What is Moral?
Morality appears highly subjective. How do you determine what is right and wrong? Is there an objective morality? Are there universal morals? I still haven't escaped the gravity of J.S. Mill. My moral construct is based in largest part on Classical Utilitarianism, and is as free from religious influence as possible (and yes, I'm a hedonist). This sparks all night debates with my religious friends, and I realize Utilitarianism has its faults. Andy inspired this question: How do you decide what is moral?
posted by Aethlos at 7:26 PM
31 Comments:
I don't think decision comes into it, to be honest - morals are the result of upbringing, social environment, all sorts of factors which influence you from infancy. The concepts of right and wrong are absorbed subliminally; only in later years do you appreciate the enormous grey area between the two.
Exploring that chasm as an adult is something which may (and probably should) be done in conjunction with others, comparing attitudes and considering how others would react.
Okay, then let me rephrase: How do you know what's moral? :)
How do you know? Look at what's worked in the past. That's where most morals come from. Kosher started out as a bunch of good ideas, epidemiologically speaking. Now look at it.
hey... fascinating point biscuits. but couldn't one argue - prior to a couple of hundred years ago - that slavery worked in the past. it worked for thousands of years. this is the only time in recorded history when slavery wasn't an institution in many parts of the world. so slavery worked for thousands of years.... was it therefore moral? or was it a heinous inhumane evil - that "worked" fine for thousands of years?
Jesus said "slaves obey your masters" - wasn't Jesus sort of a MAJOR PRICK for this adomonishment? Or - because slavery was an accepted institution - was this a "moral" commandment from Jesus? Slavery is immoral in my Utilitarian Code, but the authors of the new testament had no problems with it. Hmmmm...
I suspect the concept of universal morals is something of a utopia, as the whole of humanity does not (nor should it) think identically. The crux of the problem, for me, lies in whether one chooses to behave in a way that benefits themselves or the world at large. Some people (dictators among them) will act selfishly and suppress others' desires, while others (Mother Theresa being a prime example) keep the good of the wider community uppermost in their minds, even at the expense of their own needs.
The vast majority of us, however, lie somewhere between these two extremes: we may strive for the common good, but our human frailty will cause us to look to our own advantage on occasion. Even the most idealistic will struggle to do what is right as opposed to reaching a decision based on personal reasons.
It occurs to me that I cannot think of an instance where one person's selfish approach to life has benefited others, however inadvertently. This being a great forum for debate, I'm sufficiently intrigued almost to want someone to disprove this.
i would argue that the one person (a personal friend of mine) who acted WHOLLY out of PURE SELF INTEREST and simultaneously did the greatest good - was Mother Teresa.
I have never known anyone in my life who believed that any GREATER personal reward could come from anything but serving others - specifically - ministering to The Poorest of The Poor. Mother believed the GREATEST most VALUABLE most FULFILLING most DELICIOUS most REWARDING thing that any human could do - was to SERVE OTHERS. And she did just exactly that - she did the ONE THING ON EARTH THAT GAVE HER MORE PERSONAL REWARD than anything else she could have done. Nothing gave her MORE PLEASURE and more SATISFACTION than serving others.
The only way Mother could have really sacrificed herself - or denied herself pleasure or denied herself SATISFACTION, DENIED HERSELF REWARD - would have been to NOT SERVE OTHERS. Is it a sacrifice to do what you love? No. It's a joy. She loved serving the poor.
After spending so many months with Mother Teresa - working for her at Kalighat, and Shishu Bawhan, etc., i have come to the conclusion that NO ONE i've EVER MET was more PURELY DRIVEN BY PERSONAL REWARD than that woman. She believed heart and soul that there was NO GREATER REWARD or NO GREATER SATISFACTION, than serving others... she believed that the BEST and most FULFILLING life one could live was to be lived in the service of others... and so what did she do? Did she DENY the satisfaction and fullfillment of serving others? NO. She did the ONE SINGLE THING that gave her the DEEPEST AND MOST PROFOUND REWARD she could ever get. After knowing Mother Teresa, i can say there is only ONE way she could have Sacrificed her life - that would have been to DENY the needs of others. To sacrifice would have been to ignore the sick and the hungry and the helpless.
