Towards a Theory of Moral Change
Author(s):
Charles E. Harris
Introduction
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.
Preliminary
Considerations
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.
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Five Factors in Moral
Change
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.
Changes in Social
Structures
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.
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New Factual and
Metaphysical Beliefs
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.
New Experience
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.
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The Emergence of a New
Paradigm
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.
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Value Inconsistency
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.
Homosexuality and Moral
Change
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.
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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.
New Experience
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.
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Paradigm Change
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.
Value Inconsistency
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.
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Conclusion
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.
Charles E. Harris Texas A&M
University
Presented at the OEC International Conference on Ethics
in Engineering and Computer Science, March 1999