The Good Ship Morality

In our interesting times the prospect of an essentially moral universe is a comforting and perhaps necessary prospect; that there might be an essential goodness built into the space, the rocks, the sunshine or perhaps more importantly the behaviour of our fellow humans towards each other and the world around them. 

This article seeks to sail across the wide seas of the subject, with deeper dives necessary in many of the categories and destined for future examination. It will consider the history of man’s yearning for order and reason, cover some history, man’s position in the universe and various non-exhaustive responses to the moral challenge and question.  

And if, as we suspect, the good ship morality is holed below the waterline, how can we cross safely the ocean of time, amidst the current storms, but doing so in hope as we head for the New World.

Sailing on Irrational Seas

Humanity has attempted to explain and rationalise the world for thousands of years. Early humans looked to the skies and sacrificed animals or people in temples for the crops to grow, praying for rain and believing in Gods of fertility and weather and their displeasure as reasons for failed harvests or storms and lightning. The sun rose, pulled by a fiery horse drawn chariot driven by Apollo and travelled across the sky, Demeter ensured a strong harvest and Zeus fired out lightning bolts. 

The advent of the single deity replaced a western god hierarchy (think Greek, Norse, Roman) with an equally wide range of prophets and saints. This God evolved from the jealous, vengeful god of the Old Testament to a humanised deity in the New Testament, building on the magical explanation of the Word for the beginnings of the universe and overlaying a message of love, brotherhood and decency. 

In the modern age, science began to replace faith and belief with rational theory, maths and empirical evidence but formulated a potentially no less magical belief in a something from nothing big bang at the beginning of time. 

Yet is it not a conceit to imagine that humanity being able to understand and to rationalise the beginning of the universe is any more feasible for us today than it was for prehistoric man? Why should the universe be understandable in human terms at this point in our evolution and development? This is the equivalent hubris of assuming the sun circles the earth. 

Rather I subscribe more easily to Camus’ approach when he named the gap between the rational yearning of humanity and the mute existence of the universe as the absurd. We may be stood in the cockpit of our vessel, and wish and imagine we see land, telescope firmly fixed to our eye, but in fact it is a mirage and there are endless and nameless seas ahead of us and a distance between us and real land that we do not comprehend.

Innate Morality or Here Be Monsters?

Innate morality is a seductive concept. If we trust to our nature then we will know the “right thing” and “do the right thing”. We can safely sail ahead, clear that our charts and compasses remain true, that although we fear the unknown zones and their nameless monsters, we can trust our tools and experience. We can equally trust that our truest, deepest selves are as loyal and faithful as a labrador, with the sense of community and empathy of an elephant troop, or the heroism of humpback whales defending other sea life from orca attacks. 

But for every dolphin or porpoise guiding the lost sailor we have a creature that is of questionable moral compass, with or without human intervention. We can argue that the Pitbull or XL Bully, dogs that can and do kill, are taught to do so by their owners versus being innately aggressive and deadly. Sailing this course, we must however ignore the impulsive and playful cruelty of a cat with a mouse, the cannibalistic tendencies seen in chimps (our nearest animal relative), or the ugly viciousness of a hyena or crocodile. Red in tooth and claw indeed. 

There are therefore clearly good and bad sides to nature, but for every Lassie rescuing Timmy from a well, there is a Scar killing Mufasa. 

If nature cannot be counted on to display a consistently innate morality, this does not make nature immoral but simply acting in self-interest and the natural compulsion to perpetuate DNA. And immoral in whose judgement – that of humanity. 

A hyena would probably no more consider itself immoral than a lion would consider vegetarianism, or a fish consider the need for a bicycle; against a set of rules created by humanity, nature can be found wanting, but not against its own nature – an oxymoron too far. But neither is there good evidence of innate morality in humans; as we travel further from home shores, our good ship morality is taking on water, and has far to go to safe haven.  

Born to be Good or Bad?

Is it possible that humanity is innately evil and that good is learned or the evil either encouraged or constrained by culture, society or law?  There are infamous examples of individual evil where individuals or groups feel unconstrained by the “rules” and act according to their basest desires. 