I have never met any human more solely driven by self-reward than Mother Teresa.
For her there was only ONE NIRVANA - serving the Poorest of the Poor. If my Nirvana was serving the poorest of the poor - i would still be living in Calcutta. But i find greater rewards in things i do here.
Mother T. quite consciously chose THAT NIRVANA. That Service. That Committment. THAT REWARD.
Anyone who would try to argue that her PERSONAL REWARD was not deeper and more profound than most people's alive - would be nuts. I don't know of any human who gained a deeper reward from life than Mother Teresa - and i don't know of any human who worked as hard toward that goal.
A Saint? Yes. Selfless? No.
Only ONE thing fulfilled her and made her happy - and she INUNDATED HERSELF in it 28 hours a day 9 days a week. She was insanely addicted to pleasure - and nothing gave her deeper and more profound pleasure than feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and loving the unloved.
Mother Teresa is a perfect example of the best form of TOTAL SELF-INDULGENCE. There is only ONE way she could have DENIED HERSELF PLEASURE: to ignore the needs of others.
I wish you could have seen her tiny wrinkled face when she handed a plate of rice and dahl to a hungry child - OMG - the pleasure, the satisfaction - the PURE JOY - greater than any Oscar recipient, more intense than any heroine junkie - more ecstatic than any lottery winner - more perennial than any billionaire - more over-the-moon trip the lights fantastic magnificent JOY than any joy i have witnessed in anyone I've ever known. And she only got that high ONE WAY - serving others. The only time Mother Teresa was NOT filled with joy was when she talked to reporters or when she sat for pictures. SO, what was a Sacrifice for her? On what occasions did she DENY HERSELF, DENY HER PLEASURE? She denied herself when she talked to reporters and when she sat for photos. In other words, Mother Teresa acted selflessly about 20 minutes per week. She spent all but 20 minutes per week engaged in the one thing that made her higher and happier than anything on the planet. So was she "selfless"? NO. If she spent 40 hours a week sitting for photos and doing interviews she would have been EXTREMELY SELFLESS. But she didn't. Rather, she did what she LOVED best. She served the poorest of the poor, she indulged her GREATEST DESIRE. She indulged her GREATEST ENJOYMENT. Make no mistakes - Mother Teresa deprived herself of joy and satisfaction on VERY few occasions. She acted, 99 percent of the time, out of pure self-interest... the beauty of it was that the thing that interested her the most was taking care of others.
to beat a dead horse: If someone LOVES feeding the hungry and healing the sick, and HATES talking to reporters and sitting for photos, WHAT KIND OF LIFE IS SELF-INDULGENT? WHAT SCHEDULE IS SELF-SERVING? Selflessness would be spending 12 hours a day talking to reporters. Selflessness would be posing for Vanity Fair layouts. Mother Teresa spent a very tiny amount of time doing things she didn't enjoy - things that didn't give her a deep feeling of reward. She spent the overwhelming majority of her life doing what she loved. And what is more self indulgent than denying things that cause you pain and devoting yourself to things that give you pleasure? Okay, i'm going to bed now... so tomorrow i can spend the day doing things that give me pleasure. Too bad i get more joy from brunch at the Ritz than from feeding the homeless. I'm no Mother Teresa.
"Morality" is not about enjoying brunch more than feeding the homeless, it's about putting other people's needs ahead of your own desires. Maybe not for Mother Teresa, but for most people.
In last night's post you said that morality is a "social construct," and it is, but that must be used as an objective, not pejorative, term. It shouldn't be used to imply that morality is "artificial" and therefore something we needn't take seriously.
The root of morality is compassion. How do we "decide" what is right and wrong? As I pointed out last night, human beings hold as the highest virtue the obligation to protect the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, and that, maybe, more than anything else, is what separates us from the animal kingdom in which species look exclusively to their own survival. Most simply put, morality is the line between whether an action is beneficial or detrimental. Of course people are probably already saying, but it's not that black and white! Of course not. Lying is wrong, because you are intentionally deceiving someone. But what if you make the choice to deceive person A because you believe it will protect person B because person A is not a moral person?
