Topics Ethics

Question There are those who believe that morality consists of doing what you like as long as no one gets hurt, and no one's rights are infringed upon. However where does that central idea that hurting others or infringing on others' rights is wrong come from? Isn't that also a moral judgment? What morality is it based on? Thanks.

Accepted:
February 2, 2011

Comments

You're quire right: it's a moral judgment. It's arguable that there's no logical bridge that can take us from non-moral judgments to moral judgments; this is a way of putting the old point that you can't derive an "ought" from an "is." But I'd like to pause a bit on your last question: what morality is this judgment about hurting others based on? And I'd like to suggest that there needn't be any interesting answer to that. Moral judgments come before moral theory, and we don't need a moral theory to be justified in making them. This is a good thing, because moral theory is a contentious area. In spite of this, people who disagree in matters of moral theory might well agree that it's generally wrong to harm others, even if they give different account of what the wrongness consists in.

As for where the judgment comes from, there's more than one thing that might mean. It might be a way of asking for a historical story, or a psychological story, or an evolutionary story, or -- quite differently -- a justification. But we can probably say at least this much without fear of going too far wrong.

First, unless we work ourselves into an odd state of mind, we don't find it puzzling that we ourselves would rather not be hurt. If someone asked "Why don't you want Ronnie to rap your knuckles?" the answer "Because it would hurt!" is answer enough. From there to the more general judgment doesn't seem like a long road. If we don't like pain, it's not hard to understand why others don't. If we'd object to someone else hurting us, it's not hard to see that others would react the same way in their own cases. At this point, a sort of "sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander" thought seems plausible. We can't expect anyone to take seriously our objections to being hurt if we aren't prepared to extend the same courtesy to them.

This isn't a "proof" that it's wrong to hurt others, and it may well not be the right psychological backstory of our own attitudes. But it suggests why we find it "natural" to think we shouldn't hurt people.

Of course, it's a further question whether hurting others and not infringing on their rights are all there is to morality. But it doesn't seem so puzzling, does it, that the first of these should be part of the story?