HOW TO BE A HUMAN: MORALITY AND CULTURE

HOW TO BE A HUMAN: MORALITY AND CULTURE 

By Joel Levin

For at least the last 50 years, both political sides, the Left and the Right, have gotten morality wrong. Put bluntly, they often simply don’t know what they are talking about. The Right typically wants to make what it calls family value issues essentially moral ones, when often they are not; the Left responds by saying that morality is purely a subjective matter, when it is not. The Right responds that there are serious consequences that should be factored in about the workings of society and its future growth and prosperity that are essential to understanding what is moral, when they are not. The Left responds that morality is merely a matter of individual choice, when it is not. 

Both sides are willing, when expedient, to remove choice altogether, looking to deterministic explanations, stripping us of autonomy, morality, freedom, and humanity. The entire debate too often rages from the mistaken to the incoherent to the pernicious and back again, and then again.

More starkly, morality is not just culture. (There are no singularly Asian moral values). Morality is not just a matter of taste; economics and politics are not the same as ethics; and moral choices can be judged as pernicious, incoherent or wrong, or praised as courageous, just, and fair. They are at the heart of what we claim when we claim our freedom. 

We need to begin with the reality and importance of the moral realm, where it first arises. Morality is hardly a problem if we live alone or exist without others. We can’t lie to ourselves, or steal from ourselves, or otherwise commit morally bad acts to ourselves in the absence of others. That does not mean we cannot do things that would be against our interests. We can be (and often are) imprudent or self-destructive. We may act recklessly, drink too much or take harmful drugs, fail to prepare ourselves for the future that lies ahead, or disregard measures that would increase our health or safety or prosperity. Even living alone on top of the mountain, it would be in our own self-interest to find food, secure clothing, construct shelter and evade dangers from creatures who might harm us. But none of this is what we normally take to involve morality. The imprudent is not the immoral. 

Rather, morality is concerned with how we deal with each other. It has traditionally been focused on how human beings treat other human beings, with some increasing recognition that moral consideration should include reasonable and generous attention to the interest of animals, and perhaps the environment for all species as well. 

In any case, morality is not about solitary human beings, by themselves, thinking of themselves, alone in a room, isolated, lonely, solipsistic, and apart from others. There may be any number of issues involving those situations – perhaps implicating important matters of psychology or antisocial behavior – but they do not concern the ethical duties we owe one another. Ethics or morality (and while there is a difference, philosophers generally thinking that ethics are theories about moral rules, second-order morality so to speak, we will, less grandly or precisely or pretentiously ignore that distinction. Here the two are used synonymously) concern how we treat each other. The demands of ethics or morality require that we treat each other rather well, or at least, kindly, or at least not unjustly, or at least recognize each other’s autonomy or set of rights or uniqueness. We need to treat each other with a minimal degree of respect, but more is better. 

Ethics lives in the social arena, not by itself. The fundamental demands of morality concern social intersections. We learn this as children: don’t hit or hurt people, don’t steal, and don’t exclude anyone for arbitrary or unfair grounds, such as race or gender or religion or ethnicity or disability. Don’t smear or slander people, or belittle or ridicule them, or ruin their reputation, or interfere with their relations with their friends or family, colleagues, or even strangers. This is morality. It exists, is universal, is found everywhere, and can be built on the foundations of irrefutable basic truths – for example, Don’t be cruel to children, Don’t rape women, Don’t torture anyone, Don’t burn your neighbor’s house) and construct a moral theory to live by.

As obvious as all of this is, both the Right and the Left at times act like they don’t believe it. To divert for a moment, I want to make it clear that we are speaking of today’s Right and the Left, not traditional conservatives and liberals. The latter two clearly believed in morality. We see that in the conservative figures and their conservative writings from Aquinas to Burke to Acton to Nozick to Bork. We see it similarly in liberal thought from Spinoza to Kant to Mill to Rawls to Dworkin. However, when there is a meeting of the Right and the Left, we can safely assume that traditional thought gives way to expediency, bad psychology, blame diversion, and group defensiveness. More benignly, culture trumps all, for good or bad, as a way to assess and judge. All interesting. None of it ethical. 

