Evolving Morality
One way to study morality is to compare and contrast how different groups perceive morality. Not only do different groups have different moral standards or different ideas about what constitutes moral issues, but they can also have very different ways of thinking about morality and resolving moral conflicts.
[David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University, in New York state] and his colleague Ingrid Storm looked at liberals and conservatives (in the American senses of the words). Each group has a package of values it sees as moral, while viewing many of the beliefs of the other side as immoral. Dr Wilson and Dr Storm restricted their study to white, Protestant teenagers, in order to eliminate confounding variables. However, their volunteers came from two different traditions—Pentecostal, which tends to the conservative, and Episcopalian, which tends to the liberal.
The researchers conducted the study by giving each volunteer a beeper that went off every two hours or so. When it beeped, the volunteer answered a questionnaire about what he was doing at that moment, and how he felt about it.
Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.
Dr Wilson suspects that the liberal package of individualism and confrontation is the appropriate response to survival in a stable environment in which there is leisure for learning and reflection, and the consequences for a group's stability of such dissent are low. The conservative package of collectivism and conformity, by contrast, works in an unstable environment where joint action, and thus obedience to their group, are at a premium. It is an interesting suggestion, and it is one that plays into the question of how morality actually evolved.
Source: The Economist
This raises a "chicken or egg" question in my mind. The researchers appear to be focused on what sort of morality fits best within a given social system, which to me sounds like they are assuming the prior existence of a particular social situation then looking at which type of morality works best — which ones will best help a person survive and reproduce and which ones will be counter-productive. This makes sense, but it seems to ignore the idea that the widespread adoption of a particular way of looking at morality might effectively change the social context itself.
If enough people emphasize collectivism and conformity over individualism and the ability to dissent, wouldn't that tend to move a society towards one where obedience to the group becomes expected? Might it also not tend to cause a society to feel less stable because every sign of dissent would start to be perceived as a threat? In fact, if pushing people towards conformity requires over-emphasizing the existence of real or imagined threats (and I think it does), wouldn't that tend to induce greater anxiety in people and make them feel that their society is less stable than it might otherwise be?
Comments
This topic really trips up a lot of people. I read in Covey’s 7 Habits a good sentence that helps. Paraphrasing, it said something like, “Every where you go, people have a concept of fair–of what it means to be treated fairly or unfairly. But what constitutes ‘fair treatment’ is different depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.”
It’s the same with morality. Every person has a sense of what is right or wrong action/behavior. But what constitutes right or wrong action/behavior is different for every person. There may be some overlap, but there will be differences–sometimes very minor, and sometimes very major; but always different.
One I chuckle at is when people say, “Well, every culture has laws against murder…”
True. Every society I’m aware of does have an idea of one person wrongfully killing another person. BUT, what constitutes “murder” is not the same from culture to culture. There are cultures where a person can kill another person, and it is considered well within their rigths–far outside of any self-defense argument. We’d say they were a murderer and lock them up as a threat to society–but in their own culture, the killing is understood to have been necessary and within their rights. Even today we have reactions to “honor killings” as we try to dispell that idea in cultures where it is deeply engrained as not only a right, but an obligation to kill someone who has dishonored you.
Meanwhile, there are many societies that have the idea of retribution killings–where I have a right to kill someone from another clan because they killed someone in my clan–or did me some hurt of wrong that the culture supports is worthy of taking someone else’s life.
Certainly there are ways to kill someone in those cultures that would land you in a heap of trouble. BUT, they also allow killings that would land them in a heap of trouble if they committed those acts in other societies.
You can find a concept of murder anywhere you go–but that concept will not be parallel to the concept of murder in other societies. So, Society A has “murder” rules. And Society B has murder rules. But Society A and Society B do not agree on the definition of murder.
So, what does it really mean when we say, “Every society has rules against murder”?
It’s the same dilemma with regard to “marriage.”
Most morality is not moral. It is just moralizing. Conservatives value physical courage, while liberals value moral and intellectual courage. Both are divided.
Morality is of a viscous nature. It responds slowly to the changing conditions in the real world but it does respond and change itself. It is like the setting of speed limits in some circumstances. A study is done of the average speed that motorists find comfortable through a stretch of highway, even if that highway has previously set speed limits. If it is determined that the average speed is driven at such and such and safely then the study recommends changing the speed limit to that speed. Moral change happens in such a way too though none ever consciously establishes a “speed” of morality. Over time it just happens.
Does anyone know of any good books on this topic? I am intrigued.