The essence of morality is not a gut response, but a social construction. Morality is like the custom of stopping at stop signs. At some point our society simply decided that stopping at red lights is the thing we are supposed to do. All morality is like that. If our morality is about marriage being only between a man and a woman, that is just a custom some social group constructed. It has no more authority than that. If morality means not killing people, except in circumstances of self defense, appropriate police action, or declared warfare, that is also something that a society has decided.
We can have gut responses to our moralities. We like them. We don’t like them. We are nauseated by people to violate them. We enjoy seeing people violate them. These gut-responses are not our moralities, but attitudes we ourselves take toward the familiar moralities that our society, community, parents, or peers have taught us. Our superego, as Freud called it, is nothing else than our internalized social moralities, plus the various attitudes we take toward those moralities.
We also add to this mix rational justifications for the moralities we like and rational excuses for the moralities we dislike. But these justifications have nothing to do with the validity of the moralities. Any validity that moralities can be said to have resides in the social purpose that some society had in creating that morality. Morality rests in some socially felt need for behavioral order that was arbitrarily decided by some society. So if morality is to be realistically approved or changed, the issue is what social ordering is needed by whatever group is going to find that morality useful for its purposes.
If a particular social group is dedicated to living among one another in a realistic fashion, this dedication to realism serves as a sort of guide in the choosing of the moralities that this group selects for itself. As an example, let’s take the ten commandments, as listed in Exodus 20. I am going to word these “moralities” in contemporary speech:
1. Don’t treasure any value more than the value of Realism.
2. Don’t confuse any symbol of Reality for Reality itself.
3. Don’t superficially disregard the reputation of Reality, your primal devotion.
4. Spend at least one day in seven preparing for the realism of the other six days.
5. Honor the wisdom of your particular ancestry.
6. Don’t kill one another.
7. Don’t fuck another’s spouse.
8. Don’t steal another’s stuff.
9. Don’t get worked up for something someone else has.
These moral directives did not drop down from a heavenly realm into the minds or writing surfaces of some person or group of persons. These directives were made up by the leaders and members of a group of people who had left slavery in a hierarchical civilization and were now figuring out how to be realistic in their devotion to the Reality revealed to them in their awesome experience that a human situation can be remarkably changed by bold decisions to do so. Reality loves us, they concluded, with a freedom to be free. So let’s hang on to that, they said, and not return to those old Egyptian slave moralities. And, Moses might be said to have pushed, “ Here are some Reality recommended steps toward realistic moralities.”
The first persons who faced these new moral directives were sorely tempted to return to the moralities with which they were more familiar. Why? Because the moralities of Egypt were embedded in their superegos. To rip up an old superego and start forming an alternative superego is almost as challenging as fleeing the Pharaoh’s chariots. In the biblical narrative, it took 40 years to get those superegos re-habituated.
This fresh telling of the Exodus experience illustrates for us what all morality is like. There is no excuse for continuing with whatever morality we have. If we want to live a realistic life, we have to begin in the moral “wilderness” with the understanding that morality has no justification other than what appears to be the most realistic social patterns for our particular group of people at this particular place and time in the history of the planet.
Morality and Law
Social law is an elaboration of morality—an elaboration with enforcements and penalties. For example, the Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled as settled law the legality of marriage between same-sex couples. We have now experienced a county clerk who refused to enforce this law, citing her own morality as a reason not to do so. But for a law to be law, it must be enforced. So this clerk had three options: enforce the law in spite of her discomfort, resign her county-clerk job, or go to jail. She chose jail as a protest against this law. And she is being supported by people with like moralities. Nevertheless, the law has to be enforced; the law has no sympathy for this clerk’s morality, and there are no exceptions for her disobedience to the law. Her jail protest can be part of a movement to change the law in the minds of the nation and its courts, but, meanwhile, she personally has only the above three types of action.
It is not true, as some are saying, that her religion/morality is being persecuted. Under the U.S. constitution, she can practice any religion she wants, and she is doing so by going to jail as her “religious/moral” choice. Her religious liberty is being respected. To claim that the law has to make an adaptation to her morality is not true. For example, what if her morality included killing off Jews or blacks or Muslims, would the U.S. constitution support making an exception for that morality?
Ex-governor Mike Huckabee, now running for President of the United States, is arguing that this law is not a law because the state and county have not approved it—that this law is only the ruling of “five unelected judges.” But these carefully appointed Supreme Court Justices are the final appeal on what is to be counted as law in the United States. Huckabee’s view means that he could not take the oath of office of the presidency to enforce the law. Therefore, we should point out to voters that he is not able to take on that job, to run for it, or even to be an advisor for legal matters in this nation. A law must be obeyed until the law is changed. And the chance that this law will ever be changed is basically nil.
What can be changed is our mindset on what counts as religious protection, on how religious practices are protected by government and how governmental decisions are protected against religious tyrannies. Here are some possible guidelines: If a citizen is going to work for a public agency, he or she has to enforce the existing law, whatever be their religion or morality. If a citizen is going to sell products to the general public, they have to sell products to every member of that public, whatever be their religion or morality. Otherwise, we are allowing any individual or any religious group to tyrannize the majority.
If a law does not seem just from someone’s perspective, it can be criticized without penalty and perhaps changed in the established democratic manner, like any other law. Meanwhile the law must be obeyed or the consequences for disobedience taken. That is what it means to truly believe in a nation of laws rather than a nation of gut impulses.
These topics are more fully elaborated in these two books.
The Road from Empire to Eco-Democracy, and
Enigma of Consciousness: A Philosophy of Profound Humanness and Religion
For more information on these books and how to order them, click: