What is Morality?

The nature of good and morality is a perennial question for philosophers, and recently I realized that while I use the term good all the time, if someone asked me what I meant by that I would not be able to give them an answer that satisfied me. In this post I am interested in describing the results of my investigation into what I think of as good or moral, rather than trying to defend it as the one true concept of morality.

After realizing that I was not able to describe what goodness is, I decided to research what various philosophers had to say about it. Much of how they defined goodness, such as goodness increases pleasure (hedonism), maximizes benefit (utilitarianism), or promotes peace of mind (stoicism) spoke to me.

However, I was unable to settle on any particular one as the highest or only good because I could see how the contributions of other schools of thought were true and valuable. I needed to create a concept of goodness that acknowledged the best in each of the various ideas I encountered, as well as being consistent with my own subjective experience.

I first tried to find an objective, universal, and all-encompassing idea of goodness–a goodness that would exist independently of people and our squabbling thoughts. My efforts immediately confronted me with the reality that I could not find morality in any phenomenon except when there is human involvement. Morality does not seem applicable to the way a lion hunts and devours a gazelle, for example.

Realizing that goodness and morals is a uniquely human phenomenon to me allowed me to make more progress in my thinking. Asking myself what happens in me when I think of something as good, I answered that when I think something is good I have made a value judgement about it. The next thing I realized is that my value judgments involving goodness involve an incredibly complex set of criteria.

Various philosophers have argued for idealized virtues, our intentions, the consequences of our actions, and other ways of determining morality to the exclusion of other considerations. On the other hand, it seems to me that both the consequences of our actions, the acts themselves, and the intentions behind our actions are all important and affect the moral quality of what we think, feel, and do. Even virtues important to me such as honesty are circumstantial, as being honest about where the Jews are hiding when the Nazis knock on your door is not an ethical course of action to me.

So far my thoughts left me with an incredibly complex set of situationally dependent ideas that I could describe as good, but not a concept of what good is. I did not have the words for what was the common factor in my complex set of concepts. Eventually my thinking wandered back to how morality seemed uniquely human to me, and then it struck me that all of my ideas around goodness are based on what I think makes people more human or furthers their potential as human beings.

An interesting implication is that I have an idea of the archetypal human being that I apply in my concept of morality and goodness. A description of that archetype will have to wait for another post when I have thought about it more. Basically I have realized that what I think of as moral or good is based on what I think of as human, and what brings people closer to that archetype.

This last bit is speculation, but what I appreciate about the concept of goodness being related to my archetype of humanity is that it gives me a perspective on other people’s sense of morals. I can try to understand their morals by looking for aspects of their archetype of humanity in how they describe morality, in addition to any method I normally would use. I do not have enough experience doing this to know if it works well, but I am hopeful.