Moral Reasoning: How a Narrow Understanding of Morality Taught Me Fear
Needless to say, this underlying, emotionally-driven perspective impedes my ability to develop relationships with others. If I want to find those with whom I can connect, I have to reveal myself. This revealing of my personality feels scary, sure, but what I'm actually finding myself wondering at present is: Where did this belief that others are judgmental come from?
In order to answer that question, I believe we need to examine the concept of morality itself. And, to be clear, I don't believe everyone is judgmental in the way this assumption...err, assumes. Rather, the issue is that I don't know if someone else will be, or on what points they might be, judgmental. The more I perceive myself to differ from a group norm (particularly in matters of value, belief, or opinion), the more I want to hide that difference to fit in. This is pretty human, but I feel that my tendencies here are rather strong. My body of work on the Internet may not present things that way, but I feel safer to share openly on the Internet than I do in person, and I have intentionally pursued vulnerability in my writing work, believing that doing so is a calling from God.
Moral Authority
The first thing we need to confront about morality is that it is very often subjective. Before anyone accuses me of moral relativism, I ask you to think critically about this. For one thing, different cultures value different things. They have different ways of behaving. What is rude in one culture may be polite in another (leaving someone in peace versus leaving them alone look the same, for example, but are perceived differently). There are many particulars about how morality works that are a subjective experience, and different people put different weight on different things. Why else do we see moral conundrums, like the famous trolley problem and its many variations? How often do superheroes have to choose between saving a loved one or saving strangers?
The specific facet of morality that I'm wanting to examine here is the fundamental question of how what is morally right and what is morally wrong is determined. Before I begin digging in on this, I believe it is wise to point out that we often conflate preference (I like or dislike this) and quality (high quality or low quality) with morality. This easily happens because we use the words "good" and "bad" as values on all three judgment scales. Learning to differentiate between these is an important step in developing one's objectivity.
I'm going to turn to a familiar reference point to help with my analysis: the colors of Magic: The Gathering. Yes, the card game. The colors have well-explored and defined philosophies and points-of-view on life, and this includes moral perspectives. I personally find the framework very helpful, and I hope as you read this that you'll agree. The colors are White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. For the remainder of this article, if you see one of those color words starting with a capital, I'm using it to refer to that color. I mention this because two of the words, "White" and "Black," are used for racial (and, realistically, cultural) groups, particularly in the United States of America, and I want to avoid confusion. If I talk about White-thinking, I'm talking about how the Magic color White thinks, not how white people/culture think.
White's Morality
White is the color of hierarchy. It wants harmony, and it sees laws and rules as a way to achieve that. However, on a practical level, White's moral authority is the structure. Its morality is whatever the laws are, and the laws are whatever those in positions of authority say they are. In other words, White does not generate its own morality, it upholds the morality of others, that of leaders. In this way, it highly regards governments, religions, and tradition. White is also group-oriented. It values sacrificing for the sake of the group. It also pushes for conformity as a means of generating harmony, as increased homogeneity decreases points of friction.
Blue's Morality
Blue is the color of knowledge. It seeks perfection, and it believes the road to perfection is paved with knowing. Thus, when it comes to morality, Blue is very data-driven and analytical. In this way, it can be cold, because it is trying to produce the best outcomes. Of course, the problem here is that identifying "best" is a value-call. Blue, in other words, provides a path to creating a morality based on values, but it is poor at actually providing those values. It sees rationality and logic as the means to create a moral code, but it also sees morality as inherently mutable as new data is acquired. Something that was deemed good based on a set of data may be deemed bad as the knowledge-base is expanded.
Black's Morality
Black is the color of power. In truth, it seeks to protect and promote the self, and it sees the acquisition of power as the means to obtaining security. To this end, it is willing to make a great many sacrifices (which sometimes doesn't work out) because it sees as what it obtains as being more valuable than that which it loses. It does not mind paying the costs of acquiring what it wants.
