Norms, Ethics and Morality
Written by Sarolta Tatar
When we ask what morality is, it is tantamount to asking if social conditioning determines good and evil behaviour — and the judgment thereof — or wether there are universal laws applicable to human behaviour, regardless of time and space? Those who point out that our actions happen in a social context that determines the outcome and the judgment, will also be quick to point out that there is not (or should not be) any universal laws that determine morality. Those who believe in some form of divinity and sacredness, such as the sanctity of human life, will often take the opposite position. This latter stance is called the universalist standpoint, while the former is referred to as the relativist attitude. Relativists will be quick to point out that universalist morality is black-and-white, without taking circumstances into consideration. This is a serious accusation, since modern science and psychiatry now takes the normative attitude and action to label black-and-white thinking an abnormality and a symptom of psychiatric disorders.
Our question then becomes: is it possible to harmonize these oppositions? Perhaps a reflection on norms and morality will undress them as two points on a scale of values.
Norms
Every society sets up standards of behaviour. Such standards are not necessarily positive, and some standards are harmful, such as racism or slavery. What norms have in common, is that every society accepts them as normative standards, meaning that behaviour must be adjusted according to the norm. It is difficult to be an anti-racist in a racist society or an abolitionist in a slaver society. It is this difficulty that makes some social reformers heroes — because they must go against all odds in order to change social normativity. Yet norms do not only apply to social structures. Clothing, speech and everyday interaction is also normative to a high degree. What characterizes all norms is a lack of reflection to some degree. We grow up with a familiar system and its familiar things, and we feel uncomfortable if any part of it is changed. Even social reformers can feel uncomfortable with change. What ultimately overcomes an outdated normativity is intellectual and spiritual reflection over the norms we grew up with — are they purposeful, just and good enough to be followed with a good conscience?
Etiquette
Etiquette is the norm system that governs day-to-day human interaction. It is essentially relational, and does not apply to people when they are alone. This is the simplest, yet socially most expected, norm. The goal of etiquette is to lower aggression between people and make peaceful interaction and problem-free production possible. Etiquette often observes strict social hierarchies by applying special words and normative expressions between superiors and inferiors. Such language also inspires greater collaboration and loyalty, but also submission and silencing. Etiquette also applies to dress code and the social message that clothes send — ladylike and whorish, or gentlemanly and roguish. Understanding etiquette is a prerequisite for a successful social life and where you place yourself socially — high or low. Etiquette in this sense also applies to criminal gangs, prostitution rings and outlaws: such outcast groups generally abide by their own “laws”, which are a form of normative outsider etiquette.
Ethics
All our actions take place in a social context, unless we are the last person on earth. Even hermits who live alone tend to create a human habitat, in the form of human dwelling, work and the taming of nature, and they tend to create societies as soon as possible, like Robinson Crusoe meeting Friday. The only exceptions are children raised by animals or under such abusive circumstances that they pass beyond the age when they could learn a language. Without the capacity for speech, human beings exist like animals and with the animals. Speech is the hallmark of everything that makes us act like humans — intelligence, reasoning, emotional sharing — and all of this is directed interrelationally. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is an interrelational species. We never reach our full potential without learning language before ca. age 3, and if we miss that crucial window, then we remain dumb as the animals. It is this interrelationality that also determines the harm and benevolence of our actions — we can both harm and benefit ourselves and others. We may not be aware that we harm ourselves, unless someone else points out that an action has led to harm for someone else in the past. This is how experience is passed down. Most norms operate on the level of “harm vs. benefit”, when they assess wether actions are “good vs. bad”. With such a measuring system, most or all actions can appear as ambivalent and situational. How much or what kind of harm and benefit we achieve will depend so much on context, that no rules seem to emerge. Everything will depend on intent, consensuality and arbitrary state laws. Ethical understanding takes the relative nature of social contexts fully into account, and as a result it will demand tolerance as a political measure to handle conflicts. Tolerance becomes the etiquette of the ethical approach. This is the level that relativist thinkers are on.
