The Billy Pulpit

I said in an earlier post (The Source of Morality, Part 1) that I don’t think morality comes from religion. Or more specifically, it’s possible to be a highly moral person without religion. So if I’m saying that religion isn’t necessary to be moral, then what is the source of a moral code? Where DOES it come from? Maybe thinking of religion as the source is the wrong way to go about it, since religion (or substitute “faith” if you’d prefer) is simply every person’s attempt to put into practice what they think god wants them to do. They get their ideas of what that means either through listening to their spiritual leaders, or from their own interpretation of the book they accept as god’s word (the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, etc.). But if that’s true and that’s where everyone gets their morality concepts from, you’d think there would be as many different views on morality as there are interpretations of the appropriate holy book. There’s hundreds of religions in Christianity alone, and probably thousands by the time you add up the smaller offshoots, so wouldn’t that lead to hundreds or thousands of different moral codes? But that’s not what we see. Oh sure, there’s lots of minor variations in moral codes, but in general I think you could distill almost all views of morality down to a few simple statements. The Golden Rule kind of sums it up nicely I think: do unto others as you’d like to have them do unto you. Treat others the way you’d like to be treated. Sounds more like a kind of a social contract than anything, it seems to me.

So how would this social contract (if that’s what morality turns out to be) arise? Well, a community arises out of a tribe. Tribes/communities provide their members safety from predators, access to members of the opposite sex, and less chance of starvation because of greater food-gathering capacity. Anthropologists will tell you that virtually every culture in the world has a set of agreements or rules; furthermore there’s a similarity to these rules across most cultures. A strong case has been made that these agreements (stated but more often unstated) give the group the cohesion that keeps them together, which subsequently gives protection to individual members. Safety leads to greater probability of children surviving to adulthood and passing their genes on to future generations. So an argument could be made that a sense of community (one way of defining morality, perhaps) could provide an advantage to getting your genes into the next generation.

There’s some problems with this theory though; I’ll be discussing other thoughts in future postings. At the very least though, I don’t think there’s much starch to the theory that morality must come from a religion or holy book.

Where does morality come from? I mean, when we think about what’s right, how do we decide? I’m no expert in philosophy, but it seems to me that this is not as simple a question as it might seem, when you start to dig into it a little. At first blush it’s easy: something just “is” right or wrong. Okay, but why? Most of us got our initial sense of right and wrong from our parents and extended family. (Aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends). But that ‘s not the origin; they got their morality from somewhere. Trace it back to…what? If not the primary cause, it was likely influenced by religion. But that itself isn’t enough; each religion claims it’s the “correct” one, which by definition means that those adherents believe that all others are wrong. OK, I know, some religions are more ecumenical than others, but even the most inclusive still believe that at the core, they are more “right” than anyone else. So if that’s the source of morality then again, by definition nearly everyone is immoral, since any one religion only represents a small percentage of the total world population. And even the most hardcore believers would admit that at least some people in other religions have a sense of morality.

So religion doesn’t seem right as the source of morality; what about God? Maybe since religion is an attempt to relate to God, is God the source of morality? I’ll save that for next time.

We tend to think that “the right thing” just IS and doesn’t change regardless of circumstances. But think about it for a minute. What’s believed to be moral or “right” in a society DOES change over time. The lyrics from Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes” illustrates my point:  “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows…anything goes!” At one point in the not-too-distant past, owning other people as property was considered moral by a subset of society. They even found support for their position with the Bible:  the Biblical Israelites (supposedly God’s chosen people) had slaves, so God must’ve approved, right? While there were people who believed it immoral here in the United States, there was certainly no consensus that it was. Today, one of the chief complaints of conservative Muslims against Western society is their perception of our lack of morals because of Western dress styles (among other reasons); clearly most people in the US believe ourselves to be moral even if some in the Middle East might not.

So morality does change over time, and from group to group. Some would say that means that there really IS no objective morality, and that since the view of morality changes with society, maybe everything is relative and to understand morality first requires understanding the context.

But it doesn’t feel right that morality is totally subjective either. There is the sense that some things are wrong no matter what group or circumstances. Taking someone’s life, for no other reason than you can, is probably wrong no matter what the circumstances. (Note that it is the reason, rather than the action itself, that makes it wrong. Killing someone in defense of your family is usually considered justified; even then you’d have to prove the justification.)

So while there ARE things that are wrong in some situations and not in others (and in some societies but not others), it seems to me that there are some things that are just wrong. Morality then can’t be exclusively situational.