Sibylla Bostoniensis

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0.

There's is something that is more important to talk about than anything else we could talk about, but we can't talk about it, because the very problem about it that needs talking about is how we can't talk about it.

That thing is morality.

And I know, just in reading that, a whole bunch of you flinched. That's a problem because we do need to talk about the idea of morality. We utterly, desperately need to talk about it. It's life-or-death, fate-of-the-world important that we talk about morality.

But I can't talk to you about morality until we talk about talking about morality. The problem with the problem is the problem, see. The thing I want to tell you about is the thing that makes it hard to tell you about it.

Before I can address anything else, I have to address this: a lot of people – most especially smart, intellectual, mathy people – have a, shall we say, intellectually allergic reaction to the word "morality".

And I get it, because I used to be like that too.

In the world in which I grew up – meaning, basically, the 1980s in the US – the entire concept of "morality" had long-since become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Religious Right. The only people I ever heard use the words "morality" and "moral" were the same ones calling themselves – I am not making this up – The Moral Majority [W]:

The Moral Majority was a prominent American political organization associated with the Christian right and Republican Party. It was founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. and associates, and dissolved in the late 1980s. It played a key role in the mobilization of conservative Christians as a political force and particularly in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s.

Oxford Dictionaries defines the term as a "right-wing movement in the US formed in the 1970s."[1]

And what did the self-declared "Moral Majority" stand for?

Moral Majority portrayed issues such as abortion, divorce, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment as attacks on the traditional concept and values of American families

In other words, these people were the worst.

Like, let me contexualize this. They started off pretty homophobic in the 1970s, but then doubled down on their homophobia later in the 1980s during the AIDS crisis. Their response to the "gay plague" was to say, "See? Homosexuality leads to death/gets punished by God." Wikipedia:

Later, as the organization gained more influence in the 1980s, their rhetoric became more explicit in their stance on gay rights [...] Jerry Falwell Sr. expressed that because gay people were rejected by most of society, they had no choice but to prey on the young and were therefore a threat to children and families. Various Moral Majority members also expressed more extreme opinions, such as Moral Majority commentator Charlie Judd, who argued that “There are absolutes in this world. Just as jumping off a building will kill a person, so will the spread of homosexuality bring about the demise of American culture as we know it".[28]

That's what I mean when I say these people were the worst.

(As a side note, an important bit of US political history: it was in the Moral Majority that many different socially conservative impulses were coallesced into the one-big-ball-of-wax sort of Christian social conservativism we know today. This was the rise of the politically militant organized Christian bigotry we are still dealing with to this day.)

So the language and concepts of "morality" were, in my entire experience as a young person, exclusively the province of the worst of Christian bigots.

It would be hard to overstate how influential and powerful that organization was at the time. Unlike today, where a solid half of the country considers those positions odious on their face and staunchly regard their proponents as fundamentalist religious fanatics, at the time, these people were regarded by the mainstream as just having a different religion – a mere difference in denomination that had no real significance - and their positions just a little bit conservative. At the time, homophobia was entirely mainstream, and the idea that women were people still pretty daring and new and enough of a bridge too far that the ERA failed in 1979.

I grew up to associate the word "morality" with bigotry and persecution and abusiveness. "Morality" was something claimed by the people who threw their minor children out on the street when they found out their kids were queer. "Morality" was the justification claimed by the people who wanted to reduce me and all women to livestock. "Morality" was the system of belief that argued it was okay for a husband to beat his children or rape his wife. "Morality" was the premise of arguing a blasocyst was as valuable as a woman. "Morality" was the premise of Segregation. "Morality" was the position that what two consenting adults did in the privacy of their bedroom was something that could be a crime against society and should be criminalized.

So "Morality" was, self-evidently then, a system of social control established to bolster the power of the patriarchy and of white supremacism, and entirely predicated on a belief in the supernatural.

That is the world in which I, and all the people my age, grew up in. One in which the word "morality" had become hijacked once and for all by the religious right. What "morality" came to mean to me as a young person, to whatever extent I actually thought it out, was a hideous religious notion of supposed divinely-ordained Good and Evil which was entirely in service of legitimizing the authority of old white Christian male authorities to subjugate everyone else. "Morality" sat on a mental shelf along side other disreputable religious concepts like "piety", "divinity", "sacred", "aristocracy", "manifest destiny", and "divine right of kings".

Being a child in the time and place I was, I understood "morality" as a notion religious people had – the persecutory, belligerent sort of religious people – and it was what either made them persecutory and belligerent or gave them license to be persecutory and belligerent. "Morality" was something religious people did to hurt other people, whether for their own profit and advantage or just to indulge their sadistic urges to dominate others for emotional gratification.

