Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

A Martian’s View of Ethics

Jack Owicki
July 10, 2005
Palo Alto, CA

Once upon a time there were two planets, the third and fourth from their star in a solar system: Earth and Mars. On Earth, life developed exuberantly, filling the seas, the land, and then even the air with unnumbered organisms.

Life developed on Mars, too, but it took a very different course. It was underground, based on the inorganic materials of rock, and drew its energy from the heat in the planet’s core. Most importantly for us, it was a single organism. Not a single species, but a single individual, vast in size, self-sufficient, and nearly immortal.

This Martian developed self awareness before anything on Earth did. It was a sharp, practical kind of intelligence, without many emotions that a human would recognize. Except curiosity. It was very curious about its world and eventually developed a deep understanding of its environment.

Then it figured out the structure of the solar system, and it became curious about the other planets. It devised an instrument for observing events on neighboring planets, like a super-telescope with sound. It was like being there, except that it was only a one-way process, with no affect on the things that were observed. When the Martian turned its instrument on the Earth, it immediately recognized life. Alien to it, but life nonetheless. It was astounded at the variety. Observing and understanding life on Earth became its chief occupation.

All this happened about six million years ago. The most interesting creatures on Earth at that time were a type of primitive ape. They were the most intelligent animals on the planet, though far below the Martian. And the apes had a complex social structure. The concept of interacting with other organisms like one’s self puzzled and fascinated the solitary Martian.

It was clear that these social interactions were a key to the apes’ success as a species. The apes depended on each other for food and protection. They went out of their way to maintain physical contact, particularly with their kin. They also had a lot of conflict with each other. They fought. They formed alliances. Individuals that didn’t share food were denied food by others, tit for tat.

The apes lied. For example, once the Martian observed a fight in which the loser’s limb was hurt. For days afterwards, the loser would limp whenever it was in sight of the winner but walk normally at all other times. Maybe acting injured prevented further attacks.

Some of the conflict was managed by the presence of an established hierarchy of status with higher-ranking apes getting their way more often. Yes, the apes were very status conscious. This did reduce conflicts over everyday things, though fights over status could get ugly.

Millions of years passed. Imagine what it must have been like for the Martian to see the relentless cycle of birth and death for these ephemeral creatures. Over the eons, Earthly organisms changed. The apes evolved, and their line split into what would become the modern great apes and what would become the humans. Behavior became increasingly complex in the human line.

Language developed. The Martian, who didn’t exactly have a language of its own, was able to learn human languages at first only with great difficulty, but after the first hundred or so it became easy. Language provided a window into the humans’ minds, where before there had only been behavior to analyze. By this time, what you and I would call ethics had clearly come into being.

At this point let me note that some people make a distinction between ethics and morality. The Martian just lumped them together, and so will I from now on. In any case, ethics was something that the Martian didn’t recognize in itself, and it spent a lot of effort trying to understand ethics in the humans. It noticed several things.

First, the behavior that was tied up with ethics seemed to be of the same general sort that the humans’ ape ancestors had shown. This biological continuity didn’t surprise the Martian. After all, it had been watching the species evolve for millions of years. The humans, though, usually liked to think of themselves as extremely different from other animals. Even when some of them discovered the fact of evolution and that their bodies had descended from ape-like creatures, they resisted the idea that their minds bore marks of the same descent.

Another thing that the Martian noticed was that, although just about every group of humans had an ethical system, what constituted ethical behavior varied a lot from group to group. Although nonhuman animals didn’t show so much behavioral variation within a species, the Martian had for a long time been watching the flexibility of behavior increase as the pre-human line evolved.

Some of the ethical differences between groups could be really striking. One example was the way that violence was sanctioned within the culture. Within some cultures, violence was rare. In others, it was both common and rewarded.

One group of particularly fierce people was the large Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon rain forest. The Yanomamo lived in small independent villages. Disputes within a village were often settled violently, for example by duels with clubs that left disfiguring scars of which the bearers were very proud. Disputes between villages frequently escalated to homicidal raids. In fact, homicide was the most frequent cause of death of adult males. Yanomamo men who had killed achieved high status and had more wives and children than men who had not killed.

The Martian noted that, although cultures varied a lot on the level of violence within the culture, they tended to agree that people from other cultures were not really fully human and didn’t get the protections afforded one’s own people. Us versus them was a big ethical divide.

Here’s another thing that the Martian noticed, and this one really puzzled it. When asked to justify their ethical rules, for example upon meeting someone from a different group, the humans seldom said something like, “Well, we’ve found that things generally go better if we behave this way, so we try to ensure that everyone does.”

Something purely empirical like that the Martian would have understood. After all, it had its own rules: It wanted to keep healthy. Certain actions affected the environment in ways that promoted the Martian’s well-being, some in ways that damaged it. Therefore, the Martian acted only in health-promoting ways. This all flowed logically from self preservation.

Instead, the humans usually justified their ethics by saying that people “ought” to follow the rules. “What is this Ôought?’” wondered the Martian. “Ought” wasn’t just about consequences, like the Martian’s environmental policy. It was something new, something that (the humans claimed) transcended mere statements of fact. It was closely tied up with some other things called “good” and “bad.”

One “ought” to do the “good” and “ought not” to do the “bad”. Where did all this come from? How did they get from “is” statements of fact to these “ought” statements? What was this transcendence business, which seemed to be more than just verifiable statements about reality?

Listening to the humans explain themselves didn’t resolve the question. Some humans said that the rules came from a powerful supernatural being called a “god” and that was enough justification for the “ought.” The Martian thought that staying in the good graces of a being that could hand out rewards and punishments made a lot of sense from a purely practical point of view, but many of the humans denied that self interest was the point. They said the god was good, and the good was whatever the god said it was. If there were no gods, they said, then there could be no good and no ethics.

