A brief inquiry into the nature of morality 

To break the ice and hopefully get some interesting discussion going on here, I thought I would pick up on something that sparked an enthusiastic dialogue today in class but unfortunately was curbed due to time and scope. Two questions I will seek to say something about in this post: a) what makes actions morally right or morally wrong? b) what gives morality its sanctity?

Normative ethics has it that there are two broad schools of thought regarding morality. The first being consequentialism and the second being nonconsequentialism. I believe these two classes of normative ethics theory will be looked into in greater depth in chapter two. However, for the purposes of setting up my argument I will briefly define them. Consequentialism is the theory that says to judge whether something is morally wrong or right we have to look at its consequences or results. Actions with good outcomes would thus be morally good and actions with bad outcomes would thus be morally bad. Essentially under this theory, the end justifies the means. On the other hand nonconsequentialism states that actions are morally wrong or morally right in of themselves, that is, despite their consequences. Immanuel Kant in his argument on categorical imperatives supports this second school of thought. Kant argues that some things are categorically wrong even if they produce some greater good of some sort.

Though not fully a Kantian, I lean more towards nonconsequentialism in understanding why some actions are morally wrong and some are morally right. Some actions are morally wrong and some are morally right despite their intended outcomes. The question that arose from my comment in class was: what gives morality this sanctity if the outcomes do not matter? Well, my short answer to the question is: the nature of morality gives it its sanctity. To use Socrates' vocabulary in his dialogue with Glaucon and Adeimantus in The Republic by Plato, morality is of the highest class of goods. A society that condemns rape, murder and theft as morally wrong is bound to better perform than a society that does not recognize the immorality of these actions. Hence in the moral society, morality would bear fruits such as longer lifespans, healthier citizens, safer communities, etc. However, even if this is the case that morality is leads to these sweet marvelous results, I still do not believe that it is these results that justify the moral status of the actions and grant morality its sanctity. I think the nature of actions and the nature of morality grants actions their moral status and morality its sanctity, respectively.

Consider the following thought experiment. If rape had no physical, emotional or psychological harm on the victims, would it become morally right? I am inclined to say no and this should serve to illustrate that the moral status of an action is not determined by its outcomes but rather its nature. Furthermore, it should show that morality is certainly unique and worth upholding for its own sake, that is, despite the outcomes it produces. I can imagine that one objection to this argument could be that there is nothing unique or exceptional with morality. The objection might suggest that morality is simply a set of ideas and feelings that have been passed down from generation to generation. Well I disagree with this view. I think there is something unique with morality that even if we were the first generation to this planet it would still be objectively wrong to murder, rape and enslave fellow human beings.

A penny for your thoughts! J