1.

I wasn't the only one. I'm not telling you this to tell you about me. I'm using myself as an example to illustrate what was happening in the US in the 1970s and 1980s and after.

The impression I developed as a young person about "morality" – both the word and the concept – was almost impossible not to develop, at least for people who were not yearning to get their persecution on. And, indeed, I developed it not solely, or even primarily, because of my own observations and judgments about what the word "morality" was applied to.

In reaction to the very same things I itemize here (and others besides), there was in the US a mass societal pulling back – a recoiling in disgust and horror – from the word "morality" and the concept of morality by people who were not okay with the Moral Majority. Which is to say the left, such as it is in the US. The people who I would call today the Blue Nation (but who were not yet that, then) were repulsed by the "morality" of the Moral Majority and other applications of morality such as the War on Drugs.

This had several effects. As people on the left abandoned the concept of "morality" as, basically, a religious fundamentalist concept, it only became more true that the only people invoking "morality" and the concept of morality were religious fundamentalists. Counterexamples dried up.

This was true both of counterexamples of religious people who used the concept of morality benignly and of secular examples of the use of the concept of morality.

It has always been hard to invoke morality in the US without invoking Christianity. That's a substantial part of how we got in this pickle in the first place. From the founding of this country, morality was understood to be pretty much equal to Christianity. Case in point, take the Constitution of Massachusetts. There's a reason this document, written by founding father John Adams, is quietly buried in the history books. If you've heard anything about it, it probably was that it was forward thinking in how it enshrined public education right up at the top of the document. Here it is. Here's the bit being referred to, Part I, Article III, which, by the way, comes right after Article II, the article which starts "It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe.":

As the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality: Therefore, to promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.

And the people of this commonwealth have also a right to, and do, invest their legislature with authority to enjoin upon all the subjects an attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers aforesaid, at stated times and seasons, if there be any on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend.

That's the public education Adams seared into the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: the mandatory schooling of all the Commonwealth's citizens in Protestant Christianity, at public expense. And there's more; it doesn't get better. Read on at the link above if curious. Frankly, it's even worse in context, so I recommend starting at the very top and running up on it.

So that was what we were working with before the fundamentalist turn in Protestantism in the 19th century. Initially, American fundamentalist Protestantism was not terribly distinct from the rest of American Protestantism, as far as morality went, because American Protestantism was already pretty socially conservative to start with. But over time, the more conservative and persecutory Protestants were drawn to fundamentalism, and the less conservative and persecutory ones repelled by it, and there was a kind of sorting effect, with the fundamentalists heading hard for the fascist right, and the non-fundamentalists becoming a kind of de facto centrists, or even liberal. American Protestantism was riven into two branches: the fundamentalist denominations and what are called the "mainline" denominations.

The fundamentalists ate the mainline churches' lunch. Numerically speaking, the fundamentalists grew like gangbusters and the mainline denominations shrank.

When was the tipping point? Oh, right around the heyday of the Moral Majority. Indeed, the purpose of the Moral Majority was not merely to get its persecution on and restructure, if it could get away with it, American society, but to rally Protestants to the fundamentalist cause, both by convincing individuals to leave their mainline congregations for fundamentalist ones, or by convincing them to stay in their mainline congregations and fight to steer them right-wards. So not only did the mainline Protestant denominations find their numbers collapsing, they often (or maybe all of them?) soon found themselves in the throes of schisms over exactly the issues the Moral Majority promulgated as Christian positions. The classic example is the schism in Anglicanism over gay rights and the ordination of gay priests.

So right at the time that the Moral Majority was asserting ownership of the word and concept of morality, the mainline Protestant denominations that might have robustly asserted an alternative – and historically did – had basically lost all social volume and power, were often cowed by fear of losing even more congregants if they took firm stands against this fundamentalist notion of morality, and were engulfed in intestine discord that diverted their energies.

So from the outside, it looked like the mainline Protestants had fallen silent, and tacitly agreed with the "morality" promulgated by the Moral Majority. And frankly, many of them agreed enough, they weren't going to quibble over the details.

So in the 1980s there was no real Christian Protestant voice in American political discourse dissenting from the notion that the morality promulgated by the Moral Majority was the one true right Christian morality, and therefore, in the American intellectual tradition as per Adams above, the only morality at all.

It was like – or maybe it just was – everyone agreed that, yep, the Moral Majority represented what morality was, morality as a concept and word was theirs and they got to have it. And all decent people who were appalled by them and what they stood for, concluded that morality was nothing more than a fundamentalist religious concept for waging war on others.

2.

