September 4, 2003

No two people can view morality with the same perspective. What defines morality then? Arshia Hassan offers an insight

A common conversation on moral responsibility starts by condemning a person for a certain cruel and immoral act, and the argument slowly makes its way to an almost opposite stance, i.e., that the person couldn’t help himself because of the particular combination of his inborn nature and upbringing. Therefore, the person really deserves our sympathy.

I disagree with this type of reasoning. Consider an extreme case. A man tortures and kills his grandmother and his children. And we are made to look at the abuses that the man faced as a child, the fact that his father had similar tendencies, and are thus led to almost condone the man’s vicious acts (though we are told that the man will be kept behind bars for the safety of others).

But if we are to declare the man not responsible for his actions there is something very wrong with our system of morals. For if such an extremely vicious act is not wrong and morally disgusting then what is? And if we are told that it was wrong but not the man’s fault, we will ask if a person is not to be held responsible for such extreme wrong doing, then what will people be held responsible for?

In short the whole concept of morals is reduced to a zero, so that a system of ethics can exist only in name, if at all. To put it another way, if milk is taken to be about as black as coal, and coal is taken to be about as white as milk, the concept of colours becomes meaningless.

Similarly, if the actions of a vicious killer are justified (even though the killer is jailed), we certainly can’t have a meaningful system of ethics. Consider this: I am given something to eat, I find it stinks, and that it is spoilt meat. I am physically disgusted. I do not feel inclined to eat the meat after being told how the meat spoiled. And I don’t feel any less disgust at the stink.

Likewise, when told about the killer, I feel horrified, and my moral disgust does not (or should not unless I artificially inculcate in myself ideas that such acts are justifiable) decrease when told the ‘mitigating circumstances’.

The idea of ‘mitigating circumstances’ does creep into moral arguments (and rightly so), but only when it is felt that the person made a serious effort at doing the right thing or was at least fighting with his baser emotions. I feel revolted at the state of this vicious killer, and though I may feel sad thinking about the better state that could have been under different circumstances, it does not make me think that the acts were any less revolting.

The person is what the person has become, and when I express horror, I do so at what he has become, and not at how he reached the state. So far I have only tried to emphasize that it is okay (or proper) to feel disgust at immoral behaviour. But we need to go into greater depth as to why a person should be held morally responsible for his/her actions.

Recent theories of linguistics hint at there being a highly developed innate ability for language in human beings. In fact linguists believe there is an actual ‘universal grammar’ in the very brains of humans, such that all real world language grammars are derived from this universal grammar.

It is now being considered quite possible by some linguists and psychologists that a similar ‘universal grammar’ type structure might also exist in humans for morality, maths, art, etc. This innate mechanism gives an added advantage to humans in specific areas.

Moreover, if an individual has a particularly highly developed mechanism for one of these areas that person becomes an effective genius in that area. This idea that language, math, morality, arts, etc., may have similar innate structures coincides well with what we know of the geniuses in each of these respective ‘fields’.

In general, geniuses reach the level of competence of the average person at an extremely young age (say ten or less). Furthermore, they tend to be often obsessed by, or at least extremely interested in, their particular field of genius. And this ‘field’ tends to remain ‘close to their heart’ throughout life.

It is observed that these ‘geniuses’ can take the same amount of ‘data’ as an average person, and with the same effort and the same time, reach far more advanced results. Thus what an average person achieves through much effort, these ‘geniuses’ achieve almost ‘effortlessly’.

All this fits in so well with what is known of the ‘moral giants’ — that it is hard not to draw the conclusion that these giants are in fact ‘geniuses’ in their particular ‘field’, and their sensibility in this ‘field’ is extremely acute; the same as a genius in math has an acute ‘sense’ of math and the same for language and art.

If this was not enough to think of ‘morality as a kind of innate ‘sensibility’ in humans, we also have the reverse side of the coin as more food for thought. The similarity between idiots and psychopaths is also remarkable. Both are quite incapable in the subjects of interest: the first in reasoning and the other in moral sense, (may be able to understand what the appropriate morals are but totally incapable of having any feeling for them). In addition to this, both are uninterested in the subjects they are weak at.

Now we can come back to where we digressed when talking about how people tend to justify morally irresponsible behaviour on the basis of ‘nature and nurture’. If one listens to an Einstein, one tends to respect his ability for math, and not simply wave it aside by saying that it is only because of his innate ability or his upbringing that Einstein is able to do all this so easily.

