The Moral Mind by Henry Haslam

Author:Henry Haslam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Morality, philosophy, materialism, religion, values
ISBN: 9781845408084
Publisher: Andrews UK LImited 2016
Published: 2016-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

3-2. The Morality of Custom: To Conform or to Challenge

If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them.

Sotho proverb, quoted by Robert Ruark, Something of Value

One of the characteristics of human societies is the extent to which their behaviour is regulated by social custom - the way that people behave and think about things, differing in many important respects from other communities. I use the word ‘custom’ to describe conventional behaviour and thinking which have been learned from others (see Definitions in Chapter 1). Other animals develop customs (see, particularly, de Waal, 2001), but humans are unique in the importance that we attach to them in our social life and in how strongly they shape what we expect of one another.

I am suggesting that there is a useful distinction to be made between innate conventional behaviour that is found throughout the human species (often similar to the behaviour of other primate species), and conventional behaviour that has been learned and is found throughout a particular community (while other communities have different conventions). The interaction of the moral sense with innate behaviour patterns formed the basis of the previous section ; its interaction with learned behaviour is considered here.

To Conform ...

There are two ways in which the moral sense engages with custom. First, it is widely regarded as morally good to conform to the customs of one’s own people. As far as records go back, it seems that every community or tribe had its customs, its ceremonies and its rituals ; and these customs were enforced by moral sanction. Customs provide social cohesion and a sense of belonging, and they distinguish members of one society from people belonging to another. Many day-to-day decisions are made easier if everyone knows what is expected of them. Behaviour that is governed by custom includes such vitally important activities as eating habits, marriage and family relationships, sexual behaviour, how we greet one another, the language or dialect we speak, and rituals surrounding death and bereavement, as well as the finer points of day-to-day social interaction. Some customs are positive, things that must be done; others are negative, behaviour to be avoided. As the educationalist W R Niblett wrote in 1963,

Most people for most of their lives fit easily into the expectations of their time and place about how they should behave. One tends to follow the Joneses not only in matters of dress, speech and diet but more or less in standards of honesty, truth-telling, treatment of parents, sexual conduct, attitude to criminals and so on. In the eighteenth century it was good men, not only bad, who saw nothing that was wrong in owning slaves or hanging a sheep-stealer.

We can see some similarities with other social species. The behaviour of these animals is instinctive, lacking the variety of locally developed customs, but it may serve a similar purpose in creating social cohesion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.