Abstract

Do not ever forget that you are a man and not a mere creature of nature. Do not ever forget that all others are likewise men, that is to say, with all their individual differences the same as you, with the same needs and demands as you—that is the epitome of all morality.

David Strauss, author of Life of Jesus

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 24 September 2009

Morality

Why is it considered wrong to steal? It offends other people and disrupts society. So why is offending people and disrupting society so bad? Perhaps because a society disrupted in that way, by allowing its members to be constantly offended, would be uncomfortable and distressing to live in. What, then, is so wrong with making people uncomfortable and distressed? There would be no point in living together with other people in such a society. Discomfort is something we all want to avoid. We might as well solve the problem by getting out of such a bad life. We might as well get out of a society like that. When social living is uncomfortable to us, we will cease to support society, we might become rebellious, and perhaps become terrorists, because there is no longer any prospect of being able to leave society, and we might think it is not worth trying to change, or is too difficult. All we can do is break up a society we do not like, and hope to rebuild a better one out of its ruins. Rather than risk such a drastic outcome, it is better to promote a conscious desire among everyone that some acts, like stealing, are wrong.

Morality then is a set of rules or principles we all choose to live by to avoid discomfort in the societies we live in. It is in our own personal interest that society does not collapse. It is in our own personal interest that we preserve it in a state which we can enjoy together as human beings with common interests and desires. If morals come down to personal interest, then morality has been explained with no recourse to supernaturalism or mysticism. Humans, like all animals, have desires which they aim to gratify. All of us have the objective in life of fulfilling our desires. We therefore know what our aim is, and what we ought to do to achieve it, and what we call “good” matches what we want.

Kant said moral law was the starry heavens above our head. Emerson said it was the granite substratum under the soil of our cities. Others say it is the supreme reality, the foundation of social life. Almost all people have an imperious sense of moral law. People might defy it, but they rarely deny it. It did not come from revelation, since it existed amongst people beyond the range of Christianity, and before the Christian Era. An Egyptian moral treatise (The Maxims of Ptah-Hotep) from long before the Christian era suggests that educated people understood moral law as a social law of conduct. So, before Christ it was written in everyone’s conscience. It was a reality of life, and it had to be explained.

Naturalism is the attempt to give an account of morality without invoking any special moral facts or entities. If moral rules are a prescription for most effectively gratifying our desires, morality is explained without recourse to definitions of “good” or “right”. To contemplate an act of treachery or deceit will give most people a sense of guilt, but it does not imply any intrinsic wrongness in the action, any more than beauty is an intrinsic quality of the Venus de Milo. It is the human awareness of the wrong that is present in the mind of the one contemplating the act. Similarly to say any action is good, right or virtuous, is simply saying what impression the act has on someone with a normal moral sense.

History of Morality

Until recent times, morality was unintelligible. There it was, no one knew why, no one knew whence it came. Plato saw it as social law, enforced for the good of society, but Plato also had a theory that a material world can produce nothing, and all truth, goodness and beauty must come from a spiritual world, a world of “ideas”, not human mental ideas, but self existing “realities”. The “good” was one of these ideas, and conscience was its voice and interpreter.

After Plato, Greeks continued speculating on morality. There were three main opinions:

1. The Platonic theory, which Christian writers followed later, saying that the “ideas” were in the mind of God.
2. The theory of the Stoics, who talked politely about the gods but did not believe in them. For them, moral law was the Law of Nature. It existed. It was part of the scheme of things. People were at discord with Nature if they did not observe it.
3. Concern for human welfare. Hedonists said that the test of a moral act was whether it promoted happiness (Greek hedone). For some happiness was pleasure, for others, like Epicurus, moral acts were those which promoted a passionless tranquillity of life.

Thereafter, for fourteen centuries or so of Christianity, moral law was unquestioningly a divine command. Then thinking began again. The deistic movement attacked revelation and old ideas were revived. Some followed the Stoic theory, that moral law is the Law of Nature. Some connected it with the divine will, as revealed not in a Bible but in man’s conscience. But some, Hobbes and Locke, saw its human significance.

