(Notes 10/08/2000 - CJSC)

In this note I am

(a) taking "moral" as encompassing "social", so that by "morality" I am including social morality, justice reasoning, civic values etc

(b) including spirituality in the discussion on the grounds (see below) that morality requires its consideration.

I will look at the question of morality in two stages, the first (A) rather limited - looking at the expression of morality but not where morality comes from, and the second (B) looking more closely at the origins of morality.

The simpler first stage of this enquiry is, for the time being, to suppose that that we have values, spiritual needs and so on, without asking where these comes from or what their status might be; and then to look at how their expression is affected by our world view. The argument here would be that the new world view legitimates and encourages us to express these impulses more fully.

1. At the most basic level, the old-paradign view that the universe is deterministic undermines all moral beliefs that we ought to behave in certain ways: if all our behaviour is determined, then this "ought" seems redundant. There is an extensive philosophical literature (the subject is called "compatiblism") to argue that actually determinism need not undermine a belief in free will, but this seems to have little impact on the fact that psychologically the notion of determinism does tend to weaken our sense that we are agents of our own actions. On the new paradigm, however, there is ample scope for our free will to make a difference on the world stage.

2. At a more detailed level, the new paradigm affects the way in which we might act in the pursuit of moral or spiritual aims. On the old paradigm the only way that human actions could have any influence was through mechanical action, and this was understood in terms of the application of detailed calculations of cause and effect. This leads to a way of acting in the world based on domination and control: we try to control as much as possible, calculating the consequences as precisely as we can, in order to bring about the precise result that we desire. But the world doesn’t work like that! We now understand that

(a) the most effective way to act within an open dynamical system is to understand the changing patterns of dynamical quasi-stability (momentary attractors) and work with these in a responsive manner

(b) quantum theory (including connectivity and complementarity) suggests a quite new way of working involving changing the meaning-structures of the world in order to bring about changes through the way in which society constructs its world as a whole, entraining synchronicities within the indeterministic dynamics.

The title of this module suggests that science not merely channels the expression of existing moral impulses, but actually ‘implies’ moral values. This is a more radical prospect, and one which could make science of fundamental importance. It draws on the idea, considered in Module 1, that a "world view" includes our moral structures, so that a "new world view" may involve new moral values.

1. The origins of morality

One type of analysis of morality has been in terms of values. We value certain outcomes or states and we accordingly seek and promote these. Morality is thus, on this analysis, the attribution of value to various outcomes. Traditional philosophy sees "values" as attributes that are charged with a particular quality that marks an object as "valuable" and distinguishes the attribute from simple factual description. Thus Victor Kraft (1937 - 1951 - 1981) cites "honourable", "deceitful" etc as (positive and negative) moral values, and recognises values in other spheres (such as "beautiful" in the aesthetic sphere). For him, value is a special sort of "adopting an attitude", where by "attitude" he means a combination of emotion (attraction or repulsion) and endeavour (desiring to bring about or avoid the thing). Thus it starts off as purely personal. But then a value judgment "is a directive to adopt a certain attitude towards an object, universally and anonymously". The process of judgement extends value from the personal to an interpersonal realm, where they might start to be regarded as more objective and less personal.

The personal approach is also reflected in social psychology (at least, of the older sort that I have found!). For example, the Rockeach Value Survey (Feather, 1982, p267), determines a person’s value system by giving them two lists of 18 values ("terminal" and "instrumental" values) and asking them to rank each list in their order of importance for self, "as guiding principles in your life." The first list covers things like "happiness", "national security", "wisdom" and the second things like "honest", "loving", "ambitious". While Rockeach, Feather and others recognise that vlaues in this sense can be shared within a society, there is little suggestion that this might make them sufficiently interpersonal to be regarded as in any way objective.

But where do values come from, and is this what morality is about anyway? The philosophical problem consists in steering a path between an anarchic relativism of holding that all sets of personal values are equally valid, and an absolutism of holding that there is a concept of The Good, which might be divinely given, from which all values can be unambiguously deduced; or, more shortly, a path between relativism and objectivity. Both Kraft and, later, Kohlberg (cf Modgil and Modgil, 1986) try to do this by tracing the way in which moral concepts emerge during a person’s life. Kohlberg traces six stages in this development (with a seventh added later) passing through obedience, conventionality and contractual orientations and culminating in the level 6 morality of individual principles of conscience, characterised by:

Orientation not only toward existing social rules, but also toward the conscience as a directing agent, mutual trust and respect, and principles of moral choice involving logical universalities and consistency.

