and we aren’t going to get many medicinal or agricultural benefits from jaguars and tigers.

The WWF aren’t fighting the cause of small or ecologically important species for reasons that should be pretty obvious. They pick big, magnificent creatures and we get carried away looking at these graceful, exotic scenes and feel our emotions pang at the wonderful sight on our TVs and the ambiguous feeling of ‘What? They are nearly gone FOREVER?!’. Floods of donations follow. The process upkeeps itself like any good business, profit-chasing or not, and as a result no-one ever needs to question whether the successful non-profit is necessary. It simply exists.

These kinds of charities primarily appeal to a human weakness when thinking about damage of an irreversible kind, not to our rational will to reduce or alleviate suffering. As a result they are one of the very clearest examples of charity with no defensible purpose (at least not when so many bigger problems – poverty, environmental collapse, suffering farm animals – exist).

Charity, at it’s best, is a wonderful tool for trying to balance out our own comfort by helping those less fortunate, those who genuinely feel suffering that we can alleviate. Our will to help others in this way speaks very well of us and can be extremely effective. But let’s not get carried away with what the TV tells us. Endangered animals suffer no more than any other, so we should rationally adjust the enormous value we give to the biological category of ‘species’, instead placing our concern equally regardless of the species which the individual in question belongs to. Then we would suddenly have a much more workable and helpful notion of charity. In a time of economic hardship this is has never been more morally necessary.

Rational Morality was released last week, intentionally opening with an introductory chapter that concisely explains the importance of ethics through use of a news story which we all find morally abhorrent: the Jimmy Savile scandal. Upon Stuart Hall’s prosecution today, resulting from the actions of that same police investigation into Savile, I am providing the introduction to the book in its entirety below.

Often there is confusion as to what morality means in the modern world—what relevance do ethics or morality have in our lives? The easiest way to explain is through the media portrayal of events that touch us all.

As I write this in the first months of 2013, there remain news reports and stories circulating in the UK media which relate to one of the most heavily covered stories of 2012. It began when interviews emerged in October 2012, airing on a TV documentary, alleging that the well-known celebrity Jimmy Savile (who died in 2011) had misused his position of power in order to commit sex crimes on five different females in the 1970’s. As a result, the police began investigations and quickly gathered that he may have abused up to 25 victims. This figure rose dramatically over the coming months to around 450 potential victims coming forward (to date), with many of the targets of abuse being children or other vulnerable individuals.

A report released on January 11th 2013, jointly produced by the Met Police and the NSPCC, said the scale of the sexual abuse was ‘unprecedented’ and described Savile as a ‘predatory sex offender’. His victims ranged in age between 47 and just 8 years old–adding the further offence of paedophilic sex abuse to the already horrendous stories.

Unsurprisingly these crimes shocked and appalled the British public, as well as audiences around the world. We were shaken to our core to learn that a celebrity had managed to use his status to sexually abuse and exploit young children, patients dying in hospices and many other innocent victims. Many of the abused will be scarred for life, or may no longer
be with us.

It is our reaction to these crimes that underpin our ethics. We don’t just find Savile’s actions distasteful, we find them morally abhorrent. We don’t think it is okay to do what he did and we think he should have been stopped from doing so. This is morality, and that we desperately desire for sex offenders like Savile to be stopped, or locked up, shows our will for there to be an observed moral code. We don’t think that someone like Savile should be allowed to do what he likes at the victims’ expense, so we don’t believe that morality should be relative to each person and instead we think that it should be objectively applied to anyone who does what he did (regardless of their position of power and influence or personal tastes).

Already it has been easy to explain the idea of morality and ethics at an important level. By using the examples of news stories it is easy to show what ethics are, how strongly we want them and that we want this system of morality to be objectively applied. This, in a nutshell, is how ethics work.

This might lead you to ask, what is the purpose of this book, if we already have an observed and demonstrable form of morality in society? Well, another major news story doing the rounds might explain it: same sex marriage. For the past few years same sex marriage has been debated, and was opposed by many Republicans (among others) in the US and many Conservatives in the UK. Still many states in the US do not allow for gay marriage, and the UK plans to allow for it although does not compel any religious group to perform same sex marriage services. Unlike in cases of sex abuse, opinion is not as unified on the moral issue of gay marriage. There are passionate voices arguing for it and against it.

Yet, if one is to analyse the content of the arguments on same sex marriage, there really isn’t a big debate to be had. Religious groups have no evidence for their own spiritual beliefs (being, as they are, personally posited truths), and yet the marriage ceremonies which they can perform have legal recognition (and legal benefits, in some places). However, they are being legally allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation when it comes to performing these ceremonies, even though the law says that discrimination is illegal as a general matter.

