Morality is Black and White/ Ethics is all the colours of the rainbow - We need both!

A famous philosophical thought experiment goes like this:  on your way to work one day you see a toddler about to drown in a shallow pool.  If you go to save her, you will not be risking your life, but you will get your nice clothes wet. Are you obligated to save her, if, at that moment no one else can?  Obviously, very few would deny this.  But that is not the end.  The question is, why are we not equally obligated to save children from dying in Africa if we could do so without inconveniencing ourselves?  There are charities that do just that, such as Unicef, etc. Why are we not equally obligated to give to charity to prevent children from dying in other countries? What’s different about the two cases?  Peter Singer, the philosopher who created this thought experiment, argued there is no relevant difference, and therefore we should be equally obligated.

    Not saving a nearby child from drowning when you could is wrong.  It feels wrong, and people are likely to agree that anyone who did this ought to be shunned or punished.  Not giving to charities when you could, lacks this gravity. It might be thought heartless not to give to any charity, but no one would say it merits punishment. And punishment is relevant here because people are punished for violating moral rules. 

 Morality is the part of ethics concerned with prohibitions and requirements, the part that requires enforcement and punishment.  We do not want children in our community to die.  So, if a child dies when it could have been easily saved by an adult witness, who refrained from saving her because he didn’t want to get his clothes wet, we would agree that person abdicated their responsibility, and, at the least, shun that person.  

Good and evil are mutually exclusive kinds.  Harms are often identifiable physical events that lead to bad outcomes.   It’s famously rather difficult to define what “good” is.  It seems that there’s a lot of good things we could do, but it’s hard to know beforehand what will be the specific  good things that come out of what we do.  Giving a stranger directions, giving food to the food bank, caring for a sick person - other than a handful of obvious actions like that, it’s hard to know what really comes from all our good intentions.  But it’s very different with evils.  Everyone agrees that we ought to avoid harming others, killing others, stealing from, and deceiving others, and that violating these rules merits punishment.  The presence of prohibitions and punishments is a tell.  We want to avoid evil at all cost, so we maintain a strict system of regulation to do just that - it’s called “Morality”. This we can do by all agreeing to follow what amounts to a short list of prohibitions and requirements.

It’s better to see evil as a kind of black and white thing.  We need to prioritize preventing it. We need to keep  simple what we want to avoid, and have a handful of rules that everyone is aware of, prohibiting actions that lead to harm.  Generally speaking, watching a child drown, when you alone could have saved them, is going to lead to bad outcomes.  We know this ahead of time.  Avoiding evils needs to be prioritized because of the imminent consequences.

The good side of the ledger is nothing like the above description.  Good comes from inside us, we just need to encourage it, it doesn’t require rigid rules.  On the road to good we can be encouraged to do certain kinds of helpful things and discouraged from making life hard for others.  Life is full of our mistakes, so we act and try to learn from our mistakes.  Most of the time we do what we think is right, and we take feedback when we’ve done something wrong.  This is the domain of ethics, where we choose to follow ideals, and correct our transgressions when possible.

Ethics, while it includes morality within its scope,  is more about carrots than sticks.  Most of the time we hope what we do will lead to good but we often don’t know what the future consequences of our actions will be.   There are many ways to do good and have a good life.  To some extent we have to let go and trust that adults have the wherewithal to figure this out on their own, even if that is not always true.

  Why not inform people that there are children starving in Africa who could be saved by our giving money to particular charities? That’s the domain of ethics.  We  encourage and discourage actions in order to guide people.  Obviously, Peter Singer realizes this, because he doesn’t argue that we ought to be impelled to give to these charities.  He is trying to convince us through argument.  But his argument is subtly misleading.  He is arguing that because we feel obligated to help save a drowning child we should feel equally obligated to save children in Africa from starving, since the effect of our acting in either case results in saving children’s lives.

