On Rights, Part Five: Moral Universes

Embracing a wider ethos, as we have noted before, requires the abandonment of tribal mores, mores that admittedly once served members of various in-groups well. The evolution of tribal values into cosmopolitan values has been happening since the beginning of civilization(s) though, like biological evolution, this happens in fits and starts and never ends. It is the very nature of civilization, literally the act of living in a city. Civilization does not permit us the luxury of narrow-mindedness, not if there is to be harmony. Unless the city is utterly homogenous, a situation that obtains precisely nowhere, there will be a multiplicity of views. The keys to navigating these straits are trust and empathy, the very sources of morality. The paradox is that our morality often precludes the extension of trust and empathy.

This means accepting a set of values that, for lack of a better word, could be called "liberal." Liberal here ought not be construed in the political sense, though there is necessarily some overlap between those whose values are liberal and those whose politics are as well. Liberal here identifies a set of values constructed to embrace the widest group of people, a set of values de-coupled from the bases of tribal morality.

What are those bases? There are a couple of routes we can use to approach them. Anthropology is among the most powerful; by viewing tribal societies, we can chart how their mores differ from ours. We can also do the work of history, studying the laws of tribal societies as they were written, such as the laws in Exodus and Leviticus, or the codes of Germanic groups written following the fall of Rome in the West.

We can also use a psychological approach such as that employed by Jonathan Haidt, whose investigation into the perceptions and preconceptions of political conservatives and liberals has recently gained wide notice. Haidt, indeed, provides interesting insights into our discussion because I have earlier contended that the values of tribes are conservative and the values of civilizations are liberal. If his conclusions are correct, we should see the same emphasis in, say, tribal laws as we see in the thought-worlds of political conservatives.

Haidt suggests that there are five foundations of our moral worlds and that conservatives and liberals place different value on these. These foundations predispose us to react in certain ways towards questions of right and wrong according to the weight we place on each relative to the others. The foundations Hiadt proposes are our reactions to issues concerning harm and care, fairness and reciprocity, in-group and loyalty, authority and respect, and purity and sanctity.

Conservatives, he suggests, value all five more or less equally where as liberals emphasize the first two. The core of his argument is that conservative opposition to the aims of those pursuing social justice is born not of conservative immorality, but out of the wider—some might say more diffuse—basis of conservative mores. Issues of harm and care, of fairness and reciprocity, represent perhaps 40 percent of the moral world of conservatives while they represent a much larger portion, perhaps even excluding issues of in-group, authority and respect.

If we think of the Torah, the Old Testament laws, laws putatively established as part of a covenant between YHWH and the Hebrews and so intimately entwined with the questions of in-group, we see concerns for all of these areas. The Decalogue, for instance, known to Christians as the Ten Commandments, starts with an assertion of authority, and then touches on the other four arenas:

1. I am the Lord and your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage, you shall have no other gods besides Me. (authority)
2.  You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or in the earth below, or in the waters of the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the lord am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments. (authority, sanctity, loyalty)
3.  You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord your God; for the lord will not clear one who swears falsely by his name. (authority, sanctity) 
4.  Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall do labor do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. (sanctity, authority) 
5.  Honor your father and mother, that you may long endure on the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you. (sanctity, authority, in-group) 
6.  You shall not murder. (harm, fairness) 
7.  You shall not commit adultery. (harm, fairness)
8.  You shall not steal. (harm, fairness) 
9.  You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (harm, fairness) 
10.  You shall not covet your neighbor's house: you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female slaves, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's. (in-group, harm, fairness)

 I use the Decalogue for this example for a couple of reasons. First, it is, as we have already noted, essentially a set of tribal rules, established between YHWH and the Hebrews. Second, it is an important moral touchstone for political conservatives in the United States, to judge by disputes over its display in public places and its place in the history of American law, and so begins to at least hint at the overlap between tribal values on the one hand, and those of political conservatives on the other.

None of this, of course, ought to suggest that no political liberal values the words of the Decalogue, or of the other areas of the Laws, which show the same basic concerns. It is part of the larger point about the different moral universes inhabited by conservatives and liberals, and how this ties in to tribal and cosmopolitan ethics. My contention, which I will develop in a further post, is that as the perception of who belongs in the in-group widens, preoccupations with in-group, authority and purity will be downplayed.