Morality involves much more than a shared language experience based on an internally consistent view of the world.  A response to James Carmine’s “Moral Shape, Rights and Abortion: There is No Universal Moral Code.”

What Jim Carmine addresses in his essay "Moral Shape, Rights and Abortion: There is No Universal Moral Code" is not the subject of morality.  Rather, he simply illustrates how people make decisions in a social and political environment. 

These decisions may be based on a variety of factors, including religious beliefs.  However, being faithful to one’s religious teachings is not the same thing as acting in an inherently moral manner.  These two issues may coincide, and for certain religions they often do.  But being a good Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Druid, or member of the Church of Celestial Vibrations does not guarantee that one automatically acts in a “moral” fashion, just as saying that action X is “moral” does not always make it so. 

Morality involves much more than a shared language experience based on an internally consistent view of the world.  For years the American South organized its social, political and economic system around the allegedly “moral” belief that certain races were imbued by God with racial and genetic superiority.  This belief was supposedly based on an interpretation of the Christian bible, coupled with “scientific” evidence and secular and philosophical arguments produced by white people to bolster the claim of their natural superiority.  Therefore, it wasn’t man’s decision that Africans were inferior, and that the races should be separated into master and slave.  It was a fact of nature, a fact of life, and ultimately a reflection of God’s will. 

This “gestalt” — this set of elements, such as a person’s thoughts and experiences, that when considered as a whole are seen as amounting to more than the sum of its parts — was every bit as real and influential in shaping public and private actions in pre-Civil War America as the opposite view of this subject is today.  This tells us a great deal about the character of the nation and its people in both eras.  But it tells us absolutely nothing about whether that specific view, and the actions it produces, is “moral” or not.

This is the logical fallacy we all too often see when discussing another modern day abomination: the elective abortion of a living human being.  The notion of morality is melded into the notion of Constitutional Rights, as if each is an expression of the other.  The United States Constitution, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court which passes judgment on the fundamental acceptability of any law, says that abortion on demand is legal.  Therefore it is moral, because “words” bestow morality.

This is patently absurd.  Words don’t provide substance in and of themselves.  If I call a dog a “rock,” and convince the majority of people to agree with me, it doesn’t transform a living creature into a mineral deposit.  The dog is still a dog, regardless of what I call it, or what I sincerely believe it is. 

Thinking that words matter (i.e. that words provide substance/content) leads to such relativistic conclusions that “killing is killing.”  According to this reasoning, a society that sanctions the prosecution of a just war, the killing of another person in self-defense, and the execution of criminals for certain crimes does not see killing as immoral.  Therefore abortion, which is just another form of killing, is not inherently immoral.  Or as Jim Carmine stated: “whether or not killing a fetus is morally justified is dependent on language first and action next. Moral culpability is dependent on reasoning and reasoning is dependent on words. . ..”  Since humans speak/write these words, humans create the moral codes by which society abides.  These codes can change or evolve as society changes or evolves, so what is considered moral or immoral in 1860 may not be the same as a decision that is reached in the 21st century.

I contend that what is being described here is not the definition of “morality,” but the manner in which society identifies — and then operates — within a system of secular norms and values.  In a capitalist system, these norms and values permit the private ownership of property.  In a communist system, they do not.  Neither system is inherently moral or immoral as the term morality should be used; that is, to describe the inherent “rightness or wrongness” of an action.  To arrive at such a decision, other factors need to be taken into consideration.

And what are these factors?  Ultimately, they come down to the manner in which an action hurts or harms an innocent human life.  Only those who view the world through the relativistic prism of “might makes right” would conclude that Action X is moral because the justification for doing it is favored by a majority of a population, or is based on some other formula of human consensus. 

Words do not provide content.  Rather, they are a device humans use to help orient themselves and navigate through the complexities of life.  Words can be used to measure a phenomenon precisely (in centimeters, grams, etc.), to inspire (through poetry), and to mislead (through propaganda).  They are a means to an end; not an end in themselves.

By infusing words with substance in and of themselves, Dr. Carmine confuses the way human beings organize themselves in relation to society and nature with the inherent “rightness” and “wrongness” of an action.  This leads him to say that, “Human survival depends on moral codes as surely as we need food and shelter. The moral codes of a people allow those people to function as a unified yet dynamic human community. No moral code, no community. No community, no life.”

A nation or group of people can, and routinely do, adopt a completely secular system of norms and non-moral values that allow them to function effectively.  No right turn on red, respect for private property, weekends for leisure and not work, and respect for one’s elders are just a few examples of this.  Some of these issues may touch upon moral principles, but they are not in and of themselves examples of a moral code. 

Instead, they are examples of a completely secular code that is an important aspect of human life, and without which we would descend into utter anarchy.  Just because something is important, even critical, doesn’t make it a moral issue.  It just makes it important or critical.