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That said, let us begin with the Right. A great deal of the Right’s agenda for the last hundred years, and specifically for the last decade, has centered on what people do privately, in their own houses, in a consensual matter with others, or even alone. It concerns their sexual and belief habits and activities. Who do they have sex with? What do they watch or read? Who or what or how do they worship? Are they engaging in adultery, pornography, sodomy, homosexuality, or interracial coupling (illegal in 16 states until struck down by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia in 1967) or the religiously improper, irreverent, disloyal, impious, or impure? For example, while at one time, the set of sexual and religious acts criminalized, even subjected violators to capital punishment, have narrowed, the notion that coupling and worship are moral, not culture issues, has never gone away. The present fight begins with gay marriage and moves from there to a myriad of other sexual practices, from birth control to trans identities to pornography (and bad language). Meanwhile, the fight to return America to a Christian nation (whatever its problematic historical accuracy) continues from curriculum battles to school prayer to Moslem bans. A recent poll, for example, found that more than half of all Republicans thought America should be a strictly Christian nation. The sexual and religious are not just partners. They are linked.

Outlawing or merely restricting personal sexual and religious practices is meant, one supposes, to challenge snowflake heterosexuality or piety. There is the thought that even a lone gay or trans or heretical individual in the classroom would cause a stampede to homosexuality or gender modification, or to non-Christian beliefs (in America, substitute non-Islam in the Middle East and non-Hindu in India). It would cause panic in the oxymoronic category of Judeo-Christian believers. The dogma on the Right becomes the only legitimate cultural identity. This cultural identity of white, Christian, and European-hood is historically and geographically indefensible. It is also notoriously inconsistent. Many once barred from American white-hood – from Germans to Slavs to Jews to the Irish – are now members (if occasionally provisionally, as with Jews) of the white race, whatever that is, while others once included in Europe-hood, including any number of North Africans (Maghrebi) and Middle Easterners (Levanters), are now exiled. 

But this has to do with the particulars. The issue is, what should we say about this entire discussion? That is, how would we label the talk? We often, in fact almost always have categories available for our talk, even if we don’t always put a banner heading on it. We have sports talk, family talk, history talk, politics talk, entertainment talk, travel talk, and an enormous amount of professional or occupational talk. Within each of these, there are governing sets of rules and criteria, well or poorly developed, and including boundaries, often vague and indeterminate, but boundaries, nevertheless. Whether Novak Djokovic is the best tennis player of all time is sports talk; whether it would have been a prudent decision for him to have taken the Covid vaccine is medical talk; whether the failure to take that vaccine should have barred him from entering the Australian Open is political talk. At the boundaries, all of this is also medical and sports talk as well. For most purposes, we need not establish harsh boundaries, as the conversation almost always is relatively clear, or able to be clarified. We know what we are talking about. What kind of talk, then, is sexual practice or religious orientation?

Whatever it is, it is not moral talk. The boundaries here can be, as just mentioned, vague, indeterminate, and even at times, poorly developed. Morality is essentially and fundamentally a social concept, a concept where the concern is whether one individual in some way harms another. We might consider John Stuart Mill’s liberty principle as a way of locating moral talk. Mill held that: The only purpose for which power could be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. Under that principle, no non-coercive sexual practice or private religious thought or ritual would qualify as a moral matter. Such practices, thoughts, or rituals may be contrary or present a challenge to the culture, disturbing to the population and undermining of the relevant civilization. In short, they may be upsetting, rebellious, critical, challenging, and contrary to peace of mind and the norms of the society that the culture is accustomed to, and may, via any poll, overwhelmingly want. But they have nothing to do with morality. 

Why is that important? It is simply because of the special place morality holds for so much that matters in our life. At a basic level, we judge people not by their externally observed behavior alone, but by the moral intentions behind that behavior. Running someone down with a car accidentally and running them down with the intent to kill them clearly makes the point of why morality matters. Lacking moral judgment changes everything, whether we are speaking of human cognitive impairment or the cognition of animals.

Specifically, we don’t consider animals to have that same moral sense in the ordinary way we do, and we do not hold them responsible for much of what they do, including simply killing other animals to eat. We think that if an animal’s actions are part of a causal chain that results in harming a human being, that animal should not be held morally responsible. Doing so would seem to be an indication a mistake is being made. That is why we view the ancient legal remedy of the deodand, the criminal punishment of animals, to be absurd. Bulls that gored and horses that unseated were once hanged for their conduct. This was not only cruel to the animal, it is a degradation of what it means to be moral. 

This is the back end of Mills’ principle. Mill condemns harm to others but leaves alone private conduct. Immoral means anti-social. It implies the necessity of the force and reality of moral judgment, a judgment that can only arise if we attribute a moral sense to the actor. Someone thrown by his intoxicated fraternity brothers over a fence into the yard of a neighbor can hardly be condemned for committing trespass. He might seemingly have met the elements of trespass in one sense – coming unlawfully upon the property of another – but lacking the moral sense, none of it seems worth discussing. 

