What is Morality?

 

                            Detail from Raphael's School of Athens 

It is not so easy to define what morality is.  It’s easy to say that it’s the study of right and wrong, good and bad.  It’s easy to say that it employs the philosophical methods of rational argument and critical thinking.  It is somewhat harder to say anything substantive about what morality is without getting into controversies.  Perhaps we should simply define morality as the study of controversies over values and norms.  Nevertheless, I hope to convey here a better understanding of what we mean by ‘morality’ when we talk about it in moral philosophy or ethics. 

We’re familiar with talking of a person’s morality, or a culture’s morality, in the sense of the norms or mores they (perhaps implicitly) endorse.  But this is descriptive morality.  It’s what an anthropologist or sociologist or other empirically minded researcher might investigate by surveying people to find out which norms guide their decisions and judgments.  The philosophical study of morality is focused not on descriptive morality, but instead on normative or prescriptive morality: what we ought to do and why.  

 

It is easier to say what morality is not, than it is to say what it is.  Morality is not the same thing as the law, for example.  What the law requires of us depends on the authoritative acts of legislators and judges, and the history of precedents regarding what the law has been said to be.  It may be illegal, for example, in a certain place and time, for different races to mix in a restaurant.  But that doesn’t make it immoral.  In fact, we can judge such laws to be immoral in spite of their legality.  Likewise, morality is not the same thing as tradition, social conventions, or etiquette, since we can ask critical questions about whether and why we ought to do as tradition, or society, says we ought.  Morality is not the same thing as religion either.  Religion seems to always involve a moral code or value system, but it involves much more, too, like God or other deities, sacred texts, a creation story, gender roles, and more. 

Morality in the normative or prescriptive sense is what we appeal to when we judge that we ought, or ought not, to do what religion, or the law, or tradition, etc., says we ought to do.  Moral norms are what we call upon to evaluate other norms such as legal, social, and religious norms.

 

Once we’ve distinguished morality like this, we have to confront the threat of skepticism.  We might start wondering whether there truly is such a thing as morality.  We might be dubious of the idea that morality is something distinctive, as if it were out there in the universe waiting for us to discover the moral truths that tell us what to do and how to live.  What could such a thing be, exactly?  Where did it come from?  How do we know about it?  Might morality instead be a product of our imagination, or a construction of our social agreements?  These questions form the part of moral philosophy called metaethics.  They are descriptive issues, often abstract and conceptual ones, about the foundations of ethics.  Whereas normative ethics tells us about the content of morality (what we ought to do, and why), metaethics tells us about the status of moral judgments (can they be objectively true, and if so what makes them true?).

Fortunately, we can engage in moral philosophy without resolving these big metaethical issues first.  Even if morality is a human construct, with no objective basis, there is work to be done in constructing solutions to the problems of how to live, of what we and our society ought to do, and of who we ought to admire and emulate.  We need to answer questions about particular decisions or policies, including big questions like the sociopolitical values shaping our societies and governments and smaller yet still quite significant questions about consumer choices or where to go to school. 

Thus, we can think of moral philosophy as an activity, something that we do.  It’s the activity of formulating, examining, and assessing solutions to social problems and the problems individuals deal with in choosing how to live. 

 

Moral Principles and the Role of Moral Theories

When we rationally deliberate about what to do (or about issues like which policies to vote for, how to deal with our emotions, or how to raise children), we often appeal to principles that offer a somewhat general explanation.  For example, we might decide to help a stranger in need because we think that this is what should be done by someone with enough time and resources, or we might decide that the inconvenience would be great enough to excuse us from helping.  Either way, there seems to be a principle involved, perhaps implicitly, in thinking that our particular situation fits into some pattern or kind of situation that calls for either helping or not helping at that time.

Here are a few moral principles often appealed to in explicit or official rationales and decisions:

·       Beneficence: Help others when it is feasible and avoid causing them unnecessary harm.

·       Justice: Avoid unfairness and injustice, and treat like cases alike. 

·       Autonomy: Respect the free decisions of individuals who are capable of deciding for themselves.

            I only mention these as examples of moral principles.  No doubt we should examine these principles carefully once we start sifting through moral controversies.  Clearly, also, there are many more moral principles worth considering.  Some will be more general and others will involve more particular details, qualifications, or exceptions. 

It is good to think, and act, with principles.  But a big question looms regarding which principles to live by.  What should we do when our tried-and-true moral principles give us conflicting directions?  For example, suppose that Beneficence tells us to stop and help but Justice says no for that would create unfairness.  In such a situation, what are we to do?  Which principle ought we to follow? 

This is the role of moral theories: to resolve conflicts between moral principles, and to reveal the ultimate basis and justification for resolving any moral controversies.  Just as moral principles tell us what to do and often also tell us why we ought to do it, moral theories purport to offer fundamental explanations of right and wrong, good and bad.  They tell us which principles apply to us, and why.  Moral theories are thus not neutral.  They support some principles and undermine others. 

Perhaps skeptical doubts begin to arise again, once we consider that there are multiple moral theories competing to be the one that will help us resolve our controversies as they ought to be resolved.  Indeed, it is easy to think that nothing can establish one moral theory as better than another, since such questions of which is better than which are precisely part of the topic of controversy here.  But we can be more optimistic.  For one thing, we are sometimes rightfully confident about what to do.  Sometimes an ethical issue does not seem controversial at all.  Our confidence in preferring a fair outcome of a criminal trial, for example, seems well supported.  So, any principles that conflict with this more particular judgment are problematic to the extent that they conflict with it.  If we can trust some of our judgments (based on individual experience or values or intuition, or on social learning or tradition or…), then we have some leverage for rationally supporting some principles and theories over others. 

In effect, there is a back-and-forth to the activity of moral philosophy: we test principles and theories against particular cases (real or hypothetical), and we strive to solve particular moral controversies by appeal to principles and theories that seem well-supported.