It's easy to see Black as ruthless and immoral. The counterargument is by whose moral standard? The real secret to Black's morality is that if you can get it to trust you, it'll support you. There is also a pragmatic angle to Black: if no one else is looking out for you, then you need to do it yourself. However, it doesn't have to rely on this thinking if it believes someone else really is looking out for it.
What's really important to understand is Black's morality is centered around individuality and the self. While that can make it appear selfish (and it often is), it also means it's most likely to advocate for minority groups. It isn't afraid to rock the boat if it thinks it can get an advantage from doing so.
Black's morality is perhaps the hardest to understand, in no small part because the moral lens of society tends to be White, and White disagrees with Black morally. I'll expand on the relationships between the colors after I finish describing them all, though.
Red's Morality
Red is the color of emotion. It craves freedom. Morally speaking, it's quite simple: what feels good is good, and what feels bad is bad. However, this appearance of simplicity is deceiving. I believe the conscious lives here, and often zeal and conviction do, too. Further, intuition is a very Red thing (despite the card with that name being Blue and arguably a Black effect). This includes moral intuition. Red can develop a very perceptive sense of morality as a result, even if it might be bad at articulating it.
Like Black, Red will also advocate for minority groups, often through emotional appeals. These appeals can be quite effective, especially because when Red makes these appeals, they're sincere.
Green's Morality
Green is the color of nature. As such, Green argues that morality derives from a thing's nature: it does good when its actions are aligned with its nature and wrong when it defies its nature. Green dislikes artificiality. In this way, Green's morality is actually the most straightforward. It says you shouldn't blame a cornered animal for attacking you, because what did you expect it to do when you cornered it?
Putting Them In Relationship
Truly understanding these different moral perspectives and their sources of moral authority (society, rationality, self, emotions, and nature) requires examining them against each other, for it is in their agreements and disagreements that I think we can learn the most. In part, this is because each of us have our own combinations of these perspectives (for example, I tend towards Green, Blue, and Black, with White being the least in me—more on this later). Society itself also tends to teach us White's perspective for what are hopefully obvious reasons, which tends to bias discussions of morality towards that perspective.
Something else that is worth examining here are values. Morality itself is derived from values, which means that all of these perspectives can result in different morals depending upon both collective and individual values. Thus, a combination of values and perspective are used to derive moral judgments.
White's Relationships
There are a few important things to understand about White that heavily affect its relationships. The first, as mentioned previously, is that it wants harmony; that is, it desires a peaceful society. However, this often results in a push for conformity that tends to draw it into conflict with the other colors, particularly Red and Black. The second thing to know is that White does not actually generate its own morality. Rather, it relies upon the other colors, including Red and Black, to create its morality. This is because White relies upon hierarchies and tradition as its source of moral authority, but neither of those things are able to generate morality in-and-of themselves. Popular sentiment is driven primarily by Red and Black morality and laws based in logic and rationality come from Blue morality. Thus, White maintains morality derived from other colors.
As a general rule of thumb, White dislikes it when other colors challenge its morality, or more broadly, when other colors challenge the status quo, because it sees such challenges as upsetting its harmony at best and as abandoning morality at worst. However, such disruptions can become part of a new status quo; when this happens, White will zealously defend them.
Thus, White generally feels threatened by the other colors' moralities unless they come from an authority figure that White respects. This means, from a morality standpoint, White tends to function antagonistically towards the moralities of other colors, rather than inherently seeing merit in them (especially initially), as it takes time, and often generational change, for culture to shift morally. It should also be noted that White will often even be in conflict with itself, as different groups compete to be moral authorities.
Blue's Relationships
While White is inherently antagonistic towards all other moralities, Blue is not. Rather, it looks for anything that makes sense to it. Thus, it tends to find bits and pieces of other colors' moralities that it agrees with and other bits that it rejects. For example, Blue might look at White's morality and find parts that make logical sense to it that it approves of and other parts that strike Blue as arbitrary or outdated that it disapproves of. This applies to its view on all other colors' moralities: if a logical case can be made, then Blue can likely be convinced of a moral view.
