August 2006
Star Trek Morality
Occasionally I run across something that is so
well written that I just have to pass it on to you. The recent
July/August issue of Solid Ground contained an article
on moral relativism written by Greg Koukl, President of Stand To
Reason.* It is titled Star Trek Morality and I offer it in this space
this month in its entirety for your edification.
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Dear Friend,
For many in the world, the moral
legitimacy of a U.S. military incursion into Iraq hinged on one issue:
United Nations support. For them it is clear that, all other things
being equal, armed invasion would be indefensible unless a single detail
changed: U.N. approval.
At the heart of this view is the
conviction that morality is a result of community consensus, in this
case the international community. There can be no “majority of one.”
The guiding ethical principle is simple: Don’t buck the system. This
is the same approach implicit in both “social contract” and postmodern
views of ethics.
Many of us have seen this moral
calculus before—on TV.
Star Trek Morality
“Trekkers” will recall the Prime
Directive of the Federation prohibiting the crew of the Enterprise in
Star Trek from interfering with alien civilizations. Moral standards are
set internally, by one’s culture. What’s right for one society isn’t
necessarily right for another. Since morality is relative—all competing
values are equally legitimate—the crew of the Enterprise was forbidden
to intrude.
On this view, morality is
determined by the group. Generally the relevant group is the larger
cultural unit: the tribe, the linguistic community, the nation-state.
In some cases, the ruling social unit can be expanded to a consortium of
cultures, like the United Nations, but the basic principle is still the
same: the majority rules.
Morality as Social Contract
Classical thinkers saw the
apparently innate tendency of all human beings to think and act
according to moral categories (what Francis Schaeffer called “moral
motions”) as evidence for God.
Others disagreed. To them,
morality represented nothing more than a social contract. As 17th
Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbs famously put it, life in an
unregulated state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short.” In order to avoid such a fate, humans consent to live by a set
of rules called morality.
This “Star Trek morality,”
otherwise known as conventionalism, teaches that each society survives
because of consensual moral arrangements each individual is obliged to
honor. Morality is relative to culture, determined by popular
consensus, expressed through laws and customs. Each person (or each
country in the case of an international “community” like the U.N.)
fulfills his end of the contract by keeping the code of the group.
No Immoral “Aliens”
Star Trek morality has serious
problems in any of its applications. First of all, since each society
is “alien” to another, no society could be judged immoral by another’s
standards, no matter how bizarre or morally repugnant they may seem.
The torture of prisoners by
military regimes, the injustice of totalitarian governments, and the
apartheid of racist administrations would all be outside the reach of
moral assessment on this view. One might counter that these policies,
in many cases, are not the will of the people, but only of those in
power. This rebuttal, though, fails twice.
First, why should one accept that
the population at large is the relevant “society” determining morality,
instead of those who have the power to rule? If one has an obligation
to obey society, then which society does one obey? This ambiguity is a
weakness of conventionalism.
Culture is complex, with many
overlapping internal “societies” making claims on us. Behavior
acceptable at the gym in the morning is considered gauche at a dinner
party later that evening. The moral convictions of one’s religious
community may be at odds with the demands of his business community.
Which group is primary? Culture is not homogeneous, making it
impossible for it to define a common standard of behavior.
Second, the rejoinder also misses
the point. Maybe such injustices don’t always represent the will of the
people, but what if they did? The kangaroo courts of the French
Revolution had popular support. So did the Third Reich, to a great
degree. Do we grant French anarchists and German Nazis moral
justification on this basis?
Nazis at Nuremburg
Indeed, the Nazis essentially used
the Star Trek defense at Nuremberg. Advancing a notion called legal
positivism, the German leadership claimed that the International
Military Tribunal had no moral legitimacy to preside over the trials.
In The Law above the Law,
John Warwick Montgomery describes their argument: "The most telling
defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders
or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system, in
complete consistency with it, and that they therefore ought not rightly
be condemned because they deviated from the alien value system of their
conquerors."1
[emphasis added]
The Tribunal didn’t accept this
justification. In the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel for the
United States at the trials, the issue was not one of power—the victor
judging the vanquished—but one of higher moral law. “[The Tribunal]
rises above the provincial and transient,” he said, “and seeks guidance
not only from International Law, but also from the basic principles of
jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization....”2
The first serious problem with the
social contract view is that it violates our deepest moral intuitions,
the foundational “assumptions of civilization.” Some things seem wrong
regardless of what “society” says, including plundering innocent Jews,
pressing them into forced labor, and exterminating them. If the Star
Trek view is sound, then governmentally sponsored genocide can only be
silently observed. If there is no law above society, then society
cannot be judged.
