[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So like I said.
Well, thank you very much. It's a great honour to be here.
Um, I am not a professional philosopher or social scientist,
but I have thought about these issues for a long time, and I hope to say something useful about them.
So I'm going to talk about the importance of values, the origin of values, moral realism,
the nature of values one, the nature values two, values and life key issues.
And I may run out of time. Um, if so, um, the PDF for the could can be made available.
So the importance of values and the importance of values is that they are central to individual and social life,
and they underlie the functioning of a well-functioning society.
It's crucial if values are going to play their role, that they are internalised rather than imposed.
In fact, in a sense, trying to impose values doesn't work because then they're not actually your values.
Um, they related to meaning in a way, which I will try to make clear as we go through this,
or tell us as a word which I like to use in regard to this.
And they shape all actions by setting their context.
Once you've got a set of values, everything you do is shaped by those values because they decide what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
Now they are soiling, letting, and lacking in public discourse at the present time, internationally and in my own country, in my own country, the uh,
government is embroiled in a huge amount of corruption and stealing from the very poor,
um, the values which are supposed to underlie South African society.
When Nelson Mandela was running it with Desmond Tutu, wonderful leaders,
those values have disappeared from public discourse in our government at the present time.
And I'm going to talk, um, incidentally, I will make clearer later on that my distinction between ethics and morality.
For the moment, I will use them. Indistinguishable ethics is the top of the hierarchy of emergence.
We all emerge out of physics, from which emerge chemistry from which emerges biochemistry from which, and really just physiology.
From what you mentioned, psychology and sociology.
This is the hierarchy of complexity and emergence. For humans.
Ethics is the top level because ethics and governance in society,
what is permissible that governs what is permissible in psychology, and that change is down to the physical level,
because ethical actions are actions have consequences in the world,
and it's top down to put constraints on permissible behaviour and encourage desirable behaviour.
This is an example of the physical consequences. If your value system allows you to have nuclear weapons,
then they are liable to be used and that results in consequences not just for human life, but down to the level of atoms.
Billions and billions of atoms could rearrange as a result of your value, which says that a nuclear weapon is acceptable.
And so values really have major consequences in the real world.
What's the origin of ethical values? Are they derived from evolution or developed socially or based on neuroscience, or based in a moral reality?
These are the basic four kinds of themes which people have been developing over well over 2000 years actually.
And telling. Deciding what the values are is basically about the nature of being human.
What's our essential nature?
And the reason I, as a scientist am interested in this is that a lot of stuff has been written recently of the light of modern biology,
in particular molecular biology in neuroscience, about where values come from.
And science has been trying to tell us where values come from.
It's I want to make clear a bit later on, and this is trying to say from the scientific side, what the quality of humanity is, what is needed,
in contrast to quite a lot of what is written, is the need for an adequately humane view of humanity that also takes prison science,
those sciences I've just mentioned into account.
So the origin of values, the drive towards the scientific derivation of values has had three kinds of threads.
One was the social or culture view, which is perhaps the oldest one, uh, based in sociology, anthropology, and their discussions of values in society.
The second is the evolutionary or genetic one,
basically saying that our values have derived from our evolutionary history and then got embodied in genes,
which then are in some sense controlling how we behave in an ethical way.
And then the one which is very recent, perhaps, is neuroscience because of the incredible advantages of neuroscience, recently brain imaging,
um, detailed studies of, of synapsis individual synapses and so on, or some combination of these might be put forward.
Now, it's crucial to recognise responsibility and avoid moral relativism.
And part of the dangers in a lot of these approaches is the problem of moral relativism,
which I will say quite a lot about in the next couple of slides.
But the crucial underlying point about all of this is the approaches from the science are often trying to blur the is or distinction.
Now from the it's a very old philosophical stance that what if, what happens, what is or is not the same as what as ought, what ought to happen?
And I it is my contention that a lot of these attempts to, um, derive morality out of various of these sciences are blurring the is or distinction.
Sometimes this is made explicit, sometimes it is not made explicit.
And I think that it is crucial that one maintains that distinction.
As I will be saying, as we go through this,
what what normally happens in the attempts to derive um values from evolutionary or genetic arguments or for neuroscience arguments,
is that some naive view of the nature of the good life is brought in through the back door when you're not told that this is what is happening.
But in fact, as I said, it's normally quite a naive, a vision of the good life, and that is then used to shape what is going on.
But it's not made explicit that that is what is happening. I maintain science cannot provide values.
Science can help us to see what is there. Now what science does depend on its basic scientific virtues.
When you conduct science, it is crucial to science that other people believe what you've done.
They believe that the data you're providing hasn't been cooked.
