Why morality

Now to the questions that deal with the rules of morality and all the rules which govern human behavior. First, some terms need to be clarified. Mores - customs and rules of conduct. Etiquette — rules of conduct concerning matters of relatively minor importance but which do contribute to the quality of life. Violations of such rules may bring social censure.

Etiquette deals with rules concerning dress and table manners and deal with politeness. Friendships would not likely break up over violations of these rules as they would for violating rules of morality, e. But they are made up by people to encourage a better life. In each society there are authorities on these matters and there are collections of such rules.

Many books are sold each year to prospective brides who want to observe the proper rules of decorum and etiquette. There are newspapers that have regular features with questions and answers concerning these matters. Etiquette deals with matters such as when do you place the napkin on your lap when you sit at a dining table?

How long do you wait on HOLD on a telephone call with someone with call waiting? Should you use a cell phone at the dining table?

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The Ethics of Drone Warfare. Has Science Replaced Philosophy? Although all societies include more than just a concern for minimizing harm to some human beings in their moralities, this feature of morality, unlike purity and sanctity, or accepting authority and emphasizing loyalty, is included in everything that is regarded as a morality by any society.

Because minimizing harm can conflict with accepting authority and emphasizing loyalty, there can be fundamental disagreements within a society about the morally right way to behave in particular kinds of situations.

Some psychologists, such as Haidt, take morality to include concern with, at least, all three of the triad of 1 harm, 2 purity, and 3 loyalty, and hold that different members of a society can and do take different features of morality to be most important.

But beyond a concern with avoiding and preventing such harms to members of certain groups, there may be no common content shared by all moralities in the descriptive sense. Nor may there be any common justification that those who accept morality claim for it; some may appeal to religion, others to tradition, and others to rational human nature. Beyond the concern with harm, the only other feature that all descriptive moralities have in common is that they are put forward by an individual or a group, usually a society, in which case they provide a guide for the behavior of the people in that group or society.

Ethical relativists such as Harman , Westermarck , and Prinz , deny that there is any universal normative morality and claim that the actual moralities of societies or individuals are the only moralities there are.

Wong , , claims to be an ethical relativist because he denies that there is any universal moral code that would be endorsed by all rational people. But what seems to stand behind this claim is the idea that there are cultural variations in the relative weights given to, for example, considerations of justice and considerations of interpersonal responsibility. But Gert is certainly not a relativist, and it is central to his moral theory that there are fundamental disagreements in the rankings of various harms and benefits, and with regard to who is protected by morality, and no unique right answer in such cases.

Wong himself is willing to say that some moralities are better than others, because he thinks that the moral domain is delimited by a functional criterion: among the functions of a morality are that it promote and regulate social cooperation, help individuals rank their own motivations, and reduce harm.

As a result, when the guide to conduct put forward by, for example, a religious group conflicts with the guide to conduct put forward by a society, it is not clear whether to say that there are conflicting moralities, conflicting elements within morality, or that the code of the religious group conflicts with morality. In small homogeneous societies there may be a guide to behavior that is put forward by the society and that is accepted by almost all members of the society.

However, in larger societies people often belong to groups that put forward guides to behavior that conflict with the guide put forward by their society, and members of the society do not always accept the guide put forward by their society. If they accept the conflicting guide of some other group to which they belong often a religious group rather than the guide put forward by their society, in cases of conflict they will regard those who follow the guide put forward by their society as acting immorally.

However, that fact that an individual adopts a moral code of conduct for his own use does not entail that the person requires it to be adopted by anyone else. An individual may adopt for himself a very demanding moral guide that he thinks may be too difficult for most others to follow. He may judge people who do not adopt his code of conduct as not being as morally good as he is, without judging them to be immoral if they do not adopt it. For it may be that the individual would not be willing for others to try to follow that code, because of worries about the bad effects of predictable failures due to partiality or lack of sufficient foresight or intelligence.

Philosophers, because they do not need to produce operational tests or criteria in the way that psychologists, biologists, and anthropologists do, often simply take for granted that everyone knows what belongs, and does not belong, to the moral domain. For example, Michael Smith provides a very detailed analysis of normative reasons, but in distinguishing specifically moral reasons from other sorts of reasons, he says only that they are picked out by appeal to a number of platitudes.

And he makes no effort to provide anything like a comprehensive list of such platitudes. Moreover, it is very likely that there will be disagreement as to what counts as platitudinous. One, of course, is a conflation of morality with other things see Machery on Churchland Because theorists in psychology and anthropology often need to design questionnaires and other sorts of probes of the attitudes of subjects, they might be expected to be more sensitive to the need for a reasonably clear means of separating moral judgments from other sorts of judgments.

After all, examining the specifically moral judgments of individuals is one of the most direct means of determining what the moral code of a person or group might be.

The failure to offer an operational definition of morality or moral judgment may help explain the widespread but dubious assumption in contemporary anthropology, noted by James Laidlaw , that altruism is the essential and irreducible core of ethics. This state of affairs leads Laidlaw to ask the crucial question:. This is, to a very close approximation, a request for the definition of morality in the descriptive sense. This is a move away from the Durkheimian paradigm, and includes the study of self-development, virtues, habits, and the role of explicit deliberation when moral breakdowns occur.

Curry notes that rules related to kinship, mutualism, exchange, and various forms of conflict resolution appear in virtually all societies. And he argues that many of them have precursors in animal behavior, and can be explained by appeal to his central hypothesis of morality as a solution to problems of cooperation and conflict resolution. He also notes that philosophers, from Aristotle through Hume, Russell, and Rawls, all took cooperation and conflict resolution to be central ideas in understanding morality.

