Chapter 3

Theories that don't work

One of the classic problems connected with morality has in fact already been handled by the empirical finding above. People tend to become cultural or individual ethical relativists by noting the diversity of moral codes even between individuals in a given culture and the much wider differences between moral codes of different cultures.

But this is easily explained by differences in the idea of what it means to be a human being that different people have, and the different views of whether a given act is or is not consistent with being human. Thus, one culture, as I said, thinks that the real humanity of a person resides in his individual life, while another thinks that that life is only the animal life, and the human life is the social life we have; or one person thinks that doing something to prevent conception is inconsistent with the sex act, and another says, "But we prevent headaches with pills, and you see nothing wrong with that; why is it inconsistent to prevent ovulation with a pill?"

So my contention is that differences in moral codes aren't differences in values at all, but differences in the factual information the person possesses (or thinks he possesses) about what his reality is and whether and how his acts are or are not inconsistent with this reality.

Hence, moral arguments are resolvable in principle. They are no more and no less resolvable in practice than scientific arguments are. Ethicians are apt to take a rather exalted view of the willingness of scientists to give up their own view when new evidence presents itself; but scientists are just as pig-headed as anyone else, for all their propaganda to the contrary. I ran into a case of this myself when I was working at Sky and Telescope. I was reporting on an article in Science in which the author had shown by very detailed experiments that Boring's theory of the "moon illusion" (why it appears bigger on the horizon) was untenable, and why his own theory was better. As it happened, Boring was teaching at Harvard University, with which Sky and Telescope was affiliated; and so our editor in chief sent my summary to Boring for approval--and he vetoed it, saying it was nonsense. It was never published in our magazine. The trouble Mendel had in getting people to listen to his theory of genetics (which is universally held today) is another example; and they tell me that people would throw tomatoes at Einstein in the early days of Relativity Theory.

Small wonder, then, if someone comes along with a new view of what humanity is, or whether some act is or isn't consistent with it, and is resisted by those who have always held the contrary. Not only is he telling them that they are factually wrong, but that correcting this error is going to involve changing their conduct--very often in disagreeable ways. Who wouldn't want to have something like that conclusively proved before he'd buy into it?(1)

I'll say a little more about this under the social pressure theory below; but for now, the fact that people don't agree doesn't mean that there isn't something basic in common underneath everyone's moral code; it just means that, beyond some obvious characteristics, it's not the most straightforward thing in the world to find what it means to be human, and it's even less simple to understand whether a given act contradicts some aspect of humanity or not.

But the fact that it's not simple and straightforward doesn't mean that it's hopeless. There isn't much danger any more of people's deciding or coming to discover that there's nothing inconsistent with being human in being owned by somebody else, or that Black people or Jews are some other species than human. We learn gradually, both by studying ourselves and by trying things out and finding that they are at cross-purposes with themselves. And as far as we ourselves are concerned, we have, after all, a pretty good idea of what the structure of being human is, with evidence to back it up; and so we can make some pronouncements that people might not agree with, but which they can disagree with only by refuting the factual evidence that we bring forward. For instance, I can show that the "evidence" that fetuses are not human is, however plausible it may sound at first, sophistry; and that the arguments given in favor of abortion logically would allow killing other people that those who give the arguments do not in fact think it is all right to kill.

So don't be misled by all the talk that ethical questions can't be settled. Who are these people to say that it's a fact that they can't be settled, when in fact they have been, as in the Civil Rights movement and the anti-slavery movement before it?

Now then, let us consider the possible sources of how this prohibition got attached to behavior that is considered inhuman.

Some theoreticians (such as, I suppose, Mackie) think that we just decide on our own code of conduct, the way we choose a set of values, taking our cue, as we do with values, by what we see other people doing and what we happen to like about what we see. And this is all there is to the moral code a person has.

But there has to be more to it than that. If we're talking about the moral code, we're not really talking about what's morally good, as I said under the first characteristic of the prohibition; we're talking about what we consider forbidden to us. Now it is true that a person can consciously resolve to forbid himself some action, as when we make New Year's Resolutions. But no one ever thinks, in the first place, that his New Year's Resolutions apply to anyone else, and yet the second point of the moral prohibition is that we think that in reality everyone is forbidden what we feel morally forbidden to do. Furthermore, the fact that not many people actually bother to give themselves New Year's Resolutions is an indication that we would find vast numbers of people with no sense of moral prohibition at all if the two were similar. Finally, not to beat what is obviously a dead horse any further, we know, as with New Year's Resolutions, that if we give them to ourselves (and even assign some punishment if we fail to live up to them) we can take them away whenever we want; and in this case, why would we consider the prohibition the most serious one of all, even superseding the law?(2)

No, you could say that the prohibition you give yourself was very serious, but you would know that it wasn't. He who can give himself a law can rescind it at his pleasure; and therefore it is not really binding.

Could it be that the sense of a prohibition is innate in us? If so, this would mean that it is either explicitly so, and we would presumably have a fully developed moral code from the start, or it is innate in the structure of rational behavior, as Kant seemed to think, the way the Principle of Contradiction is known implicitly in all our knowledge. That is, as soon as we discovered that something was inconsistent, we would automatically recognize that it was forbidden; and it would be just a case of finding out what acts were in fact inconsistent.

Thus, morality would be a question of knowledge, as Plato held; but this theory, as we find even in the Meno, doesn't seem to work in practice, because, as Socrates points out, if it is nothing but knowledge, it could be taught; and if it could be taught someone like Pericles would certainly have taught it to his children--but they grew up anything but paragons of virtue.

Further, if there were an automatic injunction by reason against doing what was inconsistent (the way there is an "injunction" against accepting a contradiction as a fact--we simply can't do it), then any inconsistency would be thought of as forbidden, and so you would feel it immoral to sing if you couldn't carry a tune (How I wish this were the case in church!), you would feel morally guilty over using "ain't," or any of the other thousands of ways we can be inconsistent without acting inhumanly.

No, children have to be taught what is morally wrong and that if it is morally wrong it is forbidden. True, they see later, when they grow up a little, how illogical it is for a human being to act as if he weren't what he is--and this is why teen-agers almost universally decry the "phoniness" or hypocrisy they see in everyone but themselves. Consistency is certainly an obvious standard with which to judge human behavior; but why, again, must a person be consistent?

So the notion that what is morally wrong is forbidden can't be something innate, even though it seems that you can't get beyond early childhood without having it.

This seems to indicate that something in our early life fixes within us this attachment of a prohibition to whatever we are taught is morally wrong; and this leads us to our first really serious theory about the sense of "forbiddenness" that goes with moral wrongness: the theory that events of early life create associations between acts called "wrong" and punishment, and the fear of some unknown punishment persists into adulthood, long after any punishment actually ceases being meted out.

This is, of course, the view that Freud put forward in The Ego and the Id and more especially Totem and Taboo, where he linked religion to it. As he presented it, the theory suffers from a weakness which would make it an easy straw man to knock down: the notion of the Oedipus complex, which, if it were to work, would have to have a counterpart in girls by which the girl sees the mother as the all-powerful usurper of her father's affection, who must simultaneously be destroyed and placated. But there is no evidence whatever of this, let alone that women think of God as an avenging mother rather than in masculine terms.(3)

Still, from what we know of childhood experiences, both from the work Freud did and from other psychological sources, the theory has a lot to recommend it; and so I would like to present a sketch of it which does not have any unnecessary difficulties like the one I mentioned--to give the theory an honest examination, in other words--to see if it will account for the notion we have that what is morally wrong is prohibited.

I should point out here that, based on Occam's Razor, which we talked about in the section on scientific theory in Chapter 4 of Section 4 of the fourth part,4.4.4 if this or some other this-worldly theory actually works as an explanation of the imperative connected with moral wrongness, then our theory, which supposes an afterlife with a reward and punishment fails as an explanation of the force behind morality.

That is, even if the analysis of the spiritual aspect of the human being leads to the conclusion that there is an afterlife, this afterlife would not be acceptable as the cause of why morally wrong conduct is thought to be punishable if some other theory which does not suppose this can do the job. So, for instance, if the theory that our early experiences produce in us a fear attached to wrongdoing actually fits all the facts, and if its predictions turn out to be verified, then the reasonable person would say that it is why we think that immorality is forbidden; and while it might be true that there also is an afterlife making it objectively disadvantageous to be immoral, that fact that it takes some sophisticated reasoning to establish, would be unlikely to be the reason everybody shies away from doing what is wrong.

Let me, then, give a brief description of what the theory holds, and then test it against what we know about people's idea of the prohibition (the four characteristics above); and finally, if it passes, see what else it demands would logically have to be the case, and see whether these predictions are verified.

The basic idea is this: When we are very young, we have no sense that anything is to be avoided. But we live in a partially hostile environment, and some of the things we do as infants expecting pleasure turn out to cause pain, even severe pain. A child tries to grab the pretty red rings on the stove and gets his hand burned. He wants to stick his finger into the electrical outlet and daddy slaps him. He slams the door and gets yelled at. And so on.

Now then, when something like this happens, children, like all animals, tend to avoid the act, remembering the pain it caused. The worse the experience consequent upon the act, or the more often the unpleasant consequences follow it, the more the act tends to be avoided. Note that frequent repetition of small unpleasantness does the same job in the long run as a really traumatic event.

Now of course, the more the act is avoided, the less vivid the actual memory of the punishment becomes, precisely because it is not refreshed. Nevertheless, there stays with the act a kind of warning as the habit of avoidance is formed, which eventually becomes, "Don't do that, or else..." where the fact of the "or else" is there, but what exactly is going to happen is not clearly known, except for the fact that it is felt to be really bad.

Note further that with most children, these bad consequences come more often from the action of the parents rather than things like burning yourself or breaking your leg--precisely because parents are trying to shield their children from damage. Hence, it would be much more likely for the fear associated with this avoidance later to appear as, "Don't do that or else you'll get punished" rather than "Don't do that or else you'll get hurt."

Thus, in adulthood, some kind of person would seem to be hovering behind these prohibitions, rather than their being simply warnings of danger, such as we feel when we walk down a dark alley, even knowing it to be safe. On the other hand, these feelings of prohibition would be analogous to the sense of danger, in that they "belong" to the anticipation of the act irrespective of what we know it to be.

Thus, the moral code, insofar as it has an imperative attached to it, is on this theory a generally benign kind of neurosis; and insofar as we were trained in early life to avoid the kinds of things that are socially or otherwise damaging to ourselves, we would feel no need to try to get rid of it, the way we want to get rid of maladaptive compulsions. Morals, on this theory are simply adaptive compulsions.(4)

Now then, does the theory fit what we know of the moral imperative that people actually experience? First of all, if this theory is the explanation of it, it would be inevitable that everyone would feel some sort of imperative, because even if you weren't strictly brought up, you can't get to adulthood without undergoing quite a number of quite unpleasant experiences. Those who think of childhood as a time of innocent bliss have very selective memories and haven't been around children much.

I might point out as extra verification here that those children who were brought up by parents who didn't want to "inhibit" them seem to tend as adults to have a less strong sense of moral prohibition. This is just what you would expect if this theory is true.

So we can take it that the basic effect is verified. As to the first characteristic, the negativity of the imperative, it has abundantly been shown, B. F. Skinner notwithstanding, that pain is a much stronger reinforcer than pleasure. While there doubtless are enticements toward certain virtuous acts in this superego we have, there is good reason to believe that they wouldn't be as strong in adulthood as the prohibitions against others. First of all, people being what they are, parents tend to punish children far more often--and more severely--for doing what they don't like than reward them for doing what is good. Parents tend to expect good behavior as more or less a matter of course; and children tend to expect benefits as accruing to them because of what they are rather than because of what they have done.(5) But punishments by basically loving parents tend to be associated with the action rather than the "badness" of the self.(6)

Hence, the normal person would feel the prohibition connected with the actions as much more significantly affecting him than the moral ideals he was shown.

It would be easy to explain on this theory why every person tends to think that what is prohibited for him is "really" forbidden for everyone, because he can't point to an actual damaging consequence of doing the act, but fears doing it nonetheless--even when he has done it before and gotten away with it. He may be able to give reasons why it is undesirable for a person to do the act, but these are like the reasons the alcoholic gives for not quitting today; they are really rationalizations, even when they are true. Thus, not fighting others can be justified in terms of better social order and the rights of others to be left alone; but the person who thinks it is morally forbidden to avoid fighting does so not for these reasons but because he has been punished for fighting when he was young and now fears it.

Note that he will not remember the punishment, but only feel that it is going to happen, just as the neurotic who is afraid of the dark does not know why he is afraid, because he does not remember how he got bitten by the family dog when he was three and stepped on its tail as he ran into a dark room.

But since the person who feels a moral prohibition can make out a reasonable case why the act should be avoided (the more so the better trained he was, of course), then he will naturally tend to think as well as feel that he is right; and arguments on the other side will tend to have no relevance to him. Furthermore, since parents in a given culture tend to train their children in more or less the same way, he will find that most of the people around him basically agree with him, and this will tend to confirm in his mind that he is objectively right. In those areas where his early experiences were different from others (and there will be bound to be some), he will tend to think that the others don't quite see the truth, rather than that he is mistaken and they aren't. After all, he just knows you can't do this.

And this seems to be just what we experience in moral matters. To the extent that the society is closer-knit, people are in greater agreement on what is forbidden; to the extent that it is more diverse culturally, with many subcultures, to that extent there is greater diversity in what is thought to be forbidden. This makes perfect sense if people in different subcultures are brought up differently.