Other people disagreed, saying that basic ideas of good and bad were separate from god (if god existed at all). These people had their own ideas about where ethics came from. For example some replaced a personified god with a more abstract idea of the good, which still somehow transcended everyday reality.

Others said that ethics was simply behaving according to true human nature. Not, of course, that they could agree on what constituted true human nature. And this is just a small sample of the conflicting ways humans justified ethics.

In the end, the Martian had a hard time believing in lawgiving supernatural beings and kept stumbling over the transition from descriptive to prescriptive statements. Maybe “ought” wasn’t such a deep and transcendent idea after all.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything more than “I really want you to behave according to this rule.” And then there had always been a minority of humans, from the sophists and skeptical philosophers in ancient Greece to some post-modern thinkers in the twentieth century, who didn’t think that “ought” had a particularly special status.

The Martian wasn’t the only being who was thinking deeply about diversity in human ethics. By the twentieth century on Earth there were a lot of people, in religion, philosophy, and anthropology, who were puzzling over these same issues. I don’t think I can say that they fared much better than the Martian in trying to deal with cultural differences in ethics.

Just before World War II, cultural relativism was pretty well accepted in anthropology, if not generally in Western society. The idea was that a culture couldn’t be judged except internally, on its own terms. The Nazis and the Holocaust made this stance hard to maintain. According to cultural relativism, after all, the Nazis were just acting according to their cultural norms. What right had outsiders to judge them? Such absolute cultural relativism became less common, but some forms endured up to the present.

And as we come up to the present, we see the Martian gazing with what looks very much like sympathy on members of a small but distinguished religious denomination that swears by seven principles. One principle stresses respect for others. Another stresses justice. And sometimes the principles clash.

For example, these religious folks abhor female genital mutilation in countries like Somalia, but the practice is deeply embedded in the culture. Moreover, it is supported by many Somali women, since the operation is the traditional rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood. Is it justice or ethnocentric hubris to oppose the practice?

Or what about societies in which harsh beatings are an accepted form of childhood discipline, amounting to child abuse by the standards of the religious group’s own culture? And yet adults, who were themselves beaten as children, say that they’re glad they were beaten, because they can see now that they really needed the harsh correction and would have turned out badly without it. Where should the line be drawn between cultural sensitivity and human rights?

So pity the poor Martian. It used to think that life was comprehensible, even logical. But at the end of six million years of observing humans and their ancestors, the Martian ends up thoroughly confused. It is glad that it is alone and at least it doesn’t really have to deal with this difficult mess.

And then the humans arrive on Mars.

 

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Conflict between cultures is surely one of the most important problems of our age, and ethical issues are a significant part of that. And of course, though I haven’t been talking about them, there are the ethics wars that are going on within our own culture today.

As we live our everyday lives, we tend to accept received wisdom unquestioningly and to look at things just from our local perspective. I introduced the Martian to try to escape from that rut. When trying to understand human ethics, it’s useful to recognize what humans share with other primates, and the fact that we seem to have a common biological predisposition to create the categories of good and bad, even if we often don’t agree on which one a particular action is.

It’s also useful to be aware of the diversity of ethical systems in human cultures and the many conflicting approaches that philosophers have taken toward explaining where ethics comes from and what constitutes ethical behavior. I’ve emphasized the differences, but of course there are similarities that I haven’t talked about. The golden rule appears in many cultures.

For some of the details about ape and human societies in my story, I’m indebted to primatologist Frans de Waal and anthropologists Edward Fischer and Napoleon Chagnon [pronounced “shag-non”].

As a good Unitarian-Universalist, I want to show respect toward other cultures, and I also want to support justice. This makes it very hard when there’s a conflict between the values of my culture and another. It no longer seems tenable automatically to claim that my culture is right, even though that is the traditional stance through history and across the earth.

Yet, in the end, I do have strong attitudes about right and wrong that are hard for me to treat as anything but universal. I just can’t accept the idea that there are no ethical universals and that it’s horribly hard to justify judging other cultures and being judged by them.

It’s a conflict that I imagine that many of us here share, and I suspect that we’ll wrestle with it for the rest of our lives.

 

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For a fascinating look at behavior in non-human animals that seems to be related to human ethics, I heartily recommend Frans de Waal’s “Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals,” published by Harvard University Press in 1996.

The material on the Yanomamo was taken from Napoleon Chagnon’s classic work based on his research with that tribe during the 1960s. His book, “Yanomamo: The Fierce People” is alleged to be the best-selling anthropology book of all time. In the past decade, Chagnon and his work have become very controversial. In Patrick Tierney’s book, “Darkness in El Dorado,” he was accused of some pretty awful behavior, such as fomenting a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo. I think that the most serious charges have been refuted, but much controversy remains, including about the accuracy of his depiction of the fierceness of the Yanomomo. One way of thinking about the controversy is that it marks the divide between post-modernists and non-post-modernists in the anthropology community.

Prof. Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University has an excellent college-course-on-tape (or on CD) called “Peoples and Cultures of the World,” which I also recommend to anyone who is interested a broad perspective on the variations in human cultural behavior. It’s produced by The Teaching Company.

Finally, there’s another Teaching Company course on ethics that I’ve found excellent: “The Quest for Meaning: Value, Ethics, and the Modern Experience,” by Prof. Robert Kane of the Univ. of Texas at Austin. This is very UU-friendly and comes at ethics from a philosophical angle without much biology. It would be a good basis for an adult religious education offering.

Teaching Company courses are normally pretty expensive, but each one goes on sale at least once a year for 70% off. Many libraries stock them. Also, you might try eBay, which has a flourishing secondary market in the courses.