Morality has become a difficult word these days because the people who talk about it the most seem to be the people most driven by ego and a narrow vision of the world, hoping to force their understanding of things on others. The truly moral person, however, would recognize that the flaw lies with the people not in "morality" as an idea.
oooh... excellent. see, that's why we love andy. yes, there are some occasions when lying is a moral imperative (remember those exercises in situational ethics classes - bleeding person comes through front door and hides in bedroom, angry knock at door seconds later...etc etc etc). protecting A from B, of course, but what about lying about someone's cooking or someone's painting? is it immoral to tell someone dinner was delicious if it wasn't? or that their new haircut looks great if it looks awful? i know about the imperative cases, but what about the cases where no one's in danger? i tell friends when their cooking sucks, but not strangers. eeek. but my moral code is radically out of sych with society's on the whole. I'm not even a good utilitarian. but andy's on to something about the compassion part.
god forbid i should ever be confronted with a kill-or-be-killed self-defense situation, yikes. for me killing another human being is immoral - no capital punishment (even for mcveigh and dahmer), and no war/military killing. I suppose it's a good thing there are others who can do those jobs. and now bill d. even has me reconsidering peter singer and the morality of killing non-human animals. omg, what if i'm a closet vegetarian. i wouldn't put it past me. and if i'm simply in deep denial, it's because i don't want to get off this atkins diet. eek
so i'm tempted to say capital punishment is immoral -to me- and killing in war is immoral -for/to me- but moral for the ally soldier in wwii, but that brings Mill back into my brain and i'm tempted to agree that a thing is only moral or immoral if i believe the action/inaction should be compulsory, i.e.: capital punishment is immoral because i believe we should be prohibited from doing it, but killing in war is not (neces) immoral because we should not be prohibited from doing it (although i, myself, will not participate).
and don't anyone call me when you're dying of cancer and want to be euthanized. Can't do that either. But, UNLIKE capital punishment, and LIKE war-killing i don't think others should be compelled not to euthanize. kinda. I mean, i don't find what kevorkian did immoral, but legalizing euthanasia across the board puts strange and complex pressures on the oldest and poorest members of a society - which may be immoral. But Mill works again for me with euthanasia because i wouldn't compel others not to euthanize... hmmm... but nor would i globalize it. so now i'm stuck again. And it would not therefore be immoral for me to euthanize, but i would still refuse to do it - as in war killing, but not capital punishment.
It's all subjective. Fine to debate, but the bottom line is that it's what Ifeel is right. My thoughts and feelings about any issue are indelibly and automatically stamped with "moral" or "immoral".
Religious people argue against what they call "moral relativism" even though it is obvious that morality changes according to culture, geography, religion and chronology.
Religious people assume an "absolute morality" which they claim their god belief/god represents.
I find this a difficult notion to agree with as the majority of people out there in the world can't agree on what colour to paint the kitchen , let alone which religious dogma represents absolute morality."
Obviously our ideas of what constitutes morality evolves. Even religious morality evolves.
I don't know many christians, for example, who think that it is moral to carry out the punishments for sin in leviticus for example. Except for a few fundamentalist loonie christians.
Leviticus 20:13
'If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.'
And why don't they believe that is an example of "absolute morality" anymore? Because their notion of morality has evolved, even if they don't want to admit to it.
