Morality: concepts, sources, and social roles

The German expression "moral" goes back via the French morale to the Latin moralis (concerning custom; Latin: mos, mores Sitte, Sitten), which is used in the expression philosophia moralis, newly coined by Cicero, as a translation of êthikê (ethics).

Morality originally described above all how people actually act and what action is expected or considered right in certain situations. This descriptive meaning aspect of a morality is also called morality or ethos and includes "regulating judgments and regulated behaviors" without assessing or evaluating the rational or moral-theoretical justification of them. Such an assessment is called a "reflective theory of morality" or "ethics".

Morality is the subject of various sciences:

• Ethics is a discipline of philosophy that examines and often formulates and justifies moral principles, values, virtues, validity claims, demands, justifications, etc.
• Metaethics examines the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological presuppositions and implications of moral thought, speech, and action.
• Moral theology and theological ethics consider the relationships between morality and religion.
• Moral psychology studies what moral opinions, actions, and emotions individuals exhibit; motivational psychology attempts to explain inclinations toward them.
• Morality in the context of social units or organizations is one of the subjects of social sciences.
• Political science or economics can also be understood normatively and thus be moral sciences that attach intrinsic value to actions.

Morality as an aspect of human nature

As a social being, humans normally experience love, the willingness to renounce and to care from birth. Without these qualities, a lasting coexistence in communities would not be possible. They have developed in the course of evolution and the predisposition to them is therefore in the genes. As biologist Hans Mohr puts it, "We don't need to learn moral behavior-it's an innate disposition that enables us to do the morally right thing." However, a person's concrete moral concepts are culturally superimposed: they are expressed, for example, in the "golden rule," in religious prescriptions for action (such as the Ten Commandments in Judaism and Christianity, the Five Silas in Buddhism, or the Dreamtime mythology of the Australian Aborigines), or in the legal norms of modern states. Despite the moral disposition, education and ideological manipulation can elevate even destructive behaviors to the status of the allegedly "good", which completely contradict the characteristics mentioned at the beginning.

Morality and justice

It is one of the basic questions of the philosophy of law, in which relationship law and morality stand to each other. In many respects morality and law (e.g. the prohibition of killing) coincide. The question of how morally reprehensible laws are, for example, has been discussed since antiquity (see natural law) and in more recent history particularly intensively in the German post-war period. Of particular note here are Radbruch's formula on the relationship between law and injustice, insubordination, and the question of whether deserters should be amnestied (see Gesetz zur Aufhebung nationalsozialistischer Unrechtsurteile in der Strafrechtspflege).

Descriptive concept of morality

In descriptive use, "morality" describes a rule of action that is guiding for a society, social group or individual, or "the rules of conduct lived in a concrete community or internalized by a person". This is specified differently depending on the theoretical approach, for example as the "totality of the socially represented rule-related action orientations and reciprocal behavioural expectations anchored in the personality system of individuals, or as a more closely defined subclass" of the same. Luhmann defines, "in purely empirical terms": "A communication assumes moral quality if and insofar as it expresses human respect or disrespect". In this descriptive sense, "moral" or "moral" are also used simply descriptively in the sense of "belonging to morality", not normatively in the sense of "morally good". "Morality" then refers, for example, to "an enterprise of society" for "guiding the individual and smaller groups." Such descriptive ways of speaking correspond to everyday language formulas such as "prevailing morality", "bourgeois morality" or "socialist morality". Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has proposed the following definition: "Moral systems are interlocking assemblages of values, virtues, norms, customs, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved mental mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and enable social coexistence."

Postconventional morality

Post-conventional morality, which seeks to base moral judgements on rational discourse, especially in the case of ethical dilemmas, aims to overcome the orientation of moral judgements to prevailing conventions or norms set by positive law on the one hand, and to purely subjective decisions of conscience on the other.