And incidentally, it has been turning out and recent times that there is actually been quite a lot of cooking take place in science,
that quite a lot of scientists have not been holding to the ethical values which underlie science.
But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about more general science in society in general.
I maintain that science cannot adjudicate on moral issues.
There is no scientific way of saying whether morality should be based in the means or the ends,
in the intentions or the results, that there is no, um, despite what, um, economics may claim,
there's no real way of deciding between competing interests, because otherwise, isn't it some, uh,
unjustified assumption of how you should do that is brought in, and it's usually brought in without making clear that that is what is happening.
And particularly science cannot tell you whether values should focus on the right of the individual or the rights of the group,
which is one of the major distinctions. Science cannot provide ethics and cannot answer what is good or bad,
because there is no scientific experiment which will tell you that an action is good or an action is bad.
And to make this point, I like to say, let us suppose that you provide the scientist with data that some particular thing took place,
let's say, in Iraq or Iran, and then tell me how good or bad was that?
Please, will you tell me, using units of Hitlers, how good or how bad it was?
And there isn't any scientific experiment that can do that.
And if a scientist does say that science can provide, um, values of good and bad, you can ask them and handle ethics.
You can ask, what is the scientific prescription for handling what is currently happening in Iraq or Israel?
And there is no scientific prescription that is a moral or ethical issue, which is based in moral philosophy or um,
uh, uh, other attitudes which, which are moral, not, um, to do with science.
The limits of science are that science is very powerful in its own domain, but that domain is strictly limited.
Natural and biological science is limited by very nature to its proper domain of application,
the measurable behaviour of physical objects in a repeatable context, and so it cannot handle features of a quite different nature such.
As the appreciation of beauty, the greatness of literature, the joy of cooking,
the lessons of history, the nature of evil, the quality of meditation, the experience of love.
All of these require value judgements or experiences which cannot be quantified in a rig,
in a scientific way, a repeatable way based on scientific measurements.
Therefore, science cannot deal with ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics and meaning.
The attempt to deal with these issues on a scientific basis is not only misleading,
it is positively dangerous because it can lead to the Social Darwinism movement and its consequences, such as eugenics.
And it has indeed done so in the past. It is crucial that these topics ethics, aesthetics,
metaphysics and meaning be recognised in their own right with scientific factors in their development.
So if you if you are going to discuss ethics, science can tell you.
For instance, let's take a specific example. What is happening at the moment in the global terms of global warming may lead.
Let us say to the extinction of polar bears. Science has nothing to say whether the extinction of polar bears is good or bad.
That's not the kind of thing it can say. Science can tell you. If we continue on this path, then maybe polar bears.
Polar bears were going extinct. But science is not in a position to say that is either good or bad.
It is crucial that these, yeah, be recognised in their own right with scientific factors in their development, which is the point I was making.
But their own logic and nature justified in their own terms.
Um, so as I've already been saying, there is there is a distinction.
There's a tendency by some to believe science can handle such issues by evolutionary psychology, the imperative of survival being.
What is it called? Therewere by sociology, the force of culture, by neuroscience, but then by the very nature beyond the scope of science.
Indeed, the proponents of the views often do not even agree. So if you haven't even heard this psychologist or sociology,
they will often come with with different views of what is the good, the nature of a good life.
And but the key point is, the fact that people tend to behave some way does not make it ethically right.
And each of these will tend to take how people actually behave and then say, that's the basis for morality.
But the fact that people behave that way doesn't mean this is the way that they ought to behave.
So the occurrence behaviour by itself makes no normative statement, nor does any claimed evolutionary origin of behaviour norms are behind.
Beyond the nature of science, you can't get or from is or from tends to happen.
It's a category mistake. And I'll give you some examples. Now what we have to avoid is relativism.
In my view, I think this is actually crucially important. There's a tendency by some social scientists to promote ethical relativism,
based on the view that we cannot have grounds to prefer the views of one society over another.
And if you take the view that all societies are equally good,
all viewpoints are equally good, then this is in a sense, the natural outcome of that view.
You find yourself unable to say that what one society does is evil,
because that is the way that society is construed, and their viewpoint is as good as that of any other viewpoint.
I deny that position strongly. They are not all equal.
The the Holocaust was evil, period. There is nothing to say about it that could possibly make the Holocaust good.
Some societies believe in honour killings, or suicide bombings, or female genital mutilation,
or burning people to death for having the wrong religion, as happened here in Oxford.
And I walk down the street here past marches, the Martyrs Memorial,
and I think of the evil that was committed in the name of religion by religious leaders.
And it I and my view is that one must state as a fact that what happened there was evil in an absolute sense.
