Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
The topic of morality makes many people uncomfortable. Many people believe morality is a private issue and that no one has a right to make a judgment about someone else’s moral decision. Morality covers the vast arena of human conduct that examines our interaction with other human beings. Morality touches every aspect of our life, every moment of our life.
Morality is nothing but a code of conduct arrived at by mutually consenting persons who consider such code of conduct, such morality, to be in their own best self-interest. All successful societies have based their specific code of conduct, their morality, on the innate human drive to always act in what each individual considers to be in his own best self-interest.
Some evolutionary psychologists have argued that human morality originated from evolutionary processes. An innate tendency to develop a sense of right and wrong helps an individual to survive and reproduce in a species with complex social interactions. Selected behaviors, seen in abstraction as moral codes, are seen to be common to all human cultures, and reflect, in their development, similarities to natural selection and these aspects of morality can be seen in as the basis of some religious doctrine. From this, some also argue that there may be a simple Darwinian explanation for the existence of religion: that, regardless of the truth of religious beliefs, religion tends to encourage behavior beneficial to the species, as a code of morality tends to encourage communality, and communality tends to assist survival.
Morality is the product of the evolutionary development of man and society. Morality is always relative and never absolute. Within the framework of our society, we chose our own, personal code of moral conduct. From a biological perspective, morality is a relative, synthetic concept, solely for the convenience of man, rather than a universal and absolute dictum.
We know this instinctive, automatic interaction with the environment as the survival instinct. This instinct must be present in all living things and is the basic emotion from which all other emotions evolved. Over eons of time, man has enhanced the survival instinct embedded in his genes, by developing complex emotions, such as love, hatred, hunger, despair, fear, joy and many other powerful feelings. Deeply embedded instincts and emotions govern all animal behavior, including human behavior. However, during the past two million years of hominoid development, man has developed a new mental faculty that sets him aside from other animals. This ability superimposes rational, logical thought processes on our primitive emotions.
Our rational mind applies a thin veneer of logical thought processes over the raw emotions that govern our interaction with our environment. Emotions control the preponderance of basic human needs and behavior patterns. Emotions determine when we are hungry, when we feel sexually aroused, when we are afraid, when we feel a sense of well-being.
The arena of morality is one of the primary spheres where human beings utilize their rational mind to manipulate other human beings. We may refer to another person as evil in order to prod him to mend his ways and to modify his behavior to our liking. We may also refer to another person as evil if we wish to prevent other persons from emulating him or associating with him.
Morality does not apply to individual human beings when they are alone. A shipwrecked survivor on an island need not concern himself with morality because it does not apply to him in his isolation. Morality is a societal phenomenon and, since man creates societies, all morality is a concept created by man. It follows, that morality is relative to our environment and does not apply to all persons at all times. Morality can only be relative and subjective; instead of objective, universal and absolute.
A wide variety of morality-systems exists among men, depending on where they live. Eskimos, Europeans, Atheists, Americans, Devil Worshippers, Iranians, Chinese. Brazilians, Indians. All of these societies have voluntarily adopted unique and different morality systems, and all of these systems contradict each other in many aspects.
Part of the function of parentage is the transmission of a moral code. For the child is more animal than human; it has humanity thrust upon it day by day as it receives the moral and mental heritage of the race. Biologically it is badly equipped for civilization, since its instincts provide only for traditional and basic situations, and include impulses more adapted to the jungle than to the town. Every vice was once a virtue, necessary in the struggle for existence; it became a vice only when it survived the conditions that made it indispensable; a vice, therefore, is not an advanced form of behavior, but usually an atavistic throwback to ancient and superseded ways. It is one purpose of a moral code to adjust the unchanged or slowly changing impulses of human nature to the changing needs and circumstances of social life.
Greed Dishonesty Violence
Greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, cruelty and violence were for so many generations useful to animals and men that not all our laws, our education, our morals and our religions can quite stamp them out; some of them, doubtless, have a certain survival value even today. The animal gorges himself because he does not know when he may find food again; this uncertainty is the origin of greed. The Yakuts have been known to eat forty pounds of meat in one day; and similar stories, only less heroic, are told of the Eskimos and the natives of Australia. Economic security is too recent an achievement of civilization to have eliminated this natural greed; it still appears in the insatiable acquisitiveness whereby the fretful modern man or woman stores up gold, or other goods, that may in emergency be turned into food. Greed for drink is not as widespread as greed for food, for most human aggregations have centred on some water supply. Nevertheless, the drinking of intoxicants is almost universal; not so much because men are greedy as because they are cold and wish to be warmed, or unhappy and wish to forget or simply because the water available to them is not fit to drink.
