Two Errors in Ethics & Theology
Why do people have such trouble with those?
It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which puritan litanies, moral sermons, do-gooderism do not wish to resonate.
Nietzsche
In moral philosophy and theology, there is a lot of confusion, and therefore a lot of nonsense, about objective morality. Two issues in particular are often sacrificed on the altar of abstraction, existing biases, and an obsession with logical form over content. Let’s talk about them.
I.
There are two kinds of morality that are fundamentally different:
First, the functional morality that holds a given society together, more or less successfully. You might think of it as an evolutionary equilibrium to the degree that it works: such morality is one expression of social mores, laws, conventions, etc. leading to a functioning society within the boundaries of biology and the environment.
It is this kind of morality that Plato called the “Great Beast”—people will naturally conform to it and call everything “good” that satisfies the Beast, everything “evil” that provokes a reaction. Most people are unconscious of this dynamic and truly believe they are acting morally when they conform, and immorally when they dissent. From the perspective of the individual, this kind of morality is about seeking pleasure (societal rewards) and avoiding pain (societal punishment). Of course, within a given culture or society, there can be subgroups with similar dynamics that are somewhat different from the larger group.
Second, there is a higher form of morality for people who have reached a degree of independence from the societal norms. It is only at this point that you have a choice: you may still choose, depending on the situation, to follow the norms. But you will be aware of it, have authentic reasons for choosing so, and you could choose otherwise. This degree of freedom is a necessary condition for true moral growth—”until then,” as Simone Weil put it in a slightly different context, “whatever [man] may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.” Nietzsche talked about “high independent spiritness,” which is related to this crucial condition for morality.
In Christian terminology, this stage of independence is associated with the full transformative force brought about by embracing Christ. You could frame it more neutrally in teleological terms: you bring yourself under the influence of a new future, a new path, and thus free yourself from Nietzsche’s “herd instinct” (Herdentrieb). The alignment with a different future, a different fate and destiny, strengthens your independence from the purely functional kind of morality.
If this sounds too much like woo-woo to your taste, you might get away with evolutionary arguments.1 We could look at this sort of “spiritual” transformation as an individual evolutionary advance. With consciousness in the picture, even should this independence from herd mentality get us killed or punished by society, we may still be able to pass on something valuable to what Karl Popper called “world 3”—that is, the world of preserved cultural heritage such as books and narratives we inspire: because these impulses and ideas obviously play a crucial part in the flourishing of individuals, tribes, cultures, and humanity at large. Seen in this light, the non-conformist ultimately serves a purpose for the group as well, even though the thankless mob crucifies him in return.
That we must become morally self-sufficient, however, doesn’t tell us anything about the substance of the right morality, if we accept moral realism. Which brings us to the second big confusion.
II.
Our modern thinking is dominated by presuppositions such as:
Universalism (abstract principles, like physical laws, apply the same to everyone at all times)
Egalitarianism (everybody is, in principle, morally the same—with the same rights and duties as everybody else)
These are like guardrails that steer our thinking in certain directions, away from others.
As a result, we often cannot help but think of objective morality in terms of absolute rules that equally apply to everybody, at all times, in all situations.
However, moral philosophy and theology have to grapple with the particular, the embodied, the specific: the real. Here, morality depends on:
The specific situation: Obviously true but often forgotten in abstract reasoning is that what’s right and wrong changes dramatically depending on the specific situation. Endless discussions about hypothetical scenarios are often unhelpful, because specific situations are truly unique. There are endless variables. It often helps to imagine a good friend seeking advice on his or her troubles: suddenly, right and wrong appear much less black and white than from the ivory tower.
Levels of development: Swept away under modern presuppositions about universality and egalitarianism is the crucial notion that morality is about development, and therefore necessarily dynamic. It is a process that must always be blind to the details of its destination. What helps you on the path towards the good, the true, and the beautiful can be seen as moral—but it will express itself differently depending on where you are on your journey. For example, you might embrace a rigid moral teaching, but grow out of it the wiser after a while; and even though you realize at some point that this moral teaching was lacking in some respects, it was still good at the time to embrace it, because it was a crucial step in your moral development. For others, the path might look differently. What’s more: who’s to say what we deem right or wrong ten years down the line of our moral growth? The truth is that we can’t just skip the various stages in our moral development, which means that what’s right and wrong changes over time for the individual.
Differences between humans: Just as there are levels of development in one individual journey, there are differences between humans. Therefore, things often cannot be generalized—because some people are further on their journey than others. What’s more, we don’t come to this world as a blank slate. Hence, what is a good moral rule for one friend might be bad advice for another: perhaps he or she must experience certain things before growth can happen. One should be encouraged to do a certain thing, the other should be discouraged, and so on.
