How Is Moral Behavior Possible?
The question, how is moral knowledge possible, turns out to be the easy question. The difficult question is, how is moral behavior possible. Nearly everybody can answer the question, do you know right from wrong? Few people can, however, answer how and why they act rightly on this occasion and wrongly on that occasion. The wellsprings of behavior are more difficult to discover than the sources of moral knowledge and the processes by which we learn it. Scholars, philosophers, and scientists agree that morality is a set of behaviors(*) but they have difficulty explaining how those behaviors are activated in the individual.
When we try to answer a question, such as how moral behavior is activated, it is useful to begin by analyzing the question and classifying the possible answers. We might, for instance, classify the kinds of sources of activation of moral behavior. Sources might be conscious or unconscious, specific or general. We could say, a specific moral behavior is activated by a conscious decision; or a specific moral behavior is activated unconsciously by genetically inherited behavior pattern as a response to a stimulus. We might break down consciously motivated moral behavior into several categories, such as economically rational decisions and sexually irrational decisions. Whatever the examples, such a scheme of classification would endeavor to show that moral behavior is the result, almost mechanically, of a cause. This kind of analysis is limited by the categories of linguistic syntax, however, and devoid of empirical information can be misleading.
Another technique would be empirical research into human moral behavior. We might observe people engaging in moral behavior. We could analyze their behaviors for patterns. We could compare moral behaviors of different cultures and social situations. We could interview the subjects, before and/or after specific behaviors, to obtain their first-person understanding of their own behaviors. We could devise experiments to test hypotheses about the sources of behavior. Obviously, the sciences utilize such empirical research.
A third technique would be scientific research into animal behaviors. Some animal behaviors (such as, courage in fighting, courtship rituals, food sharing, and fosterage) appear similar to some human moral behaviors. We would want to know how we might understand animal behaviors as moral in a human sense. If they can be so understood, we would ask what are the implications for understanding human moral behaviors. Might some human moral behaviors be genetically inherited in an evolutionary process from lower animal behaviors? There is good evidence that some moral behavior is indeed genetically inherited from social mammals and ancestral primates; that is, humans have inherited a moral instinct.(**)
As it turns out, the question of the connection between moral knowledge and moral behavior has long been a favorite theme of Western literature. I am referring to the discussion of "character", meaning specifically moral character. The topic of moral character has become important in recent professional Western philosophy(***), but it has been a major issue since Homer's Iliad. The answer is, briefly, you behave morally (rightly by a code of conduct) if it is your character to do so. In other words, character is a disposition to behave (or a collection of dispositions); a disposition precedes a behavior. You do not behave morally if you do not have the character to do so, or if your moral character is somehow betrayed, for instance by character flaws.
The trick about the using character to explain moral (or immoral) behavior is not to assume in the explanation the quality of behavior the concept is explaining. Francis Bacon's discussion of sleeping powder is appropriate here. He used it to show the fallacy of explanation by naming. Naming something doesn't explain it. How does a sleeping pill put someone to sleep? Non-explanatory answer: the sleeping pill has a "dormative power". Dormative power is not an explanation. It is a name--the name of something else which is not described or its causal power understood or even proved to exist. It simply renames the effect (sleepiness) as the cause. "Dormative power" says, in effect, the sleeping pill transfers sleepiness to the person who takes it. Similarly, to say a person behaves morally because he or she is disposed (by character) to behave morally is not an explanation, if the concept of disposition is simply right behavior by another name. One would be saying, he behaves morally because he has moral character, which explains nothing.
The classical writers were aware of this problem of explanation with the concept of character. They discussed the issue in a variety of ways, including discussions of character in general and discussions of specific traits of character, such as courage in combat. Good summaries of this tradition are available.(*^)
I suggest we approach the notion of moral character somewhat differently. Character is the combination of personality traits acquired, before you have the disposition to behave morally, through repetition of moral behaviors according to a code of moral conduct. Often when you acquire the behaviors, you do not fully understand the meaning of the code and the social utility--the good--of the behaviors. Over time, the learning of these behaviors accumulate as character. This notion of moral character solves the disconnect between knowledge and the activation of moral behavior by training the activation of moral behavior before knowledge is obtained. Eventually, knowledge is obtained, of course, through life experience. Knowing is doing. Experiencing the moral codes in action in our own behavior enables us to understand what the codes are about and how moral behaviors expressing them make sense. And if the moral codes and behaviors, or something about them, don't make sense, with experience we have the ground for informed arguments against them that might strike other persons as reasonable and enable us to reform the codes and behaviors.
Flaws of character provide a strong explanation of how immoral behavior and failure to act morally (by not acting at all) occur. St. Paul claims that Greeks do not act morally (righteously) on their knowledge of nature because they are arrogant (or puffed-up). This claim amounts to the charge that the Greeks have a character flaw that inhibits whatever impulse they might have to act morally according to Divine Law. That character flaw is arrogance. As we have already discussed, natural knowledge pursued solely from the point of view of the self leads to arrogance. Preoccupation with self leads to inability to comprehend something (such as God) that is wholly other-than-the-self. Preoccupation with self prevents a person from submerging his objections to a moral behavior, hence blocking the formation of experience that would bring understanding of the codes of conduct and the behaviors that express them.
Youthful grasping of logic and the adolescent's reliance on inexperienced reason as the measure of all things, as in the adolescent's refusal to follow into religious faith, to return to the question with which I began this series of articles, are a character flaw. The arrogance might be youthful, it might be excusable, as the sign of an inquiring mind trying to engage serious issues of faith, but it is at base, still, a flaw.
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Contents
1. Arrogance
2. Paul's Problem With Greek Wisdom
3. Greek Wisdom: From Homer to Aristotle
4. Greek Wisdom: Hellenism: Paul's Era
5. Paul's Meaning
6. The Weakness of Natural Knowledge
7. Natural Fact and Moral Imperative
8. How Is Moral Behavior Possible?
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* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality, and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/
** http://shroudedindoubt.typepad.com/bag_of_worms_yet_words/2006/11/marc_hausers_mo.html
*** http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_character
*^ Concise overviews of the concept of character for explanation of moral behavior are provided by Marcia Homiak, "Moral Character" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character/ ) and Kevin Timke, "Moral Character" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-ch/ ).
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