Sunday, May. 01, 2005 - 1:04 a.m.

Against Morality

I react with disappointment and frustration when I see anti-authoritarians unconsciously duplicating the morality paradigm, which I have come to understand is a vital part of the culture of domination and submission. What I offer here I do not intend to be taken as a dogmatic prescription of how to think and speak, but rather as an invitation to examine some of our culture's habitual behaviors, and to judge for yourself whether they are in alignment with your values, and whether they're effective in getting the kind of results you want. Morality Can Lead to Immoral Results

Almost everyone everywhere has some idea of the way they'd like things to be, their idea of fairness, how they think people ought to behave ideally. Sometimes people reify their preferences into static codes called morality, and some go so far as to demand that everyone be aligned with their particular moral code.

But there is a disconnect between moralistic behavior and the desired moral ends. Judging right and wrong can actually move people further away from the "right" and "good" results that they're seeking. In order to efficiently regiment the behavior of homogenized masses of subjects, the hierarchies of civilization have devised ways to estrange people from their own desires and aversions, recasting them as standardized reactions clothed in bogus objective-sounding language. Thus can a civilization motivate people to assent to authority and even join armies to go kill strangers. Pick any historical event that is now regarded as an atrocity, and you'll find that the perpetrators at the time believed they were doing what they thought was good and right.

Impersonal

Morality is an impersonal way of discussing human action. It says nothing about what is going on inside people. Morality is a model-a description of, and prescription for, human behavior, a model which does not seek to explain why people behave as they do (except to label people as good or evil, which I do not consider a real explanation), nor why one should choose good over evil (except to get rewarded and/or avoid punishment, which are extrinsic to our internal lived experience.) I am not surprised that people using such a model come into frequent and severe conflict. I don't find morality useful as a model, because I think it obscures and mystifies more than it explains.

Condemnation

When you make a negative moralistic judgment, you're stating or implying the wrongness or badness of someone who did something contrary to your values. Moralistic judgments include blame, insults, put-downs, labels, criticism, comparisons, and diagnoses. Some examples of condemning moralistic judgments in everyday language:

"The problem with you is…"

"That person is a real piece of shit."

"Asshole!"

Underlying any moralistic judgment is an assumption that there are absolute appropriate and inappropriate ways to behave, and that the speaker positively knows what those are. Absent is any acknowledgment of the speaker's subjective position, nor the speaker's emotions, nor the speaker's desires which generated those emotions. This word usage is alienated from our lived experience because it doesn't say who would prefer a certain kind of behavior, or why.

The dominator culture believes that the world is populated by good guys and bad guys, and that the bad guys deserve to be punished. This is how hierarchies persuade some people to take on the roles of punishers, and persuade others to accept their role as the punished. When you label someone and reify them into a static one-dimensional category, you not only strip them of their nuances, you simultaneously deny yourself the opportunity to empathize with your own emotions and desires, instead petrifying the situation in pseudo-objective language. Writing yourself out of the story, the only roles left for you are judge and punisher.

Praise

Praise is positive moralistic judgment, and it bothers me as much as condemnation. I think people would be happier by giving up praise as well. Praise can take forms like:

"He's a good person."

"You're a saint."

"She totally rules."

Again, conspicuously absent are any actual emotions and the internal and external context which stimulated those emotions. Praise delivers no useful information about how certain desires were fulfilled, and dynamic nuances are plastered over with a static positive label. I suggest instead a gratitude that expresses a specific subjective context so that the person you're addressing can understand why you are pleased.

How Morality is Harmful

When you use morality to express what concerns you about someone else's behavior, that person will accept what you're saying only if they already buy into your particular moral system, and only if they are susceptible to guilt trips. In any other situation, that person is likely to react with defensiveness, resistance, and hostility. Wouldn't you if you were in their place? People caught up in moral systems want to think of themselves as good, and will fight hard to retain that self-image. On those rare occasions when someone is willing to accept the designation of being bad, they're not going to be happy about it. This kind of success comes at the price of inducing in that person unpleasant feelings of fear, guilt, shame and low self-esteem. Over time, that person is likely to associate you with those feelings, and eventually grow to resent you and be less cooperative in the future. The same can be said of praise. While it may feel good at first to receive praise, after a while it becomes clear that it's just another form of manipulation, and the proverbial carrots used to motivate eventually taste blander and blander until resentment and apathy set in. Missing in these scenarios is compassion for people's underlying motives.

Instead, I think it's more effective to use subjective language to lay out the reasons why some behaviors fulfill you while others do not, and engage the other person, if they're willing, in terms of what might be fulfilling to them. Rather than using morality, cast in terms of suppression of evil desires, I think it's far more powerful to find win-win solutions that seek to fulfill everyone's desires in ways that don't harm others.