I wrestled with this as a young person. I did a maneuver I think a lot of bright, logic-minded young people do in this situation, I said, "oh, well, but there's ethics." I glommed on to the concept of ethics as an alternative to the concept of morality. Sure, "morality" is garbage, but "ethics" is an okay idea.

This it turns out, doesn't work. Where I went with it to find that out is a long, interesting, and possibly inspiring story, but it leads to the realization that "ethics" is morality under the hood, and you can't escape it that way. And it finally dawned on me that the very enterprise of looking to "ethics" as a substitute for morality implicitly granted that morality had value. It took me a while. To admit that one thinks or feels morality requires a substitute – that morality is not something we can do without – is tacitly admitting that morality is functional. And if it's functional, then it's got at least utilitarian value, and nothing that is useful can be wholly described as "bad". Something that is useful is a tool. and while tools may be used to bad ends, they themselves are neutral.

That was one of the early intimations I had that rejecting morality might not be either as possible or as desirable a proposal as I had grown up to think.

3.

There's a much bigger problem with rejecting morality. Turns out, you can't analyze – or even really think clearly about – morality... without morality itself.

And for proof of that? I offer what I wrote here above.

After all, what is the statement "Morality is Bad" if not, itself, a moral assertion? It is an assertion of morality. Calling something "bad" – for that sense of "bad" – is a moral pronouncement.

One of the things that I learned from psychology is that moral decision making – passing moral value judgements – is a vastly more common phenomenon than most people realize. We're all doing it, all the time.

Not just when we think we are. Especially not just when we people who have renounced the concept of morality think we are.

If you're deeply invested in the idea that Morality is Bad, then hearing that we're all passing moral judgments all the time is probably several kinds of alarming. It's probably like hearing someone tell you your home has infestations of both bedbugs and ghosts: you both have a deep skepticism it could be true and a strong emotional bias against believing it because it's so horrible, and also a panicky need to know how to make it stop if true.

But everything I just wrote above about the Moral Majority and American history was completely shot through with moral value judgment. Just moral value judgments of such a type and couched in a language we often, in our very mixed up, messed up society, don't recognize as such.

When I spoke, above, of thinking as a young person that "morality is garbage": I'm describing having a moral position, and I used the kind of language young people do today. Rather than say something is "bad", they use slang like calling it "garbage". It's making an assertion about the morality of the concept of "morality". It's making the assertion that "morality" is... an immoral concept.

You begin to see the problem.

The things that we critics of the Moral Majority want to assert about it? Are that it was immoral. That its proposed moral ideas were wrong in a way that was morally bad. There was a bumper-sticker political slogan back in the day: "The Moral Majority is neither."

Saying that the idea of morality promulgated by the Moral Majority was repugnant, as I do above, is also a way of saying that the morality of the Moral Majority was immoral. So was characterizing it as "bigotry" or "odious" or "persecutory" or "belligerent". Why not be any of these things? Because, implicitly, it is wrong to be so. "Wrong" in the sense of "right and wrong". Not "wrong" in the sense of "factually correct and incorrect", but "wrong" in the moral sense of wrong.

Rejecting "morality" because it seemed to be nothing more than a religious tool of oppression is to make a moral argument that morality, the entire concept, is immoral because it is oppressive, and oppressiveness is bad, which is to say, immoral.

All of the condemnation, implicit and explicit, above in what I wrote – every negative thing I said – is latent (and not-so-latent) moral judgment upon it.

There is no way to criticize the Moral Majority's morality without using morality to do so. You must start from some a priori unacknowledged moral principle like, "being oppressive is wrong", and proceed from there.

I would propose that an awful lot of the awfulness upon the US now is entirely because the liberal/left side of the country was disarmed of the fundamental intellectual tools with which it needed to defend itself.

Because it forfeited the idea of morality to the right.

4.

Laying out, as I did above, that, say, morality was the principle that justified throwing out minor children for their being queer is to make the implicit argument that morality is immoral if it does something so immoral as that. It holds a priori as immoral throwing out one's minor children for their sexual orientation, and then judges that which presumes to call itself morality against that moral standard and finds it wanting.

This is how the liberals/left – now the Blue Nation – has been attempting to argue its cases ever since the 1980s and the final implosion of American morality that was the Moral Majority movement: through arguments that are implicitly moral arguments because having explicit moral arguments was something it did not allow itself, having rejected the idea of morality and become, shall we say, intellectually allergic to it.

There are no arguments against the fundamentalist, reactionary, fascist right which are not moral arguments. I'm going to say this again louder for the people in the back: There are no arguments against the fundamentalist, reactionary, fascist right which are not moral arguments.

