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2. Defining "Morality"
I will never forget the time, roughly twenty-five years ago, when I was talking to a fellow atheist about a moral argument for God's existence. I'll call this other atheist "John." According to John, the moral argument is silly because Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist, had refuted the idea that morality needs God in his book, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals.[1] I remember scratching my head when John said that. I thought to myself, "But that's not what Christians mean when they talk about morality depending on God." This was the first of countless conversations to come with many people, both theist and atheist, who had different ideas about what the word "morality" means.
In the introduction to his book, Morality and Self-Interest, philosopher Paul Bloomfield provides a helpful overview of the two major theoretical definitions of "morality" at play among philosophers. I want to quote Bloomfield at some length.
The first conception may be thought of as the social conception of "morality". It begins with the question of how one ought to behave toward others. Morality is seen as having a final authority over our lives and the interests of others play a necessary role in the decision procedures we ought to use. Where the interests of others are not at issue, morality does not come into play: there is no morality for an agent stranded alone on a desert island. Thus, on such a view, morality and justice, understood loosely to encompass all fair dealings between people, are often seen to have the same scope. Typically, on this conception, morality requires impartiality, such that agents must not see their own interests, or the interests of their families, communities, etc., as having any special standing whatsoever in the decision procedure that determines what ought to be done. Thus, we see Kantian deontology requiring consequentialism more generally, requiring strict impartiality in the evaluation of the outcomes of possible actions. On some accounts, the strict impartiality may be loosened somewhat by, for example, "agent-centered prerogatives," as discussed by Scheffler (1982), but this loosening must still be justified given standards according to which it would be acceptable for everyone to act in the same way; agents may, to some degree, favor themselves to avoid undue sacrifices that would be required by strict impartiality, but they may only do so according to rules that admit no exception.
The other conception of morality dates back to the ancient Greeks, and takes as its starting point the question, "How ought I to live?". It might fairly be called the "Socratic" conception of morality (see Plato's Gorgias, 500c; Republic, 344e). Answering this question will inevitably require one to consider how one will behave toward other people, but extends beyond that, to every significant aspect of a person's life, however private. Thus, someone stranded alone on a desert island may be faced with moral questions, given the possibility of living as well as possible in those trying circumstances. Like the social conception of morality, the Socratic conception of morality will have final authority over the agent's life, representing the agent's "rule of life". As such, the Socratic conception may be seen as formally egoistic, since one begins by aiming at living well, though it need not be substantially egoistic if one determines that one must treat others well in order to have a well-lived life. ... Given the Socratic conception of morality, however, and in contrast to the social conception, rabid, selfish egoism still represents a form of morality, however mistaken it may be.[2]
I have found Bloomfield's summary of these two conceptions of "morality" to be very helpful. Rather than trying to define "morality" per se, which (per Part 1) is sure to be ignored, I propose the following two terms.
- social moral system: a set of rules which define acceptable or unacceptable behavior towards other people
- Socratic moral system: a set of rules which define acceptable or unacceptable ways for living one's life, including situations which involve other people and situations which do not.
I do not claim these two terms represent all of the possible options for what other people might mean by the word "morality," but for my purposes they are enough.
Notes
[1] Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
[2] Paul Bloomfield, Morality and Self-Interest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), introduction. Italics are mine.
