Two Roots of Morality

Conviction, Observation. This post is the consequence of ricochets from two different blog posts I read in succession this morning. One is the fascinating story of the origins of the U.S. civil service on Siris (link), another is a comment on death on Maverick Philosopher (link). The first deals with corruption, the second with the strongly held beliefs of some that this life is all there is; on death we just go poof. It struck me reading these, in turn, that both morality and faith may have deep or shallow roots. Deep here means “inner” and shallow “outer.” I abbreviate these two roots further by using conviction for the first and observation for the second.

Conviction is a peculiar sort of—what? Feeling, state? I know it when I have it. A syllogism may have a compelling quality, but that compulsion or agreement falls short of conviction. I’ve met irresistible syllogisms I did not agree with—because at least one premise lacked something. A conviction, by contrast, is powerful even if the person who holds it cannot unpack it. Conviction, therefore, seems to arise from some inner intuition reaching us from a source that cannot be denied. A morality rooted in conviction is merciless—you violate it knowing full well what you are doing; you’re going against your own, firm judgement; and you know it.

Observation produces raw data. It’s what we see out there. A morality based on it produces an ambiguous picture. Lots and lots of people confirm a certain behavior; but others, and very often those who appear to be most successful, violate it. An outwardly-oriented person, essentially a stranger to him- or herself, in effect lacks morality: the observations have not sunk deep enough; the self has not engaged them effectively enough; the intellect has not examined them; they have not become internalized enough to evoke the intuitive judgement. Such people behave in response to stimuli; that something like “morality” is out there is, of course, also a social observation, but if their behavior violates it, there is justification for it. Others are doing the same.

Observation also shows that people die and don’t come back. The heavens do not cleave routinely to reveal a beatific vision. What purpose may be visible in reality is not exactly on the surface. It takes heavy digging. And living on the surface, what we see is what we get. Not so if we look deeper; and then conviction rises.

The Moral and the Natural

Amazing cathedrals of thought are built up over questions to which the answers seem very simple to me. A discussion in the blogs I read now centers on a book the subject of which is the relationship of science to values. Tracing these things I discover, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ht), that there is something called meta-ethics, further that it has a component called non-naturalism, and that this something is described as “the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.” Now if that description is correct, and to me it seems self-evident, the relationship of science to values would appear to be pretty tenuous, pertaining to scientists, and how they act and live, not to the work they actually do. To give science itself a role in explaining morality would strike me as inviting my best hammer to read out loud to me. I reach this conclusion quite simply. In order to enable science to speak authoritatively on values, I would have to accept that the mind is produced by the brain and nothing else. Now that, of course, is a widely accepted notion—and assent to it is absolutely required to take seriously the notion that science has anything to say about values at all. Science can speak about facts—but values? First, good definitions. I cannot assent to the notion that values are facts.

Get In The Habit

One impetus behind this post is a link sent in a comment to a post of mine on Ghulf Genes. The link is to an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre (accessible here) on The Nature of Virtues. The second is a post on Siris yesterday (here) addressing the question Is Faith a Virtue? Sometimes comments on blogs are just not the way to present one’s own response to highly stimulating ideas of enormous complexity, hence I thought I’d sort out my own thoughts on the matter of virtue here.

In one sense virtue and morality are very closely linked—or indeed synonymous. I find this in Webster’s first definition of virtue, rendered as “a conformity to a standard of right: Morality.” In an earlier posting I’ve at least touched on the subject of morality (here) focusing on its ambiguities. Virtue, by contrast, although very slippery (for reasons that follow), turns out to be simple and straightforward.

As MacIntyre shows, the word is rooted in the Latin vir, man, and is therefore manliness—a concept that different times define in different ways. It also carries the meaning of excellence—and when we speak of the virtue of a plant, say in a medical context, it means efficiency or efficacy. By way of example MacIntyre discusses the meaning of virtue in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament’s so-called theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), in Jane Austen’s work, and in Benjamin Franklins. The contrasts are quite striking. MacIntyre’s essay is well worth reading just to see how he parses apart two motivations behind virtue, which he labels external and internal. External motivation comes from rewards you hope to gain; internal motivation arises from the inward experience of some practice, e.g., the sheer pleasure of doing a job right. My own view of the external/internal split has been to deny the presence of virtue if the motive is external, to recognize it when it is internal. Rabia al-Adawiyya’s saying always comes to my mind. “If I worship you from fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in the hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” I’m with her.

