Chapter 3- Morality and Freedom

What is morality?

There is no need for a story to start this chapter, as values have already taken their place on centre stage. We have seen that morality runs the world, and that society and its institutions are the expression of our values at its most global level. We have not yet examined, however, what values are and how they are expressed, a vital requirement to understand how a free society would develop. This is the topic of morality.

At a simple level, we can define the domain of morality as that of human action and its judgment. From this alone we can deduce that morality is an essential feature of human understanding, because we all constantly and necessarily choose a course of action at every moment, even if to choose inaction or laziness, and choice implies a judgment on what to do. Every moment could see you deciding to stop reading this book and getting up to have a meal, or taking a walk, or pondering about a friend you met yesterday. Not only is each moment pregnant with moral choices, but these choices are also necessary for our survival. The fact that you are alive right now and reading this book implies that you have made the choice of eating, drinking, sleeping, and securing your livelihood in some way, every single day of your life, even if that meant getting someone else to do most of the fulfillment of those values, such as your "parents."

Can we define morality more specifically? Many people do, but they end up with all sorts of answers. Since these answers monopolize discussions about morality, I will now look at the most popular of them, and how they are not fundamental but rather introduce extraneous and unneeded concepts.

· Morality is defined as following God's edicts. According to surveys, this is the attitude of a quarter of the "American" population. In theology, this is called Divine Command Theory (DCT). This belief, however, is highly problematic, as it reduces morality to a question of personal opinion: God's arbitrary opinion. It would not arise in the DCT believer's mind to question the moral obligation he derives from what he believes are God's command. But to any impartial observer, there is no reason to assume that we have moral obligation towards God simply because God presumably commands us to do something, even if one believes in God. The decision to follow God's edicts is as arbitrary as the decision to follow anyone else's edicts, and thus cannot be a fundamental feature of morality.

Even more fatally, the definition is irrational, since we must choose whether to follow God's edicts or not in the first place, as well as decide what one believes God's edicts are. Thus God's edicts cannot be the whole of morality, as they are based on prior choices.

· Morality is defined as how we should act towards other people. This is another popular conception, a sort of secular whittling down of religious dogma, rejecting the parts that depend on theistic belief but keeping all the other absolutist rules regulating our behaviour in the company of others. But this view is no better than its parent. It is necessarily incomplete, as most of our choices and actions do not involve other people. Indeed, morality is most important when we are removed from the wellspring of society. Alone on a desert island, a few bad choices, or even slightly sub-optimal choices accompanied by harsh conditions, can lead quickly to despair and death. In society, we are rarely faced with such difficult choices. The constant desire on the great majority's part to live in society demonstrates that we seek to dissociate ourselves from the burden of solitary choice. But seeking to dissociate ourselves from it does not mean that it does not exist. This definition is irrational and therefore must be rejected.

· Morality is defined as what brings the greatest good to the greatest number. This statement of utilitarianism is predicated on the previous one, and as such suffers from the same flaws. But it suffers the further problem of invoking an extraneous principle: the "greatest good to the greatest number", the utilitarian, sterile, cold-hearted approach to actions. Why should we follow this principle as an a priori? Why not define morality as what brings the least harm to the greatest number instead? Or what brings the greatest good to the self and the least harm to everyone else? This seems like a much more reasonable principle, but obviously no principle of this type should be part of the definition of morality. It must be discovered, if it exists at all.

· Morality is a cultural construct, or a product of evolution. As praxeological evaluations, they are obviously both incomplete, if both are true. But furthermore, even if we acknowledge that morality is partially a cultural construct and partially evolutionary, surely these two together cannot encompass all of our motivations. If they did, then every individual of the same species in the same culture would act the same way. The wide diversity of value systems amongst such individuals disproves such a view. Furthermore, evolution does not tell us what morality is, only how it arose. Evolution is epistemically neutral and thus cannot tell us anything about what is actually moral.

If we are to gain a rational view of morality, we must dismiss all belief systems and start with the fundamentals. Morality is a study of the area of action and its judgment. We know from scientific inquiry that studying the facts of reality means to study causality, the cause and effect of things. A little child pushes a ball and sees it rolling. He pushes a book and sees it slide. From this he deduces facts about the relation between shape and movement. Later on, the child discovers the causal relation between the passing months and the changing weather, between studying and good grades, between one's behaviour towards others and their reaction to us. If he becomes a scientist, he might study the causality regulating the behaviour of particles, of the elements, of the human body, of ideas in the human mind.

If morality is the study of anything, therefore, it must be the study of causality, as it regulates human action and our choices of actions. If it is to be a factual search, then it must pertain to causal facts.