The entire talk of deviant sex and religion fares no better. It fails Mills’ test, as it is not calculated to prevent any harm here, and it denies the moral sense of intentionally (or perhaps recklessly or indifferently) committing that harm. Harm here must not be trivialized in such a way that simply being offended or unhappy with what somebody else does is enough to constitute actionable harm. If that were true, then every time a neighbor paints their house with an ugly or detestable color, a television producer introduces an unpleasant or offensive character, a nearby cafe patron orders a foul-smelling or repugnant drink, or a sports fan shouts a partisan or rabid cheer, then that so-called harm would be sufficient to defeat Mills’ principle. 

There is no significant public versus private distinction here. Reading a pornographic book at a cafe or at home makes no difference, even if seeing the problem or imagining it (a person reading pornography) is different from being public rather than private. In fact, the Right occasionally will admit to this. We see this in the statement of the Republican Governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, who vetoed a bill renewing the license for public television stations in Oklahoma because, he alleged, LGBTQ inclusive programming doesn’t line up with Oklahoma values. Seeing it (LGBTQ conduct or a character) at home, at school, or in a hotel room is clearly irrelevant. Harm is harm. Such a move may or may not signal a return to burning elderly irreligious spinsters as witches, but it would undoubtedly challenge liberty as we know it.

A momentary diversion then. Hate and discrimination can be deeply cultural, but they are not moral. That is because the freedom to act is not, prima facie, a moral issue. It all depends on the other, the social, who else is involved. The freedom to fire a gun is not the freedom to fire a gun at a person, a matter that ought to be uncomplicated, although sometimes, somehow, it is. 

Only slightly more complicated, and that just means a slightly longer diversion to getting to the obvious, would be the moral posture used to justify the recent law passed by a Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. That law states that medical providers can reject treatment of LGBTQ individuals, presumably leaving them untreated and unhealthy, left to suffer serious consequences, perhaps to die. The freedom not to act as a medical provider is certainly a cultural one, as the entire issue of first providing education, training, and licensing of a doctor or nurse, and then supporting them through building and maintaining medical institutions, hospitals, and training facilities are all cultural matters. Conversely, the decision not to treat certain individuals on supposedly moral grounds – gays act immorally so they can be ignored – is not a moral truth but an immoral fact, one based on a cultural reality. The response of the Left should not be one of moral relativism, but moral clarity.

Nevertheless, rather than saying that these entire arenas – the sexual and the religious – are either matters that do not implicate morality or veer into the immoral, too many on the Left simply take the view that morality is a subjective or relativistic concept, one where truth has no place. The suggestion is that we all have our own opinions. Ultimate agreement is not possible, and something else needs to suffice in lieu of morality. Usually that something else is law, although law lacking a justifiable moral basis is problematic if not impossible to defend. In any case, this idea of moral relativism is widespread. Who are we to judge seems to be the posture. On the Left, Michael Waltzer argues that morality extends only within a single culture, leaving us no way to judge among cultures, even pernicious ones. President Barack Obama, near the end of The Audacity of Hope, writes we should pursue our own absolute truths. Why ours? Why absolute? How do we decide if we are right? No standards can be offered to judge.

It is easy to point out the howling inconsistency in the position of the Left as it scurries to defend moral positions they hold so dear. Despite that, they are too ready to give up the authority of morality, the universality of morality, and morality’s inherently judgmental standards. They shy away from condemnation of different cultures prone to embrace (or have embraced) immoral positions with regard to minorities, religious dissidents, immigrants, women or gays, or barbaric positions on arrest, detention, conviction, and punishment. (President Obama shunned the term Radical Islam, when terms like Christian Soldiers, Crusaders, and White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are suggestive of a bloody history by his own co-religionists. Different becomes an excuse to excuse). Ethically unmoored respect for religious belief becomes respect for all religions, which becomes acceptance of unethical religious practice, which becomes tolerance of evil. 

One is reminded of just such a reluctance to condemn divergent religious practices by the otherwise unsqueamish British rulers of India. For decades, they refused to stop sati or settee, the religious practice of the dutiful Hindu wife, sitting on the funeral pyre of her husband, ready to join her husband in death. One might argue that the solitary act of the widow may be outside the realm of morality. However, the reality of the intense cultural pressure which forced such women into self-destructive behavior was everywhere evident. Coerced suicide is a moral concern, in the British Raj and everywhere else.

