Chapter 3 -- The Consequences of Morality
3.1 Introduction
In the previous chapter it was stated that there were aspects of a moral society that most people would not desire. In this chapter I wish to argue in more detail for this position. Some of the argument has already occurred, especially with respect to economic inequality in Section 2.5. But there is more to say about elitism, authoritarianism, moral denigration and guilt, inequality and revolution, the failure of morality in conflict resolution and physical danger in the moral society.
I begin with a more detailed examination of elitism. A detailed discussion of conflict resolution is left to Chapter 4.
3.2 The Elitism of the Moral Society
The moral society as it has so far been described is clearly elitist. That is to say, there is a widespread belief throughout the society that some people are morally better than others and there is a widespread desire that these morally better people ought to dominate or actually rule the society. Edmund Burke's pride in British society in his Reflections on the Revolution in France typifies the elitist attitude:
People are said to be egalitarian insofar as they wish for an equal sharing of power among members of the society.
In section 2.4 it was claimed that people in a moral society will tend to defer to those whom they regard as better than themselves, because those who are thought to be better will be thought to be more likely to know what is right. People high in the moral hierarchy will want deference from those lower than themselves, because they, too, will want these people to do what is right. If part of what is generaHy believed to be one of the duties of the elite in a moral society is to lead others along the paths of righteousness, then insofar as people are either unwilling or unable to provide this leadership, their place in the moral hierarchy will be degraded by their fellow citizens.
I was once asked by an academic philosopher why I didn't like morality. I replied that for one thing a moral society is elitist. 'Good' he replied, 'what else has the moral society to recommend it?' This was a man who had the philosophic training to know his own mind well.
Most people these days regard themselves as fairly egalitarian or at least democratic. Even if they do not want an equal sharing of power, they do not want what they would regard as excessive power to reside permanently in the hands of a small nobility. For them 'elitist' is a derogatory expression. Nevertheless many of these me people when confronting the ballot box tend to vote not for the person who is ost likely to support legislation that they believe will best suit themselves and othrs, but rather for what they believe to be the best person.
This could explain why conservative parties, representative as they are of the oral elite, and whose candidates therefore tend to be drawn from the upper stratas f society, have continually polled so well at elections ever since adult suffrage has xisted. It would explain also why labour parties, democratic socialist parties and ther parties of the left desperately try to find political candidates among the moral lite -- lawyers, doctors or academics -- even though such people are far from representative of the stratas of society which such parties try to support.
The only egalitarianism that traditional supporters of left-wing parties have insistd upon to any extent is the equality of power of people in the election of their own adership. Few have suggested that leadership itself be abolished. Thus the political ores of much of the left are not so much egalitarian as Presbyterian. The appointent of elders within the Presbyterian church is based on the asslimption that the eople know best who their moral leaders are, but unlike the Congregationalists of esteryear and members of the Society of Friends, Presbyterians still assume that here is a moral elite to be properly placed in the structure of decision making within he church. The official constitutions of almost all nations, if not their actual olitical practices, reflect this same presbyterianism.
This popularity of presbyterianism would be due, I conjecture, not so much to he proselytising of lowland scotsmen as to the fact that this sort of political strucure mimics so well the unofficial power structure of the moral hierarchy. Thus as a olitical structure, it has the advantage in the popularity stakes of appearing natural o the average moral citizen.
Elitism, then, is very widely accepted throughout society and it is doubtful if one ould tempt any large proportion of the population away from morality by showing hem its elitist aspects. However, one may be able to show those who favour elitism ome implications of moral elitism which might disturb or disgust them.
3.3 The Authoritarianism of the Moral Society [2]
In Section 1.6 it was said that members of the moral elite are often treated as uthorities about moral obligations. Since most members of the society will want hemselves and others to act in accordance with what they believe their obligations to e, they will tend to favour conformity to the injunctions of the moral authorities. his restricts their own freedom and the freedom of others. Since an authoritarian ociety is one in which obedience to authority is preferred to indi,.idual freedom, orality and authoritarianism go hand in hand.
