Moral Entropy: Will Humans Stop Caring About Each Other?

Moral entropy: will humans stop caring about each other?

So, what is moral entropy? It’s not actually a fully established theory, but I first heard the term from Garrett Russell from a Christian metalcore band called Silent Planet. He’s responsible for most of their lyrics and their discography is littered with weighty philosophical concepts and social matters.  He refers to moral entropy when discussing human progression and states that we seem to be naturally abandoning our morality due to our progression. What he means by our ‘progression’ is very literal; progression in human discovery, technological advancement etc. He says that we’re very much progressing for the sake of progression rather than progressing for any greater moral cause, because progression means power, status and even purpose.  He says that a by-product of this process is the weaponisation and manipulation of nature for person gain, which only acts as a catalyst in that it distances us from our (very much moral) nature.

I was going to discuss this, but I came across a far more interesting concept of moral entropy to discuss. In preparation for this, I decided to see if moral entropy was in fact an existing theory, and quickly found an article called ‘The Law of Moral Entropy’. It’s written by who I assume is a religious fundamentalist, who states that as Western society secularises its morality is slowly filtering out. His idea of moral entropy is as follows: a secular parent raises a child without what he describes as ‘moral theory’ and consequently the child has a lesser moral compass than the parent, and the cycle continues. He says that the only way the human can regain a full sense of morality in their family tree is to use what he calls a ‘tap root’ which is essentially religion. He uses the metaphor of a dying plant to describe secularism, saying that whilst the roots are now dying, we can’t fully observe what the eventual effects will be once the plant dies, but the tap root will again nourish the plant, giving us moral compass.

This sounds absurd, but he doesn’t do a terrible job in justifying this. The theory does have a logic behind it, it makes sense that religious people are much more conscious of their morality and are therefore more likely to experience things like guilt; it’s unlikely you’ll find an amoral religious person, because they do have a moral ‘theory’, an established logic behind what they believe is good and bad. However I do think this is what has led this writer to his misassumptions. He’s assumed that because a religious person can’t be amoral, a secular person can’t be moral.

To put it simply, you can’t just say that religion is fundamental to morality. That is not how morality operates. The obvious statement to disprove this guy would be that morality definitely predates any organised religion, because as conscious being we’re always going to have an idea of what’s right or wrong. Morality is something we always will have because it’s a property of our consciousness; I believe an amoral human can’t exist. The mistake of believing in amorality in humans is understandable, all we have to do is observe human behaviour to see that people don’t just do bad things, but many don’t even care that they do bad things. We can quickly assume that these people have no sense of morality, but this is incorrect as we’re not seeing the full picture. What we’re not trying to account is the introspective process that occurs when someone does something ‘bad’. They are disregarding their morality rather than being just devoid of it altogether. This is the whole reason hypocrisy exists; we know many that will openly say that they think something is bad and they will then do that thing they have said. They are disregarding their moral sense.

Whilst this is the case, it’s also true that some people just don’t care, but they are also disregarding their morality. Someone could kill someone else and not care at all, but would they want to be killed, or someone they care about killed? Whether this concerns morality or just self-interest is debatable, but their definitely still is moral sense involved. So, if we have a sense of morality, why do we disregard it? It’s because of the nature of morality and why it actually exists. As a property of consciousness, morality in turn interacts with its neighbouring properties, such as ego and emotion, in a way of balance. Much like energy, it can’t be depleted but only its properties changed, and I believe this very much applies to consciousness. Ego can overpower morality, awareness can overpower ego, and introspectiveness can overpower awareness. All of this introspective activity determines the conscious decisions we make, and whether they are moral or not depends on these activities.

So, to answer the question, no we are not losing our morality, and we’ll never lose it. We can only lose our morality if we lose our ability to think consciously, which is massively improbable. It’s possible that society could tame us to become desensitised to our own sense of morality (what a creepy concept), which in a sense is amorality, but again this doesn’t apply to the sweeping statement this religious fundamentalist has made. There are many other ridiculous assumptions and points that this person has made, and lot more to talk about in terms of moral entropy, such as Russell’s theory, so there definitely could be second write-up about this – if I’m feeling it. But what do you think?