Black's Relationships
Remember that Black's morality is around seeking its own security and assuaging its fears. It often does this through seeking power for itself. As such, it often sees the other colors' moralities as tools to this end. This leads to a somewhat paradoxical situation, where Black can either see the other colors' moralities as leverage points, ways to gain power through manipulation (by abiding by them, often to gain social clout through "purity"), or as oppressive forces that threaten to destroy Black.
In a general, broad sense (rather than at the individual level), Black's morality tends to be oppressive and tyrannical in practice when Black has a lot of power, but, somewhat ironically, it can be a force to tear down oppressive, tyrannical forces when Black has lower amounts of power. As such, Black will use White's moral authority to maintain its power if it has it, but fight against that moral authority when Black lacks power, making it both the oppressor and the oppressed.
Red's Relationships
Red's relationships are fairly straightforward. Remember, Red is about freedom and emotionality. Thus, it can be inconsistent (liking the status quo when it feels comfortable, hating it when it feels oppressive). In some regards, it's a lot like Blue, just the emotional side instead of the logical one. Sometimes this results in it holding strong convictions, and other times it results in Red being quite fickle.
It should be noted that Red can also often be like Black in that it can end up as both an oppressor and the oppressed. On the one hand, it can be manipulated through fears, leading to things like moral panics, lynching, and the like. On the other hand, it can be moved through compassion to dismantle oppressive systems.
Green's Relationships
For the most part, Green is pretty chill when it comes to other colors' moralities. As it believes people should just be who they are, it doesn't tend to judge others very much. It doesn't like it when the other colors impose their morality, however, which means it often finds itself in conflict with White's morality, which Green sees as both highly artificial and quite oppressive. Of course, this stance is generally true, regardless of the color. Green typically won't start the fight against oppression, but it's frequently a strong ally against it. After all, it's only natural for a cornered animal to fight back, isn't it?
So What?
So what is the point of examining all of this? For me, it's trying to understand certain things. Let me begin by explaining that, at this point, I've long identified myself as primarily Green, Blue, and Black. As I've examined the colors and their moralities, the more I can see the truth of this. The way I conceive of morality aligns with a blend of the concepts of these three colors. By default, I tend to think of "good" as being whatever maximizes a person's potential or most enables them to be themself.
This morality stuff has overall had big ramifications for me, though. For example, it affects my politics pretty heavily. However, my focus here, in case you'd forgotten (and I don't blame you if you have!) is wondering where the assumption I have that people are judgmental comes from. Though, thinking through morality this thoroughly has me additionally pondering its impacts when it comes to religion and faith. Let's tackle those two things in that order!
Assumption of Judgmentalism
Let me be blunt: White's, and to an extent Red's, morality scares me. There is some overlap here. The side of Red morality that scares me is that born of anger, hatred, or disgust. Those emotions lead to a morality that is merciless, harsh, and vindictive. White morality, on the other hand, is often unfeeling, implacable, and unable to be reasoned with. The law is the law, and that's that. You break it, you pay the price, no matter how arbitrary or senseless it may seem to the lawbreaker. So, both White morality and certain aspects of Red morality can be quite merciless, and they can both be quite arbitrary.
Now, I want to be clear: I'm not principally talking about governmental law here, though that does fall under the bucket of White morality. No, that's often well thought-through, though at times it is ill-applied, archaic, or otherwise suffers from things that my Blue, Black, and Green aspects all criticize. No, what I'm primarily talking about are things like social customs and website rules.
The problem with social customs is that they can easily ambush me. This is because they are extremely arbitrary in nature, but it is also often assumed that they are known, which means that they are invisible and can't be deduced by reasoning. In this way, they function like landmines just waiting to get you into some kind of ambiguous social trouble. The ambiguity of consequences is also a problem here, as I just indicated, as it lets my mind shrivel in the fear of the unknown. (To be clear, I'm not saying social customs are necessarily bad; rather, consequences for breaking them should be low because of the above issues. Often, the consequences are low in reality; I'm just overinflating them because of their unknown nature.)