It is commonplace to distinguish between authority in the sense of expertise and uthority in the sense of a right to command. Within moral contexts the two senses become fused because of the prescriptive nature of moral injunctions for moral agents. Those who are thought to know what ought to be done are those who are thought worthy of leadership.
Now paradoxically, authoritarianism is regarded as some sort of evil in most moral societies. So the question arises as to how moral people live and practice within a system which has properties that they regard as so evil. The answer is that they seldom regard their own moral society as authoritarian and they tend correspondingly to be blind to their own authoritarianism. Yet these same people see so readily the authoritarianism in societies other than their own.
An explanation of all this is to be had if we examine the concept of freedom. Frithjof Bergmann has argued in his book On Being Free that 'an act is free if the agent identifies with the elements from which it flows, it is coerced if the agent dissociates himself from the element which generates or prompts the action'.3 Thus the bank teller threatened by the gunman is not free since she would not identify with the 'elements from which' her act of giving money to the gunman 'flows', namely the threat of his shooting her. If, on the other hand, she knows the gunman, knows that he is only bluffing, knows that his wife and children are in need, and gives him the money for that reason, identifying with the compassion within her from which her act 'flows', then she is acting freely.
That is freedom as seen from within the agent. However, when we consider the freedom of others, we usually think of them as coerced if we could not identify with what would be the causes of our behaviour, if we were in their shoes.
Thus, Chinese students, identifying with the injunctions of Maoist propaganda, were appalled at the thought of two Australian school teachers, who they had come to love , returning to their illiberal capitalist country. But the school teachers with their different moral upbringing did not experience a loss of freedom on their return.
Likewise, it is commonplace to regard Nazi Germany as a paradigm of authoritarianism. Yet most of the Germans outside concentration camps in that period did not experience the society as unduly coercive, identifying as they did with the moral injunctions of the ruling elite.
Thus moral agents, identifying as they do with what they believe to be their moral obligations, do not feel coerced by them, and insofar as these beliefs coincide with the moral propaganda of the society in which they reside, which will usually be the case, that society will not appear unduly authoritarian to them. It is only when we allow ourselves to take an outsider's view of the moral society in which we live that its authoritarianism becomes apparent.
This view of things makes freedom and authoritarianism appear subjective states of affairs, and there is, I think, a subjective sense of freedom which Bergmann has correctly analysed. Bergmann's analysis is of freedom in the performance of an act. But a slightly different idea of freedom is freedom to perform an act. It is the latter notion that is the more objective. I may go through my whole life identifying with all the elemen ts from which my acts flow, whence all my acts are, in Bergmann's sense, free. But I may never be free to fly for all that.
Similarly, morally trained people may identify with the injunctions of their moral elite and hence be free in conforming to these injunctions, without being free to act otherwise. They would be psychologically incapable of acting otherwise. When we look upon other moral societies and see them as authoritarian, we are quite correct and objectively so. Insofar as those within a moral society are blind to its authoritarianism, it is because they do not experience their own lack of freedom.
Finally, note that in a moral society it is not freedom itself which is valued highly. On the contrary, it is a basic function of morality to place restraints on human behaviour. Freedom to do what is right is regarded as holy, but freedom to do what is wrong is regarded as a positive evil and warrants a special label -- 'licence'.
Of course, the very people who most insist on the perpetuation of these attitudes towards freedom to do right and freedom to do wrong are the same people who invent right and wrong in the first place. They enjoin us, not only to do what is right and refrain from doing what is wrong, but also to help them to force others into their moral mould.
Morality, some say, is a relatively recent development in human history. So are legal floggings, exiles, long terms of imprisonment, censorship, official secrets and large-scale warfare. With few exceptions, the anarchist and the non-conformist are the pariahs of the moral society. The foreigner who does not share its values is its enemy.