Now there were two main views. One was that moral law is an eternal reality, either in Nature or in God, or in a mystic world which nobody can understand. Morals are seen directly by the mind, by intuition, and so these theories are called Intuitionalism. Against this, some British thinkers, Hume, Bentham, Spencer, Mill, held that moral law is a human law regulating the welfare or “utility” of social life. They were the Utilitarians.

This law was closely related to the social interests of humanity. Justice, truthfulness, and self control are desirable social qualities, but it was not clear how even justice, however useful it was, came into existence, and parts of the accepted moral law, like sexual purity, seemed to have no social significance. Whatever it was, moral law was seen through a special human faculty called conscience.

Utilitarianism

Can all moral principles be reduced to one only, as the Utilitarians thought. If they can, another question arises as to why they do. What is the basis of the principle and why are we subject to it?

Before Thomas Hobbes, so called natural law laid down norms of behaviour in accordance with human nature, the key feature of which is reason. Morality is explained by reason. Human beings are rational animals. The fully rational being is within everyone, and they have it in them to achieve it, by following their reason and becoming a moral being. Even so many humans can be and remain totally unconscious of this being their aim. They do not have it in mind, and can strive for ends that are utterly inconsistent with the proper goal. Then people have become corrupt. That is the Christian idea. Adam fell, and consequently we are all corrupt. It means observing what people do is no guide to what they ought to do.

Hobbes sees the natural law in an opposite sense, a truly natural sense, an empirical sense. Humans beings do what comes naturally! The natural, rational, state of humanity is good, and so people strive to achieve it. As an animal, human beings have goals to achieve to stay alive, food, security, etc, just as any animal has. Humans, however, know they have these aims. They can therefore ask themselves what they ought to do.

But different people can have different desires, and the same people can have different desires at different times. How then to choose between them? It is to choose the one that gives most satisfaction, pleasure or happiness in the long run. But if everyone tries to gratify their desires without consideration for others, the result is conflict, with everyone against everyone else. No one then has much chance of any gratification, or of achieving anything.

Human beings are characterized by being social, and by needing the help of other people to grow, learn, survive and progress—all of it depending on cooperation. People achieve their desires, in fact by cooperating with others, not by fighting them. A peaceful and ordered society is everyone’s means to an end, they way of achieving their desires. They achieve them collectively. Society is a means to achieve what cannot be done by solitary animals, and the reason why we became social. The question is how can such a society be maintained. The conditions are that everyone agrees to a set of rules, these are morals, and a set of means for enforcing the agreed rules, laws.

Hobbes saw that an orderly society needs such rules. Morality is the set of rules necessary for society to survive and function smoothly. As the rules are necessary, a successful society has an interest in inculcating them into each new generation. People take them in with their culture. They internalize them and identify with them. Everyone has sociologically inculcated feelings of obligation and duty. It is morality. What one ought to do is what society requires for its own protection. Moreover, without obeying these rules you have little chance of gratifying your desires. Morality is therefore not pure benevolence. It requires us to help others so that they will reciprocate, and we all benefit. There is a clear self interest in morality, but it is served by helping our fellow humans beings. There is no dichotomy here with Christianity. Christians are told by their God that they have to do unto others as they would want them to do to them. That too is reciprocation. People can serve their own self interest as long as they act benevolently to others. The virtuous person puts benevolence before personal desires, and this is considered to be pure benevolence, and pure morality.

As virtue is benevolence, the use of it suggests that the aim of it is general happiness. It is the maxim of the Utilitarians: the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That is the universal principle to be aimed for. Of course, the happiness of the greatest number does not necessarily coincide with your own happiness. Nevertheless, as the aim is the happiness of the greatest number, it is likely that you will be included. It impressed a lot of clerics, who saw the principle of Utilitarianism as essentially the law of nature, the moral law—the end that God wills is the universal well being of mankind, and Bishop Berkeley said about moral laws:

No private interest, no love of friends, no regard for the public good should make us depart from them.

