Moral absolutes and uncomfortable questions

In earlier posts on the nature of morality, I've made the distinction between (1) real morality, which is an evolved instinct in humans and comes naturally to almost all of us, and without which human social organization would be impossible; and (2) taboos, the arbitrary and random prohibitions imposed by local religions and cultures -- against eating pork, homosexuality, trimming one's beard, speaking certain words, working on certain days of the week, etc.

This distinction allows us to accept that real morality is absolute and invariable (at least within our species) even though the taboos which many people mistake for morality vary dramatically from culture to culture and from era to era.  But I've come to suspect that it's not that simple -- that there are some areas of morality which are too deep to be considered mere taboo but which are also subject to disagreement or variation that I don't think can be squared with morality being an immutable inborn trait.

In this post I'll discuss two such cases that especially concern me.  As always, my interest here is in the concrete, the pragmatic, the real world -- not in airy philosophizing abstracted from the specific.

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1.  Meat-eating

From my viewpoint, the immorality of meat-eating is self-evident.  Doing it requires imposing death and hideous suffering on other self-aware beings -- in fact, supporting a vast industry which routinely does so against countless millions of them.  Yet the great majority of humans in my culture, and in the world generally, don't see it that way.  Some may be unaware of the extent of the cruelty and suffering that the meat industry inflicts (though I don't think many can be totally unaware of at least some of it, not nowadays), but all must know of the killing, and almost all Western people today have some comprehension of the fact that other animals have some degree of self-awareness and ability to suffer, even if it is less intense than our own.

The answer, evidently, is that they assign the moral issues different weights than I do.  To them, the physical enjoyment (and the imagined health benefits) that they derive from eating meat outweigh the death and suffering of animals which is necessary to provide them with those pleasures.  In the abstract I can understand the argument, because I accept a similar one in a different context -- medical research.  If experimentation on animals (which also causes suffering and death) is necessary to prevent suffering and death in humans, then I accept this as justified because our self-awareness, and thus our capacity to suffer (and the value of our lives) exceeds that of other animals.  Human life and relief from disease outweigh animal suffering, but to me, at least, mere gustatory enjoyment does not -- not even close.

While my own position here strikes me as self-evidently correct, I'm aware that I could not prove it, by appeal to an objective standard, to the satisfaction of someone determined to reject it. This is a moral question, not just an arbitrary taboo like forbidding work on Sunday, yet it can legitimately be considered a difference of opinion.

The same could be said of other cases in which different observers give different weight to conflicting moral imperatives and thus come to conflicting conclusions -- if the actual difference of importance of the conflicting imperatives is small enough that observers can legitimately disagree about which is greater. The reader can probably think of examples without much effort.

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2.  Slavery

Slavery -- the owning of one human as property by another -- is today considered self-evidently immoral, and the fact that it once existed in our country is considered the greatest blot of shame on our history.  But if this is indeed self-evident, why did that judgment not seem to occur to anyone until two or three centuries ago?  Complex societies have existed on Earth for about six thousand years, and all of them had slavery.  Babylonia, the Persian Empire, Classical Greece, China, the Roman Empire, Sub-Saharan Africa, medieval Europe, the Islamic Empire and its successor states -- all of them practiced slavery.  The Bible and Koran accepted it as a normal part of society.  Neither Jesus nor Muhammad ever condemned it.  The judgment that slavery as an institution is immoral did not exist for the great majority of human history; the consensus we have today is an aberration which most of our ancestors would consider bizarre.  How is that possible, if the wrongness of slavery is part of the innate morality inborn in humans?

Some might point out that in primitive cultures morality applies only within one's own social group, not to outsiders, and that slaves were not considered members of the social group.  But that explanation doesn't apply in this case.  Most of the societies mentioned above were sophisticated civilizations, not primitive tribal groups.  And we confuse the issue by thinking of slavery only as it existed in the US and Brazil and the Caribbean, with slaves being imported from Africa, distinctly racially different from the masters.  Indeed, much of our modern sense of moral outrage against slavery is due to the association of slavery with racism.  But this is not typical of slavery throughout history; slavery in most cultures had little or nothing to do with racism.

In most times and places, most slaves were of pretty much the same racial and cultural origin as their masters.  Most slaves in China were Chinese, most slaves in Sub-Saharan Africa were black, etc.  Even in the medieval Islamic Empire, rich and powerful enough to import vast numbers of slaves from Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, many slaves belonged to the same Arab and Persian ethnicities which made up the dominant classes.  Slavery was part of the intricate system of variations in personal status which all complex societies have.  Financial or political misfortune could reduce a free person to slavery; in most cases, other circumstances could free individual slaves.  And everyone involved accepted this general state of affairs as normal, however much individuals may have resented their own situation.

(As an example, Abû Nuwâs, one of the great Arab poets of the middle ages, was actually a slave for much of his childhood.  As a free adult, he became the poet laureate of the Islamic Empire and a personal friend of the caliph (emperor).  He certainly was not shy about challenging the dominant values of the society; much of his poetry celebrates his own homosexuality and wine-drinking, and he expressed views on religion that eventually got him into serious trouble.  Yet as far as I know, he never criticized slavery as an institution, nor even showed any interest in the topic.)

I'm not at all convinced that the abolition of slavery, or the eventual conclusion that it is immoral, were historically inevitable.  It's not clear why this vast change of heart occurred.  Some claim that slavery was abandoned as technological progress made it obsolete, but even today, there are forms of manual labor which machines cannot replace, at least not at reasonable cost.  Also, in most societies, one of the most pervasive uses of slaves was sex, something which technology still cannot replicate.  The emergence of the consensus that slavery is immoral was a true change in morality itself, not explainable by such practical considerations.

Most advanced ancient cultures had laws which somewhat limited the abuses to which slaves could be subjected.  It's possible to imagine an alternate history in which modernization was accompanied by steadily-more-enlightened laws to make slavery more and more humane over time, but in which the existence of slavery as such never came to be judged immoral.  In that case, even in a modern technological society on par with our own, people could still own slaves, but there would be an accumulation of laws mitigating how they could be treated -- much as the real world now has laws against cruelty to animals, without anyone ever imagining that owning an animal is morally wrong.

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If legitimate differences in judgment can exist on the morality of meat-eating, based on different views of the relative importance of clashing values, then they can exist on at least some other issues as well.  If a solid universal consensus on the morality of slavery could stand for millennia and then completely reverse itself worldwide in a century or two, then in at least some areas, human morality is not absolute and immutable.

If human history and the process of modernization had followed a different course, the moral consensus on either meat-eating or slavery, or both (and other issues too) might have been very different today.  And just as in the real world, whatever consensus did exist would be viewed as an obvious and immutable part of absolute morality, any challenge to which would be greeted with righteous indignation and a lot of exclamation points and words written in all capitals.

Some aspects of our morality may be more arbitrary than we want to accept.  And if (as some believe) parallel worlds in which history took a different course do actually exist, they may be far more alien to us -- and to each other -- than we expect.