3.4 Moral Denigration and Guilt
The majority of objects in any pyramid are at or near its base and similarly the majority of members of a moral society have relatively low status in that society. Moral denigration for the bulk of society is the other side of the coin to the honours bestowed on the elite minority.
Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 2, captures the mechanism:
... The origin of the opposites good and bad is to be found in the pathos of nobility and distance, representing the dominant temper of a higher, ruling class in relation to a lower, dependent one.
Nietzsche also conjectured that the terminology referring to social classes is etymologically related to moral terminology. Doubtless there are etymological facts of many languages which demonstrate that association of the upper classes with goodness and the lower classes with baseness has been a continuing feature of moral societies. But what is more interesting for our present purposes is the double meaning that so many of our social class words exhibit. Thus, 'noble' means both being a person of high rank or title and also being of lofty and exalted character. The words 'high', 'elevated', 'lofty' can be used to describe both social status and moral character. The same applies to 'low', 'common', 'ordinary', 'vulgar', 'churlish', and 'plebeian' to describe the base of the moral society's pyramid. Again, the political right wing is that which supports the upper classes against the demands of the lower classes. One further example is a word used in the heading for this section -- the word 'denigration'. This means 'the blackening of character' and has common etymological roots with 'negro'. Little wonder that black-skinned people have been such a rarity in the upper strata of English-speaking societies.
Clearly the moral elite have all the advantages and the lower classes all the disadvantages when it comes to fallacies of equivocation. But it is important to realise that these double meanings do not arise by chance. To the extent that a society is a moral society the lower classes are regarded as morally inferior to the upper classes, the nobles are supposed to be noble, the churls churlish, common people common, ordinary people ordinary, and plebeians plebeian. The snobbery inherent in the moral society seems to extend to the very language used to describe it.
Someone may ask why we should worry if most people regard themselves as morally inferior. After all, most people regard themselves and are regarded as inferior at mathematics, tennis, karate, athletics, nuclear physics, medicine and motor car maintainence, but this usually does not worry people. So why worry about their sense of moral inferiority? The reason is that in the moral society people are trained to want above all to be good and noble and to want to be other than vulgar, ignoble and low. Yet the structure of the society destines the majority of them to be regarded as failures in that regard. The situation is similar to the old fashioned present-day competitive education systems within which most children receive a training which urges academic excellence upon them but nevertheless guarantees that only a small minority will make the grade. The majority end their educational career with an inferiority complex with respect to their academic abilities.
At the extreme lower end of the moral pecking order would be those who, believing themselves to be bad if not vile, lose all hope of what they think of as moral betterment and in their despair feel they might as well get what enjoyment and satisfaction they can out of doing what they think is bad. In this way (though perhaps not only in this way) the phenomena of juvenile gangs, vandalism and what commonly passes for criminality could be generated. At higher levels on the social scale, the moral inferiority complex could be characterised by ego-competition, including continual attempts to denigrate the character of others, in order to achieve a higher place in the moral pecking order than would otherwise be believed to be possible.
Moral and evaluative language would provide a useful tool for this exercise, not only because of the inbuilt snobbery of moral language, but also because almost any describable human behaviour and almost any human characteristic can be described in two ways -- derogatively or euphemistically. People who try to boost their ego or image at the expense of others continually make use of this moral parsing, as Bertrand Russell once called it. Here are just a few examples.
| I | You | |
| am discreet | are deceitful | |
| am different | are abnormal | |
| am normal | are common | |
| am a rough diamond | are churlish |
To return to our theme, even where a sense of moral inferiority is not accompanied by perversions and ego competition, the feeling of continual moral failure, the feeling that for all one's efforts one is still morally inferior, will be a saddening thing for those who bear it.
An associated sadness that morality can render even to those who feel fairly content with their moral status is the feeling of guilt, the feeling of remorse at having done something that they believe to be morally wrong.
