38. Morality

With this item I start a long series on morality and ethics: good conduct, the good life, justice, tolerance, freedom, and power. That will be followed by a long series about self and other and collaboration, in which I will discuss Nietzsche and Levinas, and finally I will give a series on trust.


Morality is about rules for good conduct. Where does that come from? For Plato, and for Christendom, there is a moral duty anchored in an absolute, transcendent reality. For Christians morality is the expression of the divine in the human being. I cannot go along with that; I cannot grasp what it is about.

Philosophers of especially the moderate Enlightenment assumed that people had a sense of good conduct (a ‘moral sense’) on the basis of tradition and habit, or from experience in social intercourse, or in a God-given feeling, or combinations of those. Rousseau assumed that the human being has a natural feeling for it, but that it is corrupted by society.

Philosophers of the radical Enlightenment held that the only enduring moral principle is that of self-interest, inherent in human nature, in the rational pursuit of well-being and deliverance from pain. However, they were convinced that rational self-interest is enlightened and takes into account the interest of others and public interest. The role of laws is to mobilize the rational insight of enlightened interest so that the interests of others are indeed taken into account.


The philosophers of the radical Enlightenment underestimated how also politicians, judges, and public servants are moved by human drives of vanity, self-interest, prejudice, conformism, and mutual rivalry. They were also extremely naive concerning the supposed harmony of interests of self and others. Later in this blog I will discuss the irrationality and immorality of groups. In that suspicion of societal dynamics, my analysis resembles that of Rousseau. In moral decisions people are subject to collective pressures. The individual can try to escape and follow his/her own conviction, but often at a high price.

According to the philosopher Kant morality is not a matter of any natural moral sense or striving for well-being, or of education, socialisation, or habit, but is determined purely rationally, on the basis of universal principles such as, in particular, the categorical imperative that some maxim of behaviour is morally acceptable only if one would want to make it a universal rule. Earlier in this blog (item 17) I indicated my suspicion of such universals.

I think that moral dispositions emerge from partly instinctive predilections towards both self-interest and solidarity to others in a group. With Rousseau I think that next to an instinct for defending its self-interest for the sake of survival, and an instinct to manifest itself and to develop its potential (called thymos in ancient Greek philosophy, which Nietzsche called will to power), the human being by nature has an instinct for good behaviour and for solidarity. For this, there are arguments from evolution that I will discuss later in this blog.

My conclusion from that analysis, however, is that the instinct to altruism and solidarity is mostly directed towards groups to which one feels to belong (organization, profession, neighbourhood, region, nation, culture) and tends to be accompanied by distrust of outsiders. Culture is needed to curtail the instinct towards suspicion and discrimination of outsiders.