Note: This is part 5 of a series on morality and ethics. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, 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).

 

The Golden Mean and Tradition

One of the maxims inscribed outside the Ancient Greek temple at Delphi was “nothing to excess”. Aristotle expanded on this with his concept of the Golden Mean:

Moral virtue is a mean . . . between two vices, the one involving excess, the other deficiency . . . it is such because its character is to aim at what is intermediate in passions and actions. . . . 1

It is the nature of . . . things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health. . . ; both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean.2

Thus, for Aristotle, most virtues fall in the middle between two vices, one caused by excess and the other by deficiency.3

As with virtues, so too with schools of ethics. The four schools of ethics we have discussed (I exclude moral relativism as not being a legitimate school of ethics) all have their strengths and weaknesses. Deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and prag­matic ethics each has a different focus: on rules and duties, on consequences, on virtues, and on moral progress and change. If you take any of the four schools to its extreme, it yields perverse results, such as deontology teaching that you should help a murderer find his victim. Conversely, each school shines when you apply it at its Golden Mean between the excess and deficiency of its guiding principles.

And not just for each school by itself. Holding up each school as something separate in competition with each of the others is the wrong approach. When a situation forces one school into deficiency or excess, then another one can step in to offer better guidance. When you take all four schools together, each at its Golden Mean, then you really have something.

I am not the first to have pointed out that, in practice, each of the four major schools incorporates elements of the other three. Most forms of deontology and consequentialism incorporate notions of virtue. Real-world application of deontology and virtue take into account the results of actions (Constant’s solution of the “lying to murderer” problem was an appeal to duty, but it seems to me that he specifically created his solution to avoid a bad result). Virtue ethics and consequentialism acknowledge the role of moral rules and the importance of fulfilling duty. And pragmatic ethics incorporates the elements of each of the other three that have proven useful.

Each school complements the others. Together, the four of them can best be compared to the four legs of a table holding up modern Western morality. But that table (to continue the metaphor) rests on the solid, firm ground of tradition. The four moral schools of thought only work because they were built up on the tradition of the past, relying on the moral rules and practices slowly developed through hard experience and then proved true over generations of practice. The four moral schools have advanced morality because they examined what already worked and then offered explanations for why they worked, thus helping us understand better our moral system to be able to advance it a little. None of the four schools got the explanation exactly right, which is why they work better in concert, complementing each other’s deficiencies. This is also why we will likely always need the guiding hand of tradition, since it has provided us more of what is true and right than any of the four schools by themselves have ever been able to.

Looking at moral systems that try to divorce themselves from tradition shows us that. Some moral systems make a lot of logical sense, but do not actually work. I briefly mentioned communism, which purports to be set forth on rational, logical, and scientific principles. Communism preaches the necessity of revolution to overturn the old order. In practice, every time a regime tried to implement communism, it sought to break the “shackles” of the past to bring about a promised communist utopia. The utopia never came. Instead, the communists perpetrated some of the worst horrors of the 20th Century: the Holodomor, the gulags, the cultural revolution, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, to name a few.

Nazism, the ideology responsible for the most of the rest of the terrible horrors of the 20th Century, also rejected the accumulated wisdom of the past, as manifested in Christianity. Nazism was antagonistic toward Christianity—had they been victorious in World War Two, the Nazis planned to eradicate Christianity in Germany.4

The moral rules provided by religion and tradition do not always make sense. Someone trying to create a rational system of morality and practice would probably not have created the traditional system we have inherited. But what we have inherited actually works. The “reason-based” alternatives cannot claim that.

Rules of Cohesion and Purity

One of the ways religions and communities create unity is through rules of cohesion, which I discuss elsewhere. Closely related to rules of cohesion (and often overlapping with them) are rules of purity centered on helping us grow closer to the divine. Our desire for purity is related to the natural emotion of disgust, which is centered on the sanctity/degradation dimension of morality. We normally feel disgust in relation to several areas: “food, body products, animals, sex, death, body envelope violations, and hygiene”,5 and rules of purity usually focus on these areas. Examples of these types of rules range from the dietary rules of many cultures and religions (such as pork for Jews and coffee for Mormons) to rules about hygiene (such as taking off shoes before entering the home in many Asian cultures) to rules about sexual morality and courtship (which are found in every culture and religion).

Many rules of purity serve practical real-world purposes. As we have seen, rules about sexual purity encourage productive, prosocial behavior that makes people happier and feel more meaning, and that encourages the creation of more resilient, well-adjusted, flourishing families. Or some purity rules have health benefits, such as prohibitions on tobacco. Some rules are focused only on the external (such as our prohibition on gluten, or the Jewish prohibition on pork). All of these rules, even the purely external ones, serve as rules of cohesion as well.

Beyond this cohesion function, following rules of purity serves another function. We seem to feel a natural emotional, psychological connection between physical purity and internal feelings of moral advancement and spiritual transcendence. Moral purity rules help us separate aspects of the outside world that appear to be profane and dirty from an inner world of purity and divinity. Following these rules thus helps encourage feelings of the divine within us, which invigorates our desire to seek inward purity in our thoughts and intentions, which positively affects our outward actions towards others. These rules of purity are thus also rules of divinity that help us live more elevated, virtuous lives.

In the next post, we will discuss how morality and ethics applies in the most important, fundamental part of human life: the family.

 

Footnotes

1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, part 9.

2. Same at Book 2, part 2.

3. Aristotle admitted that this principle did not hold in all cases. For example, it did not hold for things universally recognized as bad, such as adultery, theft, and murder. Same at Book 2, part 6.

4. U.S. Office of Strategic Services, The Nazi Master Plan, Annex 4: The Persecution of the Christian Churches, July 6, 1945, published in Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, Winter 2001 (“[T]he destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement.”); George Lachmann Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich, 2003, p. 240 (“Had the Nazis won the war their ecclesiastical policies would have gone . . . to the utter destruction of both the Protestant and Catholic Church.”). It is well-documented that Hitler was an atheist.

5. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, 2006, p. 188.