Religion and morality are historically quite intimately linked. Religion has often been invoked as a means of justifying moral teachings. An action is immoral by appeal to the decrees of a transcendental being - its authority assured by its being transcendental. However, in this relationship it should be clear that religion does not underpin morality, but rather sits atop it. If we were to follow the course of development of a moral practice with religious justification we would see it emerge and evolve over time, stabilise into a more rigid form, become codified and then justified by appeal to divinity. The role of religion with respect to morality is to explain why things are the way they are and why they need to stay that way. But this kind of justification is quite arbitrary and insufficient to survive the weight of modernity.
First I develop my concept of relative morality. This takes a view of morality in a societal context, it is relational in that it is between moral agents and it is relative in that it is specific to each social construct in which it is situated. I think it is fair to say that most questions of morality that are of interest are between moral agents although I will refrain from going so far as to say that there is nothing to be said on morality in the admittedly purely theoretical case of a sole isolated moral agent. As concerns relative morality I posit that morals adapt to the prevailing ways of life that arise in a given society in such a way so as to preserve the status quo - they are anti-disruptive. While there is some feedback between moral code and social order, in a traditional emergent society the social order will arise first, so that without a view of the social order to be preserved, little can be said of the morals. In the case of a planned society the intended morals can be assessed against the envisioned social order. If there is a clear-view of the desired social order to be brought about, the accompanying morals can be adopted prior to or in parallel with the appearance of the new order. Because morals are dependent on the social context, where the social order is in flux, subject to continuous change, the morals too must also be in flux. Rapid social change will lead to rapid moral change. Note though that a lag between social context and codified morality is always to be expected, so that quickly changing societies are expected to exhibit behaviour that is quite out of sync with their professed moral ethos. Morals then are not only geographically specific, they are also temporally specific - they have limited domain.
Morals describe the responsibilities of moral agents to each other, including the responsibility of individuals to their societies and the responsibility of societies to individuals.
Morals are limited not only in time and space but in a third sense as well, they cannot be absolute, scale is important. In a way this simply falls under the time-limited nature of morality, but it is worth detailing on its own. Scale refers to the size in terms of complexity - defined by number of moral agents and the connections between them - of a society. As a society grows or contracts, it crosses critical thresholds whereby the moral responsibilities of its members must change in order to continue to preserve the society. For example, in a society with too few individuals to sustain itself, bearing children becomes a moral duty since the survival of the society depends on it. Conversely, in a society with too many individuals that is unsustainable in its depletion of the ecosystem, having too many children becomes immoral since it endangers the survival of the society. (What constitutes too many in such a scenario need not be the same for all individuals since the society could be highly stratified.) In comparing these two societies it becomes evident that neither the bearing of many children or prudence in such regard can be considered as somehow fundamental or absolute. Morals should aim to guide the behaviour of individuals toward the optimum societal condition for a given society. As change is inevitable, a society with inflexible morality will lead to its own demise given sufficient time as the old morals gradually cease to apply to the new conditions. However, a society with overly flexible morality will also decline, as its changing morals will undo the existing social order, and if new morals are adopted without a new order in mind, the degree of social organisation will begin to collapse.
This view of morality is as noted limited and in some ways unsatisfactory. On the question of whether such morals can tells us what kind of society we should create and preserve we must answer in the negative. It is unsatisfactory because it seems at odds with our experiences of societies undergoing transitions, where individuals pushing for a new social order are driven out of what seems to be a moral sense or duty to improve things. While I will not pursue this question here, I speculate that individuals can certainly sense moral dysfunction, such as when a society has become negligent in its duties to individuals to the point that it is undermining the stability of the society, and may therefore strive to improve things. There is always a conflict between the individual and the group, and the moral struggle may often manifest through the actions of the individual trying to reconcile a thirst for more personal enrichment with the larger concerns of the group. I use enrichment here in the broadest possible sense and consider that it could be a very good thing such as more individual autonomy or freedom or access to opportunity.
This relative morality sees morals acting (when they are working) for the good of society, toward its continual function and future preservation. Morals can be judged against their success or failure in this regard. However morals may also be assessed by their relation to the inclinations of individual agents within a society. The degree to which morals can be said to be bad is proportional to the conflict they cause with our evolved natures as counter-balanced by the benefits they confer. In short, morals are contingent upon our own constitutions. In general, as societal change occurs on much shorter timescales than evolutionary change, our human natures or constitutions often appear as a fixed background. However, across different geographical groups isolated by time we should find notable differences in nature given specific enough a population to merit consideration in the development of morals. In the present time it may be that for the most part, only artificially constructed social groups comprised of unusually similar individuals are found to have natures sufficiently different to society at large and similar to each other to truly weigh on moral concerns. As we step further into the twenty-first century and begin to potentially take the reigns of evolution the idea that natures are basically fixed will become completely untenable. Another consideration with regard to nature is its dialectical origin in inheritance and environment. Our inheritance does not necessarily fate us to moral or immoral behaviour according to the prevailing morals of the time but takes expression under external influences. Societies have always been able to shape the natures of their members and this is part of the moral responsibility of a society to its members. It is incumbent upon society to align the moral duties of its members with their internal motivations. This becomes more complicated in practise because the degree to which the society is held responsible for this alignment, and the extent of the population across which this is owed becomes a point of debate since it can never be complete or perfect.
