I think you are absolutely correct. It's about beauty in the end. (I hesitate to say aesthetic, because the term seems to limit beauty to the sensible realm.) And how interesting it is that you describe traditionalists with the contrast between "purity and polution". Sounds very much like the Mosaic laws.
I agree. Genuine morality is beautiful but it is not quite aesthetic. I should read up more on that. I’m sure there are some good discussions on this.
There are many kinds of traditionalists. But the main thing I don’t like is identifying a law that has a propositional form with genuine morality. I actually don’t think this is possible—and it is what many “Trads” like to do. It’s also what is most often criticized.
Super interesting article, enjoyed it very much. This idea for discovering ”self evident ethical action”, as being possible in the inner self, is somewhat similar to Kants Categorical Imperative. There are though some differences in the ”origin” of the moral feeling, and your moral feeling doesn’t make claims on what other people should do.
It’s a very interesting idea. I have had similar, although not as clearly articulated, thoughts on this matter. That which is right is that which seems natural and good to you yourself. The ”self” is capable of absolute moral determination it seems, at least from my vantage point. I don’t think every person has this ability, something you and allheart have spoken about in the scheler book club… either way, I enjoyed the read very much.
It’s different from Kant in that there is no formal principle guiding everything. This is really downstream from Scheler, who has a very good critique of Kant. Hans Reiner’s Duty and Obligation does as well. I’m basically continuing that tradition, which has no popular name today.
And I agree. Som people can only understand morality in terms of mores.
As a full fledged nerd, your writing’s great to read. The issue we have in thought for me is purely literary. Definitions used to be called senses, so that words could have several meanings or senses, they probably should not have more than 5, like us humans do, but we pushed past that with ease. When we speak of morality we get into the labyrinth of language. Some of us had mean old ladies to shout about definitions, who differentiate morality as consensus based and ethics as individual or at least small group based. Largely this sense of language went away. They used to talk about the protestant work ethic, which would end up being an aesthetic quality, a devotion to craft, being prepared for work and nervous of appearing lazy. Because ethics and aesthetics are mostly inseparable in reality, it happens with bald men who feel as if losing their hair and shaving their head signals evidence of an adaptation to the stress of leadership or effort. It gets very hard to talk about mores, morals and ethics, because of the over corporatization of life. We get punished for community standards violations that are not explicitly set by a community, because the community is undefined. They largely removed ethics and aesthetics from topics of discussion, no one really talks about individual choices anymore how they used to. Largely individuals would like to do right for the community at large and can not define what that community is
It’s very hard to talk about this stuff in general. Older traditions that have a similar distinction often just give up and hold that we can’t talk about these things. But I think we have better tools these days. It’s still very challenging though. Glad you got something out of it.
one of my favorite words is chronolect, which is a dialect based on time. That's where it gets weird for me, because most of us have arguments in different chronolects, because where you say mores, I could easily ethics. Which died because of government's over reach, no one's supposed to have their own decisions anymore. It's amazing to see unfold in the course of 10 years or so
Great essay! I used to think about a different but comparable division of morality into four kinds of "behavioral regulation strategies".
(1) families and tribes using their relationships and love for each other as leverage and motivation to treat eachother pro-socially.
(2) cities and empires using physical force and logic (laws) to appeal to self-preservation and thus incentivize pro-social behaviour between strangers.
(3) philosophers and religions using myths and rules to make laws into abstract principles with emotional weight behind them, often hijacking and exaggerating emotions like guilt.
(4) the primordial desrie for goodnees and safety that makes us value pro-social behaviors in the first place.
These might be divisions, not of morality itself but of strategies for upholding it. Anyway I like the mores / true morality distinction and I'll have to think about it some.
I don't agree with this division and I will explain why. I simply do not think we can differentiate between mores and virtues so easily because the division between the individual and social spheres are so porous. I agree generally that the locus of morality is the individual. However, I don't believe most people are inherently virtuous. We may all share a conscience, but many people lack the willpower to act out what their conscience dictates. I think if we were to dissolve mores and rely upon individual virtues, the result would be a rather base society at best and complete chaos at worst. Do correct me if I am mischaracterizing your view.
