Philosophical Dialogues, Hunter and Bain Is Morality Relative, Jake Jackson

Dialogues | Is Morality Relative?

Hunter and Bain huddle in a corner bay at the front of the cafe, sheltering from the dark downpour of seasonal rain. In the street outside a couple shuffle past, with the man holding an umbrella over his own head, his female companion, drenched and uncomplaining shakes her hair of water and notices a pile of melting clothes on the other side of the street, slumped against an alleyway wall. Bain watches her wrench, suddenly, the umbrella from her companion and stalk across the rainswept road. She leaps over a huge puddle and thrusts the flimsy protection towards the miserable pile from where a small hand emerges. For a moment the hand shivers a refusal, but the woman is insistent and presses the handle into the open palm. The now-grateful hand closes, holding firm in it’s unexpected respite.

The time does not matter, nor the year.

Bain: I don’t see that very often.

Hunter: Perhaps she was punishing her companion. Evening up the misery of her own condition.

Bain: Or, she was just being good!

Hunter: That seems unlikely, you humans always have an ulterior motive.

Bain: So we have no capacity for being truly good? That’s very cynical.

Hunter: Not really, it’s a survival mechanism. I’m not making a value judgement.

Bain: And you say that with a straight face! You think there is no sense of morality in our action?

Hunter: It’s more relative than that, it depends on circumstances, and motivations. It’s just not as absolute as you imply.

Bain: But surely she could just have seen a greater need, and just responded to it morally.

Hunter: But that doesn’t deny a greater relative need on her part, in motivating her action.

Bain: I think your confusing motivation with action. By any standard she performed an act that was good, whatever her motivations. She improved the life of the hand in the clothes, even for a moment, in preference to her own.

Hunter: On the face of it, perhaps that’s true, but what if she’s an android, and so doesn’t either feel the cold of the rain, or suffer from the ill-effects of it? Doesn’t that lessens the morality of her actions?

Bain: Not really, it’s still a good action, with worthwhile consequences.

Hunter: Does that mean any good act, whatever its motivations, or origins, is intrinsically good?

Bain: The act itself is good.

Hunter: So, a man is saved from death by a drug that’s been mined by slaves, on some mountain colony, many of whom die in the tunnels. Is the act of giving the man the drug, moral?

Bain: Well, the act itself is moral, but it is compromised I suppose.

Hunter: If the man who is saved knows the drug is created in that way, is the act still moral. Or the doctor giving it knows?

Bain, sighs: I suppose not.

Hunter: So this morality of yours can’t be absolute, because it’s affected by other factors.

Bain: Always?

Hunter: What do you think?

Bain: It seems problematic. If every such act is relative, perhaps there is no morality, just convenient or inappropriate action, according to circumstance.

Hunter: Indeed, morality is so compromised, it’s almost worthless.

Bain: No, that can’t be right. I know when I’m doing something good, however rare that might be, I know how I feel if I do something I know to be wrong, even if I continue to do it. There’s something less than relative about that.

Hunter: But isn’t that a conditioning put in place by the structure of the society that reared you?

Bain: Rebelled against, more like.

Hunter: But still defined by. You seem to say that when you reject what you know to be right, there’s still part of you that recognises it. That response is part of who you are.

Bain: So the morality is about circumstance, a conditioning which drives identity, self-identity particularly.

Hunter: Well, as part of a collective identity. Most groups, cities even, or a species, agree on a set of principles which construct the morality that raises its young.

Bain: Such as the allowing, or ignoring knowledge of, the deaths of people forced to work in a mine, which is agreed to be wrong.

Hunter: Or, if a drug is available that could save a life, if taken, however it was created, is agreed to be good. It’s the mediation of such decisions that creates laws in human societies, based on an a negotiated threshold of morality.

Bain: Negotiated?

Hunter: People don’t always agree.

Bain: And I suppose greater circumstances come in to play too. If people are at war, perhaps a different set of moralities kick in. More brutal decisions are made.

Hunter: Oh yes, sometime we need to talk about the terrible human concept of ‘just war’.

Bain: I think we’ve covered enough for now.

As they lapse into silence, their hands warmed by the coffee cups they gaze outside to find the rain has eased. The pile of clothes on the other side of the road, largely hidden by the umbrella, shivers and falls further to the sodden ground. The hand, still holding the object of apparent selflessness is curiously inert, and as the rain subsides entirely the umbrella tips backwards to reveal a jumble of discarded robot parts, and a disconnected metal arm poking out, its hand jerking slightly without anything to hold.

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