Origins of Morality
by
Matt Giwer (c) 1994 <5/19>

      It is presumptuous of me to attack the subject but then since it was last addressed seriously there has been a century of anthropologic research. What once took a life time of work to demonstrate morality came from god now takes but a short article to discuss.
      Humans have many characteristics which make us unique and we concentrate on them to the exclusion of most everything else. Speech is one of them. Morality is another.
      We know we evolved from social animals. Social animals only exist when they have evolved the characteristics which permit them to live in social groups. It existence is identical with the definition of the species.
      We have many different moral codes as we have many different languages. We learn both our moral code and our language from birth. A human that can not grasp speech is as rare as a human who can not grasp a moral code.
      A moral code is simply what permits social life. The general rules are common to all, the specifics can vary widely. It is the same as with a language. All languages are for communicating and although they may vary in complexity and the ability to express things, it is the exceptional languages we use as strange examples.
      It is not uncommon in primitive social systems to consider their language god given and other languages to only be spoken by non-humans. We have no substantive difference in our view of morality save we will sometimes admit those who do not follow our system are still human. We do work to save them from it.
      The British pushed the English language upon the world. They also pushed the European moral system on the world. Consider the US uproar over the Singapore moral system. They do not agree with ours so they must be wrong.
      It was the same type of person who would have insisted the way to make a person understand English is to speak louder. It was not everyone, it was the sanctimonious class. The class that holds their view of human behavior is the only proper view.
      Humans also have problems with changing their moral system. It is as difficult as learning a new language. Total immersion is the usual way to learn and there are truly few who do not grasp the concept of "when in Rome do as the Romans do." It is as easy to learn as is learning to speak the language of the Romans.
      If we give linguistics some credence then language like morality is simplifying over the millennia.
      Presuming you will give the above some credence, what is my point? I hold it is possible to construct an artificial language and an artificial morality. I do not mean a false morality and we can all tell those as easily as we can tell a gibberish from a real language. I mean a morality that creates premises of behavior. In this case we can use terms like good and evil and admit that humans are sinful.
      There is a constructed moral system that did not grow up on spectators like Topsey. The one that has been proposed is based upon the following. The use of force is inherently evil.
      Humans can be evil but must never lose sight of the inherent evil of force. It is incumbent upon us to judge the evil of the force against the evil of that which we wish to use force against.
      Government has become our codification of our moral standards. It permits our morality that is good only for relatively small family groups to work for social groups in the millions of unrelated people. What is needed is a moral system that assumes force is evil to be imposed upon our governments.
      And use of force by the government must always be from the moral perspective that force is evil and must only be used to prevent a greater evil. It can NEVER be used to support a greater good.
      There is the key concept I have been building toward. Evil can not morally be used to promote good but only to stop a greater evil. (This is not an invitation to doublethink and say that not providing a greater good is evil. Honest thought does not work that way.) We need the admission that all laws are the use of force whether or not there is voluntary compliance. Thus we would not tolerate a law for the "good" any more than we would tolerate one person forcing another to do something for "his own good."
      Notice that this is nothing new. But also notice what we would never tolerate from and individual we advocate for our governments. We make no pretensions that law makers become god-like in wisdom by virtue of becoming law-makers yet we readily accept force by those same law-makers.
      We have not learned to accept that we are evil when we use force but that our evil can be justified. We must never lose sight that the evil of force must be scrupulously justified in every case. Rather we have come to accept a public morality we would never accept from an individual.
      We permit our governments to use the evil of force to promote good. The moral system I propose finds this offensive. It is hardly different from the Hippocratic oath, do no harm.