Instead of denying that a number of these issues of sex and religion are cultural and not moral, the Left often defaults to the view that there may be different moral truths, at once inconsistent, relative, subjective, and unable to allow judgment. Morality is just a flavor. Then, as freedom is held to be ascendant, we are each allowed our own moral truth. This is a tortured and ultimately destructive view of what morality is. Instead, the simple answer should be simple: none of this is morality. All of it is cultural. In that it does deal with a particular culture, that culture, not unlike other cultures in other places, must be judged firmly, even at times harshly. 

The Right argues against the Left’s view that morality is subjective, relativistic, and a matter of individual choice in two ways. First, quite correctly, it points out that most of what we think about morality – oversimplified, an expansion of the religious Golden Rule or adherence to the philosophical categorical imperative, that is, for either, don’t kill, assault, steal, be unfair, treat individuals badly in general, or make it impossible for people to make their way in the world – ought to be accepted by almost everyone. 

In fact, it is accepted by everyone, including the Left. Morality is the defining feature of humans acting as humans, rather than as beasts or as machines. This is often largely but not entirely subsumed in much of criminal and tort law, the basic moral turned cultural protections in society. The Left wants this (everyone does). It could then be forced to respond to its announced moral relativism by saying: I didn’t mean all that, just the other stuff. The Left is then saddled with embarrassing terminological and even semantic inconsistency, the suspicion of moral laxness, and a reluctance to believe in their good faith, maybe even their sanity. The clumsiness of the Left’s reply to the moral misidentification by the Right gives rise to such a dilemma. 

The Right’s second response is more apocalyptic: it suggests that civilization itself is at stake. That is, it sees the rejection of morality correctly as a fundamental attack on our existence as a set of societies. Of course, the Left’s rejection, as inartful as it is, is disingenuous. Part of the reluctance of the Left easily to converse using moral language is historically rooted in its identification of morality with religious morality. 

The two are quite different; one might even think oxymoronic. As Immanuel Kant pointed out during the Enlightenment, in that we can judge religions by moral criteria – finding: Turn the other cheek or the Golden Rule to be better moral injunctions than: Murder all heretics or Tell non-believers to convert or die, or the Quaker’s view of war being on a higher moral plane than that of ISIS – moral judgment must necessarily lie outside and be apart from religion. We can judge just how moral a particular religious view is, so the criteria for that judgment must be external to, not merely part of, the religion. The misidentification of morality with religion gives rise to a general reluctance to label almost anything as moral. It allows that reluctance to be caricatured as the end of society as we know it. As the National Review on the Right would have it: The earnest, incoherent moralism that characterized Clintonism at the outset remains its salient feature. Or from the Wall Street Journal: [T]he left’s ostensible moral relativism actually often is a cover for hostility to tradition, patriotism, individual responsibility, and common sense. 

Again, the Left provides inadequate replies to all of this. Morality matters, but only where it matters. Attacking sex, atheism, birth control, and disfavored religious beliefs: these are not moral matters, except in that they restrict practices that might involve a certain concept of autonomy, with the restriction being a curtailing of that autonomy. That is, the moral concern only works in one direction. The practice itself does not implicate morality, but restricting it does. This ought to be clear, but somehow, it isn’t. 

As to respect for all religions – to the point where criticizing religion itself is off-limits – this hand-off approach degrades religion and religious beliefs. Any belief worth holding is a belief worth examining critically. It can be judged, improved, criticized, and otherwise looked at to consider its implications, principles, appropriateness, truth, and ethics. Instead of doing this, the Left takes the position of uncritical deference, what Daniel Dennett calls the Belief in belief. That is, those who are full-throttled believers are entitled to a certain kind of respect if the belief is a religious one, no matter how absurd, unhealthy, unethical, misguided, or even insane it is. It is true, of course, that religious minorities have been unfairly and appallingly, under attack at least since ancient times, initially with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, and then later with Moslems and Hindus, Anabaptists, Lutherans and Puritans, sun worshippers, earth worshippers, and idol worshippers, and almost everybody else. The problem here is that the criticism often involved an intolerance of the belief, and worse, mistreatment of the belief’s adherents. Certainly, we must condemn the intolerance and stop the persecution. Then criticizing religion becomes little different from criticizing any number of other beliefs – whether they involve psychoanalysis or behaviorism, socialism or capitalism, Keynesianism or monetarism, Darwinism or Intelligent Design, Annales or Post-Modern historiography, utilitarianism or deontology, or any other widespread theory or theoretical controversy – that people use to form their beliefs and direct their actions.

