Ethics, Morality, and Custom

O tempora! O mores! [Cicero]

The concept of morality, which as a child I encountered as rooted in divine commandment, therefore of transcendental origin, acquired that special sense during the Christian centuries of our civilization. Our own form of that word was coined by Marcus Tullius Cicero [104-43 BC]; Cicero was seeking a good translation of the Greek word ethikos, meaning exactly the same thing as morality. The Greek itself came from ethos, meaning “custom” or “usage,”; hence if we wished to use a word equivalent to Cicero’s moralis, we ought to translate it as “customary.” The Latin for customs, of course, is mores, singular mos. The Latin moralitas was a later addition used in ecclesiastical Latin.

Now, to be sure, customs change, and long before Cicero already the concept had taken on pretty much the same transcendental flavor I tasted as a child, namely as a higher law or standard—illustrated by Cicero’s own sighing comment above: “Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!”—implying that they had deteriorated from a permanent and higher standard up in the sky. Similarly, an additional meaning of ethos is “character,” a concept humanity has always treated as a permanent and enduring state. A person whose behavior undergoes frequent and abrupt changes in response to circumstances is not considered to have character but a lack thereof. I still remember the contemptuous flavor of the German adjective charakterlos, meaning, literally, character-less; those so designated were, indeed, beneath contempt.

This brief definitional walk-around the subject thus shows the curious duality of the moral, as something usual, accustomed, sanctioned, relied upon, and practiced by an entire society, the mores—as well as a permanent standard from which individuals and groups can deviate with regrettable results.

What I detect here is an interesting indication (as in the sense of “economic indicator”) of the real rooting of morality—not at all in custom, although that’s where we anchor the words we use—but in some permanent quality of the inner agent that we are beneath the flesh and bones. Down there in the invisible self we have an innate perception of right and wrong, good and bad. We also, obviously, collectively favor one side of this duality; if we didn’t then the notion of customs could not have become intimately associated with morality. We favor the good for practical as well as transcending reasons. It is the indicator of the vector that we are trying to follow in our collective quest. I have attempted to sketch various cosmic models to indicate where that vector points, namely to some possibly lost state of greater happiness or higher development lost because we erred.

Another and concluding note on this subject. The whole concept of “situation ethics” is based on the denial of absolute moral standards; thus Cicero’s plaint about the tempora would have to be viewed as whining and sentimentality. Whatever the mores are, that is what they are. They evolve with circumstances and are defined pretty much by what some majority concludes is good. Someone out here on the edge of the Borderzone might wonder: “Is that, perhaps, how we came to be in this vale of tears in the first place?”