Dishonesty is not so ancient as greed, for hunger is older than property. The simplest “savages” seem to be the most honest. ”Their word is sacred,” said Kolben of the Hottentots; they know “nothing of the corruptness and faithless arts of Europe.” As international communications improved, this naive honesty disappeared; Europe has taught the gentle art to the Hottentots. In general, dishonesty rises with civilization, because under civilization the stakes of diplomacy are larger, there are more things to be stolen, and education makes men clever. When property develops among primitive men, lying and stealing come in its train.
Crimes of violence are as old as greed; the struggle for food, land and mates has in every generation fed the earth with blood, .and has offered a dark background for the fitful light of civilization. Primitive man was cruel because he had to be; life taught him that he must have an arm always ready to strike, and a heart apt for “natural killing.” The blackest page in anthropology is the story of primitive torture, and of the joy that many primitive men and women seem to have taken in the infliction of pain. Much of this cruelty was associated with war; within the tribe manners were less ferocious, and primitive men treated one another and even their slaves with a quite civilized kindliness. But since men had to kill vigorously in war, they learned to kill also in time of peace; for to many a primitive mind no argument is settled until one of the disputants is dead. Among many tribes murder, even of another member of the same clan, aroused far less horror than it used to do with us. The Fuegians punished a murderer merely by exiling him until his fellows had forgotten his crime. The Kaffirs considered a murderer unclean, and required that he should blacken his face with charcoal; but after a while, if he washed himself, rinsed his mouth, and dyed himself brown, he was received into society again. The savages of Futuna, like our own, looked upon a murderer as a hero. In several tribes no woman would marry a man who had not killed someone, in fair fight or foul; hence the practice of head-hunting, which survives in the Philippines today. The Dyak who brought back most heads from such a man-hunt had the choice of all the girls in his village; these were eager for his favors, feeling that through him they might become the mothers of brave and potent men.
Homicide Suicide
Where food is dear life is cheap. Eskimo sons must kill their parents when these have become so old as to be helpless and useless; failure to kill them in such cases would be considered a breach of filial duty. Even his own life seems cheap to primitive man, for he kills himself with a readiness rivalled only by the Japanese. If an offended person commits suicide, or mutilates himself, the offender must imitate him or become a pariah; so old is hara-kiri. Any reason may suffice for suicide: some Indian women of North America killed themselves because their men had assumed the privilege of scolding them; and a young Trobriand Islander committed suicide because his wife had smoked all his tobacco.
The socialization of the individual
To transmute greed into thrift, violence into argument, murder into litigation, and suicide into philosophy has been part of the task of civilization. It was a great advance when the strong consented to eat the weak by due process of law. No society can survive if it allows its members to behave toward one another in the same way in which it encourages them to behave as a group toward other groups; internal cooperation is the first law of external competition. The struggle for existence is not ended by mutual aid, it is incorporated, or transferred to the group. Other things equal, the ability to compete with rival groups will be proportionate to the ability of the individual members and families to combine with one another. Hence every society inculcates a moral code, and builds up in the heart of the individual, as its secret allies and aides, social dispositions that mitigate the natural war of life; it encourages by calling them virtues those qualities or habits in the individual which redound to the advantage of the group, and discourages contrary qualities by calling them vices. In this way the individual is in some outward measure socialized, and the animal becomes a citizen.
Hospitality Manners Tribal limits of morality
It was hardly more difficult to generate social sentiments in the soul of the “savage” than it is to raise them now in the heart of modern man. The struggle for life encouraged communalism, but the struggle for property intensifies individualism. Primitive man was perhaps readier than con-temporary man to cooperate with his fellows; social solidarity came more easily to him since he had more perils and interests in common with his group, and less possessions to separate him from the rest. The natural man was violent and greedy; but he was also kindly and generous, ready to share even with strangers, and to make presents to his guests.” Every schoolboy knows that primitive hospitality, in many tribes, went to the extent of offering to the traveller the wife or daughter of the host.” To decline such an offer was a serious offense, not only to the host but to the woman; these are among the perils faced by missionaries. Often the later treatment of the guest was determined by the manner in which he had acquitted himself of these responsibilities. Uncivilized man appears to have felt proprietary, but not sexual, jealousy; it did not disturb him that his wife had “known” men before marrying him, or now slept with his guest; but as her owner, rather than her lover, he would have been incensed to find her cohabiting with an- other man without his consent. Some African husbands lent their wives to strangers for a consideration.