Action is controlled by internalized ideals that exert a pressure to act accordingly regardless of the reactions of others in the immediate environment.

If one acts otherwise, self-condemnation and guilt result.

The characteristic of levels 5 and 6 is the transition to reasoning based on principles of justice. The idea here is that personal development traces a path that transcends the egoistic and social, achieving a final stage which is normative in relation to the previous stages. The perspective of the final stage makes sense of the earlier stage, and makes particular moral judgments objective to the extent that everyone sharing the view at stage 6 will agree on the moral judgments that it implies. But then, where is this hierarchy to stop? Do we not need some meta-theory in order to justify a particular level 6 stand? Robert Carter (in Modgil and Modgil, op cit, p 17) writes that

For someone to understand fully why someone holds the position that he or she does, it is necessary to ‘initiate’ that person into one’s overall perspective, or weltanschauung. This is precisely what Stage 7 thinking is meant to supply. In other words, for Kohlberg to explain, and to philosophically justify his views on normative matters, he must weave a life-tapestry in which he tells us what his assumptions are, and why they are instrumental in bringing about (1) a life of the kind that he selects, (2) in accordance with specific moral requirements and boundaries, (3) in accordance with a vision of individual human development and (4) those social structures which he values. All of these are further imbedded in a metaphysics/ethics/religion which affords the widest context and support for one’s strictly moral conclusions. A moral system is but one among several moral systems, which themselves are subsets of the set of more embracing speculative systems dealing with the cosmos and our place in it. Stage 7 is the fullest account which one can give of why one’s moral assumptions make sense, given one’s perspective on man, the cosmos, and (depending on one’s view) God. No wonder that Kohlberg states that the haunting question, ‘Why be moral?’ just never goes away if one limits oneself to morality itself. He adds that religion, or ethics (i.e., a cosmic perspective) is ‘a conscious response to, and an expression of, the quest for an ultimate meaning for moral judging and acting.’ Religion, or ethics (i.e., Stage 7 thinking) supplies ‘additional social-scientific, metaphysical or religious assumptions necessary to help answer questions which morality itself cannot answer. Indeed, what Kohlberg seeks is ‘support in reality, in nature taken as a whole or in the ground of Nature, for acting according to universal moral principles’, and, I would add, for the normative assumptions which yield those moral principles in the first place. In this sense, Stage 7 thinking is implied as necessary for the justification of any stage of moral thinking.

The hypothesis here, therefore, is that it is the total world view that has to ground moral thinking. This concept endorses in part the argument of Murphy and Ellis (1996) that ethics do not stand on their own, but require support from a wider framework. They name this framework as theology. I would rather see it in terms of the holarchical world-view developed below. The world-view is broader than a rational construction, though we may and should bring rational activities such as theology, sociology and psychology, physics … to bear in understanding it; it is transpersonal in being essentially grounded in processes that go beyond the individual; and it is transcendent in that these processes are unbounded and necessarily and always draw on spheres that lie outside our current comprehension.

2. Is morality rational?

Importantly, however, once one takes the standpoint of the total world view as the foundation of morality, then it become questionable whether actions are in fact the result of moral reasoning at all. Thus Carter earlier notes (Modgil and Modgil, op cit, p15-16) that

if Christian agape is invoked, all the reasoning in the world, without love, is next to nothing, and agape. even with modest systematic reasoning, yields all. Or consider the Zen master who becomes moral by meditation whereby he discerns the state of inner harmony, integration and peace, and endeavours to express this diligently in the countless situations of life. We may retrospectively claim that these people are reasoning morally, and even that they display justice reasoning. However, they have either transcended such reasoning (Kierkegaard), or have by-passed it by the learning to love, or to he harmoniously receptive in identifying with another person in his or her unique situation. It may well be a just act, hut an interview need not reveal that the state of morality was arrived at through moral reasoning at all.