 I’m sure that Peter Singer would agree that helping to save people’s lives from starvation in a faraway  country is an ethical choice not an obligation. The problem lies in Singer making no distinction between Ethics and Morality. Singer equates morality with ethics, so he is blind to the difference between a moral system that has publicly known prohibitions and requirements and ethical systems that  compete amongst themselves for influence through persuasive ideologies.  Following Utilitarianism is an ethical choice, just as becoming a Christian.  We ought to be able to choose rather than be forced into any ethical system.  If it was an obligation, then ethics would be unviable, as, in fact Peter Singer shows, by insisting that we should take all of the excess money we have and give it to suitable charities.  That is not morality, that is a certain kind of ethical life, one where we try to maximize the number of children saved globally.  It would be unviable for it to be a requirement for everyone.

Singer does not seem to respect the common intuition that when, in some circumstances, we ought to help our neighbours, it does not follow that we ought to help people  in distant lands.  The fact is we are not obligated.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t help people in other places. It just means that we are under no moral obligation to do so, and no one will think we merit punishment if we don’t.  We may be criticized by people like Peter Singer, we may be encouraged to give to charity, but we shouldn’t be required to do it. 

But we are responsible for acting morally in our particular neck-of-the-woods.  And being participants in a moral system is essential because it’s not a choice to opt out of morality.  If you do, you are liable to be arrested, shunned or banished.  If you stand in the middle of fifth avenue, in New York City and shoot someone, then you will be put in jail. But, if you stand on a soap box and loudly reject Utilitarianism or Christianity, and publicly announce that henceforth you will refrain from giving to any charity, you might lose friends, but you have not violated any moral rules.  

 Ethics is about ideals: living the good life,  being virtuous, helping others, facilitating the best in people.  Morality is about avoiding imminent harm.  You cannot opt out of the moral system the way you can opt out of practicing Christianity.  You can make up your own ethical system if you want, but you can’t make up your own moral system.  If you reject common morality, you will be considered an outlaw and treated accordingly.  And this is necessary because the moral system will break down when enough people are allowed to violate it with impunity.  When that happens, society itself breaks down. Hence the necessity of punishment in the moral system.

 There are no societies without morality but there are Christian societies, Buddhist societies, Pagan societies, multi-cultural societies, etc.  There is no one ethical system; one that always works; or one that everyone everywhere is required to adhere to.  But there is one human moral system in the sense that in every society there will be publicly known prohibitions and requirements, and most people will agree that violating moral rules merits punishment.  The content of these rules will vary from place to place and time to time, but the basic structure of the moral system is the same.  Morality is always about avoiding harm and it always requires enforcement.  In contrast there is much more variance in ethical systems,  they can be about following the golden rule, maximizing the general welfare, honouring our ancestors,  earning good karma, or following the eightfold path.  Whatever they are, you should be able to choose whether or not to follow them.

Here I Stand!

 I’ve been trying to find a good historical example of a person who stood up to the most powerful people of the day and ended up changing the entire world, and blimey if I haven’t found him in the person of Martin Luther.

 “Here I stand.  I can do no other!”  That’s a sentence that has reverberated over the last five hundred years. In 1517, Pope  Leo X  had demanded that Martin Luther recant  his criticisms of Catholic doctrine. 

Luther’s  attack is not a rejection of Christian doctrine.  He shared with all other believers  prioritizing individual salvation. What is different is that Luther challenged the Pope’s authority over salvation, and he gave a convincing theological argument.   Luther appealed  to scripture’s authority over all humans, since all Christians believed at the time that the  Holy Scriptures were infallible.  He ends his defence by stating:  “ “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” 

 The Pope’s position was that giving financial support for the church earned you merits that drew on Jesus’s sacrificial power that had been invested in the institution of the church through the church’s monopoly on the sacraments. Against this, Luther appealed to Augustine’s foundational concept of original sin, which implicated all humans, and, it meant, paradoxically, that without God’s grace, nothing one could do would contribute in any way towards their own salvation.  It is only by subjectively trusting in God in this moment that a person is saved, he insisted.  On this basis Luther condemned the practice of "indulgences”, ie.  gaining merits towards salvation by giving money to fund the church’s projects.