I am not sure what your religious views are, but I will use an example from Christianity to illustrate why I think both mores and virtues are important.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, morality is equated with law. God is portrayed as legalistic, and the relationship between man and God is one of revealed law and covenant. This is a morality based purely on mores, which I think is untenable.
The revelation of Jesus in the New Testament is that law alone is insufficient for man's salvation because man inherently lacks the willpower needed to obey the law fully. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak... And so Jesus reveals that what matters equally to the letter of the law is the spirit of the law--the individual disposition of love that, when embodied, helps us abide by law. It is this that He indicates when He says "I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it."
What this shows about morality, in my view, is that mores and virtues are mutually sustaining, and both are needed to have a moral society. Mores, when used correctly, can help people aspire to virtuous conduct (even if it's through leveraging shame or punishment) where they would otherwise not be inclined to do so, and accentuating the role of virtuous disposition sustains those mores in turn. I don't think my argument hinges upon the truth of Christianity, either.
I would love to live in a Kantian "kingdom of ends" where everyone acts out of pure goodwill towards each other, but this is not a possibility, hence the need for mores.
There are, of course, backwards mores which should be abolished, but there are also some societies on earth which would benefit greatly from the imposition of mores.
You not cheating on your Czech fling is admirable, and I don't mean to flatter you when I say that most men in your position would have unflinchingly slept with the girl in Budapest.
For somebody who is apparently not interested in moral philosophy you sure have some well thought out views. I didn’t try to explain my own position, and I’m sorry if I implied that we should dispense with mores. I just think it’s wrong to fixate on those as if they were the source of moral goodness. Some Christians call this Phariseism. In reality I agree with basically all of what you say here.
What I don’t like about traditional morality is that it tends to conflate these two things, which I think we have very good reasons for distinguishing. I don’t think we should just do away with mores. They’re just not directly related to genuine moral goodness.
This opens up many interesting questions that you can’t ask if you believed that mores had moral import. How do virtues shape mores? To what degree do mores have a positive moral impact? Also, this approach basically dodges all the major critiques of moral values that aren’t just ontologically motivated.
I do not consider myself a Christian, but I am a personalist and Christianity is really the only game in town there. But insofar as Christ is”the way, the truth and the life” then I have a personal connection with him. I find the hostility towards Christianity in our age completely bizarre. I’m on the same team, to say the least.
I actually agree that most people are not virtuous, and moral goodness is probably much rarer than we think. That Budapest example (thank you btw) is good because it is so clear. There are only a few times in my life where I can recall really doing anything like that, or at least anything where the goodness of the act was so clear. Maybe that says something about my own failings, but I think there are many people who never do anything of any moral significance over the course of their lives—and they need mores to stay in line.
I also think you can’t try to be a good person, which is something I will write about in the future.
In the end, I don’t think we disagree that much. It seems that you don’t have an issue with the distinction itself but with the dismissal of mores (which was a miscommunication on my part). I hope this leads to many interesting discussions and discoveries.
Well, I'm not interested in moral philosophy because I already hold all the answers, of course.
Joking aside, I agree that we don't actually diverge all that much. I agree that most people who call themselves traditionalists are more interested in the aesthetics of the past, and not in the animating spirit and virtues underlying past ages. As such, mores over virtues, letter of the law over the spirit of the law, etc.
Like I said, I do agree that the individual is fundamentally the locus of morality, but I'm maybe a little more optimistic about the potential of mores to inspire men to genuinely virtuous conduct. I only have a problem when philosophers neglect the social or practical dimensions of a moral theory.
Kant's moral philosophy is fundamentally based on agency, which is fine in theory. But given that people in practice have very little genuine agency, this sets an impossibly high standard for moral conduct, which hardly helps inspire virtue in the first place. A moral theory, in my view, should not only focus on what constitutes moral action, but should examine how to make men more moral also.
