In opposition to this position, it is suggested here that the more that people are motivated by moral concerns, the more likely it is that their society will be elitist, authoritarian and dishonest, that they will have scant respect for most of its members, that they will be relatively inefficient in engendering human happiness, self-esteem or satisfaction, that they will be relatively inefficient in the resolution of conflicts, and that their moralising will exacerbate conflicts, often with physical violence or even war as a result.
The arguments which will be offered for this position are unlikely to be conclusive. The issue falls within the realm of moral sociology, and the fact is that there is very little solid sociological evidence available for or against the position.
My motive for presenting my views on the matter as best I can is not simply the desire to correct a widespread false belief. Many widespread false beliefs would be relatively harmless. But this one, if I am right, is not. I am concerned enough for others to try to warn them of the dangers of morality. Even if the evidence for such danger is below par, a warning is not irrelevant to such concern if the dangers are great. This book will have served a purpose if it stimulates some of its readers into a genuine investigation of their own beliefs concerning morality.
Here is a synopsis of what is to follow.
Chapter 1 is about the meaning of moral terms. Though the meaning of moral terms clearly varies from some people to others, I argue that the meaning of moral terms delineated here is traditional and in conformity with most common practice. That view is that morality is not relative to persons or societies; that if some particular act (as opposed to a type of act) is morally good or bad or right or obligatory it is absolutely so. The view is also that the moral worth of people and their behaviour is an objective matter that is not to be determined by subjective feelings about those people or their behaviour.
Thus, I argue in particular that 'morality' does not usually mean what some people name, or rather, I would say, misname personal morality, that is, the ways in which some individual person would like everybody, including herself or himself, to behave. On the contrary, it will be allowed that some person could want everyone to behave in a way which was, perhaps unbeknown to that person, immoral.
I argue also that 'morality' does not usually mean what sort of behaviour is acceptable or unacceptable to a society, that is, what I shall call the mores of a society. It will be allowed that when William Wilberforce and other reformers argued that the mores of their society were immoral, they were not contradicting themselves.
By the same token, when people talk about what is and is not moral, they are not to be taken as talking merely about the moral beliefs of a society or individual; nor merely about how things appear morally to a society or individual. It will be allowed that moral beliefs can be false; and that appearances, including moral appearances, can be deceptive.
More controversially, I shall argue that if there were any knowledge of moral obligation, it would have its primary source in an intuitive apprehension of a moral quality by some person using a faculty that most people call 'conscience'; in other words, that morality has an intuitionist epistemology. Neither purely logical considerations nor these combined with sense experience can be a primary source of moral knowledge.
In Chapter 2, I present my view of the structure of the moral society and its method of self-perpetuation. I suggest that the faculty of moral conscience is a myth and that moral obligations are myths also. There are no moral obligations to be known, and, even if there were, we are not possessed of the intuitive apparatus needed to apprehend them.
Since there are no moral obligations, there is nothing whose existence would entail the existence of moral obligations. So there are no moral virtues, vices, sins, morally good, bad or evil people, acts, or products of such acts, or goods that we are morally obliged to promote, or evils that we are morally obliged to avoid or eradicate.
The morality of a society is stipulatively defined as the extent of the occurrence throughout society of
(b) the wish to conform behaviour to these moral beliefs.
(b) Within moral societies, the desire in moral agents to act morally and to have others acting morally is instilled by using reward and punishment in childhood. Some moral beliefs will be instilled in the process.
(c) Moral agents may also accept moral beliefs from those whom the agent regards as moral authorities -- parents, teachers, ministers of religion, et cetera.
(d) There is a rough social ordering of moral authority within the moral society for the purposes of moral indoctrination and the application of rewards and punishments for moral success and failure.
(e) Those at or near the top of the moral hierarchy may sometimes modify their systems of moral belief by mistaking their personal desires about behaviour for moral insights.
(f) One's place in the moral ordering is a function of, among other things, one's self-esteem, and this, in turn, is a function of the extent to which rewards have exceeded punishments or vice versa in one's moral conditioning.
In Chapter 3, the sociological effects of morality's perpetuation mechanisms are discussed. It is argued that the moral society will have a tendency to be elitist, authoritarian and inegalitarian. Its members may have unnecessary burdens of ego competition and guilt. Where there is conflict between conflicting moral leaderships, the chances of physical violence and warfare are enhanced.
Chapter 4 critically examines various ideas about how morality or systems akin to morality may be used to maximise satisfaction. It is concluded that there is no evidence to suggest that morality as an institution within human society is of any such use.
Chapter 5 examines the possibilities for empirically testing the theories outlined in Chapters 2 and 3.
Let us proceed, then, to a discussion of what is meant by 'moral' and its cognates.