The Prehistory of Morality

Joseph McCabe (The Human Origin of Morals) explained something of the emergence of morals and religion from primitive tribalism. Neglecting fairy tales, the human race had been evolving towards civilization for hundreds of thousands of years. Morality could have arisen among human beings long before historic civilizations arose. That was why ancient civilizations awoke into history already possessing a moral code, and so could not imagine that it was drawn up by the ignorant uncivilized humans that had preceded them. As they had not formulated it, who had?

God must have been behind it, Kant said, impressed as he was with the imperiousness of conscience, which was, for him, an absolute dictator. It spoke “categorically”. It spoke “categorical imperatives”. Yet, what we see is just people accepting their conduct was somehow regulated. They lived according to certain regulatory customs. Then they discovered how to write down what was important to them in society, and among them were these laws they had been keeping unconsciously, out of custom and culture. The earlier more primitive people had not devised, however imperfectly, any moral law, but they had evolved, by instinct and practice, ways of living together.

The earliest humans, not yet tribes, were the first level of evolution of morality. Primitive people call an act “bad” in reaction to a cause of inflicted pain or discomfort. From the outset, self interest approved acts of pleasure or service, and resented pain or injury, and the fact of the action rendering service or inflicting pain must be perceived before the emotion can arise.

People are moral before they have morality. They resent anyone’s “bad” act, but cannnot generalize—it is before they can make rules. At the mental level of the early Old Stone Age, they are incapable of abstract ideas, and so cannot draw up rules. They have no moral laws or codes. They think only of individual acts. They reflect on their ways no more than apes do. They are unconsciously moral, but morality is conscious. They have no consciences, no consciousness of law.

Yet their social conduct is generally excellent. People at the lowest level have no moral rules or ideas, yet they rarely steal, lie, or murder. They are kindly to the widow and aged. They live peacefully. They observe their rules of conduct without having a list of them. The Australian Aboriginals behaved well and had a code. An Australian youth, forbidden to eat certain meat during his initiation period, and asked if he would eat it if nobody saw him, said, “I could not do that. It would not be right.”

By “right” he meant against the custom. The bad act is against custom. Custom is the lawgiver, of primitive people. “How can I tell?” says a Kaffir asked why he behaves in a certain way. “It has always been done.” We have customs, as many species of social animals have, but they cannot identify their customs abstractly. Once we learn to write and become fully conscious, we can. It—custom—is a clue—our word “morals” is from the Latin for customs or ways, and our word “ethics” is from the Greek for the same.

The next step was for humans to perceive, as their awareness developed, that their customs were good, and they set them up as standards of conduct. It is the dawn of conscience, of an inner voice, put into the person by the social group, by acculturation. Humans have perceived the social value of their customs. They are now rules, though the idea is still so vague that many anthropologists still denied primitive tribes had any morality. For a hundred years, it was disputed whether they have any moral or religious ideas. The uncertainty was due partly to the lack of skill of the observer, who, especially if a missionary, asked the natives whether they knew of sin and God. As the natives had no words for them, the missionary concluded they had no religion and no morals. Western observers failed to realize that our words did not apply in the culture of the natives. The native would respond with blankness, or give an account in their own concepts of what they thought the observer meant.

Partly, the mistake is what can be expected from evolution, from progress. We cannot say that religion begins here, or morality there. They rise gradually from tribal culture. These people had no morality in one sense, and they had in another. Their development was in transition—evolution is continuous transition. Custom is at first followed unconsciously, then enters the consciousness of the tribe and becomes its rule. The most primitive have nothing corresponding to conscience or a conscious code of conduct, but still follow a code. At a higher level of intelligence they are conscious of a code, but it is merely custom. At a still higher level the spirits of the dead are said to be as interested as the living community in the observance of the code. Religion and morality enter into combination.

Custom is something set up by ancestors, but they could be exacting, malicious, and vindictive. The primitive thinks the ancestor’s spirits will punish him for violating custom—the father god will punish his sins. Rain or health often does not follow sacrifices meant to induce them. They have to invent reasons. A good reason is that the man has offended the spirits by his conduct, or has been immoral.