There wasn't anything relativist about it that we are in a position to say that some things are evil.
And so we I think we can and must reject these kinds of things as unacceptable because they're evil acts.
And in fact, we have made moral progress over the past hundred years, as Steven Pinker has written about,
there is no longer torture, at least publicly, in the streets of London.
People are no longer hung, drawn and quartered as they used to be.
Slavery has been abolished in most parts of the world. Women's rights have made incredible gains in the past 100 years.
The growth of democracy has been incredible. Now, I'm not saying this is everywhere.
This. I'm not saying all societies are great democracies.
In fact, democracy is a very fallible institution, as we all know.
Nevertheless, if you look back to the way things were, things have made a huge amount of progress over the past hundred.
Past a thousand years. Darwinian logic suggests ethics is based in survival.
I've been told that by a co-author I was writing a book with.
But the Darwinian logic expressed it relates to what people do, not to what they ought to do.
It's it's it's based on the fact that they act in such a way that they survive and pass their seed on to create,
uh, a new children who will then pass their genes on.
If this is taken seriously, it can lead to the evils of social Darwinism.
It's an all priori claim that survival is the ultimate ethical value.
But I've heard that made by some, um, lecture neuroscientists.
If the origin of ethics is solely to do with kin or group survival, there's a lot written about group survival,
kin survival, if that is the foundation of its meaning, as claimed by some evolutionary psychologists.
And the clear logic is that it's fine to massacre the enemy. War is justified because they're not your kin and they are not your own group.
There's a more moderate view from a student of mine about evolutionary psychology, about the evolutionary nature.
Relation to values is as follows. Ethical principles go towards the survival and more and more cooperative,
hierarchically complex systems which use free energy more and more efficiently.
This is trying to make it a more scientific basis.
But again, this is an example of bringing in assumed unjustified values.
Without making this clear, why should, um, more and more complex systems be good?
Why should using free energy more complex, uh, more and more efficiently be good?
I'm not saying that it isn't good, but I'm saying it's just being assumed without any justification that this is what is good.
The origin of values neuropsychology. I think this is the hot spot in the subject today.
There's a tendency to mistakenly believe that science can handle such issues by neuropsychological studies.
It is said by some neuroscientists, and effective moralities to do with happiness.
There are neurotransmitters that make us happy. Hence, we can underpin morality by neuroscientific investigation of molecules related to happiness.
So there's this book called The Moral Molecule. And the moral molecule is oxytocin.
The problem here is that feeling good is not the same as being good.
They don't have a clue about 2000 years of moral philosophy.
The debate about morality, the nature of good and evil, and what is the good life.
When you say that there can be a moral molecule?
The latest of these, which is important one is by Sam Harris called The Moral Landscape, and the book blurb says the following.
Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our culture wars.
Harris delivers a game changing book about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation.
What is happening there is he's assuming that human cooperation is good.
Now, I'm not saying that it's not good,
but I'm saying that he's throwing in an assumption about what is good by saying that human cooperation is good.
That's where he's inserting his values.
Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape in this explosive book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values,
arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge.
Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being,
viewing the experiences of conscience creatures of peaks and valleys on a moral landscape.
Because there are definite facts to be known about where we fall on this landscape.
Harris foresees a time when science from no longer limit itself to merely describing what people do.
The name of morality in principle. Science should be able to tell us what we ought to be able to do to live the best lives possible.
Now, I think that's a really dangerous kind of statement. I'm.
Bringing a fresh perspective to angel Christians.
Rotten. Good and evil. Harris.
Demonstrate we already know enough about the human brain and its relationship with the Winstons to say there are right and wrong
answers to the most pressing questions of human life in the neuroscience that are going to tell us what's right and wrong,
because such moral relativism is simply false and comes at an increasing cost to humanity,
and the intrusion of religion into the sphere of human values can be finally repelled.
For just as there is no such thing as Christian physical muscle algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality.
Now, the one thing I agree in this is that moral relativism is simply false,
as I've already made clear next time of Pagliacci, who is a very good philosopher, writes as follows.
There's much about Harrison about which Harrison.
I agree we're both moral realists, i.e. we believe that moral questions do have non arbitrary answers.
As an obvious corollary of our moral realism, both.
Harrison, I think of moral relativism is a silly notion and is in fact downright pernicious, and it effects on individuals and society.
Here's where the two of us disagree. I do not think that science amounts to the sum total of rational inquiry,
a position often referred to as scientism, which he seems to implicitly assume.
I do think that science should inform the species the specifics of our ethical discussions, and hence is an important sense pertinent to ethics.
But I maintain that ethical questions are inherently philosophical in nature, not scientific.