Witness the individual horrors enacted by Fred and Rose West, the Moors murderers, or Jeffrey Dahmer if you want an American twist. The political and the personal can cross over – the example of the human experiments of Josef Mengele or the genocides committed by Pol Pot, Mao or Stalin. 

Evil is an internationalist it would seem. All were purposeful and premeditated acts of terror if at differing scale, with power corrupting absolutely or giving permission for the worst excesses in the service of ideology.  How to explain these levels of evil? Difficult childhoods with absent mentors? Absolute power corrupting absolutely? A belief that the ends justify the means? Or innate evil unbound? Where were the natural constraints, the restraint driven by common decency? How did these vessels get blown so far off course?

Evil can flourish in a much more banal setting: the German citizens denouncing their Jewish neighbours and turning a blind eye to the death camps, the train drivers ferrying Jews to Auschwitz and just doing their jobs. 

There is good and evil in the everyday – the rescue teams heroically putting their lives beyond risk during 9/11, the passers-by trying to protect strangers being attacked on London Bridge, whilst other watch strangers being attacked on the tube or in the streets and do nothing, not wanting to get involved.  

The Migram Yale psychological experiment in the 1961 to measure the response of people to authority was as revealing as it was unethical: when instructed to inflict pain through electric shocks on a hidden person on the other side of a barrier, many participants followed their orders even to the point of administering fatal levels. In fact every participant went as far as inflicting up to 300 volts, with 65% going as far as the full 450 volts. 

They displayed signs they were uncomfortable doing this, but followed the instructions just the same, even while listening to screams of their victims. Other experiments of separating groups into jailers and prisoners such as the Stanford Prison experiment have resulted in the jailers embracing their role rather too enthusiastically.

What can we conclude? Probably that we can be counted on to be neither good nor evil, and that even the judgement or classification of good and evil will change over time except at the furthest extremes. Neither is innate or certain, the human and natural world response can both positively surprise and horrify. 

Our rules, laws, cultures, religions are built upon this realisation that unchecked many of us are capable of the very worst when given the opportunity. It suggests that through history humanity has been more than aware of this dark side and sought to rein it in for the sake of social cohesion and safety. 

The stone tablets with God’s absolute morality were a recognition that we even need the support of a higher force to authenticate the foundations of our morality. Otherwise, it is simply your sense of morality against mine, my altruism or self-interest against yours. 

Another hole in the ship, and as fast as we bail, our ship is sinking with still no sight of land. Our crew look to the skies for hope and for guidance but above us only clouds, and some of the stone tablets must be thrown overboard to help our ship to stay afloat.

Absolute Morality or Shifting Winds?

Our sense of morality is changeable through time and situation. Whilst we may largely agree upon some of the God given rules of the ten commandments (thou shall not kill seems relatively uncontroversial as necessary to a cohesive social order), situation is everything and few would criticise the deadly defence of a family against murderous intent. 

Morality can and must flex by situation rather than be an absolute created by a preternatural omniscience. As the wind moves around us, we must trim our ship’s sails, change direction a little and tack into the occasional headwinds if we are to keep to our course. 

But this flexibility in morality can shift in other ways too and what is acceptable in one era is abhorrent in another: statues have been built for slave traders who founded colleges and were pillars of society, women were denied the vote, black people were segregated from whites, homosexuals were vilified and imprisoned for having consensual sex, state sanctioned murder was carried out against guilty verdicts. 

Society continually moves the goalposts and practices deemed acceptable today, farming, killing and eating sentient animals for example, may well be viewed as barbaric by future generations. Imagine an alien race, vastly more evolved and intelligent, arriving on earth and farming humans for food – with ET considering that relative higher intelligence and being top of the food chain is argument enough. Unacceptable enough to be the plot of a science fiction series where the evil lizard creatures send humans off planet as a delicacy. 

The role of culture represents another interesting take on morality. Evil can also be a product of a culture permitting or somehow allowing acts of cruelty such as FGM or honour killings. With the same cultural differences making an animal a loved pet and companion or to a western eye a morally unacceptable food source.  Barbecued gerbil or roast dachshund anyone? 