If you take everything Jim Carmine says and strip away the phrase “morality” or “moral code,” and substitute in its place “societal norms” and “societal values,” you have an excellent essay on what it takes to form a cohesive social consensus that allows people to orient themselves within a society and operate in an effective manner.  But just as Hitler was both organized and effective in killing 6 million Jews, the simple fact that these social norms and values exist does not make such actions moral.

Morality cannot be the sum and substance of human compromise, or environmental factors, or social organization.  If morality is all or any of this, then morality is ephemeral.  This means that it is no more inherently “immoral” to own a slave than it is to outlaw slavery. 

We all instinctively understand that slavery is immoral.  And 19th century American society recognized this too.  The country was divided along these lines well before 1860.  Even slave owners knew their actions were immoral, which is why they went to such lengths to define-away the humanity of their slaves.  No one in the North or South felt compelled to explain why a cow wasn’t entitled to full human rights.  But those enslaving a fellow human being needed to rationalize their actions by attempting to explain away the essential human qualities of darker skinned people.

It is in this sense that words impact morality.  Not by giving substance to the universal moral code every human shares that tells them intuitively what is right, and what is wrong, but by using words to obfuscate and confuse (or, as I am attempting to do here, enlighten and educate).  This is why abortion advocates go to such lengths to deny that the “thing” developing inside a woman’s body is a “human baby.”  To them, it’s human only when the law says it is human, and not when it is not. 

But the law isn’t concerned with the essence of truth about the developing life inside a woman’s body.  Its only focus is on upholding and conforming to the secular norms embodied in the U.S. Constitution — in short, the man-made laws that bestow man-made rights on the people of this country.  This is a matter involving politics, economics, and social organization.  Not morality.

The “moral” gestalt Jim Carmine constructs falls apart of its own logic, because it isn’t moral at all.  It’s simply human interests and human compromise at work within a Constitutional political system.  This produces occasionally contradictory and sometimes ludicrous decisions, as any human activity does.  For those of you who are married, or who have children, or simply have a few close friends, you know that the “decisions” and judgments that arise out of this interaction can be equally incoherent at times.  This is a natural by-product of any human interaction, whether it’s on a national scale, or limited to one’s bedroom.

But again, this has nothing to do with a discussion about morality, and I believe that Dr. Carmine intuitively understands this too.  In his postscript, he recognizes that defining morality as he has (as a secular decision, not something reflecting a higher universal value), leads to “the bizarre notion that a woman is entitled to an abortion if she wants it.”  This isn’t bizarre at all if one recognizes that the basis for this is man-made law and man-made Rights.  It only becomes inane if what this activity represents is somehow thought to reflect a basic moral code.

So we are left with two choices. 

(1) There is no morality other than political, economic, and social decisions; in which case you shouldn’t condemn anyone for anything as long as enough people agree with that decision to make it part of the national (or your sub-group’s) gestalt.  Hitler acted in accordance with his society’s norms in that the people supported his rise to power and, like him, condemned the Jews.  So we must conclude that the Holocaust was “moral.”

(2) Or, as I contend, there is objective “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” that transcends human decisions about a given issue.  Slavery is immoral regardless of how many people support it, and what rationalizations or justifications are used to defend it.

If you believe that certain actions like slavery, or the raping and killing of a young child, are inherently wrong regardless of whether it is legal or not, then you must accept the notion that a universal moral code does exist.  And if slavery and/or the rape and murder of an innocent child is universally wrong, then the possibility exists that other things (like abortion) are equally wrong if they violate the content and substance of the same moral code. 

The fact that some people may really want a man-made right to elective abortion, and that present laws permit it, and that certain politicians and opinion leaders aggressively defend this activity, does not make abortion moral.  Instead, it makes it a highly volatile political issue, just like slavery was in the 19th century.

The question, then, is how to recognize a truly moral value as distinguished from a man-made right based on social norms and social consensus.  And, having laid that foundation, to understand where this universal moral code came from. 

This is the subject of my original essay.

POSTSCRIPT:  Sadly, we’ve just had a real world example of the universal moral code at work.  Just over a week ago a thirty-five-year-old man barricaded himself inside a school house with the expressed intention of raping and then murdering several young girls.  The universal reaction to this immoral, aberrant behavior was immediate regardless of a person’s age, gender, race, political affiliation, or any other personal or community-based characteristics.  The story made international headlines as well, with an identical reaction to that in the United States.  

The fact that the man was not able to rape the girls before murdering them has made no difference in provoking this inherent, universal reaction.  The deliberate harm to innocent human life was apparent enough through the murders without the corresponding rapes, just as it would have been had he raped the girls but not murdered them.  The only difference is the magnitude of the moral-based horror that would have been expressed had he succeeded in doing both.