Ethics, Chapter 1: What is Morality?

It is surely tempting, if one wants to write an all-inclusive (or at least fundamentally so) treatise on ethics, to begin with a meta-ethical discussion, no matter how brief, on whether or not morality as a distinct fact of the real world exists in the commonplace sense, and if so how well (if at all) it can be known and by what form. Indeed, this is the course that previous (failed) attempts at this topic have yielded. I have come to realise, though, that this course of action is not wise, for if we are to be properly basic, we must analyse all (or the most important) of our underlying assumptions, and the most critical of these is unquestionably the nature of ethics and morality itself, what it is we are referring to when we talk about matters of morality. 

I have certainly been criticised in the past for being so unendingly pedantic in my quest for accuracy and completeness, but in this particular instance the question is not being raised simply to quash spectral, nagging doubts. It may come as something of a surprise to you, as it did to me, that the ancient Greeks of so many years ago did not consider ethics in the same way that we do today. Perhaps in hindsight it should not have been such a surprise that people of thousands of years past did not address a particular topic the same way we do today, but I digress. As a matter of fact, the Greeks did not have a word for "morality" specifically, or at least not in the way we mean it today. The word from which ethics is derived, ἦθος (ēthos), meant character, custom or habit, while the derivative of morality, the Latin mos (mōs), meant the same. 

I once pondered what responses I would get if I asked intelligent, educated people what morality was, or indeed what it meant to be moral. I found it very difficult to imagine much of a coherent answer that avoided undefined value terms such as "right" or "good" (a clue in itself which will become more meaningful later on) but even putting this aside, it was clear enough to me that no answer would or could come close to this "original" meaning. Ordinarily I should say this fact is inconsequential; language changes over time, as do ideas, and it certainly doesn't make our modern conception, whatever that may be, somehow incorrect. This is a special case, however, because of the very assumption that I am attempting to question, for the assumption about what morality is, if we include the implicit assumption that we are discussing "objective" morality (to my mind the only kind, but that is a topic for another day), is that our idea of morality, though the particulars vary from culture to culture and person to person, is and always has been universal. If this is incorrect, as it seems to be, I think it is time to start re-examining the ways we look at ethics, and the best place to start is with a little history. 

As I have oh-so-subtly hinted at, the current way morality is considered has not always been the norm. I think to anyone who has reflected sufficiently on the topic it should come as no surprise that modern morality, with its solid ideas of right and wrong and likewise expectations of reward and punishment, not to mention the strength of the notion of "social morality" and the blurred line between ethics and law, is a result of the medieval period, when the power the Church in Europe (and indeed, religion in general almost everywhere it existed) was far more direct than it is today. Over time in this highly religious cultural atmosphere, religious morality became not only the norm, but indeed changed the question sufficiently to become the very way the topic was framed. I think regardless of your religious inclination this should be at the very least a warning sign that we need not consider morality in the hard and fast sense that we currently do (though you, of course, may wish to, but then I must certainly have failed in my task to convince you otherwise). If we need not, however, what alternatives do we have, if this is all we have known? And in fact, why bother changing the paradigm at all? These questions I will attempt to address in Chapters 2 and 3.