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RADIO 4
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ANALYSIS
ORIGIN OF VALUES
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Kenan Malik
Producer: Michael Blastland
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
 
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Broadcast Date: 11.04.02
Repeat Date: 14.04.02
Tape Number: TLN214/02VT1015
Duration: 29'29"

Taking part in order of appearance:
Francesca Klug
Senior research fellow at the Human Rights centre, London School of Economics.
Simon Blackburn Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge.
Denis Alexander Professor of Immunology, University of Cambridge and Editor, Journal of Science and Christian Belief.
Colin Blakemore
Professor of Physiology, Oxford University.
David Chandler
Lecturer in international relations, Leeds Metropolitan University
Martha Nussbaum
Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago.


MALIK : Values. Where do they come from? It's a vital question to ask at a time when old moral codes no longer seem to command support, and there is great uncertainty as to what should replace them.

KLUG : There is considerable lamenting of a lack of a common ethos or common set of principles that bind, in particular, the UK.

MALIK : Francesca Klug, senior research fellow at the Human Rights centre at the London School of Economics.

KLUG : There is a view that is expressed by people across the political spectrum - religious people, non-religious people - that anything goes, that for people of a more traditional bent that some of the old deferential values have now waned, that the old symbols like the monarchy and the church are no longer relevant. For people of a more progressive view perhaps, there is a view that the 'me society' where commercialism-rules-ok has taken over and a sense of a collective common good is perhaps less apparent than it was in previous years.

MALIK : In the past, people accepted both their identity and their values with little questioning. But over the past half century, both the sense of national identity and the values that underpinned that identity have corroded like an old pipe. And, as the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn points out, so too have the institutions that once embodied the values.

BLACKBURN : I think in the Britain that I grew up in, in the middle of the last century, you could assume, rather naively perhaps, that, you know, medicines could be left to doctors and the state of the armed forces could be left to the generals and the state of the law profession could be left to the lawyers and so on. I think there's been a loss of that naivety.

MALIK : There can be no going back to that unquestioning age, and I doubt if anyone would really want to. And yet more has been lost than simply naivety. Ours is an age of corrosive scepticism, of trust no-one cynicism. It is also an age in which such cynicism has led to a yearning for absolute certainties. For Simon Blackburn, this makes for a perilous mixture.

BLACKBURN : I think it does create a rather dangerous vacuum into which any old charlatan can walk with a pre-packaged set of answers. So I'm quite nervous about that. I think it's a deterioration. The increased sense of cynisism, of lack of trust, that there is no-one you can trust, I think that's a dangerous climate we enter because without trust eventually there's no civil life. One wants to somehow find a middle road between naïve over-confidence and a corrosive skepticism.

MALIK : We'll leave aside for the moment the question of whether the purveyors of moral certainty really are charlatans. But Simon Blackburn is surely right that the loss of faith and the demand for certainty are opposite sides of the same coin. Cynicism has undermined not simply civil, but political, life too. There is nowadays a widespread disillusionment with politics as an agency of change. A disillusionment that has both driven people to think of political questions in moral terms - morality seems so pristine compared to the dirtiness of politics - and also made them more uncertain about the basis of our moral life, since no source of authority seems untouched by the pessimistic spirit of our times. The question, then, is whether there really are any sources of authority left in which we can root our moral certainties. And does it matter if there aren't? The traditional source of authority for moral values is God. It's a source from which Denis Alexander draws strength. He's both a practising scientist - a molecular immunologist at Cambridge - and a practising Christian.

ALEXANDER : As a Christian I would want to say that the ultimate moral values which I believe come from God through his revelation through the Bible, through the people of Israel, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And, so this is the big metaphysical picture, if you like. This is where I think the ultimate values as a Christian, I have to say, derive from, from studying from the ten commandments and through God's revelation through his people over the centuries but, of course, supremely for the Christian in the teaching of Jesus himself.