Owing to considerations of group natures, moral codes can be roughly assessed as to their reasonableness. It may be difficult or impossible to come up with determinations of reasonableness for a single individual, but across sufficiently large populations such an assessment seems eminently feasible. Consider the taboo against indiscriminate murder in societies, is such a request reasonable? Most members of society are willing to forego their right to exact murderous vengeance on their personal enemies in exchange for their own personal safety against such aggression and the exchanges made possible within the umbra of that safety. For some individuals, such as murderous psychopaths, this seemingly universal demand is unreasonable, but provided they comprise only some small share of the population, an argument can be made that the moral code is not unreasonable in aggregate. For murderous psychopaths, all societies are bad since they make unreasonable demands not to kill, but such individuals are in poor company. In the case of the psychopaths, society has excluded them, the social order says that there is no place for such individuals. What is the responsibility of society to those individuals? Since morals here are concerned with stability, the question of how large a segment of the population is excluded becomes of paramount importance, since a small number of individuals can be essentially ignored without undermining the social order, while a large number of individuals must be catered to. Recall though that scale encompasses not just group size but also group connectivity, and so a small number of disenfranchised individuals who are highly connected may still undermine the social cohesion, thereby increasing the moral responsibility of society at large to them.
Bad morals make too many demands counter to our natures across too large a segment of the population without providing the means to satisfy or change those natures. Consider a hypothetical society (a sort of dystopia) that robbed mothers of the ability to have children and eliminated the mothering role, replacing the task of breeding and child-rearing with central authority (as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World). If the society has taken no steps to change the genetic and behavioural constitutions of its populace then it is objectively bad. We know that the mothering instinct is incredibly strong and essentially embedded in our DNA with the desire to be "mothered" as instinctive as that to "mother" so that at least some 99.9% of the population would be disenfranchised by such a society1.
The outlawing of any primal urge, if sufficiently widespread and strong within the population, by moral code must be viewed with suspicion. We have to ask what means have been provided to counter the urge. It is not the case that this is only what morality deals with, since morals also instruct on occasion to follow primal urges (the care for example expected from parents to their children).
Different morals are better suited to different societies. A society of highly diverse individuals with flexible morality is not necessarily better than one with more uniform individuals and more uniform morality. The former society faces threats to its continual existence primarily from within while the latter faces threats primarily from without.
There appears to be two general directions that our civilisation can pursue without guidance to select which configuration would be preferable (although practicality would no doubt impose overriding criteria). On the one hand we can embrace greater freedom and autonomy, giving license to our instinctive desires and seek to modify ourselves and society to make this acceptable as broadly as possible. This would in fact take the form of many directions rather than a single one. There is a need to be cautious here because individual freedom does not necessarily correlate with the health of the society and too much leads to the breakdown of society altogether. On the other hand we can reject our instinctive desires and seek to modify ourselves so that they are no longer instinctive, creating a more restrained and restrictive society. We need to be cautious here because we overestimate our ability to improve upon that which nature has honed over many generations.
In the case of pursuing greater individual autonomy, this will also run in some ways counter to our instinctive desires, since we desire responsibilities from the group to ourselves but do not desire to be responsible ourselves to the group. I hypothesise that very loose social structures with very high individual freedom are at best meta-stable and are prone to fragmentation and subsequent crystallisation as similar individuals form less diverse enclaves and establish their own sets of norms and practices increasing the demands of the group on the individual.
In practise a mixture of both approaches is likely to unfold, without any clear view or consensus as to what the resultant society will look like. As this leads to moral breakdown, large numbers of increasingly disenfranchised individuals can be expected.
Footnotes
1 There is of course the possibility of the society to placate the mothering instinct by offering artificial substitutes in lieu of changing the natures of the populace, for example allowing those who wanted to have virtual children and allowing children to form bonds with virtual mothers. Such substitution solutions are suspect because of how woefully inadequate they tend to be in practise, but it can be theoretically granted that they could be made workable.↩
References
Huxley, A.
(1932) Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus.
(1958) Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper & Brothers.
