Subject:
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Re: One of my issues (Warning: even wordier than usual)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 18 Nov 2001 18:24:12 GMT
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Viewed:
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1137 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks writes:
> From where do you (anyone, I guess the Daves especially) think that morality
> comes? I have a kind of knowledge that I can't account for very easily. I
> think of it as this stuff written on my heart.
Let's start by trying to distinguish between two slippery terms...
I am uncomfortable with even the idea of "morality" (i.e. conformity to the
rules of right conduct; moral or virtuous conduct) because it suggests
something beyond the conduct itself, some further ambiguous reward or some
further ambiguous source for the behaviors specified -- obviously, I think
the word "morality" is very heavily loaded with religious connotations.
Consider instead the word "ethics" (i.e. the rules of conduct recognized in
respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group,
culture, etc.) which makes me a lot happier, although it is still not
perfect, because the word has fewer religious associations and because the
prescribed conduct is an agreed to standard -- agreed to by the participants
in the group (no appeal to a higher authority). Thus, describing where our
shared ideas of "ethics" comes from is a lot easier from my perspective.
That said, we can get directly to the subject of knowledge of right and
wrong not easily accounted for...
I would suggest that the feelings you are describing in terms of the innate,
are actually deeply rooted in culture and have little or nothing to do with
something akin to instinct. I refer, of course, to a culturally rooted
sense of what is "fair." I would take it one step further (because there is
a lot of talk about "paying it forward" and such) and suggest that what is
fair is firmly connected to our culturally shared ideas concerning
"reciprocity."
We human beings are social creatures, as such we have to find ways to
engender equality amongst ourselves or we obtain unhappy members of our
society as the result and this may in turn lead to undesirable consequences.
These unhappy members might act upon their unhappiness with violence,
unwanted behaviors, etc. Chief amongst these undesirable behaviors are those
encapsulated in what we often refer to as "common law crimes": rape, theft,
and murder (most crimes are some variant of these primary criminal concepts,
crimes with a "corpus delecti", a damaged body or person). To obtain this
highly desirable equality amongst persons we have developed deeply
culturally rooted (slightly culturally relative) ideas of "fairness" and
"reciprocity." Our collective sense of fairness and what is right is
commonly expressed by way of axioms like The Golden Rule: "do not unto
others as you would have others not do unto you", the French variant "One
has the right to swing one's fist right up to the tip of another's nose",
and even the pagan variant "An it harm none, do as thou wilt."
While it's no big deal that you think as you do, I would suggest it is a
learned behavior and not something that comes from some unknown source.
Stuff like the Golden Rule gets drilled into you by one kind of repetition
or another. It is axiomatic not because it has a higher authority as its
source, but simply because there's little point in arguing over the matter.
-- Hop-Frog
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