What Is Morality?

So: What is morality?

Well, morality is often confused with ethics.

Morals deal with what people are doing – current customs, habits, etc.

Ethics speak to what people should be doing – philosophy, religion, etc.

What should give us pause is this idea of “moral matrices” that Alan Jacobs points to.

It is possible that the morals we pick up are almost exclusively a matter or proximity and circumstance.

Fate? Predestination? Something else?

Let me state it like this:

Would you believe what you believe now, and act how you act now, if you were born and raised in Peru? Saudi Arabia? America? Or, China?

This, I think, is how our “moral matrices,” as Haidt calls them, are formed: we respond to the irresistible draw of belonging to a group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a matter of what particular people one happens to bump into and when. The element of sheer contingency here is, or ought to be, terrifying: had we encountered a group of equally attractive and interesting people who held very different views, then we too would hold very different views.

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think (Amazon)