The Relationship Between Knowledge and Morality

Author’s Note:
I do not feel satisfied with this train of thought, for I seem to have worked myself into a dead end. I am either wrong, and need to rethink my premises, or I am right but do not know why. I have nothing else to post tonight, so please enjoy this dead end.

Morality I do not find solely precedented by knowledge, and even consider that doing harm in ignorance but with good intent makes a better person than knowingly doing good maliciously. One maybe thinks this foolish on two counts: Is not the deed, or event, more important than the intent? and is it not an absurdity to say that someone with knowledge would do good maliciously? A third point may be raised: What of perfect knowledge? Does not the quality of omniscience confer (or perhaps infer) the quality of omnibenevolence?

I do not wish to place an actor’s intent above an action’s resulting event as a general rule. I wish, however, to point out that in some circumstances, intent is more important than event. If a murderer’s gun jammed, frustrating his intent to murder, that intent is obviously more important than the proceeding event. In the inverse case, it also seems obvious that should a man unintentionally commit homicide, even though his intent is considered, the event is more serious, but more serious regarding what?

It is more serious regarding his future actions, definitely. It makes little difference what his intent was if he will not gain knowledge by this accidental evil. We are considering here that he ignorantly acted, but that that action resulted in someone’s death. If he had had knowledge, we are assuming, he, not wanting to kill anyone, would not have acted as he did. But contrasting the two, the accidental killing versus an ineffective intent to kill, do we not see that the intent is more deadly than the event, if at least not in this moment in future moments, when comparing these cases? Though the second man has killed where the first has not, it is the first man who seems the moral inferior. Furthermore, the first had greater knowledge, presumably, than the second as intent seems to imply knowledge.

I do not think that intent always trumps event, but I think there are cases where intent trumps event.

Now, can someone knowingly do good but with malice? I think so, and the same has been seen in fictions at least. Consider then that Dracula saves Harker’s life while Harker is important to his evil schemes. Dracula is knowingly doing good, but his overall intent for Harker is malicious. It is also somewhat of a trope I remember from television cartoons when the villain publicly does good works to prove his change of heart so that he might gain the people’s trust usually for some sufficiently nefarious purpose involving discrediting the hero.

But perhaps the objection arises that I am playing with words, or that I am mindfully being obtuse. When it is said that better knowledge leads people to better morals, or that morals are the result of knowledge, it is not to mean that in every case more knowledge means better morals, but that better morals cannot exist without better knowledge.

I think we need to clarify what we mean by knowledge. There’s knowledge of a trade, knowledge that’s a skill, and then there’s knowledge that’s pure. Forgive me if I have missed some category. Considering pure knowledge, there seems to be two types: The world of predicates and their resulting conclusions which I call truth and reason, and the world of trivia or facts, such as history and other forms of memory. It is to the first type of pure knowledge, some might say, which morality belongs; it is a type of knowledge.

I think there is now a confusion of morality and knowledge. If I know a piece of literature sufficiently well, am I then to say that said book or poem is my knowledge? If I know morality as I am describing, is my knowledge the same as a good moral character? Though I believe that we can have knowledge of morality, I do not believe that morality is only our knowledge of it. I think there is no necessary correlation between having the knowledge of a thing and doing that thing. I could throw a ball fairly accurately before I knew anything of vectors or parabolas.

Perhaps I am again misunderstanding what we mean by knowledge, and yet, I fear we might begin to define knowledge to mean what nobody actually knows knowledge to mean. We might say that the knowledge of how to throw a ball and the knowledge of how a ball is thrown are different. Fine, then let us say that the knowledge of how to be moral is different from the knowledge of moral precepts. This seems a fair distinction, and the original distinction I was trying to make. People act morally without necessarily knowing moral precepts, and people who know moral precepts need not act morally. But is it fair to call the action of morality the knowledge of morality? In a phenomenological sense, seeing someone act morally implies that person knows morality on some level, but going back to our consideration of a pitcher, someone who knows how to throw a ball is not therefore determined to throw a ball.

If I had all the knowledge of what is moral, all the knowledge of why I should be moral, and even all other forms of knowledge so that I might in any circumstance be prepared and able to make the moral decision, would I therefore be determined to act morally? Is morality simply knowledge, or is it something more?

I am now on my final question of whether omniscience demands moral activity. However, two questions now appear: Is moral behavior good for the actor? and is an actor determined to pursue his own good? The first bears on whether an omniscient being would in some circumstance find that an immoral action was beneficial in some way, in a way, presumably, that would result in no repercussions. This is, of course, a very old question, and the Ring of Gyges comes to mind. If one had perfect knowledge, would it be realized that personal good could be gained by doing evil? I am not omniscient, and I do not know. I suspect not, however.

