Private morality, public morality, global morality and Prudence

Gordon Brown, the British Prime minister, has been making the rounds of the world's major capitols pushing for what he calls "global morality." He is doing this in advance of the G20 meeting opening in London April 1, 2009. He appears to be very concerned that the conventional way of viewing the world economy, e.g. currency, productivity and wealth, is not sufficiently focused oh human well being, especially as revealed by the current global economic crisis. He apparently believes that the only remedy is to incorporate a "global morality" into the global economy.

This got me thinking about whether morality is scalable. Going back at least to the 18th century Enlightenment two kinds or levels of morality have been distinguished, private morality and public morality. Private morality is generally regarded as dealing with those things that are done in private and do not affect others, examples frequently used are adultery and marijuana consumption. Public morality is concerned with the well being of groups of individuals, e.g. racial discrimination, environmental pollution. Interestingly, Thom Hartman sees this distinction as distinguishing conservatives focused on private morality from liberals focused on public morality. His article on this is titled Rush Limbaugh May Teach Conservatives A Lesson can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1003-01.htm.

But what about global morality? At first such a concept sounds ridiculous. The plethora of racial, religious, and ethnic differences that have and still create so much havoc within our species would seem to doom any global morality to failure. It should be noted that moral systems, unlike noetic systems which are based on fact and subject to testing as to facticity, are based substantially on our emotions, which fact generated the 18th century notion of the moral sentiment. The intellectual challenge that moral systems face is how to build a moral system on something as slippery as our emotions. It has yet to be done with anywhere near the success of noetic systems such as those of science.

Additionally, this search for a global moral basis is not as recent as we might suppose. It was Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice who uttered, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?" This is an appeal to human commonality, albeit to justify revenge.

One of the first tasks is to find what it is in the global conglomeration of humans to which moral sentiment is or can be attached. This sentiment has to be specific enough to be recognized by all humans as a human feature, yet capable of generating that sentiment in a population of billions. I believe that the necessary ingredient is there because all armies have to depersonalize the enemy into an object before the killing can begin. Indeed, in World War 1 on Christmas eve of 1914 German and English soldiers, on their own declared a truce, visited each other in no man's land, exchanged gifts and shared whiskey. Obviously a shared culture allowed common thoughts of home to burst through despite everything including their officer command structure. Can we find a similar kind of basis, complete with such a powerful sentiment, upon which to build a global morality? Notice that this event occurred in the context of shared suffering. While dramatic events such as these indicate the possibility, however tenuous, that humans may find a common moral framework it appears to be more in the nature of a project than a solution at this time.

However, if a common moral sentiment cannot be found and generalized into a global morality then I suggest that we should forget morality as a basis for solving this global problem and turn to prudence instead, which I suspect is the root of morality anyway.

Prudence can be based on the need for survival of the human species, upon which presumably all humans could not only agree, but actively pursue. This can be much more easily promoted than global morality. My suspicion is that we will have to expend a good deal of energy and ingenuity before we realize that much of what was taken for granted in the past must now be regarded as a focus of prudence not ownership. G. W. Bush and his coterie of neocons sought to control a natural resource, i.e. oil, instead of regarding it as a human resource to be prudently used for the benefit of all. In this case oil should be regarded as a materials resource, e.g. plastic, rather than as an energy resource, which increases global warming. If we practice the discipline of prudence on a broad enough scale for a long enough time we may, as a species, create an environment for a shared morality.

Bob Newhard