Morality
Five of the Biblical 10 Commandments are universally accepted norms for most human societies: don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t fuck around, and respect or obey your parents. The other five commandments are specific to the Judeo-Christian culture, but what should surprise relativists, is that at least five universal moral laws exist globally. And these five laws have long historical continuity in human societies of the most varying kind, from hunter-gatherers to modern civilization. If moral laws are only a cultural product, then why the longevity of these 5 laws? I will refer to these five laws as the minimal moral laws: don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t fornicate, and respect your parents.
Other moral laws may be up to debate regarding their universal status, either historically or geographically. But the minimal moral laws can be found everywhere at all times, although there will be considerable behavioural deviation from these norms. The other thing that we should immediately notice about the minimal moral laws, is that they only seem to apply to members of the same community: the human species will happily slaughter each other in warfare, but the defining characteristic of warfare is that it happens between communities, wether they be tribes, states or political parties. The physical and mental borderline will be drawn ever more sharply the closer two communities edge towards warfare. And once a certain invisible line is crossed, no moral lines will apply anymore, when it comes to treatment of the enemy. War is a social state in sharp contrast to peace. Moral laws apply within the community, and most importantly in peace-time, when murderers and other criminals can be executed for doing things that might earn them a hero’s medal in wartime. Even murdering a foreigner from a politically hostile community can result in an execution, given that the murder takes place in peace-time.
This paradoxical nature follows morality everywhere: certain laws are truly universal, but can be abrogated by communal decision at a heartbeat. Certain primitive societies do not know of certain minimal moral laws at all (such as the taboo against fornication). This complexity calls the universality of moral laws into doubt, but alterations do not detract from certain social ideals, which remain valid and stable through great spans of time and space.
The mystery is hidden within the ongoing argument between universalists and relativists. Rather than simply recap it here, I would argue that this discussion will continue until the end of time, due to one paradoxical circumstance: moral laws cannot be proven, either through empirical or logical reasoning. Moral laws are unprovable! They simply exist in a suspended state at the back of our consciousness, and we mainly understand what they „mean”, when we or someone we love is wronged in person. Moral understanding depends to a high degree on lived experience. But if this is the case, then how can the minimal moral laws be universal to a such a high extent? Why aren’t people simply born with this understanding? How can certain societies simply drop a moral law willy-nilly under given circumstances, or why have some primitive societies never heard of a taboo against fornication?
The fact that we are not born with a moral understanding is perhaps the greatest argument against universalism. Because if we were born with an a priori moral knowledge then we would not be forced to learn moral understanding a posteriori. Historical and lived experience teaches us that the latter is the case, yet we experience minimal moral laws as a deeper, non-physical experience that comes from the depth of our being.
Before we edge closer to metaphysics, I would quickly point out that morality may be the result of inductive logic, as opposed to the deductive logic favoured by mathematical models of reasoning. Morality may be the result of empirical evidence from lived experience, but raised to a universal mode of absolute truth.
Moral understanding may be a qualitative jump made by our reasoning faculty from the particular to the absolute — from details to Truth. As such, morality may represent a new mode of existence for human beings, and a type of development that repeats on an individual and communal level ad infinitum. It can be likened to the first amphibiate that crawled onto land and began breathing oxygen. It could not have explained oxygen to the fishes in the sea if it tried ever so hard, because breathing oxygen is a new mode of existence, one that ocean-dwellers will never understand. The jump from particular ethics to absolute morals is similarly a qualitative jump between different existential modes.
The absoluteness of moral laws also point to another, hidden quality that follows with moral understanding: black-and-white thinking.
