Abstract
Setting up a response to the challenge of moral relativism, I show that some basic moral certainties operate on a local level. I defend three examples—(i) the wrongness of pig sacrifice in ancient Judaism; (ii) the goodness of hospitality for the Pashtun; and (iii) the wrongness of cannibalism for the ancient Greeks. I also give an account of how moral certainties shift over time to help show that though morality is objective (in that it is underpinned by basic certainties we do not choose and which we cannot alter at will) it can change.
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- 1.
In Hebrew poetry of the period, ideas rather than similar sounding words are ‘rhymed’, so that the poem is composed of lines expressing two or more similar, mutually amplifying notions. E.g. in Psalm 18:4–5: ‘The cords of death encompassed me/ the torrents of perdition assailed me.’
- 2.
It is worth noting that this does not hold for all Jews of the period. Those of the Qumran community (famous for their scroll collection the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’) actively boycotted the Temple system in the latter part of the Second Temple period, seeing it as hopelessly corrupt and ripe for God’s judgment. But theirs was certainly not the majority view.
- 3.
That is the unnamed writer of Trito-Isaiah.
- 4.
The second rhyme about one who ‘breaks a dog’s neck’, may be a reference to further prohibited forms of animal sacrifice, or simply to the unnecessary and innate cruelty of the act.
- 5.
I am here taking Isaiah’s words as expressing a generally held attitude among Jews of the time (though that belief is not held by many modern Jews who would not consider eating pork wrong at all). And that this attitude was literal rather than hyperbolic (i.e. that they took cultic use of pig’s blood as literally morally equivalent to murder) is shown by stories where transgressors against the cult were slain, the most severe form of punishment, rather than fined or given some lesser punishment (we could cite the story of Hophni and Phineas in 1 Samuel mentioned above, or Mattathias Macabee’s slaying of a Jewish priest for cultic violation in 1 Maccabees 2:15–26 as examples).
It should also be noted that I imply an equivalence between immoral and impious here. But for Second Temple Jews there was, in general, no great distinction between religious/cultic transgressions and moral ones. Cf. the story of Uzzah (in 2 Samuel 6:1–7 and 1 Chronicles 13:1–11) who was struck down by God for carelessness about obeying the Mosaic instructions for the transportation of the Ark of the Covenant. Though, as Trito-Isaiah testifies, ignoring moral injunctions was thought to empty the cultic acts of significance.
- 6.
Given at Exodus 23:19, and 34:26, and in Deuteronomy 14:21.
- 7.
In this section, I follow the historical reconstructions of Gerhard von Rad in his Old Testament Theology: Volume One (1975) (for the notion of Law in the Second Temple period see particularly 85–92), and of Martin Noth ’s essay ‘The laws in the Pentateuch: Their assumptions and meaning’ in Laws in the Pentateuch and Other Essays (1966, 1–107).
- 8.
Technically speaking the Epistle is not a Second Temple source, being written a few years after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. But it is sufficiently close (from the early second century at the latest) to be a valid witness to contemporary thinking.
- 9.
Taking note of the historical sequence by which the pig-prohibition moved from justifiable moral belief to basic moral certainty might tempt us to see a difference here with universal moral certainties like those around killing. That is, we might want to say that whereas with my examples of local moral certainties , there were justifications until those moral beliefs became part of the bedrock , universal moral certainties were never justifiable moral beliefs —that is, we were never able to give a justification for e.g. the wrongness of murder. I want to tentatively resist that move because the materials for comparison are lacking. We have documented instances of shifts in our local moral certainties (see especially the case study at Sect. 5.5 below) whereas the process by which our ancestors developed a basic aversion to murder is not open to view. That said, Mary Midgley (1991) convincingly argues that the precursors of our moral thinking probably existed in our pre-human ancestors. And this makes it likely that things like a basic aversion to killing was already a part of our nature by the time we evolved into modern humans. But again, the materials for comparison between more recently emerging local moral certainties and more ancient, perhaps pre-human, universal moral certainties are lacking, and so we should remain agnostic on this point.
- 10.
The tribal name is variously transliterated as Pashtun, Pushtun, Pukhtun and other ways without much consistency in the literature.
- 11.