But because morality as a concept became anathema to the left, and it had abdicated the concept of morality to the right, the left could not make those arguments explicitly. It had to fight its fight with its hands tied behind its back, using implication and innuendo and without recourse to explicit statements of moral principle.

This, I propose, has not worked out great.

5.

So it turns out you can't engage with morality in an intellectual way without using morality, itself, to do it, and if you try, all you succeed in doing is sweeping the morality aspect of what you're doing under the rug.

And it is radically disempowering to attempt to wrangle with moral concepts without morality. It is a philosophical precommitment not to use any of the tools necessary to get the job done. One either winds up using them on the down-low, or doing the intellectual equivalent of attempting to drive screws with a chisel.

Which is how I'd characterize the preoccupation of atheist circles with calling out the self-contradictions and logical faults of theism. Not that there isn't some virtue in doing so, but so often what the atheists in question are really trying to argue is not that a given religion is illogical but that it is wicked. But if one has renounced morality as a concept, that argument is unavailable to you, and you're left feebly calling such incursions against your latent a priori moral beliefs "illogical" and "nonsensical" and "hypocritical".

6.

What, then, is morality?

A full, even minimum, answer to that is necessarily beyond the scope of this post, and I hope to treat it in a post of its own. For now, I'd propose the following as a first approximation answer, which is to say that it's wrong in important ways and I hope to be contradicting it later, but it will get you into the ballpark.

Morality is the evaluation of things – any things, deeds, ideas, people - as good and bad.

But not all sorts of good and bad.

For instance, consider fashion, and the ideas of "tasteful" vs "tacky", and "in" vs "out", and "fly" vs "fugly". These are also types of "good" vs "bad" but they're not moral notions of good vs. bad. So there are systems of "good vs bad" which are moral in nature – they imply "moral vs immoral" – and there are systems of "good vs bad" which are not. We could call them the amoral.

What they all have in common is that they are systems of value judgments.

I've explained this before. Do you remember the very first Siderea Post I ever made for patron support? "Two Things the Mind Does":

Something else the mind does is assess objects for their value to the mind doing the assessing. Let's unpack that. By "object" I mean absolutely anything which can be perceived and apperceived, both concrete, material things and abstract concepts, and everything in between. By value, I mean extent to which the mind finds the object of regard good or bad, in some fashion.

There are many -- possibly infinite -- ways in which we assess value. These are, literally, "values" and we usually express them in dichotomous scales. Some examples are: good vs bad, good vs evil, virtuous vs. vicious, pleasing vs displeasing, beautiful vs. ugly, tasteful vs. tacky, tasty vs. yucky, appealing vs. revolting, appropriate vs. inappropriate, righteous vs. wicked, cool vs. lame, elegant vs. kludgy, polite vs. rude, noble vs. crude, fortunate vs. unfortunate, safe vs. dangerous, healthy vs. toxic.

Note that some of these are profoundly serious concepts and others are completely superficial and others are in between or ambiguous: what they have in common is that they are about valence. From wikipedia:

Valence, as used in psychology, especially in discussing emotions, means the intrinsic attractiveness (positive valence) or aversiveness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation.

Each of these pairs is a valence dyad within some domain of value. For instance, we might say that tasty vs. yucky describe the two valences within the domain of delectibleness, while virtuous vs. vicious describe the two valences within the domain of morality.

Morality, then, is that subset of value judgment involving moral value judgment.

Now, some of you are complaining that that's a circular argument, but it's not. What we've accomplished here is locating morality in a larger domain of value judgment, and that's actually useful context. For one thing, it brings in the psychology of value judgment to comment on it.

Fine, you might say, but then what makes some value judgment moral value judgment.

We use the word "moral" to indicate that which concerns itself with human conduct. It is wedded to the idea that good things are those which, all other moral considerations aside, one should do and that bad things are those which, all other moral considerations aside, one should not do.

We can understand "morality" as a set of heuristics for humans to figure out how they should behave, per a standard of interpersonal conduct. Morality, thus, prescribes principles and other abstract ideas to people to regulate their conduct.

Morality is the assertion of a standard of right conduct. It is a system of ideas of what shall be considered good conduct and what shall be considered bad conduct. It is a system of rules that attempt to grapple with the question of what do we owe to each other, as the title of one now media-famous philosophy text put it.

I say, above, "all other moral considerations aside" because, as we all know, moral principles or sentiments can conflict with one another. So that "should/shouldn't do" thing isn't absolute. It is possible that in one situation a moral principle should be acted upon, because there are no countervailing moral principles, but in another it should not because there is another moral principle that countermands it.