So long as we view virtue through the lens of qualities, tendencies, or endowments (like “manly strength” in Homer), the concept remains slippery. Natural endowments lack the immediate sense of a moral quality I tend to associate with the word. It helps me a great deal to define it more sharply from actual experience—always my tendency. And here I get real help from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine defined virtue as “a good habit consonant with our nature.” Aquinas calls it “an operative habit essentially good.” Here I footnote the Catholic Encyclopedia (link). As a habit virtue loses its mystery and becomes straight-forward. Habits are acquired by repeatedly doing something—and if a difficulty must be overcome, thus a higher good must be preferred over a lower, it involves an act of the will. Thus virtue becomes, you might say, a record of repeatedly choosing right. Experience teaches that we naturally tend toward the good; the difficulties arise when we become aware of an ascending scale of goods and realize that lower goods often have more immediate and sensory rewards. A realization, thus a conscious mental grasp of these differences must first arise before a choice even faces us. And before virtue, the habit, is present, our naked will must form it by repeating what at first are relatively painful choices.

Now here I underline that a recognition is necessary—a kind of inward knowing. In my experience this is not an intellectual operation. My word for it is intuitive. I know the difference, for me, but I cannot speak for others. I don’t know what Aquinas really meant by intellect; the internal experience of that concept, for him, might have been be quite different from mine; for me it ranks lower than intuition and, therefore, unless the intellectual formulation gets intuition’s nod, I view it with a certain reserve.

Here then arises the issue of faith as a virtue. Faith in a structure of doctrines—which includes faith in the authority on which they rest—absolutely demands an intuitive assent. We are dealing here with matters that cannot be confirmed in the usual ways. Faith has a much closer relationship to truth than to goodness. Once I believe that something is thus and so, must I continuously repeat that affirmation? The reason why faith plays such a gigantic role in Christianity, it seems to me, is because its fundamentally very complex doctrine does not meet with intuitive assent as readily, say, as belief in God. Hence, perhaps, the affirmation must be repeated—because it’s not genuinely believed; in that context it can become a virtue. Further, faith in God does not by any means logically and automatically produce the Christian doctrines unless we first accept a very particular formulation of how God relates to man. But fear of hell or hope for paradise should not compel a person to act against the movements of his heart.

Nurture

One experience is certainly denied us. We can’t “redo” our childhood and “experiment around”—and thus examine how we might have turned out if we had been brought up in a marginal, disordered household… How much of what we value as adults would still be there in us if our upbringing and culture had been skimpy, shoddy, or confused?

There is a good-old salesman’s saying: It’s better to be lucky than to be good. There is the saying we’ve all heard: There but for the grace of God go I. A sense of having been exceedingly fortunate surfaced in me as soon as I was old enough to see the world well enough. I credit my upbringing for whatever virtues I may have and blame my shortcomings on me. That’s good policy in general—an acknowledgement of probabilities. Culture is more nurture than achievement—and most of us do well if we but pass it on intact. That alone requires all of our effort.

It must be so because these days literally millions of babies have been and continue to be born into marginal families. I’m not slicing, dicing, or dividing and therefore don’t mean economically marginal. Economic deprivation may or may not be a part of it—wealth, indeed, may be a cause of it. But generally, thus by the second or third generation, the sins of the fathers—and let’s not forget the mothers, either—will have manifested in economic decline as well.

The paradox that I discover here is that loss of culture is caused by individual acts of failure—often by small, careless acts—but the transmission of such failure to the next generation magnifies these errors. The poorly nurtured children are weakened and disabled. With each round of births, the children are less and less to blame because, in an almost literal sense “they know not what they’re doing.” But their acts of failure are much more visible and harmful. And the paradox is that we hold individuals responsible who have become irresponsible by lack of nurture rather than by their free choice.

Thus then develop very strange notions and gain a wide authority. One is that morality should not and must not be taught in schools. Morality is a religious concept, and religion, folks, is a lifestyle option, isn’t it?

Ultimately failure of any kind, not least cultural failure, is self-correcting. But cultural failure may take centuries to work around and cost vast amounts of suffering—generally of the stupidly innocent.

The Ambiguities of Moral Action

Let me, for starters, delimit the scope of the moral, thus to separate genuinely moral from what might be called spontaneous useful action. All action is aimed at achieving something good, and we can define good simply enough by saying that it’s something pleasing to us. The issue of moral choice never really arises unless there is a conflict between goods—thus until a situation arises in which we must deny ourselves something for a so-called “higher” good or undergo a pain or deprivation in order to benefit either a future instance of ourselves or to help other people. If there is no conflict, there is no morality involved. Morality always involves the willing acceptance of some kind of deprivation. To eat the French fries may not be a moral act, but to eat the spinach, if I don’t like it, may be—because it is good for me. Similarly, doing services for others in exchange for something else is just exchange. I’m merely pleasing myself by means of other people. When I spend a day helping the old lady next door move her furniture to a small apartment half-way across the city—and I rent the truck and do all the labor—then I’m doing something just because, under the circumstances, I find it appropriate.

