The nature of morality

The Nature of Morality by William H. ShawFrom Social and Personal Ethics (Wadsworth, 1999), 3-10 Ethics.

"The word ethics comes from the Greek word ethos, meaning character or custom," writes philosophy professor Robert C. Solomon. Today we use the word ethos to refer to the distinguishing disposition, character, or attitude of a specific people, culture, or group (as in, for example, "the American ethos" or "the business ethos"). According to Solomon, the etymology of ethics suggests its basic concerns: (1) individual character, including what it means to be "a good person," and (2) the social rules that govern and limit our conduct, especially the ultimate rules concerning right and wrong, which we call morality.

Some philosophers like to distinguish ethics from morality. To them morality refers to human conduct and values, and ethics refers to the study of those areas. Ethics does, of course, denote an academic subject, but in everyday parlance we interchange ethical and moral to describe people we consider good and actions we consider right. And we interchange unethical and immoral to describe what we consider bad people and wrong actions. This essay follows that common usage.

Moral Versus Nonmoral Standards

What falls outside the sphere of moral concern is termed nonmoral. Whether your new sports car will top out at 120 or 130 miles per hour is a nonmoral question. Whether you should top it out on Main Street on a Wednesday at high noon (or even at 3 A.M., for that matter) is a moral question. To see why requires an understanding of the difference between moral standandards and other kinds of standards. Wearing shorts to a formal dinner party is boorish behavior.

Murdering the King’s English with double negatives violates the basic conventions of proper language usage. Photographing the finish of a horse race with low-speed film is poor photographic technique. In each case a standard is violated -- fashion, grammatical, artistic -- but the violation does not pose a serious threat to human well-being.

Moral standards are different because they concern behavior that is of serious consequence to human welfare, that can profoundly injure or benefit people. The conventional moral norms against lying, stealing, and murdering deal with actions that can hurt people. And the moral principle that human beings should be treated with dignity and respect uplifts the human personality. Whether products are healthful or harmful, work conditions safe or dangerous, personnel procedures biased or fair, privacy respected or invaded are also matters that seriously affect human well-being. The standards that govern our conduct in these areas are moral standards.

A second characteristic follows from the first. Moral standards take priority over other standards, including self-interest. Something that morality condemns-for instance, the burglary of your neighbor’s home-cannot be justified on the nonmoral grounds that it would be a thrill to do it or that it would payoff handsomely. We take moral standards to be more important than other considerations in guiding our actions.

A third characteristic of moral standards is that their soundness depends on the adequacy of the reasons that support or justify them. For the most part, fashion standards are set by clothing designers, merchandisers, and consumers; grammatical standards by grammarians and students of language; technical standards by practitioners and experts in the field. Legislators make laws, boards of directors make organizational policy, and licensing boards establish standards for professionals.

In every case, some authoritative body is the ultimate validating source of the standards and thus can change the standards if it wishes. Moral standards are not made by such bodies, although they are often endorsed or rejected by them. More precisely, the validity of moral standards depends not on authoritative fiat but on the adequacy of the reasons that support or justify them. Precisely what constitutes adequate reasons for moral standards is problematic and, as we shall see, underlies disagreement about the legitimacy of specific moral principles.

Morality and etiquette

Etiquette refers to any special code of behavior or courtesy. In our society, for example, it is usually considered bad etiquette to chew with one’s mouth open or to use obscene language in public; it is considered good etiquette to say "please" when requesting and "thank you" when receiving and to hold a door open for someone entering immediately behind us. Good business etiquette, to take another example, typically calls for writing follow-up letters after meetings, returning phone calls, and dressing appropriately. It is commonplace to judge people’s manners as "good" or "bad" and the conduct that reflects them as "right" or "wrong." "Good," "bad," "right," and "wrong" here simply mean socially appropriate or socially inappropriate. In these contexts, such words express judgments about manners, not ethics.

So-called rules of etiquette that you might learn in an etiquette book are prescriptions for socially acceptable behavior. If you want to fit in, get along with others, and be thought well of by them, you should observe common rules of etiquette. If you violate the rules, then you are rightly considered ill-mannered, impolite, or even uncivilized-but not necessarily immoral.
Scrupulous observance of rules of etiquette does not make one moral.

In fact, it can camouflage moral issues. Not too long ago in some parts of the United States, it was thought bad manners for blacks and whites to eat together. Those who obeyed the convention and were thus judged well-mannered certainly had no grounds for feeling moral. The only way to dramatize the injustice underlying this practice was to violate the rule and be judged ill-mannered. For those in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, being considered boorish was a small price to pay for exposing the unequal treatment and human degradation that underlay this rule of etiquette.

