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Morality in Guyana

Dec 25, 2010 Editorial

This Christmas Day is as good a time as any to question the sort of morality that is guiding our people. Killing without apparent remorse and a tendency to dehumanise and oppress each other are only two of the most obvious symptoms. This may be partly due to the fact that our Guyanese society is to some extent, morally pluralistic, and unfortunately this pluralism appears to be widening.
We can distinguish four levels of moral pluralism: radical moral pluralism, the pluralism of moral principles, the pluralism of moral practices, and the pluralism of self-realisation. Radical moral pluralism describes that state of affairs in which people hold mutually irreconcilable views about morality, such as what the terms right and wrong mean, and which actions are right and wrong.
People who hold such radically divergent views, however, do not form a society, and herein lies the danger for Guyana. To be a society, a group must accept certain fundamental practices and principles. At a basic level, for instance, there must be general agreement that life is worth living, that the lives of the members of the society should be respected, or that people will respect existing differences to the extent that they do not interfere with each other.
Some people do not care whether others live or die and also believe it is their needs that are always paramount: it may not be possible to convince them they are mistaken. But people with such a view cannot form a society. To the extent that society and morality go together, the morality of a society must be a shared morality, not a radically pluralistic set of opposing moralities. The morality of the gunmen of Lusignan and Bartica and the phantoms fall into this category.
But a plurality of moral principles within a society does not necessarily mean irreconcilable diversity. Pluralism on the level of moral principles is compatible with social agreement on the morality of many basic practices. Such agreement does not necessarily involve agreement on the moral principles different people use to evaluate practices.
The vast majority of the members of our society, for example, agree that murder is wrong. Some members of our society operate only at the level of conventional morality, and do not ask why murder is wrong. Some may believe it is wrong because the God in whom they believe forbids such acts; others because it violates human dignity; others because murder has serious consequences for society as a whole, and so on. Each of these involves a different moral principle. These different principles are compatible with similarity of moral judgments.
Further, we look on the third level, where we see specific actions. On this level, we encounter a variety of moral opinions about some of them. This pluralism regarding moral practices may stem from differences of moral principles, but it may also stem from differences of fact or of perception of facts, differences of circumstances, or differences in the weighing of relevant values.
Even when there is basic agreement on principles, not all moral issues are clear. In a changing, dynamic, developing society there is certainly room for moral disagreement, even if there is unanimous agreement that what helps the society to survive is moral. New practices might be seen by conservatives as threatening the society’s survival, and the same practice might be championed by others as the necessary means for survival. Pluralism of practices, however, is compatible with areas of agreement, and this is usually the case.
The fourth level of moral pluralism is that of self-realization. As long as the members of a society abide by the basic moral norms, they are allowed, in such a pluralistic society, to choose freely their other values and their lifestyles. This constitutes a kind of moral pluralism, because self-development and fulfilment, according to some views, are moral matters.
A society that allows divergence of self-development within the basic moral framework tolerates a great many differences that would not be allowed or found in a homogeneous society. Let’s live and let live.

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