What is today conventionally called morality covers only one of these sets of moral codes, the social-biological code. In a subject-object metaphysics this single social-biological code is considered to be a minor, subjective, physically non-existent part of the universe. But in the Metaphysics of Quality all these sets of morals, plus another Dynamic morality are not only real, they are the whole thing.
In general, given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution, is more moral. An example of this is the statement that, It’s more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient. The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he’s at a higher level of evolution.
Taken by itself that seems obvious enough. But what’s not so obvious is that, given a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality, it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient. This is not just an arbitrary social convention that should apply to some doctors but not to all doctors, or to some cultures but not all cultures. It’s true for all people at all time, now and forever, a moral pattern of reality as real as H2O. We’re at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before.
In the moral evolutionary conflict between the germ and the patient, the evolutionary spread is enormous and as a result the morality of the situation is obvious. But when the static patterns in conflict are closer the moral force of the situation becomes less obvious.
A popular moral issue that parallels the germ-patient issue is vegetarianism. Is it immoral, as the Hindus and Buddhists claim, to eat the flesh of animals? Our current morality would say it’s immoral only if you’re a Hindu or Buddhist. Otherwise it’s OK, since morality is nothing more than a social convention.
An evolutionary morality, on the other hand, would say it’s scientifically immoral for everyone because animals are at a higher level of evolution, that is, more Dynamic, than are grains and fruits and vegetables. But the moral force of this injunction is not so great because the levels of evolution are closer together than the doctor’s patient and the germ. It would add, also, that this moral principle holds only where there is an abundance of grains and fruits and vegetables. It would be immoral for Hindus not to eat their cows in a time of famine, since they would then be killing human beings in favor of a lower organism.
Because a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality is not tied to substance it is free to consider moral issues at higher evolutionary levels than germs and fruits and vegetables. At these higher levels the issues become more interesting.
Is it scientifically moral for a society to kill a human being? That is a very big moral question still being fought in courts and legislatures all over the world.
An evolutionary morality would at first seem to say yes, a society has a right to murder people to prevent its own destruction. A primitive isolated village threatened by brigands has a moral right and obligation to kill them in self-defense since a village is a higher form of evolution. When the United States drafted troops for the Civil War everyone knew that innocent people would be murdered. The North could have permitted the slave states to become independent and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But an evolutionary morality argues that the North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body, and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation. John Brown’s truth was never an abstraction. It still keeps marching on.
When a society is not itself threatened, as in the execution of individual criminals, the issue becomes more complex. In the case of treason or insurrection or war a criminal’s threat to a society can be very real.
But if an established social structure is not seriously threatened by a criminal, then an evolutionary morality would argue that there is no moral justification for killing him.
What makes killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not even just a defective unit of society. Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value. Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.
And beyond that is an even more compelling reason: societies and thoughts and principles themselves are no more than sets of static patterns. These patterns can’t by themselves perceive or adjust to Dynamic Quality. Only a living being can do that. The strongest moral argument against capital punishment is that it weakens a society’s Dynamic capability — its capability for change and evolution. It’s not the nice guys who bring about real social change. Nice guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the bad guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution. That was the real moral lesson of the brujo in Zuni. If those priests had killed him they would have done great harm to their society’s ability to grow and change.
It was tempting to take all the moral conflicts of the world and, one by one, see how they fit this kind of analysis, but Phædrus realized that if he started to get into that he would never finish. Wherever he looked, whatever examples came to mind, he always seemed to be able to lay them out within this framework, and the nature of the conflicts usually seemed to be clearer when he did so.
And as a matter of fact that looked like the answer to Rigel’s question that had been bugging him all day: Does Lila have Quality?
Biologically she does, socially she doesn’t. Obviously! Evolutionary morality just splits that whole question open like a watermelon. Since biological and social patterns have almost nothing to do with each other, Lila does and Lila does not have quality at the same time. That’s exactly the feeling she gave too — a sort of mixed feeling of quality and no quality at the same time. That was the reason.
How simple it was. That’s the mark of a high-quality theory. It doesn’t just answer the question in some complex round-about way. It dissolves the question, so you wonder why you ever asked it.
Biologically she’s fine, socially she’s pretty far down the scale, intellectually she’s nowhere. But Dynamically… Ah! That’s the one to watch. There’s something ferociously Dynamic going on with her. All that aggression, that tough talk, those strange bewildered blue eyes. Like sitting next to a hill that’s rumbling and letting off steam here and there… It would be interesting to talk to her more.
He stepped forward to the hatchway and looked down. It looked as though she was sleeping on the bunk down there. He could use some of that himself. Tonight she’d probably be wide awake and raring to go. He’d be all zonked out.
Phædrus saw that an approaching buoy was slanting slightly toward him and that at its base was a little wake from a current running against him. The river was flowing backward now and it would be slow going. It would be dark soon too, but fortunately they didn’t have far to go.