Moral Absolutes

There are no moral absolutes. There are just consequences and preferences and rules that apply for only a short or long time.

Most people think, to the extent that they think about the matter, that almost all people think they have basic principles of conduct and that people more or less try to abide by their principles, while acknowledging that people in other cultures may have different basic principles and so follow those different ones. Everyone has their principles, whatTalcott Parsons called “values”, and that is what differentiates people. Values are the axioms from which behaviors are implied or descend. So people believe that you should not kill or steal, and some emphasize that they are loyal to religion, family, or church, and there is no logical way to dissuade them from their values even if you might disapprove of those allegiances although you might try to argue an opposing point of view was cruel or revengeful but your antagonist might simply embrace that point of view however contrary it is to your own values, or try to move an advocate of reproductive rights that a fetus looks like a human being but the reproductive rights person could steel themselves to this appeal by asserting that nonetheless a woman controls her own body.  

I want to suggest that this point of view is not true. There are no such things as values, just short or long chains of  causes and consequences which justify a behavior and the eventual end of the chain is a matter of fact which is true or false and so that the value has been reduced to being true or false rather than good or bad. This apparently outlandish view of morality is consistent with Spinoza, the Pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey and, I would say, of G. E. Moore, who claimed that a sense of right or wrong was independent of theories of ethics but a particular sense of the rectitude of a behavior as when a person might sense it was acceptable to kill enemy soldiers even if killing is generally wrong.The reconstruction of philosophy Dewey contemplated meant that a number of traditional terms in philosophy just disappear as meaningless. Among them, I would say, is “nature”, which simply means everything, so that angels living on clouds and having wings would be natural rather than supernatural if that in fact was the way they existed even if you know that fact only on faith. Another term to be abolished is “cause” which is a force and that can be substituted with the word “context” and so people don’t get pneumonia because of germs because pneumonia germs are always present and a necessary condition for the disease but also require people who are run down in one way or other, all the conditions together and being arbitrary as which condition is to be regarded as the cause. 

There is also no need for the word “justice”, however much the term is bandied about. “Justice” is a term that cannot be defined because there is no balance of interests, as there are with weights, and so perhaps applicable to some damages, such as restitution for a wrecked car, but when applied in the criminal court system simply means punishment as if incarceration or execution somehow balances the original offense. All it does is repeat the action of killing. The victim of murder does not come back to life. All that can be meant by “justice” is palliative or remedial programs for those who live under dire conditions. Similarly, there is no need for the word “should”: even though Kant insisted the word was so essential in conversation that it must necessarily have meaning, when the word “should” is a shorthand for all the consequences one prefers that, as I say, resolve into being matters of fact, as when I say I should be nice to my wife because to do otherwise leads to wear and tear on a relationship and wanting to have that relationship is satisfying, which is a fact not a value. Now consider the status of a number of well known values that are absolute in the sense that they are axiomatic and so beyond appeal when that is clearly not the case.

A simple derivation that reasons to an absolute are the morals in the Ten Commandments. “Though shalt not steal” can be found in its consequence that this is functional for the maintenance of society. As Hobbes might say, allowing people to steal leads to anarchy and so has to be raised to the status of a moral outrage. That practical usefulness is reason enough. But some religionists might say that the implication need not be practical, that it is akin to dietary laws which some people say are sanitary or otherwise useful, but have to be obeyed because God mandated it for whatever reason He had. Your’s is not to argue. But if God commands something, the question resolves itself to the factual question of whether God exists and I have said elsewhere (See my “Contra-God” in Wenglinsky Review) that the term God is essentially meaningless, just a set of metaphors drawn from lords and masters. The commandment doesn’t hold if there is no God to command it.

Try another commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”. Leave aside the functional argument that allowing killing also leads to eternal fear amidst anarchy. Or that there are qualifications whereby enemy soldiers at the least are allowed to be killed. Consider the legal death penalty. People offer the reason for allowing it is that it may serve as a deterrent and that under present guidelines it is more expensive to do that rather than put a murderer into life imprisonment but underlying the practical considerations is the view that killing a person is worthy because it shows the sanctity of a society to protect itself, and so execution symbolizes the authority of the state. Opponents of the death penalty go beyond the practical claims that there are people who are wrongly convicted or rehabilitatable to the bedrock, axiomatic symbolic idea that refusing to execute people shows the respect of a society for all human life, even of those who are just awful. But in both cases of symbolism, the object is empirical: whether to enhance the glory or value of either the state or the individual. 

Avoid the shorthand of referring to God or symbolism and so provide the practical chains of reasoning for policy decisions. A particularly complex chain of causation to ultimate ends or values means a longer one. These are political ones such as price supports and making castes into ethnic groups. These chains, however, do not follow the model of Euclid and Spinoza to assemble axioms, already proven theorems and lacunna so as to arrive at a very different and perhaps surprising result ending with “ergo something”. Instead, a moral absolute is challenged by a logical or empirical objection followed by an alternative moral absolute that is also answered with a logical or empirical response until all the moral absolutes are used up for that particular question. 