Prehistory of Religion

Religion and morality arose independently, as different aspects of culture, albeit embedded together in it. No modern authority questions it, and they remained independent for some time. In the evolution of advanced society, religion was important for stability and inculcating culture and morals from one generation to the next, but morality did not begin with religion, it stands on its own natural footings needing no particular religion. Morality is evolving, and, as it evolves, it approaches religion naturally. Morality and religion gradually and naturally blended.

Chiefly, religion began with deified ancestors, who were concerned with the observance of custom, not Nature gods. Ancestors had built the tribe, made the customs, and so were interested in them. Then, in the blending of tribes into kingdoms, rival priesthoods had to merge and their deities merge too. So ancestor gods fused with Nature gods. As deified ancestors were keen on proper conduct, so too were the new gods, and Osiris in Egypt, for example, originally an ancestor, became the judge of the dead.

The wicked were seen to flourish in this life, but the priests assured their flocks that they would get punished for it in the next—a good deal longer one. Many of the Nature gods were tendin, in part at least, to become ethical. They had fearsome aspects—drought, fires, storms, and floods—but some were benevolent—rain or fertility, sunshine up to a point—causing people to thank them, so they could share and swap their benevolence with the ancestors’. The Nature gods turned ethical. Jupiter and Zeus were the sky gods, the dispensers of rain and sunshine, but were also the fathers of men, guardians of justice.

When people learned agriculture, the goddess of fertility became one of the most important divinities. Except in the stormy season, mother earth was more important than father sky or sun. The fertility of the earth became closely connected with a woman’s fertility. At first human beings copulated not even knowing that the man begat the child, but love and fertility were to become important facts of life for early people. The spirit of sexuality was a tremendous and beneficent force.

One of the most striking features of natural morality is that the approval or censure of an act directly reflects the social value or social injury of the act. Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. In tribal society religion and morals had remained close to each other. Then religion became the interest of the sacerdotal caste of priests, when nations and empires were built. Then it perverted morality in the interests of that class, yielding extraordinary notions of mortally serious sin—rules about washing, sneezing, coughing, marrying, excreting, wearing hats, etc. Utterly pointless morals were invented to give priests more income, absolving the sheep of these perversions, or forcing them to get natural social arrangements like marriage celebrated by the priests, further enriching them.

The Morals of Christianity

The prime morals perverted by Christianity were those related to sexuality. Christianity was born out of Judaism, a religion that put women at a serious disadvantage, and treated them as polluted. Moreover, Christianity specifically came from the chaste Jewish sect of Essenes, for whom, at the highest level, sex was pollution. The Essenes endeavour was to be angelic They considered angels to be in no need of sex, and indeed sexless beings. So for these very religious people, sex was anathema, and that distaste for sex has passed on continuously through the following 2000 years of Christian history, its entire point lost, but leaving a perfectly natural and biologically necessary act of love as something disgusting and dirty, to be confessed and repented.

What, though, are the greatest moral innovations of Christ and Christianity. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” is a quotation from the Old Testament. It was centuries old when Christ quoted it, and as the Old Testament was first written only late in the fifth century BC, its doctrine of brotherly love is a century later than Buddha, who taught universal love. The Jewish maxim applied to Jews, and that is actually how Christ meant it. Buddha required everyone to love their fellow humans as a mother loves her children.

To express the principle of love more practically, Christ taught an ancient principle, an admirably moral principle, the Golden Rule:

Act toward others as you would have them act toward you.

