Morality: An important and necessary tool for social progress
By: Rohit Balakrishnan
Tags: Philosophy, Ethics, Morality, Society, Criticism

There is a reason why Morality/Ethics is not a respected field in general. The most popular views on morality are something of these sorts:

Morality is completely subjective, being nothing more than a personal opinion without any truth-value.

Morality is a cultural construct and each culture defines morality in its own framework.

Morality is about claiming a moral high-ground and teaching others how to behave from a position of authority.

However, when questioned more, many people holding the above notions start acknowledging that some aspects of morality are objective. For example, they tend to agree that killing innocents, rape, mindless violence etc. are objectively wrong — and that this is not a matter of opinion. But beyond this, they generally cling to the view that morality is a mere opinion/construct.

I would like to question this half-hearted approach. If one can accept that some of the most abhorrent crimes are indeed objectively wrong, why stop right there? Why limit our moral judgement to only ideas and actions that appear to be the most harmful? Why should we let the less harmful ideas off the hook? Someone might think — but there is no agreement on the lesser evils. We don’t need agreement to decide truth! What we need is logical reasoning instead. Rest assured, there exist people who justify all of the abhorrent crimes I listed earlier. That didn’t stop us from considering those to be objectively wrong, did it?

What are we scared of? Offending people? Upsetting cultural/religious sentiments? Are these more important that social progress? Is it worth slowing down social progress because some people would be upset over us holding an opinion? Or are we simply scared that we might be wrong? Yes, we could be wrong about the judgements we make in life — including moral judgements. This doesn’t mean we should stop making judgements and relying on them.

Remember that morality isn’t primarily about judging people. It is primarily about judging ideas/actions regardless of who is holding/doing those. We need to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas — but that’s not enough. We need to differentiate between good ideas and better ideas and between bad ideas and worse ideas. Going easy on moral judgements is only going to help preserve social evils for longer. Am I saying that we should always express moral judgements? Not really — we need to be smart and tactful too. What I’m saying is that in principle, we should always be prepared to make moral judgements in our minds — and express these judgements whenever it helps the advancement of good.

After much discussion on morality, people often end up agreeing with one general rule: That we should be free to do what we want short of initiating violence on others. Beyond this, they might ask — what is the point of further discussion on morality? That still begs the question — why limit goodness to merely respecting freedom/liberty? Consider a situation where there’s a lot of freedom in the society but people end up suffering too much and living miserable lives anyway. Freedom is necessary, but not sufficient. Freedom alone doesn’t always lead to a happy society — unless people use it to build happiness in the society. Morality shouldn’t stop at freedom. It should never stop in its quest to make happier societies that suffer less — for which freedom is only one of the many tools.

We don’t always know the truth. We often don’t know the future. There are limits to our intellect and the amount of time we have in our hands. And there is always an element of unpredictability in our lives. None of this should stop us from valuing and trying to understand truth — for the love of everything good — and for the love of everyone dear living today or tomorrow.