The Internet is a rather different animal. Rules are per website, but much of the Internet has functionally contracted to a relatively small number of very large websites. This creates a moderation issue, as users radically outnumber moderators. On the Internet, that's like saying there are too many citizens for the cops to police. So they turn to automation, understandably so. The thing is, standards online are often quite strict, as websites are global, so they have to worry about laws around the world, but more than that, the big websites these days also have to worry about the sensibilities of a ton of different people. However, this means that the arbitrary lines White draws are at their most apparent and strictest in online spaces.
Additionally, online spaces have the tendency to bring out the most authoritarian of human morality. From website owners acting as tyrants, to witch hunts, to automated moral policing, all of these lead to scary, merciless places. Combine that with how online spaces often are with nudity and sexuality, two things that are quite important to me for a reason God alone knows, and it's easy to see why I've developed an intense fear of White's morality, especially when aligned with the anger or zeal of Red. (It should be noted that these qualities of Red can also work against White's morality, ultimately changing it, as mentioned earlier; also, Red's compassion can push White to be merciful.)
As I write here, it's become clear to me that rhetoric online and in the media has had a significant impact on my understanding of people. It doesn't inform me about those I know, but my brain does use it to fill in the unknowns. So instead of filling things in with a blank, a lack of information (as is logically correct), it fills it in with generalities. Mind you, I'm aware of this effect, but it took until this moment for me to fully grasp what it looks like in practice, to connect the idea to an experience, where previously it floated untethered in my mind.
So, why do I fear people are judgmental? Because I have been taught by culture to have that default assumption about people until the truth of them is filled in. It is my assumed default when no other information is available. So the question is, how do I change that? Acknowledging it is the first step, but I also need to acknowledge that that assumption is there to protect me. If I act towards others with the assumption that they'll be judgmental, I protect myself from that judgment. However, I also cut myself off from relationships.
Religious Morality
White is the color of organized religion, and organized religion is big on its moral rules. Like White morality in general, it does not care where these rules come from. However, unlike social law, religious White morality tends to carry with it a stronger air of importance or significance (your mileage may vary on this) because religious law is seen as infallibly perfect, while governmental law does not enjoy that same perspective. This has caused me quite a few problems!
There is a sort of doublespeak at play within American Christian culture. On the one hand, it says that salvation is by grace alone, that it is a gift from God that we cannot earn, we simply must receive it. On the other hand, however, it says that to be right with God (and to find social acceptance and social standing), one must be obedient to the culture's rules and values—to its morality. This creates an inherent confusion and tension, as faith wars with White's social order and hierarchy. White, after all, is obsessed with compliance and conformity; both of these have to do with White's goal of harmony, but they're also at fundamental odds with God's vision of diversity within the church.
There is something significant, but perhaps subtle, in that previous paragraph. You'll note that I did not write that you have to be obedient to God. No, what I wrote is that you have to be obedient to the church's cultural rules and values. There is an important reason for this! The reason is simply that the morality of the church's culture is quite often not godly. This claim shouldn't be surprising; we see the same issue happening within Judaism in Jesus's day. After all, He was (to stretch religious jargon a bit) a Jewish pastor and teacher who challenged the religious elite of His day, often on the grounds that they had abandoned the fundamental principles of their religion by elevating tradition above sound moral logic.
Here's the thing: as I have studied the Scriptures, I have found that God does not make arbitrary rules. It is my belief that there is an axiomatic value-core to God's morality, from which all commands derive. Jesus Himself states as much when He says that all of the Law and the Prophets hang on the commands to love God with all that you are and to love your neighbor as yourself.
White's morality, however, does not care. Tradition is important to it, and abandoning tradition feels like abandoning morality, regardless of how sound (or unsound) that tradition is. Thus, it teaches the commands of men, elevating them to the same place as the commands of God (which themselves ought, in my mind, to be understand in a subservient position to God's character, from which true morality derives). Peeling this stuff apart has been a great labor of mine in recent years.
Another challenge here is White's approach to motivation and how that connects with selflessness. To be blunt, I'm not qualified to write about how White views selflessness and sacrifice because I don't have a White perspective. What I can write about is how these concepts have been conveyed to me; what I have understood and must reject.
