Morality is about tolerating other people’s values.
Another take on morality and how to (possibly) deal with intolerance.
I think that what we call morality is likely often not about the content of the moral itself, but about the possibility to find agreement on them or not. What we deem to be moral is often not coincidentally also what we can easily all agree on or at least understand. The statement ‘thou shall not kill’ is agreed upon by many, not the least because it creates a safer environment for yourself and others. A more nuanced view is offered by Jonathan Haidt who explains that morality is about reputation, about others, about conventions, not so much about what is moral, but what others ought to think about you.[1]
The most famous example of such a morality that makes an emphasis on ‘agreement’ is Immanuel Kant his Categorical Imperative. This has been Kant’s attempt to derive morality out of pure reason, and I think that no philosopher has since (or before) been able to come up with a better alternative. The strength of the Categorical Imperative is not that the Imperative in itself is a value that is reasonable, but that the consequence is that it allows people to have as much freedom of values as is rational. Why is ‘as much freedom’ desirable or rational? I am convinced that morality and thus values are subjective and relative, and above all, humans are fallible. Nobody can claim to have the Truth. This means that we could never advocate the opposite, namely that there is objectively some moral or value that we ought to follow or limit. Kant his categorical imperative therefore only tries to find agreement.
There are three imperatives:
1) Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
The best way to explain this maxim is by offering the more well-known and closely associated ‘Golden Rules’ like: treat others like you want them to treat you, or: do not impose upon others what you do not wish for yourself. Kant here tries to set an objective standard viewed from an individual perspective. It is you who decides what is moral.
2) Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
Here Kant tries to add that you can set subjective goals, which he defines as ‘means to an end’, but that the other person always has value in itself, hence the ‘at the same time as an end’. What Kant possibly means is that you should never for example treat your employee for example as a resource, but as a person that has intrinsic value. What Kant is also said to have meant with this imperative is that you should always accept other people as being rational agents with a free will.
3) Thus the third practical principle follows, from the first two, as the ultimate condition of their harmony with practical reason: the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.
What Kant here tries to explain is that every rational human being is autonomous and that the will of every one of them should be such that it could be a universal law, without infringing upon the freedom of others. [2] When I turn this around, you can also state that something is only a universal law (or legislating will) when every rational being agrees with them. What I see when I read these imperatives is that it is relative because it depends on what other people think is acceptable. It is also subjective because it depends on the premise that you would like others to act in the same manner, but also because what matters is the autonomy of rational individual human beings.[3] Individual human beings are the measure of morality, not some (scientific) fact or revelation from God. How you could interpret these imperatives is that the only thing that matters is that you find agreement on, or that at least others tolerate, your moral. The imperative does not state what counts as being moral or not, only that others should be able to tolerate your moral also, no matter what it is.
Picture 1: The Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
There have of course been many critiques on Kant his work. One famous challenge is that of the philosopher Benjamin Constant. He proposed the thought experiment that if a known murderer asked Kant where his prey was located, would Kant then lie or tell the truth? Kant conceded that from his own premises he must infer a moral duty not to lie to a murderer. What could negate these obviously unwanted consequences is acceptance that morals by definition are relative. What counts as moral also depends on the situation, time, location, etcetera. This may sound contradictory to something being universally applicable but it is not. What one instead needs to do is take into account the precise situation of the moral at that time and location. This is also what judges and lawyers do in court, they try to assess whether the situation influenced the actions or decisions of the defendant in such a way that the (universal) law does not strictly apply anymore.
Another example of a magnificent moral idea that focuses on finding agreement and not on what counts as moral content, is the thought experiment of David Rawls called the Veil of Uncertainty. The thought experiment goes as follows. A group of persons needs to reach to an agreement on how to structure and organize a new political and economic structure. Each person will then start all over again in this new society, but with a clean slate. However, each individual does not know what his original position will be. They don’t know what for example their race, gender, intelligence or age will be, hence the ‘veil of ignorance’. They only know that they will be capable of participating in society and have the capacity to pursue and revise a conception of what is good or justified, but they do not know yet what this will be. What will happen is that the group will deliberate about the social structure they want to create. When everyone is ignorant about one’s status, everyone will likely strive to improve the position of the potentially worst off, since he or she might find themselves in exactly that position. This in turn, Rawls argues, will lead to a Principle of Liberty and a Principle of Equality.
Now let’s frame this thought experiment in a slightly different way. What if a group of people needed to structure and organize a moral system. In other words, decide what is moral and what is not. People do not know what pre-existing values they will have when they cross the ‘veil of ignorance’, like whether they are religious or not, or what neurological reference frames influence their values. The group cannot deliberate or decide beforehand on what counts as moral or not, since that will be decided after they cross the veil of ignorance. They can only construct a framework that enables each and every one to maximize their morals or values, independent of what they will be. For example, if you end up as a women in a society where women are not entitled the same rights as men, you would likely not prefer to be a women. In this case, the most rational construct will be a system where everybody can have their morals and values as freely as possibly, without infringing upon the freedom of others. This means that not all morals or values are allowed, since some of them can limit the freedom of others. If you for example do not think women ought to have the same rights as men, then you limit the freedom of potentially half of humanity. The difference between this thought experiment and the real world is that we do not know what morals and values we will possess after crossing the veil of ignorance, but this is the only difference. In the thought experiment we do not assume to know what is actually moral or valuable. But in reality we cannot know this either. The only difference in the real world is that we are not clean slates and it is difficult to accept that morals that might seem different than yours are equally not true. Because again, morals are subjective and relative and nobody can claim to be right or possess better morals.
