If the law commands me to sin, I will break it. – Angelina Grimke
Though the words “morals” and “mores” come from the same Latin root (mos, meaning “custom”), they do not mean the same thing: “morals” are the same as “ethics”, in other words principles of right and wrong; “mores”, on the other hand, are simply customs which are universally accepted in a culture. Leaving a restaurant without paying is a violation of morals, but leaving without tipping is a violation of mores: theft is always wrong, but not every culture practices tipping and restaurants don’t post signs announcing that doing so is a condition of service. The distinction is not always as clear-cut as one might like; religions which pretend that their rules were directly dictated by a deity intentionally confuse the two by pretending that private, personal actions are an offense against that deity, and modern secular societies do the same by speaking of offenses against nebulosities such as “the law”, “the state”, “decency” or “the public order”. In most cases, however, it’s pretty easy for a reasonable person to tell the difference, despite the obfuscatory efforts of “authorities” and moralists (a word which might be defined as “those who demand that mores be treated as though they were morals”).
Morals are precepts which govern forceful interactions between people. Every individual owns himself, his actions and the products of his labor unless he has freely consented to some agreement which assigns rights over one or all of those to someone else in exchange for some compensation. For example, a person may agree to allow someone else to control his actions and own his produce in exchange for a wage or salary. If such an agreement is made due to force or threat of force applied by the other party or one acting on his behalf, it is invalid and immoral; if, however, the force is applied by a third party with no connection to either it is not.
For example, if I choose to give sex to a man in response to his threatening me, it is rape; but my choosing to have sex with him in order to get money to pay a third party is not. Now, it may be that the third party’s demand for money is an immoral one, but that has absolutely no effect on my sale of sex to the man; our interaction is morally equivalent whether I’m using the money for rent, drugs, food, gambling debts, education, taxes, a retirement fund, a blackmail demand or anything else. Similarly, if a thief buys food from a grocery store with stolen money, that transaction is the exact moral equivalent of buying food with money that was rightfully his; the grocery store owner is not morally responsible for the thief’s actions unless he somehow caused them himself.
Actions which exert control (including harm) over others which they neither desire nor require (for example, in response to incapacity or their own immoral actions), are legally described as malum in se (wrong because they are wrong); they do not require a law to be thought of as wrong by moral people, nor can they be made less wrong by law. Laws do not determine the rightness or wrongness of an action; they merely determine a government’s official response to that action. Laws against consensual, private activities do not make such activities wrong; all they do is to declare that the state will use those behaviors as an excuse for its own immoral conduct. Nor does the lack of a law make an activity right; slavery was accepted by most cultures for millennia, but it was still always wrong because it is a flagrant violation of the principle of self-ownership.
Mores, by contrast, govern either wholly private behaviors or public behaviors which do not violate others’ rights. Belching and farting in public don’t hurt anyone, but they’re certainly considered offensive in Western culture (though belching, at least, is not at all rude in some other cultures). Public nudity is another example; it has no direct effect on anyone else and in some cultures is (or at least was) perfectly normal. But in Western culture, it’s a violation of mores, as are a number of harmless private (especially sexual) behaviors which might nevertheless cause significant social embarrassment if they were discovered by others. The majority of laws are made against behaviors which violate mores, yet aren’t actually wrong; many others ban acts which violate neither morals nor mores, but somehow offend the rulers. Behaviors which violate such laws are legally described as malum prohibitum (wrong because they are prohibited). Because such laws are arbitrary they vary widely from place to place, and because they are not based in morality they often conflict with moral actions, either by forbidding actions which are not wrong or by compelling actions which are.
From the very beginning, then, would-be “authorities” faced a problem: how to get sane, reasonable people to obey laws that conflicted with their own judgments. In the days before science and mass communication this was accomplished by a combination of extreme violence and appeal to supernatural beliefs: “Omniscient gods made these laws, and if you disobey them they will punish you, either now or after death; furthermore, your disobedience offends the righteous so if we catch you we won’t wait for the gods to strike you down, but instead will do it ourselves.” Nowadays, it’s a lot harder; supernatural beliefs aren’t as universal as they once were, and the internet makes it possible for people to see exactly how arbitrary their own counties’ laws are. And while early mass communications like printing, radio and television were largely centralized and unidirectional (and therefore subject to control by governments), the internet is both decentralized and omnidirectional (which is why governments and other control freaks yearn to censor it, hobble it or bring it under their control).
