Where does morality come from?

To some people, especially religious-leaning people, it probably seems like a fairly simple question.  I used to believe that every person inherently knew the basics of right and wrong.  It didn't have to be taught.  It was just there, endowed by God at birth and manifesting at a very young age.  But what about the answers to all of those supposedly "moral" questions that don't come instinctively?  I don't know about anyone else, but I personally don't know, by instinct alone, whether or not it's ok to have sex outside of marriage, to swear, to work only an acceptable amount instead of my very best...  When answering these questions, I need to look outside of my basic human instincts.  I must look to my experiences, to my upbringing, to the advice and counsel of those around me, and to my God.  The answers are not instinctive.

Now most people would probably say in retort to this that some moral issues still are instinctive, and the classic example is usually murder.  No one instinctively thinks that it's ok to take someone else's life.  That's the line in the sand.  That's the big f-ing deal.

And yet.

A couple days ago I re-watched The Reader.  By the way, the movie is absolutely stunning.  It has a lot of sexual content in it, but it's the one movie that I would recommend people who would normally not watch stuff like that to just get through the first half.  The second half is so powerful, and the first half is essential to understanding it.  That being said, if you really want to see the movie and don't want me spoil the whole thing, stop reading now, go watch it (borrow it from me, if you're in DC), then come back and finish reading.

While the movie seems to portray the central issue to be the shame of illiteracy, for me it raised much deeper questions.  Does one being literate make one understand morality?  Did Kate Winslet's character, Hannah Schmitz, honestly and naively believe that it was more important to follow orders and do her job as an Auschwitz guard than to spare the lives of dozens or even hundreds of people?  Is her illiteracy to blame for her crimes?  Or is her illiteracy a product of some mental deficiency which is in turn the cause of her seeming lack of morality?  She didn't seem to think it was at all a problem, as a middle-aged woman, to seduce, sleep and carry on with, and then mysteriously dump a fifteen year old boy.  Is it then a logical extension that she wouldn't understand how murder by order of her superiors could be wrong?  I don't think Hannah's illiteracy is the central issue here.  I think her morality is.  She isn't portrayed as a psychopath (someone completely devoid of emotions) or a sociopath (someone incapable of empathizing with someone else's emotions).  To me, at least, she seemed sincerely incapable of understanding the immorality of her actions.  So what went wrong in this woman that she couldn't comprehend the most basic moral questions?  Or does it go deeper than that?  Are these moral questions really not as "simple" as we would like to believe?

Now, I realize that this is a movie, so you can really only extrapolate so much.  But what about the now infamous Stanford Prison Experiment?




These were just normal college boys back in the early 1970s.  And given a few days and a little bit of power, many of the "guards" became monsters.  The worst of the guards, the one known as "John Wayne" stated afterwards that he just wanted to see how far he could push the "prisoners".  These people were not given orders to use cruelty of any kind.  They were even instructed to not use any forms of physical abuse.  But they could use psychological abuse, and so they did.  This was a fake situation in which everyone knew that at the end of the two week period, everyone would get out and resume their normal lives.  How much harder must it be for real-life prison guards, who are often given at least implicit permission to use physical abuse, to be governed by some universal standard of morality?

Now, obviously, I'm not saying that the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment were in the right.  I think their actions were atrocious.  And I feel exponentially stronger that the guards at Abu Ghraib and, of course, Auschwitz, were committing atrocities in the strongest sense of the word.  I could never and will never attempt to condone actions such as these.  But I still have to wonder, what is it about situations like prisons which seem to bring out the absolute worst in the people serving as guards, and afterwards, when asked to look back at what they've done, the perpetrators seem perplexed by the backlash.  They were just following orders.  They were just doing their jobs.

What would each and every one of us do in the name of following orders, doing our jobs, or even maintaining pride?  In an abstract land of comfort and ease, it seems easy enough to say that we'd follow a strict, moral line.  But both scientific experiments (albeit incredibly flawed) and real-life experiences seem to suggest that these questions of morality, even the big, line-in-the sand type questions are not easy or instinctive.  In fact, our instincts may even seem to scream the opposite of the "correct" moral answer in certain cases.

Possibly due to her upbringing, life experiences, or even her illiteracy, Hannah Schmitz took the blame for killing hundreds of innocents, seeming to truly not understand why it was wrong.  Similarly, guards at Abu Ghraib took pictures such as the now infamous one below with smiling faces and dead bodies, saying afterwards that it was only natural to smile for the camera.

It would be easy to try and blame the immoral things which our fellow man does on some villainous figure such as Hitler, Stalin, or Osama Bin Ladin.  But the truth is that all too often, oftentimes without being fully aware of what they're doing, normal human beings commit atrocities on an epic scale.  And it can't always be blamed on some fancy mental condition which conveniently takes the blame off of humanity.  The world has tried, over the years, to come to terms with its own brokenness.  And each time we collectively pledge: "never again!"  And yet again and again, it keeps happening.  And we keep looking away.  Maybe because some part of us knows that, if we were in the same position of power, there's no guarantee that there would be a different outcome.  Because the concept of inherent morality, while nice on paper, doesn't seem to have played out very well over the last few thousand years.