Handout 5

Morality and Ethics

 

 

Morality:

Morality is not the same as ethics! That's the first thing to get through your head. Morality has to do with convention which means that morality often is a majority rules kind of thing whereas ethics is a set of beliefs arrived at through reflective equilibrium and the application of various ethical principles. Hence, the moral thing to do may not necessarily be the ethical thing to do. Morality has to do with the acceptance of conventional wisdom whereas ethics has to do with deciding on principles that may serve to guide morality but are, in and of themselves, not necessarily part and parcel of conventional morality. Here's an ethical principle: "The needs of the majority outweigh the needs of the few" This is a classic (if crude) utilitarian rule if you will and it holds true in many, if not all, situations. Likewise, to say "it is our duty to treat one another as equals" is another ethical principle based on Kant's deontology and the Categorical Imperative he formulated e.g., "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become a universal law of nature.". It's not important you know what those words mean or who Kant is, but it is very important to one's peace of mind to know what counts as an ethical statement as opposed to a merely moral pronouncement. Why is this important to us as bipolar folks? Well, it has to do with what we believe to be the case and what we know to be the case again. We covered this in [LINK] handout number four. on believing and knowing. Let me see if I can make the import of morality and ethics relevant to you as a bipolar individual who may, at this very moment, be suffering the pangs of conscience due to something you've said or done recently or in the past.

For example, conventional morality says that it is wrong to steal. To believe this a truth serves us well until we are confronted with a greater principle that conflicts with this. Suppose you're starving and so you steal a loaf of bread and get caught; ought you to be sentenced to prison for that theft? Which principle shall overrule the other? The principle that comes into conflict with the fact that you stole is the belief that human beings are entitled to basic human rights, one of which is the right to have their basic needs met i.e., food, shelter etc. In this situation we might say that the right to eat trumps the moral injunction against stealing and most courts of law would deal leniently with such an offender. That is a pretty simple and clear cut example, but suppose you are caught being unfaithful to your spouse during a bout of hypersexual mania? Ouch…this one is bound to hurt and destined to dreg up tons of moral outrage on one party's behalf or the other. So what is the moral principle that's been broken in this example? Where does it issue from? Who verified it and set it in stone like the 10 Commandments of which it is one. In short, why do we accept it as unquestionable truth when it clearly isn't so?

Most of us were likely raised with this bit of conventional wisdom despite the fact that statistically speaking most of us will be unfaithful to a significant other at sometime in our lives. The outcome for the unfaithful one is a serious bout of self-derision and guilt, but do we deserve that? If the truth is that most "normal" people will be unfaithful at least once in their lives then why is it we feel so deeply that we are more deserving of blame than the statistics indicate we ought to feel? It's that old upbringing into convention that dictates just how guilty we will feel and whether we can get past it with a little damage or feel forced to forever suffer terrible recriminations for what we've done. The truth is that if you were raised in a Judeo-Christian home you've got a serious strike against you when it comes to getting over this incident because both of these religions revel in applying guilt, but the rest of the world thinks little of it. To someone like me it is just a blip on the moral screen, maybe not the best thing you could have done, but hardly up there with kicking your dog or thinking war is justifiable in my book.

So you were unfaithful…maybe even more than once…oh well…come clean about it and let the significant other deal with it as they may. You've a better chance of doing this if you don't think what you've done is a mortal sin. Thinking it a sin stems from your background and what morals you've taken as your own. If you haven't thought about why you think X is a sin then now is the time to do so. A sin according to what evidence and what tests? According to what book? Whose words and beliefs? If they aren't your very own beliefs arrived at after insistently thinking for yourself about such issues then think about them now and throw out the ones that come to you through the social milieu. What I'm trying to do here is get you to refuse to accept any moral principle as your OWN until you've examined its truth value very closely and held it up to the light of day against how those who think differently than you look at it. You may be very surprised to find that others think it a fairly minor transgression and immanently forgivable. So when you are beating yourself up over this kind of moral non-no, make sure you aren't accepting someone else's beliefs as your own without deciding, yes, actually making an ethical decision to follow that moral dictum as though you would have it applied to everyone universally.