What is moral and what is immoral? You probably have some ideas about that. It can be a sensitive topic, especially if you are among those people who think there's objectivity to be found in this. But, no matter how bored you are about me going on about it, I'm a nihilist. I don't believe in objective morality, nor do I believe that any moral code is better than any other. However, if you have strong opinions on the matter, I don't want to take those away from you. Many systems of morality have inbuilt mechanisms to reinforce themselves, like treating it as immoral to question their validity. If you have such a moral code and are thus uncomfortable with discussing morality on a meta level, please stop reading now.
Right. Now that the fanatics are gone, let's talk about what may constitute a moral code. In essence, any rule that prescribes a certain behavior can be part of a moral code. A moral code can consist of any number of rules and thus limit its followers freedom to act within it a lot or only a little. That's what I mean when I talk about how extensive a moral code is. I want to make it clear that I don't want to make any value judgements at this point. It's neither good nor bad if a moral code is extensive, it's just a property of it.
The same goes for rules that can be part of a moral code. We can't say that any are inherently better than others, just that some are better at accomplishing certain goals. It goes without saying that there are certain behaviors that are so harmful to a group of people that they are prohibited by any moral code you'll ever come across. Indiscriminately killing people should be prohibited, because followers of a moral code that allows it are unlikely to survive. This brings me to a key observation I want bring to your attention in this blog post: morality undergoes a process of evolution.
If we consider moral codes as organisms and the rules that make it up as genes, we have an interesting model of how morality evolves in humans. However, we should not make the mistake to equate it only to the evolution of higher organisms, where all genes die as whole and genes are only recombined during reproduction. Instead, humans can adapt their moral code based on the situation they are in, similar to how microorganism exchange genetic information via plasmids. Don't worry if your biological knowledge doesn't suffice to know what that means. I just want to stress that we need to take a gene focused view on evolution, where we analyze the effects of a certain gene mainly with regard to the survival of that gene and not the organism as a whole.
Based on this evolutionary perspective, we can loosely group rules into three categories. First, as already mentioned, there are rules that are so universally useful that they don't require a lot of reinforcement, like not killing people or helping others who are in dangerous situations. Some moral codes might define certain exceptions to these rules, but in general they aren't questioned as this would reduce the survival chance of the resulting moral code. The second category contains rules that require constant reinforcement using the guilt, shame, fear mechanisms I wrote about in the last post. Not killing cows, not drinking alcohol or resting on Sundays are examples of such rules. It may be inconsequential or even beneficial to individuals to act against them, yet there is an at least perceived benefit if they follow it even if others don't. The third category contains the most fragile of rules. There are rules that become impossible to follow if they aren't followed by a critical mass of people. Keeping a public space quiet is impossible to you if other people are loud. Keeping a turf intact is impossible to you if other people keep walking on it. Sure, you might try to be quiet yourself or walk around the turf, but at some point this action, which may be an inconvenience to you, becomes completely pointless.
This last category of rules is why I wanted to write this post. I think that this is the main problem we tend to have in multicultural societies. A rule from this category is very likely to die if people from a culture with the rule are mixed with people from a culture without it. None of the guilt, shame, fear mechanisms can protect it. If you break the rule because you are from a different cultural background, you're not going to feel guilty because you might not even know or care about it. Shaming you for it only works if the order the rule aims to bring is still mostly intact but is also inefficient because the people shaming you are not your peers. The fear mechanism will only work if done very consequently, which is usually not practically possible.
Here in Germany, I feel like one of the main reasons people don't get along very well with people of different cultures is noise. Germans love their silence. Meanwhile, people from different cultural backgrounds have no idea how negatively they are perceived by some Germans just for being a little too loud. It's difficult to shame people who are too loud because there's no such thing as being aggressively silent. You can talk to them, of course, but it becomes hard to make your point if other people are loud as well. I don't have any data to back this up, but I have the strong feeling that the alt right parties that have gained a lot of traction in the recent years would be far less popular if only we could make some public place a bit more quiet again.
I might be completely wrong about this as well. Maybe I'm biased because I'm also bothered by the perception of everything growing louder and louder. It doesn't matter. I don't have a solution. Usually I end my posts with some kind of appeal, but I don't have one this time. "Be quiet!" doesn't cut it, because even if you are someone else isn't.
I feel like, at some point, this post went into a different direction than initially intended. I don't know if it actually makes any sense. It's quite warm, so I need to keep the windows open, but it's so loud outside. I find it really difficult to concentrate. Maybe that's why the post ended up where it did. I'll just end it here. Maybe I'll pick this topic back up, once I remember where I actually wanted to go with it.