We must eliminate right away the notion that morality may not exist or may be entirely arbitrary. If we started from the premise that everything was arbitrary, we would never discover anything. Such an attitude betrays a profound pessimism about our capacity to understand reality. And as it turns, we can learn plenty about morality by observing human action and its structure.

Our fundamental unit, the action, is itself more complex than the popular moralities would have us believe. We have inherited from the dogmatic the annoying habit of talking about actions as aggregates: "killing is bad." Such a proposition may seem uncontroversial until we start looking at what it means. Killing what? Flies? Deer? An innocent person? A person who has a gun trained at you? The second we start looking at different instances of "killing," we realize that it is not a homogenous moral whole but rather a generalization which is not very useful for judgment. What is missing is context, which is to say, the surrounding actors, the environment, and most importantly the expected results- the values that the agent hopes to effect.

We know values exist because people generally act in order to fulfill some goal. When you eat, you do not eat out of random impulses. You eat in order to keep your energy levels up, you sleep in order to feel rested and fresh, you need to be benevolent towards others because people will be more likely to feel benevolent towards you, you cultivate friendships because they provide you with the social visibility and companionship that you need. Even people who live dispersed lives still have short-term reasons for doing things, if only to get out of bed.

We instantiate our values in a wide variety of ways. Everyone values eating (although I imagine some Indian swamis might argue with me on that), but people eat all sorts of things, from apple pies to goulash to grub worms. Due to our past experiences and inborn preferences, we all have different ways of implementing our values. The set of all such implementations is called our value system. Every single individual in the world has a different value system. We know this simply because people do different things, minus, of course, parameters such as geographical diversity, which necessarily dictate some things people do (such as the foods we eat).

Values have an interesting property. We instantiate them in all sorts of ways, but their basic nature never changes. However we instantiate them, we all have the same biological, psychological and social needs. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is one way to structure and understand those needs. Maslow groups human needs under five categories: physiological (breathing, food, water, sleep, etc), safety (health, employment, resources, family, etc), love/belonging (friendship, family, sexual intimacy), esteem (self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect from others and of others) and self-actualization (morality, creativity, problem-solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts, etc).

My personal choice is David Kelley's divisions in his excellent book The Logical Structure of Objectivism. While I don't consider myself an Objectivist, I think Kelley's exposition of the value and virtue structures in chapters 3 to 6 is probably the most logical and clearest examination of the nature of morality. His hierarchy of values is more philosophical and so fits better the task that lies before us- to link moral principles to political issues. On page 81 of his book, Kelley classifies values in the following manner:

1. Material needs/values: "Material needs such as needs for health and food: these values contribute directly to survival."
2. Spiritual needs/values: "Spiritual needs such as needs for conceptual knowledge, self-esteem, education and art"
3. Social needs/values: "Social needs such as needs for trade, communication, friendship and love: these values are social in that they occur only through interaction with others. Logically, their status as values is due to the fact that they contribute to the fulfillment of spiritual and material needs."
4. Political needs/values: "Political needs such as needs for freedom and objective law, which are needs concerning the organization of society. These provide the context for fulfilling our material, spiritual and social needs."

A need translates into a value by virtue of being pursued. When we know that we need something, we seek to acquire it. Needs are our motivators.

Now, if you look carefully at this hierarchy, you will note that it has one important property: it is self-sustaining. Kelley himself notes this on point 3 and 4, when he points out that social values and political values contribute to the other values in the hierarchy. But all values contribute to the sustenance of the hierarchy. Without our material values, we would not be alive, or at least not in a state where we can fulfill our other values. Without our spiritual values, we would be unable to grasp how to fulfill our other values. Without our social values, we would be left unable to cooperate with other people in order to fulfill our other values. And without our political values, we would not be free enough to be able to act towards fulfilling our values; we would be constantly coerced into fulfilling the ruling class' values. Nothing in the hierarchy is out of place.

As such, asking the question "why do people have values?" is a category error. Our values are the explanatory substrate from which our actions boil out. It is our values that are the given of human nature. Their wildly varying implementations are what makes us all so different.

The fact that these values are self-sustaining, and thus necessary, also ensures that they are universal. If we all have the same biological values, and if the whole hierarchy sustains biological values, then we all have the same hierarchy of values. And, as values are the barometer with which we measure actions, we come to the inevitable conclusion that morality is universal. As I already noted, we are all morally equal, we all live under the same requirements, and thus any proposed moral principle must apply to all people, or it is a matter of mere taste or fantasy, like the kind of ice cream one likes, or the fact that one might like to have a million dollars instantly. If you believe that "murder is evil," for instance, then you must agree that murder is evil for yourself also; otherwise, you are simply fantasizing.

