INHERENT RIGHT AND WRONG
Let us go back to the beginning. Human beings are rational creatures of action with free will. Human beings are also animals. Our first attempt at establishing a scheme for determining morality was through our animal feelings of pain and pleasure. We thought that if an action resulted in more pleasure than pain it would therefore be a good action, while one resulting in more pain than pleasure would be a bad action, insofar as that pleasure and pain were measured across a group. Of course, our analysis ultimately led us to a dead end, and a close reading showed many demurrals along the way, and a lot of exceptions lurking at the edges. Maybe good and bad, morality and immorality, are something else altogether. Maybe we should be asking a deeper question: Is there anything such as right and wrong in the first place, or are we just playing a jejune mental game?
Originally we defined morality as the assigning of values to our actions. A value of good is assigned to some actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should perform, and a value of bad is assigned to some other actions, meaning that these actions are those that we should not perform. We say that performing good actions is the right thing to do, and that performing bad actions is the wrong thing to do.
With this definition, we really don’t have to have right and wrong as platonic or absolute ideas preceding action. Right or wrong are our assignments of values to action, not the recognizing within the actions of an inherent rightness or wrongness. Since humans are rational creatures of actions, analyzing our actions is a logical outcome of our rationality. Preferring some actions over others is, similarly, a logical outcome of our rationality. Since we are human, we have no choice but to perform actions. A claim that right and wrong precede the action is no different from the core religious question, is an action moral because God says so, or does God say so because it is moral in the first place. If the latter is true, then attempting to understand why is attempting to read the mind of God, a human impossibility. And if an action is inherently right or wrong, God notwithstanding, attempting to understand why it is right or wrong seems about as humanly impossible as reading the mind of God.
So, we have two possibilities. Either we find out what is inherently right and wrong, and assign those values to our actions, or we find out what our actions are, and assign values of right—actions we should perform—and wrong—actions we shouldn’t perform—to them. Since the former possibility is probably unattainable, we have no choice but to pursue the latter possibility. But the end result is probably the same. We are not pondering imponderables. We are pondering how to assign values to actions. We are perfectly capable of doing this. Hence, we are not simply wagging our brains in the wind. We can proceed with our analysis.
We asked ourselves earlier, in analyzing the pleasure/pain of actions, would we be analyzing the act itself, or the results of the act, and we decided that we would analyze the totality of the two. What if we break things down, and simply analyze an action in and of itself? Is this a meaningful attempt at assigning a value of right or wrong to that action?
PICK AN ACTION. ANY ACTION. IS IT RIGHT OR WRONG?
Tough problem. Since we’ve agreed that a knowledge of the absoluteness of the rightness or wrongness of an action is probably unattainable, if such absoluteness indeed exists, we have to come up with something else. And we’ve also discounted our physical reactions (pain and pleasure) distributed over the group affected by the action. So what else is there?
Well, using my rationality, I not only have it within my mental power to analyze an action as one that I should perform, or one that I should not perform, but I do so all the time. Every action I perform as an exercise of my free will is subject to my mind deciding that action should be performed. I do not act blindly. I act according to my own mental proscriptions and prescriptions.
But do I actually follow my sense of right and wrong, and only perform actions I think are right? Not always. Sometimes I evaluate an action and I decide that the action is wrong, and do it anyhow, or else I decide that it’s right, and I don’t do it. My rational evaluation of the action does not determine whether I perform the action; that determination is through my will. I am perfectly capable of deciding to do something I think is wrong. But when I do, I know that it is wrong, at least according to my analysis, and I know that therefore I am performing an immoral act.
The main question is, how do I decide, in my day-to-day life, that an action is right or wrong? Generally I pull a set of criteria from various places and measure the act against those criteria. I know what is culturally thought about a particular action or comparable actions, I know what that action is like because I’ve performed it in the past or performed similar actions, or at least considered them, or seen others perform or refrain from performing them. In other words, I have a wealth of experience, both personal and cultural, to inform my decision. Which is why we made the point about culture earlier on; the cultural component of morality can not be removed the discussion.
