Society is an interesting thing. Today,
we look back on the Dark Ages and wonder how it was possible that
people accepted things like the burning of witches, public
executions, and the hard punishments for blasphemy. For the major
part of people the answer might simply have been: Because I grew up
with this. Because it has always been like this. Because society
accepts it. Nowadays society has changed, and we look back and wonder
whether people at that time were lacking an individual sense of right
and wrong, whether they didn't have a conscience. The same goes for
so many other cases: slavery, segregation, National Socialism, the
fact that homosexuality was illegal until the 1970s. And it is not as
if there were no more of these issues nowadays. Society is by no
means always in accordance with everyone's individual consience. Can
there be universal moral ideas at all? What role does our personal
conscience play? Who or what is the final judge of right and wrong?
I agree with society in many respects.
I think most laws are good laws, and that they go along with what one
usually considers to be morally right. In some cases this might seem
obvious: of course it is wrong to murder. Of course it is wrong to
steal. Of course it is right to let everybody choose their own
nutrition freely. Or is it? Even on these „obvious“ cases we can
have very different opinions—not to talk of contoversial issues
such as abortion or euthanasia. But is it really always wrong to
kill? German society and law would agree; society and law of 58 other
countries around the world would not: they still practice the death
penaltyi.
(I will not extend on the huge paradox that this implies—the fact
that they kill in order to show that killing is wrong.) And think
about it: can it really be reconciled with your conscience that there
are people dying of sheer poverty while others are wallowing in
money? Imagine a mother stealing from Bill Gates in order to feed her
undernourished, dying child—is stealing still wrong, in this
context?
In the eleventh chapter of Walden,
called „Higher Laws“, Thoreau expresses his belief „[…]that
it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual
improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage
tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with
the more civilized.“ As vegetarian, I would love to agree to this
belief wholeheartedly; I sincerely wish that eating animals was only
a stage in our development to a higher and better life. However, the
development of mankind has not exactly been a straight line,
improving from generation to generation as we would like to think.
There were many set-backs: antiquity was followed by the Middle Ages,
Enlightenment was followed by the Holocaust.
Although I am not very optimistic
about the future of mankind, I love the idea of future people
teaching their kids about how people used to eat animals in former
times, how they denied climate change because they didn't want to
change their convenient lives, how there were countries where people
died of hunger while others were so wasteful that they coined the
term “throwaway society”. And I love the idea of future kids
sitting there, gaping in incredulity like we nowadays do when we hear
about the Dark Ages. After all, it is all a matter of what we are
used to. We are influenced by what society thinks, but history has
shown that this is by no means always what is right. Yet even in a
utopia like the one I just outlined, I don't think all individuals
would agree with society. There will always be different experiences,
perceptions, ideals and opinions. Yes, if society gradually develops
to the better, people will grow up with changed values and ideas
about right and wrong. But who is to decide what is better?
In The New Republic, Thomas
Nagel states that “one of the hardest questions for moral theory is
whether the values tied to the personal point of view […] should be
part of the foundation of morality or should be admitted only to the
extent that they can be justified from an impersonal standpoint such
as that of impartial utilitarianism.” Should an impartial
utilitarianism be our guideline, then? To increase the happiness of
as many people as possible—is that what we should aspire?
Spontaneously, we might answer yes. However there are cases where the
individual consciense would contradict: imagine a homeless old man
without relatives or friends. His life is hard and lonely. Imagine he
slips, falls, and is badly injured: your concience would say, take
him to the hospital and nurse him back to health. Utilitarianism,
however, would say, keeping him alive doesn't exactly make him happy,
hospital is expensive, no one will miss him, and therefore society
will gain more happiness if we just end his sufferings the way we do
with badly injured horses.
I find it extremely hard to come to a
final answer on the question who or what is to decide about right and
wrong. Society or a impersonal utilitarianism are certainly not fit
to do so, but the individual conscience is amoral authority too
unstable and sometimes unwillingly selfish to be trusted. In the end
I think that this question can never be answered satisfyingly. We can
only hope that Thoreau is right and that society is, on the whole,
improving—whatever this may mean.
i
“Staaten mit und ohne
Todesstrafe”. Amnesty International,
21 December 2013. Web. 11. January 2014
<http://amnesty-todesstrafe.de/index.php?id=42>
Works cited:
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden or Life in the Woods. USA: Popular Classics Publishing, 2012. Print.
Thomas Nagel, “You Can't Learn About Morality From Brain Scans, The problem with moral psychology”. The New Republic, 1 Nov. 2013. Web. 11 January 2014 <http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115279/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-reviewed-thomas-nagel/>
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