Useful Judgments

When I'm advocating giving up moralistic judgment, I'm not saying to give up judgment altogether. Humans need an ability for judgment to survive, discerning what's healthy from what's harmful. While moralistic judgment disconnects us from what's going on, other kinds of judgment enhance our lives, such as value judgments, judgments of accuracy, and judging costs against benefits.

I'm not advocating an attitude of "it's all good". You need value judgments to keep yourself aligned with our own integrity.

I'm not advocating an attitude of "whatever". We need to judge the accuracy of things and take notice of lies and obfuscations, especially from people in positions of power.

Most of all, we need to judge what kinds of things are likely to enhance our lives, and which things are likely to hurt us. Getting in touch with that is far more empowering than an abstract, impersonal system of right and wrong. It helps us feel more alive.

I don't think it's wrong to use moralistic judgments, because that itself would be a moralistic judgment. I'm just concerned because I think that morality inhibits compassion, problem-solving, and an authentic experience of life, and I'm sad when I think about people missing that.

Beneficial Outcomes

I want to be clear that when I advocate abandoning morality, I'm not saying that, "anything goes", nor that I advocate behaving in ways that moralists label immoral, nor that I think it's unimportant to care what happens. I think that people are the happiest when they care intensely about how their behaviors affect themselves and others in the present moment and happiest in the long run when they care about the future consequences of their actions. I think that people will best like the results of a given situation when each of them pays attention to their own individual need for integrity. I think that behaviors motivated by personal conscience are likely, more often than not, to be in alignment with what is deemed moral by moralists, but without the undesirable side effects of morality.

"The proof is in the pudding" says the old aphorism. To determine whether a behavior is beneficial or not, I recommend judging according to the outcomes. One outcome happens inside the person doing the behavior, changing the way that person feels. Often this occurs simultaneously with the behavior, or even before hand, at the time the intention to act is formed. The person may have desires fulfilled, desires unfulfilled, or a mixture of both. Later, when the action produces consequences, the people involved can evaluate how well their desires were fulfilled or not.

The notion that by rejecting any code of morality, humans will desire to act in ways that produce harmful outcomes, does not match what I have observed in life. Humans always choose the option that seems best to them at every given moment, given what they know and believe. Harm occurs when people are ignorant of the consequences of their behavior, or if they are unable to think of a way to try to meet their needs without causing harm. I'm worried about morality, because it encourages its practitioners to evaluate their choices by referring to their moral code rather than by referring to the internal and external consequences of their actions. I think that not emphasizing the importance of evaluating actions according to their consequences is tantamount to ignoring the consequences; thus, I think that morality causes harm by encouraging its adherents to remain ignorant of the consequences of their actions.

A moral might be beneficial if it happens to coincide with a course of action that leads to beneficial consequences. Perhaps the moral was developed as a generally helpful piece of advice through trial and error over a long period of time. But how can you tell if it's helpful unless you judge for yourself, with reference to its consequences? A moral code that's not independently verified is arbitrary. Accepting a set of morals on faith alone is risky. 9 morals from one source might prove to be helpful, but that does not ensure that the 10th won't lead to disaster.

Different moral codes conflict with one another. Agreement is possible across cultures when people talk about their feelings and motives, but if they only discuss their differing moral codes, conflict is inevitable. Within a moralistic paradigm, peace and harmony can only occur when all the people of the world conform to the same universal moral code. Since some people would rather kill and/or die than change their beliefs, the predictable outcome is endless war.

No static, generalized moral can ever capture the nuances and dynamics of real-life situations. From moment to moment, your motives can change, as can the motives of those you interact with. A certain behavior might fulfill you on one occasion, while the exact same behavior might hinder your fulfillment on another occasion. You might discover new information that indicates that a strategy you thought was helpful now appears to cause harm. A moral that helps in most situations is not guaranteed to help in all situations. That's why I think it would be better to discard morals altogether, and just try to stay as aware and thoughtful as possible.

Only you can make the final decision about how you will decide to act. Please don't abdicate your responsibility by adhering to a moral code instead of thinking for yourself.

The Goal

I think we would benefit from replacing the moral concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, with an assessment of whether strategies fulfill people in the present and over time. I would hope that even a moralist would concede the value of strategies that lead to the deepest and most long-lasting happiness.

The Challenge

You may feel disconcerted at first to question the things you've been told to accept as right and wrong. You may even feel alarmed if you discover that something you've been doing for a long time because you believed it was right, actually causes harm. You may even have been aware of the harm for some time, but dismissed it as irrelevant, due to your belief in the abstract rightness of your action. I suggest taking some tome to grieve for your thwarted desire and remembering that you were acting according to your best understanding at the time, and that now that you have a different understanding, you're capable of acting differently.

Let your heart and mind and senses be your compass.

newest archive guestbook email rings profile Diaryland