Bill Maher has said that our political orientation is an extension of our morals. He is partly right, but the relationship is more complicated than that statement suggests.
Political orientation can reflect morality. However, morality comes first in a much broader sense. Humans differ in their innate moral dispositions, while upbringing, culture, education, experiences and social environment further shape those dispositions.
Some people are naturally more empathetic than others. Some are more selfish, aggressive, cooperative, compassionate or sensitive to injustice. Civilization then takes these different human beings and attempts to teach them rules about what they should and should not do.
Politics emerges somewhere downstream from this complicated mixture.
That is why political orientation can tell us something about a person’s morality without being identical to it.
Morality is partly innate and partly environmental
Human beings are not born as morally empty pieces of paper.
Evolution has equipped us with psychological tendencies that make morality possible. Empathy, reciprocity, attachment, cooperation, guilt, anger at cheaters and concern for relatives all have biological foundations.
But evolution did not give everyone precisely the same brain.
Personality traits differ. Empathy differs. Aggression differs. Impulsivity differs. Sensitivity to suffering differs. The willingness to cooperate or exploit others differs.
Genes contribute to these differences, but they do not operate in isolation.
A child develops within a family, culture and society. Parents teach rules. Schools impose behavioral expectations. Religions and philosophies offer moral doctrines. Friends influence behavior. Economic circumstances affect opportunities and incentives. Personal experiences can strengthen or weaken empathy.
Morality therefore emerges from an interaction between nature and environment.
Neither can be ignored.
Human morality resembles a distribution, not two camps
If we could somehow construct a meaningful overall measure of moral behavior, we might expect enormous variation among individuals.
At one extreme would be exceptionally altruistic people willing to sacrifice substantial parts of their own well-being for others. At the opposite extreme would be extraordinarily selfish or cruel individuals. Most people would probably fall somewhere between them.
Conceptually, we can imagine something resembling a Gaussian, or bell-shaped, curve.
That should not be mistaken for an established scientific measurement. There is no universally accepted “morality score,” and morality consists of multiple traits rather than one easily measurable characteristic.
The Gaussian curve is therefore an illustration of the argument rather than a demonstrated mathematical law of morality.
Still, the basic idea matters. Human beings vary.
Some people are kinder than others. Some are more selfish. Some experience extraordinary empathy, while others possess remarkably little. Most people combine altruism and selfishness in different proportions depending on the circumstances.
Political labels cannot erase that underlying distribution.
Political orientation is partly an extension of morality
This is where Maher’s observation becomes useful.
A person’s underlying moral dispositions can influence what political ideas appeal to him.
Someone highly sensitive to inequality may favor extensive redistribution. Someone who places extraordinary value on individual autonomy may oppose government interference. Strong concern about outsiders may produce one attitude toward immigration, while stronger tribal attachment may produce another.
Views about punishment, welfare, war, taxation, minority rights, abortion, immigration and economic inequality inevitably contain moral judgments.
Politics therefore partly expresses the morality we already possess.
But only partly.
A person does not cease to possess an underlying moral character merely because he adopts a political label. Two people can vote for the same party for completely different moral reasons. Likewise, two people with similar levels of empathy can reach different political conclusions because they disagree about economics, facts or the consequences of particular policies.
Politics is therefore one manifestation of morality, not morality itself.
You can be moral and still politically downgrade yourself
Suppose someone is naturally compassionate, generous and highly empathetic.
That person could still embrace a terrible political ideology. Consider Nazism.
Someone might be personally kind toward his family, generous toward friends and compassionate toward members of his community. Yet if he embraces Nazism, he accepts an ideology constructed around racial hierarchy, authoritarianism, exclusion and ultimately persecution.
His underlying capacity for morality has not necessarily disappeared. But he has morally downgraded himself through his political beliefs.
The same principle applies to totalitarian communism. A communist may begin with genuinely moral concerns about poverty, exploitation and inequality. Those motivations can be sincere and compassionate. But embracing Stalinism or another authoritarian communist system means accepting or excusing political repression, abolition of fundamental freedoms and potentially enormous violence in pursuit of ideological objectives.
Good underlying moral dispositions therefore do not guarantee good politics.
A person can possess considerable moral capacity and then attach it to an ideology that severely narrows the group of people to whom that morality applies.
The Nazi may care deeply about Germans but dehumanize Jews or Slavs. The communist revolutionary may care deeply about workers but regard supposed “class enemies” as expendable.
The morality remains human, selective and tribal. And that is precisely the problem.
We are selfish animals
There is an even deeper limitation. Humans are animals.
We are products of evolution by natural selection, and natural selection did not produce us to become perfectly impartial moral beings. It produced organisms capable of surviving and reproducing.
That evolutionary history remains inside our psychology.
We naturally care enormously about ourselves. We generally care greatly about our children and relatives. We care about friends and communities. As psychological distance increases, our willingness to sacrifice usually decreases.
This makes evolutionary sense.
An organism completely indifferent to its own survival would not be particularly successful at surviving. An organism that invested just as much in every unrelated organism as in its own offspring would often lose reproductive competition to organisms displaying preferential concern for themselves and their relatives.
Consequently, humans inherited powerful forms of self-interest.
We seek status. We compete. We favor relatives. We form coalitions. We distinguish between “us” and “them.” We rationalize behavior that benefits ourselves.
None of this means humans are incapable of altruism. We clearly are.
The problem is that our altruism is usually incomplete and inconsistent.
Civilization shaped the animal
Civilization has enormously improved this situation. Human beings created laws, ethical traditions, education, democratic institutions, human rights and social norms that constrain some of our most destructive impulses.
