Tuesday, July 08, 2014
Mores & Ethics
Mores (from Latin mōrēs or ‘habits’) is a term
coined by William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), an early U.S. sociologist, to refer to social norms that are a) originally informal in
nature even if they have been formalised, b) are more widely observed and have
greater moral significance than other social norms, and c) are attached to
greater social penalties. For example, mores include societal taboos against incest and pederasty.
Sociologists contrast mores with ‘folkways’ (also a term coined by Sumner), which are social norms
for routine or casual interaction, including ideas about appropriate greetings
and proper dress in different situations. For example:
In many rural regions, people crossing paths in the street nod and say
‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ Drivers meeting one another on remote country roads
give each other a quick wave. But in most urban regions, neither walkers nor
drivers acknowledge one another unless provoked. Urban residents who travel to
remote places may notice the difference and find the folkways unusual. The
local residents may find the urban newcomers strange or a little cold if they do
not offer greetings, but they will probably not sanction them formally or
informally. Likewise, in the city, residents may think newcomers from the
country a bit odd if they give unsolicited greetings, but those greetings will
probably not draw sanctions.[1]
Hence mores ‘distinguish the difference between right and
wrong, while folkways draw a line between right and rude. While folkways may raise an eyebrow if violated, mores
dictate morality and come with heavy consequences.’[2]
One might say that folkways describe behaviours that a
society considers right or wrong only relative to that society, in that its
possible to recognize that other societies have different ‘club rules’ and that
there is no objectively correct set of such rules per se. By contrast, moral mores relate to beliefs about moral
values that are considered to be trans-cultural and even objective in nature. Thus
eating soup with the ‘wrong’ spoon at a dinner party would be an example of
transgressing a ‘folkway’. The other guests would consider one uncouth,
uncultured or unfashionable, but wouldn’t think one was morally evil, for using
the ‘wrong’ spoon. On the other hand, using one’s dinner knife to murder the
other dinner guests wouldn’t merely be frowned upon as rude, but would earn you
a jail sentence for doing something considered morally wrong.
The distinction
between mores and folkways can be drawn irrespective of how one answers the
further meta-ethical question of whether or not anything is objectively right
or wrong in the first place, since it only requires that people believe some mores or values to be
objectively correct. Nevertheless, moral values are either Objective (independent of the subject) or Subjective (not independent of, and therefore relative to, the
subject – hence this view is also called ‘moral relativism’). Moral Objectivism
claims that there are moral truths that don’t depend upon our belief in them.
For instance, one culture may believe that cannibalism is right, and another
may think cannibalism is wrong. In order to argue that at least one of these
cultures is wrong, one must be a
moral objectivist (the objectivist needn’t claim to know which culture is wrong to coherently claim that one of them is wrong).
Suppose one group of people think
the sun goes around the earth, and another thinks the opposite. Scientists
wouldn’t say ‘These are equally true claims’, but that ‘At least one of these
contradictory claims is wrong’. In this case, we know the earth goes around the
sun; those who think otherwise, however
sincerely, are simply mistaken. Moreover, our coming to know that the earth
goes around the sun was a matter of discovering
the truth, not inventing it.
Likewise, moral objectivists see ethics as a matter of discovering objective
moral facts about right and wrong, facts that hold even if we sincerely
disagree with them. Hence, according to the moral objectivist, if there’s a
moral disagreement, the fact that some people think one way and others think
another way simply means that some people’s beliefs are mistaken. William Lane
Craig defines moral objectivism as the view that:
moral values . . . are
valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not. Thus, to say, for
example, that the Holocaust was objectively wrong is to say that it was wrong
even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right and that it
would still have been wrong even if the Nazis has won World War II and
succeeded in exterminating or brain-washing everyone who disagreed with them.[3]
As Thomas L. Carson and Paul K.
Moser explain, meta-ethical relativism or subjectivism: ‘states that moral judgements are not objectively
true or false and thus that different individuals or societies can hold
conflicting moral judgements without any of them being mistaken.’[4]
According to subjectivism, the
belief that slavery is okay and the belief that it is not are equally valid, there being no objective fact of the matter.
However, it seems obvious that great moral reforms have come about when one
person, or a group of people, have stood out against the false ethical mores of
their generation and by so doing have not merely changed things, but changed
them for the better. The abolition of
the slave trade was brought about because William Wilberforce and his friends
believed that it was objectively wrong even though it was both socially
acceptable and legal, and the abolitionists worked to convince other people of
this fact. But if subjectivism is accepted, then the change from a society that
traded people to one that didn’t was not progress,
because for the subjectivist there can be
no moral progress, only change. On the subjectivist’s theory there is no
objective value-added between slave-trading Britain
and non-slave-trading Britain
Here’s the same ethical dilemma
in general terms: Does one maintain that
subjectivism is true, and therefore accept that one cannot progress morally, or
does one reject subjectivism in favour of objectivism and so comply with the
intuition that a state without the slave trade is better than one with the
slave trade? One can’t have it both ways. Either subjectivism or our
intuition that some things are objectively wrong must go out the window. Which
horn of the dilemma is most plausible? According to the objectivist, the proposition
that some things are wrong (e.g. slavery) is more plausible than the claim that
subjectivism is true. As atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen argues: ‘moral
truisms... are as available to me or to any atheist as they are to the believer
[in God]. You can be... confident of the correctness or, if you will, the
[objective] truth of these moral utterances... They are more justified than any
sceptical philosophical theory that would lead you to question them.’[5]
Recommended Resources
Francis
J. Beckwith & Gregory Koukl. Relativism;
Feet firmly planted in mid-air (Baker, 1998)
Robert K Garcia & Nathan L King (ed.’s).
Is
Goodness Without God Good Enough?: A Debate on Faith, Secularism, and Ethics
(AltaMira Press, 2009)
Francis
J. Beckwith, ‘Why I Am Not A Moral Relativist’ www.lastseminary.com/moral-argument/Why%20I%20am%20Not%20a%20Moral%20Relativist.pdf
Peter
Kreeft, ‘A Refutation of Moral Relativism’ www.peterkreeft.com/audio/05_relativism.htm
[2] John
J. Macionis & Linda M. Gerber, Sociology 7th ed. (Pearson Canada 2010), p. 65.
[3]
William Lane Craig, God? A debate between
a Christian and an Atheist (Oxford
[4]
Thomas L. Carson & Paul K. Moser, introduction, Moral Relativism; a reader (Oxford