And this is, of course, my own position. I'm going to.
There are some laboratory experiments which tend to relate to morality,
and that people are given in laboratory kind of, um, experiments to say, would you do this?
Would you do that? How good would you feel, this kind of thing? There's a very interesting response to this in a journal called The Hitchcock Review.
The science turns out to be far less revolutionary than advertised.
The conceptions of morality and moral judgements are highly truncated,
typically limiting moral judgement to how somebody to respond to highly contrived laboratory experiments.
The findings neither explain morality nor undermine the role of reason and agency, meaning and experience.
And again, they relate to what people do and not what they ought to do.
Now, the book, which I think is actually really good about this from this viewpoint,
is this book by Jonathan Hyatt called The Righteous Mind Why Good People are divided by politics and Religion.
And he is another psychologist, and he talks in a much broader way than these other writers do.
He talks about a different kind of ethics that actually exist in various societies.
Following a sociologist called Schrader. He talks about the ethic of autonomy, which tends to be the ethic of the West, the ethic of community,
which tends to be the ethic of the East, and the ethic of divinity or sanctity, which is a traditional view about morality.
And he says all of these do exist as a matter of fact, in various societies around the world.
And then he goes on to talk about dimensions of morality. There is more to morality than harm and fairness.
Morality has universal moral foundations, he says, based in modules related to emotions, which he calls the taste buds of the righteous mind.
But he's a psychologist, and this is still a study of what people do and the foundations for behaviour on the basis of.
It's a study of how people behave. It's not about what they ought to do.
And that is runs through all of this. When the psychologists do this, they're telling you moral.
This is how morality is in people's lives. It's not about how they ought to behave, which is the philosophical issue rather than the scientific issue.
But he's done. He does bring in the higher cognitive aspects.
It's not just our mammalian emotional brain leading the way.
Emotions are important in deciding what is moral and what isn't, but they aren't all.
It also involves deep thought and analysis. And I love this picture of the man and the dog.
The man is saying who, what, where, when? High wire which.
So the dog is thinking of his time. We.
The higher, the highest thoughts and rational choices we make are important and but they are regarded by the emotion,
and both are needed in order to get a real deep morality.
So I'm going to flunk for moral realism.
I've already said that to you several times, and the idea is there is a moral reality underlying our existence,
just as there are physical and mathematical possibilities, spaces that are the deep structure of cosmology.
The idea is that if there is moral realism,
the deep structure of morality will be agreed on by all spiritually advanced intelligent beings wherever they are in the universe.
In this case, it is not derived in the end from evolution or culture or the human mind.
It exists in its own right. Evolution, culture and the human mind will be reactions to this moral reality, but they won't be the origin of morality.
The existence of moral reality actually is, interestingly, is implied by Richard Dawkins and Victor Stengel's characterisation of religion as evil.
I could say a lot about that characterisation, but I don't want to talk about why they say religion is evil.
Richard Dawkins and Victor Stenger say religion is evil.
When they do so, they are assuming that there are standards by which you can judge that religion is evil.
In fact, without realising it,
they are moral realists because they are assuming the existence of those standards with which you can judge religious behaviour.
And moral realism is also implied by my statement that the Holocaust was evil in some absolute sense.
I've just been reading a novel about what went on in the Holocaust, that horrific kind of stuff that went on.
And I think it's crucial that we can say that it was evil.
Now, as a warm up to developing this, I want to talk about mathematics and photonic spaces.
In my view. Major part of mathematics are discovered rather than invented.
For instance, the existence of irrational numbers. Mathematics is discovered has an abstract rather than embodied character.
The same abstract quantity can be represented in many symbolic and physical ways, so you can write mathematics down in many ways,
but the mathematics itself is independent of the existence and culture of human beings.
They are a platonic world of mathematical abstraction, comprehended by the human mind,
realised in details of neuronal connections, and then bringing into the world where they are causally effective.
And one book about this is Jean Pierre Shandra and Alan Kuhn's conversation on mind matter and mathematic mathematics.
Another is Roger Penrose, whose book The Large is smaller than the human mind,
and another person who takes this view is Andrew Wiles, the famous solver of Fermat's Last Theorem who lives in Oxford.
And I had a discussion with him about this at lunch and Morton College.
And he said to me in the real mathematician knows they are discovering the way mathematics is.
They are not inventing it. So the basic geometrical features like Pythagoras theorem and the number pi, those are the same everywhere in the universe.
A competent mathematician everywhere in the universe will discover those features.
The same results will be discovered near Alpha Centauri, the Andromeda Galaxy.
These results have been true since the beginning of the universe, and will remain true till the end of the universe.