And, to be more precise, I think I only object that mores and virtues are separable, not that they are distinguishable. And if you don't think that they are separable then we don't disagree here.
Excellent piece. It seems the major distinction you are making between mores and moral values is the source of their motivation: mores are extrinsically motivated while moral values are intrinsically motivated. The observed behavior (in your example, chastity) is identical or very similar.
I’m curious, why do you specify moral values instead of saying values in general? It seems to me that any deeply held value necessarily has moral implications. Liberty, for instance, is not necessarily a moral value, but there are clear moral implications for valuing liberty.
I am using the term value in a specialized sense. I mean value quality or value property. I had a few essays specifically on this. It is not standard usage todayg, but i am just following the guys i like here (Scheler, Hartmann, …).
In the tradition that i am writing in, moral values are just a subset of all values. They are mental values that are essentially related to other people. The sublime is mental but it doesn’t necessarily relate to others. I suppose everything can have moral implications, but that seems like a different point than categorizing things.
I think there are non-moral virtues, however. These would be based on non-moral values. But in this article I just wanted to focus on morality because that’s where the main questions are for now.
I think my point was that there does not seem to be a clear distinction between moral values and nonmoral values since all nontrivial values have moral implications. Perhaps I’m just not understanding your conception of what a value is.
Fantastic article. Like I said, the division between social convention and the inner moral life/the virtues one embodies is a well-established and Pauline division in Christian ethics, all the way back to Christ who takes such issue with hypocritics and who prefers manifest sinners to them (and indeed who are the moral superiors of hypocrites).
Since you place the sacred/profane distinction in the category of social convention, how would you integrate what Scheler says about the value of the holy superceding even that of transcendentals in his phenomenology of preferability/value?
It’s a different meaning of sacred/profane. I will do a future article on this and the errors of George Bataille. The sacred in the sense I use it there has nothing to do with the divine.
I think you are absolutely correct. It's about beauty in the end. (I hesitate to say aesthetic, because the term seems to limit beauty to the sensible realm.) And how interesting it is that you describe traditionalists with the contrast between "purity and polution". Sounds very much like the Mosaic laws.
I agree. Genuine morality is beautiful but it is not quite aesthetic. I should read up more on that. I’m sure there are some good discussions on this.
There are many kinds of traditionalists. But the main thing I don’t like is identifying a law that has a propositional form with genuine morality. I actually don’t think this is possible—and it is what many “Trads” like to do. It’s also what is most often criticized.
Super interesting article, enjoyed it very much. This idea for discovering ”self evident ethical action”, as being possible in the inner self, is somewhat similar to Kants Categorical Imperative. There are though some differences in the ”origin” of the moral feeling, and your moral feeling doesn’t make claims on what other people should do.
It’s a very interesting idea. I have had similar, although not as clearly articulated, thoughts on this matter. That which is right is that which seems natural and good to you yourself. The ”self” is capable of absolute moral determination it seems, at least from my vantage point. I don’t think every person has this ability, something you and allheart have spoken about in the scheler book club… either way, I enjoyed the read very much.
It’s different from Kant in that there is no formal principle guiding everything. This is really downstream from Scheler, who has a very good critique of Kant. Hans Reiner’s Duty and Obligation does as well. I’m basically continuing that tradition, which has no popular name today.
And I agree. Som people can only understand morality in terms of mores.
As a full fledged nerd, your writing’s great to read. The issue we have in thought for me is purely literary. Definitions used to be called senses, so that words could have several meanings or senses, they probably should not have more than 5, like us humans do, but we pushed past that with ease. When we speak of morality we get into the labyrinth of language. Some of us had mean old ladies to shout about definitions, who differentiate morality as consensus based and ethics as individual or at least small group based. Largely this sense of language went away. They used to talk about the protestant work ethic, which would end up being an aesthetic quality, a devotion to craft, being prepared for work and nervous of appearing lazy. Because ethics and aesthetics are mostly inseparable in reality, it happens with bald men who feel as if losing their hair and shaving their head signals evidence of an adaptation to the stress of leadership or effort. It gets very hard to talk about mores, morals and ethics, because of the over corporatization of life. We get punished for community standards violations that are not explicitly set by a community, because the community is undefined. They largely removed ethics and aesthetics from topics of discussion, no one really talks about individual choices anymore how they used to. Largely individuals would like to do right for the community at large and can not define what that community is
It’s very hard to talk about this stuff in general. Older traditions that have a similar distinction often just give up and hold that we can’t talk about these things. But I think we have better tools these days. It’s still very challenging though. Glad you got something out of it.
