Moral absolutes

I was intrigued at two articles in today’s newspaper which I think are ethically linked. One discussed how wealthy parents buy houses in the catchment area of the best schools – pushing up house prices by as much as £500,000 and by implication squeezing poorer families away, and the second, discussing the flight of Ebola victim Wiliam Pooley back to the UK. How are these two stories morally linked?

It may seem rational in a competitive age to want my children to be ahead of other children. After all, we all like to see our child win the 100 metres so why not see them win the race for the best jobs? Or the best schools? And for a winner to exist there must be a loser – as one particularly cruel colleague of mine once observed to a student “don’t worry, someone has to be bottom”. True, but nasty.

Ethically it fascinates me because geneticists such as Richard Dawkins and anthropologists such as Colin Turnbull would agree that what is called reciprocal altruism is necessary for a flourishing society. According to the Darwinist Dawkins, the selfish gene (or to use its more accurate description, the self-promoting gene) developed as an altruistic gene. That’s right: the selfish gene is actually the gene that’s worked out that it’s in its own best interest to help others and even sacrifice oneself for others – the selfish gene is altruistic. Human beings won the survival race against the Neanderthals (who died out 40,000 years ago) and other species (whose co-operative instincts such as they are are less well developed) because they learnt to be moral. They learnt to consider the interest of others alongside, and sometimes above, their own interests.

This is important as we start the year studying ethics because one of the key issues we face at the start of the course is whether there is such a thing as absolute morality. As I point out in the section on Relativism, the terms absolute and relative are ambiguous. In my first webinar which I hope to broadcast in the second week of term, I will explain more about why it’s important to grasp the ambiguity of the two terms. Philosophers use them in different ways – which can make them both confusing.

But as a historical fact: between 800 and 600 BC the major world religion of the day – Judaism – formulated one of the key absolute moral values which forms the basis of an absolute accepted the world over. This is the idea in Leviticus 19:18 that we should ‘love our neighbour as if they were ourselves’. This radical idea is echoed by the golden rule of Jesus ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’ (Matthew 7:12) and in Islam “No-one truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself” (Hadith 13). This ‘ethic of reciprocity’ or (in Dawkins terms) reciprocal altruism is the cornerstone of every ethical system and so can be truly described (I believe) as one universal absolute.

The fact that we don’t seem to follow it in northern Iraq, or on the Gaza strip, or in the way we push our own children forward doesn’t stop it being true. What makes it ‘true’? I think the recognition that if everyone pushed their children to the front of the queue, the queue would cease to exist and become a fight: the fact that some parents are able to do it simply consists in the fact they are richer and so have power which others do not possess (to move house into a very expensive catchment area or hassle the Vicar to get into a Church school).

The better world, Kant’s summum bonum, Mill’s greatest happiness, Fletcher’s most loving outcome, always consists in recognising by an imaginative leap that co-operation may involve saying ‘after you’ or even making great sacrifices (not necessarily thumping on the door of the best school) in order to help others. It is found in the heroism of Wiiliam Pooley, the health care worker who has contracted Ebola, who was flown home this week from Sierra Leone, and Dr Khan, who died of Ebola as other doctors agonised over whether to give him ZMapp, the experimental new drug that may have saved the lives of two American doctors. They had a vision of a better world informed by absolutes such as this. Do we?

Further: have a look at this website which lists all the versions of the golden rule that exist in world philosophies and religions http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc2.htm

Peter Baron 26.8.14

Image – the Lottery Winner © the author