The Mandelbrot set was sitting there waiting to be discovered for 14 billion years until we had computers which could discover the set.
But people didn't invent the set. They discovered that was there, waiting, uh, as it were, the platonic space for us to develop those computers.
Now, this is the crucial thing you need to think about this.
The mathematical platonic space is timeless, unchanging, and eternal.
What we know about mathematics, the social construction of mathematics does change with time.
For instance, over 3000 years ago, we didn't know about Pythagoras theorem.
We did. So mathematics as it is, is an abstract reality.
There's a projection which is time dependent to mathematics as we know it, which is a social construct.
And the reason various people don't like this idea of an abstract platonic mathematics is they confuse the two.
But if you keep in mind the separation of our understanding of it from the abstract thing, then there's no problem whatever.
So socially understand mathematics is an imperfect reflection of the real thing.
How can we comprehend that?
One of the things which philosophers said about why you couldn't have this kind of platonic space is because the mind couldn't interact with them.
But in fact, the brain can. And this is a wonderful book about this,
Plato's Camera how the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of abstract universals by Paul Churchland in Plato's Camera,
eminent philosopher Paul Church,
and offers a novel account of how the brain construct a representation or takes a picture of the universe as timeless,
categorical and dynamical structures. They are then represented in details of the neuronal connections in the brain.
And he's a philosopher who's got heavily involved in neuroscience,
and he looks in detail at how neural networks represent knowledge and how they are able to interact with these platonic realities.
So there isn't the problem, which used to be claimed that if there were these platonic realities, they can't affect the mind.
Once they're in the mind, then they get embodied in engineering, mathematics, and all sorts of other things.
So now it's obvious what I'm going to say. Morality. I'm going to distinguish what I call ethics and morality.
Morality is the timeless, unchanging, unchanging nature of what is right and what is wrong.
Ethics is what a particular society makes out of the same morality as it is an abstract, eternal, unchanging morality.
It always has been the same, always will be the same.
There's a projection there into what a particular society knows about, and that is extremely variable.
It depends on the nature of the society, what the history is, and so on.
So socially understood. Ethics is an imperfect reflection of true morality.
And you'll see the exact analogy between what I'm saying for morality and for mathematics.
What I've then got to do is tell you what I think about the nature of morality.
And I'm going to do this in two parts. Is that moral reality rule based?
Is it based on intentions? Is it based on outcomes, or is it a holistic situational thing which is based on intentions and outcomes?
I certainly don't think real morality is rule based.
Every attempt to write down moralism and a set of rules will always fail, because it will just cover some things and it won't come.
Other ones cover other ones, and the attempt to write down the true nature of reality is not a good idea.
Morality is related to meaning and purpose to tell us both intentions and outcomes matter, which cannot be captured in rules.
It's based on what you think is important in life, and I will continue with that in a minute.
All human life is situational and context dependent,
and it is really important that morality is not the same as emotions, as some of the psychologists believe.
It's informed by the emotions, but it includes also deeply rational reflection.
Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet writes about this your soul is oftentimes a battlefield upon
which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite.
Your reason and your passion are the rudders and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either the sails or the rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at standstill and sealed seals for reason.
Ruling alone is a force confining and passion unattended is a flame that burns to its destruction.
Therefore, let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing,
and let it direct your passion with reason that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection.
And like the phoenix, rise above its own ashes. And I think it's a beautiful expression of reason and an emotion in forming each other.
The emotion is crucial in order to have a moral life, because that's what drives you to do things.
And the reason guides you in what to do. Okay.
The nature of values. There are basically four different views of what morality could be, in my opinion.
One is the coercive view of morality. We will force you into what you into doing, what we think you should do by brutality.
And this is a traditional one going back thousands of years.
And it was very rife in the church when they burnt these people up the road there.
It was because they thought that they should force people into into what was the right life, coercive morality.
The second is the reward or consumer morality. What is good is having a lot of stuff.
It's the, um, if everything you want. Morality is about how you live your life.
It's about what values are important. And so the consumer morality go out and grab as much for yourself as you can.
And that is the nature of the good life. Intellectual uncertainty is an old one going in the intellectual world.
The idea that we're going to argue about what is the good life, and we're going to give you such a great description of morality,
it'll compel you to follow us, because it's going to be such clear, logical reasoning, you won't be able to avoid it.
Well. Isn't the way that intellect and emotion works.
The one which I believe in, and which I'm going to say more about, is what I call economic morality.
This is a kenosis is giving up your own welfare on behalf of other people.
Economic morality is one of love and self-sacrifice,
and the difference of this from the other ones is this has a transforming nature, as I will talk about.