For example, this from the Economist (December 19, 2006): ‘Near the village of Saidkhail, in the Zadran tribal area of eastern Khost province, a wandering Islamic student, or talib, killed a man with a knife, recounts Mohammed Omar Barakzai, the deputy minister for tribal affairs. The talib knocked on the nearest door and said to the woman who opened it: ‘I have killed a man. Shelter me.’ She let him in. And sure enough, to trim an elegantly told tale, the murdered man was the woman’s son. ‘I am a Pushtun and have given this man refuge,’ the woman told her blood-lusting husband and brothers. ‘Take him to safety.’’ http://www.economist.com/node/8345531?story_id=8345531. Now the fact that the husband and brothers wanted to kill the man does not tell against the fact that they knew it would be wrong, or un-Pashto to do so. The fact that all the wife had to do was declare their tribal identity (‘I am a Pashtun’) in order to end the discussion, and convince the husband and brothers to take personal responsibility for the murderer’s safety, shows the power of the Pashtun hospitality obligation for them.
- 12.
Modern ‘Creationists’, Christians who take the first chapter of the book of Genesis as a literal account of the creation of the cosmos, are an interesting case in this regard. While doubting facts that are well established for many of us, for example the great antiquity of the cosmos or the fact of (macro) evolution, they usually attempt to harmonize their beliefs with a version of the scientific method. They might claim, for instance, that though fossils appear to be millions of years old this is only one interpretation of the data, which interpretation they reject (sometimes for supposedly scientific reasons). But it seems to me that such people are not quite epistemic outsiders in that they accept some version of the scientific world-view and the scientific method, even if it is inconsistently deployed.
- 13.
And that is not to say that I am sure of the existence of America because I’ve checked the records and looked into the history. Such checking would be nonsensical as in our British culture the existence of America is a (local) basic certainty.
- 14.
Murder is punished according to the custom of badal, or revenge , whereby it is considered a duty for the victim’s family to seek to kill a member of the aggressor’s family. In the absence of a centralised justice system, this duty to revenge acts as an effective deterrent against murder (cf. Ginsburg 2011, 103–4). Seeing revenge as a positive duty, a positive moral response to murder, is not limited to the Pashtun but is common in tribal societies. See below (Sect. 6.5) for a discussion of this obligation in ancient (Attic) Greek society.
- 15.
In fact these customs act as checks and balances that work together to produce a relatively stable society. As long as the Pashtunwali is respected the various families can coexist.
- 16.
That is not so say that a Pashtun person might not praise the practices for their benefits, only that they do not justify melmastia .
- 17.
- 18.
And this conclusion stands even if we think, as some do, that the scene is Herodotus ’ invention. It is clear from the story that Herodotus’ readers, his fellow Greeks , were meant to react as the Greeks at Darius’ court would react: with moral disgust.
- 19.
The Fore people of Papua New Guinea have, in recent times, practiced endocannibalism (the eating of parts of deceased family members) cf. Whitfield et al. (2008).
- 20.
All quotes from the Iliad come from Richmond Lattimore’s translation (1951).
- 21.
In the opening invocation the poet asks the Muses to help him ‘sing of the wrath of Achilleus’, thus signalling the subject of the work to follow.
- 22.
In fact, Hesiod ’s contrast between animals and humans amplifies that of Achilleus, where he allows that the dogs and birds may eat Hektor, though he himself may not.
- 23.
It may be tempting to see here an example of the Greek /barbarian contrast-theme attributed to Homer by later writers, with the Greek hero holding off from cannibalism and the barbarian queen restrained only by circumstance. But Oliver Taplin ’s arguments (1992, 110–15) against Homer maintaining such a negative contrast between Greeks and Trojans, mainly through citing Homeric descriptions of ‘Greek ’ behaviour in Trojans, are I think decisive.
- 24.
I call these pollution beliefs ‘empirical’ because they are about the physical world as the ancient Greeks saw it. I don’t mean to imply that they were arrived at through empirical investigation, though they are used to explain physical phenomena like bad weather or crop failure.
- 25.
As classicist and historian Robert Parker says in his book Miasma: Purification and Pollution in Early Greece ‘[t]he two natural pollutions most often referred to in Greek sources are those of birth and death’ (1983, 33).
- 26.
