Hildegarde

Which is what we’ve got a lot of outside my window.  I’ve started sitting around wishing plaintively that we’d have just a day or two of half decent weather so that the cold, now mostly on the way out, won’t just come back again.

Of course, there are students, so there’s that.

I’m feeling, this morning, a little flabbergasted.

The ten commandments, the most famous moral code in the world, is suddenly not morality at all, but “rules for behavior,” which is somehow different from morality.

What?

A moral code is a set of rules for behavior.  That’s what it is. 

I’d say that those rules always have an objective basis in the facts of human nature, relative to the teleological framework they’re meant to express.

In other words, morality isn’t anything we want it to be, willy nilly, because we feel like it on Thursday.

It’s the engineering for a specific project–to obey the will of God, to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, to recognize the status of human beings as radically individual…

There are a lot of proposed teleological frameworks, but the teleological frameworks are not morality.   Morality is the rules for human behavior, derived (objectively) from the facts of human nature, meant to express those frameworks.

The study of human nature is the science.  Morality is the engineering.  The teleological framework is the decision of what to build:  a bridge, a house, a road, a garden.

Back a few posts ago, I said it drove me crazy when everybody started jumping the gun, going from the first steps in this outline to the last.

And that’s what going for the teleological framework is–it’s the end point of a longer discussion. 

But it’s very important, I think, to keep the various strains of the discussion separate. 

The teleological framework is not morality.  It is the decision about what kind of morality to have. 

But there’s nothing odd about this, and nothing peculiar to philosophical questions.  The laws of physics won’t tell you if you should build a bridge or a house, and neither will the rules of engineering.  Before you know what the proper rules are, you have to make a decision to build something in particular.

But the laws of physics remain objective, as do the rules of engineering.

But here’s the thing:  I don’t think the choice of a teleological framework is entirely subjective, either. 

For one thing, for all the superficial variety, I think that the available teleological choices are actually rather small, and the available teleological choices that will not result in what is essentially a form of suicide are even smaller.

For one thing, as I said, even if we look at just the rules, there’s actually less variety in them than there seems to be on the surface.

Part of the problem is that societies tend to throw everything but the kitchen sink into their “morality,” including a lot that isn’t actually morality at all.

In most areas of study, we prune away this kind of thing and define the field.  For some reason, we just accept anything anybody anywhere says is “morality” and then fret that there’s nothing but chaos and nothing makes any sense.

I don’t know why we do this. We don’t find it difficult to see what makes this sort of laisseiz faire attitude counterproductive in most fields.  We don’t care if the Strange Colorful Hill People declare that finding the spiritual dimensions of toothache is a form of chemistry.  We don’t declare that it’s impossible to know what chemistry really is since the SCHP feel this way.  We just point out that they’re wrong, and why, and get on with it.

That said, there are indeed some moral rules that are close to universal, and that are universal in every literate society.  As somebody pointed out, there’s always a version of the Golden Rule.  There are also almost always strictures on the sexual activity of women (not always of men, but always–until very recently, and then only in the secular West–of women.) There are rules against murder, and theft, and rape. 

And these rules come in varieties, yes, and the terms of defined differently–when murder is murder and when it is not, for instance.

But the real differences between the basic level of moral code isn’t in the idiosyncracies in those codes.

The idiosyncracies are largely explained by something else:  by how and what the codes define as “human.”

The human race has been remarkable consistent about what behavior we owe other human beings.

Where it has been varied is in the field of people who are defined as actually human.

When you begin to look at the anthropology that way, you find far less variation than you’d think. 

Aristotle had a point–and so did Aquinas.  There does seem to be some kind of internal clockwork in most people that tracks the moral law, a kind of basic conscience.

What there isn’t is a universally acknowledged, single definition of “human being.”

And now it’s raining, and I’ve got to run.