The bottom line that we need to keep coming back to is this: While there is a private aspect to morality, it primarily emerges from the fact that human beings are vulnerable social beings who need to interact with each other in positive ways to ensure survival and maximize mutual benefit. Without morality we are doomed as individuals, communities, nations, and as a species.
One of the earliest western thinkers to ruminate on the origin of morality was Protagoras, a fifth-century B.C.E. sophist. He pictured its origin emerging from the needs of the members of the community to live in peace and security. They thus mutually agreed to refrain from committing violence or abuse against other members of the community/society. The idea is that if you and others agree to refrain from being a victimizer, you yourself will not be victimized. It is a version of the golden rule. This account gives human beings a self-interested reason to adopt (moral) attitudes and behavior that transcend self-interest.
Regardless of whether there ever was such an historical agreement, the theory gets at an essential component of how human beings need to behave in their interactions with others. This is a normative, not a descriptive account of morality: it is not just meant to describe what a particular person or society happens to regard as moral, but establishes a blueprint for how everybody ought to behave.
Subverting morality
Although we see that the very idea of a well-functioning community or society promotes the idea of moral behavior, why have there been and continue to be constant examples throughout history of people abusing or unfairly treating those who look, act, or think differently? How does it happen that entire societies close their eyes to abuse or structures that perpetuate disadvantage to others or groups of others? How can it be that those involved in such action typically can still regard themselves as highly moral people? Even religions and the religious can be complicit in this behavior.
Unfortunately, there are multiple paths to the witting or unwitting subversion of morality, but they tend to start from the fact that human beings typically and primarily identify with and have empathy and compassion for those with whom they know and are most comfortable with. This tendency is grounded in our tribal instincts. It is a survival instinct, and can play a positive role in protecting us from hostile forces that may lie outside our tribe or family.
However, this allegiance to one’s family and friends and by extension those of the same religion, ethnicity, or class, undermines morality once that allegiance leads to unfair and unjustified disadvantage for those outside the select group. The moral response would be to avoid such behavior, but what happens is very often the reverse.
That does not mean, though, that in-groups acknowledge this conflict with morality. As a matter of fact, they try to do everything they can to avoid such acknowledgement. One very such common approach is simply to ignore countervailing realities. In some cases, this is an easy trap to fall into because one may have little or no contact with groups disadvantaged by one’s own group.
To use an outrageous example, many simply remained unaware or pretended to be unaware of the mass extermination of Jews in World War II, in the same way as many now seem oblivious to or closed to seeing systemic patterns that perpetuate and increase income and wealth inequality in the United States. The unaware are typically those who are or feel advantaged by the way things are, or who at least suffer no disadvantage or believe they do not.
Even if one becomes aware of the existence of unfair treatment, it is easy enough to choose not to rock the boat and risk losing one’s own advantages. In that case, one may downplay or even deny the existence of any conflict with morality. One can downplay the Holocaust; one can say that slaves had it pretty good, one can say that growing income inequality is morally acceptable because the worst-off groups, certain minorities and those Whites at the bottom two income quintiles, also reap some financial benefit from the country’s economic growth, however small such a benefit may be.
On the other hand, another response is to acknowledge a situation as unfair or lamentable, but let oneself off the moral hook by thinking that you yourself are not responsible for it or helpless to do anything about it. In this way, the moral high ground can be seized by declaring that you yourself have not perpetrated any wrongdoing towards, say, racially or ethnically disadvantages groups, and hence are not racist or biased. We just had a president who pictured himself as morally irreproachable by saying he had no racist bone in his body. Once one occupies that moral high ground, it is unlikely that he or she will come down to earth and actually take some responsibility for improving the status of the disadvantaged.
However, one can go even further and actually blame the victim or declare that the disadvantaged deserve their status. Slaves were born to be slaves: they are uneducated, feeble-minded, and unable to enjoy freedom responsibly. In the same way, women were declared too emotional and feeble-minded to have the right to vote. As for those who are on the wrong end of income inequality, it has become easy enough to block out any moral issues by declaring that the poor deserve their fate.
Here we run up against the destructive myth of meritocracy, the view that in our society we all enjoy equal opportunity; and if you are not successful, it’s your fault. Others are not responsible or have any moral obligation to provide assistance, or even feel any compassion.
And here we run up against what I would call the destructive myth of meritocracy, the view that in our society we all enjoy equal opportunity and if bad things happen or one ends up homeless, or mentally disturbed, or without a job, well, there is some reason why you merited this situation. It’s your fault, and others are not responsible, and so in the extreme these others feel no moral obligation to provide assistance to you, or even feel any compassion.
I find the idea of meritocracy quite insidious and arrogant. It implies that we have far more control over events than we really have. The perspectives of ancient Greek thinking were more realistic and humane: it was thought we are essentially only be in control of how we react to the vicissitudes of life. That is, we can only truly be in control of our inner character, the qualities and virtues we have habituated ourselves to in dealing with matters of good and bad fortune like wealth and health. We are lucky to have them, but we certainly do not merit them and we could lose them at any moment—they are matters of chance.