Morality and law

The legality of an action does not guarantee that the action is morally right. Consider an actual case of a four-month-old baby suffering from diarrhea and fever. The family physician prescribed medication on the second day of the child’s illness and saw him during office hours on the third day. On the fourth day, the child’s condition worsened. Knowing that the doctor was not in the office that day, the parents whisked the child to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. There they were told that hospital policy forbade treating anyone already under a doctor’s care without first contacting the doctor. Unable to reach the doctor and thus denied emergency treatment, the parents took their child home, where he died later that day of bronchial pneumonia.

There was a time when hospitals had a legal right to accept for emergency treatment only those they chose to accept. Under such a rule, then, the hospital would have been exercising its legal right. But would the hospital have been morally justified in exercising that right, when by so doing it would deny the child lifesaving care? Philosophers might disagree in their answers. But they would agree that the issue can- not be satisfactorily resolved by appeal to law alone. (As it happened, the case went to court and set a precedent by repudiating the traditional discretionary powers given a hospital in operating its emergency facility. But even if the court had upheld the institution’s legal right, the hospital’s policy would still be open to moral assessment and possible criticism. )

Consider a second case. Suppose that you’re driving to work one day and see an accident victim on the side of the road, blood oozing from his leg. He is clearly in need of immediate medical attention, which you can provide because you just completed a first-aid course.

Legally speaking, you have no obligation to stop and offer aid. Under common law, the prudent thing would be to drive on, because by stopping you would bind yourself to use reason - able care. If you fail to do so and the victim thereby suffers injury, you would incur legal liability. Many states have enacted so-called "Good Samaritan laws" to provide immunity from damages to those rendering aid {except for gross negligence or serious misconduct). But in most states the law does not oblige people to render such aid or even to call an ambulance. Moral theorists would agree, however, that if you sped away without rendering aid or even calling for help, your action might be perfectly legal but would be morally suspect. Regardless of the law, such conduct would almost certainly be morally wrong.

What then may we say of the relationship between law and morality? In theory and practice, law codifies a society’s customs, ideals, norms, and moral values. Changes in law undoubtedly reflect changes in what a society takes to be right and wrong, good and bad. But it is a mistake to see law as sufficient to establish the moral standards that should guide an individual, a profession, an organization, or a society. Law simply cannot cover the variety of individual and group conduct. The law does prohibit egregious affronts to a society’s moral standards and in that sense is the floor of moral conduct. But breaches of moral conduct can fall through the cracks in that floor.

Conformity with law is not sufficient for moral conduct any more than conformity with etiquette is. By the same token, nonconformity with law is not necessarily immoral, for the law disobeyed may be unjust. Probably no one in the modern era has expressed this point more eloquently than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Confined in the Birmingham city jail on charges of parading without a permit, King penned his now famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to eight of his fellow clergymen who had published a statement attacking as unwise and untimely King’s unauthorized protest of racial segregation. King wrote:

All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court*, for it is mor-ally right; and I can urge them to disobey seg- segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong. ("Letter from Birmingham Jail," in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 85)[* In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Supreme Court struck down the half-century-old "separate but equal doctrine," which permitted racially segregated schools as long as comparable quality was maintained. ]

Professional codes of ethics

Somewhere between etiquette and law lie professional codes of ethics. These are the rules that are supposed to govern the conduct of members of a given profession. Generally speaking, the members of a profession are understood to have agreed to abide by those rules as a condition of their engaging in that profession.

Violation of the professional code may result in the disapproval of one’s professional peers and, in serious cases, loss of one’s license to practice that profession. Sometimes these codes are unwritten and are part of the common understanding of members of a profession-for example, that professors should not date students in their classes. In other instances, these codes or portions of them may be written down by an authoritative body so they may be better taught and more efficiently enforced.

These written rules are sometimes so vague and general as to be of little value, and often they amount to little more-than self-promotion by the professional organization. In other cases-for example with attorneys-professional codes can be very specific and detailed. It is difficult to generalize about the content of professional codes of ethics, however, because they frequently involve a mix of purely moral rules (for example, client confidentiality), of professional etiquette (for example, the billing of services to other professionals ), and of restrictions intended to benefit the group’s economic interests (for example, limitations on price competition).

Given their nature, professional codes of ethics are neither a complete nor a completely reliable guide to one’s moral obligations. First, not all the rules of a professional code are purely moral in character, and even when they are, the fact that a rule is officially enshrined as part of the code of a profession does not guarantee that it is a sound moral principle. As a professional, you must take seriously the injunctions of your profession, but you still have the responsibility to critically assess those rules for yourself.

Where do moral standards come from?So far you have seen how moral standards are different from various nonmoral standards, but you probably wonder about the source of those moral standards. Most, if not all, people have certain moral principles or a moral code that they explicitly or implicitly accept.