J. F. K. said that price supports for farmers were necessary because they had been promised to them and we should honor that promise. That seems pretty weak, begging the question of whether price supports were a good thing in the first place. A more candid answer to why to continue to honor price supports is because farm states have a disproportionate number of Senators and get the support to trade favors with other things that are important to industrial states. A more generalized and moral value for farm price supports can instead be offered. It is that farm families need it and the government should provide help to whatever constituency needs it, whether struggling farmers or inner city youth, even if some politicians support one or the other because of their own interests. That moral principle is too general because it would include financial and moral support for Nazis or criminals, and indeed there is political support for either one in that Trump thought Nazis in Charlottesville were among the good people there and that Liberals want criminals to get good conditions and rehabilitation. The more economic and practical issue underlying farm price supports is that agriculture is a different kind of business than manufacturing where you can cut back on production and so cut costs when there is less demand but that farms don’t save much money by decreasing production and so the question is if there is the demand for the ample opportunities farms produce. Farm subsidies and government bought food like butter ate up some of the farm crops and other products. But things changed in that the family farmer was replaced by the industrial or corporate farm and large amounts of farm products like soybeans were sent to overseas markets at least until Trump upset the applecart with his tariffs. So farm subsidies largely become obsolete, which is not a value but an empirical question, a matter of fact about the rural economic and institutional structure. 

The same practical issue of obsolescence holds with regard to slavery which was regarded by Southerners as a necessity and Northerners as an abomination even though, not for them, the reason to go to war. The absolute moral claim of whether all people are by their nature free and that to enslave others is to diminish oneself, is countered by William Graham Sumner, the turn into the twentieth century sociologist, who said that slavery was obsolete as a method for procuring workers because wage workers were more productive and less costly. The same goes for Jim Crow. Integrating the work force and other amenities to the South helped in the decades after the Second World War, along with air-conditioning and Northern investment, to make the South prosperous. So the moral sentiment for treating people as equal is not a moral absolute but the question of obsolescence, which is an empirical matter as well as an operative rather than idealized condition.

Here are two other social policy issues that seem to rely on the same absolute value: the taking of risk. The overt and initial reason for providing Social Security is that it provides income to the elderly and old people are no longer the worst income groups in America and so easing the elderly is a good thing because people should be nice to old people. The objection to that is that the provision of pensions to the elderly allows people not to provide for their own old age by saving money and investing in private insurance or investment instruments. Those who are self indulgent, like the grasshopper, aren’t able to last the terminal winter. But that again can appeal to the cruelty being inflicted on the old. Another objection to Social Security is that people of even moderate means will never make up in their benefits from the contributions they have made in withholding payroll income taxes, and so that is unfair to the better off workers, and the answer to that is that Social Security is not an annuity but a tax scheme whereby money is transferred from the people working to the people no longer working and can easily enough be funded despite the lower number of workers to people retired with minor tax adjustments such as lifting the cap on incomes to be taxed. 

Underlying these other reasons for and against Social Security is a very different issue. Social Security is a system where people do not have to take risks and risks are a good thing, part of a person being alive and an active member in life. So Social Security would be alright if people were allowed to invest their Social Security contributions into stock portfolios and so risk making either a profit or maybe a loss and so a participant based on their own judgment even though the conversion to such a system would require massive amounts of money and also require the government to list which stocks were eligible for investment lest citizens invest in very long term odds and lose their money and have to be supported by a supplementary Social Security fund for bad investors. But that would mean engaging in the unprecedented event of the government intruding in the stock market to decide which companies were winners and losers, either worthy or unworthy objects of investment. Those who support the insistence on everyone engaging in risk as a natural and praiseworthy enterprise for all people, a kind of right, are willing to accept the costs and the transformation of the American economy in a radical way in order to accomplish this end. Risk is the absolute value.

There is another kind of risk, a social rather than an economic risk, which seems to have come to prevail in American and Western society as the essential way to manage a practice. That is courtship. People in the old days and in the Old Countries had arranged marriages. That meant that potential spouses would be culled and even marriages enforced by parents or professional matchmakers who might have better judgment than young people about what couples might get along as well as fit their lifestyles. Never mind romance. People of good will will find it easier to become companionable with a chosen mate rather than one found otherwise. But people decided differently. The young men and women who came to America decided that Western liberty meant finding a spouse on your own though usually from their own neighborhoods or mixers where the people they met were likely to be compatible. They had romantic love  interests as the basis for settling down and even had serial love affairs, as it now turns out, before settling down. Yes, that creates considerable emotional wear and tear on people and leads to computer dating and other sketchy devices for identifying who is the One, but it is worth it because romance is the greatest risk people will have in their lives, remembering how the two hit it off at a bar or a mixer, and so everyone becoming a kind of hero and heroine in their own lives however pedestrian their occupation or other activities in life might be. You did it yourself. You risk-take for better or worse. And that is an end in itself to have that adventure, something no longer available only to knights on a pilgrimage or an explorer going into the wilderness, and so part of the pursuit of happiness available to all rather than just some elites. 

