One of the stupidest poll questions I’ve ever seen is where voters are asked to rank the issues which most determined their vote, and “moral values” is one of the choices. When someone says that “moral values” is his/her top priority, that means virtually nothing about that person, since “moral values” means entirely different things to different people.
In particular, liberals and conservatives have very different perceptions of what is moral and what isn’t, and I have often wondered why that is. A book that I read recently, “
Whose Freedom? – The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea”, helped to clarify this issue for me. The author of the book is George Lakoff, a Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics. Though I don’t agree with some things that he says, I did gain some important insight about morality (and other things as well) from reading his book.
The source of moralityLakoff asserts that
empathy is the source of morality. I don’t recall if I’d ever thought about it like that before, but after thinking about that statement I concluded that I agree with it. I’m not sure I’d say that it’s the only source of morality, but I do believe that it’s the most important source.
If you think about it, what else could be more important in facilitating one to lead a moral life? Empathy is the ability and the will to put yourself in another person’s shoes and understand and care about how that person feels in various circumstances. In short, it is highly related to
caring about other people – or maybe it’s the same thing. Can you imagine a person without any empathy at all leading a moral life? I can’t. And can you imagine a person with a great deal of empathy doing the kinds of things that George Bush and Dick Cheney do? I can’t do that either.
How the source of morality differs between liberals and conservativesI don’t usually like to speak in stereotypes, and I’m sure that there are some people who consider themselves to be conservatives who feel that what I have to say about conservative morality doesn’t fit them. But I think it’s fair to say that,
in general, liberals and conservatives have some very different concepts of morality.
In general, liberals perceive and live by the type of morality that is derived from empathy. For example, most liberals are in favor of government providing more opportunities for poor people than is currently the case. Why? Because we try to put ourselves in the shoes of people who are hungry, don’t have the means for a decent education, and who live miserable lives. We wonder how we would cope with such a situation. And thinking about that makes us want to change our country in ways that would provide more opportunities for people to make a decent life for themselves.
The other major conception of morality, more typical of conservatives, is the type where an infallible Authority sets moral standards which are set in stone and against which one dare not argue. For some, the infallible Authority is a parent (though they may not recognize this). Others feel that their country proclaims what is moral – which is why some people actively or passively support any war that their country declares. And other people believe that the source of all morality is God*. What all these people have in common is that they accept the word of an “Authority” as to what is moral and what isn’t. If God (or God’s spokesman on Earth or their father or their president) says that it is the right thing to do, then it must be the right thing to do. Even questioning the word of the “Authority” is blasphemy or evil.
How do these people
know that their authority figure is right? Faith. It’s not something they have to think about or even
should think about. It reminds me of a Bible study group that I once attended. The host read passages from the Bible and then asked the group if they agreed with the passages. Invariably they all did. The host would then ask them
why they agreed with it. The answer was always the same: Because Jesus said so. Needless to say, I never went back to that study group.
* This is not meant as a criticism of Christianity or any other religion. I realize that many Christians and other religious people are liberals. Lakoff says that most Christians are progressives. In fact, Jesus was a liberal. Whether liberal Christians believe that the source of morality is empathy or God is not something that I can answer. Complex causationThe relationship between complex causation (Lakoff calls it
systemic causation) and morality is another issue where liberals and conservatives tend to differ. Most things are the result of numerous causes, rather than a single cause. Furthermore, true explanations of the causes of many things are likely to be so complex that it is difficult to explain them accurately. For example, the number one cause of death in the United States is heart attacks. Causes of heart attacks include smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, genetics, high cholesterol, and lack of exercise, among other things. And in none of these cases is the cause direct, but rather the causes of heart attacks act alone or in concert with other causes to produces a chain of events that eventually leads to a heart attack.
Liberals tend to think more in terms of complex causation than conservatives do. For example, many liberals are concerned about global warming and believe that governments should take actions to reduce it, even if that means intervening in the economy. We also think about how our own individual actions contribute to global warming, and so are more likely to buy fuel efficient cars than are conservatives. Lakoff explains that most conservatives have trouble thinking in these terms. They don’t see a direct connection between their own hydrocarbon producing activities and global warming, with the attendant catastrophes that it is likely to eventually lead to. Consequently, most of them don’t consider their own individual contributions to global warming to have anything to do with morality.
The common denominator in the difference between liberal and conservative perceptions of moralityThus the primary difference between liberal and conservative morality is that liberal morality requires a good deal of mental effort. First, it requires effort to understand how other people feel, especially how one’s actions impact other people. It can require actually feeling another person’s pain. And, it requires consideration of the long term effects of one’s actions. The relevant issues are often tremendously complex.
An extreme example of this comes from a
recent interview that Bill Moyers did with Keith Olbermann. Moyers asked how Olbermann initially decided to do his scathing “special comments” on the Bush administration. Keith explained that the last straw for him was when he heard Dick Cheney publicly accuse those who criticize the Bush administration of being “appeasers”, comparing them to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasing of Hitler in 1938. He (Olbermann) believed at that point that the Bush administration’s lying and demonizing of its political opponents had reached a point where they presented a grave danger to our country. His first thought was that someone with a platform for counteracting that dangerous rhetoric ought to say something about it to the American people. Then he realized, “Hey, I have such a platform”. It would have been easy for him to rationalize that there was no reason why he had to be the only TV news journalist in the world to counteract the Bush administration publicly. But he saw something that needed to be done for the good of his country and the world, and he realized that if he didn’t do it, it probably wouldn’t be done. So he risked his career and perhaps his life to do what he believed was the right thing to do. And all of that is consistent with his stated view on morality, from a
1998 speech: “Life is defined by how much you improve the lives of others”.
