(2) Moral community and moral code

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt recognizes that one of humanity’s most important characteristics is shared intentionality - the ability and motivation to engage with others in collaborative, co-operative activities with joint goals and intentions. ² He argues that a moral community is formed with rules and principles governing the conduct of the members when individuals work together and cooperate. ³ Shared intentionality is a human intuition. As a result, many, if not most, of the rules and principles surrounding shared intentionality are initially intuitive and implicit. As a community develops, more and more rules and principles become explicit, e.g., ancient Chinese society adopting teachings of Confucius. Collectively, the implicit and explicit rules and principles form the moral code of the moral community.

As we have seen since antiquity, a community’s moral code can evolve and can be superseded. For example, Confucius taught that women must be submissive to male family members, which was the moral code in ancient China, but is no longer the moral code now. The moral code permitting slavery and denying women the right to vote is in the past. The Greek tragedy Antigone provides an example of one moral code superseding another. In Antigone, King Creon decreed that the rebel brothers Eteocles and Polyneices’ dead bodies be left unburied. Under the moral code at the time, a king’s decree must be obeyed absolutely. When the dead brothers’ sister Antigone disobeyed King Creon’s decree and buried the brothers anyway, Antigone was punished to be buried alive. However, under the moral code of the gods who had supremacy over King Creon, it was wrong not to bury the dead. King Creon was punished by the gods – he lost his wife and son.

Yet another example of moral code evolved within a moral community is from the 1962 western movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” ⁴ Run by cowboys, the community at first had a moral code of resolving conflict using cowboy style open violence. A young attorney tried to introduce a moral code of justice under the rule of law. Consequently, he was challenged to a gun shooting duel with the lead cowboy character. The cowboy character ended up dead, thought to have been shot by the young attorney according to the old moral code. The young attorney was able to introduce the new moral code of justice under the rule of law which replaced the old moral code of open violence. Ironically, the cowboy character was not shot by the young attorney in the duel, but by someone hiding in an alley way, an act that violated both the new moral code and the old moral code.

Because a moral code is an attribute of a moral community, moral obligations are what a moral community demands of its members implicitly or explicitly. Therefore, it can be said that the foundation of moral obligations is the intuitive, implicit and explicit demand of a moral community. Normally, the “moral ought” and “moral obligation” carry only the ordinary sense of what one ought to do and does not contain the special law binding sense. The law binding sense of the moral obligation arising out of Christianity, Islam or similar religion where God is a divine law giver is specific to such cultures. It is not entirely unreasonable to say that what has been acquired can be subsequently disposed of. Therefore, there shouldn’t be difficulty in disposing of the special law binding sense in moral obligation and restoring the concept of moral obligation to its normal sense.

Aristotle’s sense of moral obligation develops without the special law binding sense. To Aristotle, the virtue of justice occupies the center of ethics. In Book V of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the various types of justice, and good and bad in terms of what is permissible, what is obligatory, and what is forbidden. He makes a distinction of justice in the sense of what is lawful, as opposed to what is fair and equitable – natural justice. A moral code for a moral community building on the human intuition of shared intentionality necessarily has to have some sense of justice for the moral community to become sustainable. That is my answer in case Anscombe wonders how moral obligation born out of a moral code for a moral community arrives at justice. However, as we have seen from discussions thus far, absolute justice is not guaranteed in any given moral code. We must develop and apply our sense of natural justice and subject moral obligations and moral code to reason so that we might progress from a society accepting slavery, racial discrimination, and gender inequality to a society intolerant of bondage and oppression.