The key to Martin Luther’s impact, is that he successfully broke the Catholic hierarchy’s medieval monopoly on theology and the sacraments by appealing to scripture and individual conscience. Luther’s defiance created the spark that led to the modern age: the age of the individual, the age of mass literacy and education, and the secular age. 

 It’s been five hundred years since Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Cathedral,  and the idea that we ought to obey our own conscience is still  in currency;  most of us are comfortable in this modern secular world, where people from multiple faiths live together in peace; in Western European inspired societies it is less and less the case that churches or mosques have any jurisdiction over our secular activities;  Even the division between secular and religious can be traced back to Luther, through his two kingdom doctrine.

 Luther had effectively destroyed the very idea that any person or institution could be considered infallible,  and his words had the  effect, not of cementing Biblical infallibility, but of opening up Christian writings to new critique and interpretation.  Now we look down on countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, that impose a single religious doctrine on the entire population, countries that, not coincidentally, have no respect for individual conscience.   I may not believe the same things that Luther believed, but I do recognize the importance of what he did for making the modern world that we live in possible.  I think we can see by Luther’s example the world changing potential that can come from standing up to a corrupt authority.

The Limits of Moral Obedience

According to Christian doctrine, the “original sin”was disobedience, which was what led to the first humans being separated from God and ejected from paradise. The Bible tells us that  at first God planted a tree of knowledge in the middle of the garden of Eden and then forbade the humans from eating its fruits.  Here we have the very first test of obedience, the kind  where children are given access to an attractive goody but are expressly forbidden from partaking, in order to see whether they have the self-discipline to obey authority.  Apparently, Adam and Eve failed the first test, hence the idea of “original sin”. 

 Note that later in the Bible, one of the “ten commandments”  is “Honour your father and mother”.   Put this way, deference to a parent’s authority appears to be a human universal.   But then we grow up and moral authority becomes a lot less simple.  Which authority to recognize?  Is it your priest or rabbi, is it the reigning monarch,  the President or the Emperor?  Or is it an abstraction like “the Law”?

Deference to authority is a central moral requirement in many cultures, but it has its limits.  What if the authorities are immoral? Should we always obey the law, even in the case of immoral laws?  This illustrates the fact that morality itself appears to be authoritative even over legal systems and human authorities. But, if so, where does morality itself derive its authority?  Indeed, how do we know when authorities or laws are immoral?  Some would say that morality derives its authority from God - a very satisfying answer for those who feel certain about these things, but ultimately a problematic answer because there are multiple claimants to knowing God’s commands, with multiple interpretations of what they are.  So we are back to square one.  And it doesn’t help that some of the most vociferous claimants to know God’s real intentions can turn out to be immoral cads such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker, and Jim Jones.

There has to be more to morality than obedience. After all, in the vast majority of human encounters we are dealing with our peers, and when we come into conflict, we need to be able to follow moral rules that we’ve already internalized and agreed on.  Immanuel Kant, who understood this situation better than most philosophers, argued that morality is the opposite of obedience to authority.  In fact, he saw it as an exercise of autonomy in the form of “moral self-legislation”. Kant sums up human autonomy in the  form of the “categorical imperative”:  "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."   I bet many of us have heard their grandma admonish,  when they were caught throwing litter on the street, saying, “What if everyone did that?”  I bet you didn’t know your grandmother was a follower of Kant’s.  Now you know better. I have to say that, as a philosopher, I am very impressed by grandmothers!  

We agree that the moral rules should be impartial, and shouldn’t favour certain people or groups, simply because of their power or status. In other words, no one is above the law.  These are all ways that morality transcends mere deference to authority. This is just as true of religious authorities as it is of secular authorities.

We Need Morality - Not Moralizing!

  People moralize when they use morality as a weapon against people they disagree with.  Some principles are in dispute:  is homosexuality wrong?  We can obviously disagree about this.  Many, if not most people, see morality through the lens of religious belief.   Although the Bible has some prohibitions of homosexual behaviour, it also has prohibitions against wearing fibres mixing wool and linen together.  And like mixing fibres together,  homosexuality is not a major theme of the  holy scriptures.  It isn’t one of the ten commandments.  Jesus never mentions it, although Paul condemns certain kinds of behaviour.  It’s not really a thing in the Bible. You can go through the whole Bible and you will find very little about homosexuality.  It is definitely not an important Biblical theme.

