Morality and Public Policy

Henricson, Clem, Clem Henricson

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781447323853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With an increasingly bitter secular religious divide, there is a messy, defective relationship between the state and morality in the UK. In response, Morality and Public Policy puts forward proposals to enhance the capacity of public policy to respond more effectively to morality and associated shifts in social mores in different cultural settings. Spanning religion, moral philosophy and scientific understanding of the human condition, this unique book draws together and adds to the latest thinking on morality, its causes, mutations, tensions and common features. It challenges misplaced concepts of 'moral progress' and the supremacy of empathy, and puts forward the management of the full span of human impulses - some complementary, some conflicting - as the function of morality with major implications for the interface between morality and public policy.

TWO

Moral perspectives to be addressed in an inclusive public policy

The kaleidoscope of morality is daunting for the analyst trying to get a handle on the myriad of thoughts, emotions, habits and cultural identities that fall within its domain. A full description is beyond the scope or indeed the purpose of this discussion. Rather the task is to draw out the core themes of division and coherence in morality that critically need to be assessed in order to develop a positive interface with public policy.

In this chapter synergies and oppositional pulls are drawn out to facilitate this objective. We examine two broad thematic splits that require acknowledgement and accommodation. The first of these is between revelatory systems of thought espousing the metaphysical, on the one hand, and, on the other, a humanistic orientation with rationalist philosophical thinking on the subject of morals, fulfilment and happiness. The second relates to a narrative of commonality in understanding and bettering the operation of morality versus a relativistic stance that abjures the common thread and instead opts for an interpretation of morality that is culturally and individually determined. Finally scientific insights across these dimensions are considered forming a fifth component of this review of different models of moral development and understanding.

Revelatory morality

The arguments marshalled in the field of revelatory morality relate to the metaphysical rather than rational deduction or human psychology. That is not to say that they are irrational or that they are wholly divorced of human imaging and needs, but rather that the final arbiter lies outside the material world and human control and even understanding.

Revelatory morality has largely been within the purview of religion; it is described in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods’. There have been in the past and continue to be a multiplicity of religions manifesting a diverse cultural heritage. In terms of global population numbers adhering to their tenets, the principal religions that have continued to hold sway in the 21st century are Buddhism (7.1 per cent), Christianity (31.5 per cent), Hinduism (15.0 per cent) and Islam (23.2 per cent). Believers in folk religions encompass 5.9 per cent and 0.8 per cent adhere to other religions (Pew Research Center, 2012). Monotheism is the predominant form of religion, but all institutional religion is typified by some form of personification of what is perceived as a metaphysical truth, whether a god in human form or a human conduit for a divine message. While most people acknowledge a religious affiliation, a substantial proportion of the global population is unaffiliated to any institutional religion, some 16.3 per cent. They comprise, as well as atheists and agnostics, those who have a belief in an undefined spiritual force (Pew Research Center, 2012).

While levels of religious affiliation are hard to calculate and cited statistics need to be treated with caution particularly when emanating from religious foundations, there is evidence from polls of an increase in the percentage of the global population with religious affiliations (Micklethwaite and Wooldridge, 2010). One study from the World Christian Database which Micklethwaite and Woodridge cite found that affiliation to the four largest world religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam – increased from 67 per cent in 1900 to 73 per cent in 2005 with further rises anticipated over the coming decades. While some of this may be explained by moves from smaller tribal religions to larger religions, the findings are nevertheless significant. Overall there does not appear to be a growth in individuals with secular convictions outside Europe.

In addition to the considerable scale of religious adherence across the globe, the 20th and 21st centuries have seen a growth in fundamentalist and vocal religiosity. In America, for example, the tolerant Episcopal Church has declined in favour of evangelical Southern Baptists. A highly charged Christian fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, founded in America, has thrived globally frequently at the expense of mainstream Catholicism. Currently this movement (Pentecostalism) is estimated to have 500 million participants (Pew Research Center, 2006). Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism has also thrived with, for example, the Hindu political movement in India and the well-documented social conservatism of Islamic states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. This religiosity has manifested itself in adversarialism that has included cultural stand offs and on occasion warfare. It is in evidence in respect of, for example, Catholicism versus Protestant evangelicalism, Sunni versus Shia formulations of Islam, and defensive stances between the major religions – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism and Buddhism (Micklethwaite and Wooldridge, 2010).

In the UK the number declaring a religious affiliation is far lower than the global figure, with 50.6 per cent claiming to have no religion in the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey (NatCen, 2014). Some 42 per cent acknowledged a Christian belief, but affiliation to the established church, the Church of England, has declined from some 36 per cent in 1985 to about 20 per cent in 2012 (NatCen, 2014). While religious belief is declining in this country, religion nevertheless remains at the forefront of national debate on moral issues.

Multifaceted, contradictory – religion reflects life and human impulses

For many people religion provides the most vivid and fulfilling host for morality. It offers an aid to living through narrative, myth, art, music and theatre, and it assuages fear by offering the prospect of an afterlife. It addresses the breadth and tensions in the human psyche and frequently does so with dramatis personae.

