One path from fact to moral value

 

Accomplishment

Pride

Glory

Honor

Respect

Courage

Consistency

Tradition 

Accomplishment is not a moral value.  It is a fact.  

In order to survive and reproduce, an organism of sufficient complexity must set goals, work toward them, and eventually reach them.  Thus natural selection is the driving force that will compel the evolution of beings capable of accomplishment.

As the saying from Twin Peaks goes, "Achievement is its own reward.  Pride obscures it."

But in the absence of any moral values, there is nothing to prevent this obscurity.

Is pride a moral value?  According to many, it's the very opposite: Pope Gregory the Great, back in the 6th century, declared pride "the queen of all vices."  Theologians have long written about how pride is the sin that gives rise to all the other sins.  Thus Milton portrays Satan as motivated by pride in the initial fall at the origin of the universe.

And yet this very diversion, this very obscurity, may be the step that gives rise to the entire progression that leads to moral value.  Perhaps people could only become moral by becoming immoral.

What distinguishes pride from a sense of accomplishment is that, unlike accomplishment, pride is not a fact.  Pride is capable of being false.

And once pride has arisen, what is to prevent the striving for glory?

What distinguishes glory from pride is that glory is inherently social.  The seeker of glory desires recognition in the eyes of others.  This is still not moral, specifically.  What is glorious is victory.

But what counts as victory?  If someone kills a mighty warrior while the warrior is asleep, is there any glory in this?  What if the mighty warrior is gravely injured and someone comes along and delivers his final death blow?  Cheaters are not especially impressive.  The pursuit of glory inevitably entails a sense of honor, a sense of what will constitute an honorable victory in the eyes of those one wishes to impress.

And so and so on.  The pursuit of glory compels the pursuit of honor, which compels the pursuit of respect.  Obviously, in the background - and, for that matter, the foreground - of all of these considerations is the pursuit of power.

The isolated, pure element that clarifies all of these considerations - their defining essence - is courage.  (For instance, killing someone in their sleep is less honorable than facing them in a pre-planned duel, because it requires far less courage.)  At this point, with "courage," we have what is fairly unmistakably a moral value.  But this is just the beginning.

To prove that one has courage, one must be consistent in one's goals and one's attempt to accomplish them.  If someone can come along and intimidate you into changing your goals, by their mere presence, you cannot be very steadfast, very courageous, or very strong in your dedication to them.  Those who are motivated by the pursuit of honor will thus cultivate their own consistency.

And how far can you develop consistency?  The ultimate accomplishment here would be to maintain a consistency that supersedes a single human lifetime - a consistent code that is passed down from person to person through the centuries.  A tradition.

Note that, in a sense, we have come to the fulfillment of a progression here, but from another perspective, we have not yet reached the starting line of morality, because as of yet, there is nothing "absolute" about the foundation of any of these considerations.  Any tradition is just one tradition among many - there is something fundamentally relativistic, even arbitrary, about it.  (Although, a sufficiently absurd tradition will not last very long.  By something like a natural selection process, some traditions, if self-destructive for the societies they inhabit, will cease to exist.)

These, then, are the cardinal values of an honor-based society.  Each step grows seamlessly out of the previous step.  These values can be maintained for centuries, or millennia.  Many aspects of what has been described here could potentially even be found among pre-human animals.  I suspect something like many of them can be found in various forms throughout the animal kingdom - perhaps even among other kinds of organisms.

This is obviously not the end of the story of the development of morality.  It's an interesting question which, if any, of these successive steps requires rationality.  I did mention courage as an "essence" - but whether it is necessary for people to recognize it as an essence in order for the drive to demonstrate courageousness to manifest itself - and whether essences are rational - remain open.  But once a tradition exists, it is possible for rational thinkers (and even irrational ones) to question that tradition.  Eventually a traditional code of honor make work itself out into a system of law, and these laws may be debated, and philosophized.  (Eventually, if questioning goes far enough, people may question all their values and arrive at a kind of nihilism - but that is a topic for another time.)  Eventually, enlightenment rationalism may transform the values of "primitive" honor society into something else entirely.  But dig down beneath this rational facade, and accomplishment, pride, glory, honor, respect, courage, consistency, and tradition will be still be lurking down there.