Now, we can't prove any of these correct,
but we can respond to their persuasive nature and choose between them on the basis of our life experience and our philosophy.
And I claim that the first three are not the nature of the true morality, which is basically what is in that moral space.
There's a spectrum from coercion to consciousness. On the left, I'll kill you and torture you in order to gain control.
Slightly over. I'll work for my good, and you work for yours.
But I won't be killing you in the middle. Getting to.
Yes, we can work together for common good. That further is the golden rule I would do to you what you would like to do to me over here.
I will forgive you for your hurt you have caused me.
And over at the far end, I'm prepared to freely suffer on your behalf.
Even if you are my enemy. This is the. The spectrum from coercion to kenosis, and you can put moral behaviour.
The way we live our lives on that spectrum. It's an issue.
And so what I am proposing is that this is the deep nature of morality, and it shifts down through to here.
That's a slightly weaker form. That's a slightly weaker form, that's a slightly weaker form, that's an even weaker form.
And that is definitely wrong. It's an issue of attitude that gets you worked out in specific situations.
Contextually, as I said, you can't write down rules for this, but you can try to convey an attitude.
The canonical morality is a deep morality that is based in some form of loving attitude.
You can only do this if you have a loving attitude.
But again, you can't specify what you will do in particular cases because that would be a rule based morality.
I'll just give you an idea about this.
It's a self-emptying joyous attitude that values love and justice, is generous and creative in pursuing these aims,
if needed, is willing to give up personal needs and to voluntary sacrifice on behalf of others.
And the word voluntary is crucial that if you are made to sacrifice, it's not kenosis.
If you do so voluntarily and of your own free will.
This attitude of letting go has a transforming nature, with the possibility of changing the quality and meaning of the situation facing us.
And it is probably the only approach that has the capacity to change an enemy into a friend.
And this is what underlay the political action of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, and to some extent also of Desmond Tutu.
In fact, if we go back to this, Desmond Tutu lives here, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi lie over there.
Its use is not absolute. It's situational.
You have to try to have that attitude if you're following this route,
but you have to work out what is the way to do it in a creative way, in a particular context.
I'm going to give you some comments on it as a theme of life.
The mother and child the mother protects, the child is willing to give up its life for the child, and so on.
But then the difficult part and the mother child relation, where most of us really comes in,
is letting go of the child when it's growing up and stopping, trying to control the child as it grows up.
It's the foundation of community. A community depends on giving up your welfare on behalf of the community and other people in the community.
It's a foundation of learning,
but giving up because if you as a scientist or have an idea which you think is right and you stick to it and are not willing to look at other ideas,
you will not be able to make scientific progress because your first idea will almost certainly be wrong.
And in order to make process, you've got to be willing to let go of it and to get on with it.
And kenosis is the foundation of true artistic endeavour.
When someone, an artist is writing a novel, doing sculpture, uh, whatever it is a painting,
you start off with a vision of what you're going to do and you're trying to make the thing fit into that vision.
But after a certain time, the thing you're working with, the sculpture, the painting, the music,
whatever develops its own integral integrity and you're then your function as an artist is to follow that integrity and help that integrity come out.
In other words, to hand over to the thing that you are creating its own integrity and to help that come into being.
And so that's the difference of art, which is based. Look at me.
I'm the artist. Oh, look out there. There is beauty out there, which I am just facilitating.
But it's not about me. It's about what is out there. It's not my cleverness which matters.
It's the thing out there which I want you to look at. And it's the basis of deep social action, as exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,
Desmond Tutu, Ruby Bridges you may have heard of in South Africa, the Amy Beale family.
I can tell you about those if you want to. It involves giving up hate, seeing and responding to the humanity of the opponents of if they.
Have a chance to stop being an enemy and to become your friend.
And it occurs in all the major religious faiths.
I can say that with complete confidence. It should be the basis of Christianity.
It's what Christ's life was about. I have spoken about this in a talk in California when after the took, a muslim came rushing up to me and said,
you spoke like a true Muslim and the Jewish faith, it is what is called Simsim and the Hindu religion where Mahatma Gandhi got attacked.
It occurs in all the major religious faith. So I believe that if we were able to meet intelligent people out there on other planets,
they would have also discovered the transforming nature of kenosis,
in which you have got an enemy and you come and you give up on their behalf and thereby turn them from being your enemy into being your friend.
I'm just going to give you two quotes about this. Martin Luther King and individual has not started living until he or she can rise above the
narrow confines of his or her individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Every person must decide whether he or she will walk in the light of creative altruism, or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others?
That's Martin Luther King, and I'm going to give you just one example from a difficult situation, a military situation.