There are the wars of the gods and the acting out of multiple passions in Greek and Norse myths. There is original sin, the fall of mankind, the dichotomy between good and evil personified in the fight between god and the devil in the Christian religious construction. The Manichean religion offers a scenario where the empires of good and evil as powers in the universe clash with the world as the battlefield. Matter – earth – is evil and base, and withdrawal from earthly matters and engagement with the spirit through a variety of devices such as fasting and contemplation is espoused, as in many religions (Midgley, 1984). This particular aspect of religious vision is one of winning the fight; good should vanquish evil, and evil is a force in the world to be reckoned with. It is a conception that has guilt, chastisement and corporeal loathing as its baggage. There is something here of human passions and a sense of the apocalyptic associated with muddled, out of control psychological drivers and mortality.

It is significant that in responding to human impulses a number of religions, predominantly pantheistic and polytheistic, do not have a good/evil split, and even where such a split does exist, predominantly within monotheism, there are a host of contexts and contradictory impulses worthy of note (Assmann, 2004). The wealth of the impulses that religion caters for goes beyond the ‘fight’ to other inclinations. For example, there is torture, which has a thematic hold on Christian practice from the centrality of the crucifixion to the martyrdom of the saints. Then there are the elaborate rituals of pain – hell on earth and hell in the afterlife. There is much engagement in the spectacle of pain and sadism – a predilection of the human psyche woven into the fabric of many religions and their moralities. Then there is a thread through morality and spiritual practice across cultures of the abnegation of the self – the ascetic life that provides a release from the irksome demands of choice and want. There is, too, in contrast to self-abnegation, self-promotion. In the personalised religions we see the urge to individual distinction, recognition and praise being accommodated. A further example of engagement with conflicting impulses can be seen in the continual tug of war between power, obedience and self-realisation. How central to religious morality is both the bolstering of authority and its challenge – an encapsulation of the emotional drivers and conflict in personal and social relationships. One only needs to look historically at the attitude to inequality in the Christian church – exhortation to the disadvantaged to accept their lot alongside material support for the poor and admonition of the elevated and the wealthy.

Addressing as they do the full gamut of human impulses, it is not surprising that many religious systems are typified by detailed specification of requisite behaviour across matters such as mode of worship, ritual, gender roles, sexual conduct, intergenerational relations, property regulation, blasphemy, doctrinal texts and more.

Furthermore, as noted in Chapter One, the nature of religious morality being grounded in the requirements of a god renders it less malleable and adaptable to change and conciliation than secular moralities. The combination of this trait with detailed behavioural prescription presents a major point of difficulty for the management of morality by a state administration that is seeking to be responsive to social difference and pressures for change.

Growing adherence to a ‘life force’

Detailed prescription and inflexibility is less in evidence in respect of looser revelatory moralities associated with a ‘life force’ rather than personified theism. The notion of some relatively undefined metaphysical being has a long history and appears to be a conviction shared by a substantial proportion of the world’s population in the 21st century according to Pew’s 2012 survey of religious affiliation. A Eurobarometer poll in 2005 found that in the UK some 40 per cent agreed with the statement that ‘there is some sort of life force’ (Eurobarometer, 2005).

Looking at Ancient Greece, Plato’s ideal forms – the spiritual essence of the material world and ideal to which the latter aspires but falls short of – offers an early, sophisticated conception of a generalised life force (Ruggiero, 2002). Current advocates concerned with an exploration of the derivation and properties of morality include thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin and Clive Hamilton. The former, coming from a legal human rights background, has written Religion without God in which he attributes human values and appreciation of what is right to a metaphysical force. While human perception of that entity is only shadowy, it is sufficiently revealing to sustain moral conviction (Dworkin, 2013). He builds on Einstein’s identification of a non-personal god linked to the mysteries of beauty and wisdom, and cites Rudolf Otto’s (1958) description of the numinous experience as ‘a kind of faith knowledge’.

Hamilton (2008) in his study of ‘post secular’ ethics draws on the neuroscience finding of an empathetic dimension to the brain to underwrite his conviction of an underlying spiritual force. His interpretation of the nature of morality is that it is broadly affirmative with moral themes holding good across cultures, and that this, in turn, is linked to the wiring of the brain and an intuition that derives from some essence of matter or being beyond the individual and of which all matter is a part – the ‘noumenon’.

‘Religious atheists’ and the ‘noumenon’

Ronald Dworkin

What Dawkins misses is that for pantheists a numinous experience is an experience of something they take to be real. It is not just an emotional experience whose origin and content may be explained by evolutionary advantage or by some deep psychological need. Pantheists believe there is wonder or beauty or moral truth or meaning or something else of value in what they experience. Their reaction is produced by a conviction of value and a response to that conviction; it cannot be accurately understood without recognising that a real value is its object. We should not say that though pantheists – I include Spinoza – do not believe in a personal god, they believe in a non-personal god. It would be much clearer and more accurate to call them religious atheists. (Dworkin, 2013, p 43)

Clive Hamilton

If we can find a fixed point, it will allow a moral philosophy to be nailed down, and moral relativism vanishes. I argue that there is such a locus, a metaphysical absolute that is the basis for all-important moral judgements. After consideration of the alternatives, I adopted the term ‘noumenon’ (usually pronounced ‘noomenon’) to describe its source. Kant uses this word for his concept of ‘the thing-in-itself’, which can be thought of as the world as it is, in its pure existence, before we bring our forms of understanding to it. The noumenon is always discussed as a partner of the concept of the ‘phenomenon’, the world of everyday appearances. As this suggests, the distinction is really about how we experience and understand the world.

