Notes on Morality

I have come to believe that morality is one of the most misunderstood words of our time -- or any time for that matter. 

To conceptualize how it is misunderstood, think of it like a commodity that can be delivered to the customer in a variety of ways: milk, for example. This can be delivered to the customer as milk, cream, butter, or cheese, but it is essentially the same thing -- something rich in fat and protein, secreted by female mammals for the nourishment of their young. 

When we talk about morality today, it is as if we forget it is "milk" and instead see it as separate things: "cheese," "butter," or cream. We mistake the "delivery system" for the thing itself. The essence of morality is lost, so we end up talking about "Christian morality," "Nietzschean morality," "Muslim morality," "liberal morality," or the morality of a specific era -- "Victorian morality," etc. It becomes entirely contextual, so that all that we see is the context instead of the thing itself. 

A quick search of the internet for the "essence of morality" will produce some ridiculous results: 

"There are three elements that are essential to a system of morality: a moral community, moral values, and a moral code."

Yes, we have covered that already. It is cheese or butter and those who prefer cheese or butter.

"We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds-a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient."

Yes, a meeting of minds. For some reason I immediately think of Burke and Hare or Bonnie and Clyde. 

"The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil."

This by Georges Bataille, no less. But it clearly asks more questions than it answers and throws in those cursed and subjective terms "good" and "evil" at entirely the wrong moment. 

Good and evil cannot tell you what morality is; only morality can tell you what good and evil is.

In other words, measures of good and evil are outputs of a moral system. The problem is that the recognised moral systems will produce different measures of good and evil. To really understand morality, we need to get to a situation where there is one undeniable outcome. This requires a model that can frame and include all lesser "moralites" in its system and also explain various moral conundrums that have emerged over the years.

As an example of one of these moral conundrums, take how differently Stalin and Hitler are viewed, even though they were more or less equally as monstrous. The fact that Hitler is seen as much eviler than Stalin cannot be explained by such trite points as the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that "the Jews control the media (and presumably history)" or that "history is written by the winners (and Hitler clearly lost)."

A more serious attempt might try to claim that Hitler is seen as uniquely evil because he lost by his own "superman" morality, which prized strength above all things. But this too fails to hit the mark, although such ideas are quite capable of satisfying some. 

Really, what is needed is something more basic, simple, and fundamental that can then be slotted into all moral questions.

The example of Hitler is a good one because it points us to the key of morality, which is a system of limiting our enemies. On closer examination all moral systems fundamentally employ this principal. 

Take a psychopathic axe murderer. It is not the butchery and the horror that he unleashes -- something which may even make us vomit with visceral disgust -- that renders him immoral and evil, but instead it is the fact that we all feel threatened by him and his unpredictability.

A non-psychopathic killer -- i.e. a soldier -- carrying out equally disgusting acts of bloodshed and brutality on our behalf is, by contrast, treated as a "hero." 

Stalin is as bad as Hitler in terms of cruelty and butchery, probably even worse, but this was nevertheless a man who knew how to make alliances and stick to them fairly well -- at least compared to Hitler, who wore out his geopolitical trust with his first few stolen successes.   

Now, let's see if we can slot this formulation of morality into other aspects of morality.

Throughout history, a lot of morality has concerned itself with sex. But here too the same fundamental rule applies: morality is a system of limiting our enemies.

Sex is several things, but outside a marriage, it is often viewed as an act of aggression or a cardinal insult to one's honour, either to the woman concerned or her family. A man having sex with several women was traditionally viewed as a moral problem because such a man was not just a threat to the fathers and husbands of the women he had sex with, but also because he was -- and "normalised" -- a similar threat to all fathers of daughters and husbands of wives. 

In the modern age, the sexual revolution and its scientific clean-up squad of contraception and abortion has changed this equation, while also corrupting it with utilitarian values of the pleasures to be gained. Only in recent years have we seen a little pushback against these moral innovations from "incel morality."

This seeks a simpy alliance with pumped-and-dumped feminist morality against the chad morality of democratic pleasure giver to the long-suppressed sexuality of half of humanity.