Moral action thus seems to require the development within us of a kind of sympathy—both for an enlarged sense of our selves and for other people. In the first case, I enlarge my sense of self from this immediate moment to the larger sense of myself over a long period of time. In relation to others, I include the community as part of my narrow being, hence I give of myself to the collective. In both cases a sense of sympathy and unity must be present as a motive. The sensory pay-offs of abstemious behavior or good deeds are quite minimal.

Now the ambiguities of moral action arise precisely because such action demands this inner state, this intuition, this something that I call a sympathy. And we are not the sole agency that participates in the formation of this feeling. Nurture plays a very big role. Our sense of sympathy is an inner presence formed reciprocally with the community. Suppose a child grows up in a harsh and violent environment where an abusive figure dominates and sets the tone of most hours of the day—whether he or she is present or not. Here I am reminded of Saddam Hussein; he grew up in the shadow of a violent stepfather with criminal tendencies. If our earliest experience is of a certain kind, just how free, later, is our will to ascribe to the “world out there” a benevolent aspect? Why should it—when its own experience has been of a world of irrational and arbitrary threats against which only deception, dissimulation, and countering violence are really effective foils?

Ambiguity further plagues this subject because even people who grow up in the worst of circumstances still retain a sense of moral rights and wrongs. This sense may be deformed, but it won’t be absent. The person will know what hurts him or her, and he or she ought to know to avoid doing to others what he or she does not wish to experience. The good deeds of people scarred like this may be more difficult to discern, but may be present. The Biblical admonition, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” [Matthew 7:1] is based on the perception of this ambiguous character of moral action, the roots of which are so clouded and difficult to see. To shake our organic rootings in actual experience so that everything appears clearly, sharply, and in the right focus, requires a long journey sometimes—and sometimes is present early thanks to the grace of fortunate birth, parents, and optimal circumstances. And even then, the drag of the sensory, the personal, and of the here and now are great enough to lead us into error.

Our Mysterious Awakening

We never even think about our origin—which is the subject of our meaning—until our consciousness is able somehow to separate itself from the turbulent flow of our experience. Something in us must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection.

Consciousness thus becomes a mystery in turn. In one sense it is a partial description of a feeling—the feeling of our agency, the feeling that we are a Self. We couldn’t feel that we are individuals, people, responsible beings if we remained unaware. Neither could we choose to act this way or that without awareness. Thus the other major element of our fundamental nature, our will, is possible only through awareness. Indeed the very concept of an agency includes both at the same time and irreducibly so.

But our nature is paradoxical. Muted forms of agency—and therefore of consciousness and of will—are everywhere displayed for us in living creatures from birds to lions to giraffes. And most of the time their behavior is equivalent to ours. What divides us from the animal kingdom is our ability to become holy or evil. Neither path is open to a mule. And the paradox itself is murky and reveals additional degrees.

Thus, for instance, I genuinely wonder about the “humanity” of a pair of thugs who, under orders from a boss, kill two innocent people in an attempt to extract information from them (an actual case). I wonder about the “humanity” of the boss as well. I wonder about the human label applied to shady financiers who obtain houses from the desperate by fraudulent schemes they know will soon end in forfeitures. And on. In these people consciousness is present at levels well above a mule’s. They must know that they are causing harm. Are they really conscious? If they are they’re deliberately choosing evil. Is that possible? I assert that it is on the basis of personal experience—and I rather think that all of us have chosen evil knowingly in the past, finessing the acts by rationalizations. The difference between the criminal and Everyman lies in the degree. Evil does not always qualify as crime; it is a sliding scale.

Thus consciousness and agency in animals continues at a heightened rate in humans, but still on a certain scale, the difference in us now being that we deliberately choose. And when our choice is real—and if not real it’s not a choice—we use our will to lean now in one direction and now in the other.

The situation just described is a central feature of our meaning—must be. How it fits into the scheme of origins must still be developed.

Genuine consciousness really arises as a “separation” from the general flow of turbulent experience. Something must detach, something must reflect—or catch a reflection. More and more I’m coming to see awareness as a force or as a structure that emerges out of a material casing—not in the modern scientific sense of an “emergent phenomenon” but rather as a seed that catches on and begins development until at some point it reaches the light. It’s not an achievement but requires a favorable environment or endowment nonetheless. It seems to me that once it’s present it will assert itself thereafter—not because a person is virtuous or diligent but simply because this soul-force is strong and sovereign. It is not equivalent to intelligence but without its presence in awareness, intelligence is limited in reach.

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?”