BLACKBURN : I fear the word of God just gets in the way of ethics. All the monotheistic religious traditions at least have a version of a sadistic god and sky. It's an ethic of punishment, an ethic of exclusion of outsiders, of elevation of insiders. I think those things get in the way of ethics. They're ways of cementing what's essentially, I think, tribal identity in the face of outsiders. And that's a pity. So I have no truck whatever with a theological source for ethics and that's even before we start looking at the dismal history of theological ethics and the histories of persecution and intolerance and so forth. Believing that the answers to everything are there in a particular text which needs no interpretation, no revisions, no up-dates, needs no scientific investigations - just there and given. It's very simple minded of course and it's very dangerous because we'll have our text, they'll have their text, so on, round the table and those texts won't say the same thing. I think it's an uneducated view in the strict sense that when we look at the history of human progress - when we look at science, when we look at what we know about the world - it never proceeds by simply according final absolute authority to a particular text at a particular time.

MALIK : Simon Blackburn. Moral values, he seems to be saying, derive from human reason, not divine wisdom. Faith is an obstacle to the application of reason to values, and hence can lead to deeply immoral sentiment. Not surprisingly, Denis Alexander disagrees.

ALEXANDER : I'm fully aware of the arguments that if you believe that because God says something then you do it no matter what, you could end up doing all kinds of horrible things which most people would find abhorrent. So, in that sense, the Christian world view is a kind of package of theology and ideas about the world which also resonate with, you know, what we actually believe works in societies. So, there is a pragmatic aspect of it which, in that sense, it gives us the common ground with all kinds of people to actually live together in society - in a pluralistic society. So, I think it's obviously a nonsense to say if God says that torture is right then somehow we should believe that. As a matter of fact, He hasn't said that, you know, that as a matter fact a revelation we have of God in the Christian world view is of an ethics which actually cares for people, which is against torture, which is against, sort of, depriving people of their rights and so forth.

MALIK : But that's not how people have read the Bible in different ages, even in different parts of the world today. Different people have read the Bible, for instance, as providing sanction for slavery, for homophobia. That line from Exodus - 'thou shall not suffer a witch to live"- was used for three hundred years to burn tens of thousands of witches on both sides of the Atlantic. I'd imagine Christians would agree with any of that today. And so we're able to stand back from a particular text to decide what is good and what is bad in that text. But if we're able to do this, where do our standards come from? How can we have the ability to pass judgement upon the word of God if all our values and our standards come from God Himself?

ALEXANDER : Well I think for the Christian, the primary authority comes from Jesus himself who told us to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. And so it's absolutely true of course, one could take many examples from history about where people have taken passages of the Bible out of context. But I think what we see in the teaching of Jesus is the primacy of human value - the fact that we do treat other people as being made in the image of God and therefore enormously valuable and therefore to be treated with respect. So, that does give, I think, an absolute value the Christian would see as coming from God himself.

MALIK : I believe in equality - I assume you do - most Christians do, many Muslims do, many Jews do and, moreover, many Christians and Jews and Muslims would suggest that they do so, they believe in equality because it is sanctioned by God and by the Bible or by the Koran or by the Torah and so on. Why can't we simply throw away the text and say that we've used our faculty of reason to say that equality is good and leave God out of the picture entirely?

ALEXANDER : Yes, well obviously one can do that and I think … but I think what actually happens in practice is that when the metaphysical underpinnings for a certain world view are thrown away, then it's a bit like a sort of booster rocket which sets the whole rocket off, but eventually it sort of slows down and I think the problem is when you have the booster rocket in this sense - let's say the teaching of Jesus and the influence that he had on the world - I think when that's sort of thrown away then eventually the morality tends to go with it. I think it's very difficult to maintain the kind of system of belief that you suggested without some underpinning, without some rationalisations, something which is rooted in something bigger than our own biology and descriptions of our own beings. And I think that's what we're seeing in society around us actually, you know, that in actual practice when you kind of throw the God basis out of the window, then eventually the Christian morality goes as well.

MALIK : Despite Denis Alexander's steadfast defence of the importance of theology, it's difficult to get away from the thought that religion simply drapes our own values with stories of divine origin as a way of asserting the authority of those values. To use his own metaphor, whether or not religion acts as a booster rocket, and whoever may have launched it, humans themselves must decide in which direction it goes. That's why different people in different places, and different ages, read the same sacred text in different ways. It seems difficult, then, simply to root our values in God. So what about the other traditional source of values - nature?