Normativity and Silencing
The greatest obstacle to the development from ethicism to moral understanding is currently the social normativity of psychiatry. Psychiatry currently labels black-and-white thinking a symptom of the following disorders: autism, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, anti-social personality disorder, masochistic disorder. This stigmatizes one of the determinants of moral understanding. We simply cannot make the qualitative jump from ethical relativism to moral absolutism without it. And society not only shames and silences black-and-white viewpoints, but also „punishes” it through psychiatric treatment. This is a strong social incentive to remain a relativist, because we as human beings depend on interrelationality and the quality of our relationships. But why should we?
The strongest ethical argument against moral absolutism is empathy. This is the foundation for ethical relativism, which views every action circumstantially and by weighing all harms and benefits against each other in a utilitarian manner. This approach is universally available to everyone, even if they have never studied philosophy. Empathy asks us to view each person`s situation individually, to feel for their subjective pain, to take all sufferings at face value and try to ease each person`s situation according to their immediate needs and long-term self-interest. Empathy is in some sense our highest human quality, a prerequisite for language development, and something that springs from the deepest source of our interrelational human nature. This is the constant urge we feel to harmonize laws with compassion. To the relativist it may seem like the absolutism of morality is incompatible with the normativity of empathy. But the existence of war rules prove differently.
Of all moral ideals, war rules are by far the most suprising and interesting. It seems our ancestors have understood the evils of war for generations, yet this is a type of behaviour we cannot stop. Hence we can only hope to control it by applying certain principles borrowed from peace-time to wartime. The existence of international laws and war rules is the effect of peace breaking into war and disturbing the internal logic of war by trying to tame it and exercise damage control. Yet war never ends, despite this moral understanding. Why?
We can only state what we have stated about moral laws: while peace is „easy to explain”, something about war remains inexplicable. War is simply a different mode of communal existence than peace. It follows its own internal logic, and the laws of peacetime are suspended while the crisis lasts. War is a qualitative dive from the ideal state of peace into something else. Historians exist to analyze the reasons, yet those who have lived through war can never fully explain their experiences. They seem to have witnessed a horror beyond words, and they may experience both trauma and guilt.
The occurrence of guilt and trauma are perfect examples of experiences that can cause the qualitative jump from ethicism to morality: it shows that our empathy works just fine, just not all the time. Something happens in wartime that makes us suspend our empathy. Yet it returns with peacetime, after we have survived the unimaginable or committed the unspeakable. How is such an extreme experience possible? Why doesn’t the empathy of soldiers work around-the-clock in both war and peace? The extreme opposites of war and peace are perfect examples of lived experience that can trigger black-and-white thinking: not only in terms of seeing the enemy as “evil”, but also in experiencing life, death and suffering at the edge of human resilience. Returning to peace from that, means taking the lived experience of the outer rims of human existence back with the survivor. Those who have not experienced the trauma and the guilt can no longer relate. But the extreme experiences stays with the survivor with unwavering intensity through decades. The survivor experience teaches us to view all events in a black-and-white light, while the survivor’s reasoning faculty constantly calculates the possible outcomes of perceived dangers.
Trauma causes moral understanding. Incidentally, trauma also causes several psychiatric disorders. Which means that the shock that afflicts our interrelational capacity has come full circle — from war and peace and trauma and guilt to psychiatric disorders to moral understanding.
Similarly to a broken circle, where many sufferers exist in a confused hinterland state between “normal understanding” and „moral understanding” — not being able to draw the full conclusions of their traumas, they develop psychiatric symptoms as a coping mechanism to deflect the inner tension caused by disturbance to our interrelational capacity.
Trauma reaches full conclusion when we make the qualitative jump from ethical relativism to moral absolutism — and understand that certain laws of conduct must apply everywhere to everyone. So, why can’t we simply vote anti-war activists like Gandhi into every parliament, and let the most enlightened among us end war once and for all? Why does war continue? And if moral laws are absolute, then how can we forgive? And how can we say that a murderer deserves punishment in one case, but no punishment or even a medal in another case? I call this moral problem the “assassinating Hitler paradox”.