An Indifferent Sky

The broad picture is neither back nor white. There is everyday evil and everyday heroism. There is acceptable behaviour in one century which can be feted even and yet becomes unacceptable in the next. There is a morality of situation when one must kill or be killed. There is a cultural difference in the treatment of your neighbour, other people and animals/food. The good ship morality is holed and cannot keep to straight course, but must it therefore inevitably sink?

It is hard to support the thesis therefore that the universe is moral, or even that humanity is innately moral and that the good ship morality can sail true without a great deal of skill and effort. We have rules and religions and laws invented to try to curb our passions, our outliers, our worst excesses, almost in tacit recognition of our potential for a Lord of the Flies descent into evil.  Trusting to a moral universe or a western middle class liberal “do the right thing” is naïve in the face of history and human frailty. 

What therefore to do, is there a way to build back to morality through a Cartesian method that rejects the Matrix-like view of a brain in a vat? 

We can reject certain approaches such as morality of the strongest, might is right, the American World Police project. The victors write the history books but this is self-evidently not a basis for morality, more a basis for land and resource ownership.  

Do we choose the many over the few with utilitarianism? This is a tricky one as it denies the individual for the collective and poses a challenge to the western capitalist world and conception of self. It also then becomes a numbers game and, on that basis, surely China wins? 

Do we choose democracy over all else and how do we square the opinion of the masses being right in the age of fake news, alternative truth and the power of social media? Would we cede our right to the vote for a council of wise elders who would guide us to the right choices, laws, policies? A House of Lords as a parliament, wisdom as a quirk of birth? I think not. And is democracy more important than justice or peace? 

Finally, do the ends ever justify the means when this leads to the justification of atrocities that go against the very end project itself?  Perhaps we can at least agree on our opposition to nihilism? We could probably agree that the obliteration of the self through violent suicide, harming bystanders is a nihilistic act. However, this is not a universal view – the suicide bomber instead believing this to be a righteous sacrifice resulting in an immediate martyred path to a virgin laden afterlife as a reward.

Captain Camus, First Mate Sartre

Do we therefore despair, sinking with our good ship and succumbing to nihilism before we sight land and the new world? Surely, we cannot. As Camus wrote, “where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.” 

We must trust to the best of our impulses, seek the conditions to foster the culture and everyday morality of the good Samaritan, look ourselves in the mirror and ask if we are living up to our ideals. And build institutions that protect the fabric of our society from the worst political excesses through checks and controls. Perhaps the Deep State is not all bad if it can prevent extremist harm.

Ultimately, this is hard to reduce to a formula, even if we must. It becomes the poetic image of an arrow flying straight and true to its mark or a damaged ship voyaging to the unknown shore whilst trusting to its sailors and the accumulated charts and compasses of humanity’s history. 

If we wish to develop a more useful formula, then perhaps the Sartrean concept of choice and how to escape nihilism can help: make every decision as if you are choosing for the whole of humanity. 

Remove the purely personal and choose weight rather than the unbearable lightness of being. If you believe it is acceptable to kill then you are essentially deciding that it is equally acceptable to be killed. If you wish for kindness, then you must be kind. 

It is flawed, no doubt, and assumes a logical and rational approach to morality which forgets the passion of the moment but more useful than holding to instructions carved in tablets in stone from 2000 years ago.  

Keep the ship sailing, trim the sails to the winds, check the charts and follow the moral compass that our ancestors and our history have taught us. We can surely reach land before we sink and we must above all else invent hope.

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Steve Robson is a lapsed academic, sometime transaction banker and existential son who spends his time between Canary Wharf towers, arthouse cinemas and French cafes. A true believer that the unexamined life is not worth living and living proof that there is never an angst too far, he somehow manages to believe in nothing aside from a Camus inspired philosophy of human salvation and love, his hero’s passion for the beauty of an indifferent earth and more personally the élan and elegance of the Roger Federer backhand