Given that both Social Security and courtship, very different things, are both rooted in risk, it might be thought that risk was a moral absolute but that would be incorrect because it leads to a deeper idea than absolute value. People can either decide to accept risk or reject it as a moral principle and there is no way to insist on taking risk or not taking risk though a different value, such as the obligation to answer a military draft can entail risk and is maybe morally mandatory without it being an absolute value but one of the many obligations that people take on by being a citizen or an employee or a spouse. Rather, risk is a preference, which means a voluntary choice akin to liking Chinese or Italian food or one of the range of breakfast cereals in the supermarket, these considered in a trivial sense to be matters of taste, which means of no significance. Only your spouse cares about whether you like asparagus.

But there are also matters of taste that are significant that they are deep expressions of character. A preference for Verdi melodramas paraded as tragedies rather than a Mozart rom-com is a test of what you sound as simpatico about life, just as is the case in preferring middle brow John Steinbeck to high brow Modernists like Mann or Joyce. It tells you who you are and adopting one or the other is also a matter of taste in the sense that Hume meant that taste was a sense of something deeper not deeply explored or what C. E. Moore meant when he said that morality was taste in that it was a sense of what is right or wrong in a particular matter without reference to some moral rule which necessarily does not spell out what might be or might become regarded as exceptions. So the heart of morality is  preferences and not rules, much less absolute values, which can exist singularly as a sense of justice rather than a code of justice. And there you have it: you have a taste for or a preference for a potential spouse or a politician and that tells a lot about you but that does not exhaust you and you can change your preferences and these still have the weightiness of moral decision making but are not moral absolutes, just possibly very bad judgments that other people or even yourself find disreputable or invoke mean thoughts rather than whatever other thoughts and feelings that a politician can evoke.

There is another meaning to “moral absolutism” other than the one discussed, that it is axiomatic, and it too can be dispensed with. This second and related meaning is that moral principles are not only true but are always applicable, the view that if that timelessness is abandoned for cultural relativism, it means that it is not truly a moral principle and is subject to the whims of cultural fashion, so that principles of “Thou shalt not kill” are acceptable in some cultures or times rather than in others. When in Rome do as the Romans do applies to togas or good manners (which I would argue are in fact long lasting rather than transitory, only the expression of good manners varying from time to time but the function of good manners is more or less permanent). The status of whether a moral is absolute is just a question of whether you look at the short run, such as that of a few millenia, or the very long run, in which case a moral principle changes only when the social structure changes so fundamentally as to be difficult to imagine when the absolute moral principle disappears. 

Consider “Thou shalt not steal” again. That makes sense for all societies that have existed so far (though some Marxists believe that caveman societies might have had a primitive communism where everyone worked together and distributed goods on a need to have basis.) It makes sense that people should not take grab of the holdings of another person, whether a meal or an item or a piece of land appropriated except by law, or even a woman, though the Ten Commandments speak of two other ways not to take women, neither to engage in adultery or even just to covet them. The ancient Hebrews must have been a lascivious people, just like everyone else. Think of stealing as becoming no longer meaningful if there is so much abundance created by technology that everyone can get free of charge everything they want, available online to your heart’s content, money an unnecessary transaction, even though there still might be records of transfers so as to keep the production and distribution line going. There would be no scarcity, which ends economics and theft as a meaningful idea. That is a very long way away and so we might think not stealing a universal and permanent rule for the game of organizing social life but still nevertheless theoretically terminal.

A less fanciful notion of a permanent moral principle that could in fact become suspended because it is no longer meaningful is “Thou shalt not kill” which would occur when there arrived what Kant called “perpetual peace” when a world organization made it no longer necessary to have wars and killing people for greed was unnecessary and killing women or men for lust or jealousy gave away to the pacific world of Diderot who thought that women in Polynesia might think they were kind to even ugly men. Even closer to the horizon are the abolition of penitentiaries as punishment just as penitentiaries replaced a very general death penalty when rehabilitation of criminal minds could be successful rather than serious crime to be the result of bad social conditions or a bad seed. A shorter time frame would be to eliminate the forbearance of those who suffer from illness if most illness was eliminated through vaccines and quick surgery of the sort imagined in “StarTrek” which is just half a millennium from now, which is not very far away. Then, people would not have to be patient with the pathetic because no one would be pathetic however much that aspect of human compassion may seem a bedrock of moral existence.and universally admired as a virtue. Absolute morality, therefore, is always for a relatively short time.