“Components of Moral Content” refers to the different ways in which our views of right and wrong are generated, explored, and debated. This part is about the forms in which moral guides, models, injunctions, reasons, criticisms, and revisions appear. These components are the activities, beliefs, habits, institutions, and intellectual content that together make up the morality of a given human society—whether that society is a family, an organization, or a political entity such as a town, state, or nation. A group is a cultural unit. And cultural units necessarily have moral systems.
All morality of which I am aware is messy, inconsistent, partially contradictory, and in a continual state of flux. The Great Conversation continually tugs and pulls at the de facto status of a given society’s moral system—revising, reshaping, and reordering what counts as right or wrong or somewhere in between.
But this conversation is not chaotic. There is structure and order to every moral system. Our known universe continually seeks equilibrium. In life, this physical impulsion toward balance takes the form of the law of reciprocity, which is embedded in the evolutionary code. Humans cannot not develop moral systems, any more than babies can avoid growing into adults.
We tell ourselves stories, some of which become constitutional vehicles of moral content. We develop values and virtues and identify heroes, heroines, and villains. Norms emerge. Religions sanctify some norms as holy, that is unbending, absolute pronouncements, beyond the reach of human tinkering. With civilization come rules and laws. Philosophers develop coherent, logically consistent systems of moral thought based on what they believe to be universal principles. Professionals and others develop codes of conduct for particular aspects of economic life. Artists bring old and new problems to the fore of the conversation. Participants in all areas call for moral imagination, the creative wrestling with values, virtues, norms, and rules to produce better solutions for moral dilemmas.
By breaking down morality into components, I hope to help us see some of its constituent parts, which together establish a society’s morality at any given moment in time. The pages in this section of the website lay out the major components as I see them. Others may see additional components or believe some of these should be divided into two or more components. Comments are welcome.