Nowadays there is a strong feeling among many of us that homosexuality doesn’t do any harm, unless by harm you mean ruining a parent’s expectation about getting grandchildren.So the thing is, it’s not clear that same sex preference should be the subject of morality. On the other hand, it definitely can be the subject of moralizing.  Moralizing is weaponizing or politicizing something because you don’t like the choices that some people make.

  Where we all agree on what is right or wrong, that is where moral rules should be. We all agree that killing, injuring, and maiming other people should be prohibited.  In general, if we are able, we want to be able to avoid harm whenever possible.

Rape can be seen as a serious type of harm that should always be prohibited; showing one’s genitals in public is also considered wrong; same with incest and sex with a minor; so there are definitely a number of moral prohibitions to do with sexual behaviour.  In the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the first humans, inadvertently find out that exposing oneself  in public is wrong, and go find big leaves to cover their private parts - and for some reason that only makes God more angry!

 A good argument, that makes a lot of sense,  is that sexual relations should only happen between consenting adults, and that it should be between equals.  It is wrong when it occurs between unequals in power, such as in families of origin, and in pederasty.  In contrast there are extreme religious groups that permit and even encourage unequal sexual relationships, like so-called “fundamentalist Mormons”  who allow established patriarchs to have multiple wives, including underage girls, while at the same time, callously exiling surplus young men from their colonies. Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale gives a good picture of what is wrong with the kind of unequal sexual relationship that exists in religious cults.  The point I’m making here is that the reasons for sexual prohibitions should center around harm, not  around preference. 

Socrates,  perhaps the most famous philosopher in history,  was executed, ostensibly for not believing in the gods of Athens, and for corrupting the youth.  In the case of Socrates, it seems more likely  that a group of rich Athenians manufactured the charges, and influenced the citizenry, with the aim of getting rid of Socrates,  because of the trouble they thought he caused.   This is the first well documented case of moralizing - of using moral accusations to get political results. 

We can see a similar kind of moralizing today in the political use of moralizing to scapegoat LGBTQ people in order to gain people’s votes, and win elections.  This is the modus operandi of the American Republican party, Working on people’s fears and feeding resentment, to seek revenge against their political opponents , with the aim of electing an authoritarian like Donald Trump, a man who is, in fact, grossly immoral.

We shouldn’t condemn morality for the sins of moralizing.  Everyone knows to follow the genuine moral rules in order to avoid causing harm.  Over time our collective  views about what should be prohibited have sometimes changed, but we have never abandoned a core set of beliefs about right and wrong.  Some of the ten commandments reflect that core, although a small portion of them reflect strictly religious prohibitions and are simply not moral rules, such as keeping the sabbath,  not worshipping images,  and not worshipping more than one god. These are all rules that we might choose to obey if we were Christians, Jews or Muslims, but are under no obligation to obey otherwise. Other commandments do, in fact, reflect that core of morality -  such as do not kill, do not steal,  do not lie, and do not commit adultery.

Real moral rules function to avoid harms.  Strictly religious rules function to strengthen religious identity, and so, are irrelevant to non-believers. In Canada we are lucky to not live in a country where joining a particular religion is obligatory and holding alternate beliefs is prohibited, as it is in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Faith should always be a matter of choice, and never obligatory.  It’s morality that is obligatory, because if we don’t agree to follow the moral rules we simply do not belong in any human society.

Where did Morality Come From?

Where does morality come from? We seem to feel what’s right and what’s wrong in our very bones.  Even babies, before they can speak, have been shown to have a nascent moral sense and a definite preference for good over evil.  Did God instill this capacity for moral judgement in us? According to the Bible, God forbade us this capacity when he told Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Presumably God wanted humans to receive moral knowledge from God’s commands only, but, as we now know, that didn’t work out too well.  

Consequently, there have been as many interpretations of God’s commands as there have been peoples and religions.  In fact, there is no prospect of getting beyond interpretation, because even people who claim to have gotten instruction directly from God are in competition with others who also claim this, but give radically different directives.  

