On Morality

Morality also has been said to be what people actually do socially. That is one may define social conduct interactively in various spheres from the point of view as a social anthropologist-historian. Moral behavior is made or developed from a variety of sources including obviously history and tradition-experience of real world circumstances that have bound people together.

One might consider Navaho funeral behavior of the 19th century and note that the procedures of the Shamanistic tradition were regarding life rather than the afterlife, and that the customs of body washing with soap of the funeral participants after three days, of not looking north and of concern for evil spirits coincided with the avoidance of germs and communicable diseases that often accompanied death-the living had no biological explanation for or understanding of germs, yet their selected moral traditions roughly followed the better decontamination and social grief release procedures possible given the criteria.

Social behavior tends to adapt its moral guidelines appropriate for the times. One sees the changes in feminist politics and employment following Rowe vs. Wade and the changes in sexual practices after the marketing of birth control pills. Moral guidelines tend to be rules of conduct with less than a substantive codification into law, although moral norms are often made into laws.

Natural law is its own implicit moral criterion that emerges throughout human cultures although not uniformly. Revelations of a divine nature are on occasions instructions for individual and social behavior that one disregards only at one's peril, and there is no necessary causal link between the emergence of moral codes from direct divine revelation, although some of the latter have been found through investigation to coincide with reasonable historical grounds for emergence into being.

Philosophical definition of terms such as good and evil tend have ontological values that vary, and construction of logical propositions and formations for moral axioms to induct responsive behavior conformity historically have been of a subjective and temporal nature. Good is a concept that requires a particular definition-utilitarians and others have obviously considered what good is, and if the greatest good for the greatest number is truly moral when that premise is exploited to annihilate individual primacy in existential social worth. If a political order pursues a particular highest moral goal that is good, then it might justify any lesser evil to advance society toward that goal as good as well. All evil in support of an ultimate goal is phenomenally good as well. The opportunities to disclarify terms are evident and abundant in such abstract impersonal approaches to manufacture of moral values.

Abstract moral values made practice by elite imposition are sometimes examples of the elevation of abstract goals through equivocation to a moral good that may then be placed upon the society as a straightjacket. Nietchze's idea that the annihilation of traditional morality and of Christian values obviously adversely influenced Germany toward a self-destructive political course in the 20th century. Some have noted that the adoption of mass social moral values of anti-values tend to bring about the most rigid mass social conformity possible as one might find in a gang, militant terror organization or the Hitler Youth Movement-Even Stalin's Russia sought to impose a culling moral existential guideline that would have been a comfortable philosophical fit for the Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea.

The abstract construction of moral value in order to bring about political change is a common enough historical occurrence. Even today in the United States there is a possibility of a Presidential contest in 2012 between two non-Christians from different parties yet in a way from the same state of Massachusetts with each advocating a corporatist health care plan in a state with homosexual marriage. One might speculate that the operative new moral axiom for the godless atheism of Massachusetts is Darwin' gambit; the over-use of evolution as a tool for the controverion of morality for-itself.

The philosophical consideration of the range of behavior useful to human life in a criterion of phenomenal evolution is not limited to crass anything goes-ism. There are implicit physical and spiritual criteria of the empirical state of being that makes some intentional and unintentional behaviors good, and other bad. Then again, there are transcendent questions concerning morality that are a matter of faith and insight.