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Personal and Collective Morality. (Morality 5)

~ All the Right that's left ~ 2 Comments

I assert that morality, the internal compass for right and wrong, is personal. It cannot be a shared or be community standard simply because we all have different priorities, and those priorities change from day to day with our lives. When I was a teenager, I had questionable and flexible moral standards. As I grew, became a man and assumed adult responsibilities, my internal compass changed. Get married, quit chasing random women. A father, well, there go most of the toys and self-indulgent hobbies. Personal priorities are a constantly shifting patchwork and cannot be shared with the whole community.

Collective morality is a myth, or at least a mislabeling of an observed standard of conduct. If morality is internalized than community standards are ethical, external standards, enforced either by community disapproval or codified as law and punishable as such. Any conduct that is forced or enforced cannot be moral, there is no choice other than obedience or punishment. The act is simply avoidance of punishment or defiance.

There is a tendency of communities of similar standards to raise children to reflect their beliefs and standards of conduct. Christians raise their children, with varied success, to whatever standards are derived from their version of Christianity. Jews, the same, depending on their sect, or Islam. Living in the northeast, I have the handy example of the Amish. A strict sect that will expel anyone who violates the precepts of their faith and community. What the children learn from their community is what will become their internalized moral standard. It is impossible for everyone to share the same world view and priorities. If nothing else is applied, the perceived rank within a family is different Father, mother, children by age and talent.

At best, the collective standard can be the mores, customs and conventions that when viewed externally, can roughly define what a community believes. Further division occurs in different communities or subcultures. What comparisons can be made between urban and suburban cultures; nations differ significantly as well. Is there a universal standard for good and evil? Is it possible to achieve a single standard when there are cultures that believe everyone who does not share their beliefs is wrong and somehow lesser? Sadly, the answer is no. As long as one group rejects the foundational beliefs of equality, a universal definition of good and evil will be impossible.

In “Famine, affluence and morality”, (Singer 1974), Singer argues that it is a moral requirement to send any excess funds to support charities. The argument is based on an equivalence argument that breaks down once past the benefactor/recipient stage. If you send your funds as food support to an obscure African village, the chances are fairly high that the local strongman will benefit more than the intended recipient. Singer simply created a logic box and excludes the reality of his proposition. If we shift our perspective along the layers of interaction, the different moral and ethical standards are obvious

The affluent feel obligated to provide for those less fortunate, either from altruism or self-aggrandizement. Starting from the doner, the desire to donate excess funds, an obvious first world problem, comes from a need for recognition.

Morality (3) Wrong and Evil.

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I noticed that I skipped over trying to define what wrong and evil are. Those are tough words, complicated by degree. How wrong? How evil? Where and how do we draw the lines?

I was going to take the easy way out and say that wrong is something that causes harm to another. That is simplistic and indefensible. In war, law enforcement, medicine, or any situation where a decision needs to be made and you can likely come up with a way that someone may be harmed. We can also skip for the time being, the numerical arguments that are based on the “Greater Good” or “Greater Harm”. Triage is triage, making decisions based on economics, in the classical sense not financial. There are only so many lifeboats or X- number of doctors for Y-patients. You can use the resources wisely and save the people with the highest chance of survival or waste it trying to achieve an equal outcome for all, in which case is probably death.

That leaves the other two sides, moral good and societal good.

Moral good is inwardly focused but outwardly observed, virtue based on a particular creed that dictates actions. It also seems responsible for the Patriarchy, men leading, working, fighting and sacrificing for women and children. Also, those who took the rights of patriarchy more seriously than the obligations. Witness the scale – in the former we can see virtue in a man who sacrifices for his family or community. In the later someone who may contribute to the family or community, but lacks virtue because, inwardly his actions are directed by self-interest. The simple definitions do not take into account things like an abusive or unfaithful spouse, emotional trauma or exhaustion, financial strains that seem insurmountable, just virtue and evil.

Societal good is even trickier. What constitutes good for a society? How do we measure it. This question is answered in ethics, the outward actions of individuals, whether they are people, communities, corporations or governments. Whose self-interest is the deciding value? Peter Singer brings this up in an offhand way in “Famine, Affluence and Morality”, an essay he wrote in the 1970’s, arguing that it is immoral to spend money on luxuries when there are people suffering that can be helped by financial support. Failure to do so, is by Singer’s argument, evil. I’m not convinced, a logic box is a logic box. Solipsism is a fine argument to waste time on, but it’s just a logic box, it is true by the parameters placed around it.

Center stage in America is the Trans debate, exclaiming that it is good and essential to acknowledge and support anyone who feels that they are closer to being identified as a sex not supported by their biology. They would be happier if they could simply transition, emerge from the cocoon of hormones and surgeries to be what they believe they are. The next step is to support the beliefs of minor children if they believe or are convinced that they are Trans. With children, it becomes more difficult, do we allow half-formed minds to determine their future because we believe they truly know themselves? When I was a child, I believed I was a fireman and a police officer. Should I have been given a gun or allowed to run into burning buildings to support my belief? We have laws preventing anyone under 18 from getting tattoos, but they are allowed to castrate themselves because they believe it will make them happy?

What about the harm or risk to others. Mixing biological sexes in ways that thousands of years of societies have avoided such as bathrooms, mixed changing rooms, letting boys and girls share a room on a trip because one claims to be Trans. Why do we neglect protecting children because they believe they have a right to make decisions that are beyond their experience?

Another view? Is it ethical to allow the government to take extraordinary measures to save Social Security for the Baby Boomers? There is no way to do this without imposing on the still working Gen-X and Gen X groups, who will have to rely on the Millennials and whoever is next. The program is insolvent for simple reasons. When it was started, the expectation was that it would provide additional income for a limited amount of people for a short period. The average life expectancy in the 1930s was 58 for men and 62 for women, so most would not have reached the age of 65 to receive payments. In 2017, those numbers had risen to 77 for men and 82 for women. On average, most Americans will live to collect a portion of benefits for up to 12 years, when the original program did not foresee many receiving any benefits. Would it be ethical to reduce the benefits paid instead of passing the burden to the next generation.

Of course, we haven’t touched on Medicare and Medicaid. Heroic measures for life saving interventions for the elderly who are simply waiting to die and served by machines. Estates and lives crushed under the cost of paying for health care that cannot restore health and does not care for the welfare of the patient or families.

So, evil…