Superman and the scary bear

Religion and Secularism
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I could have given this a boring title about morality and I could have put it in the poltical category or maybe science, but I’m referencing a 2025 paper by Richard Carrier and he usually frames things in the context of what religious people believe. In the process, he often exposes larger truths about the universe, so he not only shows the uselessness of gods or belief in gods, he shows how we can determine what is moral.

The paper is Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes. Pretty big claim, what, did he travel to all those other universes and find them? No, this is philosophy. And it’s the good kind of philosophy, the kind that is based on facts and how we know facts. This blog post has the scary bear analogy and others to illustrate how physical facts are used to get to facts about what we should do, like avoid being mauled by a bear.

It’s long form, something I’m working on spending more time with because I can see the rot of our society due to memes and TikTok scrolling and spending milliseconds on headlines and pithy quotes. Here are key takeaways:

After all the lead-up, there is a section “Defining Moral Facts”, where he says what we mean by ought is, “That which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.”

Note there are two parts, rational acting people (or any creatures, I guess), and the relevant facts. Both questions require a depth of understanding of physics, evolution, logic, neuroscience, and on and on. But I found a summation in the comments; there are four bullet points he lists on January 2nd, and a follow-up. It goes something like:

Villains don’t believe in godly punishment, so they do what they do. A rational agent would change their behavior once aware of its outcome, be it godly punishment or a miserable existence on earth. That’s what it means for a moral fact to be true even when the agent irrationally doesn’t believe it. Getting “God back in” or convincing someone their life is better if they are moral has a prerequisite of rational behavior.

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The matter is that many unmoral people live a very nice and successful life !!!

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Carrier sticks mostly to how we can determine what is moral. Sometimes he dips into conclusions like how it’s better to be compassionate and to care about the physical and mental pain of others. I wish he would spend more time on how to control sociopaths rather than only saying that they aren’t truly happy.

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The questions in the comments are not unusual. If you try to work through the idea that morality is connected to your own happiness, they will pop up. One questioner pursues the idea that you can ignore your own thoughts, and choose short term pleasure and call it “good”. As he says, there are those who ask

“I know society will hate me, and I don’t care”? “I know I’m irrational, and I don’t care”? What should be done with monsters?

Carriers answers help clarify the article. The rest of this post all him,

  1. You can’t “get away” from your own conscience. If you are rational you will always know you are a piece of shit who deserves to be imprisoned or killed. And that’s hard to live with. Certainly not a satisfying way to live. The escape of irrationally avoiding that realization entails literal mental illness, which will damage everything else in your life and deprive you of real love and relationships and friendships and everything else. As I cite the science in my study, we know sociopaths are miserable. And we know why.

  2. You can’t get back the opportunity cost (all the joys and pleasures you lose in life from being hollow rather than caring; all the miseries that an uncompassionate nature inflicts on you in terms of constant paranoia and disappointment and anger and hate; and so on).

  3. And society can punish you in every way it can find a way to. There is no such thing as “enough” wealth and power to be immune. Trump is lucky he isn’t dead. Hussein’s luck ran out. So did Hitler’s. And those were some of the wealthiest and most powerful criminals in history. But killing you isn’t the only way society can bring justice to a fugitive gangster like them. People can screw your deals, sour your friends, wreck your family ties, frustrate and frighten you, drive you into rage, isolation, and paranoia in a continuous halo of actual failure. Which actually describes most wealthy scoundrels even today. No rational person would want Putin’s miserable besieged terrifying life. And there’s a reason why that is.

  4. What you fear is “what will always happen in this world if God DOES exist,” since you can point to it happening everywhere all the time. So obviously God’s existence has no effect on this concern. You might be thinking at least God can fuck them up in the afterlife, but there is no real evidence to believe he will even if he does exist (and little reason to believe he exists). Human assertions are not evidence of any god’s plans or will, but merely their own.

But here is the most important takeaway (as I point out in my cited study):

Even if it were true that all villains will with 100% certainty end up in a celestial prison in the outer planes of the Lord, they clearly still don’t believe they will, and so they irrationally go on doing what they do. That a rational agent would change that behavior once aware of its outcome is what it means for a moral fact to be true even when the agent irrationally doesn’t believe it. And that’s exactly the situation they are all in whether God exists or not. So the problem is not getting God back in. The solution is getting people to behave rationally. Which circularly can’t be done by appealing to their rationality, because the problem is that they don’t have that yet.

The question of how to get people to act rationally is a separate question from what is true (what they would do when rational). That has more to do with emotion and education theory, and may be impossible in cases on irrecoverable insanity, and so then it just becomes a question of what to do about recalcitrantly irrational people. And that’s what we build political and legal systems for. But that someone can never be convinced the earth is round does not make the earth flat. The truth stays the truth even if the insane can never accept it. So, likewise, any other truth, moral or otherwise.

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It’s beautiful writing, great therapy.

Has value, but what do we do with it? It is a restatement of stuff we do already know on many different levels.

How does it further rationality?
Or curiosity, and desire for honest answers, rather than My Answers?

So human Ego is the problem, us mistaking our Ego for God’s will, is a problem.

Where do we go from here?

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After all Ego is about as biologically basic as it gets.

Check out Arthur Reber’s work with Stentor roeseli, a single celled protist.
It’s not just me, but scientists like Lane and Reber, see “Ego” in action. This creature is out for it’s own interests and will do what it can to protect and further those interests.

Where do we go from here?