BLACKBURN : People will look at nature and see, for example, nature red in tooth and claw, we should infer that unbridled competition and aggression were the admirable ways for human beings to behave. I think that was a fallacious inference, a false inference - it came out of reading morals into nature. And I think that's a very dangerous thing to do. it's not dead yet in things like some of the extremes of socio-biology but I think we've got to be very careful of that. The human animal without culture might turn pretty nasty and if you think that's what nature requires and you start advocating it, then you're turning the clock back against culture and civilisation.

MALIK : Simon Blackburn. But perhaps he's being unfair. In the nineteenth century, certainly, social Darwinists argued that morality was rooted in nature's struggle for existence, and that might was right - a justification for racism, colonialism, even genocide. Today, though, social Darwinists (or sociobiologists as they are now called) are a very different breed and tend to find in nature the source, less of aggression and exploitation, than of cooperation and empathy. But this raises the same kind of problem that religion faces: if nature is a text that can be read as supporting both nastiness and niceness, why not simply throw away the text, and agree that niceness is better than nastiness? There is another problem too. Many sociobiologists today accept that no moral lessons can be drawn from nature. But they also suggest that human beings are simply physical beings like any another. We live in a fully determined universe, they argue, and such determinism calls into question what are often considered special human traits, such as free will. Colin Blakemore is professor of physiology at Oxford University.

BLAKEMORE : We are part of physical world. I mean, we're made up of the bits of machinery that everything else is made up and we more of the molecules and the atoms and the forces and all of that sort of stuff. So, we're part of the physical world. And you have to say, either all of that stuff including us, the stars, the planets, people and plants and everything on the earth are determined by a set of physical rules, causal rules, or there are exceptions to that. And if there are exceptions to it, if we're an exception in the sense that our actions are not absolutely determined by a causal sequence of events - as you say, going back to the Big Bang - then, my goodness, that is an enormously fundamental catastrophic challenge to our logic, to the way that we think about the world, to science.

MALIK : But if free will is an illusion what can moral values possibly mean?

BLAKEMORE : Ha, I wouldn't advocate that just because I think that all of our actions are determined we should just throw caution to the wind and become totally anarchic and abandon the courts - of course not. I mean, society has to work. It designs for itself - again, all of this is, in a sense, determined - but designs for itself a complex process, a set of rules, people know what those rules are, they learn about them when they're kids, they know that there are policemen on the streets, they make decisions causally determined with the knowledge of the law in their heads. So if they disobey it, then something has to be done to constrain society and make it work. So you have to detach, I think, the crude notion of responsibility that there's an evil person sitting in there who has to be punished. Well, I don't think, you know, there is a person sitting inside us - there are brains sitting inside us and physical machinery sitting inside us - not persons. But unless you did something to stop actions which disturb and perturb the society that you live in, then a society would no longer work.

MALIK : So what you're really saying is that moral responsibility has no real meaning but it's simply something we've invented because otherwise we can not make society work?

BLAKEMORE : That's close to what I'm saying, yes.

MALIK : What Colin Blakemore seems to end up with is a concept of morality robbed of any moral content. The problem lies not so much with his determinism as with his insistence that this determinism renders free will, and hence moral choice, illusory. The logic of this argument seems to be that any moral values will do - so long as they allow the machinery of society to function. Such relativism is also at the heart of a very different kind of philosophy that has gained ground over the past century - the belief that values are not rooted in the natural or the supernatural worlds, but are self-created by human cultures. In which case it seems to follow that there can be no universal values, for every culture will establish its own. This denial of universal norms strikes most people as profoundly wrong. After all, should only the lucky ones who happen to be born into the right societies possess freedom from arbitrary arrest or torture? One attempt to reject such relativism, without invoking the aid of either God or nature, has been through the idea of human rights. Francesca Klug.

KLUG : We're all human beings and that's the essential nature of what human rights thinking is all about. It's in a sense extremely simple which is the idea of the essential dignity of every human being and, therefore, the essential equality between them.