An alternative to basing morality on reasoning is to base it on empathy (raised, below, by Skolimowski) or sympathy. Charles Bailey (using "sympathy" in an almost identical way to Skolimowski’s "empathy") argues against this, however, in favour of rationality: (ibid, op cit, p 202)

Another affective phenomenon often associated with morality is that named ‘sympathy’. Various characterizations of sympathy can be given, but the one that appears most commonly to be in people’s minds when the word is used is some kind of fellow-feeling or feeling of accord—a kind of affective agreement or identification. Morality can then be construed as acting out of sympathy, and contrasted with acting out of duty. The latter is the working out, in a supposedly detached way, of what one ought to do; whereas the former is the warm, affective linking of oneself with the ends and the sufferings of another. … Morality is to be seen, on this view, as the making of the sympathetic response, an affective and spontaneous rather than a worked-out response, a matter of the affections rather than of reason. …

There is, however, considerable difficulty in accepting this view. It is not that sympathetic feelings towards others, feelings of affection towards or accord with others, are not recognizable experiences that most people have at least some of the time; though like all affective states they are difficult to characterize with precision. It is what action should be taken as a result of having or not having these feelings that constitutes the problem.

If it were the case that feelings of sympathy were universal, that is, felt by all towards all for all of the time, then there might be a case for supposing that a deity or evolution had so engineered things that if we only heeded our proper feelings all would be well for all. We would know that what we ought to do was to act on our sympathies. But surely this is not the case? If I go by my feelings as they actually are, I find I have strong sympathetic feelings towards some people, weaker but still positive feelings towards others, indifference to yet others, and weak or strong negative feelings of hostility or lack of accord towards some few. Are we not honestly all like this? Is this not the normal state about the feelings of individuals? We cannot base a morality on the existence of these various and multitudinous shades of feeling. Rather, I need a morality that will help me deal with such variations of feeling. How I react to, relate with, those with whom I most easily feel accord is no test of my morality. The real test is how I react to those I am least in harmony with, those I positively dislike. Towards such as these I can only exercise a morality that is based on some rational and cognitive awareness of the worthiness of respect of all humankind: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you . . for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.’ The spirit of this great saying has to be a matter of intellectual and principled conviction or it can never be universal.

3. The Connected World-view as an origin of morality

Bailey’s comments would be valid, but for the difference between a Newtonian world view and a connected world view. A key factor of the world view of modern science is that we are involved in connection with an integral whole. Skolimowski has drawn from this the principle that ‘participation requires empathy implies responsibility’ - leading to ‘the well-being of the whole is my responsibility too’. In this the key link is empathy. In a connected universe I do not merely observe other beings, and make egoistic decisions on what to do about them, but I commue with them through our connectivity of being implied by quantum theory. Does this allow us to make the crucial step of transcending moral reasoning, a reasoning that always stands in need of something beyond itself for its justification?

In the light of this, I suggest that Bailey’s comments are only valid so long as we (a) consider objects of value as isolated individuals; and (b) regard empathy/sympathy as "merely" an emotion (in the sense of an epiphenomenal gloss on top of real facts). Going beyond these assumptions marks the transition from moral reasoning to spirituality, from level 6 to level 7. I consider these in turn.

(a) Taking the first of these, on the modern world view the universe is not an aggregate of interacting parts, but a nested holarachy of overlapping systems. These participate in each other, and the empathy we feel is correspondingly a state of being that expands outwards through these systems. It is this universalisation that is the essence of the moral ascent of Kohlberg, but we are here seeing it not just at the level of cognitive development, but also at the level of our actual incorporation in the world as we particpate in it. We are involved not in our reactions to individuals whom we may like or dislike, but in our reaction ot he whole. This gives a universality that arises not from rational judgment (though rationality may well be involved in it) but from immediate awareness.

Thus, values are built within this nested holarchy of dynamic connections, of which our individuality is but a part. This "embededness in relationship" (Isabel Clarke, unpublished talk) includes

Relationship with the people who are important to us.

Relationship to our ancestors, to those who will come after us;

to our tribe;

Relationship to the whole human race;

Relationship to the non human species;

Relationship to the environment;

Relationship to the ultimate - to God, or however we understand it ( as this relationship literally "passes understanding").

It is this that ensures that values arising from empathy with individual beings are part of an entire world-view. Indeed the values at one level do not make sense in isolation from values at other levels.

(b) A reaction based on quantum interconnection takes us from the level of individual emotional reaction to a reaction rooted in being, to an integrated reaction of the entire body-mind to the entire external system. - it is simultaneously cognitive, affective and ontological. This dimension which goes beyond particular cognitive, affective etc modes is what I mean by the the spiritual.

