Christian Smith in his 2003 book “Moral, Believing Animals,” wants to identify and explain the uniquely human aspects of culture, history, religion, and especially narration from an anthropological and sociological perspective. Personhood, Smith’s term for those unique qualities that make us human, needs to be understood if we are to understand humanity. At the heart of personhood is motivation. He finds all existing theories of human motivation to be lacking. Two that he particularly dislikes are the economic self-interest model and the biological gene spreading model. That people act and are motivated by rational self-interest either alone or at root is demonstrably false. The biological paradigm that a human being is a chromosome’s way of making more chromosomes is so reductionary and lacking in nuance and meaning as to be ridiculous. It is like saying that since the sun will blow up and destroy the earth in 5 billion years everything that happens now is really meaningless – this misses the whole life and point of human existance.
Smith’s thesis is that we should think of humans as moral, believing animals to make sense of personhood, better understand motivation and all aspects of culture. Smith defines ‘moral’ as “an orientation towards understandings about what is right and wrong, good and bad, worthy and unworthy, just and unjust, that are not established by our own actual desires, decisions, or preferences but instead believed to exist apart from them, providing standards by which our desires, decisions, and preferences can themselves be judged.” In other words, morality exists outside of us or at the very least is believed to exist outside of us. This belief creates new second order facts of motivation and action that result in real tangible results and are thus just as real as primary facts even if we cannot find the actual source of the morality. This notion of ‘second order’ can be applied to a wide range of our personhood. For example, we and any other animals may have many primary desires such as for food, safety, mates etc. but humans also have second order desires: desires about our desires (such as when we wish we didn’t want to drink so much or when we hate but desire not to be hateful). We humans are conflicted animals. “Human collective moral order and action are founded on and sustain this distinctive human proclivity toward forming second order desires based on strong evaluations of first order desires, beliefs, and feelings.” Smith defines a moral order as “intersubjectively and institutionally shared social structurings of moral systems that are derived from the larger narratives and belief systems” which we will describe next time. “[T]o enact and sustain moral order is one of the central, fundamental motivations for human action; and that until this is recognized and built into our theories and analyses, our understanding of human action and culture will be impoverished.” The amount of time and resources we spend, arguing, rationalizing, and justifying everything from the trivial arguments kids make, to mafia revenge killing, to appeals to the Supreme Court (or International Court of Justice) is evidence that sustaining a moral order is central and fundamental to our motivations and actions.
Moral belief is universal but particular moral beliefs are not. Moral differences can be detected by what emotions are elicited. “Human emotions provide excellent telltale indicators of the moral assumptions, convictions, and expectations that pervade and order our personal and collective lives… [guilt, annoyance, thankfulness, anger, embarrassment, elation, outrage, contentment, betrayal, indifference, shock]… These emotions and most others are signs of moral orders fulfilled and moral orders violated. They serve as clues of often unarticulated, assumed beliefs about and commitments to normative expectations embedded in larger moral systems within which people make sense of and live out their lives. For example, there are times when one is willing to tolerate being yelled at and reprimanded and there are times when that is most unacceptable – the difference is in what you accept as a legitimate moral order. Moral orders are expressed everywhere and at every level from the most informal micro interactions to the most formal ceremonies, in liturgical form. “Human social life is well understood as the ‘liturgy’ of moral order.” A liturgy as practiced in most major successful religions is “the collective enactments, the dramatic ritualizations of the theological stories of faith traditions.” A secular liturgy is “also exactly what human social life more generally does with cultural moral order.” Imagine the reaction what anyone in our culture would think and react to if someone takes offence to being asked ‘How are you?’ Consider how government employees act if someone expresses anger or frustration ‘inappropriately’ at a government office? The term ‘inappropriate’ in our culture is the modern secular equivalent of sacrilege or blasphemy or heresy of earlier times. “All of the social practices, relations, and institutions that comprise human social life generally themselves together dramatize, ritualize, proclaim, and reaffirm the moral order that constitutes social life. Moral order embodies the sacred story of the society, however profane it appears, and the social actors are believers in social congregation. Together they remember, recite, represent, and reaffirm the normative structures of their moral order.”