Although fundamental to the work of Kant and Schopenhauer, the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon is more a characteristic of Eastern philosophies, in which the idea of the noumenon is captured in terms such as ‘universal essence’ and ‘subtle essence’. Throughout the book I note some parallels between my argument and those from Eastern traditions, where it has long been understood that the noumenon can be known (if at all) only by transcending the everyday forms of understanding.

Although the noumenon is usually thought of as a characteristic of the world ‘out there’, I take up Schopenhauer’s most original insight (which he subsequently recognised in the classics of Hinduism) that the noumenon must also be found within us. In developing my moral philosophy, I call this fixed point within us ‘the moral self’ (Hamilton, 2008, p xiii).

Systems of moral philosophy with a genesis in rational argument

There are various systems of moral philosophy that are derived from human cogitation rather than metaphysical revelation. They are generated within the parameters of human philosophical thought with human-oriented objectives. These are systems of moral philosophy concerned principally with human fulfilment either as an individual or collectively as a society involving a process of rationalisation.

Individual fulfilment

In terms of the individual perspective there is a major strand of thought concerned with the search for a good and meaningful life. Aristotle is widely viewed as one of the principal exponents of this philosophical stance and offers a further example of the Ancient Greek origins of European philosophical thought. Aristotle (2004) made the case for the realisation of an individual’s capacities, a life engaged with the honing of capabilities and the virtues. Through this route fulfilment could be achieved. It is an approach that has permeated western thinking and today can be seen in the socioeconomic theories of the likes of Amartya Sen (1992). In the same vein, self determined goals with a life plan were advocated by Rawls (1971). Addressing the issue from the perspective of the vagaries of human life, Bernard Williams (1981) considered the realisation of human individual fulfilment in the context of the individual making choices with multiple pressures and influences.

Duty

The notion of duty constitutes a strand of moral philosophy concerned with individual responsibility within the collective. It is an exemplar of post enlightenment ethics based on reason, a negotiated set of expectations developed by philosophers unguided by emotion. Kant (1785) argued that duty formed the crux of morality with a universal set of rules that allowed for no differentiation between cultures or individuals; they were the product of theoretical rationalisation. They were about principles and regulation and did not exist with reference to outcomes or empirical consideration of behaviour, which Schopenhauer (1837), for example, considered a defect.

An action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according with which it is decided upon; it depends therefore, not on the realisation of the object of the action, but solely on the principle of volition in accordance with which, irrespective of all objects of the faculty of desire, the action has been performed. That the purposes we may have in our actions, and also their effects considered as ends and motives of the will, can give to actions no unconditioned and moral worth is clear from what has gone before. Where then can this worth be found if we are not to find it in the will’s relation to the effect hoped for from the action? It can be found nowhere but in the principle of the will, irrespective of the ends which can be brought about by such an action; for between its a priori, which is formal, and it’s a posteriori motive, which is material, the will stands, so to speak at a parting of the ways; and since it must be determined by some principle, it will have to be determined by the formal principle or volition when an action is done from duty, when, as we have seen, every material principle is taken away from it. (Kant, 1785/2005, pp 71–2, emphasis in original)

The case made here for adherence to a code because of duty, irrespective of desire or anticipated outcome, stands in contrast to Russell’s perception of the need for unity between reason and the emotions.

Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside of ourselves. …

All unhappiness depends upon some kind disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of coordination between the conscious and unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. (Russell, 1930/2006, p 175)

While Kant’s inflexibility, even sterility, has been critiqued, his concepts have had an influence through to the present day, albeit that they have been considerably modified. Rawls neo-Kantian Theory of Justice (1971), for example, proposed the collective development of social rules without those engaged in their development knowing how they would personally be affected – operating from behind what Rawls described as a ‘veil of ignorance’.

The idea of the original position is to set up a fair procedure so that any principles agreed to will be just. The aim is to use the notion of pure procedural justice as a basis of theory. Somehow we must nullify the effects of special contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage. Now in order to do this I assume that the parties are situated behind a veil of ignorance. They do not know how the various alternatives will affect their own particular case and they are...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• one: Introduction: why we need a better connection between morality and public policy
• two: Moral perspectives to be addressed in an inclusive public policy
• three: Synergies and tensions: morality as an accommodation of human impulses in different cultural contexts
• four: The challenges and benefits of a new role for public policy
• five: Managing morality: a public policy analytical tool
• six: Conclusion
• References