Experiential Morality
To understand the ways in which moral worldviews affect political worldviews, we must look first at our system of moral concepts in some detail. Because I will argue that political perspectives are derived from systems of moral concepts, we must consider what those concepts typically consist of and why we have the moral concepts we have.
An important conclusion of research in cognitive studies is that moral thinking is imaginative and that it depends fundamentally on metaphorical understanding (see References, A6; Johnson 1993). Before we proceed with our discussion of metaphors for morality, we should point out the obvious—that morality is not all metaphorical and that nonmetaphorical aspects of morality are what the system of metaphors for morality is based on. Nonmetaphorical morality is about the experience of well-being. The most fundamental form of morality concerns promoting the experiential well-being of others and the avoidance and prevention of experiential harm to others or the disruption of the well-being of others.
Here is part of what is meant by “well-being”: Other things being equal, you are better off if you are healthy rather than sick, rich rather than poor, strong rather than weak, free rather than imprisoned, cared for rather than uncared for, happy rather than sad, whole rather than lacking, clean rather than filthy, beautiful rather than ugly, if you are functioning in the light rather than the dark, if you can stand upright so that you don’t fall down, and if you live in a community with close social ties, rather than in a hostile or isolated one. These are among our basic experiential forms of well-being. Their opposites are forms of harm or lack of well-being: poverty, illness, sadness, weakness, imprisonment, and so on. Immoral action is action that causes harm or lack of well-being, that is, action that deprives someone of one or more of these—of health, wealth, happiness, strength, freedom, safety, beauty, and so on. In the case of young children, it is the job of parents to do their best to guarantee their well-being. On the whole, young children are better off if they are obedient rather than disobedient to their parents, who, in the normal case, have their best interests at heart, know how to keep them from being harmed, and exercise legitimate authority.
These are, of course, norms, and the qualification “other things being equal” is necessary, since one can think of special cases where these may not be true. A wealthy child may not get the necessary attention of its parents, someone beautiful may be the target of envy, one ordinarily needs to be in the dark in order to sleep, excessive freedom can sometimes be harmful, sadness and pain may be necessary to appreciate happiness, social ties that are too close can become oppressive, and parents may be abusive or neglectful or ignorant. But, on the whole, this account of experiential well-being holds.
It is these conditions that form the grounding for our system of moral metaphors. Since it is better to be rich than to be poor, morality is conceptualized in terms of wealth. Since it is better to be strong than to be weak, we expect to see morality conceptualized as strength. Because it is better to be healthy than sick, it is no surprise to see morality conceptualized in terms of health and attendant concepts like cleanliness and purity. Since it is better to be cared for than uncared for, it seems natural to find morality conceptualized as nurturance. And because, in normal cases, children tend to be better off if they obey rather than disobey their parents, we expect to see morality conceptualized as obedience.
What we learn from this is that metaphorical morality is grounded in nonmetaphorical morality, that is, in forms of well-being, and that the system of metaphors for morality as a whole is thus far from arbitrary. Because the same forms of well-being are widespread around the world, we expect many of the same metaphors for morality to show up in culture after culture—and they do. Where we find purification rituals, we find a manifestation of Morality as Purity. Because of the widespread fear of the dark, we find a widespread conception of Evil as Dark and Good as Light. Because it is better to walk upright than to fall down, we find the widespread metaphor of Morality as Uprightness. In short, because our notion of what constitutes well-being is widely shared, our pool of metaphors for morality is also widely shared. Indeed, the commonality of shared metaphors for morality both within and across societies raises a deep question: What are the differences in moral systems and what is the source of those differences? As we shall see, different conceptions of the family constitute one such source of difference—at least within American culture.