All content © RJ Robinson 2002-8
by CR Hallpike (2004)
ISBN 0-9542168-4-9
Introduction
The idea that there has been an evolution in the quality of human thought about moral issues over the course of history will have occurred to anyone, for example, who has read the Old and New Testaments. This is not to deny the obvious differences between societies in cultural values, such as attitudes to physical courage, chastity, or humour. But underlying all such differences of values are certain basic moral issues such as: should we take a person’s intentions into account when we decide their guilt or innocence? Why should we do “the right thing” - because we will be unpopular if we don’t, or because it makes life easier for everyone, or because the claims of morality are absolute? Do we have any moral obligations to strangers, or only to members of our own group? Is there any difference between a moral rule and a rule of custom or law?
It is the argument of this book that, in dealing with these and similar issues, some types of answer are intellectually simpler than others and it is these that are typical of small scale, preliterate societies. So, for example, in those societies intention will be given little importance in judging people’s responsibility for their actions; people will justify an act, such as helping others, by its practical consequences and not on abstract moral grounds; and strangers typically have no rights. Such moral ideas are much easier to understand than those which are found in literate civilization, but they can survive in simpler societies because this social milieu is less intellectually demanding than that of more complex societies and so, as societies have become more complex so, too, our moral understanding has become more sophisticated.
These are contentious propositions, and Chapter 1 of the book deals with the argument most likely to be produced by anthropologists: that all thought is culturally relative so that it is ethnocentric to claim to be able to describe the moral ideas of some cultures as less advanced than those of other cultures. I distinguish between a moderate relativism, which admits that we can always be influenced by ethnocentrism but can nevertheless correct it, and a strong relativism that denies this possibility, and I argue that strong relativism is self-refuting. But it is no part of my argument to deny those obvious differences in cultural values, which may indeed all be valid in their own particular circumstances, and I am not therefore claiming that all differences of moral opinion can be settled according to a single monolithic theory.
I also argue that, whether or not there are cross-cultural agreements or disagreements about right and wrong is not the main issue; anthropologists have been led astray by this problem of finding moral universals, and I point out that even if such universals could be found, this sort of elementary head-counting could give us no way of distinguishing between a universal moral principle and a universal prejudice. We have therefore to establish first of all what ethics is about, what are the foundations of morality, before we can decide whether the understanding of it has developed as societies have become more complex, and this is the subject of Chapter 2.
Here I begin by discussing the role of moral philosophy, and say that it has been too narrowly based on the logical analysis of the concepts of Western culture, and has also failed to give sufficient attention to the social nature of man. But the main error of philosophers has been to convince themselves that facts and values are quite different and that to try to base values on facts is to commit “the naturalistic fallacy”. In fact the opposite is the case, and we cannot understand the nature of ethics unless we regard it as rooted in the social condition of man. I treat ethics as having four basic aspects - utility, or the nature of benefit and harm; the social order, whence come ideas of duty, justice, and law; the moral agent, and so virtue, conscience, and responsibility; and human status. (Another error of philosophers has been to base ethical theories on only one of these aspects, such as utility, duty, or justice.) This analysis of the foundations of ethics thus provides the basis for that assessment of the development of moral thought which is the subject of the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 introduces the research of Piaget and Kohlberg and other developmental psychologists on the way in which children’s moral ideas develop, and this is highly relevant to our theme because there is a significant parallel between this developmental process and the evolution of moral ideas in history. In the simpler societies it is possible for ideas which children find the easiest to grasp, whether about the natural world or about ethics, to survive unchallenged because of the cognitively undemanding nature of these societies. So there has been a dialectical process in history between the cognitive development of individuals and their culture, because all culture has to be transmitted through the minds of individuals. As social complexity has increased it has produced new problems for its members, to which they have had to accommodate by developing more powerful cognitive skills, and these in turn have been incorporated into their culture.
This interaction between thought and social organization is the subject of Chapter 4, where the interaction between developmental psychology and the processes of social evolution is considered in more detail, and the evolution of moral understanding is summarized as follows in section 4:
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The range of moral concern has steadily expanded from one’s immediate kin and neighbours to include human beings as a whole.
