I think the idea that morality is rational is dangerous. It is one that I believe to be true however.

For the person who is striving towards a moral ideal, rational morality can be double-cutting. Not only does the flawed person who makes immoral decisions feel guilt for their mistakes, but they also feel that they have done something that is simply irrational. They feel stupid. It doesn’t make sense to make that decision, so why did you? Now, not only have you made an immoral decision, the reason for making that decision is completely unexplainable. They have no way of justifying even to themselves why they made that decision. “What can I do to make better decisions?” asks the person who believes morality is rational. I knew morally and rationally, that that was a mistake, yet I did it anyway. There is no root cause, no logical mistake, no error in calculation… you simply knew that it was an immoral decision, and yet, you made it anyway. It is all too easy to come to the conclusion that the only explanation is this: you are a bad person. You make bad decisions, you cannot explain why, and so you must be the problem.

The person who believes that morality is rational certainly spends a lot of time deriving logical proofs as to why certain things that they already believe to be moral are moral. Or, at least I do. Hopefully, to such a one, this idea makes sense. The engineer spends a lifetime learning how physical systems work. Deriving laws and extrapolating equations and predictions. They study the physical world academically, humbly, admitting that they don’t know how it all works but that they will do their best to create an accurate model. There is no moral failing in occasionally failing to carry the one, what is important is that they are seeking to understand.

To the person who believes in rational morality. To the person who is seeking not to live up to “high standards” or striving to “be a good person,” but is simply trying to do what makes sense. (i.e C.S Lewis) No one understands how the human system functions. We do not know how we ourselves work. “The man who does not understand God (or your moral equivalent) does not understand themself,” and vice versa. Like the engineer trying to understand physical systems with a specific purpose in mind, I know what I would like the system to do. I know, very clearly (I think), the person I would like to be. I am trying to understand how I, a human being, work with the purpose of being moral in mind. (In my mind they are inseparable) While being consistently confronted by people who do not believe that morality is rational it is easy to believe that understanding morality is the hard part, but it is not. For us the difficult task is learning how we function.

The fact that one can admit that they have made immoral decisions at all shows that they are moral.

We are judged by what we seek, not on how we actually perform, that is correlation not causation.

Many cannot admit that they themselves don’t know how they work for two reasons:

1.You can/will only admit that you don’t know how you work if you admit that there is a single, rational, “correct,” way for you to work. This would mean admitting the existence of an objective, logical system: objective morals.

2.This would require humility. Admitting the existence of a gap between who we want to be and who we are, immoral beings.

——— The remainder is similar to “Sincerity” post further extrapolated

This leads to a tangential topic. It is easy to the person who believes in rational morality to think the following:

Morality is rational. It is rational because it brings about good consequences, peace, joy, happiness. Therefore, I should be rational/moral because I want to be happy.

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’ Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

The person who tries to do moral things because they want to be happy does things because they “should” do them not because they want to do them. Doing something only because it “should” be done rarely changes the person doing it. It leads to internal conflict and cognitive dissonance. If you believe that the reason that morality is logical/rational is because it brings about personal happiness it will feel paradoxical. Morality rarely jibes well with selfish personal endeavors. The core of morality is altruism, seeing other people deeply, increasing agency, etc. not your personal happiness. We are often taught, enticed almost, into doing good things because doing so will make you happy. Seems logical, however, the real rationale for morality is it is the only means by which you are able to see and experience the whole human experience. (See Neural Networks and Morality)

One must strive to do the moral thing not because they will make us happy but because it is the right thing to do.

Do things because they are moral not because they make you happy.

We often put the cart before the horse. “I am not happy” we think, therefore internalizing and drifting farther away from the beautiful reality that is around us. Then, in our internalization, we think “I am not happy that I am not happy.” Or on the flip side we think “I am happy, I worry that it won’t last long enough for me to enjoy it.” All the while we are drifting farther away from reality and are primarily experiencing derivative emotions that are not even caused by reality or anything that you or anyone else did but rather by an entirely internal feedback loop. Our preoccupation with how we feel creates a gap between how we feel and the reality that we live in. Better to worry about reality, and let the emotion follow.

Morality is taking the time to notice and see people, and then having a love for them come as a result of our awareness of them. Not the other way around. Happiness is the same way. We are grateful (see/ are aware) for the world we live in and the opportunity that we have to do good, then allowing happiness to come, knowing that we are living in harmony with what we know to be true and rational.

C.S Lewis says “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.” If I can expound on that I would say that it is impossible to focus on not focusing on yourself. That is circular and still internal. The only way to think of yourself less is to think of others more. This doesn’t mean that you forget yourself, if anything I think that it is easier to show kindness to yourself as you learn to be kind to others.