The reason, thirdly, why the moral prohibition would be felt to be the most serious of all is twofold: First, the adult does not know what will happen if he violates it, but is nonetheless afraid that something terrible will follow; and he can't shake that feeling even when nothing in fact happens after a violation. The sense that retribution will come, is what many psychologists say is the reason why a person who has violated a serious tenet of his moral code often becomes accident-prone; he feels incomplete without punishment and without consciously realizing it, puts himself in harm's way "to get it over with."

In any case, the unknownness, even the secrecy, of the consequences would tend to magnify them in a person's mind, making this prohibition seem to be the one that overrides all others.

The second reason why the prohibition would be felt to be serious is connected with the fourth characteristic: that the imperative is felt as coming from some divinity. Here, we don't need Freud's avenging father-figure, because in fact the gods of many cultures included goddesses as well; but all of them were parental with respect to human beings: superior in power and capable of punishing. In fact, one might even say that Freud was thrown off by taking what was going on in Judaeo-Christian Europe too seriously as a model for the whole of human experience.

But since parents (either fathers or mothers or both) do tend to do the punishing, as I mentioned, then the prohibition seems to come from some superior person who is giving orders and who is invisible (it's certainly not Daddy and Mommy any more, because they're weak while I'm now strong--or they may even be dead). The fact that some cultures, as Freud pointed out, actually do worship the dead ancestors shows that the invisible person has a lot to do with the feeling that he is a parent.

Therefore, you would expect, if this theory is true, most people to believe that there is a god of some sort, and a god precisely associated with the moral code, and one who is going to punish it in some way. But note that this punishment doesn't necessarily come in some afterlife; it is just that it will somehow come if you violate the god's (or the gods') will. And this is just what studies of world religions show us that people feel.

It is not hard, therefore, to see why this theory is widely held today. It seems to fit all the facts.

Well, not quite all.

People who propose a theory and advocates of it, not surprisingly, tend to show what facts the theory does explain; and if this is all you do, the theory can be very convincing. But it turns out that the theory predicts a number of things that are the opposite of what actually occurs.

First of all, if this theory is true, there is no reason at all why people would tend to equate "immoral" with "inhuman," as they do, if my empirical finding has any validity at all. The prohibition on this theory comes from the fear induced in you by being actually punished for doing what your parents (or the world around you) didn't want. I suppose I should point out that this punishment, when one is very young, need not be corporeal, or even what the parent thinks is punishment at all; the mere fact that the parent is angry can cause a fear in a child (of devastating harm, or even of being abandoned, one of childhood's perhaps greatest terrors). I remember my father's saying, in a quiet voice of barely controlled fury, "If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about!" and, though he never touched me, he scared me to death. But the point I am making here is that the fear that carries over into adulthood is the fear that was induced by what happened to certain specific acts.

We also saw that the more severe the unpleasant consequences of the act, or the more often they occurred, the stronger the fear would be, and therefore the more serious the prohibition would be felt to be. Now if you examine what acts children are punished for, you find that what parents seem to stress most is things like making messes, slamming doors and shouting when Daddy has a headache, interrupting, losing things, scuffing your best pair of shoes and running out to play in the dirt with your best pants on, and so on. It is not often the parents punish their children for murder, rape, theft, and such, for the simple reason that these seldom come up in the child's life.

Now it's true that parents tend to punish their children for fighting, for sexual play, and for taking what doesn't belong to them; and so you could argue that what I just said is not true. The injunction against fighting would carry over to murder. But if you look harder at this punishment, you find that when Daddy scolds Junior for fighting, it's for starting the fight and not simply for defending himself; and Daddy's disapproval of fighting is not clearly shown when Junior sees him watching football, hockey, and the daily news on television, and when he allows Junior to see all those kids' shows in which your being one of the good guys is a license to commit all kinds of mayhem. How is it, then, that Junior grows up with the notion that killing a person is one of the worst things you can do?

The way we are brought up sexually is extremely instructive in this regard. Children are--and certainly were--brought up to avoid all sexual activity, whether solitary or with others, and were severely punished for all infractions, including such things as immodesty. But how is it that, ever since Adam, people as soon as they get married drop the notion that sexual activity, seductive display of your body to your spouse, and all the rest of it, is immoral?

Remember, the moral prohibition is supposed to be a kind of neurosis, not something that a simple change of social status can erase overnight; it is supposed to be a basically irrational fear induced from repeated unpleasant consequences, something that remains with us our whole life long, and which we can't shake just by telling ourselves there's nothing to be afraid of. But then how has just about everyone who ever married been able to slough this one off? Especially since Freud and many psychologists and psychiatrists think that sex is underneath most neurotic behavior, indicating that this is the prohibition that is strongest of all.

Before exploring this a bit further, because there is another implication in it that is significant, let me just point out clearly that most of what we got punished for as children (and which we do tend to avoid) is not thought by us as adults to have anything to do with morally wrong conduct. Further, we recognize as morally wrong acts which we were never punished for as children.

And if you look at the adult's moral code, you see that he makes a clear distinction between two sorts of conduct that are forbidden: what William Graham Sumner called the "folkways," or the acts that are "not done," and the "mores," the acts that are morally wrong.

Conclusion 1: There is a distinction in people's minds between acts that are disapproved of as "not done," (folkways), and acts that are morally wrong and must not be done.

Not shouting, not interrupting, not using your knife as a fork, not putting your feet on the furniture, not washing, and so on, are recognized by people as not morally wrong, even though people's disapproval of these acts can be very strong indeed--even stronger than their disapproval of acts like lying or pilfering from the company's supplies, or even engaging in what might be called "sexual indiscretions," or getting drunk, or other things that these same people will say are morally wrong. Certainly parents, in training their children, spend a lot of time with acts that are essentially just folkways.

But if this theory is what accounts for why we think what is morally wrong is forbidden, it predicts that we would also think that violations of the folkways are morally wrong, because as far as the punishment in early life is concerned, there would be no distinction between the two.

Secondly, the acts that are thought to be morally wrong are acts that the adult thinks are inhuman, as I said, whether he was trained to avoid them or not. There is no reason why a person would associate what he was trained to avoid with the act's being inhuman--because in fact, he was trained to avoid the violation of the folkways, and he recognizes that the acts have nothing to do with inhuman conduct, and are just cultural expectations. But if this theory is true, you would predict that the "rationalization" for avoiding morally wrong acts wouldn't be on the basis of their inhumanity.(7)

Thirdly, Freud actually predicted from his theory that the moral code of a culture could not change quickly. The reason is that the prohibitions do not, on his theory, come from reasoning, so that new evidence would affect them, but from a neurotic fear carrying over from childhood. He mentions that since parents have this fear, they would tend to train their children to avoid the acts they felt afraid of, and so the moral code would carry down from generation to generation, and only modify itself slightly, if at all, over time. This seemed to have been empirically verifiable in his day.