The majority of people are no better than their Bronze Age ancestors; they still have faith in a priori arguments which bear no resemblance to the real world, in the superhuman powers of charismatic leaders, in mystical principles which contradict each other and in demonic forces which move about in the Unknown waiting to carry off nubile young virgins. Given that, it’s no real surprise that so many still accept the equation of mores with morals and malum prohibitum with malum in se; the world is full of people who really cannot understand the difference between weed-smoking and assault or between prostitution and rape, and are willing to say so in courtrooms and legislatures. And that’s why it’s so very important that those of us who do understand are very clear on the distinctions and therefore able to offer a cogent answer when someone demonizes cultural differences as “moral relativism”, says “why don’t we just legalize murder, too?” or declares that laws have the power to alter reality or to force others to believe the same things he does.
This was a tough read for me … with all the “morals” and “mores” with latin kicked in for good measure I was looking around for a BC Powder!
LOL – but I hung with it! I think you’ve made a great “step-by-step” argument that walks people through to the truths of the matter.
When I was young – the Rev. Jerry Falwell told me (on TV) that lack of morality would be the downfall of the nation.
i now think that TOO MANY rules and regulations governing morality will be the downfall of it. If you think about it – we’ll be hiring “pacified” Secret Service Agents soon because they’re the only ones that can keep their dicks in their pants on White House trips to South America. I don’t think these guys will be tough enough to protect the POTUS though. We’re doing the same thing in the military will all the restrictions placed on their sexual conduct – even after DADT has been ended.
Everyone is guilty … everyone’s a pervert. I just don’t think a nation can survive this kind of psychology.
I suspect that it will be more like, we’ll only hire Secret Service Agents capable of carrying out a basic business transaction with the normal amount of discretion typical with that activity.
Plus, it’s like a month, and you’re a submariner, a group of people who go on patrols without women for up to 90 days.
You know what they say about submarines …
120 men “go down” and 60 couples come back up! 😀
There’s a million of those jokes! Everyone I met outside the sub force thought submariners were strange and weird (which we were). I had a friend of mine who had to go to a shrink once. He said the doc asked him …
“Ever have any sexual fantasies about other women besides your wife?”
“Yeah”
“Ever have any sexual fantasies about other men?”
“Hmmm … well, yeah”
LOL … Doc told him after the session … “Son, I don’t know if you’re heterosexual or homosexual but you are damn sure sexual!!”
Excellent piece! I’ve always been basically pro-liberty, but what really drew me towards a more full-throated libertarianism is that, as a philosophy, it starts with a simple premise (that the individual owns them self/ought to be considered free by presumption) and infers from there. It’s logically coherent in a way that the two main non-fascist views simply are not.
Competing contemporary philosophies are little more than intersections between emotional reactions, fads, and the law. The most naked example of this is Progressivism (though conservatism isn’t much behind); if it made the median progressive feel good, emotionally, to support genocide, they would embrace it en masse. They have no actual, concrete sense of right or wrong as libertarians, or even socialists, have – at least as pertains to the law.
Sadly, I think the majority of people are soft-Lawheads. They at least tacitly assume that the laws on the book carry some moral weight.
On a related note, you might be interested in a book from this past year; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (by Jonathan Haidt). It looks at how people form their political views from an empirical stance.
Hmmm, wonder why my name keeps changing on this.
Weird! The Gravatar shows your name as “Wilson263”; maybe you should change that?
Well said Maggie.
Though you say that “morals” and “ethics” are synonymous, there’s a point of view that separates them by no more than the legal split hair. In this, “morals” are an individuals system of principles, while “ethics” are those of (a) society. Thus, hospitals often have “ethicists” to help in reaching decisions, not “moralists” (which term does have negative connotations).
That’s interesting; I’ve always interpreted the two words the other way around. That is, I hear “ethics” and think of personal principles, and hear “morals” and think of society-defined principles.
Two words with very similar meanings; can be very confusing, if you don’t know exactly what someone means.
