Morality Revisited

This is a research paper written for my English Composition class at the University of Akron. Enjoy!

Humanity’s collective memory reaches back far into its past, pushing into the fog of the long ago and recalling scenes of a simpler time. Humans, of course, do this individually. Everyone has vague recollections of their formative years, of undemanding times when the expectations of society have yet to exert their full pressure. In these years you see a more pure personality, one that hasn’t yet been sugar-coated with those social niceties that dress up our base instincts. Humanity as a whole underwent a similar process. In a primitive world where civilizations were separated effectively by large distances and seemingly insurmountable geographical hurdles, systems of morality and values were absolute. This child-like certainty of truth and goodness was often incompatible with the truth and certainty developed under widely varied circumstances by a different group. What is necessary for the desert folk of North Africa to survive may seem appalling to the highland folk of Northern Scotland and vice versa, but this potential denigration of one’s cultural practices by another culture does not give the weight of authority to either. This is because there is no ‘authority’ to be had. What follows here is a clear argument in defense of the notion that right and wrong are not universal truths but, rather, that morality and ethics are dependent on perspective and only gain the weight of authority in those societies, cultures, and groups to which they apply.

Deep within a forest, there exists a clearing. At the center of this clearing, there exists a tree. The tree in question is old, its branches gnarled, twisted, and blackened by brush fire and lightning alike. The forest with the clearing with the tree is the home of two tribes of natives. To the south of the tree is the South tribe. The South Tribe lives in a relatively calm and mild climate. In this climate all sorts of berries, edible roots, nuts, and pleasant clear-water springs provide a bountiful existence for those lucky enough to live there. The pleasant simplicity of this southern lifestyle breeds many things, but organized violence is not one of those things. What need has the tribe for organized violence when the land provides them with all of the necessities for survival? Many miles to the north, past the clearing of the tree, live the Northern Tribes. The northern climate is much harsher. The biting cold and resulting scarcity of thriving flora and fauna makes life much more difficult for the inhabitants of the area. These inhabitants of a harsher world are harsher people, having to provide for their families and communities by whatever means available. The instinctive will to survive introduces violence into the population, causing factions of these rival tribes to raid each other’s communities for food, supplies, and whatever other useful things they can lay their hands on. The economy of survival makes these people calculating, cynical, and crafty.

The gnarled blackened tree stands between these two societies of people. For the Northern Tribes, the tree stands as a symbol of prosperity. The northern people see the tree as a battle-scarred omen of good fortune as they pass through on occasional raids of the South Tribe. To them the tree symbolizes their harsh, calculating survival. The members of the South Tribe, of course, see a different picture. To them, the tree is a foul omen. For such people of prosperity and good living, the tree symbolizes the bitter foreign land to the north and the unpleasant raiders that often come out of it. Such association with negativity leads the southern people to imagine that the tree is cursed. The essential point here is that these two different groups of people see the tree in very different ways, although the tree is the same. For a member of the Northern Tribes, the tree absolutely represents good because it represents survival and the prosperity to be had in the South. The people of the South Tribe will likely assert that the tree absolutely represents evil because it represents the harsh men and life of the north and the bane that these people present to prosperous society. As a spectator far removed from either side of this conflict, the reader can see that each side’s belief is relative to its situation. The important question to apply here is to ask why the spectator, armed with this realization of relativity, cannot apply the theory to his own situation.

