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.