In 1967, I was a young officer in a Scottish battalion engaged in peacekeeping studies in Aden town in what is now Yemen.
The situation was similar to Iraq, with people being killed every day.
As always, those who suffered the most were the innocent local people.
Not only were we tough, but we had the firepower to pretty well destroy the whole town had we wished.
But we had a commanding officer who understood how to make peace.
And he led us to do something very unusual not to react when we were attacked.
Only if we were 100% certain that a particular person had thrown a grenade or fired a shot at us.
Were we allowed to fire? During our tour of duty, we had 102 grenades thrown at us, and in response,
the entire battalion fired the grand total of two shots, killing one grenade thrower.
The cost to us was over 100 of our own men wounded, and surely, by the grace of God, only one killed.
When they threw rocks at us, we stood fast. When they threw grenades, we hit the deck and after the explosion we got to our feet and stood fast.
We did not react in anger or indiscriminately. This was not the anticipated reaction.
Slowly, very slowly, the local people began to trust us and made it clear to the local terrorists that they were not welcome in their area.
At one stage, neighbouring battalions were having a torrid time with attacks.
We were playing soccer with the locals. We had in fact brought peace to our area at the cost of our own blood.
How had this been achieved? Principally because we were led by a man whom every soldier in the battalion knew would die for him if required.
Each soldier in turn came to be prepared to sacrifice himself for such a man.
Many people may sneer that we were merely obeying orders, but this was not the case.
The Scottish soldier has scant respect for rank, but great respect for leaders.
Our commanding officer was more highly regarded by his soldiers than the general, one might almost say loved.
So gradually the heart of the peacemaker began to grow in each man, and a determination to succeed, whatever the cost.
Probably most of the soldiers, like myself, only realised years afterwards what had been achieved.
There's an underlying spectrum of values of how we relate to each other on the left, corresponding to what I had as hatred.
Next is indifference. Next is acceptance.
Next is regard. Next is conditional love.
And next is unconditional love. And that is the range of values which correspond to those different moral attitudes.
The classical virtues are corollaries to the high level values.
If you have economic value in life, then all the classical virtues follow.
Of necessity they will be By-Products of that attitude.
Evolutionary psychology and game theory cannot derive these high level values that cannot drive this kind of thing.
And actually, Jonathan Height's book is very, very clear about that.
He talks about, um, how evolutionary psychology and particularly the view of man homo economicus,
the economic view of man is simply assumes that people can only be selfish.
But it is not true that people can only be selfish.
The vast majority of people are kind and careful, look after their neighbours and are not selfish.
If your values are based in love, you don't kill or torture, right?
You look after the poor and hungry as well as your own family.
The key insight if you respond to methods of hate with methods of hate, then you become the same as that which you find hateful.
You damage yourself as much as your enemy. The message of tragedy throughout the ages, a lot of, um, Shakespeare and so on.
So. Someone hates you.
He uses methods of hate against, and you use methods of hate against him.
You become the same as that which you find hateful is.
After a while, no difference. And I belong to have been belong to a group called More to Life that does training what they call life training,
and they have a resentment process in which it centres on the fact that when you resent other people,
most of the damage is done to yourself, not to the person that you are resenting.
The the book The Hunger Games. That series is exactly about this how someone who is fighting a hateful group
of people develops into exactly the same kind of hateful person in the world.
The Hunger Games is actually a wonderful book about this kind of moral issue.
So morality is about character building, as Alister MacIntyre says.
What kind of person are you turning yourself into?
And from what I'm saying, the intention should be, however fitfully and faithfully, to turn yourself into a person who says, I cannot be personal.
I am not saying that is easy. It is not in the slightest bit easy.
I'm not saying that I succeed in that, but I'm saying that that is the kinetic view,
and it is a transforming kind of view of how things can work if you go the way of hatred.
This destruction of Dresden, when the Allied bombers did this.
In what way? Where they superior to the hateful acts that the German carried out when they killed 75,000 people in the firebombing of Dresden.
In what way? At that point where they superior to the people they were fighting.
The foundations of kenosis. It's based in a form of huts, ethic of divinity.
I said hut had three forms um, the east, the the west, and one of personal rights,
the eastern, one of community rights, and then the ancient, one of the ethic of divinity.
And that means it doesn't mean necessarily that you believe it's based on religion, but you believe it's the right thing to do because of its nature.
It is the nature of economic acts which make it the right thing to do.
Not necessary that it will have a good outcome.
Nevertheless, if done right, it can lead to both individual welfare, the ethic of autonomy and group welfare, the ethics of community.
These may often follow, but it isn't guaranteed that these will follow.
These positive outcomes are not guaranteed.
