I saw a post a day or three back (I’m not going to look for it) that said that “it’s only wrong if it hurts people” is a trivial proposition because it just moves moral disagreement back to disagreements about what hurts people. I think there’s some truth to that, but I think that also underestimates how revolutionary and radical “it’s only wrong if it hurts people” actually is.
There are a number of very common/popular conceptions of morality that don’t fundamentally reduce to “it’s only wrong if it hurts people”:
- Command morality: morality consists of obeying a Proper Authority, an act is good if the Proper Authority approves of it, an act is bad if the Proper Authority forbids it. An example of command morality is (certain common forms of) Christianity: in Christianity the Proper Authority is God, an act is good if God approves of it, and an act is bad if God forbids it. In other forms of command morality the Proper Authorities are often high-status humans within your community such as elders, kings, etc. (in Christian societies command morality-based obedience to high-status humans often exists under some sort of “God’s deputy” theory). At its crudest, command morality is the reduction of morality to pure social status; to be morally good is simply to obey and submit to the higher-status people in your community. There’s often some idea that the Proper Authorities don’t or shouldn’t want you to hurt people, but not hurting people is at most fundamentally tangential to command morality. Under command morality, randomly killing your own son is morally good if a Proper Authority commands you to do it (this is a common and face value interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac).
- Deontological morality: morality consists of obeying a series of rules. These usually include rules against hurting people, but they also often include other rules tangential or orthogonal to not hurting people which are given equal or greater weight. A famous (apocryphal?) example is the Kantian idea that you should tell a murderer that their intended victim is hiding in your home because in that situation that particular variant of deontology prioritizes the rule against lying over the rule against harm.
- Spiritual cultivation: good is defined as attaining some enlightened spiritual state. Attaining this state often involves some forms of non-violence and other pro-social behavior, but not hurting people is fundamentally tangential to this notion of good. Buddhism and the more mystical/transcendentalist branches of Hinduism as I understand them are this, and I think much of the Christianity and Islam that isn’t command morality is basically this (like, this seems like basically what Christian monks and Muslim sufis are often trying to do).
- Virtue-based morality: good is embodying virtues. I think a lot of the time at a cognitive level the virtue moralist is trying to embody a particular mental picture of a good person (which, to be clear, I consider a legitimate project). Virtue moralists are often trying to embody virtues that involve not hurting people (kindness, fairness, noblesse oblige, etc.), but they may also be trying to embody virtues fundamentally tangential or orthogonal to not hurting people (excellence, bravery, martial prowess, etc.), and they may prioritize the latter over the former. Virtue-based morality also has a tendency to prioritize using virtuous means over actually preventing harm or benefiting people (you see this conflict between virtue-based morality and consequentialism a lot in fiction and pop philosophy).
- Conformism: conforming to the social code and normative behavior of your community is good, deviating from the social code and normative behavior of your community is bad. The social code of any functional community will contain rules against hurting people and norms of pro-social behavior, but not hurting people is fundamentally tangential to conformism. Under conformism, using an insufficiently deferential word to refer to a respected elder may be punished more severely than killing your romantic rival. Under conformism, harmless eccentricities are often punished with appalling cruelty and violence.
- Community loyalty/patriotism: doing things that maintain or increase the solidarity, security, wealth, military power, prestige, etc. of your community is good, doing things that reduce the solidarity, security, wealth, military power, prestige, etc. of your community is bad. This can be kind of like “hurting people is bad,” but with very strong in-group preference; community loyalty/patriotism is the sort of value system in which something like Numbers 31 can appear as an account of a glorious victory that you would want to tell your descendants about with pride (because the massacre and enslavement of the Midianites increased the wealth and security of the Israelites; under community loyalty/patriotism that’s the sort of thing you tell your children about with a tone of “look at the huge favor we did you!”). Community loyalty/patriotism also often implies a wholehearted embrace of Molochian bargains that increase the community’s economic and military power while lowering the standard of living of most or all of its members. If a strong community looks like a dreary little empire where the women are all oppressed and pregnant half the time and the men live and breathe toxic masculinity and mostly die violently before their thirty-fifth birthday, community loyalty/patriotism will tell you to embrace that lifestyle and the values and attitudes that support it and will call you selfish and bad if you don’t want to do that. If you want to know why so much of the past was so awful, I suspect it had a lot to do with community loyalty/patriotism’s willingness to embrace Molochian bargains.
- Coolness/arete: anything that makes you look powerful and beautiful is good (cool, based), anything that makes you look weak and ugly is bad (uncool, lame, cringe). I think this is what Nietzsche meant by “master morality”? In mainstream Western society this is mostly not understood as a system of morality, but 1) it’s quite influential in certain social environments, e.g. high school, where it often functions a lot like a moral system or social code, and more generally the power of such thinking in human affairs should not be underestimated, 2) explicitly moralistic versions of it do have a considerable popularity among fascists and other Romantic right-wingers (another possible name for it that occurred to me is Romantic morality). At its crudest it’s the reduction of morality to pure status emotions: anything that makes you look high-status is good, anything that makes you look low-status is bad; I think it’s not a coincidence that this and command morality have particular reputations for being awful to low-status people.
The typical human’s morality is a dog’s breakfast of “hurting people is wrong” and most or all of these other paradigms of right conduct (because humans are clever primates, not computers, and our social behavior regulation mechanisms reflect that). More to the point, as far as I can tell, even having “it’s only wrong if it’s hurting someone” as an ideal is a pretty historically recent development and a pretty significant break from how morality has been conceptualized in most human cultures. People toss around “it’s only wrong if it hurts people” or “if it harm none, do as thou wilt” as if they’re radical and revolutionary statements because they are radical and revolutionary statements; they’re implicit rejections of much of the logic of command morality, community loyalty, conformism, etc.. There’s vast amounts of human thought that’s dismissed or undermined by “it’s only wrong if it hurts somebody,” and I’m pretty sure you can still find a lot of people who disagree with it even in principle (imagine the sort of reactions you might get if you ran “it’s only wrong if it hurts someone” by some Taliban fighters who grew up in the rural areas of Afghanistan).
The fact that a lot of people see “it’s only wrong if it hurts people” or “if it harm none, do as thou wilt” as boring trivial anodyne statements is a powerful testimony of liberalism’s immense success.