On the other hand, when one talks to an idiot one does not concern oneself with the depth of what is being said, not even if someone was to say that so and so is an idiot only because of his/her upbringing and/or genes. The proper human emotion for a person propounding some ingenious theory would be admiration, and the proper emotion towards an idiot would be sympathy.

But were the idiot to somehow gain a teaching position at a university, the proper emotion would be disgust. The disgust is not just because of the idiot, but because of the extremely inappropriate combination of the idiot being able to get a teaching position.

We return to where we left off — why should a person be held morally responsible for his/her actions? The discussion about geniuses and innate structures is not really necessary for this argument but helps. We have (hopefully) reached the conclusion that the killer’s actions are morally horrifying. But why should we hold him morally responsible? Here we can go into thorny problems of freewill and determination, and the arguments can end up being infinitely long.

We argue that the people should be held morally responsible because it is the best way to raise a person’s moral awareness. Math is taught through math and comments on math, art through art and comments on art, and morality is taught through moral actions and, for example, a show of repugnance at immoral actions.

If there are innate structures for math, morality, etc., the argument makes even more sense, since it makes it clear that it is so much more difficult to teach morality through means other than actual moral ‘statements’ or through ‘real morality’ (showing disgust at the killer’s acts would be one such statement). Though the senses are innate, the more input that is given, the more the potential can be realized.

Which kinds of actions are morally right (or wrong)? The main theory seems to be utilitarianism, which states (in one of its forms) that a right act is that which leads to the greatest happiness for all, whichever way this may be calculated.

One problem, which we won’t go into, is that different ways of calculating this total happiness are likely to lead to different results. The obvious problem is that this theory doesn’t quite fit in with the way most people think about morals; certainly not the way the ‘moral giants’ that the world has seen and recognized, have behaved. And of course, a meaningful theory has to take such things into consideration otherwise it is not a meaningful theory at all.

Take for example the problem of breaking promises. What if by breaking a promise I can get greater happiness or pleasure than the pleasure of the person to whom I made the promise were I to honour it, (I assume that in either case, the ‘pain or displeasure’ of the other party is the same). According to utilitarianism, I should break the promise. But certainly, this does not fit in at all with our normal view of morals.

Let us go back to the grandmother killer. What if we find out that by killing and torturing his grandmother he really saved the lives of a hundred people? If the fact that a hundred lives would be saved was known to our killer, but this was not the reason he killed his grandmother, we would most certainly still feel that his act was morally repugnant.

In fact, even if we found out that he only tortured and killed his grandmother because such and such monster made him do it as a price for saving the lives of the hundred, we might still think it was morally wrong to do this. That he had no right to ‘play God’ as it were. Then what are we left with? What is morally wrong or right?

I think that a system of ethics should be based on the fact that our morality is based on an innate, sophisticated, rich, moral sense. This moral sense is every bit as complex as our language or our math ability. It may be useful to bring in the terminology of computers to explain this specialized ‘moral sense’.

These days though computers are getting faster by the month, it has been felt that some of the functions of a computer system could benefit through the use of special microprocessor chips. For example, special Graphics chips are being made to handle the extreme demands of video on computers. Though a computer’s normal chip could theoretically do the work, it would take a thousand times longer on some tasks (effectively putting these tasks out of reach).

Similarly, our ‘moral sense’ or our ‘math sense’ can be likened to a specialized chip for these functions, which if performed otherwise would be nearly (or really) impossible.

It seems to me that only such an innate moral sense can get rid of one of the odd problems associated with moral thinking, namely that if one presents the moral imperative in any other way, the morality of the proposed act tends to ‘leak out’.

For example, if I start doing calculations (even if drawing only rough ideas) before performing a certain moral act, trying to judge if variation a or b would be better, the ‘moral’ act will cease to be as good as it would be without the calculations. It is almost as if our moral sense wants to ‘go it alone’, and does not trust reason (perhaps because it finds reason far too clumsy for the subtle calculations involved).

As the moral sense is a part of us, it is not possible for the majority of people to deaden this sense. In fact, it might be reasonable to say that nobody would ever deaden any of his/her senses, including this ‘moral sense’ no more than he/she would put out his/her eyes intentionally.

Rather, what can happen is that because of scepticism in the environment, a sense can start becoming unused and can slowly be put unconsciously in the background. So that it might seem that this sense is dead when in fact it has only been dulled through non-use and not being taken care of.

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