But note that a crucial aspect of the nature of moral value judgment is that moral value judgment allows only conflicts with moral value judgments. Where moral value judgment conflicts with any other sort of value judgment, moral value judgment prevails in consideration.

Morality – moral value judgment – is a branch of value judgment which is held to be of higher priority and precedence – to overrule – all other branches of value judgment when in conflict.

And, crucially, morality is morality even when we don't think morality is what we're doing. When we're recoursing to ideas of how it is right or wrong to treat other people, whether within ourselves interrogating our consciences or in public discourse about the conduct of others, we are promulgating morality. We are asserting moral ideas and engaging (hopefully!) in moral reasoning. We are making moral value judgments.

7.

And this is none of it a bad thing, despite how scary it may be to those who have grown up under the shadow of the Moral Majority and its largely uncontested claim to be the arbiter of morality.

Approximately 100% of the concerns of the Blue Nation are moral concerns. To be on the left of the American political spectrum is almost exclusively for moral reasons now. Liberalism/leftism in the US is, overwhelmingly, a moral movement.

This has not always been the case. When I was a young adult, it was still the case that on a given issue Democrats and Republicans might agree on moral principles – say, "Homelessness is bad" – and just disagree about how best to address that social problem, where the differences of opinion were entirely matters of efficacy, or at most minor moral positions.

I can't think of the last time I've been able to engage with a Republican on an agreed moral basis over issues of implementation. Hell, most of the people I know who once identified as Republican and were the sort of people I might have had such conversations with in the past have all(?) renounced the Republican party in horror over the last six years, if they hadn't already previously. (Props to my Republican governor, who seems like a completely decent, rational dude.)

Now, I don't mean to overstate the case: I'm not saying that when I was young, the Democrats and Republicans' differences were usually on implementation details, with a predominant commonality of moral opinion. Call it about half the time. I don't know if that was strictly true, but its as good an approximation as any other without some data to hang it on.

And a good bit of that, I seem to recall, was back then it was less universal that the attraction of either party was moral positions. There were lots of people in both parties who were motivated by a purely pragmatic sense of public policy, and voted for the party or even the candidate whose policies they thought would be most effective for bringing about changes they thought were personally advantageous. For instance, one might believe a laissez-faire approach to markets was the best thing for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Republicans who advocated a hands-off policy towards the economy; or one might believe that government intervention was better for the economic well-being of the American middle class and so vote for Democrats who argued for that. Back when I was a frosh in college, that was actually a really common way young people aligned themselves politically!

As best I can tell that's completely untenable now. It doesn't matter what you think about monetary policy, your choices are the party which believes that extrajudicial killing of peaceable innocent citizens by the police is murder and the party that does not. And, as I explained above, morality overrules other considerations, like which approach to market regulation is most efficacious for prosperity.

The nature of the conflict we are now in is moral. And we need the conceptual tools of morality to even see it clearly, much less have any leverage on it.

8.

Morality, the concept, is a very sharp scalpel. It is very strong medicine. Like any powerful tool, it can do a lot of damage. And especially for someone who has been the victim of that damage – who has had the tool wielded against them as a weapon – it's understandable why you might fear it and hate it.

But this thing that was used to abuse you and others is not intrinsically abusive. Indeed, it is the greatest defender against abuse that we have. That is why, despite renouncing it as a movement, the Blue Nation uses it in secret – most of all secret from itself.

I think self-deception is profoundly unwise, and it behooves us to confront this truth. So much of what has gone wrong on the left – cancel culture, for one! – is, I think, the product of using covert, unconscious morality. Because when we use morality consciously, deliberately, with contemplation and reason, I think it generally works out better for everyone. I think we do a better job living up to our moral principles if we actually consciously commit to doing so and mindfully and diligently examine our beliefs and ideas and proposed courses of action in light of those principles, rather than just, you know, throwing them against the wall to see what sticks. Especially given it's less like spaghetti and more like an axe.

And, frankly, I don't think we have a lot of choice. It seems to me that the fate of the world hangs on our ability to regain morality and shift the moral culture of our society.

So much of what is going on in our world to shape it right now are moral decisions. Like the decision to wear a mask that might protect others more than oneself, even though it makes one uncomfortable, or the decision to get a vaccination to reduce the chance one will consume a common resource (hospital labor) despite one's fear of the risks.

I think what we're seeing – it certainly stands to reason – is that in a society in which morality becomes the sole property of religious fundamentalists, it rapidly becomes corrupted and no morality at all, and then you wind up with a society that has no grasp on morality, and people start, en mass, making horrifyingly amoral and immoral decisions.

It's time for the Blue Nation to awaken to the reality of its fundamentally moral nature, and begin the work of rebuilding a American morality. An American morality worth the name.

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