So what are morals, anyway? More than rules, surely, more than regulations or ethics. Morals are felt deeply, seem to be built into the fabric of our behavior. The deepest of them, the most basic, seem utterly inherent in the universe - handed down by God even.
Of course they aren’t inherent in the universe, they are inherent in humanity - the Universe really doesn’t care how we behave. I think you’ll find that there are only a few things the Universe really cares about, and compliance to those rules is decidedly not voluntary.
That’s a key point, the voluntary aspect. Consider: we think of killing as an intrinsically immoral thing, no? But animals kill for food. Tornadoes, floods and earthquakes kill. Diseases kill. Sometimes animals kill others of their own species, what we would call murder - yet in all these cases, we don’t speak of a violation of morality. Why? The answer is obvious: Choice.
In order for us to consider an action immoral, a few basic facts must be true - first and foremost, the actor in question must have a choice, in the way that animals acting on instinct, storms following the laws of atmospheric physics, and bacteria following their evolutionary biochemical programming simply do not have. In other words, it is not immoral to kill, it is immoral to choose to kill.
I realize I am stating the obvious here, but bear with me.
As far as we know up to this point in time, the only thing in the Universe that has the mental capacity to make active choices about anything is Humanity itself. Well, if you believe the religious folks, there’s also God, but I’ll get to him a bit later. Aliens? Without proof, we’ll have to proceed under the assumption that there aren’t any. The fact is, morals are a very human thing. Morals are about what we humans choose, what we accept, and what is important to us as individuals and as a group. (If that tornado was intelligent, would we consider its actions immoral if it didn’t kill humans?) God notwithstanding, morals don’t exist for any other creature on the planet, because no other creature is capable of the three basic actions that make up moral behavior.
1. Formulating or understanding a given rule of behavior
2. understanding the consequences (or even the existence of consequences) of acting on that rule
3. choosing to either follow or not follow that rule
Right off the bat we can see why it is impossible to legislate or otherwise enforce morals - take away the choice, and you can’t really say that there was moral behavior, there was simply compliance to a rule or regulation. Here is the line between rules (and ethics, which are prescriptive rules) and morals.
So, this God person, do we need him as a source of morality?
To answer that, we should look at the morals we have and where they come from. There seem to be two major classes of moral law: the universal, and the esoteric. The universals are those things that seem to occur in every culture, and indeed make up the most basic of our social guidelines: don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t breed with your family, treat your fellow humans well (for a given value of fellow human). The esoteric rules seem to develop according to particular social pressures and unique circumstances - don’t eat pork, cows are sacred, don’t have sex for pleasure.
The universal rules seem to correspond quite directly to the evolutionary needs of our very social species. A social species is effective in evolutionary terms because the members of the species can work together, learn from each other, and specialize within groups to effectively tackle basic survival tasks. Quite clearly, a social species will not survive well if murder is endemic. If the members of the group cannot trust other members of the group not to slit their throats while they sleep, the huge advantage of working together is compromised, so any group will quickly learn to deter and punish murder. Genetic evolution ensures that the behavior of murder is selected against, and there you have it, a deep-seated taboo against killing members of your species. Well, at least members of your immediate group of fellow homo sapiens.., but I digress.
Is that moral taboo really genetic? A biological drive? Or is it such a universal feature of human culture that no one really stands a chance of growing up without it?
At any rate, it doesn’t seem like we really needed God to write down on stone tablets Thou Shalt Not Kill, and by similar arguments, Thou Shalt Not Steal. Would we have known, however, that we should “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” if not for those stone tablets? As far as I can tell, there is nothing that distinguishes one day from the next, save the system by which you count and name those days. Tuesdays are not derived from the positions of the moon or stars. So where did that come from, and is it really a moral issue whether you do or don’t work on the Sabbath?
Social pressures at any one time in history are responsible for many of the so called moral rules that have been encoded into religious doctrine over the years. Likely the taboo against eating certain meats had more to do with the science of preservation and the prevalence of salmonella at a particular time, than with any intrinsic harm to the soul derived from the meats.
Imagine some early doctor clever enough to understand the link between meat and disease, trying to pass on the news to his less intelligent brethren.
“Look, you have to keep the meat clean and cook it all the way through, or the bacteria won’t be destroyed.”
“Bacteria? What are you talking about?”
“OK, look, pork is fine if you clean it and cook it very thoroughly, or maybe if you salted it all the way through -”
“Yeah right, salt is damn expensive, and wouldn’t that taste horrible?”
“Fine, the point is, you can get sick if you aren’t careful with pork.”
“Yeah, we know, you have to say the right prayers over it, or God will strike you down with sickness.”
“No, no! I mean… oh hell, just don’t eat the pork OK?”
“Why not, we love pork!”
“Because its dirty, OK?”
“Says who?”