It puts morality in a nutshell. It is not profound, but common sense. If you don’t want to be murdered, then don’t kill other people. If you don’t want your spouse to have affairs, then don’t have them yourself. If you do not want lies told you, don’t tell them. If you want just, honorable, kindly, brotherly treatment, get it by reciprocity—treat your fellow humans with justice, honor, loving kindness, and brotherly treatment. It was Confucius, who, teaching the Golden Rule 500 years earlier and asked to put it in a single word, said, “reciprocity”. Lao Tse, a contemporary of Confucius, said, “Recompense injury with kindness”. Mencius, a follower of Confucius, said, “A benevolent man does not lay up anger nor cherish resentment against his brother, but only regards him with affection and love”. Buddha taught love was to be universal, and in the Dhammapada is, “Hatred ceases by love. This is an old rule”. Socrates said, “We ought not to retaliate, or render evil for evil to anyone”.

Darwin thought (The Descent of Man) that the “Golden Rule”, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise” was at the foundation of morality, but the motivation early humans had for acting thus was “love of praise and the dread of blame”. They were concerned about what others in the tribe thought of them.

That was, in all likelihood, what came to be true out of acculturation, but it meant the tribal members were frowning on behaviour which did not conform with the rule. So, tearly humans already had the rule to expect others in the tribe to conform to it. The social stigma of not acting appropriately was derived from a behavior that must have had a more fundamental source. Surely it did. People acted that way for the simple reason that by so doing others would act in the same way towards them. It is not altruism but common sense, if society is to exist at all! People primarily realized or accepted that social living necessitated reciprocity, helping each other. Social living arose as a means of fostering cooperation, and cooperation is reciprocity. Reciprocity therefore was at the heart of human society from the outset.

It is not to plug Christianity by the back door by seeing the importance of the “Golden Rule” to society. Darwin himself knew that Stoics like Marcus Aurelius had similar maxims, and, we have seen, the “Golden Rule” is common to all the major beliefs in the world in some form or another, showing that it must be associated with some very basic human instinct. Christ commanded the “Golden Rule”, but if Christ was God, he was simply restating what humans had already worked out themselves, so as to be able to live together at all. It is not a new and surprising moral injunction, but a codification of age old human custom and practice.

Despite all this, retention of the barbaric Old Testament, with its vengeful and anything but loving god, meant that the Christian God was held to be vengeful, and to cruelly punish sinners. So Christians everywhere, princes and prelates, continued without scruple to do so, irrespective of Christ’s teaching to do unto others as you would be done by. It was immoral. It remains immoral… immorality by Christians, according to the criterion of their own God, Christ. Punishment in Christendom was more abominable than ever. People were burnt to death, and horribly tortured for questioning Catholic, then Calvinist views. Christians did not change it. Liberals rationalists did. Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Filangiere, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and Bentham, all rationalists, most of them atheists or agnostics.

The Continuing Need for Morality

Moral law is social law. Moral law slowly dawns to the human race as a regulation of everyone’s relations with their fellows in the interest of society, living socially. Originally independent of religion, but springing from the same social seeds in primitive tribalism, it is essentially human. Justice, honor, truthfulness, honesty, fidelity, and hospitality, all social virtues, are its main elements. Drunkenness nor sexuality are immoral unless others are harmed by them, usually the drunkard’s wife and children, sometimes others, and the same with sex. God is not involved. Drunkenness has declined roughly proportionately to religion since the nineteenth century, and sexual permissiveness has grown in Europe where Christianity has declined, but also in the USA where Christianity has remained popular.

Morality itself—not merely sexual prudence, but benevolence, compassion, thought for others, empathy—has been in decline, especially among our leaders, the very people meant to uphold it. A better society composed of men and women of exemplary moral character is needed. Once formed, good character expresses itself in every act. The benevolence, honor and nobility of deed extend to everyone. The human value of it, the happiness, comfort, and welfare it brings, makes it eminently desirable. Virtue is a benevolent ideal, but one which benefits each of us. We need not be altruistic to want it, because it is in our own self interest, whoever we are. And we can be comfortable in knowing it is natural. It does not require any invisible means of support. It is solidly based in our human nature, our sociality and our natural empathy, which simply extends that of all advanced vertebrates.

Good fallacies never die. They spirit themselves to America, where they turn up as the latest discoveries of Fundamentalist Christians.

Pace Professor D C Broad

Further Reading

• More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History