The first subject that must be dealt with when addressing the issue of moral relativity is that of religion. The majority of the world’s population today adheres to one of the variations of three major religions: Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. The basic foundation that all three of these religions have in common is that they all center on the concept of monotheism. Historically speaking, monotheism is the latest of two religious formats, the other being pantheism. Pantheism involves the worship of many gods with each god having its own realm of control while monotheism suggests that combining these petty, conflicting gods into a single deity. In terms of morality, this transition is an important marker in a shift in thought. Most pantheons had gods which engaged in seemingly petty arguments, laid wagers, used humans as pawns to do their bidding, and even engaged in sexual activity with humans and spawned half-godly offspring as a result. For example, in Greek lore the god Zeus was known to have frequent sexual relations with mortal women. Rather than appealing to some heavenly sense of right and wrong, societies based their moral conduct on more practical grounds. Indeed, how could behavior such as murder or sexual activity be condemned by humans in terms of ultimate good and evil when their own gods participated in such activity with an appetite! What’s more, when pantheons collided (as with the expansion of the Roman Empire), they tended to be fairly capable of accommodating new gods without sacrificing the worship of the old. By uniting the powers and responsibilities of all of the gods in a single god, monotheistic religions make the jump from the relativity of competing gods and cultures being embraced under a single religion to creating a single, universal standard by which to adhere. New gods that could easily fit into a pantheon would most likely contradict in some way the absolute standards of the new monotheism. As a single deity cannot argue and quarrel in the way that multiple deities can, room for disagreement or competition between ideas rapidly disappears. A single God encompasses all of the supernatural power of the world and so must be omnipotent; similarly the morality of this single God must also be the absolute morality.

With this transition we can observe the polarization of competing ideas into those of absolute good and absolute evil. The neutral underworld, the final resting place of souls in Greek and Roman religion, becomes the purifying Hell of Christianity in which sinners must suffer for violating the absolute good. Similarly, the negative and positive aspects of life become blessings and punishments for abiding by or violating an absolute sense of good. The trouble with the idea of monotheistic absolute good is that the very existence of more than one monotheistic religion an underlying relativity to the whole affair.

In his book, A Primer on Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz explains that ever since the Enlightenment the pursuit of truth has been viewed as inherently good. “The modern scientist, for example,” he points out, “considers it axiomatic that the discovery of knowledge is always good.” (Grenz, 4) He goes on to explain that the postmodernist intellectual movement holds that truth and, by extension, good and evil are always relative and not inherent. The shift in the intellectual community towards postmodernism helps to address some of the more difficult conflicts between modernist science and ethics. During the twentieth century the early rumblings of moral relativism and postmodernism could be heard in the thoughts of men such as Sir Isaiah Berlin and Max Weber. They recognized that at least within a single society that there are “a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective […]” (Lukes, 98) Values within societies and between them are experiencing a reevaluation as the very frame of intellectual and philosophical thought evolves.

Being that morality is often tied to religion, discovering scientifically that the predisposition for religion is hard-wired somehow into the human brain and that small differences from brain to brain would result in different religious outcomes would go a long way in supporting the idea of moral relativism. Professor and biologist Richard Dawkins attempts to do this, to some extent. In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins elaborates on the idea that aspects of the mind (which he refers to as ‘modules’), like other aspects of nature, evolved through a Darwinian process. “There is a model for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favor of in-group members and against strangers.” (Dawkins, 208). The resounding scientific refutation of religion on all fronts that Dawkins seeks probably will not occur any time soon, but the postulation of thoughts, ideas, and scientific research in the search for that refutation can and will clearly have an impact on how we look at our own perception of the world and begin to comprehend how this system of perception that we exist in actually works.

With these thoughts in mind, the question of the relativity of morality becomes a simple one. Yes, morality certainly is relative. When a system of moral absolutism is in effect, the very existence of a second system of absolutism makes the first relative to the second. All that remains is whether or not to dogmatically assert the absolute and total goodness and righteousness of a certain standard over other societies, communities, and cultures. Whether it be a reversion to pantheism, a progression towards atheism, or simply the advent of greater scientific understanding of the mind and the dynamics of group perception, monotheism cannot reasonably continue to insist that its single moral absolute, its single Truth, is applicable everywhere and all of the time. Eventually the postmodern shift and everything that comes with it will cause monotheism to adapt, and even to evolve in the Darwinian fashion towards a more competent system that can operate in the postmodern world.

Works Cited

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton, 2008.

Grenz, Stanley. A Primer on Postmodernism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

Lukes, Steven. Moral Relativism. New York: Picador, 2008.