Is Deference the Basis of Morality?

 Is deference to authority the basis for morality?  According to Christian doctrine, the “original sin”was disobedience, which is what led to the first humans being separated from God and ejected from paradise. The Bible tells us that  at first God planted a tree of knowledge in the middle of the  garden of Eden and then forbade the humans from eating its fruits.  Here we have the very first test of obedience, the kind  where children are given access to an attractive goody but are expressly forbidden from partaking, in order to see whether they have the self-discipline to obey authority.  Apparently, Adam and Eve failed the first test, hence the idea of “original sin”. 

 Note that later in the Bible, one of the “ten commandments”  is “Honour your father and mother”.   Put this way, deference to a parent’s authority appears to be a human universal.  Indeed, as the Psychologist Jean Piaget showed, all young children recognize their parents as the source of moral authority.  But then we grow up and moral authority becomes a lot less simple.  Which authority to recognize?  Is it your priest or rabbi, is it the reigning monarch, as Thomas Hobbes insisted?  Is it the President or the Emperor?  Or is it an abstraction like “the Law”?

Deference to authority is a central moral requirement in many cultures, but it has its limits.  What if the authorities are immoral? Should we always obey the law, even in the case of immoral laws?  This illustrates the fact that morality itself appears to be authoritative even over legal systems and human authorities. But, if so, where does morality itself derive its authority?  Indeed, how do we know when authorities or laws are immoral?  Some would say that morality derives its authority from God - a very satisfying answer for those who feel certain about these things; but ultimately a problematic answer, because there are multiple claimants to knowing God’s commands, with multiple interpretations of what they are.  So we are back to square one.  And it doesn’t help that some of the most vociferous claimants to know God’s real intentions can turn out to be immoral cads such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker, and Jim Jones.

There has to be more to morality than obedience. After all, in the vast majority of human encounters we are dealing with our peers, and when we come into conflict, we need to be able to follow moral rules that we’ve already internalized and agreed on.  Immanuel Kant, who understood this situation better than most philosophers, argued that morality is the opposite of obedience to authority.  In fact, he saw it as an exercise of autonomy in the form of “moral self-legislation”. Kant sums up human autonomy in the  form of the “categorical imperative”:  "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."   I bet many of us have heard their grandma admonish,  when they were caught throwing litter on the street, saying, “What if everyone did that?”  I bet you didn’t know your grandmother was a follower of Kant’s.  Now you know better!

I have to say that, as a philosopher, I am very impressed by grandmothers!  But I also think that to understand morality we need to go back even further to our origins when all humans were hunter gatherers in order to understand how morality may have originated from the rejection of blind allegiance to the dominant authority of the strongest individual  in favour of collective authority; which would explain why in contemporary nomadic hunter gatherers we see the use of ridicule, gossip, and shunning as very effective ways of collectively controlling boasting and bullying type behaviours, thereby nipping overt pride and aggression in the bud. Because, nowadays we agree that the moral rules should be impartial, and shouldn’t favour certain people or groups, simply because they are dominant, or stronger, or richer than anyone else. And we also agree, in general, that no one should be “above the law”,  that the law should apply to everyone equally, and that we cannot allow someone to “get away with murder” because he has higher status than everyone else. This is an important way that we differentiate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.

 What we do as humans that other animals do not do is to cooperate with each other on a more comprehensive level.   But this form of human ultra-cooperation requires a framework that we collectively create, a framework that is not available to non-humans.

 Think of human cooperation itself.  If people are allowed to take advantage of others' efforts without themselves contributing, then people will tend to withhold their cooperation, depriving everyone of the fruits of that cooperation.  Thus human cooperation is like a reservoir of water that is there for everyone to partake in, but if it isn’t protected it can be depleted to the point that it becomes available to no one.

There is no one in charge of human cooperation, no one person or institution that stops others from taking advantage thereby depleting the pool of cooperation for everyone else, and the reason there is no one in charge is because human cooperation is a common resource that is protected by everyone. It’s everyone’s job to protect human cooperation because it’s everyone’s job to act morally and condemn immoral acts.  No one person or association can be in charge of morality because that is not how morality works.  If there were one person or one association in charge of the moral system, that would tip the scales in favour of one group and destroy the common nature of morality. And the reason we need to live in a moral system is in order to sustain and protect human cooperation. That is what it means to be human.