Why fake morality is the best kind

After all, if the argument is that economic self interest has no capacity for factoring in the welfare of imperilled Pacific nations, then it is a naïve argument. Economics, like religion, is easily flexible enough to construct new and expedient arguments to suit changing circumstances. It’s the destination that matters, not the journey.

At the very least, it behoves those who dislike my environmental motives to understand the arguments which drive the world we live in. Practicing capitalists from Adam Smith to Paul Keating tell us that unsentimental self interest produces the best outcomes. It is not enough for Scott Stephens to complain about the leadership of self interest because that is precisely what is meant to be happening. You might as well sneer at the unpleasant “self interest” of football teams who try to accumulate more points than their opposition. That’s the point of the exercise.

Whether or not my moral convictions are real or fake is simply beside the point. The job of moralists is to prove why self interest leads to poorer outcomes than any other set of instructions. It would certainly not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of unnecessary human suffering borne of heart felt moral and altruistic conviction.

It may objected that deciding what is “true” is no more straight forward an exercise than working out what is “right”. This is undoubtedly the case and another reason why postmodernists and moral relativists have always been a step ahead of Dawkins-style rationalists and religious believers alike. In fact, for people like Dawkins, scholarly truth and moral rectitude are actually one and the same.

What hyper-rationalists and Christians both over look is that we have always lived in a world where power rules. It is power - the power of history, money and language - that determines the things we believe and it is power which forms our sense of right and wrong. And it is earthly, human power, not truth or goodness, which will decide the future of the planet and, for that matter, organised religion.

Some will see this as a pessimistic message. It isn’t. The trouble with truth and moral goodness is that they both gesture towards other worlds, worlds which are pure and untouched by human hands. They both distort and obscure reality. For those of us stuck on terra firma, better to remember that our destiny is in our own hands but particularly in the hands of the powerful.

Arguing about truth and right will get us nowhere. What matters is what people can be made to believe, a game we can all participate in.