It follows that almost all our preferences and values are derived from the particular moral order we inhabit. “[P]references and values can only be explained in terms of the moral orders from which they arise, in which they are embedded, and that suffuse them with meaning….discrete social norms are usually linked to larger, complicated normative systems that carry some weight of history and tradition, that are meaningful in terms of some believed narrative.” We in the west value freedom and human rights “more” than other culture because they are part of our western narrative. They are part of our western narrative because of historical circumstances that generated narratives that morphed and evolved into our current belief system. The writings of philosophers were major contributors to our existing and traditional narrative.
Institutions are all also producers and reproducers of moral order. “All social institutions are embedded within and give expression to moral orders that generate, define, and govern them. Whether it is obvious on the surface appearances or not, social institutions are inevitably rooted in and expressions of the narratives, traditions, and worldviews of moral orders.” Universities are a microcosm of moral orders in actions. There are rankings of values on what is considered worth studying – in our tradition by how much money is allocated to each department. Universities are the standard bearers of what can be considered true, worthy, and good by what is allowed to be studied. Universities (more explicitly in the past) are character formation institutions that seek to shape their users’ worldviews. “The same case could be made of all other social institutions including those involving politics, courtship, marriage, family, law, science, healthcare, the media, education, recreation, the military, social services, business and industry, or any other socially structured human activity. Behind, beneath, in, and through all of the institutions involved in these human practices are moral orders rooted in historical narratives, traditions, and worldviews that orient human actors to the good, the right, the true. For human persons are fundamentally and inescapably moral and believing animals who cannot grow, live, or act apart from moral bearings.”
“The capitalist market is no neutral space or amoral institution. It presumes a particular, normative notion of human persons as basically rational, materially acquisitive, and self-interested. It stakes out a particular moral position on matters of human need, responsibility, equality, freedom, welfare, and merit. It is linked to specific normative commitments about property ownership, entrepreneurial initiative, the deferred gratification of consumption, and often liberal democracy [and progress]. Furthermore, the market is no self-generating, autonomous entity but only exists because (morally animated) political, legal, and regulatory structures and interventions sustain it". Consider the underlined items in the context of alternative moral orders such as feudalism, colonial imperialism, communism, mercantilism, theocracy (Calvinist as in Geneva in 1555 or Shia as in Iran today) and slave-based economies. Even science is morally based and has moral foundation based on “a set of nineteenth-century general assumptions about civilization, progress, knowledge, and morality.” Modern science has “distinct moral notions about what a good human life looks like, the nature and value of progress, the ethics of alliances with government and industry, the limits of its own moral culpability (for example, in developing weapons of mass destruction or cloning human beings)”.
A simple test to find moral norms in any institution is to violate them and see what happens. Three stage of social sanction 1) derisive laughter as when one wants to assume a violations is just a bad joke, 2) shunning and negative gossip as when one judges the advocate as morally a bad person, 3) forced compliance when the violation’s proponent has made such a fuss that he is has generated a very tiny and slight danger of overturning the moral order.
Moral orders are more than just socialization. Moral orders permeate every aspect of human life both objectively and subjectively. They empower identity and capacity. Moral orders are intrinsic and extrinsic to humans both are routinely affected by the other in a reciprocally self-reinforcing, dynamic, liturgically, multi-level dialectic. And yet moral orders are not complete, systematic, or internally self-consistent. “There are always…intellectual and practical cracks, loose ends, unclear boundaries, implementation difficulties, tensions, incongruities, and contradictions”. Additionally due to contact with other moral orders and the imperfect adoption of local moral orders there may be more than one moral order that appears self-contradictory. Lastly because humans can reflect and judge their moral world we can choose to fight, argue, and die for a cause. We can choose our actions based on our ability to form second order desires about our moral order and act to modify parts of the moral order (as when we get an institution to change a policy or get a precedent setting court judgment) or we can choose to try to throw out the whole moral order (as when we chose to take up arms and become revolutionaries – but even then the revolutionaries cannot throw everything out).