What is moral and what is not

 

José Angel García Landa

garciala@unizar.es

 

There is a curious dichotomy in the word "moral," understood as a noun and as an adjective. "The morals" of a society, for example, versus "this is moral, or immoral." The adjective "moral" is evaluative, it introduces a positive valuation, and perhaps the noun is also implicitly evaluative, since there is no society without morals.

 

To define what is moral we must proceed by levels of complexity, or centrality. A refined, complex or problematic morality is built on the foundations of a more basic or elementary morality. Thus "moral" behavior is, in principle, behavior that conforms to the generally accepted morality of a social environment—and all the more so if it involves personal sacrifice. There is here an element of generality, or mere "grammaticality" of morality, which follows established rules in principle, even in the case of notable or morally heroic actions.

 

But a more individualized analysis of an act may find that a given action is moral even if it (apparently) contradicts the values generally accepted in a social environment, or (conversely) that it is immoral even if it abides by them. One possible reason for this, among others, would be to declare an entire cultural morality as "immoral" from the point of view we adopt: thus, the act of Huckleberry Finn helping black Jim to escape is immoral for his slave-holding society, and even for the part of himself that has internalized those values, but it is moral for "us," the implied readers of Mark Twain's book, and for us, the implied readers of the present text.

 

This notion of "generally accepted morality" has a certain sense at the operative or regulative level, in order to define an act against a social background that is always complex or conflicting, especially in modernity. It has a genetic sense also insofar as primitive or ancient societies share more widely a morality and religion common to all members. But even in ancient Greece, Socrates is problematically both moral (as an ethical hero) and immoral, as a corrupter of youth. The point of view we adopt to describe an act as moral or immoral requires a cognitive, as well as a sociological-historical analysis.

 

In modernity we contemplate as moral heroes those who distance themselves from a social consensus that we ourselves contemplate with distance (Greek piety, for example) in order to explore a more universalistic, complex or philosophical moral path. There may nevertheless be problematic moral heroes, such as Nietzsche, and even downright immoral ones, such as Baudelaire or Sade. Appraisal in these cases involves a degree of paradox, and is often bracketed, so to speak. We love to read Sade, but to endure him in person would be an act of moral masochism.

 

There is therefore a certain moral imagination to be taken into account, and a certain moral evolutionism. This would go, according to the current interpretation, in the direction of an intellectual consensus of respect for public space, for mutually recognized rights and obligations (along Kantian lines) and for the free self-determination of the individual, within these parameters. However, it is also characteristic of the moral universe of modernity to recognize the sometimes irreconcilable tensions and paradoxes that arise between the different moral requirements imposed on the individual, for example between group tradition and this free self-determination. Moral heroism can be attributed either to acts of self-determination (in the style of James Joyce's non serviam) or to the self-limitation of this self-determination in search of social consensus, or of a historically rooted identity. (Take for example Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, or a contemporary American equivalent, Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (2011), where a skeptical rabbi nevertheless takes his place in his community and its rituals, overcoming his personal skepticism and his desire to escape from them by seeking a more open world.)

 

I will not go into the difference between morality and ethics, for it is clear that each tradition or author uses these terms as he pleases. In Postmodern Ethics, Zygmunt Bauman opposed grammaticalized social "ethics" to individual and creative "moral" heroism. Gustavo Bueno tells us instead (in his lecture on "Ethics and morality") that by etymology "morality" refers to social customs, and "ethics" to individual character.

 

 

 

 

References

 

 

Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

Bueno, Gustavo. "Ética y moral." Video lecture. YouTube (fgbuenotv) 30 Nov. 2009.*

                  https://youtu.be/dm3WCZud0UQ

                  2017

Goldstein, Rebecca. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. 2010. London: Atlantic Books, 2011.

Mark Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.

Unamuno, Miguel. San Manuel Bueno, mártir. 1930. Ed. Jesús Carmena Martínez. (Biblioteca Didáctica Anaya, 14). Madrid: Anaya, 1986. 2004.

 

Translated using DeepL.com (free version)