Genuine Morality 3

I have a paper slowly taking shape in my thoughts, many of which are in these posts.  The paper would argue 1) that Darwinian explanations of cooperative behavior can support a genuine conception of morality and 2) that such a conception will be Aristotelian and perhaps even Platonic in character. 

Here I am thinking a bit more about the question of what constitutes genuine morality.  I can see three approaches to the question that focus entirely on the moral action without regard to moral consciousness. 

One holds that an action is genuinely moral if it accords with a prescribed list of moral actions.  The prescription presumably requires some authority.  The authority may come from tradition or from the fact that it is held sacred by the tribe or is issued from the members of the tribe that speak with authority.  It may come, of course, from some more or less divine legislator.  Thus it is moral to obey my father because “honor your father” is an authoritative prescription and obedience is a necessary form of such honoring. 

In this view, all that matters is the consonance between the action and the prescription.  Thus someone might be considered a perfectly observant Jew if he perfectly keeps the commandments, even if he is an atheist and keeps the commands out of some kind of ethnic pride.  Likewise, Oedipus is in deep trouble because his actions violate proscribed rules even though he himself had no idea that he was doing wrong. 

A second view is that of utilitarianism, which holds that an action is right if its beneficial consequences outweigh any harmful consequences.  Returning a wallet full of money to the proper owner is right if it is better for each of us if people behave that way.  It is largely irrelevant whether the person returning the wallet does so because he has a sense of personal honor or because he hopes to be admired for his display of honorable behavior. 

Third is my argument concerning the moral logic of an action.  In a case where a number of actors will benefit from cooperation but are tempted to cheat, cooperating is the right thing to do.  It doesn’t matter in this account whether the actors are conscious of the moral import of their actions or whether they are conscious at all.  Cleaner fish and the predators whose jaws they clear of parasites are involved in a relationship which is logically moral, though I doubt that they experience anything like guilt or righteous indignation.  Even computer programs can play games which are logically moral. 

I think that all three of these accounts bring something to the table.  We often judge behavior solely by a set of rules, if only for practical reasons.  Morality is surely utilitarian, as much of moral behavior is necessary for the smooth functioning of social interaction and cooperation.  Likewise I regard moral logic as something like one of Socrates’ ideas: a pattern that is written up, if not in heaven, at least in a larger ledger than human law. 

It seems obvious, however, that something is lacking in all three.  If the first were a complete account, then someone who doesn’t eat shellfish because he is allergic to it would be just as moral as someone who declines because of God’s commandment.  The person who saves someone from a burning house solely because he hopes to build a reputation that will serve him in the next election seems scarcely moral in the same way as someone who acts because he cares about other people more than himself.  A computer program can behavior morally only in the most robotic sense. 

Here the notion of genuine morality helps make sense of Divine Command theory and supports the Biblical notion of God.  Why, one might ask, should we do as God or the gods command?  The most obvious answer is that we should do so for the same reason that we ought to drive the speed limit when we are being followed by a state police vehicle: guns and dungeons.  The obvious problem with that answer is that it reduces moral behavior to merely self-interested exchange and all of us to well-policed scoundrels.  If I do the right thing only because I desire heaven and fear hell (even if the right thing involves merely a silent confession of faith) I am simply making a deal with a powerful partner. 

In the Biblical view, God is by definition the perfect lawgiver.  I may win an eternal reward by faith, but I believe and act in accord with that belief because what God commands is necessarily the right thing to do.  Doing what God commands solely because God commanded it, and not for any benefit that may come to me or others thereby, strikes me as a more mature version of the Jewish faith.  St. Paul was willing to sacrifice his own salvation for the salvation of the gentiles, or so he wrote. 

A satisfying account of human morality needs to be consonant with our moral emotions.  These tell us that the motive for an action is key to its moral character.  We want our spouses and parents and children and friends to provide us with attention but we also want them to genuinely love us.  We are more suspicious of apparently moral behavior when it has an ulterior motive than we are of openly immoral behavior. 

Understanding the evolutionary origins of the moral emotions can help us understand why motives are essential to morality.  A partner who is genuinely motived by a sense of justice will be more reliable than one who acts out of mere expediency.  A community of people who nurture and enforce moral rules out of a genuine moral consciousness will inherit the earth. 

While Darwinian theory can explain why we are capable of and admire genuine moral behavior, it cannot quite tell us why such behavior is genuinely admirable.  That will require some consultation with Plato and Aristotle. 

Relative Virtue & Unqualified Virtue

Any philosophical account of ethics will try to discover something that is universally descriptive of moral beliefs and behaviors.  Some accounts are limited to description and these we may call relativistic accounts.  What is right and wrong are so only relative to some observer (moral subjectivism) or to some group of observers (cultural relativism).  Both forms of relativism deny that there are moral standards that are true, independently of the observer. 