Meritocracy has hardened us, reducing our feelings of empathy and compassion, because the idea of merit reduces the sense of vulnerability that we all share as human beings in confronting the fact that external goods come and go without rhyme or reason. It badly distorts our thinking. Meritocracy presupposes that if we work hard, we merit, for example, admission to the college of our choice and a good job.
Human beings do not start off on a level playing field. What is up to chance is what country we are born in, our class, how our parents raise us, their expectations, their level of education, other influences in our life and on and on. For the things that propel us to that ideal of admissions to the college of our choice, we owe gratitude to the situations we inherited and were fortunate to encounter. Yes, we had to do our part, but it is arrogance to attribute our success solely to our merits. In any case, we can see how the idea of merit and meritocracy can run counter to our moral sense, dividing the world unfairly into the deserving and undeserving.
It is true, of course, that individuals of any race/ethnicity can make decisions in life that lead to lack of success, to joblessness, to poverty, and so forth. They still deserve compassion as fellow human beings, and perhaps “tough love” or even punishment if illegalities have been committed. However, what we see happen in this country is that an entire “race,” black people, are thought to be lazy or criminals or chronic abusers of welfare, and therefore deserving of their poverty and their life in ghettoes on the wrong side of the tracks. (The raw number of Whites who live in poverty outnumber Blacks, but significantly they are not disparaged in the same way.)
To make matters worse, this way of thinking engenders the idea that providing those in need with government assistance is an unfair imposition on tax payers who are footing the bill. In her recent book, The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee exhaustively reveals the process by which many Whites are opposing any government measures that would benefit Blacks, even though in most cases they would benefit Whites as well. This path we are on of assigning success to merit is preventing us from seriously looking at how to make our society function better for all of us, financially and morally.
Also of relevance is a related, but different dynamic that accounts for our moral short-sightedness. It is not unnatural for human beings to judge a certain activities and ways of looking and acting as repellent, impure, contaminated, or profane if different from what they are used to. For example, caste systems can be built on a mixture of skin color and kinds of work one does in society. It can even be extended to foods one eats or how one eats them. Seeing the other or an activity of another as impure is another approach to distancing oneself from different classes of others, assigning them different places on a hierarchical scale or simply relegating them to the status of untouchables or sinners.
Sexual practices can be a part of this dynamic. There can be certain expressions of sexual intimacy that are deemed by particular religions or groups to be in line with the sacred and pure; and other expressions as standing opposed to what is sacred or clean. I think it is likely that this is behind the curtailment of according dignity and moral respect in some societies to women (unlike men) who have or are forced to have sex outside of marriage, to homosexuals, or to those who seen as blurring the distinction between genders. Labeling something as dirty or impure can be an emotional response to otherness, based primarily on prejudice.
In any case, morality as such would not sanction actions that systematically disadvantage or withhold humane treatment because of those differences. These kinds of differences continue to stir up hate, and often among the religious or those who fashion themselves as religious and moral. We have to keep remembering that morality is normative based on reason; it is not a merely a matter of what some groups, even religious groups, happen to believe is moral or immoral.
Righting the moral ship
What I have been describing in this post is something that is unfortunately ubiquitous throughout history. Tragically, those who are in a position to influence thinking about moral issues in our schools, in our churches, or in our politics, will too frequently go along with this pattern of behavior, openly or implicitly by their silence, thus condoning actions that a normative sense of morality would regard as at odds with morality. Without purposefully addressing the moral wrong-headedness of this pattern, this dynamic will simply continue to be repeated again and again. As I argue in my book, Nurturing Decent Human Beings, for the long-term good, schools need to take this on as part of their role in moral education.
Right now, the issue of otherness and disadvantage has largely become a political issue. But matters of moral right cannot be reduced or held hostage to political partisanship. What has to happen is that we address the problem of otherness and disadvantage as a nation, together. We must acknowledge the moral issue involved and then be open to seeing how abuse and disadvantage occurs whether it done wittingly or not. It is going to take an effort to go beyond soundbites and grapple with systemic issues that may not be immediately visible. And the moral approach is to do so by focusing on the wrongs and not on denouncing the complicit as evildoers.
One telling example of forward progress on one contentious issue comes from Gary Abernathy, a conservative columnist, in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post. Taking a hard look at the wealth gap between Whites and Blacks, he saw that (1) it is so large to make any talk of an existing level playing field meaningless and (2) Whites have undeniably and “disproportionately benefitted from both the labor and the legacy of slavery, and — crucially — will continue to do so for generations to come.” His particular solution is reparations, with the specifics open to political debate. The key piece, though, is not his solution, which is subject to debate, but his call for conservatives and all others to adopt a moral stance as Americans and “right this wrong.” Such an approach on this and other issues having moral implications would help to justify the claim that we are a decent people, and would help us overcome our blindness that has too often skewed our notions of morality.