What is morality (Lamchat in Manipuri)

Morality (Latin moralitas = manners) is a word with which we are quite familiar, but it is one of the most Byzantine words in the English language. It has connotations in ethics, society, behaviour, conduct, principles and mores that distinguish between right and wrong for an individual or a group of people. The word is so intricate that many phrases have sprung up such as moral high ground, moral fibre, moral philosophy and moral turpitude.

Moral turpitude is a fancy phrase I learnt in my college English language classes. I remember our Canadian English teacher at St Joseph’s at Darjeeling, explaining that it means an act of depravity in personal life and society. I now know that moral turpitude is a legal concept in the United States that refers to “conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty or good morals.

The teacher also explained what was meant by ‘dissipation going home’ – depraved people with unrestrained indulgence in physical pleasures going home (at the end of the night).

Morality speaks of a system of behaviours with regards to good or bad conduct, while immorality refers to a disbelief in any set of moral standards. Morality refers to some code of conduct put forward by a society and accepted by the members of the society or religion. A moral code is a system of morality that is codified according to a particular philosophy, religion or culture. They are required for societies to survive in harmony.

Religious beliefs are critical to the moral behaviour of its believers and religion and morality are closely intertwined and different religious moralities can differ from each other. These are God-centred moralities. They are often the causes of dissent between different religious communities. Thus morality has become a complicated issue in the multicultural world we live in today.

There is however, an unwritten ‘universal morality’ – one that applies to all humanity such as you shall not kill people. Different moralities are human creations. As I have argued in my books, God-centred morality is not a requirement for the modern educated people. It is freely subordinated to the ideal of what is right and wrong. It is designed to meet the needs of stable families and societies.

Morality impacts on everybody’s decisions to make a choice and that choice is directed by our conscience (knowledge with oneself), which is still a subject of scientific research. These decisions are based solely on our need to survive, rather than on a divine direction.

There is a branch of philosophy known as ‘moral philosophy’ or ethics that addresses questions about morality. For example: doctors have ethics in order that there is harmony between them, such as not poaching another doctor’s patients or ending the lives of patients when he feels like.

There is divergence as to the theory of ethics, but the ideal governing our free actions is common to all races. This is what is called the universal morality. If that be so, did morality evolve itself or is it learned. I think it is both.

Certain virtues have prevailed in all cultures and primitive societies, such as courage, justice, temperance, love and kindness. Morality is also learned by children from what they see as normal and abnormal depending on the society in which they live. For example: female circumcision is morally normal in some African societies, and is still practised clandestinely in Britain among the African immigrants.

Some studies indicate that that ‘modern morality’ is a socio-cultural evolution of different peoples of humanity. Some socio-biologists believe that morality is a product of evolutionary forces acting on the individual level and also on the group level, through group selection.

The set of behaviours that constitute morality evolved largely because they provided survival and/or reproductive benefits for evolutionary success. Humans consequently evolved “pro-social” emotions such as feelings of empathy or guilt in response to those moral behaviours.

Biologists contend that all social animals, from ants to elephants have evolved to modify their behaviours by restraining selfishness in order to make group living worthwhile. Human morality though sophisticated and complex relative to other animals, is essentially a natural phenomenon that evolved to restrict excessive individualism.

Evolutionists like Christopher Boehm (1982) have hypothesised that the incremental development of moral complexity throughout the hominid evolution was due to the increasing need to avoid disputes and injuries in moving to open savannah, and developing stone weapons. Other theories are that increasing complexity was simply a correlation of increasing brain size and group size.

Richard Dawkins in his book, The God Delusion, suggests that our morality is a result of our biological evolutionary history and that moral Zeitgeist helps describe logical and cultural origins and evolve with time and culture.

In the new theory of “Mirror neurones” discovered in 1996 ie neurones in the brain fire when another person is observed doing a certain action in imitation of the action being observed, causing the same muscles to act minutely in the observer as are acting grossly in the person actually performing the action. Research suggests that they may have a role to play not only in the action of understanding, but also in emotion-sharing empathy.

Cognitive neuroscientist Jean Decety thinks that the ability to recognise and vicariously experience what another individual is undergoing was a key step forward in the evolution of social behaviour and ultimately morality. The inability to feel empathy is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy.

The phrase ‘the moral high ground’ is often used in ethical and political parlance. In ethical terms it is a status of respect for remaining moral and upholding a universally recognised standard of goodness. In political parlance, holding the moral high ground can be used to legitimise political movements, notably, non-violent resistance in the face of violent opposition as Mahatma Gandhi did.

In political morality with nationalist movements there has been a tendency to feel that a nation will not survive or prosper without acknowledging a common morality, regardless of its content and to support what they receive from the population.

The most significant predictor of a person’s moral behaviour may have been religious commitment, but not anymore. Modernism in any religious community has helped relax obedience to such moral codes that may have been called laws, such as in the “Ten Commandments” of Judaism; the texts of “Revelation” of Christianity; the five tenets of Islam or the five Buddhist and Hindu “Niyams” (observance).

Morality began before religion. The cavemen in the Stone Age had a morality of some sort. They hunted together and shared their food. They did not steal each other’s wives. By trial and experience they developed a moral code for survival without a word from God.

In the modern society of God-befuddled humanity, different religious codes of conduct are tearing humanity apart. I like the idea of a secular society in which an individual’s concept of morality should be a life of peaceful coexistence, different groups of people doing whatever they feel are good codes of conduct, which however, should not infringe upon the other group’s moral code of conduct. A universal morality should prevail.

There is a universal morality for people – educated people, whether they believe in the existence of God or not. This is called ‘educated morality’ a more thorough morality as they have the faculty of discernment.

In short, morality is the principle that differentiates between right and wrong or good and evil. It’s simple, without all that rigmarole in this article.

The writer is based in the UK

Email: imsingh@onetel.com

Website: www.drimsingh.co.uk

16-Dec-2012 / 01:41 AM / Dr Irengbam Mohendra Singh / 0 Comments