Moral concepts found enshrined in traditions do not stay the same. They undergo transformation. They are subject to investigation and criticism. They expand, shrink, or disappear. John T. Noonan, Jr., Bribes, p. 683
...what we call morality is a body of practical knowledge....The character at any particular time of a body of practical knowledge such as medicine or music is the result of historical circumstances....morality is a human creation that changes through time... James Wallace, Ethical Norms, Particular Cases, pp. 9 and 12. These passages suggest that morality changes. Often moral change is associated with an excitement and fervor that these quotations do not convey. One thinks of the abandonment of witch trials, the rejection of judicial torture, the long fight for religious liberty, the abolition of slavery, the reversal of the prohibition of usury, the agitation for contraception and women's rights, the lifting of the prohibition of divorce, and the struggle for civil rights. To what extent can we understand moral change conceptually? Are there any factors that are always, or at least commonly, associated with moral change? Would knowledge of these factors help us to understand present moral controversy or even to anticipate moral change? Is it possible to have a theory of moral change? In this talk I shall try to address these questions in a preliminary way.
Let me begin by considering several issues that I believe will arise in any discussion of moral change. The first set of issues has to do with the broad context in which moral change occurs. Let me begin with some terminology. Unless the moral issue is entirely novel, there is a "going position" with respect to what I shall call a practice. That is, there is a widely-accepted moral evaluation of the practice, which I shall call the traditionalist position. Examples of practices are holding slaves and charging interest on money loaned. Before the eighteenth century, the traditionalist position with respect to the practice of slavery, for example, was that it is morally permissible for one human being to own another. In the eighteenth century, the traditionalist position was replaced by what I shall call a revisionist position with regard to slavery, i.e. a new moral evaluation of the practice of slavery, according to which slavery is exploitation and a violation of human rights. I want to hold that the burden of proof should be in favor of the traditionalist position. That is, there must be good reasons to accept a revisionist position, and it is up to the revisionist to supply those reasons. Absent good reasons, the traditionalist evaluation of the practice should continue to prevail. I offer two reasons for this claim. First, most of us are committed to the moral tradition in which we find ourselves. We accept much more of it than we reject. I believe the most plausible interpretation of this commitment is to say that the traditionalist evaluation of a practice should be accepted unless there is good reason to reject it. Second, intellectual and moral stability require that we not modify tradition unless there is good reason to do so. There is another important point to make about the traditionalist/revisionist distinction. While the burden of proof should be in favor of the traditional evaluation of a practice, a significant challenge to it cannot go unanswered. Once a serious revisionist position is put forth, it cannot be refuted merely by pointing out that it contradicts the traditionalist position. This is because in the past the burden of proof has often been met by revisionists, as the examples of moral change mentioned earlier attest. To say that a sufficient justification of a practice is simply that it is the traditionalist position would mean that all past moral change has been wrong, and this would commit one to some highly implausible moral views.
A second set of issues has to do with the distinction between causal and normative explanation of moral change. Most authorities on the history of morality attempt to give causal accounts of moral change. Some even argue that specifically moral considerations play little or no part in moral change. The classic example here is the claim that it is changes in economic factors, not moral criticism, that caused the demise of slavery. As a moral philosopher and not a historian or sociologist, I am interested primarily in a normative explanation of moral change rather than a causal explanation. That is, I am concerned here primarily with factors that could justify moral change, not simply causally explain it. I am not, however, simply interested in factors that could justify moral change, but rather in factors which there is some reason to believe actually did justify moral change in the minds of people of a certain era. Still, one is left to wonder: Were these rational justifications really efficacious in any sense in bringing about moral change, or were they simply interesting but ineffectual ideas in the heads of people in a certain age? In philosophical jargon, were they simply epiphenomenal? In less philosophical language, were they simply icing on the cake? My short response to this issue is to assume the position taken by John Stuart Mill that rational arguments do influence moral change, by way of their influence on human thought and action. Concerning the demise of slavery, Mill wrote: It was not by any change in the distribution of material interests, but by the spread of moral convictions, that negro slavery has been put an end to in the British Empire and elsewhere...It is what men think that determines how they act....
