Human Morality

Human morality is animal morality transformed by language and language based technology. Altruism carries over from animal morality intact as does paranoia and fear of predation as the basis of power and greed. Self-defense as an act of preservation is unquestioned in human morality and ethics and comes to us directly from our animal heritage.

Language freed humans from real time living and introduced the concept of the future. Humans with language not only invented the future but discovered death in it. Death and its known inevitability and human's desire to escape it, played a major part in the formation, of religion. The important concept is that of the future and that death was in the future.

Language not only gave rise to the future but also to the historical past—the thing not there in space and time. Territories were transformed by language into property and contract. A contract is any agreement that has its force, in the future as well as the present. It was no longer the case that the land would go to the strongest. By means of a contract the land was retained in ownership by the group who occupied it and their heirs.

The shift from territories to property and contract undoubtedly took hundreds of thousands of years. Property lines were probably something as simple as watersheds. Demarcations that could be accurately and precisely determined with little or no mechanical technology.

Since language arose in the dim recesses of time any practice or technology associated with it would be considered to have occurred from time immemorial. Religion under this rubric would have been in existence from time immemorial, and the system of morality that goes with religion would also have the same property. Christianity the major source for our modern day morality, is an outgrowth of Judaism. Judaism as a religion and as a culture had much in common with Babylonian religion and culture and Babylonian religion and culture can be traced back to ancient Sumer, our cultural history begins some five thousand years ago. From the beginning moral codes were involved with property and contract. In the code of Hammerabi there was a price for each transgression and the price depended upon the nature of the offense and the rank of the victim. The higher the rank of the victim, the more the payment but a payment in any case. Life in the Code of Hammerabi was equated with money much the same way it is today in insurance and liability practice.

We can see some of these same concepts in some of the Ten Commandments. While not all of the Ten Commandments are concerned with property, a sufficient number of them are to give it the flavor of property and contract.

• Thou shalt not steal.

• Thou shalt not bear false witness...

• Thou shalt not covet...

The concept of property is primarily a language-based technology function and it may have been associated with the rise of agriculture. Agricultural surpluses could have provided the opportunity for a new and more sedentary life style where it might be important to know about inventories, stocks of food etc., or property. Agricultural surpluses provided the mechanism to maintain slaves and the language based concept of property and contract would provide the rational to maintain the system of owners and slaves. The slaves would do the work and produce the food surplus which would form the form basis of wealth and authority and a sufficient supply of food to feed everybody.

It seems that property became sacred early on and a whole system of morality was invented to maintain it. All major religions accepted slavery. Human morality countenanced slavery as proper under property law. As many as 80 to 90% of all persons may have been in some kind of bondage in the Middle Ages. Monasteries and Nunneries owned bondsmen—slaves. The European economic system of land tenure with its bound tenants was imported into the New World along with the practice of slavery. Human morality with its heavy emphasis on property rights, especially slavery, carries heavy baggage from its past.

Human moralists still struggle with the same time honored problems: What constitutes good, right, and just? What is the moral requirement of ownership. What is the moral value of war? What is the moral value of money? What is the moral value of life? What is the moral consequence of individual responsibility? What is the moral responsibility of the group to its members and to others?

Human morality, with its accompanying ethic having a strong basis in the reverence for property, can not lead us into the promised land. The answer has nothing to do with property. Ownership of private property, by itself does not adversely influence human morality. As a factor of the technological ecosystem; private property, is a force for ecosystem vitality. The error lays not with private property. It lays with basing our system of morality on property and contract. Slavery was OK because slaves were property and human morality tends to a reverence of property. Slavery is not OK because people are not property. If we can improve human morality by removing people as slaves from the category of property, then maybe we can improve morality by removing property from its base. Keep private property. Private property is wonderful. Don't use property as the basis for what is good, right, or just in the basis of a morality. We have lived with human morality for millennia. As the world moves from autocratic to democratic systems, human morality which evolved under autocratic systems of religion and governance is evolving into humane morality, a morality given more to serving the needs of a democratic society.

Thomas Jefferson voiced the aspirations of humankind when he said, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are our unalienable rights, departing from the Life, Liberty, and Property of John Locke.

In a system of humane values, property is not a virtue it is a neutral factor. Virtue resides in persons not things. The virtue upon which our system of humane morality is based is contained in the democratic principles of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and our Creator given unalienable rights.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1993
Institute for domestic Tranquility