Moral Zeitgeist

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The Moral Zeitgeist is a term used to describe the progress of modern human morality. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. Zeitgeist is a German word meaning "spirit of the times." Proponents of a Moral Zeitgeist base their perspective on the view that morality evolved to help our ancestors survive in large groups as social animals. This perspective suggests that moral acceptability is driven by consensus, which in turn is constrained by the demands of genetic survival. As the people's view of what is morally acceptable changes, the moral Zeitgeist is said to "shift".

From this perspective, the universal consensuses within a society are what makes something morally acceptable, rather than written codes. Richard Dawkins illustrates the changing Moral Zeitgeist in chapter 7 of his book The God Delusion:

Slavery, which was taken for granted in the Bible and throughout most of history, was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. All civilized nations now accept what was widely denied up to the 1920s, that a woman's vote, in an election or on a jury, is the equal of a man's. In today's enlightened societies (a category that manifestly does not include, for example, Saudi Arabia), women are no longer regarded as property, as they clearly were in biblical times. Any modern legal system would have prosecuted Abraham for child abuse.

1 The Moral Zeitgeist and the Evolution of Morality
2 Controversy
3 Moral Realism and the Moral Zeitgeist
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] The Moral Zeitgeist and the Evolution of Morality

The Changing Moral Zeitgeist was proposed to describe the continual drift in human morality. The biological evolution of altruism and morality may be outside the scope of this term.

[edit] Controversy

The Moral Zeitgeist perspective is incompatible with religious morality, which suggests that actions are either morally right, acceptable, or wrong based on the religion's teachings or alleged revelations. In fact, versions of religious morality may be seen as attempts to freeze a shifting Moral Zeitgeist.

Dawkins notes:

There seems to be a steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable... Something... has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.^[1]

Moral absolutism, which suggests that actions are either morally right, acceptable, or wrong, regardless of the context, may be incompatible with the moral Zeitgeist depending on whether it is taken to say that actions are morally right, acceptable, or wrong based on the opinions of the masses, which implies incompatibility, or that shifts in the Zeitgeist are shifts in the knowledge of morality, which does not. This latter version of the Zeitgeist model actually implies absolutism, though the only known source of moral knowledge is biological instinct.

[edit] Moral Realism and the Moral Zeitgeist

Another view of the moral zeitgeist is that all moral controversy is strictly a matter of factual dispute or pointing out logical flaws in other people's argument. For instance, some people held the empirical premise black people should not be considered humans in an attempt to justify slavery. Once that empirical premise was disproven, and blacks where shown to be just as much humans as other people, that justified equality instead. So slavery is not considered immoral on the moral zeitgeist due to an arbitrary change in popular opinion, but by the refutation of the flawed empirical premise of slavery.

The moral zeitgeist is thus compatible with moral realism, the notion that true moral facts exists. Atheist and secular humanist Richard Carrier, a defender of moral realism, writes

"Thus we can explain all moral controversy and progress. For when we try to argue that someone is wrong about a moral proposition we always find ourselves arguing in either of two ways: either we point out how their understanding of the facts is wrong, or we point out how they have deduced the incorrect values from the actual facts. Both can be valid arguments. For instance, we tell the Nazi that his beliefs, like that Jews are not human beings and that they are plotting to take over the world, are factually false, and therefore his morals regarding the Jews are in error"^[2]