My brother thinks he's a chicken. The family is deeply concerned, of course, but we haven't taken him to a doctor.  Why not? We need the eggs.

This classic Woody Allen joke is funny because it's absurd.  But it's also the perfect metaphor for our relationship with morality.  We all know there's something off about it. Logically, we can't justify it.  But we cling to it, because, frankly, we need the eggs.

Impossible Proofs

David Hume pointed out that you can't derive an "ought" from an "is."  A.J. Ayer went further and said that moral statements are just emotional expressions dressed up in logical clothes.  Saying, "Murder is wrong" is, at its core, just a sophisticated way of saying, "Boo, murder!"

Nietzsche took this further still, suggesting that our moral frameworks are merely power structures in disguise, inventions that serve the interests of certain groups while claiming universality.  Even Kant's categorical imperative, perhaps the most ambitious attempt to ground morality in pure reason, ultimately rests on assumptions that themselves require justification.

Yet here we are, structuring societies around a set of moral rules that we can't prove.  It's as if we woke up one day and decided, "Okay, let's all agree that this set of instincts and traditions is The Good, and anything else is Evil."  And when asked why, the best we can do is wave our hands, invoke evolution, or mutter something about the fabric of society.

Fuzzy Moral Logic

Morality isn't about logic; it's about survival.  Evolution wired us for reciprocal altruism: you scratch my back; I don't stab yours. This is why we have moral instincts.  But like all instincts, they're a hot mess.  Consider:

• Incest: Universally taboo, but different cultures draw the line at different degrees of cousin-hood coupling. It's like we all agree it's bad, but we can't quite decide where to draw the line.

• Killing:  Generally frowned upon, but if you slap the right labels on it (war, self-defence, "standing your ground"), we can rationalize it just fine. And we don’t extend the courtesy to animals – they are fair game to our rapacity.

• Cheating:  Morally outrageous when you do it. Completely justifiable when I do.

• Fairness:  A concept so nebulous that entire political ideologies exist solely to define what it means, each claiming their definition as self-evident.

And, critically, we don't just have moral instincts, we have moralistic aggression.  We don't just believe things are right or wrong; we feel an overwhelming urge to make sure everyone else believes it, too.  This is why moral debates aren't like physics debates.  No one gets angry about wave-particle duality (well they do, but that reinforces the point).

Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory reveals that our moral instincts cluster around specific domains: care vs harm, fairness vs cheating, loyalty vs betrayal, authority vs subversion, and purity vs degradation. But cultures weight these domains differently. Morality is a like a financial market: all the participants are trading the same stocks, but they ascribe different values to them.

The Ethical Ghetto

Here's the paradox:  we need morality to function as a society, but morality itself is an elaborate fiction.  Philosophers have spent centuries trying to derive an objective ethical framework, only to find themselves stuck in an intellectual version of Zeno's paradox, forever inching toward a justification they'll never quite reach. Unlike Zeno, the sum of their efforts does not take us to a satisfying destination.

Consider the trolley problem.  Do you pull the lever to save five people at the cost of one? Most say yes.  But what if that one person is your child?  What if saving the five requires physically pushing someone onto the tracks?  Our moral intuitions shift wildly depending on framing, suggesting they're not grounded in consistent principles but in emotional responses to specific scenarios.

Derek Parfit spent his career trying to reconcile consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, believing they were "climbing the same mountain from different sides."  Yet even this optimistic view acknowledges that our moral frameworks are perspectives rather than discoveries.

And yet, we go on eating eggs. Sometimes we think they are good for us, sometimes we worry about cholesterol, but we keep eating moral eggs. We legislate, we argue, we moralize.  We recognize the contradictions, but we live with them.  Because without morality, everything collapses into an ethical void, and the only thing worse than living in an ethical contradiction is not having one at all.

Counterarguments

Some defend morality's objectivity. Sam Harris argues that moral questions are ultimately about well-being, which can be empirically measured.  But this merely pushes the problem back a step: why should we maximize well-being?  The "is-ought" gap remains unbridged.

Religious frameworks attempt to ground morality in divine command.  But this raises Euthyphro's ancient dilemma: is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it's good?  If the former, morality seems arbitrary; if the latter, morality exists independently of God.

Moral realists like Russ Shafer-Landau argue that moral truths exist independently of human opinion, akin to mathematical truths.  But unlike mathematics, we have no reliable method for discovering these truths, no moral equivalent to proof by induction or axiomatization.

Meanwhile, we continue living as if our moral judgments matter cosmically, as if the universe itself cares whether we keep our promises or tell the truth. It's a collective suspension of disbelief worthy of the finest theater.

A Good Egg?

What makes this paradox uniquely human is our awareness of it.  Unlike other social species with instinctive cooperation, we alone question the foundations of our morality while simultaneously being unable to abandon it.

This self-awareness creates a peculiar form of vertigo.  We stand at the edge of moral nihilism, peering into the abyss, and then step back, not because we've found solid ground, but because we need to believe there is some.

Bernard Williams called this "the human prejudice" - our tendency to value human perspectives despite recognizing their contingency.  We know our moral views are shaped by accident of birth, culture, and evolution, yet we cannot help but take them seriously.

Morality is the most elaborate and necessary fiction we've ever created. It's the egg-laying chicken we pretend not to notice is actually our brother in costume.  We maintain the pretence because the alternative - a world without moral architecture - is imaginable only to the nihilist.

Moral Comfort Food

Morality, like my brother's chicken delusion, is something we sustain even though we know it's flawed.  If we were to coldly analyse it, we'd see that it's a hodgepodge of evolved instincts, arbitrary traditions, and personal biases masquerading as universal truths.

But analysis doesn't change the fact that morality works.  It keeps us from eating each other, literally and figuratively.  It holds together families, cities, civilizations.  The elaborate dance of rights, duties, virtues, and taboos isn't just a quaint tradition; it's the invisible infrastructure of human society.

Perhaps the deepest irony is that recognizing morality's fictional nature doesn't free us from its grip.  Even the most committed moral skeptic still feels the sting of betrayal, the warmth of gratitude, the burn of indignation.  We can intellectually reject morality's foundations while emotionally remaining in its thrall.

In the end, we're left with a choice between comforting self-deception and paralyzing truth.  We choose the former not because we're weak but because we're practical.  We need the structure, the meaning, the coherence that morality provides.

My brother still thinks he's a chicken, but we need the eggs.

Martin C W Walker is director of banking and finance at the Center for Evidence-Based Management. He has published two books and several papers on banking technology. Previous roles include global head of securities finance IT at Dresdner Kleinwort and global head of prime brokerage technology at RBS Markets. He received his master's degree in computing science from Imperial College, London, and his bachelor's degree in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.