Wednesday, January 13, 2016

The shifting sources of morality

I am finding Steven Pinker's book to be the gift that keeps on giving. He asks the question about the sources of our moral thinking, and notes that they change over time. This effects society. His descriptions of the sources of morality are complex but for my purposes I can just look at three:
Communal sharing; the idea that members of a group share things fairly with each other
Authority ranking: the idea that authority figures can tell us what to do in certain circumstances
Equality matching: being fair to all (a further development of this is Market Pricing, giving everything a cost.)

The trend through history has been a change in moral basis from Communal Sharing to Authority Ranking to Equality Matching. Look at the last two particularly. The sorts of morality that come from  Authority Ranking are these (the authority being God, King, or government, for example):

Blasphemy
Sabbath Keeping
Heresy
Insubordination
Lese Majeste
Homosexuality

Ie: harm is not obviously done to others in these acts but authority is defied.

The sorts of morality that come from Equality matching are these:
Murder,
Theft
Adultery
Slander


Where people are clearly harmed by the actions of others.

Several things come from this:
1. People whose moral basis is mostly equality matching (who are usually liberals) and people whose basis is both of those (who are usually conservatives) are both fully functioning moral beings, using their moral capacities as best they can, but plugged into different outlets.

2. It is possible to see a flow in history from one source of morality to another, or from a mixed set of sources to just one.

3. This explains the loss felt by conservatives as a background of Christian authority fades.

4. But it is striking how much the Hebrew prophets, and Christ himself, and the apostles stressed equality matching over authority ranking:
-- 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice'
-- circumcision and uncircumcision are nothing: what matters is faith working through love'
-- Love God, love your neighbour: on that hangs all the Law and the Prophets
-- 'live a life of love'
-- religion that is pure is this.. Help the widows and orphans in their distress and keep yourself unpolluted by the world.

5. The Christian faith does believe in submission to authority, to God, to government, to leadership but it is nothing like as obsessed with authority ranking as many distortions of the faith over the centuries: see Christ's criticism of the Pharisees; or what many forms of Islam look like to Christian observers -- legalistic and power and control obsessed.

6. E Stanley JOnes urged us to 'baptise' history rather than fight it. It can be argued that the changes in moral source as people mix more and learn more are not something we should resist as Christians, so much as allow us to re-interprets our own faith, and then join the conversation.

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