Let’s construct another thought experiment. What if everybody could honestly accept that their own morals are equally valuable and right as that of any other person. These people now have to construct a moral system without privileging any one person or their moral views. Game Theory would advocate that you would rationally want to maximize the amount of freedom for every single person. The only way this is possible is by limiting those moral views that infringe upon the freedom of others. There can’t be an absolute freedom of morality since there are likely some of them that will impose restrictions upon the views of others, like when you do no grant women the same rights as men. The most rational moral system will be one that tolerates as many moral views as possible, but that not tolerates intolerant morals. We can make this rule more vivid by making the different strategies in Game Theory explicit, as depicted in the figure. The most rational outcome, when viewed from a thought experiment as the ‘veil of uncertainty’ or when wanting to maximize the gain for as many people as possible, is the ‘I am tolerant’ versus ‘Others are tolerant’ strategy in the upper left. The dilemma is however that free-riding behavior, as in being intolerant in a tolerant environment, does not get punished. If enough people choose this strategy the first tolerant environment soon collapses into an environment where nobody is tolerant, leaving you in the downright bottom strategy. Actually, the only two strategies that reasonably can achieve an equilibrium are the upper left and downright strategies, either everyone is tolerant, or nobody is pretending to be. In reality, we pretend to live by the upper left quadrant but some of us choose to free-ride and be intolerant when it suits us. Therefore, I have named this game the Tolerance Dilemma.
The outcome is hardly surprising when presented like this. Safety comes with a price, namely that you have to give up some freedom as in when we all agree that the law and powers like the judiciary and police decide and act on offences like theft and murder, and that you are not allowed to take matters into your own hands.
There is a possible way out of this dilemma. If you adjust the upper left rules into: I am (or others are) tolerant, but intolerant towards intolerance. This way intolerance is being punished. It does beg the question whether you are really tolerant if you limit your tolerance towards some behavior. The way out to determine if something is either tolerant or intolerant does not surprisingly lead us again to the categorical imperative of Kant. Something is intolerant if you act according to that maxim whereby at the same time you do not will that it should become a universal law. Or in other words, you want to act according to this maxim but not have others impose it upon you. For example, if women have to give up rights, as is the case in many cultures, then men should also be willing to give up these same rights, as in accordance with Kant’s genuine imperative. This is unfortunately not the case.
The conclusion is that morality ought to be about finding agreement on values that everybody could mutually agree on. This means that you should only act according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. This means that no one is excluded from this law, otherwise it would not be universal, and that everybody should be able to agree on it. Many morals are currently not that tolerant and by definition exclude entire populations or genders for example.
What do I mean by agreement? I think we should use the least stringent definition, namely that you do not necessarily need to believe or support the value, but you must at least tolerate its existence. There is much that we can learn from game-theory. What if we create a society where the foundation of morality is linked to the tolerance of other morals? As Kant explained, no matter what the moral is about, it should be acceptable as an universal law for all. This is why I think that morality in its simplest form is all about tolerance. We shall never fully agree on what values are important, but we can at least agree on which ones we tolerate besides our own values. Morality is not about the values themselves, these are subjective and relative. It is about how different people and their different values can coexist.
Since morality is about tolerating others peoples values or morals, we can say that not all morals are equal. Some morals are destructive and oppressive towards large groups of people, like the morality of Nazi Germany before and during World War two, just to name one very obvious one. But even more harmless morals can perhaps not be tolerated by other people. The act of tolerating the morals of other people is acknowledging their morals to be different than yours but not having objectively less value than yours. You and others accept that nobody can be right, possess the moral truth or have the authority to claim otherwise.
This theory above comes down to a social contract, something many philosophers have already written about for ages. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) for example stated that the fundamental principle of society ought to be ‘that man be willing to lay down his right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.[4] [5]
[1] Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind, (London: Penguin Books, 2012)
[2] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
[3] Something does not become objective if a large group of people agree on something, not even when the entire race of human beings agrees on something.
[4] P244, Steven Pinker, Rationality, What it is, Why it seems scarce and Why it matters.
[5] This should of course also include women, but Hobbes lived in a different time than we do.
Thought experiments are fun, but the real world doesn't enable us to invent society from scratch. We have to deal with the society we are given. The other brutal reality is that the Sovereign is mightier now than in Hobbes' day, covering more parts of our lives than the Leviathan's author could ever have dreamed of. Whoever controls the Sovereign decides what the morality is, which leaves little if any space for tolerance. To further reduce the room for manoeuvre, Shareholders decide our fate in the economic part of our lives, and they tolerate even less.
I kan't tolerate Kant. He wouldn't have approved of Poker, or any bluffing, for that matter.
Nor could he have approved of free enterprise because employing others is of necessity exploitative and using employees as a means to an end, and under the same pretext he was responsible for all the frigid people who won't have sex: "No, I mustn't have an orgasm because I would be objectifying you!" Give me Emmanuelle, she was very tolerant, but not Immanuel, he had a quill permanently stuck up his arse..