But in my own lifetime, I have seen two radical shifts in my culture's moral code (one of which I think was for the better, and another for the worse). The first was that of the treatment of the Blacks. When I was a child, "everyone" saw nothing wrong with the Blacks' being kept "in their place," doing the menial, physical jobs that they were "suited for," because we thought that they, poor things, just didn't have the capacity for anything involving thought. Less than twenty years later, it is universally thought in our culture that to "keep them in their place" is morally wrong.

The second drastic shift happened even more quickly: the "sexual revolution," which started as soon as the contraceptive pill was introduced. This allowed for sex without children; and very rapidly people realized that logically there was now nothing against extra-marital sex and homosexual sex. The point is that it was the logical consequence of thinking (a) that there was nothing "unnatural" or inhuman about taking a pill, and that therefore (b) sex no longer "naturally" involved the possibility of children, and (c) therefore, forms of sex where no child is possible were no longer "perversions." The whole culture before The Pill thought of certain sexual acts as perversions; now the culture as a whole thinks of them as "different life styles," or "matters of personal taste." From being morally wrong, they have become folkways overnight.

These sorts of drastic changes within a generation are simply not possible if the theory about early training accounts for why we think what is morally wrong is forbidden.

Finally, to pick up on a point I tabled a while ago, I do not want to give the impression that we don't feel guilty when we do things we were trained not to do. To this day, when I leave something uneaten, I feel guilty, because I was brought up during the Depression, and my father felt very strongly about wasting things--and made us feel strongly when we did it. But in spite of the guilt feeling, I am not going to eat and make myself fat and unhealthy just because I was served too much; and I am perfectly well aware that "the starving children in China" are not going to be helped by my turning myself into a garbage can.

Similarly, it is quite common for spouses on their wedding night to feel guilty about doing what they had been trained for so long to avoid. But they don't let the guilt feeling bother them (in fact, they rather enjoy it as added spice to what they are doing), because they know that what they are doing is not only all right, but that to avoid it would be morally wrong.

Conclusion 2: Adults generally distinguish feeling guilty from knowing that what we are doing is morally wrong.

The wedding-night experience is very informative in this respect, not only because it is (or at least was) a very common one, but because it means that things which were known to be forbidden just hours ago are now not forbidden; the act of saying, "I do" transformed what was taboo into what is commanded. This is a very strange neurotic compulsion indeed, if you can get rid of it by pronouncing a phrase.

Let me give another example. As a young child, and even into my later life, I had had dinned into my head that it was a terrible thing to "rat" on someone: to report to authorities some act of someone else that I happened to know about. In the year I left the seminary, a middle-aged priest who was the Resident in the dormitory of the men's college I was visiting asked me into his room to chat; and when I was leaving, he kissed me with a French kiss. I at that time didn't know what such a thing was, and was too surprised to fend him off; but I left rather quickly. When I got back to my room, I was faced with a dilemma: I knew I had to report him to the Rector of the college, to get him out of the men's dormitory, both for his sake and for theirs; but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Finally, in great trepidation and self-disgust, I went to the Rector and told my story, and he said he would take care of the matter. Here was a case where I knew what I had to do, and all my training made me feel that I should do just the opposite.

And let's face it; this experience is not at all uncommon. Those surviving some great tragedy feel terribly guilty for years that they survived while others died, even though they know that there was nothing they could have done to save them, and it would have been wrong not to save themselves just for the sake of solidarity with the dying. And there are many many other instances of this sort of thing also, even the other way. We know, when things like committing adultery "feel right" that they're still wrong. Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty has nothing in itself to do with knowing whether what you did was morally right or wrong. Knowing what you did was wrong comes from your factual knowledge that you did something inhuman; feeling that it is wrong comes from your training.

But the theory that the prohibition against immorality comes from early childhood training would make it impossible for us to make a distinction between the two.

Therefore, we can say

Conclusion 3: A person has a guilty conscience if he knows that what he has done is morally wrong; whether he also feels that it was wrong is irrelevant. Conscience is not a feeling.

Of course, if a person has been trained from childhood not to do what he later realizes is inhuman, he will both know and feel himself guilty if he does something morally wrong; but there are a lot of things we know to be wrong that we weren't trained against, because the issue just never came up in our childhood; and there were a lot of things (the folkways) that we were trained not to do that we don't think there's anything morally wrong with.

So this theory, as attractive as it sounded at first, simply does not fit the facts about the prohibition we find attached to morally wrong conduct. If it were true, our moral code would be very different from what it is.

Note, by the way, that it is easy to explain the connection between early experiences and a person's moral code. In the first place, people are trained to avoid doing what is regarded by their parents as morally wrong: they are punished for lying, for fighting, for stealing, and so on. What I was saying above is that this (a) doesn't by any means constitute all of their training, and (b) is not even necessarily what is most persistently or severely punished. Secondly, parental conduct is, as everyone seems to admit, a far more potent force in developing a child's moral code than punishment; and the reason is that the parents are the child's prime examples of what human beings really are like. Thus, if the child's parents tell him not to lie and he hears them lying, he takes not lying to be one of the folkways, to be avoided only when it's "not proper," not something morally wrong. If a child is brought up by a mother who is a prostitute and a father who is a stud, it would not be surprising for him to think that sexual promiscuity is the human way to behave--and so on.

We have to get our notion of what it is to be human from somewhere, and most people only begin thinking about it in the abstract when they get to be teen-agers (at which time their parents seem to be terrible hypocrites, since these paragons of humanity are now recognized to be people who preach and don't practice); and even then not many take deep dips into philosophy. By and large, we get our notion of human and inhuman conduct from two sources: (a) hearing what apparently wise people think is human and inhuman; and (b) observing what people around us generally do--and the latter is far more persuasive than the former. Someone is said to have said to a preacher, "What you are speaks so loud I can't hear what you say."

So there's nothing mysterious about it, really, as far as the contents of our moral code is concerned; we don't have to resort to "similarities in punishment when young" to account for why people who live together tend to think that the same things are wrong, and why they need strong evidence to prove to them that some behavior they have observed "everybody" doing all the time is in fact inhuman conduct.

Well, then, where are we? The notion that what is wrong is forbidden can't be deliberately attached to the conduct; it can't be innate; and it can't come from fear carrying over from experiences in early childhood. So it doesn't come from inside us. What about from outside?

Well, since it is a fear of some sort ("Don't do that, or else..."), then it can't be induced in us by something inferior to us, like "nature": the rocks, the plants, or the animals. Even those pagans who worshiped "nature," actually worshiped the forces behind it which they thought had molded them and were directing them just as they were directing the heavenly bodies and the streams and the other things in this world. These invisible beings were what had the power over our lives, not the inferior objects which they directed. So we don't have to think "nature worship" means that people ever thought that inferior beings controlled them.