Ethical evaluation of Moral Applicability
Moral laws may have „universal validity”, in the sense that we understand at some deep, personal level why lying is wrong („we do not like to be lied to”), or why murder is wrong („no one should lord it over others, just because they can” and “I don’t want myself or my loved ones to be killed”). But that doesn’t mean that moral laws are universally applicable to all circumstances. Does this sound strange? It is, because this is where an irrational human feeling, the capacity for empathy comes into play.
Just as the absolutism of moral understanding represents a qualitative jump that has the power to transform even such an extreme crisis as warfare, so empathy represents a quality of human existence that can break into our moral understanding, colour it, or even smoulder it to pieces. I would not make any distinction between “high and low” here, since both morality and empathy have a degree of irrationality, making their qualities hard to grasp, hard to describe and even harder to explain. When we look at empathy and morality, then we are simply dealing with two different experiential qualities in interaction.
Empathy asks us to look at each individual as a person, a being with thoughts, feelings and a special kind of „human” quality, and not simply as an agent moving in time and space. It means we must consider the internal worth even of criminals and foreigners, and not reduce them to externals. This means that we must look at each crime or transgression situationally — exactly what ethicists and relativists do.
Empathy adds another aspect to morality: it is revealed to be something abstract, not something absolutely valid for every here-and-now situation. Suddenly, morality behaves itself like a guiding principle, not a law of absolute value. But here lies another paradox: how can morality be absolute and depend on black-and-white thinking, if it is only a guiding principle? Heck, I feel like lying and stealing today, and who can judge me, if morality holds no legal power? Why should I care about others if my self-interest collides with theirs?
These thoughts reveal the collapse of empathy, yet those who follow moral guidance are asked to keep up their own empathy when evaluating transgressive actions.
These are unsolvable paradoxes, which I will illustrate with a moral paradox:
The Assassinating Hitler Paradox
Imagine there exists in 1925 a man of the highest moral understanding, the clearest intellect, the greatest logical reasoning, and unswerving empathy for all human beings. He gets to know Hitler, but he does not have precogniscence, hence he cannot know there will ever be another world war.
Yet he understands that Hitler is „evil”, and that he represents a danger to all other human beings on the planet. He reaches this conclusion only by studying Hitler’s character and political ideas, independently of all other social contexts. Our hero is not particularly partial to Jews or any other group. He only views Hitler as „evil” based on Hitler’s own, internal thought processes and emotions. Next, he decides to assassinate Hitler.
He rationalizes his decision to himself by saying to himself: „I have lost all respect for my friend Adolph today.” This is a self-contradictory expression for him, because his basic attitude and principle is to respect all human beings. Yet his self-contradiction does not cause him stress or confusion, because he feels most strongly that Hitler is „evil”. He understands with a deep feeling that assassinating Hitler will protect all the other people on the planet, whom he respects.
But being a law-abiding, upstanding man his whole life, he also understands that murder and lying to authorities is wrong. He must now weigh his deep and affectionate respect for the law with his deep feeling that assassinating Hitler is the only right thing to do. Being a man of the greatest moral understanding, he decides to kill Hitler, before Hitler can harm others.
He carries his plan through and Hitler dies. World War 2 and the Holocaust never happens. Extreme harm and the death of millions has been averted. But no one knows this. Neither the assassin, not the Hitler family, nor the authorities looking for a murderer understand how history has been changed.
The killer is arrested. In the eyes of all, our hero is simply a murderer. His crime is punished by hanging in contemporary Germany. He now faces two decisions:
- He can either tell authorities the truth, knowing that he will not be believed. They will label him a political extremist or criminally insane, and he will hang. He can take the punishment as an upstanding man, because that is the logical communal conclusion to his transgression…
…but deep down inside he feels he has done right. Is this justice?
- Or he can lie to the authorities and walk free.
I don’t know how he should choose.
