Most people think morality is about behavior. I suspect it’s actually about counterfactual behavior.
Imagine a world with no laws, no chance of getting caught, and no meaningful consequences for your actions. How much of your current behavior would remain exactly the same?
Assign that answer a score, X, from 1 to 10.
- X = 10: Your behavior would be unchanged. You act morally because you want to, not because you have to.
- X = 1: Your behavior would change dramatically. Much of what currently appears to be morality on your part is actually restraint imposed by consequences.
Now compute 10 − X.
That’s a measure of how evil you are. It ranges from 0 (saint) to 9 (let’s not leave you unsupervised).
This thought experiment doesn’t measure what you’ve done. It measures how much of your morality comes from character versus coercion. The more your goodness depends on consequences, the less goodness was really yours to begin with.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the so-called Ten Commandments. The situation is stranger than most people realize. The familiar commandments appear in Exodus 20:2–17 and again, with significant differences, in Deuteronomy 5:6–21. But Exodus 34:11–26 presents yet another list, followed by a verse explicitly calling it “the Ten Commandments.” So before we even begin arguing about whether the commandments define morality, we should acknowledge that the Bible itself isn’t entirely clear on which commandments we’re talking about.
But the deeper question has nothing to do with which commandments are on the list. It is whether morality comes from the list (or any list, or laws) at all.
Philosophers have wrestled with this problem for over two millennia. Socrates’ famous Euthyphro dilemma asks whether an act is good because God commands it, or whether God commands it because it is good. My thought experiment approaches a similar question from the opposite direction: if all the commandments vanished tomorrow, how much of your morality would survive?
If your answer to every moral question is, “Because God said so,” then the quality being measured isn’t goodness; it’s obedience. A truly good person doesn’t need a commandment against murder. A truly honest person doesn’t need a commandment against theft. The question that interests me is not whether you follow the commandments. The question is whether you would still live by them if nobody had ever written them down.
My own suspicion is that humanity’s favorite commandment isn’t “Thou shalt not steal”. It’s “Thou shalt round X upward.”
Many Worlds Theory 