Secondly, we can dismiss that the moral prohibition is induced in us by another human individual who threatens us without having any authority to do so (i.e. without his being a representative of society). It is universally recognized that if another individual threatens us, he is the one being morally wrong, and the fear he induces has nothing to do with our thinking that it would be immoral to disobey him.

But then what of people like police? Does the force behind morality come from the law and its threat of punishment? If so, of course, what is illegal would be recognized as immoral by the very fact that it is illegal.

But that would make tyranny impossible. The government would be like what Hobbes thought it was, incapable of commanding anything wrong, or incapable of "harming" the citizens, since they had no rights against it. But this was not in practice held either before Hobbes's time, during it, or certainly since.

People have always recognized that there are immoral laws that actually command people to do wrong, and which must by that fact be disobeyed (as the Blacks disobeyed the segregation laws, and the pacifists have always disobeyed the draft laws); and also unjust laws, which command the avoidance of things that the people as a whole think are perfectly all right to do, such as in our country the law against drinking alcohol, which was even made part of the Constitution itself, until its universal flouting forced a second amendment repealing the prohibition. I suspect that the laws against what are now called "drugs" are going to share the same fate--though I hope we get some sense and when we repeal them we forbid the advertising of them and of alcohol and of tobacco and other dangerous substances. People simply do not think that there is anything morally wrong in smoking marijuana, for instance; and the fact that it has all the deleterious side-effects of the increase of crime and so on is recognized by people as as much due to the attempt to prohibit it as the danger of the drug itself.

At any rate, if the fear of legal punishment were what was the "enforcer" of the moral imperative, people would equate illegality with immorality, and they don't. So this theory doesn't work.

Let me add here, however, that it wouldn't be surprising for people to tend to think that what is legal is morally right, because (a) people tend to think that what is morally wrong ought to be illegal (simply because it's forbidden; and why would government allow what is forbidden?); (b) if the government allows it, they presumably know more about things than the ordinary person, and so it must be a permissible act; and (c) if somebody happens to think that it's morally wrong, he doesn't have to do it. For instance, in my time it's very difficult for people to believe that the Nine Wise Justices on our Supreme Court would actually permit abortions if they were in fact killing people, as the Right-to-Life groups contend (and as is actually the case). They thought the same thing about the Supreme Court in its pro-slavery decisions. No, basically, it's when the government forbids what people don't see anything wrong with that there's apt to be trouble.

Of course, for the sake of social order, we generally accept laws that forbid things that are morally neutral. There's nothing morally wrong, most people think, with driving sixty-six miles an hour on an expressway; but it's against the law; and morality wasn't felt to have changed a few years ago when the speed limit was finally raised back up to nearly what the roads were built for. Laws prohibiting drinking or smoking in certain places don't mean that it's immoral to drink in those places; it's just for public order. It's recognized that there's a basic moral stance behind these things (that, for example, chaos is to be avoided); but the laws themselves deal with folkways, not mores.

Therefore, the prohibition connected with morally wrong conduct can't come from within us, from anything short of society outside us, nor from the sanctions on the laws of society as formally organized. Nor, by the way, can it come from any combination of all of these, because even if our training and the law forbid certain acts, such as driving on the left-hand side of the street, we don't think that such a thing is morally wrong, making all of the people in England sinners, as we would think if they thought that keeping slaves was all right.

There is only one thing left in this world, then, that could give us the notion that what is morally wrong is forbidden; and this is the other theory that is widely accepted today: social pressure.

Here, the threat connected with morally wrong conduct actually does come from "society" in a sense, at least from the people around us. But it comes from the culture, not society as formally organized; and it deals with the "unwritten" laws of the expectations of behavior that people have for other people--which may, of course, and generally do, spill over into the laws, but which extend far beyond them.

Social pressure is an invisible force, but it can be no less strong for all that. I remember one time when I was one of the first men in the Cincinnati area to grow a beard. I was checking out some milk at the supermarket on my way home from work, and the woman at the register looked at me with contempt and said, "And what are you protesting?" I was taken aback for a moment, and then answered, "I'm protesting the fact that men aren't allowed to grow beards." But it made me feel odd afterwards, realizing that people were looking at me with disapproval. Shortly afterwards, as I was visiting my parents near Boston (actually nearer Harvard Square, where the hippies congregated), I saw a number of people actually turn around as I was coming out of church and look back at me over their shoulder as if they didn't know what to make of me. Here was a hippie, coming out of church, for God's sake, and wearing a suit and a tie! I ask you, Marge!

This is not so trivial as it seems. I see the uniforms my students wear, thinking that they are dressing as they please in their jeans and their jogging suits. But let one of the young men come to school every day in a suit, and he will after a while find himself alone. The others feel that he's a snob, trying to put them down by the way he dresses, and they'll have nothing to do with him--because he does dress as he pleases, not as they want him to. This loneliness can be hard to take.

In fact, the word "boycott" comes from man's name. Mr. Boycott was a representative to Ireland from England many years ago, during (I believe) the era of absentee-landlordism that Swift decried so eloquently. In any case, he was cordially hated by all the Irish, who couldn't do anything about his being there (there was evidently no Irish Republican Army doing its dastardly things at the time); and so it was decided simply to ignore his existence. He was passed on the street as if he wasn't there, he couldn't be waited on in the shops because no one acted as if they saw him, and so on. It actually drove him mad, and he had to be recalled.

So even if nothing is done to you, social pressure can be a very potent force. But of course, it doesn't follow that nothing will be done to you. There was no law against Blacks' using the public libraries in many areas of the country fifty years ago; but it was known that Blacks had better not try. And some Black person who was ignorant enough or reckless enough actually to walk in and attempt to read a book would be very apt to be found in an alley the next day with his throat cut. The Ku Klux Klan was social pressure at its most frightening; and its enforcement was by no means confined to words. In fact, one of the functions of laws is to prevent the uglier manifestations of social pressure, like tarring and feathering or lynching in general.

So social pressure is an extremely powerful force on the individual, and one that is very often not recognized for what it is. But does it account for the moral prohibition? Let us test it against the facts we have so far observed.

First of all, since everyone lives in some sort of a culture, then everyone in fact is subject to social pressure; and so you would expect the attachment of an imperative to what the culture disapproves of.

But wouldn't that imply that everyone in the culture would feel the same moral obligation? Not necessarily. First of all, in cultures that are heterogeneous, you find various subcultures, each of which exerts its own social pressure. In the United States, for instance, a given person belongs not only to the larger society, but to the male or female subculture, to the subculture connected with his ethnic origins (there's a vast difference between Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks, for instance), to the subculture implied in his social position, his religion, the region of the country he lives in, etc., etc. Each person belongs to a different "mix" of these subcultures, and so he will have to reconcile what others expect of him differently. In cultures that are less complex, this reconciliation is much simpler, and in these the theory would predict that the moral code of the culture would be much more clearly defined--and this is what takes place. But even in simple cultures there would be some differences. There is also the fact that a given individual will not necessarily have any desire to do everything that the culture (or sub-culture) thinks is taboo; and so he might not have any occasion to discover that a given act is forbidden, while someone else might be painfully aware of it.

