Topics Ethics

Question Do any of the panelists think that there are any moral constants over time? That is to say, anything that all societies have rejected as immoral? It seems to me that just about everything that we regard as right or wrong is based on the society that we happen to be in. For example - slavery. We think it's wrong now, but other societies in different times have had little problem with it. So is it really a case of 'There is no good or bad, but thinking makes it so?' as Hamlet put it.

Accepted:
October 18, 2005

Comments

If you look around the world or study human history, it is easy to beimpressed by the apparent diversity of opinion about what sort ofactions are morally permissible or impermissible. Moreover, it might seemthat certain moral disagreements– e.g., concerning the morality ofearly-term abortion– are not rationally resolvable. And thisobservation can easily lead one to the conclusion that morality issimply a matter of opinion.

However, it seems to me that theevidence for a significant degree of rationally irresolvable moraldisagreement is not as great as it seems at first sight. Let’s take forexample the moral principle that one should never cause another persona significant harm just for the fun of it. I have never heard of any society or culture in which thismoral principle is not accepted.

Ofcourse, in differentsocieties there will be disagreement about the circumstances in whichit is permissible to cause harm to another individual, but I think thatin many cases thebasis of this disagreement is not disagreement about value, butdisagreement about how the world works– about how the gods might reactto certain events, about how certain social institutions might be ableto survive in the face of certain socially deviant actions, about whatsort of practices promote physical and psychological health, and so on.Further, some apparently moral disagreement is not really moraldisagreement at all, but instead is a disagreement between someone whois expressing a moral opinion and someone who wishes cynically topromote his own self-interest by cloaking his principles ofself-interest in the language of morality. And finally some apparentmoral disagreement is simply the result of the fact that in differentcircumstances, the same moral principles can have different practicalimplications. For example, in a context in which living conditions areparticularly harsh and in which the survival of the group depends onevery member contributing fully, certain types of actions might bedeemedmorally required which in other more fortunate conditions would bedeemed morally impermissible. Yet were we to look more closely at thebasic moral principles that lie behind these different practices indifferent contexts, we may well discover that they are in fact the same.