Keeping your moral balance

If we are moral because it is an imperative of our very nature, then the manner in which we are moral needs to reflect our nature. If our morality does not reflect our nature, it is pointless, since there is no other real basis for morality. Furthermore, morality not based on our nature is self-defeating, since it fails to fulfill the imperative within us.

So what is our nature?

There are two answers to this: there is human nature in general, and there is your own nature in particular. Each can be very hard to pin down.

But we don’t need to pin them down here. It is enough, for now, to make some general observations. Then we can see how it works with a couple of examples. Your life’s work will be to figure out the rest from there.

Observation #1:
Morality needs to reflect the many-sidedness of human nature

We are animals by nature, but we also have high intelligence.[1] We have instinct and visceral emotions that we share with our animal cousins, but we also have reason and judgment that is on a par with no other species. We are social and loving creatures, but we also have a strong drive for our own personal advancement and survival. We love peace and ease, but we have a violent streak, too.

Any moral code that does not take all such elements of our nature into account will fail. This may seem obvious, but many moral codes don’t even try. They place one aspect far above another – glorifying our reason or our lovingness or our self-sacrificing impulses while denigrating their opposites. Sure, we can admire people so narrowly focused morally that they adopt lives of great asceticism, enforced celibacy, or unabating service to others. But at the same time, people who live such lives are probably themselves out of balance, and in any case, elevating such single-minded modes of living into moral ideals is both unrealistic and false to who we are. (Kant’s rule also works here: if everyone were totally ascetic, completely celibate, or interested in nothing but serving others, human society would fall apart, or even cease to exist – so such practices are unlikely to be true moral ideals.)

If there is one secret to morality, I might suggest that it is this: balance. We need to embrace all aspects of our nature, but since many of them are somewhat contradictory, our great task is to keep them in balance. Our instincts need to be balanced by our judgment, our emotions by our reason, our selfishness by our caring for others, our drive for perfection by a recognition of limits and of the reality around us.

This is less a matter of logic than of experience. Logically, you might suppose that if you put all of your eggs into, say, the “emotion” basket or the “reason” basket, you still have the same number of eggs as if you split them evenly. But if you seek out those rare people who live happy, fulfilling, productive, involved lives, people who are loved and respected by others and who in turn love and respect others, people wise enough to do the right thing almost all the time and strong enough to stand up to adversity – generally you will find that these people have striven for, and to some extent have achieved, the kind of personal and moral balance we are considering here.

Of course, as noted a moment ago, there is our individual nature to take into account as well as general human nature. Most of us are born lopsided, and raised lopsided. We tend to be either highly emotional or highly rational, we tend to be selfish or we tend to be self-sacrificing, we tend to be rigid about things or blasé, we tend to trust our instincts or we tend to fear them. Ironically, many people of high achievement – whether for good or evil – have been among the most imbalanced emotionally and morally. They have, in effect, taken advantage of their defects, employing their extreme characteristics (though not always deliberately) to propel them down a path that a well-balanced person would never explore. And as I say, sometimes such people do marvelous, good things. But if you read their biographies, you will find that they are rarely happy and rarely feel fulfilled, regardless of what they achieve. They typically are very unpleasant people to live or work with – or to be.

So you may choose that, if you wish. But the better strategy for most people is to identify their imbalances, and to nurture the aspects of themselves that are naturally weak, while making an effort to rein in those that are strongest. Such efforts will rarely be more than partially successful – which is a good thing, actually, or else all of us would end up in the same mushy middle ground. Our society works better because of our differences: we need both nurses and engineers, scholars and laborers, artists and mechanics.

In the realm of morality specifically, perhaps we benefit from some variation as well. People in whom self-aggrandizing impulses are strong, for example, can be high achievers, great entertainers, dedicated public servants. But even for them, their personal moral code should recognize all sides of their own nature, and all sides of human nature in general. Otherwise their strengths will lead to immoral choices and actions. How often we see single-mindedness in politics or war or business or even in religion or the arts eventually lead to evil.

Building a lopsided moral code is perverse and destructive, whether it be built, for example, on the value of self-centeredness (such as Ayn Rand did), or on its opposite, self-abnegation (as many religious “saints” have done). To the extent that our morality does not represent all aspects of our human nature, it damages ourselves and others. And to that extent, it is immoral.

Balance is the key.

Observation #2:
There are no absolute and universal moral rules

To the extent that there is a biological basis in the brain for all of this, and to the extent that the development of the brain is determined by the interaction of genetics and environment, it would seem highly unlikely that any moral instinct is held by everybody. In fact, this is what we observe. Some of us melt when we see someone cry, others find their hearts hardened. Some tend naturally to bravery, some to cowardice. Some experience empathy strongly, some weakly or not at all.