Therefore, tabling this first question, I shall endeavor to circumvent it through consideration of the second. Let us say that there are two possibilities: Either omniscience would reveal that doing evil is sometimes beneficial to an actor (beneficial even in the long run); Or the reverse would be true, and this person would know that in every moral choice the moral good was his own good. In either circumstance, would the actor’s knowledge of what was personally good for him, whether to do good or evil, determine his action to do good or evil?

I do not here see a necessary correlation between knowing what is good for yourself and doing good for yourself. Though one may choose to pursue his own good, can he not also knowingly choose to pursue his own hurt? Why, you might ask, should he pursue his own hurt? I think we know. Let us say that an omniscient being had as his primary motive the destruction of a rival, and let us add that circumstances were such that should he achieve this goal, he would also destroy himself? Given this circumstance, that this omniscient being holds as a higher goal his rival’s destruction than his own safety, it seems obvious he would destroy himself to destroy his rival.

Yet you might say that I have proposed nonsense; I fear I have. Could an omniscient being have as his overriding motive the destruction of a rival? Here, I think, I am finally getting to my point: The concept of good has become so muddied that we do not know what it is. We use good sometimes to mean useful or profitable. We say of something it is good because with it we achieve a good, a goal. Yet we also have, as an idea, that there are good goods, good goals, and bad goods. This judgment of goals cannot stand in the same way as these goals stand; If I find that I automatically judge between goals, set up hierarchies of good, better, and best goals, then I am in a sense saying that there is some ultimate goal which transcends the other goals, which is not good in the same sense that these goods are good. In a sense, then, we speak of good as if there was a good which was good. We believe in goods that are ends to some goals, but we also believe in a good, full stop.

What is this good? If it is knowledge, then I am fundamentally wrong in what I have written. I do not think it is knowledge, and I do not think that merely having knowledge of it entails the pursuit of it. If there were some omniscient being who knew what this good is, I do not see that he would be determined to pursue it.

Howbeit if, knowing this good, he found it alien to him? He may see it, that is, know it, but not accept it. Yet, what would that leave him as? Logically, then, how could he have goals? Without goals, how could he act? Without an ability to act, how could he be?

Without accepting this ultimate good, what cause would he have to act in any sense? Is it not obvious that he cannot in this circumstance create a competing ultimate good? He could have no means nor motive to do so, for to have a motive means to have this ultimate good, and as to means, I can imagine no way of inventing an ultimate good for an ultimate good cannot be, by definition, derivative.

Perhaps the objection arises that though we speak and act as though there is some greatest good which is a standard for goods, that this is a fiction. Perhaps the omniscient person would find that there is no ultimate good. In either case, we must ask how he would be able to act.

Things are caused to happen and cause other things to happen. On a physical level, the sciences seem to indicate that all things had a single cause, the big bang, and that all physical reality is working toward a single determined end, the heat death of the universe. This omniscient being, should he know that there was no actual good, or, finding it, should find that this ultimate good was alien to him, could not then act, for he would have no motive to act. He could be caused to do things in the determined manner described by science, but he himself would not be doing it. These reactive actions make of him a puppet, and with no ability to act beyond uncontrolled reactions, himself never really causing anything to happen, he would effectively be nonexistent as a person.

Let us reassert his personhood, then, as it would be absurd to give the quality of omniscience to anything other than a person. You might say that something like a computer could possess all knowledge, and I would agree. However, possessing knowledge as a computer or book possesses knowledge is not the same as knowing knowledge.

So, he is an omniscient person, and we are assuming that the ultimate good is either a fiction or that it is alien to the person. Can these points stand together? Can personhood exist outside of this ultimate good? From what I’ve so far said, it seems impossible to exist outside this ultimate good. If it simply doesn’t exist, then nothing can meaningfully be said to exist beyond bare scientific reality, beyond materialism. For the same reason, to exist seems to imply some connection to this ultimate good.

So, this omniscient being must know this good is his own good and the root of all his action. Does it therefore become inevitable that he act in accordance with the good? I cannot prove my suspicion by reason, I fear, but I hope I can describe what I am thinking: If someone were to know the good, know that all his actions were motivated by this good, know even that his existence is partially dependent on this good, he might still reject it, not as false, nor alien, but just reject it.

I am not sure I can go farther than that. If we accept as a possibility that someone could know the good but reject the good, then I am right in thinking that morality is not necessarily knowledge. If we think that knowing the good determines our love of the good, then, though I can conceive of instances where morality and knowledge do not necessarily converge, they fundamentally are linked. I think, though, that I am right in assuming that we can either love or hate the good.