Turning from anthropology to psychology, one significant topic of investigation is the existence and nature of a distinction between the moral and the conventional. More specifically, the distinction at issue is between a acts that are judged wrong only because of a contingent convention or because they go against the dictates of some relevant authority, and b those that are judged to be wrong quite independently of these things, that have a seriousness to them, and that are justified by appeal to the notions of harm, rights, or justice.

Those who accept this distinction are implicitly offering a definition of morality in the descriptive sense. Not everyone does accept the distinction, however.

Edouard Machery and Ron Mallon for example, are suspicious of the idea that authority-independence, universality, justification by appeal to harm, justice, or rights, and seriousness form a cluster found together with sufficient regularity to be used to set moral norms apart from other norms. Kelly et al. The psychologist Kurt Gray might be seen as offering an account of moral judgment that would allow us to determine the morality of an individual or group.

He and his co-authors suggest that. This claim, while quite strong, is nevertheless not as implausibly strong as it might seem, since the thesis is directly concerned with the template we use when thinking about moral matters; it is not directly concerned with the nature of morality itself. But that does not mean that an animal must have these features to count as a dog, or even that we believe this.

Given the way that Gray et al. Moreover, the link between immoral behavior and suffering to which they appeal in defending their general view is sometimes so indirect as to undermine its significance. In a similar stretch, they account for judgments that promiscuity is wrong by gesturing at the suffering involved in sexually transmitted diseases Another position in cognitive psychology that has relevance for the definition of morality in the descriptive sense takes moral judgment to be a natural kind: the product of an innate moral grammar Mikhail One piece of evidence that there is such a grammar is to be found in the relative universality of certain moral concepts in human cultures: concepts such as obligation, permission, and prohibition.

In evolutionary biology, morality is sometimes simply equated with fairness Baumard et al. But it is also sometimes identified by reference to an evolved capacity to make a certain sort of judgment and perhaps also to signal that one has made it Hauser Many moral skeptics would reject the claim that there are any universal ethical truths, where the ethical is a broader category than the moral.

But another interesting class of moral skeptics includes those who think that we should only abandon the narrower category of the moral—partly because of the notion of a code that is central to that category.

These moral skeptics hold that we should do our ethical theorizing in terms of the good life, or the virtues. Elizabeth Anscombe gave expression to this kind of view, which also finds echoes in the work of Bernard Williams On the other hand, some virtue theorists might take perfect rationality to entail virtue, and might understand morality to be something like the code that such a person would implicitly endorse by acting in virtuous ways.

In that case, even a virtue theorist might count as a moral realist in the sense above. But this appearance is deceptive. Mill himself explicitly defines morality as. And the act-consequentialist J. Smart is also explicit that he is thinking of ethics as the study of how it is most rational to behave. His embrace of utilitarianism is the result of his belief that maximizing utility is always the rational thing to do.

On reflection it is not surprising that many moral theorists implicitly hold that the codes they offer would be endorsed by all rational people, at least under certain conditions. What is that to me? Definitions of morality in the normative sense—and, consequently, moral theories—differ in their accounts of rationality, and in their specifications of the conditions under which all rational persons would necessarily endorse the code of conduct that therefore would count as morality.

These definitions and theories also differ in how they understand what it is to endorse a code in the relevant way. Some hold that morality applies only to those rational beings that have certain specific features of human beings: features that make it rational for them to endorse morality. These features might, for example, include fallibility and vulnerability. Other moral theories claim to put forward an account of morality that provides a guide to all rational beings, even if these beings do not have these human characteristics, e.

Among such theorists it is also common to hold that morality should never be overridden. That is, it is common to hold that no one should ever violate a moral prohibition or requirement for non-moral reasons.

Though common, this view is by no means always taken as definitional. Sidgwick despaired of showing that rationality required us to choose morality over egoism, though he certainly did not think rationality required egoism either. More explicitly, Gert held that though moral behavior is always rationally permissible , it is not always rationally required. Foot seems to have held that any reason—and therefore any rational requirement—to act morally would have to stem from a contingent commitment or an objective interest.

And she also seems to have held that sometimes neither of these sorts of reasons might be available, so that moral behavior might not be rationally required for some agents.

Indeed, it is possible that morality, in the normative sense, has never been put forward by any particular society, by any group at all, or even by any individual. That is, one might claim that the guides to behavior of some societies lack so many of the essential features of morality in the normative sense, that it is incorrect to say that these societies even have a morality in a descriptive sense. This is an extreme view, however.

A more moderate position would hold that all societies have something that can be regarded as their morality, but that many of these moralities—perhaps, indeed, all of them—are defective. That is, a moral realist might hold that although these actual guides to behavior have enough of the features of normative morality to be classified as descriptive moralities, they would not be endorsed in their entirety by all moral agents.

In the theological version of natural law theories, such as that put forward by Aquinas, this is because God implanted this knowledge in the reason of all persons.

In the secular version of natural law theories, such as that put forward by Hobbes , natural reason is sufficient to allow all rational persons to know what morality prohibits, requires, etc. Natural law theorists also claim that morality applies to all rational persons, not only those now living, but also those who lived in the past. In contrast to natural law theories, other moral theories do not hold quite so strong a view about the universality of knowledge of morality.

Still, many hold that morality is known to all who can legitimately be judged by it. Baier , Rawls and contractarians deny that there can be an esoteric morality: one that judges people even though they cannot know what it prohibits, requires, etc. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes.

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