The rules of courtesy were as complex in most simple peoples as in advanced nations. Each group had formal modes of salutation and farewell. Two individuals, on meeting, rubbed noses, or smelled each other, or gently bit each other; as we have seen, they never kissed. Some crude tribes were more polite than the modern average; the Dyak head-hunters, we are told, were “gentle and peaceful” in their home life, and the Indians of Central America considered the loud talking and brusque behavior of the white man as signs of poor breeding and a primitive culture.
Almost all groups agree in holding other groups to be inferior to them- selves. The American Indians looked upon themselves as the chosen people, specially created by the Great Spirit as an uplifting example for mankind. One Indian tribe called itself “The Only Men”; another called itself “Men of Men”; the Caribs said, “We alone are people.” The Eskimos believed that the Europeans had come to Greenland to learn manners and virtues. Consequently it seldom occurred to primitive man to extend to other tribes the moral restraints which he acknowledged in dealing with his own; he frankly conceived it to be the function of morals to give strength and coherence to his group against other groups. Commandments and taboos applied only to the people of his tribe; with others, except when they were his guests, he might go as far as he dared.
Primitive vs. modern morals Religion and morals
Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied. The morals of modern man are not unquestionably superior to those of primitive man, though the two groups of codes may differ considerably in content, practice and profession; but modern morals are, in normal times, extended though with decreasing intensity to a greater number of people than before. As tribes were gathered up into those larger units called states, morality overflowed its tribal bounds; and as communication or a common danger united and assimilated states, morals seeped through frontiers, and some men began to apply their commandments to all Europeans, to all whites, at last to all men. Perhaps there have always been idealists who wished to love all men as their neighbours, and perhaps in every generation they have been futile voices crying in a wilderness of nationalism and war. But probably the number even the relative number of such men has increased. There are no morals in diplomacy, but there are morals in international trade, merely because such trade cannot go on without some degree of restraint, regulation, and confidence. Trade began in piracy; it culminates in morality.
Few societies have been content to rest their moral codes upon so frankly rational a basis as economic and political utility. For the individual is not endowed by nature with any disposition to subordinate his personal interests to those of the group, or to obey irksome regulations for which there are no visible means of enforcement. To provide, so to speak, an invisible watchman, to strengthen the social impulses against the individualistic by powerful hopes and fears, societies have not invented but made use of, religion. The ancient geographer Strabo expressed the most advanced views on this subject nineteen hundred years ago.
For in dealing with a crowd of women, at least, or with any promiscuous mob, a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or exhort them to reverence, piety and faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this cannot be aroused without myths and marvels. For thunderbolt, aegis, trident, torches, snakes, thyrsuslances-arms of the gods are myths, and so is the entire ancient theology. But the founders of states gave their sanction to these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded. Now since this is the nature of mythology, and since it has come to have its place in the social and civil scheme of life as well as in the history of actual facts, the ancients clung to their system of education for children and applied it up to the age of maturity; and by means of poetry they believed that they could satisfactorily discipline every period of life. But now, after a long time, the writing of history and the present-day philosophy have come to the front. Philosophy, however, is for the few, whereas poetry is more useful to the people at large.
Morals, then, are soon endowed with religious sanctions, because mystery and super-naturalism lend a weight which can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. But was this moral utility the source or origin of religion?
Morality concerns itself exclusively with interactions among human beings. The human concept of morality has been the subject of controversy and has provided fuel for many heated philosophical discourses during the entire range of human history. Morality provides the rules by which people love each other, fight with each other and interact with each other in every conceivable way. Many people have killed each other, fighting over the alleged superiority of their respective morality, without a clear understanding of what they were fighting for. What is morality? In order to address this question, we must develop a clear insight into the concept of morality.
Morality and laws are definitely not synonymous: A specific act may be moral, valued and lawful in one country, while the identical act may be punishable by death in another country. This disparity in moral values is evident in many conflicts arising from divergent religions. Salman Rushdie discovered this truth when he published the “Satanic Verses”.
A society of persons, in the sociological context, is the conglomeration of individual human beings who have come together for their mutual protection, welfare or communality of interests. All such individuals search for individual happiness in their own way, as is the nature of all individuals.
One person may wish to pursue a tranquil lifestyle; another person may be intent on accumulating wealth. In order to function smoothly, society must apply common denominators, common values that large numbers of people share, in order to achieve order, safety and predictability for all of its members. The emotional and physical well being of a society and its members depends on a common code of conduct, a common morality among all of its members.
It is not necessary for all members of a society to subscribe to the identical morality. However, it is important for all individuals to be aware of any differences in conduct that may exist among various groups. This consensus enables individuals to cope with, not only other individual members of their own society, but also with groups of non-conforming persons beyond their own society.
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood. Jonathan Haidt
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