All morality is a means of controlling people, that is, by getting them to internalize the rules by which a society governs itself. We learn to perceive things in moral terms just as we learn to speak, and no more make up our own morality than we make up our own language. Of course, we make choices, but they are pretty much pre- given.
"Internalization" means that we feel bad when we fall short of standards, and feel good when we surpass their minimum requirements. Without internalization, we are sociopaths, and although we might be happier without the friction of conscience, we are a danger to others, and are happy at their expense.
There is no way, then, to be moral without being responsible to social norms, either conforming or showing a reason to rebel in a particular case. I mentioned on another thread recently, for example, the deep irony that even Ayn Rand ends up justifying "selfishness" by portraying those who pursue rational self- interest as being the productive sector of society (in "Atlas Shrugged"), thus implicitly acknowledging that their social role was important in justifying them.
Anyway, the idea that morality only concerns oneself, or that one can have a purely private morality, flies in the face of what we know of socialization and moral conflict, which arises out of noticing an acute discrepancy in the application of a society's values, as when the issue of slavery came to a head in the United States as being radically incompatible with our most cherished principles. This is so whether one is a "relativist" or an "absolutist", and has nothing to do with whether we can identify "objective values". Even if values are subjective, they are part of our social inheritance, and though modified by the individual, cannot be divorced from that broader context........ |