MALIK : Human rights is a set of basic rights and protections - such as the right to liberty and the protection from slavery and torture - that are supposed to apply equally to all human beings. As the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights puts it: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status." For advocates, human rights constitute a 'higher law' that constrains the actions of government and individuals. But it is precisely such constraints that worry critics such as David Chandler, a lecturer in international relations at Leeds Metropolitan University.

CHANDLER : Human rights really, is a very confident and relentless critique of the political sphere - a sphere that's posited on the idea that human beings are capable, are rational and self-governing and a human rights approach really says, well that's wrong, you know, that's like enlightenment optimism. The reality is that humanity is pretty barbaric - that people aren't really interested in politics and the general good and that, you know, the way forward is really to protect people against themselves - I think that's the essence of it. It's really saying that human right's or this ethical judgement of the importance of certain values - that should be privileged and protected from ordinary people really. It should be privileged above the sphere of democracy, it should even be privileged above the idea of equality under the law.

MALIK : Human rights, in other words, like all ethical constraints, are profoundly anti-democratic. But isn't David Chandler putting democracy above justice? Is it not better to have a just society than a perfectly democratic one?

CHANDLER : I think the problem with justice is that once you talk about justice without ideas of democracy and accountability, that you're really moving towards a world of vigilantism in a way, that justice is really determined and decided by the powers that are strong enough to be able to do the intervening. So, if you look, for instance, at, say, the war over Kosovo, although everyone would agree that it wasn't justified in pure legal terms, people would argue that it's legitimate because it's an ethical intervention based on protecting the rights of others. But once they see justice outside the bounds of legality, it's a question really of who decides - who decides whether a war is just or unjust.

MALIK : Not many people, perhaps, will be persuaded by that answer, but even some proponents of human rights, such as Francesca Klug, agree that there's a problem here.

KLUG : There is an ongoing and historic debate within the human rights world about its tension with democracy - with the idea of democracy. Because if you think about it logically, rights conflict with each other and, you know, you cannot escape from the fact that you're going to have to have a referee as to determine where the balance should lie in any particular circumstance and you can argue about whether that should be the judges or whether that should be parliament. But, in the real world as it is lived, it can never be an absolute idea except, perhaps, at the most extreme levels such as the requirement not to torture people, the sanctity of the right to life - but even that can have limits in certain circumstances - such as self-defence. So, in reality I think the human rights community have done themselves no favours by presenting it as a kind of truth, as a kind of uncontested idea. It can never be and absolute idea and in that sense it can never be a universal idea.

MALIK : But if there is nothing absolute or universal about human rights, as Francesca Klug suggests, and if they are to be contested through the democratic process, in what way are they distinctive from any other kind of political claim? And how is it possible not to fall once more into the swamp of relativism?

KLUG : Human rights is essentially a set of ethical values - that's what it is. But it's strength relies on people being persuaded politically, in my view, rather than simply legally, to support them. You know, it's success will be won in political terrain. I think the essential point about human rights thinking is that it's universally applicable and that is crucial but is not a missionary religion - it is not saying that this idea is the truth and that everybody who doesn't accept the truth is somehow outside this group. Quite the contrary. It's saying, this is an idea which we, the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the judges who are interpreting the Convention put forward - it is a contested idea but at its essence is the concept that the rights or the claims that it is upholding as the right claims are applicable to every human being in the entire universe. But it is not something which is dogmatically applied - it must be an idea that is constantly open to contestation or it is nothing.

MALIK : The American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who's written widely on moral and political issues, goes even further.

NUSSBAUM : Well I think political values are a part of one's moral values. John Rawls used a very nice image. He said they're module that you can link on to the rest of moral values in whatever way it fits best. So, they have to be one part of them and that means it's pretty important that they should be consistent with the rest of what you believe or else you're going to be in a lot of tension and contradiction, but, on the other hand, they're only a part because there are lots of things like the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, the destiny of the soul after death and so on that politics shouldn't take a stand on because that would be divisive and disrespectful of people who'd have different religious views about that.

MALIK : For David Chandler, though, the attempt to link ethical and political values is a bit like regarding Manchester United as both potential Premiership champions and relegation contenders.