A person may want revenge but refrain from violence. A business owner may want to exploit workers but face labor laws. A politician may want unlimited power but face constitutional restrictions.
A majority may dislike a minority but be legally prohibited from stripping that minority of fundamental rights.
Civilization does not eliminate our animal nature. It places increasingly sophisticated restraints around it.
It also teaches us to extend moral concern beyond the groups evolution made immediately important to us.
We can care about strangers.
We can condemn slavery even when we personally benefit from it. We can oppose torture even when the victim belongs to an enemy group. We can defend freedom of speech for people whose opinions disgust us.
These are remarkable achievements.
But beneath them remains the same evolved animal.
It is impossible for humans to be perfectly moral
This creates a fundamental problem for morality. A genuinely impartial moral system would require us to evaluate interests without automatically privileging ourselves.
Human psychology does almost the opposite.
Imagine that you can prevent severe suffering experienced by either your own child or several unknown children elsewhere.
Almost every parent will instinctively choose his own child.
That response is completely understandable from an evolutionary and emotional perspective.
But an impartial moral philosophy has to ask an uncomfortable question: why should identical suffering become more or less important depending on genetic relatedness to the person making the decision?
Our instincts provide an answer. Our genes care about genetic relatives. Morality may not.
The same problem appears everywhere.
We care more about our country than distant countries. We care more about people we know than anonymous strangers. We frequently care more about humans than other conscious animals, even when those animals are capable of experiencing tremendous suffering.
We also care disproportionately about ourselves. A truly impartial moral agent would have to escape these preferences.
A human being can suppress them to some degree.
Completely eliminating them may be psychologically impossible.
Our morality is still contaminated by instinct
This is why ordinary human morality should not be romanticized.
We call ourselves moral because we compare ourselves with other humans.
That is a very low bar for establishing perfect morality.
Someone who gives money to charity may still spend enormous amounts on luxuries while people elsewhere lack food. Someone who loves animals may eat animals produced through systems that cause immense suffering. Someone who opposes racism may display intense nationalism. Someone who condemns corruption may happily use personal connections when doing so benefits him.
We continuously create exceptions for ourselves.
Our brains are remarkably effective at transforming self-interest into apparently principled arguments.
The selfish animal has not disappeared.
It has learned moral vocabulary.
Truly consistent moral systems exist mainly in theory
This is where moral philosophy becomes fundamentally different from ordinary human moral behavior.
A theoretical ethical system can demand consistency even where our instincts do not.
Total utilitarianism provides one example.
Its central idea is extraordinarily demanding: maximize the total well-being of conscious beings and minimize their suffering.
In principle, it does not matter whether the happiness belongs to you, your child, a stranger, a foreigner or another conscious creature.
Well-being is well-being. Suffering is suffering.
That is radically different from the morality natural selection produced.
Evolution tells us to care disproportionately about ourselves and those genetically or socially close to us. An impartial utilitarian morality tells us that identical experiences should not acquire different intrinsic value merely because one happens inside our own skull.
Total utilitarianism has serious theoretical difficulties. We cannot perfectly measure well-being. Comparisons between conscious experiences are difficult. Population ethics creates notorious paradoxes. Other ethical systems offer competing solutions.
The point is not that total utilitarianism has already solved morality.
The point is that a coherent theoretical system can attempt something human intuition rarely achieves: impartiality.
Other philosophical moral systems attempt this in different ways.
They formulate principles and then ask us to follow those principles consistently, even when doing so conflicts with our instincts or interests. Humans usually fail that test.
Politics comes after all of this
Now we can return to political orientation.
First comes the human animal, equipped with evolved moral capacities and selfish instincts.
Then comes individual variation. Some people possess more empathy, aggression, selfishness, altruism or sensitivity to suffering than others.
Environment subsequently shapes those tendencies. Family, culture, education, religion, economic conditions and personal experience teach us what behavior society considers acceptable.
Civilization adds another layer by constructing laws, institutions and moral norms that restrain our instincts.
Only then do we arrive at political ideology.
Politics partly expresses everything underneath it.
A highly compassionate person may gravitate toward political ideas promising to reduce suffering. A highly individualistic person may prioritize personal liberty. A tribal person may find nationalism attractive. Someone comfortable with hierarchy may prefer authoritarian political structures.
But none of these relationships is absolute.
And adopting an ideology can produce a dramatic moral downgrade.
A basically decent human being who embraces Nazism has accepted morally abhorrent principles. A person sincerely concerned about inequality who embraces totalitarian communism has accepted a system capable of subordinating individuals, freedom and even human lives to an ideological project.
Neither example proves that every Nazi or communist begins with identical moral dispositions.
It shows something more important. Our underlying moral capacity and our political ideology are related, but they are not the same thing.
Maher is partly right
Political orientation is therefore partly an extension of our morals.
But morality itself has deeper origins.
It begins with evolved psychological mechanisms. Those mechanisms vary among individuals. Environment shapes them. Civilization restrains them. Culture gives them language and rules. Political ideology eventually expresses some combination of all these influences.
And none of this produces perfect morality.
We remain fundamentally self-interested animals capable of extraordinary altruism but also extraordinary rationalization, tribalism and cruelty.
Civilization has made us considerably better at controlling those tendencies.
Moral philosophy asks us to go further still.
Perhaps systems such as total utilitarianism can eventually provide principles more consistent than anything evolution gave us. Perhaps an entirely different ethical theory will ultimately do better.
For now, however, perfectly impartial morality exists much more convincingly on paper than inside human beings.
Our political orientation can reveal part of our morality.
But beneath both politics and morality remains something much older: the animal that evolution created.
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