“God. God says it’s dirty. God says don’t eat the stuff. Happy now?”
The “God Says So” position doesn’t seem terribly convincing to us in the modern day, when we understand so much more about parasites and bacteria, (you could argue that it should not have been convincing back then) but it stuck with people for a very long time without the benefit of understanding -why- pork was unsafe. It is less easy to pinpoint why the Sabbath should be holy, but again, the rule and its moral weight have stuck with us.
If you believe what the priests tell you about what is right and wrong, then you find that God is indeed necessary - how else do you come up with the Sabbath or the immorality of homosexual behavior, if not by Holy Writ? At least the declaration that pork was immoral had a very real physical consequence attached to it, who would have stoned someone to death for working on the Sabbath if they weren’t convinced of the absolute moral necessity of it?
So where are we? We have some pretty solid universal moral rules that seem to be grounded pretty well in our biology and social structure. We have a bunch more that seem to have nothing much behind them except for tradition and the word of God. Is that it? Do we simply decide whether we believe in God, pick up a holy book and believe whatever it says is moral? Do we reject all the rules as constructs and say to hell with morality? The first seems like a horribly shortsighted way to go, especially in light of the whole pork debacle. We restrict ourselves not only to a possibly outdated and misguided set of rules, but we also subject ourselves to someone else’s interpretation of those rules. Do you trust your church leadership to always read the bible with a mind towards your well being, and not their own power or personal hangups? The second approach seems needlessly nihilistic.
I said earlier that morals are a very human thing, and require both choice and analysis of consequences. Alone among the animals, we have that capacity for analysis and consideration of consequences, and that seems very clearly to point the way towards a rational moral path. Here are the commandments, as I would state them to a community of intelligent, rational humans rather than an ignorant mass of brainwashed and worshipful followers:
Thou shalt not cause harm by choice
Gee, that seems to be it. But its more subtle than it looks on the surface. One has to consider the meaning of the word “harm”. Harm comes in many shapes and sizes, there are direct physical harms, social harms, environmental harms. All harms are, by definition, bad, but we must carefully define what we mean by the word if we want to make moral choices around it. I define harm here in very human terms - after all, we are talking about morals, which only apply to humans (or intelligent extra terrestrials we might meet later):
Harm results in measurable damage to human needs and interests.
Sounds very homo-centric, no? Well, it has to be. Consider: chopping down a rain forest is repugnant to most of us, many would consider it immoral - but to whom does it seem repugnant? All the animal life that is destroyed? The dirt beneath the forest that washes away into the river? The trees that are sawed up and sold as lumber? No. Only us. We are the only ones that can see the forest as more than a bunch of trees, understand its destruction, or care that it is lost, and therefore the rules that govern our behavior regarding the forest are entirely about human interests, emotions and needs. Would we consider a moral law to have been broken if a meteorite struck the forest, obliterating it in flames?
And don’t get the idea that “human interests” is an economic calculation. If it is measurable, it counts. Harm to a bank account, a body, a mind, or a group of people, a source of food, an environment that sustains us, or a rain forest that we may need in the future for oxygen or medicine or simply the dignity that comes of preserving the treasures of nature… all these are very real and must be weighed. Neither should you get the idea that this is a mathematical exercise, that a great good outweighs a small bad, and the moral bottom line is all that counts.
Take this example - a small tribe of people traditionally kill and eat a rare species that is declared endangered and put under strict protection. The nation enforcing the rules against killing the animals is doing a great moral good - protecting and preserving a species that might be lost otherwise. Future humans will be able to see and know this animal, the environment will remain more intact and less hazardous to humans (we hope), and in these ways, human interests have been served.
But the rules also do moral harm, they damage the freedom of the tribe, endanger its source of food, and perhaps even force the tribe to fade away forever. The moral good and the moral harm both exist, and those who made the decisions must remain aware not only of the good they do, but the damage they do. A nation regulating its resources in such a morally aware way will be motivated to reduce the harm they do to the tribe as they strive to save the animal - a nation that disregards the harms in light of the good will end up doing more harm than necessary (and will incidentally find it much easier to rationalize the harms to make the perceived good outweigh it).
When considering whether to work on the Sabbath, we simply have to ask ourselves, what harm is done thereby? Obviously no one is killed (unless maybe your work is soldiering) and generally it is hard to see what harm is caused - but what if you live in a strictly observant religious community where people will be very upset by seeing you mow the lawn when you should be worshiping? Remember, harm can be emotional as well as physical. Your decision, of course.
So there you have it, my One Commandment. I’ll talk about it more later, it is more subtle and slippery than it first appears, but I think you can see how a coherent moral landscape springs quite naturally from it. In future sermons, we’ll discuss the nature of Harm, and the consequences for our moral landscape, til then please comment and discuss in the comments section, and I hope to see you all here next Sunday night for another sermon.
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