While this example highlights the paradoxical nature of the minimal moral law „Thou shalt not kill”, the next example highlights the paradoxical nature of the minimal law „Thou shalt not lie / bear false witness”:
The Hiding Jews During the Holocaust Paradox
Imagine there exists in 1943 a man of the highest moral understanding, the clearest intellect, the greatest logical reasoning, and unswerving empathy for all human beings. He hides Anne Frank and her family in the attic. By doing so, he puts his own life in danger, since his punishment would be execution. He is perfectly aware of this every day for several years, while the Frank family hides in his attic.
Being a man of such a heroic character, he understands the value of human life. But he is also an upstanding man with affectionate obedience to the law and loyalty to his country. He understands why bearing false witness in court is an injustice of the highest order. He is in fact so saintly that he has only told the truth his entire life.
When the Gestapo knocks on his door, he is confronted with two choices:
- lie to the authorities and save lives
- collaborate with the authorities and avoid being deported yourself („save your own life”)
This choice represents a high moral dilemma to our hero, yet he does not hesitate to lie to authorities, because being a man of the highest moral understanding, he comprehends that the sanctity of life trumps everything — the sanctity of life is a “higher truth”.
From Inductive Morals to Deductive Metaphysics
Morality looks simple from afar — „Thou shalt not kill” or „Thou shalt not lie”. But under a microscope we only see human suffering. Empathy demands that we see the sanctity of life. Like a storm from another dimension, empathy breaks into the absolutism of moral thinking, and drags suspended moral laws down to a human level.
This interaction between morality and empathy calls us to perform one more qualitative jump in our reasoning: to deduce from minimal laws the sanctity of all human life.
We intuitively understand that we are „justified” in lying to authorities to save life, because life somehow represents a higher value. The truth of the value of life is somehow a “higher truth” to other truths. Yet we are perfectly capable of killing, and many of us already have. Those who have not made the qualitative jump from ethicism to morality, may not be able to endanger their own lives by hiding Jews or other persecuted people in their attic. Or they may not be able to assassinate Hitler, because they cannot carry the burden of the wellbeing of all human beings.
Only those who have made a qualitative jump from ethicism to morality, can then be dragged down to earth again by re-experiencing empathy differently, this time in the light of morality.
I will call this experience moral empathy, and just like morality, it represents a new mode of existence. It is the end of a journey that the relativists have not yet made.
Moral empathy leads to experiencing, rather than arguing for, one of the basic metaphysical truths: the sanctity of life. This strange quality — an experience of holiness in myself and others –cannot be hypothesized from empirical studies only. Universalists may use empirical examples to argue their case, but in this case they make their case from empathy only. Their argument will not be entirely comprehensible to relativists, who have not made the entire spiritual journey from trauma and guilt through black-and-white thinking to moral understanding to moral empathy and finally reaching an experience of holiness.
Hence the discussion between relativists and universalists can never be fully resolved. In good Western philosophical tradition, these two poles will face each other for eternity and will try to resolve their differences by arguing for empiricism or abstract logic, with equally squalid results.
Morality is Paradoxical
Morality appears differently depending on what angle we view it from: the solution to world peace, a form of universal empathy, cold and dogmatic, callous and impersonal, the rule of peace, the rule of war, a guidance for lawmakers, an overarching higher truth that let us break the law, universal and personal at the same time.
All the philosophical arguments seem to miss something important: how morality, empathy and transgressions seem to rise from the human condition, how war and peace, ethicism and morality all represent different modes of experiencing our human condition, and how spirituality represents a rise in our modus existentiae, where higher levels do not necessarily communicate well with lower levels.
Existential modes also have an intrinsic quality that philosophical arguments seem to miss: irrationality. The qualitative jumps from one level to the next are not communicable or explainable by normal scientific or philosophical discourse. Perhaps existentialist philosophy comes closest to describing how such a qualitative jump is experienced on an emotional, rational and spiritual level.