I mentioned that the theory that the moral prohibition is due to childhood experiences cannot explain the fact that there is a distinction between folkways or things that are "not done" and mores or things that must not be done. Can the social pressure theory do so?

Not, I think, as Sumner and others stated it; but it would be easy to adjust it to make it explain the distinction very nicely. If we assume that there are some behaviors that the people in the culture expect for the sake of being able to predict how others will act (or basically for convenience and ease of social living), and there are others that the people in general feel threatened by for one reason or another (even for no objective reason), then the distinction falls into place.

Thus, people in my generation expected men to have short hair and women to have long hair. Women started wearing their hair short many years before my generation, but women have (in spite of what feminists nowadays allege) been allowed a great deal of leeway in behaving and looking like men, while men have been supposed to look like men. Hence, there was a tremendous furor when the young people, following the lead of the Beatles, began wearing their hair long; and some young men really suffered from the opprobrium that followed their "sissifying" themselves. But few except those who associated this with homosexuality thought that it was immoral to grow hair long. It was just that "you can't tell whether it's a boy or a girl, for heaven's sake!" And people in general want to know, because we are expected to behave differently towards men and women.

The point I am making is that the social pressure against violating folkways can be extremely severe; but if this theory is true, this is still different from violating the culture's mores, because the culture does not feel threatened by it. Our culture obviously feels threatened by "doing drugs" nowadays and yet does not feel threatened by "doing alcohol," in spite of the fact that the damaging effects of alcohol to the society are far greater than those of drugs, especially if you discount the damage that is done by the mere fact that the drugs are illegal, making supplying them a crime and also immensely profitable for that reason. We think that getting drunk is bad, but we don't shun distilleries or stores that sell the stuff--while we think of drug-pushers as scum that must be wiped off the face of the earth.

Note that if this theory is true, there doesn't have to be any rationality to this social horror at a given act; if the people around you feel threatened for any reason or no reason by some act, and you start to do it, your friends will say, "My God, don't do that!" You ask them why, and they say, "Because it's terrible!" And it's clear that they are afraid, not only of doing the act, but of having it be done. Naturally, this fear will communicate itself to you; and so even though you don't know what will happen to you if you do it, you think that it must be really bad, if everybody looks on it with such terror and loathing. And of course, that fear you have picked up makes you another one of the group exerting social pressure on those who would contemplate doing the act.

So on this theory it is simply the fact that the people around you feel threatened by some act that creates the social pressure, not the reason why they have this dread. As Sumner pointed out, the actual reason may be some fact lost back in antiquity, like a farmer in one culture who, not following custom, planted during the new moon instead of the full moon, and a week later there was a devastating flood and consequent famine. The people would notice the sequence and put a cause-effect relation to it, making it taboo--and the taboo would persist long after they had forgotten why it was absolutely forbidden to plant during the new moon.

Once again, of course, the people will generally be able to give reasons for the fear; but it isn't the reasons that produce the prohibition, but the fear, because people will take steps to prevent what they are afraid of; and besides, the fear itself communicates itself throughout the group, reinforcing itself.

Now as to why the moral code is basically negative, the explanation on this theory would be because it is based on social fear of the acts that seem to threaten the social fabric. The folkways have their sanctions, but they aren't based on fear, but simply on the desire to find others' behavior predictable; and so beyond what is regarded as destructive behavior, a good deal of latitude is allowed. So this point is neatly taken care of.

As to why the prohibition would be regarded as the most serious of all, there are three explanations that would come from this theory. First, the individual doesn't know what will happen if he violates the code, and fear of the unknown is apt to be considerably stronger than fear of the known. Secondly, there is the fact that everybody around him is also afraid of the act, and so it must be really serious if everyone is scared to do it.

But thirdly, and this accounts for the association with a divinity, no one individual really knows what the whole code really is or where it came from; it has always been "just there" and "every-body knows it"; and so it seems to have come down from On High. Further, who or what will enforce it is also unknown, and so seems to be something invisible taking charge of our actions. Any actor can tell you that the audience appears to him like a single person, and any teacher will agree that each class has its own collective personality, which may or may not match that of the most vociferous members of the class. I have had classes, for instance, in which a small group of objectors were constantly raising their hands; but the others shifted in their chairs when this happened, and it was clear that the class as a class considered them disruptive rather than spokesmen for it.

So a group of people seems to have a "personality" hovering over it somehow, a personality you can't put your finger on in any individual or even small set of individuals, but one that belongs to the group as a group, derived, actually, from their interaction with each other.

If this is the case, then the moral code would be to the group's horror as a group to the action in question, and so it would have a special "personal" dimension to it which would be somehow "above" that of any individual and more powerful than any individual or even than the totality of the individuals in the group. In short, the group as a group would appear to any individual in it as if there were a god directing it.

And everyone in the group realizes that he is subject to the god's orders, and so is everyone else; and so everyone will see to it that the god's will is done, even though the god is perfectly capable of seeing to it himself--but if the god takes matters into his own hands, who knows but what everyone in the group will be made to suffer for the sins of a few?

Once again, this sense that there is a god supervising everything cannot really be escaped even by someone who does not believe that there actually are gods. You may rationally think that there's no god; but when push comes to shove, and you are faced with doing something wrong, you will feel that there is one--simply because the attitudes of the people around you will convey itself to you in this form. In the same way, even if an actor knows that there's no such animal as "the audience," he plays to it, and listens to it. He can't help it. Thus we get the famous cry of the atheist in extremis, "Oh God, if there is a God, save my immortal soul, if I have a soul, and if it's immortal, and if it can be saved!"

So the theory fits all of the facts originally observed, plus the fact that the early-experience theory couldn't, that people recognize a distinction on seriousness between folkways and mores.

But there was another fact that the early-experience theory couldn't handle: that moral codes could change drastically in a short time. Can this theory account for that?

It can in one sense at least. Sumner points out in Folkways that when life-conditions change, what was once deviant behavior now becomes more rational than the accepted behavior; and so the "bad" element in the community begins doing it and prospering, inducing more and more people to "sin," until the practice becomes accepted and finally sanctioned by a new moral order. This in theory could happen very quickly, if some new practice is introduced making people as a whole rethink what they were doing.

For instance, the introduction of The Pill would lead people to rethink the connection between sex and reproduction, which had up to that time been inescapable or difficult to avoid. Since, of course, sex is something people like to do, then the "sinners" would become numerous rather quickly, and would then rather quickly cease to be regarded as sinners at all.

But one of Sumner's examples illustrating this was rather unfortunate, I think. He claims that it was the fact that slavery became impractical in the United States of the first half of the nineteenth century that made people then begin to think that it was immoral, and particularly those in the North impose their new-found moral code on the South (because in the North it was cheaper to hire wage labor in the factories than to own the laborers and have to feed and house them). He mentions that after the Civil War, for many many years, the Southerners still thought that their way of life was "right" and were not following it only because they were forced not to.