Tony, you perfectly describe the capitalist ethics of Adam Smith, so the example you can cite is any merchant. Also >>> Spencer thanks for sharing those stories and photographs. Some highlights from this thread that resonate with me are Andy's point about compassion, Spencer's point about situational ethics, and Beep's introduction of the word evolution. So let me synthesize that. In my experience, I see scads of people using situational ethics that look suspiciously derived from pack dynamics. An ethologist could account for that morality. We are creatures of evolution, and pack behavior is easily intuited as common sense and applied to social interactions. Going further, I tend to believe the most universal rules that govern behavior are evolutionarily inherited and that they also falsely pass for moral and ethical understanding. It's a nasty world when the monkeys get out of control. Andy has pointed out that something must separate us from animals, but I would rephrase that. Something must separate moral understanding from our own animal nature. Compassion is a good place to start. Mother Theresa's joy - and that emotional high you describe - are great examples. In my own efforts to escape the clutches of evolutionary psychology, which in my view includes Oedipus and the reward mechanisms you describe, I fall back on conscience, which I think is a two-fold experience. First, most of us experience "good" conscience only as the absence of psychological pain. I "know" something is moral only if I am at relative peace. I "know" something is immoral if I have pangs of guilt or regret or remorse. Second, I'm always holding out for a positive experience of conscience, because, per my religious fancy, I believe conscience to be our faculty for experiencing the Word of God, should it ever present itself to us. Getting back to evolution and Oedipus, I also believe that we are estranged from our own God-given conscience via the Oedipal apparatus...that we expropriate our conscience to a societal ideal...which allows cultural relavity to enter the discussion. If our conscience is allied with the most socially and politically influential ideal, then our certainty about morality goes out the window, and the relativists and situationalists win the day (with a very potent neurochemical reward mechanism). Ultimately, I like your classical utilitarianism - and agree - because of its elegance, simplicity, and like-minded disavowal of egoism. And I am intrigued by your hedonist reading of Mother Theresa's good works. Now if only I could get my neurons to fire like hers!
I'm just shocked at reading this thread! There's nothing more I can say about that.
Aethlos, clearly you should know that even your classical, a la JS Mill Utilitarianism would not hold any credibility in attempting to defend the immorality of slavery! Any consistant utilitarian would have to concede, in the manner of John Rawls, a "reasonable pluralism" in judging morality -- which opens wide the door for the possibility of a society that would infact re-instate slavery and deem it fully MORAL.
Oh, and P.S.: I met M. Teresa. Personally, I thought she was a bore.
And I'd hope that you would atleast slightly credit Rand (whom you have read) for *her* original exposition of the true meaning of concepts like "sacrifice" and "selfishness" which you so abundantly have used in your "hedonistic" revisionism of M. Teresa.
Beepbeep, ummm...one really ought to be more careful about making sweeping generalizations about "religious people." Faith communities are quite diverse. I happen to be an active Episcopalian. It's a safe bet that many of my opinions would defy your easy categorization of "religious people."
I'll have to go back and re-read CS Lewis' chapter on where morality comes from in his book Mere Christianity. He made some good points about compassion as the basis for universal morality.
Andy, just to throw in a bone, hasn't compassion been shown in dozens of cheap Hollywood movies to be quite easily misapplied to further evil? Just think of The Ring when that poor boy asks his mother, "You didn't help her did you?" And doesn't that mother's feat fly in the face of compassion when she finally tells Samara "I'm not your mother!" In that case, her most brutal act was the most moral. [Sorry for the amusing myself with that counterexample.] My other point is that you may elevate compassion to something Beautiful and specifically and uniquely human, but not convincingly. And you misstate evolutionary theory if by survival of the fittest you mean to include only brute competition, because the most fit are often the most cooperative. You also make a false statement when you say that compassion "is what separates us from the animal kingdom in which species look exclusively to their own survival." First, nurturing traits, like compassion, are already observed in the animal kingdom and already accounted for as products of natural selection. Second, when is not compassion furthering the survival of the species? Couldn't all the frills and warm fuzzies just be an ulterior motive?