However, they may well come about because of the transformational, paradoxical nature and economic ethic is paradoxical because it takes a situation.
Which is full of this tension, this hatred, and it tries to get around it by not doing what is expected, not fighting back in that way,
fighting, responding in their way, which recognises the humanity of the people who is against you, which is Bishop Tutu's big theme.
And that. Catches your enemy off guard.
It's not what they were expecting. It's not what the game theory is about.
And so it transcends the calculus of home economics.
Finally, how does this work out in real life?
And it's very difficult. And particular issues I would point to is poverty and inequality, peace and war, environment and the future.
And so one has to try to work out how does it work out in, for instance, environment in the future?
What awareness training is our present day welfare against the welfare of future generations?
That could not take thing is to not grab as much for yourself in the present generation, in order that future generations may live a better life.
Truth and falsehood are a great part of this. If you're based, it's.
You can't act in a proper economic way unless you are distinguishing truth and falsehood.
And of course, we are seeing a great deal of confusion about this at the present time.
What you have to do is establish the facts, work out what the consequences are, and then take a stance based on the facts.
Keeping an open mind because you may have got the facts wrong.
You may have been misled by propaganda. So then you have to act on one's understanding and values, given what you understand about the situation.
So you have to understand the present, seeing things as they are.
You have to have a transforming vision, what they might be.
Then you have to have transforming action, which is the way the power of love and kenosis comes in.
And then you have to have determination and courage to make it happens all the time.
You should be asking who benefits? And that from Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank in India.
He was asking himself, who benefits from the economic order?
And he then introduced the Grameen Bank in order to help the disempowered to.
To benefit. So who benefits? And it's the poor and the helpless that one wants to benefit.
Out of all of this, the rich able to look after themselves.
The core from a religious viewpoint is as follows.
You are confused about what has gone wrong and how to set it right.
Then listen. This is what Yahweh asked of you, and only this.
To act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God, comes from a book of spiritual liberation.
Now this is based, as I said, in the view of um.
Of the deep nature of their being based in the sanctity.
This does not mean you have to be a religious person in order to live the good of life, to understand what is good and to follow it.
I think if you're really over on the far economic side, I think it is easier to follow that kind of life if you are a religious person,
like the deep religion of Martin Luther King and of Mahatma Gandhi, but I'm not saying it's absolutely necessary.
Uh. So.
You base it in this kind of worldview. This is the right way to go.
And then the other kind of things that will sit individual and group price will follow if you manage to get it right.
How it works. Art is contextual, and there are many dangers of helping in an injudicious way.
There's a lot of damage caused by doing good. And again, this is where you have to step back and be commodity.
Here are these people. I'm going to go out and do good.
You are in danger immediately of not actually helping,
because you are actually putting your feelings of doing good in front of actually doing what they really need.
That's where the difficulties lie. You have to avoid the arrogance of the developmental agencies.
And I've seen this many people in this audience will have seen this.
I'm developing you guys, and you've got to follow what we tell you in a kinetic view,
respects the integrity of all concerned at action, a developmental way, developing both opportunities and capacities.
And the Amartya Sen lecture in this series is exactly the kind of lecture that developed this.
I don't have time to develop it here. So it's not easy.
But if you've got those values and try to work out how they will go, then very deep things can result.
So my summary of morality, the grounding of values cannot be given by science.
The sociobiology option explains it away. The cultural and psychological options relative gives it away if you're not very, very careful.
I am saying I believe strongly in the moral reality option,
a real existence of the desirable way of behaviour in a platonic sense, in the way that I've tried to make clear based.
And I cannot take a view of existence, that existence, the deep nature of existence,
comes in giving up on behalf of others, and that has a transformational power.
It comes back into your own life in a way which you cannot achieve if you try to feel good on something.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this in his book surprised by Joy.
If your life is aimed at trying to feel good, to have joy, you won't get there.
But if you have this kind of attitude, you will on many occasions, get that back as an unexpected reward for what you have done.
But if that's your aim, then this whole thing is wrong.
It mustn't be your aim in what you're doing. And finally, it has a paradoxical logic that transcends the calculus of economics, as was saying.
And this is because it's paradoxical. It is precisely not what is encompassed in standard economic theories.
And a lot of what is written about this,
trying to say that you can derive the good life from science or from neuroscience, and a return, not to the end.
This is a picture of an angel rising, a fallen soldier, and the First World War cemetery in Aquileia, Italy.
Naturalist. And in a sense, this is a tragic kind of thing.
That soldier there, all of those graves that this represents the bravery and the courage those people put into that.
But what did the World First World War achieve? Nothing achieved.
Absolutely nothing. It was for no good purpose.
Thank you.