The Structure of Moral Revolutions

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian Cambridge / Princeton historian who has examined how moral revolutions happen. He studied practices like duelling, slavery, and footbinding in China. Moral practice does not develop in straight lines, but by a process of subterranean build up followed by swift surface disruption. What seemed unthinkable suddenly, over a single generation, becomes the social norm.

Appiah’s key concept is Honour. In 1790’s England, the traditional honourable thing to do when gentlemen fell out seriously was to fight a duel. Very soon after 1800, all of a sudden, it wasn’t any more — the honourable thing became not to fight a duel.

Such changes are always led by small groups living out their beliefs. They survive and flourish, like eighteenth century Quakers and Evangelicals, by aligning their ideals and their lives. The more their powerful opponents try to bolster the status quo by pleading what “everybody knows” the more they make it plain that everybody does not know what their small group does any more. All others see is ambiguity, defensiveness and hypocrisy. From then on in, reiterating anti- arguments actually backfires and promotes change.

A moral revolution throughout the developed world fits professor Appiah’s schema perfectly. It has normalised gay people, entitling them to respect and equal treatment.  Narrow changes in social attitudes to homosexuals are only a small part of a far broader mellowing in the way people see others, partly in reaction to the barbarities, cheapening of life and suffering experienced in the total wars of the twentieth century. These privilege respect, and the cherishing of human dignity.

Like every a moral revolution the process has deep roots. It touches many aspects of life, including capital punishment, child beating, sweated labour, racism, discrimination and violence against women. The assumption that gay people have a stunted capacity to give and receive love and to structure their households around permanent commitment, has collapsed for most people under 50. Articulations of the old morality suddenly appear outrageous, for moral reasons.

Tragically, churches too often position themselves on the trailing edge of moral change — 1950's C of E bishops railed against the abolition of hanging, quoting the Bible and warning of social collapse. Now it's this. Often they are comfortable people with an enhanced sense of their own virtue who do not know personally the harshness that necessitates change. Jesus pointed out Pharisees can change, and longed for them to be born again, but it's a harder process. They have more face to lose.

So what should everyone do? Professor Appiah:

Create organizations which commit themselves to implementing the norm, not just as a norm of morality, but as a norm, as a convention of everyday life, as it were, as something you are going to live by, then you can be one of the key figures in... if you create such institutions, you can begin one of these revolutions.  And I think that in all of these sorts of cases—there was an anti-dueling society in England—in all of these cases it is very important to get people organized around the new norm and it’s kind of exciting to be in those societies because of the thing I said earlier, which is that you can see that you’re on the right side because other people, the people who are engaging in the old norm, the norm you’re challenging, already know in their hearts, in part of their hearts at least, that what they’re doing is objectionable in some way, that it’s causing unnecessary pain, that It’s denying people things they are entitled to.