It’s the same with “goals” and “targets”; interchangeable use to mean long term aim and the steps needed to get there.
i think some people do get the differnce. That is why the false trafficing science and sky high numbers are used.It would be more diffucult to jail folks if it was just someone oppion. no harm to anyone else……but if all the women were trafficed ………..well now we can round everybody up.
Aha! Cicero! Unfortunately, “government” and “society” are anonymous, or you – on behalf of all sex workers – could have added, appropriately, the famous first lines from his speech against Catalina that uses “OTempora! O mores!”:
“How long, O Catiline [government, society], will you abuse our patience? And for how long will that madness of yours mock us? To what end will your unbridled audacity hurl itself?”
(I found the translation conveniently on Wikipedia)
Of course, Lucius Sergius Catiline was in all probability railroaded by Cicero and the optimate faction, as Catiline was current titular head of the opposition to the optimate faction, the populares. They even tried to frame Gaius Julius Caesar, but Caesar was too smart for them. This did not save the five men–including one praetor, normally the second highest office in the Republic–being put to death without benefit of a trial, or any thing else, under a senate consultus ultimatum.
I agree with Dr. Martin Luther King, obnowious laws should be ignored. However, there is a difference between obnowious and inconvenient. Just because you do not like a law means you should ignore it, because you think you know better. Building Codes and Restaraunt health regulations are two that come immediately to mind in this category.
Well there’s this …
http://www.businessinsider.com/government-bureaucracy-in-hurricane-2012-11
I was also in a Honolulu Strip Bar when it was raided by the cops – but the reason they raided it was to shut down the on-stage showers the strippers were using as a part of their shows. There was an island-wide water management order in effect but the strip bar was ignoring it. That on stage shower was AWESOME!!
Cops are NO fun!!
Heaven forfend that a health inspector make sure that no one’s being served tainted food. You can go without food for weeks. And… did the article even say the inspector shut the place down? No! Just that he was making an inspection!
…but, regrettably, whether a law is obnoxious or inconvenient is often in the eyes of any given beholder.
Even people with the sincerest of rational, objective considerations too often end up with differing conclusions. Our human limitations and fallibilities hinder unanimous agreement and partly cause the conflicts between people.
By the way…some parts of building codes and restaurant regulations are more the result of special interests and outright profiteering rather than of objective concerns for safety and health. So, even in those spheres, obnoxious-versus-inconvenient applies.
Having worked in the construction and food service industries, I’m going to have to say “no” to that one.
What you look at as obsessive is–in reality–lessons that have been learned the hard way over a lot of years. They are stringent because if you give some people an inch they take a mile. These codes are especially important in an era when so many foreign nationals are working in these two sectors, and if they do things like they do them at “home,” you would have a lot of sick and injured people.
The idea that prostitution is immoral is the central problem; overturning that would cause the legal and cultural opposition to fade.
We can see a historical parallel with nursing. At certain times in the past, it was a profession treated with the utmost scorn, suitable only for women who could not become wives, prostitutes or nuns. An immoral and dangerous activity, to be sure (sound familiar?) classed alongside burying the dead, cleaning the streets, catching dogs and collecting sewage.
But gradually, the opposition to caring for the sick and dying was challenged, and that was helped by a number of high-class women who entered nursing, most famously Florence Nightingale. Harm reduction, particularly the improvement of hygiene, did the rest (although getting doctors to wash their hands is a battle that alas, has not yet been totally won).
Thus, nursing gained recognition and respect, and so it can be with sex work.
I suppose that I could respond, “No, the central problem is that politicians think they have the right to legislate morality, and too many citizens support this notion.”
But in truth I do have to admit that if whoring were more respected, it wouldn’t be under such moral sanction. As more and more of us see homosexuals as just people instead of dangerous perverts, we find that the laws making their lives hell decline.
Also, there seems little chance of getting politicians out of the business of telling us how to be good people.
So until we live in that Utopian world where governments just plain bug out of the morality business, we can hope for and, some of us, at least a little, work towards getting the working girl some respect.
[…] or neofeminists apply their own synonyms for the term to porn and prostitution, these things are not and cannot be “immoral” by any valid definition of the word because they are voluntary interactions which are acceptable to those who choose to participate in […]