Moral relativists insist that an individual cannot escape the strictures of their cultural milieu to judge an ethical system. A transcendent ethic would be required to judge cultures fairly. However, just because man is a ‘political animal’ does not mean he lacks the capacity to access the objective. Principles to judge an ethic need not to be transcendent or divine in order to be objective and thus fair to use. This essay will argue that a morality can be judged by how well it fulfils two conditions; the promotion of human well-being and the facilitation of excellency. It does not follow from this that there is a perfect ethic which all cultures should follow because there are different ways in which communities could strive towards these goals. Nonetheless it does allow for ordinal ranking between cultures by comparing which morality ensures human well-being whilst not excessively constraining the pursuit of the extraordinary.
The first criterion is the advancement of human well-being. This essay will break ‘well-being’ down into two principles used by Macklin. Firstly, the principle of “humaneness” in which one culture is considered more morally advanced if it produces less gratuitous suffering. This criterion is based on utilitarian ethics. Secondly, the principle of “humanity” whereby the extent to which the liberty of each individual is respected determines how moral a society is. This part is based in Kantian ethics. It may be argued that these principles are just as arbitrary a moral telos as any other, no matter how abhorrent, there is no fundamental reason why reducing needless suffering is preferable to pursuing the extermination of a race of people. However, this appears to be placing an excessive burden on ethics to justify its foundational axioms. It is commonplace for subjects to have unfounded groundings. It is the assumed goal of medicine to make people ‘healthy’, the ‘pursuit of health' is axiomatic. Equally, the natural sciences, as pointed out by Hume, commit an inductive fallacy, basing their subjects on the assumption that results of experiments will be repeatable. Their unjustified axiom is that ‘presently observable phenomena can be used to predict the outcomes of future events’. There appears to be little reason why the science of morality should not be able to cite the ‘reduction of suffering’ and the ‘promotion of welfare’ as its fundamental axioms in the same vein.
The promotion of human welfare should be considered an ethical primitive because it is a common feature of all ethical systems. The varying attitudes and practices of different ‘societies’ share common fundamental values. Any ‘society’ which did not share these values would in fact not be a ‘society’. At the one level, all societies share certain superficial goals such as the pursuit of ‘justice’ and ‘caring for the young’. However, due to differing structures of social connections these values manifest themselves in different ways, some more conducive to those goals than others. More fundamentally, all value systems consider human wellbeing and happiness to be fundamental. Even barbaric ethical systems based on divine revelation fundamentally value pleasure. An adherent follows divine edict in order to gain the favour of the deity. Followers seek favour with the deity to be rewarded in the afterlife. Reward in the afterlife is sought after because it will be pleasurable, or at least more pleasurable than eternal punishment. Even if different systems consider certain groups to be less ‘human’ than others, and thus their wellbeing is of less importance, the system still fundamentally believes that what matters is human well-being, even if not all individuals are considered wholly human. If ethical systems share common abstract goals then it stands to reason that you can compare cultures based on how well they achieve them. These common values are partially encapsulated by what have come to be known as ‘human rights' (Macklin).
The apparent universal presence of these values does not mean that they are not conflicting to some extent. Judgements are going to have to made about which values are more important. An example of this conflict can be seen when “…Algerian families [refuse] to allow women who have been raped and impregnated back into the home…” (Macklin). The revered non-Western ‘family values’ are taking precedence over the need to reduce the unnecessary suffering of an individual. The values which should be considered more fundamental than others are those which promote greater well-being at the margin. It is common among religious apologists to insist that the Islamic culture provides extensive rights to women and demands that men respect them “but that respect does not extend to granting women decision-making autonomy.” (Macklin) The fact of the matter is that an incremental increase in women’s right to autonomy in the Islamic world would serve to reduce suffering much more than the preservation of tradition would. Under this rubric, for personal liberty to be superseded by tradition or ‘family values’ a society must be verging on anarchy. This does not mean that ‘family values’ cannot be promoted in society at the expense of other less important values, but it does mean it must not be promoted at the expense of personal liberty and respect for autonomy. Just because we are all human does not mean we are all endowed with the same capacity for moral reasoning. Some decisions are less moral than others because they simply do not promote as much well-being. It almost goes without saying that a culture which prioritised care and family support for these women rather than exclusion and victim-blaming would be an objectively better one.