one of my favorite words is chronolect, which is a dialect based on time. That's where it gets weird for me, because most of us have arguments in different chronolects, because where you say mores, I could easily ethics. Which died because of government's over reach, no one's supposed to have their own decisions anymore. It's amazing to see unfold in the course of 10 years or so
Great essay! I used to think about a different but comparable division of morality into four kinds of "behavioral regulation strategies".
(1) families and tribes using their relationships and love for each other as leverage and motivation to treat eachother pro-socially.
(2) cities and empires using physical force and logic (laws) to appeal to self-preservation and thus incentivize pro-social behaviour between strangers.
(3) philosophers and religions using myths and rules to make laws into abstract principles with emotional weight behind them, often hijacking and exaggerating emotions like guilt.
(4) the primordial desrie for goodnees and safety that makes us value pro-social behaviors in the first place.
These might be divisions, not of morality itself but of strategies for upholding it. Anyway I like the mores / true morality distinction and I'll have to think about it some.
Interestingly enough this was my excuse for not doing a lot of things as a libtard that I would have regretted
Thanks for the thought provoking read.
I don't agree with this division and I will explain why. I simply do not think we can differentiate between mores and virtues so easily because the division between the individual and social spheres are so porous. I agree generally that the locus of morality is the individual. However, I don't believe most people are inherently virtuous. We may all share a conscience, but many people lack the willpower to act out what their conscience dictates. I think if we were to dissolve mores and rely upon individual virtues, the result would be a rather base society at best and complete chaos at worst. Do correct me if I am mischaracterizing your view.
I am not sure what your religious views are, but I will use an example from Christianity to illustrate why I think both mores and virtues are important.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, morality is equated with law. God is portrayed as legalistic, and the relationship between man and God is one of revealed law and covenant. This is a morality based purely on mores, which I think is untenable.
The revelation of Jesus in the New Testament is that law alone is insufficient for man's salvation because man inherently lacks the willpower needed to obey the law fully. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak... And so Jesus reveals that what matters equally to the letter of the law is the spirit of the law--the individual disposition of love that, when embodied, helps us abide by law. It is this that He indicates when He says "I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it."
What this shows about morality, in my view, is that mores and virtues are mutually sustaining, and both are needed to have a moral society. Mores, when used correctly, can help people aspire to virtuous conduct (even if it's through leveraging shame or punishment) where they would otherwise not be inclined to do so, and accentuating the role of virtuous disposition sustains those mores in turn. I don't think my argument hinges upon the truth of Christianity, either.
I would love to live in a Kantian "kingdom of ends" where everyone acts out of pure goodwill towards each other, but this is not a possibility, hence the need for mores.
There are, of course, backwards mores which should be abolished, but there are also some societies on earth which would benefit greatly from the imposition of mores.
You not cheating on your Czech fling is admirable, and I don't mean to flatter you when I say that most men in your position would have unflinchingly slept with the girl in Budapest.
For somebody who is apparently not interested in moral philosophy you sure have some well thought out views. I didn’t try to explain my own position, and I’m sorry if I implied that we should dispense with mores. I just think it’s wrong to fixate on those as if they were the source of moral goodness. Some Christians call this Phariseism. In reality I agree with basically all of what you say here.
What I don’t like about traditional morality is that it tends to conflate these two things, which I think we have very good reasons for distinguishing. I don’t think we should just do away with mores. They’re just not directly related to genuine moral goodness.