The history, however, isn't by any means that clear. Something of what he says is true; but the evil of slavery was widely recognized in the South long before the War, and during the time that slaves were becoming more and more necessary to the Southern economy, and consequently more and more expensive. The problem the people in the South faced was that it might be bad to own slaves, but if you freed them, particularly en masse, what would happen to them, and how could their owners be indemnified for the colossal financial loss of suddenly giving up this investment they had made in them? It would bring practical ruin on the South to free the slaves (in fact it did, of course, and the South is now beginning to recover, a century and a half afterwards). In fact, if I recall correctly, the constitution of the Confederate States of America contained a provision abolishing slave-trading overseas. No new slaves were to be imported. The idea obviously was to get rid of slavery by attrition, not in one fell swoop.

No, it was not really because slavery was impractical (though it was in the North), it was because of the inconsistencies Harriet Beecher Stowe portrayed so vividly in Uncle Tom's Cabin that people began to believe that it was wrong. And it was then that--it can be argued--the movement against it began; the change in life-conditions followed, rather than led, the change in perception of what was right and wrong.

The civil-rights movement of my century is perhaps even clearer. It was not because it became more practical to desegregate; desegregation is impractical in many ways still as I write this--and even the Blacks in many universities are tending to segregate themselves now, having seen a number of disadvantages for them in integration on campus. No, the whole thing began when Rosa Parks was too tired to move to the back of the bus when the front seats filled and a White person asked her to give up the "White" seat. Then a preacher named King began asking everyone the question, "Why must a Black person be treated as if he were only half human? Why must we walk ten blocks to the public drinking-fountain when there is one right here, but it's White only? Why must we plan our day around our bodily functions, so that we'll be in the vicinity of a Black toilet when we need to use one, or near a Black diner when we need to eat? Is this a human way to live?"

The Blacks, who had not collectively thought in these terms, but had simply accepted things as "the way it is," began listening to this, and could see that Blacks were not being treated as if they were really human. And the Whites who listened also saw that, however convenient this arrangement was for them, it was treating human beings as if they weren't human--and as soon as this was realized by the people as a whole, things had to change, no matter how hard the change was going to be, and how impractical.

There was no change in life conditions, certainly no drastic one, that preceded the most significant positive step our culture has made in morality since the abolition of slavery itself; it was a recognition that we as a people were giving lip-service to the concept that Blacks were just as much people as Whites were; and lip-service was not enough.

This is a difficulty with the theory serious enough to destroy it. Cultural reforms come, often with great pain, not because life conditions change, but because inhuman practices are brought into the open. The reformer convinces the people that what they are doing is inhuman, and the people, if he provides clear evidence, listen. The reformer is often vilified while he is in the process of presenting his evidence; but to the extent that the evidence is evidence, it speaks for itself, and doesn't need him; and the word spreads and changes the society.

What specifically, then, are the predictions connected with this that destroy the theory? First, since the prohibition is, according to the theory, simply the actual fear and revulsion that the people have against the act in question, it would predict that the moral code of any culture would simply be a haphazard collection of "thou shalt not's" without any rational basis to it; it would not be derivable from the culture's definition of what constitutes being human and therefore what inhuman behavior is. But in fact, if you examine a culture's taboos, you find that they also invariably spell out that culture's notion of behavior inconsistent with human reality.(8)

Secondly, since the social pressure at a given time is supposed to constitute the moral code at that time, the present moral code would always be thought to be "right" (as Sumner himself says), and anyone who disagreed with it would automatically be regarded as at best a crank. But in fact, cultures have always had people decrying the immoral spirit of the times; and these people have been held in esteem generally by the people as a whole, even if they have not been followed by them.

Nor is this just the fact that the practice of the society falls short of its ideals. The people who form the "conscience" of the society, from Socrates in Greece and Cato in Rome down to the present day, usually are talking about the moral attitudes of the people as a whole, implying that the people as a whole have no problem in doing things that these leaders think is morally wrong.

Using Socrates as an example would seem to prove the point of the social-pressure theorists, because he was killed for "corrupting the young people" by allegedly teaching them atheism (implying that the people thought that their moral view was right and his was wrong). But actually, it reinforces what I am saying, because (a) he was almost acquitted in his trial, and would have been if he had not antagonized the audience (which was the jury) by his bluntness, (b) it was realized almost as soon as the verdict was in that the charges were specious and it was a miscarriage of justice, (c) the people were willing to look the other way and let him escape, and (d) just a few years after that Plato came back to Athens and began teaching the very things that Socrates taught, and was held in great respect by the people.

But if the social-pressure theory is true, reformers would always be looked on as immoral and evil people by the society at the time, not simply misguided, because (a) they are not only doing what is wrong (any deviation at all from what the culture thinks is the moral code is ipso facto wrong on this theory), but (b) trying to persuade others to sin--and in all cultures, tempting others to sin is regarded as the most heinous of acts.

But in fact, though reformers in the culture are often hated, they are just as often looked on as well-meaning troublemakers, not as evil tempters. People nowadays talk about Martin Luther King's sexual faults; but those were not known at the time, and even those who hated him did not think of what he was doing as immoral, but as something that disrupted the social order.

And thirdly, people do seem definitely to make a distinction between what disrupts our social order and what is morally wrong; certainly what is morally wrong tends to disrupt the social order, but it is also disrupted by technological advances and by social reforms, which are embraced in spite of the trouble they cause. Many people faced with how the abolition of slavery or the recognition of the Blacks' human status was going to wrench society out of shape had no problem with the goal, but fought what was going on because they thought that a way should be found to achieve it at less cost to the social order.

If you look closely at social changes that are regarded as moral reforms, you will find that the people as a whole seem to be quite astute in distinguishing the immorality from the social effects it causes; but of course on the social pressure theory, it is precisely the socially deleterious effects that make the action in question morally wrong. In South Africa, for instance, the apartheid of the Blacks from the Whites is recognized as immoral and some kind of integration of the society as moral, in spite of the fact that there was at the time of transition a great fear (a) that there might be a civil war once the status quo was changed, and (b) from the experience of other African countries, "majority" rule might simply be tyranny by the Black group that happens to get power (which now seems to be the case there also). Still, the country as a whole recognizds that the system it had then was wrong and had to change, whatever the dangers; a kind of Europe in southern Africa with each tribe having its own nation has been tried and found unfeasible.

Fourth, the culture also makes a distinction between those who call themselves reformers and are only advocates for license, and those who really are reformers. For instance, Timothy Leary some forty years ago preached, "Tune in, turn on, and drop out," and extolled the virtues of LSD, which as a professor, he had been experimenting with. For those of you who don't remember, LSD is a psychedelic drug. He tried to show that doing drugs was harmless and a better life than "leading the straight life," but though he got a number of rebels following him, the culture never regarded him as a reformer, because the only "case" he made for his position was that it made you feel good; and anyone with any sense knows that there are a lot of inconsistent acts that make you feel good.