CHANDLER : Essentially they're opposite sides of the spectrum. The more that ethics and morality become central to politics, the more you find that political discussion, political decision making, is restricted to a sphere of elites - whether it's moving issues to the judiciary, which the Human Rights Act does, or towards ethics committees and people that have a moral standing in society. Democracy is posited on the idea of there being no absolute values. If there were absolute values, why would you need to have a collective decision-making process? Those absolute values would be interpreted for us or laid down by the elites or whoever's regulating society. And, I think that the ideas of democracy and the political sphere of equality and decision making really sort of say that there are universals but those universals are really coming in the process of how that decision is decided, whereas, a human rights approach is really saying that we've already decided what, you know, the end process is - that we should be safeguarding these questions from the dangers of the ballot box, from the dangers of a democratic process.

MALIK : This is an argument that gets to the core of the problem: how might it be possible to establish a common set of values? Today, both politicians and the public tend to reach for ethical answers to political questions, in order to root beliefs in some kind of certainty. But, David Chandler suggests, such quick-mix ethical concrete can provide no real foundation to our lives. When we transform political discussions about right and wrong into ethical debates about good and bad, we expunge reason from politics, and vacate our own responsibility for shaping the values that govern our lives. The trouble with all this, though, is that we seem to have got no further than we were at the start. We appear to have rejected all the sources of value - God, nature, even human rights judges - seemingly without finding anything to replace them. Are we condemned, then, to live in a nihilistic world? Possibly not. For throughout these discussions two themes have emerged again and again as crucial: reason and democracy. Even those who look to God or nature for their values accept that ultimately it is through reason that we have to decide which values are good and which bad. It is when we throw away reason, and dogmatically defend values as absolute, that the problems arise. Simon Blackburn.

BLACKBURN : I fear that the tendency to go fundamentalist is a tendency that can't put up with the fragile way in which we stand on our own feet. Not standing on our own feet, but simply submitting yourself to authority is a kind of act of self-deception. It's pretending now that you've found the answers where as you've not - you've just given up looking - you've given up thinking about them - the questions - and I share that belief. I think there is something deeply unsatisfying about giving up the attitudes associated with enquiry and with testing the structure and seeing whether this bit hangs together with that bit.

MALIK : In other words, the importance not just of reason but also of democracy in shaping values. Many people will question this reliance on democracy. After all, Hitler was elected on a popular mandate. And in any case, how can we trust democracy when barely fifty per cent of the electorate can be bothered to vote in many Western nations? These are both important criticisms. But they miss the essence of why democracy is vital. Democracy is not about end results - It's about how we achieve them. It doesn't tell us which values are good. But it does provide a means of debating them and of implementing change. That's why democracy sometimes leads to unpalatable results. It is also why in the long run values that emerge through a democratic process are likely to be both more humane and more robust than those imposed from without. Democracy allows us to get away from the idea of values as eternally fixed, and yet to see them as potentially universal. And as for the political process being moribund today, that surely is an argument to think of how to re- invigorate it. The only thing of which we can be certain is that we have to do it all ourselves. Not nature, not God, not even God wearing the robes of a human rights judge, can do it for us. To believe this, though, requires a certain faith in human nature - something at which many people blanch today. David Chandler suggests that underlying the idea of human rights is a vision of Fallen Man needing to be redeemed.

CHANDLER : Not everyone can agree on what human rights are, where they come from, how they can be implemented. But human rights advocates say, well we can all agree on what a human wrong is, we can all agree that torture is wrong or that genocide is wrong. But the whole problem, I think, of regulating society on the basis that we're all liable to commit human rights abuses and human wrongs, has a very negative view of humanity and the form of regulation that that sets up - that says, well we can't really trust people to vote in a government that won't commit abuses, we can't trust people not to attack their neighbours or abuse people around them or their children - that view of humanity and the idea of rights that that sets up, isn't rights of active, rational subjects.

MALIK : It's a pessimism that can only make more difficult the task of creating a shared set of values, for it can only strengthen the 'trust no one' cynicism that haunts our age. I'm not saying that humans are inherently good or that a little bit of reason will solve all our dilemmas. I'm just suggesting that rather than sub-contracting our morality, we should put a little bit more trust in ourselves.