A related issue is whether we can identify the rational considerations (the normative elements) that were actually important in a specific moral change, assuming that they were. The only way to do this is to look at examples of moral change to determine whether the factors that I shall shortly begin to identify seem to have historical validity. A third set of issues has to do with the distinction between moral progress and moral decline. The expression "moral change" can refer either to moral advance or moral degeneration. Moral conservatives would argue that much moral change at the present time represents degeneration, not progress. Can we provide criteria that enable us to distinguish moral progress from moral degeneration? Responding to this issue, James Wallace writes: "it is the continuity of the changed ideas with the earlier moral notions that prevents the change from being a corruption...." I don't think this criterion is adequate, however, because most moral change probably has considerable continuity with the past. My own suggestion is that moral change which can be justified by the five factors I shall mention shortly should be considered moral advance and that change which cannot be so justified should be considered moral decline. Unfortunately, this criterion also suffers from a certain vagueness, but I believe it may still be useful.
Now I want to identify five factors that I believe are important in a normative explanation of moral change. There is a certain amount of arbitrariness in selecting these factors, and no doubt the selection could be made differently. Nevertheless, I shall make the attempt. Not willing to go out totally on my own in identifying these factors, I shall take suggestions from others, mostly from the two writers quoted at the beginning of this talk. Now let us look at the five factors.
The most concerted attempt to isolate the factors important in moral change with which I am familiar was made by historian of morality John Noonan in a 1993 article, Development in Moral Doctrine.In considering how the emergence of religiously pluralistic societies affected traditional moral views on religious toleration and divorce, for example, Noonan remarks that only as social structures changed did moral mutation become possible. We can see how the emergence of religious pluralism might supply grounds for religious toleration and a more permissive attitude towards divorce. If religious strife is undesirable, religious toleration be attractive as a way to avoid it when there is no agreement on religious matters. Similarly, divorce might be more justifiable in a society where religious differences may make a marriage intolerable. These considerations do not, of course, demonstrate conclusively that religious toleration and the sanctioning of divorce are right, but they do make the options more attractive. I want to use the term highlighting to refer to the way in which a change in social structures (which also includes economic and legal structures) can contribute to the justification of moral change. By highlighting I mean a change which serves to throw into stronger relief certain moral considerations which may have been present all along. After the highlighting takes place, these factors are given greater moral weight, as it were. Here is another example of what I call highlighting. In the eighteenth century, the use of judicial torture came under severe criticism. In Torture and the Law of Proof, legal historian John Langbein argues that the explanation of the decline of judicial torture is to be attributed to a modification of the law of proof, whereby a confession was no longer a virtual requirement for conviction in a serious crime. He argues that, apart from this legal change, all the moral criticisms in the world--most of which had been around for a long time--would not have produced a change. With this change, the moral criticisms of torture were thrown into stronger relief.
Changes in factual (empirically verifiable) or what I shall call metaphysical (non- empirical-verifiable) beliefs about the world can also contribute to the justification of moral change. Consider the example of slavery. Here, again, this often occurs by way of the phenomenon of highlighting. Historian of slavery David Davis finds the Quaker opposition to slavery particularly important in the abolitionist movement. Quakers were the first Christian church or sect to express disapproval of owning and trafficking in slaves. It was, he believes, Quakerism that furnished the set of conditions that made an antislavery movement possible. According to Davis, the change in the idea of sin (an example of what I call a metaphysical belief) is the key to the religious origins of antislavery thought. Much of traditional Christianity conceived the natural relationship of man to God after the fall as one of total subordination. Sin was identified with the individual's indulgence of his desires, and the state's function was to suppress them in the interests of social order. Slavery was simply one aspect of a fallen and sinful social order that must be accepted. It was not possible, Davis believes, to fully perceive the moral contradictions in slavery until this picture was modified. The modification came in the form of the resurgence of perfectionist thought and of the prophetic traditions, represented by such groups as the Quakers. These traditions taught that people have a desire for virtue, and that it is possible for Christians to be delivered from the bondage of sin, or at least to move closer to perfection. Sin can be identified, at least in part, with social forces that block the movement toward perfection. One should free oneself from these corrupting influences. Slavery is one such influence, so one should free oneself from its corrupting influence by renouncing the ownership of slaves. Here we have a change in metaphysical beliefs, in this case about the relationship of man to God and the possibility of human perfection. Changes in these beliefs highlighted not only the moral problems with slavery, but also the possibility of its abolition.