This opens up many interesting questions that you can’t ask if you believed that mores had moral import. How do virtues shape mores? To what degree do mores have a positive moral impact? Also, this approach basically dodges all the major critiques of moral values that aren’t just ontologically motivated.
I do not consider myself a Christian, but I am a personalist and Christianity is really the only game in town there. But insofar as Christ is”the way, the truth and the life” then I have a personal connection with him. I find the hostility towards Christianity in our age completely bizarre. I’m on the same team, to say the least.
I actually agree that most people are not virtuous, and moral goodness is probably much rarer than we think. That Budapest example (thank you btw) is good because it is so clear. There are only a few times in my life where I can recall really doing anything like that, or at least anything where the goodness of the act was so clear. Maybe that says something about my own failings, but I think there are many people who never do anything of any moral significance over the course of their lives—and they need mores to stay in line.
I also think you can’t try to be a good person, which is something I will write about in the future.
In the end, I don’t think we disagree that much. It seems that you don’t have an issue with the distinction itself but with the dismissal of mores (which was a miscommunication on my part). I hope this leads to many interesting discussions and discoveries.
Well, I'm not interested in moral philosophy because I already hold all the answers, of course.
Joking aside, I agree that we don't actually diverge all that much. I agree that most people who call themselves traditionalists are more interested in the aesthetics of the past, and not in the animating spirit and virtues underlying past ages. As such, mores over virtues, letter of the law over the spirit of the law, etc.
Like I said, I do agree that the individual is fundamentally the locus of morality, but I'm maybe a little more optimistic about the potential of mores to inspire men to genuinely virtuous conduct. I only have a problem when philosophers neglect the social or practical dimensions of a moral theory.
Kant's moral philosophy is fundamentally based on agency, which is fine in theory. But given that people in practice have very little genuine agency, this sets an impossibly high standard for moral conduct, which hardly helps inspire virtue in the first place. A moral theory, in my view, should not only focus on what constitutes moral action, but should examine how to make men more moral also.
And, to be more precise, I think I only object that mores and virtues are separable, not that they are distinguishable. And if you don't think that they are separable then we don't disagree here.
hell yeah krug got the wheels turning on this one.
looking forward to the next article
Excellent piece. It seems the major distinction you are making between mores and moral values is the source of their motivation: mores are extrinsically motivated while moral values are intrinsically motivated. The observed behavior (in your example, chastity) is identical or very similar.
I’m curious, why do you specify moral values instead of saying values in general? It seems to me that any deeply held value necessarily has moral implications. Liberty, for instance, is not necessarily a moral value, but there are clear moral implications for valuing liberty.
I am using the term value in a specialized sense. I mean value quality or value property. I had a few essays specifically on this. It is not standard usage todayg, but i am just following the guys i like here (Scheler, Hartmann, …).
In the tradition that i am writing in, moral values are just a subset of all values. They are mental values that are essentially related to other people. The sublime is mental but it doesn’t necessarily relate to others. I suppose everything can have moral implications, but that seems like a different point than categorizing things.
I think there are non-moral virtues, however. These would be based on non-moral values. But in this article I just wanted to focus on morality because that’s where the main questions are for now.
I think my point was that there does not seem to be a clear distinction between moral values and nonmoral values since all nontrivial values have moral implications. Perhaps I’m just not understanding your conception of what a value is.
That might’ve it. I think you feel values kind of in the way you see colours.
Fantastic article. Like I said, the division between social convention and the inner moral life/the virtues one embodies is a well-established and Pauline division in Christian ethics, all the way back to Christ who takes such issue with hypocritics and who prefers manifest sinners to them (and indeed who are the moral superiors of hypocrites).
Since you place the sacred/profane distinction in the category of social convention, how would you integrate what Scheler says about the value of the holy superceding even that of transcendentals in his phenomenology of preferability/value?
It’s a different meaning of sacred/profane. I will do a future article on this and the errors of George Bataille. The sacred in the sense I use it there has nothing to do with the divine.