BeepBeep, i'm SO with you on 'religious people' (sorry andy, you're highly atypical of a religious person - you're pretty rational), and based on that Leviticus quote you will LOVE MY BIBLE NOTES!... that heinous Leviticus quote is really one of the more mild of the evil shit in the holy bible. Chiron is walking library - i'm reminded of Lincoln's definition of his religion: "when i do good i feel good and when i do bad i feel bad"... i'm a big fan of that, but i hope garden variety sadists don't adopt that criterion. And the one thing i'll credit Rand for is being the novelist i most love. There are huge horrifying problems with her political and economic ideas... the world is not as b/w as rand's - but i've spent enough time flacking Atlas in these pages, and i've learned not even to discuss it with people who haven't read it (danger). And my reading of Mill's Utilitarianism would absolutely prohibit slavery - an institution which promotes far more unhappiness than happiness vs. Freedom which promotes far more happiness than unhappiness (except for masochists i suppose) and i made it CLEAR that i'm not a consistent utilitarian, and i find all kinds of holes in rawls AND urmson's 'rule utilitarianism' (i can't imagine any argument in which Rule or Act Utilitarianism could be twisted to assert that the reinstitution of slavery would increase the overall balance of happiness, nuts.) Oh, and Ergo: she probably thought you were a reporter ;), i assure you when she's in the field she's more exciting than any superbowl or summer movie. C.S. Lewis, ugh, okay, i liked Surprised By Joy, but all those 'The Cat, The Cunt, and The Closet" books made my hair ache. FINALLY found something worth discussing!.... i get tired of haranguing the Fag Five and President Dumbfuck. I'm actually out in the middle of nowhere today - Walden Pond sort of... and MISSING MADONNA TONIGHT. :(
Does anyone happen to remember Robt. Wright's book, The Moral Animal and it's encouragement to look at ourselves under the clarifying lens of evolutionary psycology? I think it is up to each of us to pursue our own private vision of morality. Perhaps too many people are still naively viewing the world as harmonious. Do we really have options of our choosing? What is our attitude and approach to life? If we want to live a truely moral life, and make rational decisions, maybe we must first understand what kind of animal we are.
Morality is not relative...even what we see as the most straight forward wrong of "Thou shall not kill" doesn't work for African tribes, whose practice of genocide is part of who they are. But, as you know, America has to push it's weight around and try determine moralty for all, and gee, it ain't working, is it?
Re: Andy, I agree, not all religious people believe that homosexuals will go to hell, just a large % of fundamental evangelical christians and probably most muslims.
RE raven, I would suggest that the "thou shalt not kill" code is meant for people within your own tribe/ ethos.
There are thousands of instances where "thou shalt kill thousands of them" has applied and is seen to be legitimate.
To me, on the surface, it's simple...if something hurts you or hurts another, it's lacking moral luster. How does one define "hurt?
As in doing harm, either physically, psychologically, or mentally.
In defense of religion, I actually think most religious people are like Andy. It's those who scream the loudest and protest the most who are in the minority.
But it's all political now and the religious right has done a terrific job in marrying the two.
The conservatives used an effective tool in changing the landscape of religion and politics in this country back in the 80's.
They used the grassroots template that worked so effectivey in the civil rights movement and crafted it to their won use. So some churches were used (and still are) to sell their political viewpoints.
Soon came the Moral Majority who said they spoke for Christian values and morals and everyone just accepted it.
But statistics say most Americans are Democrats and most Americans consider themselves religious with a belief in God, and I would say that most Americans probably pay little attention to what Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell say.
I hope this wasn't too off topic.
Good points dave. And, for the record, there is no such thing as off topic in this blog. I'm about as desultory as any blogger can be... so feel free everyone... rental cars, social security, ontology, false eyelashes, the sacking of Carthage, the first fossilized specimen of Australopithecus, suspension bridges, coonskin caps, the European Space Agency, Egypt in 1911, Palo Alto swimming pools, lime Jell-O, watchmakers, Orion's belt, silkworms, the California Gold Rush, Florence Nightingale, Louis XV's flying chair, left-handed knights, epilepsy, Wall Street, Edward Gibbons, who cares... talk about anything...
I agree with Glenda the benchmark is whether the behavior hurts someone else though I might throw in the word "unnecessarily," since sometimes it's necessary to hurt someone to do good; that's why lying, cheating and stealing is sometimes the only moral thing to do. However, I'd say hurting only yourself unnecessarily isn't immoral, just stupid.
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