Conservative morality on the other hand may not require much thought at all. It’s whatever the Authority says it is, which is often reduced to a simple formula. In Germany in the 1930s morality was rounding up Jews and other “undesirables” and sending them to concentration camps. In 21st Century United States it’s killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Iran, kidnapping them, imprisoning them indefinitely without charges or trial, and torturing them.
Arguments about moralityIt is nearly impossible to argue about conservative morality because of the circular nature of its justification. For those who believe that morality is what God says it is, how do you argue with them? If you ask them how they know that the Bible’s view of morality is right, they will tell you that their faith tells them that it is. There is no plausible response to that. Those who believe that morality comes from their nation’s Leader (i.e. the nationalists) will simply explain their acquiescence to the Leader as “patriotism”, as if that explains why their Leader’s numerous war plans are moral. And as for those whose parents are the Authority on morality (though they probably don’t recognize that to be the case), if you try to argue with them about a moral issue they probably won’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, since they simply can’t understand how anyone could have views on the subject that differ from their own.
Since liberal morality, on the other hand, is derived from real world experience, trying to understand other people, and reasoning, moral issues can be discussed and argued about. For example, in debating whether or not it is moral to assist another person in committing suicide, one can discuss how one’s decision will impact the well being of that person.
How do I know that morality isn’t handed down from an infallible Authority?It may seem arrogant of me to argue that liberal morality is superior to conservative morality. How do I know that moral standards aren’t down from an infallible Authority, as many conservatives believe? Well, I don’t know that. All I know is that I have the mental capacity to emphasize with people to some extent, I have reasoning abilities, and I have experiences in interacting with people and observing my effects on them. So why not use all those capacities to decide for myself what is moral and what isn’t? It just seems far preferable to me, as compared with taking some Authority’s word for it.
On the other hand, there are situations when a person just doesn’t know what the right course of action is. When a person lacks confidence in his/her ability to decide on the right course of action, perhaps relying on some authority figure is the best alternative available.
My personal opinion of conservative moral valuesI guess it’s apparent by now that I don’t care for the conservative version of morality. I’ve always been like that as far back as I can remember. When I was a child, my dad, who was fairly liberal and a psychologist, explained to me that a child’s moral values are determined mostly by his/her parents. I resented that, and I argued with him about it, telling him that morality made no sense to me unless it came from within myself.
Lakoff seems to me to have ambivalent feelings towards conservative morality. Though he obviously far prefers liberal morality, throughout most of his book, when he talked about the way that conservatives see the world he tried to adopt a neutral, objective attitude towards them. But every once in a while his true feelings for them came through, as he went off on a rant:
So-called pro-life conservatives are typically in favor of the death penalty… They favor conservative policies that result in America having the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world… These deaths are a result of conservative policies against prenatal and postnatal care, universal child health insurance…, Medicaid…
If they were really pro-life… they would support programs for pre- and postnatal care, health care for all children, programs to feed and house the hungry and homeless, antipollution programs, and safe food programs. Instead, they let strict father morality dominate over issues of life – that the poor are responsible for their own poverty and that they and their innocent children should suffer for it, and that government should not interfere with corporate profits through public health regulations for clean air and water.
Like Lakoff, I have some ambivalent attitudes on this matter. I agree with his rants to a large extent. But I don’t believe that they fits
all people who exhibit conservative morality. On the one hand, conservative morality drives me crazy and enrages me. I believe that it makes an important contribution to violence and wars, and therefore it is one of the major scourges of humankind. But on the other hand, I personally know some people who exhibit a conservative type morality whom I believe to be good and decent people. Enough said about that. I just don’t want what I’ve said here to be taken as a blanket condemnation of conservative morality. This is a very complex issue.
The politics of “morality”If you are convinced that moral standards are handed down by some invincible Authority, whether it be God, your country, or whatever, imagine how you might view people who have their own independent ideas regarding morality. You might view persons who proclaim to be capable of exercising independent thought on the subject as being arrogant and virtually lacking in morals. Consequently, you might view them as extremely dangerous, to yourself, your family and your country.
The leaders of the Republican Party are quite aware of these kinds of feelings, and they have taken advantage of them to constantly fuel the fear and passions of their constituency. In addition, the Republican Party elites have their own reasons for hostility to those who proclaim themselves to be capable of independent thought. If you exercise independent thought, especially with respect to morality, then you are probably going to be difficult to control. You’re the kind of person who might protest against your government if you observed it doing bad things. This kind of attitude is very threatening to conservative elites who wish to proceed with their plans with a minimum of interference.
Thus it has come about that the Republican Party has been anointed as the Party of “moral values” or “family values” or whatever they call it. Much of this
can be attributed to our corporate news media, which appreciates the pro-corporate positions that the Republican Party always takes. It is also largely attributed to the smooth coordination and repetition of Republican talking points, which constantly emphasize the high “moral” standards of the Republican Party.
Proclaiming oneself to be highly “moral” is a little bit like proclaiming oneself to be honest. It says
nothing about what your opinions or plans are. In fact, it says nothing at all. There is no positive correlation between those who
proclaim themselves to be moral and those who actually
are moral. In fact, there’s probably a negative correlation. The more immoral a politician is, the more that person would need to proclaim his or her morality. Any person who votes for a candidate based on frequent proclamations of the candidate’s morality or religiosity probably voted twice for George W. Bush and is extremely naïve. If more of us learn that lesson we’ll start electing better people to represent us.
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