The Practice Of Morality

 "all human beings have the same morality"

You've got to be kidding.

I'd expect a nun's morality to put God first, her a close order second (though the first two might be reversed or equated), and the Church third, as morality in religieuse might correspond to her loyalities and her expectations of reward and punishment; from my reading it seems that that's how it worked out in Spain's American colonies. And of course her nunly role would come before any moral duties to the Natives at the Mission.

And a German soldier at the Russian Front would have a different morality from that. Morality depends on the person, the situation, the intended function, and the particular role. Once you start taking the real world into account moral universality falls apart quickly.

The moral standards I'd like to expect from anybody on the street anywhere begin with the negative Golden Rule, don't do to others what you don't want done to you. In theory at least that should be universal. Yet applying it strictly would rule out entire lines of work as immoral: prison guard, corporate lawyer, marketing advertiser, and so on. I would never have considered taking such jobs, but our society would fall apart if everyone shared my compunctions. And our society falling apart, however morally questionable it is, would bring harm to an awful lot of people. Even firing prison guards would harm their families. Could we tell a kid "you should have thought of that before you picked him for a father"?

Expecting an IDF soldier in Gaza to not do what he wouldn't want done to him would greatly decrease his job performance and even his chance of survival: such could be expected to avoid gang-raping a 12 year old, but not shooting an unarmed "terrorist" who's running away might get him disciplined. And for him to expect that the same should be done to him might mean he's mentally unwell.

What we should expect of you must depend on who you are.

My own moral standards were stricter and less relative when I was younger and had less life experience: it was based on "a human being should not..." But then I routinely violated my own standards without thinking about it, in fact I did very many things I should have never considered, and I really didn't know enough about real life to have any real basis for my judgments concerning other people's behavior. But I've had reason to look back on my past actions and factor them in to the ethical standards I've had the luxury of coming up with, so now I think I know what I'm talking about when I talk about morality.

Here's one example: every active member of Hamas should have expected that whatever he did while invading Israel would be done to him and/or his family and neighbors, both in terms of him as a human being and as a Hamas fighter. I'd like to expect him to apply the golden rule to Israelis at a music festival, for example to take prisoners alive and with minimal harm, i.e. acting with the moral right to expect the IDF to not summarily destroy whole cities. His morality might dictate he avoid provoking a "disproportionate" retaliation, at least. Especially considering the behavior the IDF has should in very many circumstances over a few generations.

But that's not what they did: by treating random people at a concert as embodiments of The Enemy they surrendered the moral right to expect that their people would treated humanely, or at least according to what we'd like to expect of soldiers in wartime. The flip side of the golden rule is "an eye for an eye," and if we value human well-being and human dignity, even if only for our own kind, we should keep that in mind while we make war.

In a world run according to the golden rule there would be no Israel, at least not like this one. But morality is neither natural nor universal: we are not born with any morality whatsoever, and the fact that we can articulate moral rules, let alone follow them or not, comes from our species being a total fluke. In real life following anything like the golden rule consistently is the difficult, and the difficulty increases with the complexity of the society and the number of people on Earth.

For example I very often buy from Walmart and Amazon, whose practices toward their workers violate the rules we're supposed to expect from employers. But I can't afford not to, because for one thing I need things delivered. Shutting down Amazon and Walmart would greatly inconvenience me, let alone the workers and their families. If America didn't have Walmart and Amazon we'd need to invent them, because of the way our society actually works. In a moral world there would be no Walmart, nor any need for one, but as it happens I have to be able to order a kitchen sink stopper/strainer for $1.59 and have it brought to this building. And whether I should apologize to anyone involved in that process would depend on how badly s/he needs that job, shouldn't it?

Even following the morals I'd like to apply to myself would be very difficult: in practical terms in my current physical condition I'd have to be homeless and do without SSI.  Which might damn well kill me.  So to spare myself that injury I'd be obligated to kill myself, because as I see it it's immoral to put anyone in that position, even for me to do it to myself. "Die rather than commit," as the great rabbis put it.

So I try to do the best I can come up with in my own life, to at least not seek to harm anyone directly, which gives me the right to expect to be left alone to get on with my life.  I'm even able to try to benefit some of my peers directly, which maybe I should do. 

What the world should expect of me must depend on who I am and the circumstances I find myself in. So I would die rather than shoot you and rape your daughters, indeed I should not do that to anybody, and I'd prefer that nobody do such things. But I decide what my morality must consist of, and nobody has the right to force me to think or do otherwise.

I am a fluke in a species of flukes. It would be impossible for great numbers of Americans to practice my morality, let alone the general run of human beings, and it would be unjust to expect them to. But then according to my rules our species should go extinct, or at least be drastically reduced in numbers and capability to cause harm.

So sitting here looking at the world out there I can say that everybody ought to be able to live at least as well as I do. But the flip side is that because that is practically impossible. So it's regrettable that the people of Gaza should die in the ways that they do, but in a global scale a few hundred thousand deaths is a good start. Morally speaking human existence has become an abomination. Even out behavior toward our own species is inexcusable. Look at the Middle East, for example.

As I see it, in absolute moral terms the only permissible action is suicide. That would be the most moral thing I could do, and I have reason to suggest that as many people as possible should follow my example. But then whether they should or not should depend on who they are and their situation, shouldn't it?

So from where I sit I can say all human beings  should have the same morality and work to make our species go extinct. But then I would say that, wouldn't I.