Different destinies: Related to 3., we all have different potentials we can manifest in this world and different things we need to learn. Your strengths and talents are related to your destiny, while your weaknesses have an impact on what you should do as well. One person might need to learn how to stop wasting time with dating, while another should learn how to date. One should read more, the other do more sport; one should seek divorce, the other swallow his pride and stay, and so on. Unfortunately for the holier-than-thou types and ideologues of all stripes, these things seldom allow for general rules.
Now, this idea that different standards apply to different people because of their differences is very unsettling to the modern mind. And it immediately raises many questions:
Who can judge the stage and development of someone else? Obviously, only someone who is more advanced than the person to be judged. The problem is that everybody thinks of himself as advanced: moral or spiritual shortcomings are seldom acknowledged, if only because the denial of one’s faults is part of such shortcomings.
How do these differences come about? This has consequences. Are some people more advanced because of many reincarnations? Because of bloodlines and genetics? Because of the soul of their civilization? Simply because they consciously developed themselves from an early age?
What does that mean for our political and juridical systems, which are based on equality and universalism—should they better reflect these realities, or should they represent an ideal that may not be real, but useful?
And so on. These uncomfortable questions might be one of the reasons why many people find it so difficult to think of morality as a process, as something that changes with specific situations and depends on individual development. This is especially true because they also don’t know about my first point: the distinction between functional morality developed to hold society together and higher morality. This would at least allow them to soften the blow from the implications of the second point: you could still make functionalist and utilitarian arguments about universalism or equality, even while you acknowledge that these things ultimately aren’t true. Alas, the very fact that someone makes the distinction between functionalist and higher morality means he already achieved a degree of moral self-sufficiency: sheeple are unaware that they follow their herd instinct; they will wrongly assume what they’re doing is higher morality.
Some of our unconscious presuppositions are under strain, something that cyclically happens to all civilizations. This can be dangerous and rattle a society to its core. But it is also natural and necessary for progress in our understanding: when things are shaken up, an opening is created for new energies and ideas, both creative and destructive, high and low, beautiful and ugly. We may not like it, but it is our responsibility to choose our alignment wisely.
While I have nothing against evolutionary arguments and evopsych, I think that sometimes it can be too limiting to automatically revert to evolutionary thinking: “When all you have is a hammer…” and all that. The real magic comes when we become able to mentally change perspectives, say, from Neo-Darwinism to teleology, from non-materialist spiritual thinking to known scientific arguments, from biology to hermeneutics and back, and so on. That way, a multi-faceted picture can emerge that is more complete; and often what appears at first to be a contradiction turns out to be complementary.
Nietzsche quote at the beginning from Beyond Good and Evil, translation mine.
Hi L.P. first, this is an excellent post, thank you for it, and it raises a lot of very interesting points. What stood out to me in particular is your use of Nietzsche, your identification of societal values with egalitarianism and universalism, your exploration of how people grow and change over time, and how each of us have different strengths, weaknesses and outlooks that contributes to our own unique destinies. I've going to respond at length, apologies in advance.
1. I believe Nietzsche is quite important and that he was the last philosopher. This is because he was the first to correctly identify the prior transvaluation of values that had occurred under Christianity from paganism; only after another societal transvaluation of values occurs will important philosophy restart, based upon whatever the new societal values are.
2. You correctly identified society's core values as egalitarianism and universalism. I like atheist Tom Holland's quote on this in his book Dominion: "The more years I spent immersed in the study of classical antiquity, so the more alien I increasingly found it. The values of Leonidas, whose people had practiced a particularly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognized as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more. It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with - about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold - were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those whose triumph is to be taken for granted.”
3. The core problem with modern society, in my opinion, is that we have gone full-boar toward Christian inspired egalitarianism or Nietzsche's "priestly" energies. Historically Catholicism provided rigid hierarchical guardrails against the word extremities of this, which were then weakened by (1) the reintroduction of Aristotle's works by the Muslims and (2) the invention of the printing press, which eviscerated the Church's authority and led directly to Protestantism. This then led, via Unitarianism, to drop the outright belief in God but retain the underlying egalitarian/universalist belief concepts, which then took over the universities and propagated worldwide, an argument originally pushed by Moldbug here: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/ultracalvinist-hypothesis-in/
Anyway, my core point is that I think there needs to be some sort of transvaluation of values that results back into a priestly/warrior energy balance (I don't advocate for a full-on Roman-tier all-warrior energy). The ideals of inequality and master morality should be appreciated for its positive values, such as its emphasis on greatness, strength, directness, honesty, nobility, and for its benefits of creating stability and accountability, while balanced with a priestly degree of equality, dynamism and other-worldliness. Whether such a balance comes from a new secular movement, a new religion (as the pro-Chinese blogger Spandrell argues), or a reinvigoration of hierarchical Catholicism, I don't know.
🗨 what C. S. Lewis in his Abolition of Man would call “the Tao”: i.e., “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”