Referring again to the emergence of religious toleration in the Roman Catholic tradition, Noonan identifies another factor in moral change by observing that these social structures could not have shifted without experience. On the negative side, Noonan posits that the experience of persecuting heretics must have been demoralizing. On the positive side, he believes that the experience of religious freedom in America was important in Vatican II's endorsement of religious toleration in the 1960's. The experiences which challenge a traditionalist position are often not really new, but rather experiences that have newly come to the attention of the wider public, often by way of literature or the work of a moral prophet. Sometimes voicing this experience requires creating a new vocabulary. Writing about the oppression of women, Richard Rorty says: ...only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy--even to themselves--if they describe themselves as oppressed.
Conveying experience that can justify moral change requires not only imagination and creativity on the part of the writer or moral prophet, but also sympathy on the part of the public. One factor in the movement to abolish slavery was the rise of the philosophy of benevolence and the praise of the man of feelingwho could empathize with he sufferings of others. Adam Smith's The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759) based virtue on sympathy, or our ability to put ourselves imaginatively in another's situation. It was characteristic of abolitionists--even Christian abolitionists--that they appealed more to feelings of sympathy and benevolence than to the Bible. Perhaps the most important example of this appeal to sympathy, however, was Harrriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) which David Davis calls ... probably the most sensational literary success of the nineteenth century.... Whatever might be said about the literary quality of the novel, its importance from the standpoint of moral change cannot be overestimated. Stowe portrayed for a wide audience the dehumanizing reality of slavery: Uncle Tom's separation from his spouse and children, being bought and sold like a commodity, having his fate decided by others, whipping and finally death at the hands of a sadistic master. The use of experience as a justification of moral change often involves an implicit argument based on the Golden Rule. Stowe repeatedly asks her readers to place themselves in the position of Uncle Tom and ask whether they would be willing to be the recipients of his treatment. But the traditionalist may resist the Golden-Rule argument. She may say--for one reason or another--that she sees no reason to place herself in the position of the recipient. The advocate of slavery may admit that she would not want to be in Uncle Tom's shoes, but she may say that those who are slaves occupy a role assigned by God, and she does not and should not occupy that role herself.
In order to counter this argument, the revisionist must convince the traditionalist that she really should make the imaginative leap into the recipient's position. This task often falls to literature. The traditionalist must be led to appreciate the humanity of the slave and to see that the supposed differences between the slave and herself that keep her from making the imaginative leap into the slave's position are invalid. In the words of Rorty, the traditionalist must be led to see that the plight of the slave is indeed an abomination. If this can be done successfully, the use of experience can contribute to the justification of moral change.
Noonan also finds an explanation of moral change in what he calls new analyses.In the case of usury, he maintains, the most important aspect of the new analysis was the shift from a focus on the loan itself to focus on the lender and the nature of the investment. This resulted in the conclusion that the lender himself could be exploited if he did not charge interest. I believe Noonan's point can be seen as referring to what I shall call the emergence of a new paradigm. For most practices subject to moral evaluation, there is a typical or paradigmatic example of the practice. This paradigmatic example presents the picture which is the object of moral evaluation. If the paradigm itself changes, the moral evaluation of the entire practice is likely to change. In the case of usury, the old paradigm went something like this: A farmer has a bad year with his crops. He must borrow money from his more fortunate neighbor in order to feed his family and buy seed for the next year. The neighbor charges such an exorbitant rate of interest that the farmer can never get out of debt, and his sons lose their inheritance.
The new paradigm for a loan, brought about by changed economic circumstances, might run like this: A merchant needs money for a business venture. He calculates the maximum interest he can pay.
Here is another example of the emergence of a new paradigm that contributed to the justification of moral change. Historian of divorce Roderick Phillips describes three changes in the conception of the nature and purpose of marriage that explain, he believes, the increase in the number of divorces. One element was the emergence of romantic love as an important element in marriage. As a result of this change, the expectations for marriage rose. Another change was the decline of the economic and social pressures that kept marriages together. Traditional families were productive units, operating perhaps a farm or a family business. If a spouse died, he or she was replaced quickly, in order to insure the continuation of the family enterprise. Violence, hostility, emotional indifference and sexual infidelity were more easily tolerated if the family enterprise went well. A third change was the emergence of alternatives to marriage. In traditional societies, women, in particular, had little alternative to marriage. Independent employment was difficult, and widows often sank into poverty. Men had more opportunities: they could "go to sea" or join the military. But even they found a life outside of the bonds of marriage difficult, and it probably had less social status.