There are only two possible, rational solutions to the same-sex marriage issue when we are given these facts as outlined above. The first is that religious groups are forced to allow same sex couples to marry, so as not to legally discriminate based on their own personal opinions. The second is that religious groups give up the legal and state-influencing powers they have, due to the spiritual, illegal and non-rational justification they wish to give to discrimination. These are the onlytwo moral options: there is no middle ground, just as there isn’t with the Savile case. Doing anything other than this (such as allowing same sex marriage, but not making all institutions that need to recognise it do so; as has happened in the UK) is to arbitrarily allow for discrimination. That is an abuse of the kind of fairness which we seem to want in cases like Savile’s.

What the same sex marriage debate shows is that although we have a functioning system of morality in some areas (such as where societal opinion is rationally unified against sex abuse), it is completely uninformed in others (where it should be converged against discrimination in the case of gay
marriage, for example).

The analysis of these two news stories gives a good grounding on what morality is, but also with the problem of morality in society. Almost everyone recognises the immorality of what Savile did, probably because it is already legally and culturally forbidden, and yet relatively few recognise or are disgusted by the immorality of discrimination or other rationally indefensible moral acts that are not already culturally forbidden. We seem to understand the reason that we need morality, as exemplified by our opinions on things like murder and violent abuse, but we seem to misunderstand that morality doesn’t just stop with what we currently find as immoral; it extends to things we may never even have thought about before, or things that we don’t currently legislate for. It should work based on fairness, not familiarity.

These stories show that ethics is still an extremely relevant subject. We want the vulnerable to be protected, we want aggressors to be stopped and we want fairness to persevere. We may wish to sum up the theoretical issues that these very different examples raise in three sets of questions:

1. Should morality be relative, or objective?
Is it definitely our split personal opinions on gay marriage that are wrong, or are we instead wrong to have a largely unified opinion against sex crime? Can an objective view of morality even be defensible within a modern, scientific view of the world, when morality seems to be opinion based and not fact based? In other words, how can an opinion on a moral issue be equated with being a moral fact, in the same way that physical science like physics or chemistry talks about facts? Are we deluding ourselves?

 

2. If morality is objective, then how can we fully judge what is right and what is wrong?
How do we know what is objectively wrong and what is objectively permissible, and how do we best make these decisions?

 

3. What is the real world effect for each of us once we have these answers?
What would a rational morality have us do? And why should we care to do it?

 

Don’t worry if these questions feel very vague or unexplained for now, as they will be explained in detail at different stages. Roughly speaking, the following pages are my attempt to answer these questions—and a few more—whilst formulating a fresh, modern and more rational way to think about morality. A way in which morality can be viewed as a form of science. If at any stage things seem like they have gotten too complex, or too theoretical, always draw it back to these kinds of simple questions; ethics is about events and happenings in the real world, and should be able to be understood by anyone. The theory, as referenced throughout, only exists so as to back up or else correct our opinions, by pointing out a more thorough understanding of the real world. That’s all theory is and thus it should never be needlessly complex. This is my adopted philosophy, and there’s no better place to quote one of my favourite historical influences, William of Ockham:

“It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer.”

I hope that the influence of this single line will become obvious the more you read.

Rob Johnson, March 2013

• How do we formulate a coherent moral code in a world without religion?
• How can we show natural ideas like ‘moral relativism’ and ‘egoism’ to be irrational?
• Moreover, how can we create a genuinely scientific and rational theory of morality which, so far, has evaded academics?

Rational Morality sets out to answer these questions by presenting a new form of ethics for the Brian Cox and Richard Dawkins generation; creating ‘moral science’ from ‘moral philosophy’ in the process.

In this passionate, thought-provoking and often radical thesis, Robert Johnson presents both a refreshing theory of morality based on science and a guide to the practical consequences of what a truly rational concept of morality involves. Exploring rationality, atheism, animal ethics, determinism and politics in the modern world, Johnson uncovers some surprising and original arguments in each area.

 

Today is the official release date for Rational Morality: A Science of Right and Wrong, after a long few years consisting equally of research and trying to fit an awful lot of explanation, science and philosophy into 200 pages! The above is a brief description of what I’ve come up with; an entirely new theory of morality, explained in an entirely accessible manner. Below are a couple of the first reviews (of which we will hopefully see more on the site in the coming days):

 

“Robert Johnson convincingly argues that ancient religious myths cannot provide a reasonable basis for morality. In Rational Morality he concisely and forcefully demonstrates how evidenced based science can and must determine the moral theories and ethical norms that best contribute to the wellbeing, not only of humans, but other sentient beings. He offers a unique and compelling view of a complex topic.”