When the concepts of sacrifice, selflessness, and service come up, they have been presented to me as ends unto themselves. In other words, you sacrifice because sacrificing is good. You serve others because serving others is good. Doing these things for their own sakes, almost to spite yourself, is what selflessness is, and it's that selflessness that makes them good and valuable. As soon as you do it for any other reason than to deny or deprive yourself, they lose their worth and value.
That is what I have been taught, intentionally or not, and it's a load of crap.
The simplest way of seeing that is looking at 1 Corinthians 13, where the Apostle Paul writes that none of these "spiritual" things matters if we aren't motivated by love. But there are loads of other examples. Hebrews tells us that Jesus Himself endured because of the "joy set before Him." He didn't endure suffering for the sake of it, but for the sake of what He would gain because of it. Jesus describes the kingdom of Heaven as being like a pearl of great worth that a person would sell all of their possessions to acquire—why? Because what they gained was worth more to them than what they lost.
In all of these examples, we see time and again the motivation at play. It isn't the sort of selflessness that sees the self as worthless. Doing kind things to others out of love is, in a way, rather self-interested. So is serving others for the same motivation. All sacrifice should end up this way: what you are sacrificing is worth less to you than what you gain from that sacrifice.
Why did Jesus submit to the cross, sacrificing Himself? It was because He wants us. And I think He loves us so much and genuinely wants us so much that nothing short of requited love will do. I personally think that's beautiful!
This sets up a powerful contrast: sacrificing for the sake of the sacrifice versus sacrificing for the sake of what is gained as a result of that sacrifice. The problem is that we've labeled the former righteous and selfless, but why? It's some sort of weird contest that's ultimately worthless. At least, that's how I see it. And yet...I struggle—and I suspect others struggle, too—because sacrificing for the sake of sacrificing? Yeah, we've made that give you something: social standing.
Ultimately, my point here is that the way we humans tend to evaluate things is kind of messed up, and more personally, it's really messed me up. God doesn't think the way we do; He can see through our actions to our motivations. So, being like Him doesn't mean selfless sacrifice, it means love. I'm trying to learn the implications of that.
Conclusion
There are a few big conclusions I have as a result of writing this. The first is that I've gained a better understanding of morality, particularly my own sense of morality and how that contrasts with the general sense of morality that groups develop. The second is that I've come to realize how this contrast leads me to being scared of a moral system I don't entirely understand. Finally, it's made it clear how religious language has caused fears thanks to what gets emphasized. I think it's worth elaborating on these some.
Doing this examination of morality has helped give me a better perspective on the topic as a whole. For one thing, it has helped me better appreciate my Black aspects, something I've struggled with in the past because White tends to hold Black in such a negative light. But something else that has struck me is that, though society does try to indoctrinate everyone into White's morality, that doesn't actually mean everyone adheres to it, especially not entirely. Further, different subgroups will generate their own moral philosophy and ethos. It would behoove me to recognize this!
I've also come to realize why White's morality scares me so much, and why I have self-protective assumptions about how others might judge me. Because White's moral lens doesn't make sense to me at an intrinsic level, I often find it unintuitive and ambiguous. Because I expect White to be merciless, I feel like I have to follow its rules exactly or risk punishment. And finally, because White's morality is so hierarchical in nature, it seems impossible to contest—after all, who are you going to contest a moral judgment with? The person in authority who has judged you? Thus I fear harsh, uncontestable judgments from White that I also can easily fall into unintentionally. Why wouldn't that be scary?
Finally, I've put together how the framing of a concept can affect my perception of it. The way religious language puts the emphasis on things like service and sacrifice, making them out to be good in-and-of themselves, has created a lot of trouble for me. If I instead focus on the why (the motivation, in other words), it'll help me considerably. I'm not called to help others because helping others is good, I'm called to love others, and helping them flows out of that. I think that's the kind of service and sacrifice God wants, anyway—one motivated by love, not a sense of obligation.
I've learned a lot from writing this, both about morality and about myself. I hope you've been able to learn something meaningful to you, too! Thank you for reading.
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