Moral reformers typically judge society from the inside. They challenge their culture’s standard of behavior and then campaign for change. If morality is defined as the present society’s standard, though, then challenging that standard would be an act of immorality by definition. Social reformers would not be moral after all, but rather moral outcasts precisely because they oppose the status quo.

To celebrate Stand to Reason’s 30th anniversary, we’re republishing classic issues of Solid Ground that represent some of the foundational ideas characterizing our work over the decades—ideas that continue to be vital to apologetics and evangelism today.
 

For many in the world, the moral legitimacy of a U.S. military incursion into Iraq hinged on one issue: United Nations support. For them it was clear that, all other things being equal, armed invasion would be indefensible unless a single detail changed: U.N. approval.

At the heart of this view is the conviction that morality is a result of community consensus—in this case, the international community. There can be no “majority of one.” The guiding ethical principle is simple: Don’t buck the system. This is the same approach implicit in both “social contract” and postmodern views of ethics.

Many of us have seen this moral calculus before—on TV.

Star Trek Morality

“Trekkers” will recall the Prime Directive of the Federation prohibiting the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek from interfering with alien civilizations. Moral standards are set internally, by one’s culture. What’s right for one society isn’t necessarily right for another. Since morality is relative—all competing values are equally legitimate—the crew of the Enterprise was forbidden to intrude.

On this view, morality is determined by the group. Generally, the relevant group is the larger cultural unit: the tribe, the linguistic community, the nation-state. In some cases, the ruling social unit can be expanded to a consortium of cultures, like the United Nations, but the basic principle is still the same: The majority rules.

Morality as Social Contract

Classical thinkers saw the apparently innate tendency of all human beings to think and act according to moral categories (what Francis Schaeffer called “moral motions”) as evidence for God.

Others disagreed. To them, morality represented nothing more than a social contract. As 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, life in an unregulated state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In order to avoid such a fate, humans consent to live by a set of rules called morality.

This “Star Trek morality,” otherwise known as conventionalism, teaches that each society survives because of consensual moral arrangements each individual is obliged to honor. Morality is relative to culture, determined by popular consensus, expressed through laws and customs. Each person (or each country in the case of an international “community” like the U.N.) fulfills his end of the contract by keeping the code of the group.

No Immoral “Aliens”

Star Trek morality has serious problems in any of its applications. First of all, since each society is “alien” to another, no society could be judged immoral by another’s standards, no matter how bizarre or morally repugnant they may seem.

The torture of prisoners by military regimes, the injustice of totalitarian governments, and the apartheid of racist administrations would all be outside the reach of moral assessment on this view. One might counter that these policies, in many cases, are not the will of the people, but only of those in power. This rebuttal, though, fails twice.

First, why should one accept that the population at large is the relevant “society” determining morality instead of those who have the power to rule? If one has an obligation to obey society, then which society does one obey? This ambiguity is a weakness of conventionalism.

Culture is complex, with many overlapping internal “societies” making claims on us. Behavior acceptable at the gym in the morning is considered gauche at a dinner party later that evening. The moral convictions of one’s religious community may be at odds with the demands of his business community. Which group is primary? Culture is not homogeneous, making it impossible for it to define a common standard of behavior.

Second, the rejoinder also misses the point. Maybe such injustices don’t always represent the will of the people, but what if they did? The kangaroo courts of the French Revolution had popular support. So did the Third Reich, to a great degree. Do we grant French anarchists and German Nazis moral justification on this basis?

Nazis at Nuremburg

Indeed, the Nazis essentially used the Star Trek defense at Nuremberg. Advancing a notion called legal positivism, the German leadership claimed that the International Military Tribunal had no moral legitimacy to preside over the trials.

In The Law above the Law, John Warwick Montgomery describes their argument:

The most telling defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system, in complete consistency with it, and that they therefore could not rightly be condemned because they deviated from the alien value system of their conquerors. [Emphasis added.][1]

The Tribunal didn’t accept this justification. In the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel for the United States at the trials, the issue was not one of power—the victor judging the vanquished—but one of higher moral law. “[The Tribunal] rises above the provincial and transient,” he said, “and seeks guidance not only from International Law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization….”[2]

The first serious problem with the social contract view is that it violates our deepest moral intuitions, the foundational “assumptions of civilization.” Some things seem wrong regardless of what “society” says, including plundering innocent Jews, pressing them into forced labor, and exterminating them. If the Star Trek view is sound, then governmentally sponsored genocide can only be silently observed. If there is no law above society, then society cannot be judged.

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