No Immoral Laws
This leads to the second problem
with Star Trek morality: There can be no such thing as an immoral law.
If society is the final measure of morality, then all its judgments are
moral by definition.
An attorney once called Stand to
Reason’s radio talk show with this challenge. “When are you going to
accept the fact that abortion on demand is the law of the land?” she
asked. “You may not like it, but it’s the law.”
Her point was simple. The Supreme
Court had spoken, so there is nothing left to discuss. Since there is
no higher law, there are no further grounds for appeal. End of issue.
This lawyer’s tacit acceptance of conventionalism suffered because it
confused what is right with what is legal.
When reflecting on any law, it
seems sensible to ask, “It may be legal, but is it right? It’s the law,
but is the law good? Is it just?” If these are proper questions, then
there appears to be a difference between what a person has a liberty to
do under the law and what a person should do according to sound moral
judgment. Conventionalism renders this distinction meaningless. There
is no majority of one to take the moral high ground. As ethicist Louis
Pojman puts it, “Truth is with the crowd and error with the individual.”3
When any human court—even a de
facto court like the United Nations—is the highest authority, then
morality is reduced to mere power, either the power of the government or
the power of the majority. If the courts and the laws define what is
moral, then neither laws nor governments can ever be immoral, even in
principle. Compliance is the highest good, breaking ranks the greatest
evil, regardless of the issue.
No Room for Improvement
Another absurd consequence follows
from the social contract view. Not only is it impossible to criticize
society from without; it can’t even be opposed from within. Star Trek
morality makes it impossible to morally reform a society from either
direction.
This view requires not only that
outsiders remain morally mute in the face of things like the Holocaust
of the Third Reich, but that even Germans within the Reich would have
been wrong for resisting. Instead, they had a moral obligation to
participate in the murder of innocent people. That’s part of the
contract. All those under the authority of the Third Reich—their ruling
society—would have been morally bound to cooperate in genocide.
There are actually two problems
here. The first is called the Reformer’s Dilemma.
Moral reformers typically judge
society from the inside. They challenge their culture’s standard of
behavior and then campaign for change. If morality is defined as the
present society’s standard, though, then challenging that standard would
be an act of immorality by definition. Social reformers would not be
moral after all, but rather moral outcasts precisely because they
opposed the status quo.
Corrie Ten Boom and other
“Righteous Gentiles” risked their own lives to save Jews during the
Holocaust. William Wilberforce sought the abolition of slavery in the
late 18th century in the United Kingdom. In the ‘60s, Martin Luther
King fought for civil rights in the United States. In Germany, Martin
Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged Christians to oppose
Hitler.
We count these people as moral
heroes precisely because they had the courage to fight for reform.
According to Star Trek morality, however, they are the worst kind of
moral criminals because they challenged the moral consensus of their own
society.
Moral Nonsense
Star Trek morality faces another
difficulty with moral improvement. It makes the whole concept
incoherent. If a society’s laws and cultural values are the ultimate
standards of behavior, then the notion of improving those laws or values
is nonsense. A social code can never be improved; it can only be
changed.
Think of what it means to improve
something. It means to increase in excellence by raising to a better
quality or condition. How would one know if he’d increased the quality
of something? Only by noting that some change has brought it closer to
an external ideal.
A bowler improves when he raises
his average closer to 300, the perfect game. A baseball pitcher shows
his increased skill by the decreasing number of batters he allows on
base. If he strikes out every batter, he’s attained perfection. In
either case, an outside standard is used as the measure of improvement.
What would it mean to improve a
society’s moral code? It can only mean that the society would have to
change its laws and values to more closely approximate genuine
goodness. If no objective good exists, if the social contract is itself
the highest possible law, then there is no way to improve the quality of
the contract.