Phillips argues that the vastly greater incidence of divorce may be due not so much to lower morality, but to these changes. The new paradigm of marriage provided different standards for a good marriage and for a justified divorce. According to the new paradigm, the primary purpose of marriage is love and emotional satisfaction. The importance of marriage as an economic unit is less important. Divorce is legitimate when the proper expectations of marriage are not fulfilled. Thus, a new paradigm of marriage developed, which in turn lent justificatory weight to a revisionist position with regard to divorce.
In Ethical Norms, Particular Cases, James Wallace suggests that a practice can be suspect morally because it violates norms inherent in other practices which we accept. Thus slavery came to be considered wrong because it violated emerging doctrines of human rights accepted in other areas of Western society. Here is another example. The use of torture was clearly incompatible with the emerging doctrines of human rights. Several writers advanced what historians refer to as logical/moral criticisms of torture. Although Montesquieu and Voltaire denounced torture as a violation of the dignity and rights of human beings, perhaps the most important single eighteenth-century protest against torture was produced by Casare Beccaria in his On Crimes and Punishments. Here Beccaria advances various criticisms of torture. It makes a person his own accuser and tests a person's physical endurance rather than his veracity. It also places the guilty person in a more advantageous position than the guilty. If an innocent man is tortured and he confesses, he is punished for something he did not do. If he does not confess, he has been unjustly tortured. If the guilty man confesses, on the other hand, he receives only what he deserves. If he does not confess, he has transformed a heavier sentence into a lighter one. It is easy to see how these considerations can contribute to a justification of moral change. The use of torture was incompatible with the standards of fairness and justice upheld in other areas of Western social and political life. We have already seen that these considerations were highlighted by the change in the law of proof. Sometimes the inconsistency appears in the form of an incoherent application of the norms within a practice itself. In the case of usury, exceptions to the prohibition of usury were increasingly recognized. A Christian had always been allowed to extract usury from an enemy, including heretics and infidels. Then a distinction between compensation and usury was developed. Thus, a lender had a right to compensation for delay in repayment, for a loss of the use of funds loaned out in charity, and a loss because one is forced to contribute to a bond. As time went on, still more exceptions to the prohibition were recognized. If one invests time and the other money in a business partnership, the one who invests money risks a loss that the other does not, so he is entitled to interest. Later, even those who furnished money in a partnership and insured themselves against loss were allowed to collect interest on the monetary contribution to the partnership. In both cases, the argument ran, the money invested in a commercial enterprise ceased to be available for other purposes. Merchants storing money in banks were also allowed to collect interest. The last two exceptions seemed especially implausible modifications of the traditional position and posed a dilemma: either these exceptions should not be allowed or the prohibition of usury itself should be abandoned.
I believe the analysis of the factors in moral change that I have developed here can be applied to many contemporary moral issues. Two issues that I think are particularly appropriate are euthanasia and homosexuality. I believe both of these areas are ones in which moral change is justified. One of the ways to make such an argument is to identify factors operating in past moral changes which we consider justified and show that they are also evident with respect to these issues. For lack of time, I shall limit myself to the issue of homosexuality. I shall further limit my discussion by considering only the last four factors.
Many contemporary writers believe that homosexual orientation is difficult if not impossible to change. Whether it has a basis in early experiences or in genetics, there is widespread recognition that sexual orientation is not very malleable. The relationship of this belief to the question of the moral justification of homosexual conduct is controversial. It does not show that such conduct is morally justifiable, for it is certainly open to the traditionalist to maintain that a homosexual who cannot change should embrace celibacy. Still, most of us probably intuitively sense that the belief that sexual orientation is difficult to change does have an important bearing on the morality of same-sex relationships. I believe the relationship can be understood in terms of the phenomenon of highlighting. The belief in the difficulty of change highlights the issue of the traditionalist prohibition of same-sex relationships. We now place considerable value on sexuality as an important part of personal fulfillment and self-realization. If many homosexuals must choose between a same-sex relationship and celibacy, the arguments for the traditional prohibition had better be good ones. The difficulty in changing sexual orientation might be thought of as an argument for raising the threshold of proof that homosexual conduct is immoral. Good reasons will have to be supplied to justify the invitation to perpetual celibacy. If these arguments are weak, their weakness will be more evident than before.