Because the moral principles of different people in the same society overlap, at least in part, we can also talk about the moral code of a society, meaning the moral standards shared by its members. How do we come to have certain moral principles and not others? Obviously, many things influence us in the moral principles we accept: our early up- bringing, the behavior of those around us, the explicit and implicit standards of our culture, our own experiences, and our critical reflections on those experiences.

For philosophers, though, the important question is not how in fact we came to have the particular principles we have. The philosophical issue is whether the principles we have can be justified. Do we simply take for granted the values of those around us? Or like Martin Luther King, Jr., are we able to think independently about moral matters? By analogy, we pick up our nonmoral beliefs from all sorts of sources: books, conversations with friends, movies, experiences we’ve had.

The philosopher’s concern is not so much with how we actually got the beliefs we have, but whether or to what extent those beliefs - for example, that women are more emotional than men or that telekinesis is possible - can withstand critical scrutiny. Likewise, ethical theories attempt to justify moral standards and ethical beliefs. The second introductory essay examines some of the major theories of normative ethics. That is, it looks at what some of the major thinkers in human history have argued are the best-justified standards of right and wrong.

But first the relationship between morality and religion on the one hand and morality and society on the other needs to be discussed. Some people maintain that morality just boils down to religion. Others have argued for the doctrine of ethical relativism, which says that right and wrong are only a function of what a particular society takes to be right and wrong. Both these views are mistaken.

Religion and Morality

Any religion provides its believers with a world view, part of which involves certain moral instructions, values, and commitments. The Jewish and Christian traditions, to name just two, offer a view of humans as unique products of a divine intervention that has endowed them with consciousness and an ability to love. Both these traditions posit creatures who stand midway between nature and spirit. On the one hand, we are finite and bound to earth, not only capable of wrongdoing but born morally flawed (original sin). On the other, we can transcend nature and realize infinite possibilities.

Primarily because of the influence of Western religion, many Americans and others view them- selves as beings with a supernatural destiny, as possessing a life after death, as being immortal. One’s purpose in life is found in serving and loving God. For the Christian, the way to serve and love God is by emulating the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In the life of Jesus, Christians find an expression of the highest virtue-love. They love when they perform selfless acts, develop a keen social conscience, and realize that human beings are creatures of God and therefore intrinsically worthwhile. For the Jew, one serves and loves God chiefly through expressions of justice and righteousness. Jews also develop a sense of honor derived from a commitment to truth, humility, fidelity, and kindness. This commitment hones their sense of responsibility to family and community.

Religion, then, involves not only a formal system of worship but also prescriptions for social relationships. One example is the mandate "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Termed the Golden Rule, this injunction represents one of humankind’s highest moral ideals and can be found in essence in all the great religions of the world:
Good people proceed while considering that what is best for others is best for themselves- ( Hitopadesa, Hinduism )

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. (Leviticus 19:18, Judaism)
Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them. (Matthew 7:12, Christianity)

Hurt not others with that which pains yourself. (Udanavarga 5:18, Buddhism)
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. (Analects 15:23, Confucianism) .
No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself. ( Traditions, Islam )

Although inspiring, such religious ideals are very general and can be difficult to translate into precise policy injunctions. Religious bodies, nevertheless, occasionally articulate positions on more specific political, educational, economic, and medical issues, which help mold public opinion on matters as diverse as abortion, euthanasia, nuclear weapons, and national defense.
Morality needn’t rest on religionMany people believe that morality must be based on religion, either in the sense that without religion people would have no incentive to be moral or in the sense that only religion can provide moral guidance. Others contend that morality is based on the commands of God. None of these claims is convincing.

First, although a desire to avoid hell and to go to heaven may prompt sori1e of us to act morally, this is not the only reason or even the most common reason that people behave morally. Often we act morally out of habit or simply because that is the kind of person we are. It would just not occur to most of us to swipe an elderly woman’s purse. And if the idea did occur to us, we wouldn’t do it because such an act simply doesn’t fit with our personal standards or with our concept of ourselves. We are often motivated to do what is morally right out of concern for others or just because it is right. In addition, the approval of our peers, the need to appease our consciences, and the desire to avoid earthly punishment may all motivate us to act morally. Furthermore, atheists generally live lives as moral and upright as believers.

Second, the moral instructions of the world’s great religions are general and imprecise: They do not relieve us of the necessity to engage in moral reasoning ourselves. For example, the Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill." Yet Christians disagree among themselves over the morality of fighting in wars, of capital punishment, of killing in self-defense, of slaughtering animals, of abortion and euthanasia, and of allowing foreigners to die from famine because we have not provided them with as much food as we might have. The Bible does not give unambiguous answers to these moral problems. So even believers must engage in moral philosophy if they are to have intelligent answers. On the other hand, there are lots of reasons for believing that, say, a cold-blooded murder motivated, by greed. is immoral; you do not have to believe in a religion to figure that out.