This means that there is always some flux in any particular moral rule. One person may very strongly endorse a rule that says, “Thou shalt not kill (ever),” and embrace it as an absolute. But that rule is absolute only for that individual, and for anyone else who feels the same way. For the rest of us, it may be an ideal or a guideline, but it is not an absolute.

Similarly, rules may be universal by societal agreement, but then they are not morally absolute. “Thou shalt not commit murder,” is a rule most societies have agreed upon and intend to be applicable to everyone. So by intention, at least, it is universal. But it is still not universally absolute, because some individuals accept it only conditionally, and some not at all.

All moral rules have limitations, therefore, in their force or their applicability. This does not mean we should not follow them, but it does mean that we should resist turning them into rigid, absolute, inviolable moral laws.

Unfortunately, as humans, we tend to do this all the time.

Part of this is due to our rational nature. On our good days, we do like to be rational. We may not actually be all that rational, or even consistent, but we sure don’t want to appear (to others or even to ourselves) as irrational or inconsistent. So rather than act on pure moral instinct at every turn, we concoct general rules. This is definitely helpful, up to a point. But we also tend to overdo it, making the rules rigid and applying them stringently where a balanced approach would be more appropriate.

The other reason we gravitate toward inventing absolute, universal rules is that it makes life superficially easier. Once we establish such rules, we don’t have to think about them, and moral decisions are easier. So the temptation to lock our moral rules of thumb into hard-and-fast codes of morality is almost irresistible.

But it is a temptation we need to resist. The more successfully we do so, the more we enable ourselves to do the best thing in each particular case, even though (horror of horrors!) we might actually have to think about it with insight, sensitivity, and sound judgment.

This is a bit of work, but again: the secret is balance, not easy, phony absolutes.

Example #1:
Every man is my brother?

There are many times when a naturalistic, balanced approach to morality simply works better than religion or some other absolutistic approach. One good example of this involves our decisions about how to treat other people.

The truth is, most if not all of us have an instinct to take better care of those close to us than those farther away, those more closely related than those more distantly related. Ideally, we love our families, we hold our closest friends very dear, we are concerned about what happens to other people we know more casually, we root for people from our town or state or country, and we have a generic sort of compassion for people far away who have no real connection to us. This is all perfectly natural.

It is more than natural, though – it is both practically and morally necessary that the obligation decrease as the distance increases. It is practically necessary because we simply can’t give equal attention to everyone in the world. It is morally necessary, because most of us would consider someone to be wicked (or at least seriously misguided) rather than saintly if he treated everyone the same – if, for example, he gave away everything he had to the distant poor and ended up depriving his own children of adequate food, education, and medical care in the process.

So caring for people in proportion to their closeness is natural, practical, and moral. But it is very difficult to express this in the form of a commandment. Religious doctrines, in fact, usually end up in the opposite camp, teaching us platitudes like “every man is your brother.” Yet in real life, such teachings are rarely taken seriously. The byword is, “charity begins at home, brother.” Even Jesus recognized the essential truth of the more nuanced, balanced doctrine: when he was being soothed by Mary Magdalene using expensive oils that might have instead been sold to benefit the poor, he defended her wastefulness by pointing out that “the poor are always with us,” in contrast to himself, who was there now and needed soothing.

The religious platitudes are simply wrong. They make great sound bites, but they are unnatural, impractical and, if taken literally, immoral.

If you haven’t noticed it yet, though, consider how natural, in evolutionary terms, this instinct to take care of those closest to us is. To put it in simplest terms, those closest to us share more of the same DNA with us than those who are more distant, so the more we care for and aid those closest to us, the more we perpetuate our own DNA. From the standpoint of evolution, this makes all the sense in the world, so any inclination that our ancestors had in this direction would tend to be replicated, while its opposite would tend to fail and die out.

There is no suggestion here that either Mother Nature or we ourselves have to be conscious that this is what is going on. Quite to the contrary, our moral instinct to treat our closest relatives and friends best is there because it works, and it works whether we know why it works or not. Yet it is remarkable – and probably not coincidental – that for most of us, our natural instinct to help (and even sacrifice for) others is largely in proportion to their genetic relationship to us: immediate family most, more distant family less, unrelated people and foreigners least.[2]

At the same time, we have to keep our balance, and not give these instincts free rein. One ill effect of our natural tendency to care less about those farthest and most different from us is the tendency to disparage, demonize, or destroy those least like us, which has led to racism, genocide, wars of aggression, and other abominations. We need to think sensibly and wisely if we want to nullify these dark tendencies. We need to let our reason balance our instinct. And when we apply it that way, the naturalistic approach is more moral than an absolutistic religious one.