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The consequences of moral relativism, and eventually part of its cause, play a role in the larger flight from moral judgment. Morality is associated with religious morality, and that morality is associated with the possibility of evil and evil doing. Those who do wrong are not to blame: it is the circumstances – social, psychological, cognitive, criminogenic factors – that all, in some way, determined the state of affairs to be beyond the alleged wrongdoer’s ability to avoid. Flight from morality is flight from responsibility. Bad neighborhoods, dire social circumstances, poor education, lack of job opportunities, mental and emotional problems, cognitive deficits, a culture stacked against them: these become the complete causes of misconduct, not the ethical shortcomings of the individual. Humans become animals or machines. Choice is an illusion, freedom not possible. The moral gives way to the psychological. 

The Left has increasingly embraced this view, looking to explain what went wrong – why someone acted badly – with some non-human, deterministic theory. Mitigations become primary causes. Blame is avoided. The problem with this view, other than it being nonsensical, false, and incoherent, is that if blame is beyond the pale, then so would be praise. Either we credit humans for their actions or we don’t. The Right has had a soft spot for this view, although traditionally crediting some combination of the Devil, the irreligious, or the hypnotic force of Leftist theory for the sins of the sinner. This has made it easy for the Right in the gun debate to take up the deterministic, amoral argument: the gun used to shoot her was irrelevant, the mental disease made him do it. Bad ethics in search of bad science lead to bad conclusions. All of it is the denial of who we are as humans when moral choice no longer figures in the calculation.

It might be protested that cynical juries and jaded judges hardly buy any of the deterministic defenses, not even when there is clear cognitive impairment, a sordid history of abuse, or other factors that might drive anyone to consider engaging in antisocial behavior. The Twinkie, the Burning Bed, and the Stockholm Syndrome defense move from interesting abstractions to the subject of ridicule, but so do better-justified defenses involving cognitive impairment. Rather, the legal system behaves very much today as Anatole France described it more than 100 years ago: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. 

But even if legally ignored, relativism by the Left and the Right causes severe damage to our politics and to our moral sense. In that there is routine talk of deterministic explanation providing a complete explanation for bad behavior – for example, from the Left today excusing gang crime because of poverty and abuse, and the Right excusing gun violence because of mental illness – the way we think of ourselves, judge each other, and work to revel in rather than shrink from our autonomy is severely compromised.

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All of this has created a fallout, one of moral confusion. It has led to the retreat or removal of ethical judgment from discussions where it belongs. Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war clearly has a moral dimension (the invasion and subsequent tactics by Russia) and a prudent one (stopping aggression but risking a wider, perhaps nuclear, conflict). The problem, and it is an enormous one, is the failure by many to recognize that a moral dimension exists. There is no room for that dimension when retreat into self-interest occupies the entire space. International law becomes the law of the jungle, and human rights conventions morph into the survival of the fittest. Discarded is the importance of the ethical dimension, the importance of humanity. 

Consider two takes on the Ukraine war, one from the U.K. Deputy Ambassador to the U.S., the other from a former Fox News commentator. 

Michael Tatham, UK:

We are watching with outrage what is happening in Ukraine. We’re seeing a flagrant violation of international law. But not just outrage, but also horror. The horror of the level of suffering that is being inflicted on those living in Ukraine: horror in seeing indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas by Russian forces. What we’re seeing with this invasion – this further invasion of Ukraine – is actions that are premeditated, are brutal, and utterly cynical.

Tucker Carlson, Fox:

It might be worth asking yourself since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?

Moral talk becomes debased when it is ignored or degraded. The degrading arises when ethical anti-values – such things as patriotism, race, nationalism, sectarianism, patriarchy, misogyny, or religious loyalty – become substitutes for moral values. This spring, for example, the Kremlin introduced a new curriculum intended to promote Russian values in the schools. One of those values requires that all students at the age of 16 must have military training and, specifically, must achieve proficiency in handling a Kalashnikov. 

Tucker Carlson is the second step in this process of moral degradation, Putin is the third. The first is not understanding the place, the natural habitat, so to speak, of the moral realm, of the ethics of conduct and political talk. What we lose when we lose our way in this conversation, and think that culture and self-preservation are all that matter, are the unique qualities we claim for ourselves in being human: the ability to understand the right thing, to courage to do the right thing, and the insistence on judging our society, others and ourselves on whether the right thing is being done.