Third, although some theologians have advocated the divine command theory -- that if something is wrong (like killing an innocent person for fun), then the only reason it is wrong is that God commands us not to do it-many theologians and certainly most philosophers would reject this view. They would contend that if God commands human beings not to do something, like commit rape, it is because God sees that rape is wrong, but it is not God’s forbidding rape that makes it wrong. The fact that rape is wrong is independent of God’s decrees.

Most believers think not only that God gives us moral instructions or rules but also that God has moral reasons for giving them to us. According to the divine command theory, this would make no sense. In this view, there is no reason that something is right or wrong, other than it being God’s will. All believers, of course, believe that God is good and that He commands us to do what is right and forbids us to do what is wrong. But this doesn’t mean, say critics of the divine command theory, that God’s saying so makes a thing wrong, any more than your mother’s telling you not to steal makes it wrong to steal.

All this is simply to argue that morality is not necessarily based on religion in any of these three senses. That religion influences the moral standards and values of most of us is beyond doubt. But given that religions differ in their moral principles and that even members of the name faith often disagree among themselves on moral matters, practically speaking you cannot justify a moral principle simply by appealing to religion - for that will only persuade those who already agree with your particular interpretation of your particular religion. Besides, most religions hold that human reason is capable of understanding what is right and wrong, so it is human reason to which you will have to appeal in order to support your ethical principle.

Ethical Relativism

Some people do not believe that morality boils down to religion but rather that it is just a function of what a particular society happens to believe. This view is called ethical relativism, the theory that what is right is determined by what culture or society says is right. What is right in one place may be wrong in another, because the only criterion for distinguishing right from wrong - and so the only ethical standard for doing an action - is the moral system of the society in which the act occurs.

Abortion, for example, is condemned as immoral in Catholic Ireland but is practiced as a morally neutral form of birth control in Japan. According to the ethical relativist, then, abortion is wrong in Ireland but morally permissible Japan. The relativist is not saying merely that the Irish believe abortion is abominable and the Japanese do not; that is acknowledged by everyone. Rather, the ethical relativist contends that abortion is immoral in Ireland because the Irish believe it to be immoral and morally permissible Japan because the Japanese believe it to be so. Thus, for the ethical relativist there is no absolute ethical standard independent of cultural context, no criteria of right and wrong by which judge other than those of particular societies. In short, what morality requires is relative to society.

Those who endorse ethical relativism point o the apparent diversity of human values and he multiformity of moral codes to support heir case. From our own cultural perspective, some seemingly immoral moralities have been adopted; polygamy, homosexuality, stealing, slavery, infanticide, and cannibalism have all been tolerated or even encouraged by the moral system of one society or another. In light of this fact, the ethical relativist believes that there can be no non-ethnocentric standard by which to judge actions.

Contrary to the relativist, some argue that the moral differences among societies are hot as great or as significant as they appear. They contend that variations in moral standards reflect differing factual beliefs and differing circumstances rather than fundamental differences in values. But suppose the relativist is right about this matter. His conclusion still does not follow. As Allan Bloom writes, "The fact that there have been different opinions about good and bad in different times and places in no way proves that none is true or superior to others. To say that it does so prove is as absurd as to say at the diversity of points of view expressed in a college bull session proves there is no truth." (The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster ,1987, 39). Disagreement in ethical matters does not imply at all opinions are equally correct.

Moreover, ethical relativism has some unpleasant implications. First, it undermines any moral criticism of the practices of other societies long as their actions conform to their own standards. We cannot say that slavery in a slave society like that of the American South of the last century was immoral and unjust as long as that society held it to be morally permissible.

Second, and closely related, is the fact that the relativist there is no such thing as ethical progress. Although moralities may change, they mot get better or worse. Thus, we cannot say that our moral standards today are any more enlightened than they were in the Middle Ages.
Third, it makes no sense from the relativist’s point of view for people to criticize principles or practices accepted by their own society. People can be censured for not living up to their society’s moral code, but that is all; the moral code itself cannot be criticized. Whatever a society takes to be right really is right for it. Reformers who identify injustices in their society and campaign against them are only encouraging people to be immoral - that is, to depart from the moral standards of their society - unless or until the majority of the society agrees with the reformers. The minority can never be right in moral matters; to be right it must be- come the majority.

The ethical relativist is right to emphasize that in viewing other cultures we should keep an open mind and not simply dismiss alien social practices on the basis of our own cultural prejudices. But the relativist’s theory of morality doesn’t hold up. The more carefully we examine it, the less plausible it becomes. There is no good reason for saying that the majority view on moral issues is automatically right, and the belief that it is automatically right has unacceptable consequences.