A society can abolish apartheid in
favor of equality. It can adopt policies of habeas corpus protecting
citizens against unjustified imprisonment, or guarantee freedom of
speech and of the press. No one could ever claim, though, that these
are moral improvements. All that can be said is that society changed
its tastes.
With Star Trek morality, the
society’s standard is the ultimate. There is no objective ethicl ideal
to emulate. Moral change is possible, but not moral improvement.
Improvement means getting better, and there’s nothing better—on this
view—than any society’s current assessment of morality.
Selfless Is Selfish
There’s a final twist in the social
contract view of morality. If moral rules can somehow be reduced to a
personal survival code, then ethics is ultimately self-centered. This
seems to turn morality on its head: The moral rule to be selfless only
has legitimacy if it accomplishes a selfish end. Selflessness has now
become selfishness.
If morality is simply self-interest
in disguise, then as long as I ensure my self-interest—personal
survival—all my conduct would be “moral.” I could still rape, murder,
and steal as long as I get away with it. A dictator at the top of the
pecking order of power could do as he pleases—including purging his
country of millions of undesirables—with no moral ramifications.
I’ve heard two ways of responding
to this charge. The first is that this works only if one doesn’t get
caught. True enough and precisely my point. Such actions are only
undesirable if one gets caught. Genocide is only suspect because it
endangers my personal safety (I might get caught), not because the
behavior itself is despicable.
The second response is that since
living this way breaks the contract, it’s not a fair criticism of the
contractual system itself.
Normally that would be a reasonable
defense, but not in this case. Here the flaw is in the contract itself
because it has no grounds for enforcement. On what basis does one find
fault with the renegade? He broke the contract. But what obligates him
to keep the agreement? Star Trek morality only works if one must keep
her end of the bargain in the first place as an extra-contractual
obligation.
One can’t demand she live
“morally”—according to the contract—without smuggling morality in the
back door to begin with. Such moral obligations can’t be explained by
the contract because they are prior to it. Ethics can’t be explained by
culture because it’s a moral rule that applies to culture.
Star Trek morality might sound
plausible in a TV script, but real life is more complex. This view of
ethics rules out the possibility of moral critique of any culture from
without or within, reduces morality to power, and makes nonsense of the
idea of moral improvement. It also leaves individual nations beholden
to the collective will of morally misguided governments and brutal
regimes.
The social contract view may
explain some behavior and even some social institutions. However, it
can’t explain the human moral enterprise because some ethical principles
must be in place (e.g., “people ought to honor their contractual
agreements”) before any contract has force.
Ethical theory aside, a simple
reflection is sufficient to show that the social contract view simply
rings false. When someone cuts in line and you object by saying, “You
shouldn’t do that,” what do you mean? Is your meaning, “Your action
encourages others to cut in line in the future. It’s therefore in your
own self-interest to play by the rules”? Of course not. You mean the
opposite: Line-cutting is wrong precisely because it promotes
self-interest over fairness.
Sometimes we are compelled to rise
above the “provincial and transient” and interfere in the affairs of
other cultures or ignore the consensus of the international community.
That’s why even Captain Kirk ignored the Prime Directive so often. It
wasn’t just good TV. It was good moral thinking.
Your
partner for the truth,
Greg
Koukl
President
Portions of this article were excerpted from
Gregory Koukl’s book, Relativism - Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air,
co-authored with Francis Beckwith (Baker). It’s available through
Stand to Reason.
____________
Footnotes:
* Stand to Reason
is an educational organization training ambassadors for Christ to
defend classical Christianity and classical Christian values in a
gracious, even-handed, yet incisive way. Greg Koukl is an award-winning
author and a radio talk show host. A central theme of his speaking and
writing is that Christianity can compete in the marketplace of ideas.
You can access their website at
www.str.org.
1. John Warwick Montgomery, The
Law above the Law (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1975), 24.
2. Robert H. Jackson, Closing
Address in the Nuremberg Trial, in 19 Proceedings in the Trial of the
Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal 397
(1948), quoted in John Warwick Montgomery, The Law above the Law
(Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1975), 26.
3. Louis P. Pojman, Ethics:
Discovering Right and Wrong (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing
Company, 1990), 25. |
