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Are Ethics and Morality Totally Dependent

on Environment, Heredity and Culture?

To understand the Eskimo, one must understand and share his life. He lies and steals, believing it will help him survive. He murders because of fear, or for what he believes to be necessity. He suppresses his baby daughters, not through wanton cruelty, but because he sincerely believes he is serving the general good. If, one day, he kills himself, it is because he feels he has become a burden upon the community, a useless mouth. “Primo vivere,” the philosopher wrote. “First, live!” To live. The entire Eskimo code of conduct is conditioned by that primary objective, and to it his morality has been adapted. “Primo vivere, deinde philosophare.” The Eskimos have neither the time nor the means to go beyond the first two words. And perhaps they would ask you how many caribou a system of philosophy would help you kill.

Fr. Roger P. Buliard (Oblate missionary)

Ethics is essentially a product of the gregarious instinct, that is to say, of the instinct to co-operate with those who are to form our own group against those who belong to other groups. Those who belong to our own group are good; those who belong to hostile groups are wicked. The ends which are pursued by our own group are desirable ends, the ends pursued by hostile groups are nefarious. The subjectivity of this situation is not apparent to the gregarious animal, which feels that the general principles of justice are on the side of its own herd. When the animal has arrived at the dignity of the metaphysician, it invents ethics as the embodiment of its belief in the justice of its own herd.

Bertrand Russell

A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

C. S. Lewis

[Is this a fair, although crudely expressed, statement of “consequentialism,” the theory that the goodness or badness of any action is never inherent, but is solely dependent on the perceived consequences of that action?]

I suppose we can say that there are some things that are wrong because we have agreed to act as if they are wrong for such a long time, and the acting as if they are wrong appears to be right. That’s what an ultimate truth is to me, to be really philosophical here. When something, over and over again, generation after generation, turns out to be destructive and to be perceived as wrong, and rightfully perceived as wrong, meaning everybody agrees to act as if it’s wrong and it works to act as if it’s wrong for 10,000 years, that begins to look like an ultimate truth.

Psychotherapist

[Proponents of the “Scientific Outlook” (metaphysical naturalism) have struggled long and hard to justify or explain the existence of ethical values. Their solutions stand in sharp contrast to those of the supernaturalists, whose task is much easier. In the famous 1948 BBC radio debate on the existence of God between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Frederick Copleston, S.J. the two participants grappled with the problem of ethical values. Here is an excerpt from the section entitled “The Moral Argument.”]

RUSSELL: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don’t say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.

COPLESTON: Yes, but what’s your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?

RUSSELL: I don’t have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.

COPLESTON: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?

RUSSELL: My feelings.

COPLESTON: By your feelings. Well, that’s what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?

RUSSELL: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn’t been gone into in the same way and I couldn’t give it [to] you.

Culture is not instinctive to human beings. It has to be conquered by a continuous moral effort which involves the sublimation of natural instinct, and the subordination and sacrifice of individual impulse to the social purpose. It is the fundamental error of the liberal humanist to believe that man can abandon moral effort and spiritual discipline, and yet preserve all the achievements of culture.

Christopher Dawson

Thoughts about Ethics & Morality

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Ernest Hemingway

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All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

Thomas Carlyle

Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible.

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Art is like morality. Both consist in deciding where to draw the line.

G. K. Chesterton

Ethical advances that are made in one generation are very often lost in the next.

When Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor left their respective spouses for one another they were castigated and condemned in the U.S. Congress. One congressman said, “The conduct of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is a public outrage and highly detrimental to the public morals of the youth of our nation.”

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I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.

C. S. Lewis

He who does not wish to fight in this world where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

Adolf Hitler

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I believe the artistic sense to be the true basis of moral rectitude.

George Bernard Shaw

With an intellect that big you tend to create your own moral universe.

Woody Allen

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If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose.

Bertrand Russell

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In some ways we should be more sceptical of our moral sentiments once we realize that they are the byproducts of evolution. And, as far as we know, they are morally arbitrary.

The most dangerous person in society is the thinker who questions fundamental moral and sentimental certitudes.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

Oscar Wilde

I was glad when I found Celia (his wife) was unfaithful. I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.

Charles Ryder (to his soon-to-be lover in Brideshead Revisited)

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that ninety-nine per cent of them are wrong.

H. L. Mencken

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One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal.

Richard Livingstone

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frederic Bastiat

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The ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process but in combating it.

T. H. Huxley

Practically all advanced Victorian minds proceeded on the assumption that you could destroy the religious beliefs of a nation without affecting its moral standards.

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The worst tyranny is that which imposes a higher standard of conduct than is natural.

George Bernard Shaw

Political correctness engenders a coercive culture of ritualized insincere approval. The majority feels that it’s being compelled to accord moral approval to practices that at best it only tolerates.

Michael Ignatieff

To preach morality is easy, but to provide a foundation for it is hard.

Bryan Magee

Political correctness becomes a code word for a new form of moral tyranny.

Michael Ignatieff

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

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Would an example of a moral absolute would be the assertion that kindness is always to be encouraged or cruelty always to be condemned?

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