Because values are what we seek to fulfill, they shed light on the judgment of human action. We can now judge an action, in its proper context, based on what values it effects and how well it effects them. To take a simple example, I can fulfill my value of nutrition by eating an apple. But if I previously injected said apple with concentrated cyanide, eating the apple is of negative value since it threatens a much more important value, that of biological survival. As a general rule, we can judge actions by looking at their context, and deriving from this the values effected by the action.

After actions and values, we have the virtues. The need for virtues derives from the use we make of morality. Many of our moral decisions are made in situations where we don't have that much time for reasoning and judging. Let's face it, it's all well and good to discuss values and their application at the end of a day, when some leisure time is available, but we often need to take important decisions in the span of minutes, or even seconds. When we are not aware of the values we are implementing, we usually take these decisions subconsciously. But when we decide to take choices consciously, we need principles to make those choices easier. That's where virtues come in. It's not a coincidence that we call virtuous people "men of principle."

A virtue is a mental attitude that is conductive to the efficient fulfillment of our values. Or more simply, a virtue is a way of thinking that helps us act morally. David Kelley defines some important virtues, so if you'll indulge me with following him for a little bit more, let me list them here:

Integrity: The commitment to act in accordance with principles in pursuit of long-range values.
Productiveness: The commitment to take responsibility for achieving one’s values.
Honesty: The commitment to grasp the truth and act accordingly.
Pride: The commitment to take credit and responsibility for acting on the basis of one’s judgment, in accordance with rational principles.
Autonomy: The commitment to act by one’s independent judgment.
Justice: The commitment to evaluate other people objectively and act accordingly.
Non-Sacrifice: The aspect of trade that recognizes that one should not deliberately provide others with values without seeking values in exchange. (It is important to remember that values are not solely financial: loving another person is not a sacrifice because we gain a great deal of mental and social values by doing so)
Existential Independence: The aspect of trade that recognizes that one should not deliberately seek values from others without offering value in exchange.
Non-Coercion: The aspect of trade that recognizes that one should not initiate the use of physical force against others.
The Trader Principle: The commitment to interacting with others only by trade.
Benevolence: The commitment to treating other people as potential trading partners.

All of these definitions were gleaned from the beginning of chapter 5, and they are all logically justified during the course of chapter 5 and 6. I would invite anyone interested in such justifications to get their hands on The Logical Structure of Objectivism, as this is a task beyond the scope of this book, although I do intend to discuss the justification of non-coercion later on.

For instance, the question "why should we be benevolent?" could give rise to a lot of discussion and argumentation, but the basic answer is: "because that is the best way to get others to help us fulfill our values." If I meet you for the first time, I must assume, in the absence of contrary information, that you are a potential friend or partner. From this, two possibilities can obtain: either you are, or you are not. If you are, then I reap the benefits of being a moral partner with you, and if you are not, I may decide to retract my benevolence towards you. But if I assume that you are my enemy and act accordingly, we will never be able to cooperate to help fulfill values that we might share.

The last moral level is purpose. A purpose is a higher-level goal that we set for ourselves in order to be in a better place to fulfill our values in the future, marshalling our values in the short or medium term to help the long term. In a metaphorical sense, we can speak of other species having values and virtues, but not purpose. Humans can have purpose because they can plan for the future and imagine desired results.

A general, long-term purpose might be "having a successful career." A shorter-term purpose might be to clean one's house or go grocery shopping. We may not be fulfilling any values directly by going grocery shopping, as few of us value resources in and of themselves. But we buying those resources, we put ourselves in a better position to fulfill other values later. Having a career, while much more long-term, also puts us in a better position to fulfill our values, perhaps because it would permit us to marshall more financial resources, or by granting us more freedom in our work.

Morality, like any other study, serves a practical purpose. It gives us the causal laws with which we can examine the results of our actions, and what actions can best fulfill the values that we hold. It permits us to judge our actions by the values they effect within their context. It stands completely apart from concepts like "altruism," "duty," or any other a priori belief, as a rational study should.

In this causal view, the question "why be moral?" becomes as absurd as an engineer working on a Space Shuttle asking, "why should I follow the laws of physics?" You don't "have" to understand the causality of human action any more than you have to understand the causality of gravity or electromagnetism, but anyone who builds his life on ignorance has as much chance to achieve his goals as a Space Shuttle built with total ignorance of physics has a chance of getting to the Moon.