The Morality of the Two Wrongs

As long as I have been cognizant of my own reality and have had the ability to listen and interpret speech, the old adage "two wrongs don't make a right" has been a part of my proverbial upbringing. I was reared with the idea of reciprocity. Do unto others. You get what you give. Walk a mile in someone else's shoes. It all boils down to this universal, idea of reciprocity. But in an attempt to be more specific, I felt the need to define concretely this seemingly human construct, this concept of 'morality'. Well, it turns out I'm not the only one who thought about morality in a more definable sense, either. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in a 2008 TED talk entitled Jonathan Haidt On the Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives, identified and defined five universal "foundations of morality". Let's explore each of these:

Harm / Care

 As mammals, Haidt explains, we are all wired to"bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others - especially the weak and vulnerable - [and] gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm." These feelings and emotions we feel about those who do harm to people generally shows up in each of us in the form of fear, anger, or shock. Typically, we describe those individuals that are either devoid or lacking of these feelings as having a disconnection, a lack of "moral fiber", or lacking compassion. We attach negativity to their identifiers, to those who display these behaviors; We refer to them as unbalanced, apish, inhumane, primitive, and, in some cases, even  pathological.

Fairness / Reciprocity

While there seems to be "ambiguous" evidence for reciprocity and fairness in the rest of the animal kingdom, it is easily observable in humans and very much present in culture, society, and humanity as a whole. Most of us have heard and understood the simplicity of its meaning in such parables as ones found in various bibles and religious texts. But to say that 'we reap what we sow' is as historically tell-tale and common as was the implications of Homer's Odyssey during the time of the Greek Empire. It describes where we come from and from what we evolved. Reciprocity is the remnants of the birth of mankind from a savage world wrought with predation and catastrophe, one from which we we lived as we fought to survive long ago. It was necessary to identify enemies, perhaps, and a simple act of reciprocity was a way to elicit a positive, useful, or otherwise compatible behavior from another.

Ingroup / Loyalty

Likely leftover from when we began to live in tribes and bands as nomads, human beings have a strong sense of loyalty. Since ancient times, to be cast out of society was to punish.  Oedipus cast himself out of Thebes as punishment for his actions in Sophocles famous play, Oedipus Rex. When people act as criminals, we take them out of society and lock them away in prisons as punishment. We are a communal species by nature. Hermits are regarded as strange, foreign, disturbed, crazy, eclectic, unrefined, and unconventional. The familiar saying, "it's always the quiet ones" refers to the belief that those who disconnect from their fellow human beings seem to perform the worst acts as evidenced by David Berkowitz, the famous 'Son of Sam' serial killer from 1976 and 1977. But tribal behavior is part of our competitive nature, too, alludes Haidt as he shows a group of people in a football stadium and say, "even when we don't have [tribes], we make them because it's fun."

Authority / Respect

While observers of animal species can see evidence of submissive behavior in a wide variety of species, human beings are the only species that seems to have alternative motivations for such behavior other than dominion and control. While the desire for power over another person is certainly a powerful motivator for many (not to mention a violation of the compassion aspect of morality), morality comes into play when we experience "voluntary forms of deference and even sometimes love." in the instances where we realize that we are wrong and someone else is right in an argument, we often submit to the truth wielded by another. It is a common belief and understanding that societies authorize elders to speak out about certain topics because their experiences are well respected. Consider, if you will, thefollowing quote from the 1997 film, Amistad, as spoken by the character of John Adams (Anthony Hopkins) to the US Supreme Court:

         James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, 
        George Washington... John Adams. We've long resisted asking you for 
        guidance. Perhaps we have feared in doing so, we might acknowledge that our 
        individuality, which we so, so revere, is not entirely our own. Perhaps we've 
        feared an... an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But, we've come to 
       understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now, we've been made to 
       understand, and to embrace the understanding... that who we are *is* who we 
       were. We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, 
       our prejudices, ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right. And if it 
       means civil war? Then let it come. And when it does, may it be, finally,  the last 
       battle of the American Revolution. 

Purity / Sanctity

The concepts of purity and sanctity are historically regarded in terms of sex and chastity. The traditional, albeit largely mythical, view of chivalrous knights are that they rescued chaste princesses and damsels in distress. Until she ate the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden, Eve was innocent and pure. After, Eve then saw that she was naked and became ashamed. Haidt regards this as a typically conservative view, but recognizes that this eternal, sacred quest for purity is one that can be found by liberals in food. "Food is becoming extremely moralized, and a lot of it is about purity and what you're willing to touch and put into your body" Haidt says, standing in front of an advertisement selling organic fruit juice. A common view of hippies in the 1960's and early 1970's were of a group of young people who wanted to "live off the land" and "get back to nature", believing that they would be rewarded in some sort of way in the long term. Either way, the body remains a temple of sorts, and should not be defiled or suffer acts of blasphemy, metaphorically speaking.

Ok, I admit that may have been a bit long. But that brings us back to the idea of reciprocity. See? I'm not the only one who believes that reciprocity is something that is characteristic of a moral mindset. This brings us back to the original question: why is it that two wrongs do not make a right? Well, at this point, we can take a couple of approaches: 1.) we can use the mathematical approach, or  2.) we can take what I will call The Moral Law of Reciprocity approach as reciprocity is explained above.

The Mathematical Approach

In simple math, a negative number added to another negative number cannot yield a positive number; it directs the count in a negative direction, always. On the other hand, a positive number added to a negative number does the same thing from the perspective of the positive number. However, only two positive numbers added together can be positive. This is the course of logic with the idea that "two wrongs don't make a right". The cause and result relationship between morality and opposing behaviors is in the negativity of the two behaviors, which repel each other and are, therefore, incompatible and incapable of combining to create anything but a negative result.

The Moral Law of Reciprocity

Recognizing that all things that are amoral because they are intrinsically amoral rather than because someone or something has deemed them as such, reciprocity is also true by this fashion. We don't go around murdering people because someone told us it is bad, but because it is bad, in and of itself. Likewise, if we want to be treated well, we have a moral obligation to treat others well. This truth is self evident. In the case of the "two wrongs" argument. each opposing wrong is, in and of itself, wrong; there is nothing good or true about either of them. Without a positive instance present, there can be no good to come out of them. Goodness does not create itself. Goodness doesn't spring from nothingness. Now, this doesn't mean that reciprocity of negativity is good because, well, two wrong don't equal a right. But also, reciprocity is only good if it is the result of something that doesn't violate the other tenets of morality, such as Haidt's harm / care. In this opposing view, it becomes not reciprocity but rather vengeance, vindication, compromise, or a unilateral result. In other words, the result can only be neutral or bad if both causes aren't good. Therefore, The Moral Law of Reciprocity states that reciprocity is a.) inherently good, b.) constructed of elements that are good, and c.) can only end with a positive result.


Invino Veritas
4/24/12
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