A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
I was taught – and I bought it – that if I live a certain way I’m going to heaven, and if I live a certain way I was going to go to Hell. And that’s for eternity…So, to me, it’s all that simple. I get it, and I want other people to get it, too, for their own benefit. Is that illogical? Is that Insanity? I don’t know. I don’t want to go to Hell.
Tom Monaghan, pizza mogul.[1]
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
What exactly is morality and why it is central for the functioning of society? Who gets to decide what is moral or immoral, good or evil? Is religion essential for morality? How can we make better moral decisions in an increasingly complex world? Are values absolute, relative or neither? What are the values worth acquiring and pursuing?
What determines good and evil? Morality is central to all human societies and world belief systems. Explicitly or implicitly, each society has a system of morality or a “moral code” that determines which intentions, decisions and actions are good (or right), and which are bad (or wrong). The word morality itself, from the Latin moralitas, denotes proper manner, behavior; a moral code represents a common agreement as to which conducts are unacceptable and which morally justified. Examples of moral codes include the ancient Egyptian code of Ma’at, the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity, the Quran of Islam, the Five Precepts, and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and the yamas and niyama of the Hindu scriptures.
Throughout history, moral codes have played a critical role in maintaining group cohesion and harmony. After the invention of agriculture, a watershed event in the history of civilization, populations became much larger than the small hunter-gatherer groups in which humans lived for most of their evolutionary history. Agriculture was clearly necessary to support a large population, but the orderly functioning of society would have been impossible without a unifying moral code.
Moral codes are so essential to the functioning of the group that most cultures operate under the assumption that they are divine in origin. This is the case of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which share the belief that God revealed the moral codes to humankind. Such codes are usually called laws, as in the Law of Moses, or Islamic Law.
Supposedly, humans would not have arrived at these moral laws by their natural reason alone. Civil rights activist and Baptist minister Al Sharpton stated the following in a taped debate: “If there is no order to the universe, and therefore some being, some force that ordered it, then who determines what is right from wrong? There is nothing immoral if there is nothing in charge.”[2] Similar sentiments are expressed by many people who echo Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, exclaiming that “if there is no God, I am free to rape my neighbor!”
Do humans really need divine help to know right from wrong? Is the belief in God what prevents men from raping their neighbors? These questions raise important issues. For example, many Christians believe that rejecting religion and accepting evolution produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor.
From a purely biological perspective, morality is about cooperation; simply, without cooperation advanced human civilization would have been impossible. According to evolutionary biologists, morality is the way in which evolution “solved” the problem of cooperation. For most of their evolutionary history, humans lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, and competed for resources with other hunter-gatherers. The evidence shows that our moral instincts are “calibrated” to allow cooperation within members of the in-group (a group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member), but not so much with the out-group (group with which an individual does not identify).
In this view, instincts, and emotions such as empathy, anger, revulsion, shame, remorse, honor, and loyalty, which are recognized and understood by people from all cultures, evolved to promote cooperation within the group. These emotions, and the associated behaviors generated by them, allowed the development of rules, laws, and moral codes to regulate behavior and create harmony within the group. This, in turn, allowed the development of more complex societies.
One implication of this is that moral beliefs cannot be “delinked” from the environments in which they operate. In other words, moral beliefs and values that could have been adaptive in some environments can become maladaptive in others.
For example, medieval Christians had a hierarchical view of all matter and life, represented by the Great Chain of Being (scala naturae), which they thought to have been decreed by God. For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and natural scientists used the idea of the Great Chain of Being to rank all beings along a vertical dimension of morality. The chain starts with God and progresses downward to angels, demons (fallen angels), stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, animals, trees, other plants, metals, and minerals. Some authors have proposed that the Catholic Church’s narrative of the Great Chain of Being kept the peace in Europe for centuries. Indeed, the belief in the chain of being meant that a monarchical government was ordained by God and inherent in the very structure of the universe. Rebellion against a king was not challenging the state; it was an act against the will of God itself.[3]
The idea that kings are anointed by God may had kept the peace for many years, but it became untenable after the Enlightenment, which resulted in the creation of secular governmental structures that vested power into the hands of ordinary citizens, rather than in those of divinely ordained monarchs. One of the absolute monarchies that lasted into the 20th century was Tzarist Russia, which also had a backward feudal system. As we know, it was toppled violently during the Russian revolution, and replaced by a communist regime that itself collapsed in 1989.
Although the idea of a chain of being has fallen out of academic favor, most people still use an embodied vertical moral hierarchy to understand their moral world. This is what researchers refer to as the social cognitive chain of being (SCCB), which describes the processes and perceptions that help humans organize their moral universe. The evidence shows that the SCCB persists in people’s conception and perception of their social world, allowing people to perceive others and themselves along the continuum from devilish to divine. For example, people usually connect immorality with “down,” pollution, and animality, and connect morality with “up,” purity, and divinity.
Likewise, some people perceive others along a vertical sacred dimension anchored by the animal and the divine. It is easier to dehumanize, and consequently to discriminate or harm, other people if we perceive them as being lower on the SCCB.
This happens mainly at an unconscious level, which means most of our moral perceptions and actions are not driven by reason. As we shall see in this section, we often make moral judgments based on instincts and emotions, without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights, or abstract ethical values. Instead, most of the time moral reasoning is a post hoc (after the fact) rationalization of intuitive decisions.
If our moral instincts and emptions were “calibrated” to promote cooperation in small, closely-knit societies, this may mean that our moral decisions remain biased to favor people from our own group. But that bias is surely out-of-date; the “moral landscape” has changed drastically from our hunter-gatherer days, and so have the problems of cooperation that the evolution of morality was meant to solve.
The fact that environments have changed dramatically, mostly by human activity, means that many of our traditional values have become maladaptive. For example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, humans were put on this Earth to fill it and subdue it and to “rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis, 1:28). These ideals, however, are no longer viable in the Anthropocene era, in which human action has resulted in the pollution of the environment, the extinction of many animal species and the endangering of many others vital for our survival. The historical record shows that those civilizations unable or unwilling to adapt to a changing environment are destined for extinction.
Clearly, we need new values that are more consistent with the fact that humans have become the most influential force shaping the environment. Thus, being receptive to, and protective of, the ecosystems and adaptable to change should be impressed in all of us as core values. In Idea 18 (forthcoming) I will further explore the reasons why we need new values to improve our survival as a species.
I hope you find the discussion of the ideas in this section stimulating and relevant to your own way of thinking about values and morality. As we shall see, although many moral dilemmas are intractable, it is helpful to see them through different moral lenses.
[1]Quoted in, “The deliverer: A pizza mogul finds a moral crusade,” by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, February 19, 2007. [2]Quoted in de Waal, F. (2010). “Morals Without God?” In Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments. Liveright Publishing Corp. [3]Allenby, B. & Garreau, J. (2017). “Weaponized Narrative: The New Battlespace.” Center on the Future of War.
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