In particular, it incorporates alongside the rational response a response from the more basic levels of the brain, of what Teasdale and Barnard (1993; cf Teasdale, 1997) call the implicational subsystem in their model of human mental functioning. This is a form of perceiving and thinking that deals directly with being, significance, personal impact and so on, bypassing the usual logically construed sensory channels. It is the system that is active in spiritual experience, as well as being, according to Isabel Clarke, the system which - if it comes to dominate to the exclusion of the rational propositional subsystem - gives the material of psychosis.

When the implicational and propositional modes of thinking and perceiving are deployed with a sensitivity to the real connectivity of the universe, then we reach the core of spirituality and the foundation of the moral impulse. Its essence is that - unlike the "sympathy" of Bailey, which is a one-way emotional reaction to the Other - it is a mutual relationship between the self and the Other. We value as we are valued. It is an "I-thou" relationship. Speaking from therapeutic experience, Isabel Clarke (ibid) notes:

Deep in the implicational level, the sense of loving and being loved, being valued and special, and being united with the highest value and specialness can be experienced. Such experience can give the fullest sense to our existence; well channelled it can help to openness to the fullness of relationship with all those other parts of our universe already mentioned. This love and opening brings with it a sense of responsibility - as we take responsibility for those close to us that we love - our children etc. On the wider scale, this means a sense of justice.

We thus return to Kohlberg’s conception of justice as the overarching layer of meaning, but not as a purely cognitive notion - we have a relation that is linked in with the deepest dynamic of the self, and this is in turn, through participation in the largest scale context of the world, the dynamics of the universe.

4. Getting an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’

A basic philosophical position has been that a description of what is in fact the case (an ‘is’) cannot in itself imply anything at all about what should be the case (an ‘ought’). Human culture is littered with examples of the ‘ought from is’ fallacy: in the Middle Ages a social heiracrchy was thought proper because the universe was thought to be ordered on hierarchical principles; in Victorian times competitive capitalism was thought proper because the biological world was thought to be ruled by the "survival of the fittest" (social Darwinism). Is it the case that we are now committing precisely the same fallacy in arguing that being emotionally connected and cooperative is a moral thing to do because the universe is physically connected and cooperative?

Boyd discusses this on pp 43-64 of Modgil and Modgil. In our case I would argue that we are not committing this fallacy, because we have radically altered the nature of ‘is’. The conventional philosophical argument is dependent on the traditional distinction between fact and value (see 1 above), which rests on a Newtonian world view in which facts simply are there in the external world, waiting to be perceived by an ideal detached observer. In an interconnected world, however, the only source of facts is through our human participation in the world. There is no reality other than that which is constituted by the mutual participation in the world of all beings. This participation is already both implicational and propositional, already charged with value. We obtain the Cartesian/Newtonian universe of "pure facts" by subjecting our integral perception to the seventeenth century’s projection of the image of a machine, or to the nineteenth century dogma that reality is nothing but what mechanistic science sais it is. The result is not a "value-free pure fact" but a perception whose value has been distorted by a dogma that holds that the subjective side of human perception is worthless.

The connected universe thus implies a new epistemology that transcends the fact/value distinction. The ‘is’ is on this epistemology charged with intrinsic value. We need to exercise care that we do not make an absolute of this value - the system is always open, always subject to correction and revision. The new epistemology gives us an intersubjectivity that transcends the individual self; but it does not bring an absolute objectivity of the sort presumed by the old epistemology. In this way, an intersubjective ‘is’ gives rise to an intersubjective ‘ought’.

Feather, Norman T (1982) "Human Values and the pRediction of Action" in N T Feather (Ed) Expectations and Actions: Expectancy-Value Models in Psychology, Hillsdale N J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, , pp 263-289

Kraft, Victor (1981) Foundations for a Scientific Analysis of Value, Ed H L Mulder, Trans E H Schneewind, Dordrecht: Reidel

Modgil, Sohan and Modgil, Celia (1986) Lawrence Kohlberg: Consensus and Controversy, Barcombe: Falmer

Murphy, Nancey C. and Ellis, George F. R. (1996) On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology and Ethics Minneapolis: Fortress Press

Teasdale, J.D. & Barnard, P.J. (1993) Affect, Cognition and Change: Remodelling Depressive Thought. Hove:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Teasdale, J.D. .(1997) "The Transformation of Meaning: The Interacting Cognitive Subsystems Approach". In: Power,M.and Brewin,C.R.Eds The Transformation of Meaning. Chichester: Wiley.