Although one could contract miasmic pollution through wrongdoing like murder. However, the link here between murder and miasmic pollution does not make miasmic pollution a moral concept as there are many instances where one can be polluted but not be guilty of wrongdoing e.g. through giving birth. Indeed, that guilt and miasmic pollution are separate can be seen from the fact that in Aeschylus ’ Oresteia (which I will discuss below), Orestes is tried for murder even after he has been ritually purified. That is, even though the matter of his pollution (from killing his mother) is settled (as he has been purified), the matter of his guilt remains open. The link between murder and miasmic pollution probably has something to do with it involving proximity to death.
- 27.
Cf. Anton Powell (1988, 386) where he discusses Athenian laws relating to murder trials, where ‘in some circumstances a man accused of murder had to plead his case offshore in a boat, to a jury on land, to avoid contaminating Attikē.’ The notion of contamination here is that of contamination by miasma.
- 28.
Where I touch on some historical factor about which there is no strong consensus I will note it in the footnotes, and try to leave the main text free from anything not directly relevant to the arguments. There is some controversy among historians over the date of the synoecism of Attica, that is the time at which Attica became politically unified under the city of Athens. But the precise date of the synoecism is not decisive for our discussion as the Attic synoecism did not imply strong central control by Athens. Indeed, after Attica was politically unified most of the day-to-day life and institutions of the non-city dwelling inhabitants remained locally focused. Even Robert Parker , who argues for a very early date for political unification (1996, 10) is happy to say that ‘even after the synoecism, most of life’s important activities for most inhabitants of Attica were probably still played out in the local community… And if no synoecism ever needed to occur (because the townships were never independent), we doubtless have still to imagine a society that was strongly decentralized in most of its habits of life’ (ibid., 16). And so the official synoecism should be seen as distinct from the process of increasing investment in polis life I will go on to describe, though of course the former will have played a part in the latter. In any case it is clear that in matters of revenge obligations at least, centralised control was a late occurrence (see note 131).
- 29.
Cf. Raphael Sealey (1983) who speaks of the pre-Classical period responses to murder as characterized by ‘self-help and retaliation, in which the relatives of the victim avenged themselves on the killer or accepted compensation in valuables, without approaching a court or public authority’ (ibid., 286) and says that ‘until the time of Draco [around 630 BCE] homicide was a private matter, to be settled between the families by retaliation or eventually by reconciliation in return for compensation’ (ibid., 293). And Michael Gagarin tells us that before Draco ‘[t]he pursuit of a killer was traditionally the task of the victim’s relatives’ (1979, 304). The practice of family-led retribution is seen as the accepted system in the earliest surviving witness, the Homeric poems, which reflect Greek practices from the pre-Classical, and possibly even Dark-Age and Mycenaean periods (that is, stretching back as far as the seventeenth century BCE). See especially Iliad 9:632–6, and Odyssey 21:2.4–30, 23:118–20.
- 30.
Of course, we would consider it understandable for the family of a murder victim to feel a deep desire for vengeance; such feelings would be perfectly appropriate and natural. Indeed, cases where a murderer is forgiven by the family of the victim are usually seen as instances of supererogatory goodness. But all this doesn’t mean we approve when a family member does act in vengeance, and does seek to kill the killer.
- 31.
Technically this is an argument from silence, but the fact that before Draco the potential for state controlled punishment of murder is never even expressed (for instance in Homer or Hesiod ), strongly implies that it was not a conceptual option. Indeed, even when the state did begin to intervene the family still had to be given a primary place in the new prosecution procedure and the old revenge system, personified in the Furies, be given a place of honour (see this section below).
- 32.
This is also affirmed at Choephoroi lines 273–4 ‘[Apollo] proclaiming afflictions chilling to my warm heart’s blood, if I avenge not my father…’ (Weir-Smith 1952, 187).
- 33.