So, drawing on what I can think, I determine if something is right or wrong. But how do I know if I’m correct in my judgment? Well, I can’t be certain that I’m correct. But if I am convinced that something is right, I would naturally expect that others think it is right too. This is akin to Kant and the prescription that we should act according to the idea that we would want that action to become moral law. If it’s right for anyone, it’s right for everyone. There is an interplay that is hard to pin down between my drawing from the culture and my contributing to the culture, but I would clearly expect that if I think something is right, I think it is right not just for me but for everyone. Moral rules, whatever they are, should apply equally. We would imagine that anyone in our position, using their rationality as we are, would come to the same conclusion of what is right and what is wrong.
By the way, in this line of thinking, and in my rejection of utility, I am implying and accepting a universal sense of humanity and human value, a very Kantian thing to do. But I’m not really basing my logic on universal humanity, so we won’t go into it in any detail. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile area of further analysis, for another time, perhaps.
Anyhow, while we are not putting right and wrong to a majority-rule vote, we are drawing on cultural/personal experience to conclude a general rightness or wrongness of an action. We are concluding that moral laws are universal, even if we determine them as individuals, because we posit a norm to the culture and expect that norm to be, well, normal. We believe ourselves to be average moral determiners within the culture, our rationality no better or worse than anyone else’s. Regardless of our belief in a relativistic universe, we act on the basis of a relatively objective cultural norm. (This is a set of ideas disputed by Nietzsche, by the way, if you find this logic unacceptable and wish to see a counterargument.)
And what about the differences between cultures? Are we limited on a purely relativistic cultural level? Can Americans only think like Americans, or Chinese only think like Chinese? The data suggests that, while there are certainly specific cultural mores, many ideas about right and wrong either transcend culture or at the very least are a-cultural. Some actions seem to be so right, or so wrong, that all people within their cultures, drawing on their own and their culture’s experience, conclude the same as every other culture. It could be that the human animal has some moral instincts. Or, perhaps, human rationality simply always leads to certain constant decisions about the performing of certain actions. It doesn’t matter, because the end result is the same. Moral law, which we begin by determining as individuals, ultimately transcends culture in some core instances (murder, theft, incest). The question of the source of cultural morality vis-à-vis instinctual morality is another which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-tuna-fish conundrum that need not concern us in this essay.
The combination of our rationality with our experience of ourselves and our cultural experience of others, therefore, allows us to consider an action in and of itself and make a moral determination about that action, which we are free to perform or not perform regardless of its morality. Whatever it is we bring to our thinking, we bring it. We can use our rationality to say, this action is good or this action is bad. We can do it, and we do do it. If we want, we can even use a Kantian make-this-moral-law model to enhance the underlying rationality of the process. We can, it would seem, evaluate the intrinsic morality of an action. This would allow us even to make moral determinations about ourselves alone in a box. Would we want to apply our determination of right and wrong to everyone else who is alone in a box? Or for that matter, if it’s moral law, would the box even matter? We could decide that suicide is wrong, for instance, based solely on the fact that it is an act of murder, if we decided that all acts of murder except in self-defense are immoral. (Unless, I guess, you could contend suicide a version of self-defense, which would be quite a rationality-challenging twist on both concepts, if you ask me.)
Are our moral determinations really workable from this model? Have we established a test for the rightness and wrongness of actions—something curiously akin to a popularity measure when we apply the moral law idea—based entirely on the actions themselves? Can we live with the results of that test?
Unfortunately, the answer is, often, yes, and occasionally, no. Stealing would be the sort of action that would never stand up to a test of inherent morality in and of itself. Taking what does not belong to one is wrong on face. But look back at Jean Valjean’s sister’s starving family. We would probably all agree that it is morally acceptable, or at least not morally unacceptable, for Valjean to steal bread for them. Do we have to set up a paradigm that is so fluid that every single action is subject to a unique test of morality?
CONSEQUENTIALISM
(If we were being academic, I could point you to all sorts of resources covering bits and pieces of what I’m discussing here, but we’re simply relaying the results of one particular meditation on the subject of morality. You can do your own research if you want other ideas on the subject. This essay is entirely creative, and not an outline of the subject from a teacher/course perspective. Feel free to disagree on any of it. That’s what it’s here for. That, and, perhaps, to get you to think about the subject for real, rather than just as the parroting of ideas you’ve picked up along the way. This is my own trying to think about the subject for real. The result, good or bad, is what it is.)