People who are amoral may experience regret. They may regret having done something with a consequence they disliked and which they did not foresee, or which they did foresee but did not care about at the time of the act. But they cannot have regrets at having done something wrong. They either do not care about what is right and what is wrong or they do not believe that there are such things as right or wrong acts. Thus, insofar as a society is amoral, there is no possibility of feelings of guilt, guilt complexes or moral inferiority complexes with all the sadness, madness and suffering that these feelings and complexes entail.'
3.5 Economic Inequality and Revolution
In section 2.5, it was explained how the way was wide open for either subconscious or deliberate but morally sanctioned exploitation of the rest of society by the moral elite. But there are limits to the extent to which the gullible can be fooled by the confidence trickster, and likewise there are limits to which there can be an unequal distribution of wealth before someone comes up with the idea that perhaps the wealthy are giving themselves more than they deserve.
These are dangerous revolutionary thoughts because it is thought to be ignoble to take more than one's just deserts. The revolutionary, therefore, is in effect crying 'Imposter!', and such imposters deserve to be parted from their power and possessions if not their lives -- or so would go the revolutionary injunctions.
The moral society at this stage may divide like an amoeba, with the rebels attached to a revolutionary moral leadership and the remainder remaining 'loyal'. The situation is then physically dangerous, with the moral leadership of each side denigrating the other with a strong possibility of civil war.5
The danger of rebellion is mitigated by the recently invented so-called 'democratic' elections of the Presbyterian style mentioned in section 3.2. This device is efficient in yielding the minimal change in the power structure to satisfy the feelings of injustice within the community at least to the point where the great majority feel that the fruits of rebellion would not outweigh the dangers of the rebellion itself. The rebellious minority, however, continue to be irked by what they see as the injustices of the usurpers of social power and decry the elections as a 'liberal' device for the retention of the status quo. In this they are right, but where they are wrong is in thinking that the revolution for which they strive would make any fundamental difference to the structure of society.
If the story told in sections 2.3 to 2.5 is somewhere near the truth, such a revolution would merely alter the membership of the power elite and perhaps redistribute rewards and sanctions. Large scale economic inequality would remain as long as the doctrine of moral desert was retained. But if this was discarded, the perpetuation mechanism of morality would be lost and morality itself would rapidly become nonexistent. This is the bloodless but much more significant revolution that 1, for one, would welcome.
3.6 The Theory that Morality Does Not Matter
M Zimmerman has speculated that society would remain virtually unaltered if everyone came to believe that there was no way of finding out what their moral obligations were.6 Everyone, claims Zimmerman, would want to do just what they would want to do if they believed, as many of them now do, that they had certain moral obligations.
Now if the account given in Chapter 2 is something like the truth, Zimmerman's theory is clearly false of those moral agents whose behavioural tendencies are affected by their moral beliefs and whose moral beliefs sometimes run counter to their natural inclinations. Such people will either have different behaviour than they would have if they were amoral, or they will suffer from guilt, which will in turn be likely to affect their subsequent behaviour.
I shall argue that, given the account of Chapter 2, any plausibility that Zimmerman's case may have derives from the examples with which he operates.
The article opens with a discussion of whether a judge would or would not sentence a man found legally guilty of killing his wife and children, and whether there would be any difference in the judge's behaviour in this regard were he to live in an amoral society. Now in this case of course it is plausible to suggest that there may not be any difference. For a judge is paradigmatically a member of the moral elite and, if the story of Section 2.4 is roughly correct, members of the moral elite tend to equate their natural inclinations with what is either morally obligatory or at least morally permissible.
Zimmerman goes on to consider a moralist objection that morality is needed to combat 'contemporary totalitarianism, involving persecution, concentration camps, secret police, executions, destruction of freedom, denial of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and all the other things in life that we hold to be of greatest value'. Zimmerman replies quite correctly that it is not correct to suggest 'that Hitler did not believe and say that we "ought" to persecute Jews, that Stalin did not believe and say that we "ought" to destroy burgeois democracy'. Yet having made that important point, he lets it pass, and claims that the real point is that it is implausible to believe that in an amoral society, 'people are less likely to want and fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that they will want and accept concentration camps, persecution, secret police, etc.'