What about the idea that morality evolved?  Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of natural selection, in his book The Descent of Man, argues that morality could have evolved by “group selection”, where human groups who followed moral rules were more cohesive and stronger, and therefore bested groups who didn’t.  This is an improvement over the idea of natural selection of individuals, which is the basis of Darwin’s overall theory, since “survival of the fittest” fundamentally contradicts morality.  If you can’t see this, think about the fact that widows and orphans, the sick, and the lame, i.e., those who are most likely to perish, are encouraged to do so under “Social Darwinism”, something even Darwin abhorred.

It’s interesting that not long after Darwin died, his most loyal defender, Thomas Huxley, gave a famous lecture in which he contradicted the idea that morality could have originated from natural selection. Huxley compared morality to a well-tended garden, which receives its productivity from the constant attention and effort of the gardener to cast out the weeds, and encourage the beneficial plants.  Humans cultivate productive crops whereas nature gives us weeds. Doing good and avoiding evil takes constant effort. 

 Moral systems do not exist outside human society because animal societies are strictly organized according to dominance relations.  The dominant male produces the most progeny - that’s survival of the fittest.  Whereas in most human societies the vast majority of human families are monogamous,  Monogamy destroys the alpha male’s monopoly over procreation. Indeed, in nomadic hunter gatherers, the first human cultures, male dominance type behaviours, such as boasting, threatening, and violence were actively discouraged, and sharing food was encouraged - evidence that the origins of human morality and monogamy were linked, and did not naturally evolve, but were consciously chosen by the first humans.

On Love

 What is love? It is something that has powerful biological roots in the rise of mammals. Mothers giving birth and loving and caring for their children is a mammalian thing.  Love comes from motherly love.  The hormones that facilitate motherly love are triggered by physical touch, and, since touch is often reciprocal, males can also feel love because they inherit the same hormones. 

 

Why is love so special for humans? At some point in our evolution we lost a lot of body hair which, since that change would facilitate skin-to-skin contact, might have led to  pair-bonding in humans. Pair-bonding, the sexual relations and prolonged mutual attraction between two adults, is actually rare in other mammals.  Most mammals  that live in groups live under polygyny, which is where one male monopolizes all the females and drives all the other adult males away.  There, love exists only between mother and offspring.  

We humans associate love as an emotion that lasts over a prolonged period of time, unlike most other emotions. The reason may be that human infants and children are helpless for a very long time, much longer than  any other animal. They need to be cared for for years, and it helps a lot if motherly and fatherly love lasts at least that long, so that the new generation gets a healthy start on their life’s journey. It helps the offspring if their parents stay together for a long time, and for their bonds to their own parents to  last as well, because grandparents can make a difference in their grandchildren’s survival and thriving.

The transcendence thing comes from the ecstatic nature of loving.  When, as adults, we fall in love with another, we may find ourselves consumed with our lover’s existence.  We can forget our own needs and devote ourselves to our lover’s needs instead.  This experience can be so powerful that it presents itself as a life-changing revelation, one that forms the basis of much poetry, literature, and religious thought.  Hence Plato’s famous dialogue on love: “The Symposium” and the Hebrew Bible’s “Great Commandment”: “You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, and all your soul, and with all your might” a prayer called the “Shema” by Jews, which I believe was promoted by the prophet Jeremiah after the Babylonian exodus and the destruction of Solomon’s temple.  Because the exiled Jews were no longer able to make sacrifices in the Temple this little prayer was an internal act of love between each individual Jew and God, one that could be practised in any location, making the continued survival of Judaism outside of the Holy land possible, just as a mother’s love makes the prolonged survival of her offspring possible. And then there is Christianity’s fascination with the image of the Madonna which brings us back again to where it all began - a mother’s love for her child.

Tibet and China - "Fellow Passengers"

 Xi (April 2022):  "Countries around the world are like passengers aboard the same ship who share the same destiny."

C.J. : Unfortunately some of those passengers have already become shipwrecked!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Ns02qzLA8&t=3s