Example #2:
Abortion

Feelings are so strong on this subject that it’s tempting to leave it untouched. But it is worth getting into, to show that a naturalistic approach to morality can deal sensitively even with hard issues – and perhaps better than a religious approach can.

Before we dive right in, though, let’s consider something else – another way in which our instincts may lead us astray, and need to be balanced.

Our senses are perhaps less powerful than some other animals’, but even so, they are picking up a lot of information most of the time. Apparently, it is easier for the brain to deal with all of this data if it can categorize things. So anything that seems to be a rock is a rock, and we can deal with it that way without giving a lot of thought to what makes it different from other rocks, unless we have the leisure and inclination to do so. When a wild boar is charging us, the fact that it’s a rock is good enough – and anything more in the way of sub-classification or ambiguity could be a deadly waste of time. As long as we can tell the rock from a clump of dirt, that’s all we need at a critical moment. So this is a useful category.

This way of looking at the world – by categories – is so natural and commonplace that Plato thought that everything fell into such categories (which he called “Ideas”) and that they had some kind of existence that, if anything, was more real than the world we perceive around us. We might not all be inclined to take it that far, but we do like to identify things, name them, and pigeon-hole them. It’s the way humans tend to think.

But hard-and-fast categories can lead us astray. A rock is not always distinct from a clump of dirt. Some rocks are soft, and some clumps of dirt are hard. Or to take another example, we all know the difference between a stool and a chair (a chair has a back), but what if you made a stool with just a very slight rim around the back side of it to make it a little less likely that someone would slide off – would that make it a chair? Exactly how high would the rim have to be before it was no longer a stool, and now a chair? Obviously, the answer is arbitrary. In the end, this is true of virtually all categories.

We need to recognize that our categories are, for the most part, matters of convenience. There is no actual reason to think that there is some sort of “chairness” or “rockitude” that exists out there in a cosmic reality-land (sorry, Plato). We see things the way we see them in part because our brains and senses are built that way, and in part for arbitrary but convenient reasons of our own. So when it comes to classifying things that do not fall clearly into a category, there is usually not a right and wrong decision about whether they belong. Instead, it is more a matter of individual decision or group consensus whether they belong to this category, that category, a new category, or no category.

The abortion controversy involves that kind of situation.

The religious opposition to abortion is based on equating abortion to murder. Fetuses are innocent humans, killing innocent humans is murder, therefore abortion is murder – and therefore it is impermissible, period.

This is a classic example of forcing an ambiguous situation into a particular category, and using universal, absolute moral rules to evaluate it.

However, a similar thing happens on the other side of the debate. Some “choice” advocates consider that fetuses are a part of the woman’s body, a woman has an absolute right to do whatever she wants with her body, therefore a woman has an absolute right to have an abortion. Similar mental attitude, opposite conclusion.

If people relied on their instincts, though, rather than on absolutistic doctrines, they would probably come out more in the middle of this dispute.[3]

What we know is that immediately after conception there is a unique human cell. That says less than it appears to say, though. Every human cell is unique, and in principle (though not yet in practice), any living human cell could be developed into a separate human being. So the difference between a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg or even an ordinary cell is not very great, from a biological point of view. From there the cell grows bit by bit until eventually you have an embryo, and then a fetus, and then a separate person. So at just what point does this cell become a person?

If you believe that people have souls that are somehow distinct from their bodies, then one “answer” would be that the budding individual becomes a person when the soul appears (or separates itself from the parent-soul, if one supposed that it worked that way). Unfortunately, we know much less about this than we do about the biological aspects of reproduction – in fact, as we discussed earlier, there is no reason to believe that a soul exists at all, so any talk of “when and how” is a bit silly. But the point is, even if souls existed, they wouldn’t help us answer the question.

Indeed, the right question is not even, really, when does the cell or fetus become a person, because it is not always murder to end the life of a person (it may always be regrettable to some degree, but it might also be legitimate or even morally right in some circumstances). So the question is not just the difficult one of whether or when a fetus is a person, but rather the even more difficult one of whether and when a fetus is a person deserving of protection from abortion.

The answer is: there is no objective answer. Believing in one is a great example of taking an ambiguous case and trying to make it definite. In reality, of course, we need a definite answer, so that the practice of abortion can be appropriately regulated. But that is a practical matter that can be subject to a practical compromise. The real question we are dealing with here is: what is the theoretically morally correct answer? And that answer is, by its nature, ambiguous and frankly arbitrary.

God does not define what a person is, the Bible certainly does not define what a person is (that is, it doesn’t even try, whether it is the Word of God or not), nor does the universe somehow define what a person is. We define what a person is, and we more specifically define who is a person worthy of protection against death. Since these definitions are our doing and no one else’s, whatever we say, in our collective conscience, is what the “right” answer is.