The varieties of moral objectivism look for precisely such a standard.  The four serious contenders are follows:

1.       Divine Command Theory holds that the standard is the authority of a divine or otherwise transcendent lawgiver. 

2.      Utilitarianism holds that the standard is the beneficial consequences of the moral action. 

3.      Deontology holds the standard is the good will: moral actions are those and only those done because they are the right thing to do. 

4.      Virtue ethics, as I have argued in these posts, finds the standard in the reciprocal relationship between the virtuous action and the virtuous character. 

All of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses and, I believe, each captures some genuine features of moral behavior and consciousness as it actually presents itself in human life.  Most of my students in Philosophy 100 tend to switch between the first three depending on the situation. 

I hold with number 4 because I believe that it provides both the best descriptive account of morality as a universal dimension of the human being and because I believe that it provides the best counsel for someone wanting to know what to do.  I would add to this that it incorporates the insights of the other accounts, including even some of those that come from cultural relativism.  I will focus here on the latter. 

Cultural relativists recognize that different groups frequently have different sets of moral rules.  The relativist argues that these rules are ultimately arbitrary and thus to be right or wrong is nothing other than to be in sync or out of sync with some particular cultural set.  Relativists tend to emphasize the disagreements between distinct moral cultures and prefer to ignore or deny that there are any universal rules.  All moral cultures are the product of a distinct history and thus owe their character largely to accident. 

Interestingly, Aristotle (the authority in virtue ethics) recognized what one might call relative virtue in his Politics.  To be a virtuous citizen in an aristocracy is not the same thing as to be virtuous citizen in a democracy.  The one must support and the other must oppose an inegalitarian distribution of political honors and offices.  On the other hand, Aristotle thinks that the virtuous man is the same in all regimes. 

It is true that the vast majority of human beings acquire their moral beliefs from the culture they are raised in and that moral codes differ at least in the values and rules that they prioritize.  Cultural relativism allows these facts to obscure the universal ground of morality.  From Chapter 2 of Moral Origins, by Christopher Boehm:

The rules that individuals internalize are the cultural product of groups that gossip moralistically on an ongoing basis.  That’s how moral codes originate, stay in place, and are continuously refined. 

The facts that Boehm points out here are not relative but universal.  Virtually all human beings are born and raised and live in moral communities and internalize the moral rules of the groups.  This is to say that those rules become part of their psychological equipment and form the original ground of their moral intuitions. 

However, just as the multitude of human languages all testify to a human capacity for speech, so the various moral cultures testify to our universal capacity for morality.  A particular rule internalized by some culture may be specific to that culture (e.g., not eating shell fish).  Internalizing moral rules, enforcing them by shaming, shunning, expulsion, or some more violent sanction, are not specific to any culture.  They are human things. 

When something like moral consciousness and collective enforcement are universal, there are two likely explanations.  One is that they are natural.  These have been selected for in our evolutionary history.  The other is that they are artificial but address universal human needs.  Which is it?  Both, I am sure.  Our tendency to form moral cultures is too deeply engrained in us to be a recent product of history.  However, it is flexible enough that we can modify it by intention. 

While cultural relativism blinds one to the universal foundation of morality, it also overemphasizes the difference between moral cultures.  Again from Boehm:

Today human groups come in the form of nations or cities, as well as tribes and nomadic bands, but they all have such moral codes.  And even though certain types of moral belief can vary considerably (and sometimes dramatically) between cultures, all human groups frown on, make pronouncements against, and punish the following: murder, undue use of authority, cheating that harms group cooperation, major lying, theft, and socially disruptive sexual behavior.  These basic rules of conduct appear to be human universals. 

Again, these universal rules must be either the products of natural inclinations or they emerge historically because they meet natural needs.  Again, it is probably both; though I suspect that the flexibility we in definitions of murder or decisions about which uses of authority are undue puts the weight on the latter. 

Virtue ethics is grounded in a realistic appraisal of moral development.  We learn to be good, in so far as we can, by internalizing the moral rules of our native culture and imitating those who are identified as virtuous by that culture.  We learn that some people are better than others and if we strive to be like the best we will make moral progress in that context. 

As moral cultures differ, the best person in one may well be different in character from the best person in another.  However, if Boehm is right, the two may not be all that different.  Boehm relates the story of collective hunting among the Mbuti pygmies.  The hunting system was a genuine prisoner’s dilemma.  If everyone cooperates, all will get some meat.  One hunter cheated and was punished with ridicule by his tribe.  I seriously doubt that there is any human culture that would not recognize this tale and condemn the cheater. 

At some point one may recognize that some cultures are better than others and at that point adopt a critical view of her own culture.  This may result from an exposure to other cultures.  When I compare our ways to theirs, I might conclude that in some ways theirs is better.  Such a comparison is possible, however, only if there are some standards that are independent of cultural differences.  If human intelligence can discover such standards in the natural function and meaning of morality, then virtue ethics represents the mature stage in moral thought.