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The concept of duty begins simply with the proper performance of one’s specific social roles. Only much later does it become the general principle of moral obligation.
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The most elementary concept of justice is that of equal exchange, of reciprocity. Only in more complex societies does it develop more fully as the result of the evolution of formal courts and legal systems.
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Responsibility is initially objective, with little regard for intentions, but as society becomes more complex there is increasing regard to the motives and inner states of the agent.
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This is paralleled by a development from shame, the consciousness that one has offended against an external, social rule, to guilt, with its essential element of self-condemnation.
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There is a general development from conventional to principled morality. “There gradually emerges the notion that goodness is something which the mind can apprehend as self-sustained and independent of external sanctions. Among simpler peoples…the sanctions behind customary rules are relatively external and prudential” (Ginsberg).
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The moralization of religion. The lack of principled morality in primitive society is one reason why its religion has little or no distinctively ethical content, but is essentially concerned with obtaining life, with health, prosperity, and victory over enemies.
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Virtue. Members of primitive societies can easily give lists of what are regarded as desirable qualities - generosity, good temper, bravery, and so on. But there is no analysis of the essential elements of character that allow people to perform well as moral agents; the virtues in primitive society are simply lists of attributes that remain unsynthesied.
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The self. One of the fundamental ways in which the moral consciousness of man has developed is the growing awareness of the inner life of the individual, and of the mind in its cognitive aspects, as necessary to understanding why other people behave as they do, and how it would feel to be in their place.
Having set out the basic theory of how moral understanding develops in the individual and society, the remaining chapters present the detailed anthropological and historical evidence in relation to three basic levels of social complexity. Chapter 5, Atomistic Societies, is about hunter-gatherers and shifting cultivators, and in these societies, as the title suggests, we are at the level of Kohlberg’s Concrete Individualism. Chapter 6, Corporate Order, considers the evidence from a range of tribal societies based on agriculture, and the implications of the more elaborate ideas of social order that we find there on moral thought, parallel to Kohlberg’s “Conventional” stage of moral thought. Chapter 7, Transcendence, presents extensive material from the literate civilizations of antiquity to show how philosophical reflection was able to transcend the specific social order and to consider ethics in a more abstract manner, comparable to Kohlberg’s “Post-Conventional” stage:
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The concepts of Righteousness/Justice/Truth - the precise emphasis varies - are extended beyond the thinker’s own society, and become universal, even cosmic, principles of moral order, valid for all societies. A permanent tension is therefore established between the eternal moral law and the institutions of actual societies.
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In other words, society itself becomes an object of thought, and models of ideal societies are formulated. These debates focus on such issues as the authority of government, the difference between natural law and the law of the state, and the source of the moral law itself: is it from nature, or from Heaven or God, or is it a human invention?
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Popular opinion or traditional authority are no longer treated as the obvious and only guides to proper conduct, and there is a new opposition between conventional opinion and the critical views of an intellectual elite of experts or sages. The claims of individual conscience in the face of social pressure to conform become more clearly recognized.
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Thus we find a growing awareness of the inner life of the individual. This manifests itself in a new consciousness of the need for self-awareness, and an increasingly sophisticated range of psychological concepts develops.
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The question “What is virtue?” becomes central, and there is a clear progression from the notion of the virtues as a “bag” of socially desirable attributes to concentration upon a few essential virtues which are the necessary excellences for all human beings as moral agents, and schemes of the virtues form an integrated whole.
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The topic of human nature is generally discussed, both in relation to virtue and to speculation about society, and forms one of the essential foundations for the idea of a universal morality transcending the limitations of one’s own society.
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There is the growth of the idea of a common humanity going beyond the boundaries of nation and culture and social distinctions of rank, such as slavery.
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Religion becomes thoroughly permeated by moral values, and the salvation of one’s soul depends on one’s personal virtue and good deeds alone.
In the Conclusions I consider another standard argument against evolutionary schemes, which is that they are ethnocentric because they always rank Western civilization as supreme. I argue, on the basis of that moderate relativism discussed in Chapter 1, that the moral theory of liberal individualism and human rights is actually a product of special features of Western culture and history, and has not in fact demonstrated its superiority to all other civilized traditions of moral thought.
Science
Etc.
Work in progress