Consequentialism is the evaluation of actions by their results. If the results are good, then the action is good, and if the results are bad, then the action is bad. It doesn’t matter what the action is in and of itself. We probably won’t be able to derive universal moral laws from a consequentialist perspective unless a particular action always has an identical result. Each action will have to be tested each time, if there is a likelihood of different results. The consequentialist is, by definition, a busy thinker.
There are many forms of consequentialist ethics, and our earlier discussion of pain and pleasure could certainly be construed as a discussion of consequentialism, although limited to certain specific principles and, as we said, including an evaluation of the action itself into the calculus. What we want to do now, different from that earlier analysis, is look at results for the test of morality as juxtaposed to looking at the actions themselves for the test of morality, which is what we did in the previous section. Removing pain and pleasure and the classic utilitarian view of morality from the picture, can we just make our judgments based on outcomes?
In evaluating the morality of actions by their results, we would have to make the judgment the same way we would make the judgment about the act in and of itself. We would draw on our own instincts and reason, combined with our own and others’ experience culturally, and make a determination. If I do X—and it doesn’t matter what X is—will the results Y be good or bad? In that case, X is good.. When evaluating the act itself, we said, If I do X, is that good or bad, regardless of the results Y. Results didn’t matter, only the act mattered. Now the act doesn’t matter, only results matter.
To be honest, evaluating the results is certainly going to be close to what we said earlier about pleasure/pain, with the same benefits and flaws. At this point we’re just stripping it down to the essentials. And the big benefit to this is that we don’t have to throw in a lot of qualifiers. If the end result of an action is good, as we perceive good (with our already problematic preconception), that is all we need to know.
Let’s look at an example, one that it relatively easy: murder. We would not evaluate murder as murder in this consequential model. We would evaluate a particular murder or type of murder. For instance, is it a good thing (or not a bad thing) to prevent someone from killing us by killing them? With a consequential model, we would probably easily answer yes. The result of our action is saving an innocent party at the cost of killing a guilty party. On the other hand, in evaluating the same act with a deontological model (which is the fancy word for evaluation of the thing itself) we could determine that all murders are wrong, which means that if all murders are wrong then so too murder in self-defense is wrong, and in this case our innocent party would die and the guilty party would live, which doesn’t jibe intuitively. But if we have to hem and haw and say some murders are right, and some murders are wrong, this does not give us much of an answer to the particular question, much less clear moral rules for the question in general. By the way, religious conscientious objectors certainly have asserted that all murders are morally wrong, so it’s not as if we’re being extreme in our choice of example. More people might think otherwise, but conscientious objection certainly seems reasonable to its practitioners (and, for that matter, is supported by US law). At least in this example, a consequentialist approach seems more workable as a test of morality than a deontological approach. But is it?
What we seem to get from a purely consequentialist view of morality is a more portable model, freely movable from action to action, allowing some leeway in our determination of morality. To the deontologist this portability might be considered moral turpitude, but it ties in to the idea above of setting up a paradigm that is so fluid that every single action is subject to a unique test of morality. The more we’ve talked about it in this essay, the more that fluid paradigm seems to be the only solution to solving the problem of morality, yet it is a solution that is not particularly helpful. We seem to be saying that no unique model of morality works in all situations, and that the subject of right or wrong, and how we perform our actions, must be subject to a mix of tests rather than a simple moral litmus paper turning blue or pink with a single dip into the test tube of action. Morality is so complicated, in other words, that there is no simple solution for it.
And that would seem to be true.
Our morality is informed by a complex web of external ideas combined with our perhaps instinctual animal natures combined with our own unique yet universal abilities to reason. The conclusion that right and wrong exist is not hard for us to accept, but the conclusion that knowing the one from the other can be tricky should also not be hard for us to accept. Unless we are willing to follow moral precepts laid down for us by others, then we are forced to take on one of the impossible challenges of rationality.
How, then, should we act?
We should think about our actions. Do they seem right or wrong? And will they result in good or bad? More often than not, right actions will resort in good and wrong actions will result in bad, and we won’t have any trouble evaluating them. But every now and then there will be actions that seem to result in contradictory moral outcomes. What do we do then?
We attempt to do the best we can.
At least, in that case, we are trying to be good. And trying to be good may be the most moral action any human being can attempt to perform.
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