Now that seems to me to be quite correct. However, the point Zimmerman let pass is crucial. In an amoral society, Hitler and Stalin could not have used moral injunctions to lead ordinary people to persecute fellow citizens and the citizens of other countries in such a heartless manner. In an amoral society, moral propaganda is unavailable to the megalomaniac as a tool for mass manipulation.
Tyrants could, of course, still use fear to establish and maintain their position. Nevertheless, fear unaccompanied by moral charisma is a two-edged sword as many tyrants have found to their cost when rebellion has finally broken out. Fear and moral constraints have different social consequences.
Notes for Chapter 3
[1] Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France.[2] The suggestions made here of the elitism and authoritarianism of ( moral societies would not surprise many modern sociologists of morality. (See for example Musgrave, P.W., The Moral Curriculum: A Sociological Analysis, London, Methuen, 1978.)
[3] Bergmann, Frithjof, On Being Free, London, University of Notre Dame Press, 1977.
[4] What I have been describing as a guilt complex would be a special case of a phenomenon that has received close study by the psychologist Carl Rogers, namely, a gap between a person's self-image and what that person would like to be. (See his 'Learning to Be Free.' in Rogers, C.R. and Stevens, B., Person to Person: The Problem of Being Human, New York, Pocket Books, 1971.)
The role of guilt and moral denigration in the moral society has received some attention from criminologists. See Taylor,l., Walton,P., and Young, J., The New Criminology, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Of especial interest is their discussion (pp 47-52) of Hans Eysenck's work Fact and Fiction in Psychology (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965).
[5] R. Dahrendorf in an essay 'On the Origin of Inequality among Men' (in Essays in the Theory of Society, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, pp. 151-178) claims that a system of reward and punishment for maintaining norms which regulate human conduct is a necessary feature of any society and argues that this is the origin of material inequality. Whether material rewards and punishments are essential let alone desirable to keep citizens conforming to norms and whether societies need norms in order to remain societies as Dahrendorf claims, seem to me to be moot points. Moreover, even if these things were so, the extent of the material inequality which tends to prevail in moral societies would still need explanation.
Even though Dahrendorf thinks that inequality in power and material wealth are inevitable in society, he claims that 'There is certainly reason to regret that children are ashamed of their parents, that people are anxious and poor, that they suffer and are made unhappy, and many other consequences of inequality. (p.178). He claims also that for such reasons 'every system of social stratification generates protest against its principles and bears the seeds of its own suppression' (p.177). But then he agrees with Kant that although inequality is a 'rich source of much that is evil', it is also the source 'of everything that is good'. He attempts to justify this, quite inconsistently, it seems to me, with the assertion that social inequality is an 'impetus toward liberty' and with the claim that the idea of a perfectly egalitarian society is not just unrealistic, but terrible. Utopia, he claims, is not the home of freedom, but rather the home of total terror or absolute boredom.
Why society would be the home of total terror were it devoid of the conflicts arising from inequality he does not explain. The idea that the only possible escape from boredom is our involvement in such conflicts seems to me bizarre.
P.W. Musgrave also (op.cit., p.122) claims with respect to inequality, that we may suddenly realise ourselves in some sense deprived and say 'it isn't fair' so that we may be driven to action that 'could lead to an attempt to renegotiate the current moral code'. He goes on to claim that any such changes in the moral code are a 'result of conflict between those with power' (p.124), though he does not comment on the physical danger inherent in such conflicts.
[6] Zimmerman, M., 'The "Is-Ought": An Unnecessary Dualism', Mind, 71, 1962, pp53-61. Reprinted in Hudson, W.D. (ed), The Is-Ought Question, London, Papermac, 1969.