An extensive literature depicting the experience of homosexuals is an important feature of the contemporary debate over homosexuality, just as the narratives depicting the experience of slaves and women were important parts of public controversy over slavery and the rights of women. Accounts by homosexuals of their experience of social condemnation, their struggle to accept their sexual orientation, their sense of wholeness and peace after their self-acceptance, and the integrity which their lives can display--these are all important challenges to the traditionalist position on homosexuality. To be sure, the traditionalist may respond that one should not apply the Golden Rule to the homosexual's position. We should not ask ourselves whether we would be willing to be the recipient of the unfavorable social response to homosexuals, on the grounds that we should not place ourselves in the position of one pursuing an immoral lifestyle. But it is one of the functions of a narrative in moral debate to show that a practice traditionally condemned can indeed have the kind of integrity that undermines this objection.
The traditional paradigm of homosexual practice in the Christian West was probably something like this:
Engaging in homosexual acts does not make one a distinct type of person, namely a homosexual. Rather, there are homosexual acts, not homosexual persons. Homosexuality is not a crucial aspect of one's identity. Further, the decision to engage in homosexual acts is more or less freely chosen, not a part of a sexual orientation that is difficult if not impossible to change. Homosexual acts are not strongly connected with personal fulfillment, and romantic love is usually not an aspect of homosexual relationships.
In terms of this paradigm, it was perhaps not inappropriate to call same-sex relationships a perversion, much as it was not inappropriate to call usury in the old paradigm a form of exploitation. Without going into detail, two ideas that can be associated with the concept of perversion are voluntariness and the use of another person as a "mere means," in Kantian terms. Social constructionists have taught us that much has happened to the paradigm of a homosexual act in the last century and a half. The very term "homosexual" was invented, and homosexuality was medicalized. This medicalization was probably an important aspect of the transition from the old paradigm to the new one that appears to be emerging. At any rate, the new paradigm includes the notion that sexual orientation is discovered rather than chosen, that sexual orientation affects the entire personality, and that it can be associated with romantic love and long-term commitments. It is obvious that this change can contribute to a very different moral evaluation of same-sex relationships. The new paradigm is much more amenable to the evaluation of homosexuals and homosexual acts under the same or similar criteria used to evaluate heterosexual acts. As Michael Walzer points out, this is a familiar pattern in moral change: Insofar as we can recognize moral progress, it has less to do with the discovery or invention of new principles than with the inclusion under the old principles of previously excluded men and women.
One type of inconsistency is the use of a criterion for moral evaluation of a practice that is not used for evaluating any other practice. Homosexual acts have been historically condemned as "unnatural." Yet in non-Catholic circles, this criterion is seldom employed in evaluating any other moral practice. Even practices once condemned for their unnaturalness (such as masturbation, non-procreative intercourse and sterilization) are no longer condemned by most people at all, and certainly not by reason of their unnaturalness. These and similar considerations raise serious questions about the consistency of the traditional condemnation of same-sex relationships.
I believe the foregoing investigation suggests a framework in terms of which at least some contemporary moral issues can be discussed. The investigation has suggested that if an analysis of a moral issue is to be persuasive and complete, it must approach the issue from a number of different perspectives. That is, the arguments must be of several different types. While some of the arguments, such as the exposure of inconsistency, are standard fare in philosophy, others are somewhat different. Analyses of highlighting, paradigm, change, and experience, for example, are not as common in the writings of philosophers, at least not philosophers in the analytic tradition.
Finally, my investigation has suggested that many of these modes of argument are rhetorical in nature. That is, they incline without necessitating. Taken by themselves, they are not conclusive. Stacked on top of another, they have a significant cumulative effect.
In examining the factors involved in a normative account of moral change, we may be closer to the types of considerations that influence people outside philosophy. This is one of several reasons why I believe philosophers can profit from the study of moral change.