If we go by our instincts rather than by our cherished doctrines, most of us do, I think, end up somewhere near the middle. We do recognize that in an ideal world it would be undesirable to snuff out a fetus’s life. A fetus near to being born resembles a person strongly enough that we feel it should be protected except in the most extreme circumstances. And since embryos are on their way to becoming fetuses, it is highly desirable to protect them, too.

At the same time, we recognize that the world is not ideal. Carrying a child can be an enormous burden for a woman, more so if she is in a vulnerable medical, psychological, financial, or family/social situation. Having to raise the child can be even a greater burden, especially if the woman is facing the prospect of doing so alone. Weighing these burdens against the rights of an embryo that has no expectations and perhaps not even any physical feeling, most of us would intuitively say that the embryo loses out. It is alive, and it is composed of human cells, but it is no more entitled to protection than, say, a damaged finger that needs to be amputated (even though it, too, is alive and is composed of human cells).

So, do we draw a line somewhere? We could – if we could only agree on where. Birth seems rather late, conception rather early, though some people would argue for either. Anyplace in between seems arbitrary. Where some of us would like to draw the line, perhaps, is the point at which the fetus becomes conscious. But this too is arbitrary, and we have no way of knowing when it occurs anyway.[4]

Part of the political/social problem here is that we are not dealing with raw instinct, but with moral sensibilities that change and are influenced by our environment. The great thing is that as human culture advances, it tends to become more sensitive and expansive in its recognition of the interests of others. Although we still care more about those closest to us than those farther away, for instance, we see distant people on television starving or suffering from earthquake damage, and we feel real sympathy, and sometimes are moved to help them. This is a moral advance.

Likewise, we increasingly acknowledge the rights of others. Over the last century or two, we have become much less tolerant of oppression against people of other races, against women, against the poor, against immigrants, against children, against homosexuals; we have even become less tolerant of abuse of animals.

Ironically (in political terms), the anti-abortion advocates are taking a “liberal” position in this process. They are trying to make sure that a borderline class of individuals (fetuses and embryos) is inside rather than outside the definition of protected creatures.

But doubly ironically, the pro-choice advocates are also taking a “liberal” position, making sure that the rights of women are protected, particularly early in pregnancy.

This is not really the conservative vs. liberal battle it is usually made out to be. Rather it is one kind of liberalism against another. And neither side seems to be all that happy about it.

It can’t be rewarding for most religious believers to confront the notion that hundreds of thousands of “persons” they want to protect end up dead. Nor is it rewarding for a young woman to have an abortion that, apart from being an unpleasant surgical procedure, ends the possibilities of what might have been, both for herself and for the potential future child.

If we follow our natural instincts and the increasingly open-hearted inclinations of our civilization, we will throw off the unjustifiable doctrines that push toward absolute rights of one party over another. Instead, we will see abortion for what it is: a hard situation where either choice may bring pain and harm. And seeing it that way, perhaps we can work toward balanced answers that minimize the suffering, even if our preconceived categories of thought have to yield.

The final point, for now, is that this is our decision – as individuals, and as a society. There is no objectively right answer. We define our own terms: when a rock is no longer a rock, when a stool becomes a chair, and when a fertilized egg becomes a person whose rights take precedence over its mother’s. There is no right answer out there to be discovered, or to be read out of the mind of God. We choose who and what we embrace, and when.

The right decision, therefore, lies in whatever consensus we can achieve, in our love and sensitivity to each party, and in our inevitably fallible attempts to discern, in various circumstances, where the balance of good lies. If there were a fixed formula for this, it would be easy. But in naturalistic ethics, there is no fixed formula, and so it is not easy. Nor will it be resolved socially and politically until we are inspired by caring and love (that notion Jesus was so devoted to) instead of absolutism and legalism (which Jesus abhorred and rejected).

But who ever listens to him?

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[1] Let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt here.

[2] Our caring for spouses and friends – though they may not match us genetically – does not disprove this observation so much as expand it. Our mutual relationships with such persons help both us and our offspring survive, so these relationships, too, offer a survival advantage for our own DNA.

[3] The U.S. Supreme Court decision on the subject, remarkably, did just this. It acknowledged that both sides of the argument and both parties in an abortion had a legitimate stake, saying that when the fetus was clearly not able to live on its own (first trimester) it could be considered part of the woman’s body and her rights prevail, and when the fetus was clearly able to live on its own (last trimester) then it should be considered an independent person whose own rights would prevail, and that during the ambiguous in-between period the sensibilities of each locality (state) could decide which way to go. Although this decision is often viewed as pro-abortion, it is actually straight down the middle.

[4] Brain activity can usually be detected at about 6 weeks after conception. Response to external stimuli, however, so far is not detectable until about 28 weeks. In neither case do we know if there is any consciousness.