On the other hand, when Martin Luther King started his campaign for equal treatment of the Blacks, the culture perked up its ears; because what he said made sense to anyone who had any idea what his reality was.

Hence, the culture rejects some "reformers" and accepts others; and it rejects, often, the reformers who show the easy way and accepts those whose reforms are bound to bring turmoil. But if you examine the basis of this rejection and acceptance, you find that it is what evidence the people present that their course of action is human and the alternative inhuman.

And so fifth, there is the point that introduced this critique: I think it can safely be said that through history those shifts in moral codes that have passed from one thing's being thought of as permitted to the same thing's being thought of as morally evil and forbidden have come about, not because the act became impractical, but because the act was recognized as inhuman. It may be that changes in the practical situation might cause the people to think that something which was before wrong is now permitted, (I am thinking, e.g., of The Pill and about the change in money lending once banking was invented), but it is rare that practical ease of doing wrong would make people think that it is right (it's always easy, as I said, to do wrong).

And how, on the social-pressure theory, did the handful of Christian missionaries effect such radical changes in the cultures they visited? These changes, by the way, are decried by the social-pressure theorists, because the previous set of mores "worked" so well. It is alleged that it was the "alien" mores of the Christians that destroyed the Aztecs and the Incas as much as the depredations of those looking for the city of gold. But actually, if the social pressure theory (on which the vilification of the missionaries is based) is true, the missionaries couldn't have done it. If the mores were thought to be "right" by the people and were in fact adapting them to their situation, how could they have believed that these foreigners were correct when they said that what they were doing was wrong, and that less practical actions were the only right ones? There was precisely no change in life-conditions here preceding the moral shift, only the arguments of strangers pointing out that sacrificing people and so on were inhuman acts.(9)

No, let us face it; as soon as anyone, individual or culture, becomes convinced that a certain action contradicts what it is to be human, then that person or culture automatically recognizes that it is wrong and must not be done by any human being, however "adaptive" it might be. For instance, I have the conviction that our health-care cost problem is not going to be solved until the distinction I made in Chapter 3 of Section 7 of the fourth part 4.7.3 between values and necessities is recognized, from which it follows that health-care providers simply have no right to become rich from providing necessities to others, though they have a right to a decent income. It is going to take a lot of convincing to show doctors that they just don't have a right to their BMW and their box at the opera, and to be moral will have to make do with a Buick and a seat in the orchestra; because they are supplying what people have a right to have and not what they want. I will spell this out a little more fully in the section on economics in the next part. The point I am making now is that there are such things as new moral discoveries as we understand more fully what it means to be human; and new inconsistencies are brought to light. But once they come to light, the moral code changes.

Therefore, the people themselves judge the mores of their culture and sometimes reject it as being perverse. But this cannot happen if social pressure is what accounts for the force that makes morally wrong acts forbidden; and this in turn means that the people think that there is a higher standard than what society or the culture happens to think is right and wrong at the moment, and this higher standard is this:

Conclusion 4: No human being may ever deliberately act as if he were not a human being, no matter what the culture in its ignorance allows.

That is, hypocrisy, or a deliberate pretense in action that you are what you are not, is the basic definition of immorality. And that is why the basic definition of moral conduct is being honest.

Ignorance of what is right and wrong is generally regarded as excusable and not hypocrisy or dishonesty; it only becomes hypocritical behavior when it is perceived as knowing and deliberate. For instance, most doctors now still think of themselves as benefactors of mankind, "deserving" of the wealth that society heaps on them, because it has simply not entered into their heads that their fees are not freely and gratefully offered by the patients who desired so much the great boon that the physician conferred upon them. In the same way the slave owners of old interpreted the gratitude of the slave for a new pair of shoes.

Next


Notes

1. This works both ways, by the way. Some reformer who comes along telling people that what they thought was forbidden is really permitted is apt to be hated by the "conservatives" as corrupting the people's morals; and of course, if he tells them something they thought was all right is really forbidden, the "liberals" get after him. Jesus was in many ways a victim of the first kind of persecution, and Martin Luther King and Jesse Helms are examples of the second.

2. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment is a novel about a person who was testing whether he could do away with the moral prohibition against his conduct and just murder someone. He found that as soon as he committed the crime, he could not escape its guilt, and it haunted him until he was caught and could pay the penalty.

3. This notwithstanding the efforts that feminists have made in recent times to make God a super-woman or to invest "him/her" with both "genders." God, of course, is beyond "gender," which is a limitation, and is no more both "genders" than clear glass is both black and white.

4. Note, by the way, that Freud by no means was in favor of letting children grow up without punishments and without creating these compulsions in them. If the little dears are permitted to do just what they please, they will grow up without the inhibitions that adapt them to adult life, and will be unable to cope with the real world without great difficulty. Those who were inhibited from doing things like fighting or grabbing their neighbors' toys won't have any inclination to fight or steal as adults, and so are better off. It just goes to show how a good idea can get perverted by the "compassionate" who don't know what it's trying to say.

5. This is even true in the animal world, interestingly enough. I remember giving my dog a treat in the morning (she normally ate at night), as a reward for something she had done. When she repeated the act for several days, she got another reward. One day, she didn't repeat the act, and was not given the reward, though she clearly expected it, associating it with a "morning snack," and not with her behavior. The withdrawal of the reward was looked at as a kind of punishment.

6. Of course, when parents keep telling children, "You're a bad boy!" instead of "You shouldn't have done that!" then the children will begin to believe it--and this can be the source of later problems of self-hatred.

7. It should be noted also that theories like Mackie's, that I quoted above, where there is simply some "consensus" reached about disapproval of certain acts, would also fail to be able to make a distinction between gauche behavior and immoral conduct. Disapproval is disapproval.

8. In this connection, I remember a Presidential Address of the Kentucky Philosophical Association some years back in which that year's president (whose name, unfortunately, I forget) had the thesis that morality was just a game played by the culture, and if you were going to play, you had to abide by the rules the culture set for itself. He showed very nicely how this fit what was going on in the moral behavior of the culture--except, I realized, for one thing. What does the culture do with someone who says, "I refuse to play"? He is then not bound by the rules.

If the culture makes him play, then it's no game; if it's a game, then anyone who doesn't like the rules simply opts out and can go his merry way. Clearly, the first alternative is the one that is taken by the culture, which destroys the game-theory. Morality is, as I said, thought to be the most serious of all pursuits.

9. And it's not even as simple as that. The Mayans, for instance, rebelled against the "adaptive" practice of drowning the maidens, and slaughtered the elites who foisted it on the people, and thereby destroyed the advanced civilization. But the people after that could live in peace.