Joseph L. Daleiden, author of ‘The Science of Morality’

 

“Rational Morality is a guide for practical humanity sans the religious belief that without God, there is no reason to be moral. Johnson brings to bear convincing studies and data, as well as a lucid, elegant, and forthright writing style.”

CJ Werleman, author of ‘God Hates You. Hate Him Back’

 

And, as if that weren’t enough, please remember that if you buy a copy of the book and don’t like it, it also doubles as a durable yet stylish pet bed. Practical ethics in action.

Stay tuned for further updates in the coming weeks, some interesting article releases and the first sets of reviews coming in. If you simply must have a copy of the book on the official release date, the following are the links to visit:

Amazon – Paperback

Amazon – Kindle

Book Depository

Rob Johnson, 14th June 2013

Though not the first time, FIFA president Sepp Blatter has today garnered more media attention for his desire to sideline gay equality in football. In the same speech, the most powerful man in football then cemented his position as the ‘Boris Johnson’ (read as ‘bumbling idiot’ for anyone outside the UK) of the soccer world by celebrating the first full female member of the FIFA executive committee in the most patronising way one would think is possible:

“Are there ladies in the room? Say something! You are always speaking at home, now you can speak here.”

It’s striking how backwards these comments sound, considering football is the most popular sport in the world. These kind of speeches wouldn’t look out of place in the stand-up comedy of the 70’s – the joke about women, especially, could come straight from an ancient routine about a bossy mother-in-law.

In all seriousness, Blatter is clearly not saying he is okay with homophobia or sexism. He’s not doing a great job of not saying these things, admittedly – skirting around the edges of as yet uncompleted social movements for humour is not particularly smart – but never the less, Blatter’s comments are not sincerely stated prejudices.

The problem with Blatter’s position, instead, is moral cowardice. As a tactical matter, you don’t go full out on the attack against racism whilst ignoring other forms of discrimination; it just doesn’t make sense to do that. All discrimination is formed the same way, consisting mainly of irrational opinions that stigmatise certain groups of people, so it is easy for the mental roots of one prejudice to support others. Exemplified by the fact that members of the EDL often aren’t fond of homosexuals, and rampant old-fashioned homophobes tend to think a woman’s place is in the kitchen.

This isn’t always the case, of course, but more often than not prejudice tends to be transferable in this way. Indeed, why wouldn’t it be? If one doesn’t feel a need to look at evidence or reason in forming a particular opinion about a particular group of people, then why would one need to do so when it comes to other potential prejudice? Once you discard explicit evidence as a motivator for forming belief in one area, it becomes a lot easier to do it when faced with adjacent, similar issues (just like any learned character trait – we are not rational machines, but a collection of personality traits).

This is the problem with any type of moral cowardice, whether sincere or tactical. Sincere moral cowardice (meaningfully ignoring certain prejudices) or tactical moral cowardice (allowing prejudice for now), have exactly the same counter-productive effect by allowing for discrimination, which in turn feeds back into encouraging all prejudice by implicitly stating that it isn’t the nature of prejudice itself that is the problem. So you not only implicitly fail to discourage prejudice itself, thus potentially hitting an infinite feedback loop, you also face the risk of successfully ‘influenced’ people falling back on old prejudice opinions once your campaigns have died down. After all, they haven’t understood that arbitrary prejudice is logically wrong – that wasn’t what your campaign was about – they’ve simply done as you told them in not being prejudice about that one area (while it is trendy, at least). Campaigning against one prejudice simply as a rule, rather than as a matter of principled understanding about making rational moral decisions, is a short term and fairly ineffective idea.

Evidence to back this kind of reasoning is generally difficult to come by; social science is not easy to ‘prove’. But we do have some firm evidence to fall back on – history tells us that only an all-out apocalyptic assault on the one prejudice in question (such as the suffragettes forced via ‘terrorism’ in the early-20th Century, or the civil rights movement through mass protest of the mid-20th Century) will overcome this huge structural issue that Blatter and FIFA seem to be falling foul of. But these are the kinds of historically effective events that can’t take place within sport.

Perhaps Blatter is advised by better ethicists than me, and has evidence which disagrees with the conclusion that encouraging or ignoring discontinuous moral opinions is the root cause of prejudice. I sincerely hope he does. The world’s biggest sport, after all, is an important battle ground in the fight against prejudice. I’m not confident that Blatter’s intentions are quite so pure, though.