Note: This is part 4 of a series on morality and ethics. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, part 6, and part 7 (plus additional posts on hypocrisy and free will). The entire series makes up the fourth chapter of my book, The Triple Path, which can be downloaded for free here in PDF and eReader formats or purchased at all major book retailers (in print and eReader formats).

 

In this part, we finish our discussion of the different schools of thought on ethics and morality.

Moral Relativism

In its most mild form, moral relativism is merely the recognition that people disagree about what is moral. At its most pernicious, it takes Hume’s is-ought problem to an absurd extreme and holds that because people disagree about what is right and wrong, and because there is no way to use science and reason to resolve the question, this means that there is no right and wrong, and we should therefore tolerate others’ behavior even if we personally think it to be immoral.

The general influence of post-modernism on society has also brought with it—to our collective shame and detriment—a strong undercurrent of moral relativism to much current public discourse and opinion. Moral relativism is worthless as a moral philosophy, as it does not even attempt to help us make judgments about what is moral and what is not. It is an anti-morality, tearing down what came before without even pretending to offer anything useful as a replacement. It represents the worst of post-Christian nihilism in the West.

Moral relativism is a dead end and not worth further discussion. So, let us move on to one of the most compelling modern schools of ethical thought: pragmatic ethics.

Pragmatic Ethics

Pragmatic ethics grew out of the general American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. It holds that societies can progress morally just as they do scientifically, through a process of inquiry and social innovation. It calls itself pragmatic because one of its core tenets is that we should keep what works and discard what does not. It recognizes that we can never fully understand the truth and must seek ever-closer approximations by testing ideas through human experience, evaluating them based on their practical uses and effects.

So far, this is not much different from the approach of the Triple Path. There are differences, though. The first is that most proponents of the pragmatic ethics approach are wholly materialist, not making much allowance for the divine or the spiritual. The next big difference is that its main focus is on society, whereas the Triple Path’s focus is on first taking ethical responsibility as individuals and families.1

The biggest difference is that for ethical pragmatism, everything is subject to revision—nothing is sacred. It holds that all moral principles should always be subject to inquiry and reexamination with no regard to established tradition. Because of this orientation, pragmatic ethics too quickly rejects the wisdom of tradition in areas where quick experimentation and analysis can yield misleading results that only become clearly wrong much later. This is where pragmatic ethics goes most wrong. The wisdom of tradition is not always apparent at first glance. Change is more likely to get things wrong than right. It is highly likely that our descendants will consider to have been grave mistakes many of the social “innovations” of the last 60 years that were breathlessly praised at the time by their proponents as great progress.

Even the very willingness to so quickly reject the sacred weakens a moral system. All human societies sacralize things. Every culture has taboos. Our natural psychology appears to create a mental hierarchy in which the values and beliefs at the top are considered so sacred and important that they are inviolable, and the things at the bottom are so reprehensible that they are always worthy of contempt and should be shunned.

In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses research that indicates that one of the major groups into which our moral concepts cluster is “the ethic of divinity”.2 When people apply the ethic of divinity, “their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred”.3 “The core idea of the ethic of divinity is that each person has divinity inside, so the ideal society helps people live in a way consistent with that divinity.”4

Even if we never end up tearing down any of our most sacred values, and even if we never accept that which we now reject, a moral system that encourages a ready openness to tearing down the previously sacred and uplifting what had been considered reprehensible is inherently weak. The very willingness to tear sacred parts of it down makes none of it feel sacred in the way that we psychologically need. And being willing to uplift that which was once considered evil makes nothing proscribed feel very bad anymore. With the moral system being thus weakened in our minds, it is easy to ignore important, valuable moral rules when they are hard to follow. Even worse, beyond just making it easier to ignore moral rules, a mindset open and willing to tear down what is sacred and to uplift what is evil creates a general predisposition to tear down sacred things and accept what was once thought evil, even when the sacred parts are true and valuable and divine and the proscribed things really are evil.

When someone’s prior hierarchy of sacred values has been torn down in his mind, it is not a dispassionate, rational pro­cess to replace them. It is often psychologically shattering. It usually takes a long time to find something with which to replace it and then rebuild a new internal hierarchy. Tearing down the sacred hierarchy also usually removes the stigma (at least temporarily) of the taboos as well. While someone is seeking and rebuilding a replacement set of values, it thus becomes all too easy to justify dysfunctional and evil behavior, to the point where, to avoid cognitive dissonance, someone can come to permanently accept evil and start to think of it as unobjectionable, or even good. In this way someone who starts out applying pragmatic ethics can become a moral relativist.

Even worse, the most common available alternatives compatible with science and rational cosmology are, on the whole, terrible replacements. Like candy that over-satisfies our natural taste for sweetness without providing any of the nutrition of real fruit, the common secular replacements for religion only momentarily gratify the natural moral and religious longings of the soul by providing empty spiritual calories that leave it still hungering. The most insidious influence of pragmatic ethics and of moral relativism is that they have created a greater willingness to tear down the old order without offering a viable replacement.

This helps explain why it is such a big problem that religions are stuck with pre-modern cosmologies and historical claims that are clearly false. Once you recognize the parts of a religion that are incorrect, the next emotionally natural step is to reject all of it, since none of it feels as sacred as it used to. As Professor Jordan Peterson wrote:

Our inability to understand our religious traditions—and our consequent conscious denigration of their perspectives—dramatically and unfortunately decrease the utility of what they have to offer. We are conscious enough to destabilize our beliefs, and our traditional patterns of action, but not conscious enough to understand them. If the reasons for the existence of our traditions were rendered more explicit, however, perhaps we could develop greater intrapsychic and social integrity. The capacity to develop such understanding might help us use our capacity for reason to support, rather than destroy, the moral systems that discipline and protect us.5

Part of the Triple Path’s purpose is to help solve this problem by making it harder to “denigrate” what religion has to offer. The Triple Path is compatible with current knowledge and better able to accommodate our growing understandings. It is thus more resilient and less likely to bring on a shattering moral experience.

But this aspect of pragmatic ethics does raise a valid point: what should we do when something held sacred is wrong? No moral system is absolutely perfect, and a resilient moral system has to make allowance for that. The problem with pragmatic eth­ics and moral relativism is they are too ready to change. I daresay that many of those sympathetic to their views relish such change. In contrast, the Triple Path’s approach is that change should be infrequent, slow, and considered, and that we should entrust decisions about such change to elders who have proved themselves through a lifetime of upright living. With great respect for tradition, such elders can reconcile and apply the relevant aspects of the different schools of thought to make small changes when they are needed.

While the Triple Path is a new creation, it was created out of the hard-earned wisdom and longstanding, proven traditions handed down to us by our forbears. And one of the most important sources for the Triple Path is the wisdom of the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome, who taught an important concept that can help us reconcile the conflicts between the different schools of thought on ethics.

In the next post, we will talk about the Golden Mean and how we can integrate the different schools of thought on morality and ethics.

 

Footnotes

1. See The Triple Path, Virtue 11:1-11 and Hope 1:2-3.

2. Jonathan Haidt (see footnote 16, page 59), pp. 187-211.

3. Same, p. 188.

4. Same, p. 209.

5. Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning, p. 189.