The second proposed criterion is how well the morality, in practice, allows for the development of excellency and other non-moral goods. Nietzsche raises the concern that ethical systems compel people pursue the moral life at the expense of the ‘extraordinary life’. This is a point, to some extent, raised by Nagel, who argued for the need for the moral life to accommodate the ‘good life’ exemplified by family, friends, love and community. The dutiful rationalism of Kantian ethics and agent-neutrality of utilitarianism left no room for the cultivation of these other needs. For Nietzsche, not only do moral systems not leave room for the development of the good life, but they are positively incompatible with the extraordinary life. The ressentiment which underlies societal morality serves to undermine the futures of nascent geniuses. This conflict between greatness and conventional morality is most easily seen through the conflict between virtue signallers and controversial artists working in religious satire or nudity.
The ethic adopted by a culture necessarily, by seeking to reduce suffering and promote welfare, produces an attitude detrimental to the extraordinary. People with the capacity to achieve greatness, for the benefit of themselves and society, will be inculcated with an aversion to the suffering necessary for them to achieve their goals. Theories of morality necessarily reduce all value to a unitary source—happiness, rationality, piety—to establish a practicable normative procedure. This normative procedure is then taken to be a universal requirement of all citizens in pursuit of the chosen value. However value is not uniform even if moral value is. But the necessity for citizens to follow the edict in all aspects of their lives is to the detriment of non-moral values. The non-moral values which sustain people through life by coming together to create meaning. These non-moral values are often achieved through suffering. Indeed, Nietzsche sees the necessity for man to affirm life, suffering and all, to fully will eternal recurrence and adopt a Dionysian attitude. However, this is not to say that suffering has intrinsic value, but it has extrinsic value for cultivating human excellency. It is not faux happiness which sustains man through life, but meaning which is almost exclusively brought about through suffering of one kind or another.
It is worth noting that this criticism is not levelled at the moral theory itself, but the second-order consequences of adopting any normative theory. As asserted by Nagel, “there can be no ethics without politics” and for Nietzsche, the “dispositions” which are cultivated in the populous from the political application of the ethic, melt the would-be greats into the mob of the obsequious. Nietzsche is also not arguing that people act out their morality too much, it is obvious the world is a pretty immoral place, but he is saying the fact that people believe the values espoused by the prevailing morality—altruism, equality, happiness—are of sole and paramount importance causes harm. Even if a morality were to explicitly attempt to accommodate genius, the actual manifestation of the morality in the culture would not because the moral criteria by which most people were judged would still serve to dissuade would be geniuses from their future. Nascent geniuses will want to avoid the necessary suffering to make them great which would, given their character, be their best hope of coping with the pain of existence. Most people can cope with the suffering of life by simply being moral—people are moral for this fundamentally practical reason—yet for a select few, this is not enough, and a morality should not necessarily incorporate them, but not hinder them. This need for a moral theory to accommodate personal development is alluded to be Nagel when he suggests that “reasons of autonomy” place limits upon what one should do in pursuit of impersonal values.
In conclusion, from the descriptive claim that ‘different cultures have different moral codes’ it does not follow that they cannot be judged and compared. Unlike opinions about the purely arbitrary, such as your favourite colour, people provides reasons and rationalises for their moral judgements. From these reasons it can be discerned that there are common values shared, in one form or another, throughout all viable cultures. Cultures can, and should be judged on the extent to which they maximise human well-being whilst at the same time not ignoring the idiosyncrasies of those who seek excellency. The morality cannot be absolute; it must allow individuals to progress from camels to lions and finally to children.