I don’t want to clutter the main text with historical detail but it will be worth just noting the major events in the process of both political centralisation and state control of previously family-led institutions. As we’ve seen above, before the eighth century BCE family-led institutions prevailed; in 621/0 Draco instituted his famous law code in which the state first began to legislate about revenge killings and imposed some very basic controls on it, for instance making it illegal to kill a murderer who has escaped into exile (perhaps to guard against inter-state conflicts). In terms of greater political centralisation, around 590 BCE Solon established the Council of the People, a body of 400 representatives including those from Attica at large, thereby increasing enfranchisement of country-dwellers. In around 510 BCE Attica was rearranged into new geographical groups called demoi, and a democracy established whereby all free Attic males were given the vote. These demoi then, rather than the old family unit ‘became the focus of citizen’s loyalties and attention’ (Jones 1984, 9). By 350 BCE Demosthenes is able to speak of the revenge obligation as a thing of the past saying ‘only the laws and the appointed officers have power over the man for punishment. The prosecutor [prosecuting family member] is permitted to see him suffering the penalty awarded by law, and that is all. Such are the prosecutor’s rights’ (1935, 261). Of course the fact that there was such a law against revenge killings, and that it had to be reaffirmed here, shows that the pull of the obligation had not gone away—we only legislate against things people actually do.
- 34.
We might think that the wrongness of killing family members is a candidate for a universal moral certainty rather than a local one as it is treated here. But it isn’t a universally held belief , as in some cultures such obligations can be overcome by obligations to the state. Consider the contrast between Greek and Roman views as expressed in the morally pointed stories of Agamemnon and Iphigenia (especially as told by Aeschylus ) on the one hand, and Manlius Torquatus and his son on the other. In the Greek story, Agamemnon is represented as seriously culpable for killing his daughter, Iphigenia, though the killing was for the good of the ‘state’, in order that the Greek fleet could sail to Troy. In contrast Torquatus, who while Consul had his son executed for disobeying military discipline was seen, all in all, as doing the right thing, subordinating family obligations to those to the state. The latter’s act was seen as a harsh and regrettable but necessary and correct moral judgement (cf. Livy , Ab Urbe Condita, 7:10–8:8).
- 35.
An example of the tension between the old and new conceptions of justice, one probably more familiar to philosophers, can be found in Plato ’s Euthyphro (1969). There Euthyphro is prosecuting his father for murder. The legal situation is this: Euthyphro’s father had ‘arrested’ a labourer who had killed a slave. He bound the killer and left him in a ditch while he went to go fetch the authorities (citizen’s arrests were legal); while he was bound and left untended the labourer died; Euthyphro initiates a prosecution against his father for killing the labourer. Essentially, Euthyphro represents the new, polis-centred conception of justice and the father the old, family-centred view. Under the old view killers could be killed, and one’s primary obligation was to the family. Under the current law though the father had detained the killer in an illegal manner: killers could be arrested but not in any way abused or maltreated; but here the labourer was bound and starved. So the father was acting in accordance with the old ways (under which his son was acting very impiously!), and the son the new. This makes sense of Socrates’ concern in the dialogue to establish a standard against which these opposing views could be judged. It also shows that the old revenge beliefs were still alive, though by no means basic moral certainties .
- 36.
Adherence to the prohibitions around the Temple cult was in several instances a cause of conflict between the Jews and the Romans who governed the province of Judea. Cf. for example Josephus , 1981, 120–1, 139–41.
- 37.
This is a fact Wittgenstein himself acknowledges in his well-known metaphor of the river-bed (OC 96–7). There he says that,
[i]t might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid… The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself.
The same could be said for basic moral certainties , in that in cases like that just discussed the moral ‘river-bed’ itself might shift, if certain aspects of the wider context change in relevant ways. This is just the same as the way empirical certainties change, that is, gradually and indirectly, not through rational means.
- 38.
But though those changes might be prompted or caused by such social changes, they are not justified by them. That is, the shift in moral certainties is not empirically justified or the product of ratiocination—they change over time as those empirical beliefs which hold them in place change.
- 39.
The Athenian’s did have a jail (probably only one) by the Classical period but this is somewhat different in function from our prison. The Athenian desmoterion (‘place of chains’) was a place for holding prisoners before trial (somewhat like a modern jail) or execution, and people were only exceptionally sentenced to a term there as a punishment in itself, and this as a punishment for debtors, never for serious crimes. Plato , in the Laws (1970), imagines using prison terms as punishment but only considers short terms of one or two years (two for a murderer who illegally returns from exile), except for when punishing an atheist who must serve a minimum of five years, though his incarceration is conceived of in restorative terms (to cure them of their atheism). In short, life-sentences were not conceived of or practicable even as late as the Classical period (cf. Virginia Hunter 1997, 2008).
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O’Hara, N. (2018). Local Moral Certainty. In: Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75444-4_5
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