How Moral Codes Stunt Growth (and Moral Language Grows Us)

There’s a beautiful moment in the The Miracle Worker, the 1962 biopic about Hellen Keller. It’s the moment when Keller, blind, deaf, and dumb from infancy, suddenly gets the miracle of language.

It’s not the moment when she discovers that there are words for things. She already gets that there’s code, symbols that stand for this or that. She already has that precursor to language and can learn the way Pavlov’s dog learned that a bell stands for food.

Rather, it’s the moment when she realizes that language is a system of symbols that can be mixed and matched to convey anything. It’s the moment that she becomes fully human, crossing the threshold to becoming the expressive writer she becomes, gifted with the “miracle” that makes humans distinct from other beings.

To make that transition, she has to wean herself off the “indexical” treatment of words – indexical meaning pointers, one-to-one correspondences as with proper nouns. Chicago points to one place. Your name points to one person.

Most words aren’t like that. At, freedom, and shadow don’t point to one thing. They’re more abstract and metaphoric, or as linguist say, promiscuous, meaning they sleep around with many possible meanings: The shadow of her smile, in his father’s shadow, shadow of a doubt.

In Keller we witness the Aha! moment that occurs in all children’s language development, the moment when toddlers finally recognize what a language is. It’s the moment when they transition from pointing their index fingers at named things and start combining words into simple sentences. They can retire their index finger because they’ve discovered the syntax of word-pointers, words like this or it. They can say It’s big instead of pointing and saying big.

We also see the Aha! moment in research efforts to teach animals minimal syntax. Sue Savage-Rumbagh taught the bonobos Sherman and Austin to use syntax by a laborious process that involved two kinds of symbols, buttons for “eat” and “drink” and buttons for particular things to eat or drink. Savage-Rumbagh rewarded the chimps when they pressed “eat banana” or “drink juice” but not when they pressed “banana” or “drink banana.”

Sherman and Austin mastered this task but could not extend it to new foods or drinks. If a milk button was added, they had to learn “drink milk” from scratch, which shows that they didn’t understand what “eat” and drink” meant but learned individual sequences the way Pavlov’s dog learned that bells were associated with food.

With enough training, the chimps finally had their Aha! They weaned themselves off code and switched to syntax. From then on, they learned quickly when other food or drink buttons were added.

I suspect that there’s a similar weaning when we transition from “moral codes” to “moral language.” Moral codes draw one-to-one-correspondences between a term for a behavior and its moral value. “Quitter” codes as bad. “Loyal” codes as good.

Moral codes are simplistic, inaccurate approaches to morality. Quitting psychopaths is good. Being loyal to psychopaths is bad. Behaviors are means to ends and not ends in themselves. To say that one can never have too much loyalty is like saying that to make soup, no amount of salt is too much.

Moral codes stunt our growth on figuring out what’s good or bad for particular situations and they make it easy to rationalize and manipulate, because we can always find moral words that code for the same behavior but with opposite connotations, I’m steadfast; you’re stubborn. I’m loyal; you’re a suck-up. I’m open-minded; you’re wishy washy. I’m kind, you’re a pushover.

Humans have an evolved behavioral repertoire. Each of our behaviors has its functions. We might dream of lobotomizing or amputating a behavior out of our repertoire. Lop off lying or hating, and we’d all live in harmony.

I don’t think we can or should do that. Show me a behavior and I’ll show you a situation in which it’s appropriate. Sometimes lying is right. Sometimes harmony is cultish (coded as bad).

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With moral language we come to recognize the promiscuity of moral words, thereby waking up to richer moral deliberation and debate about the real moral questions—not which behaviors are always good or always bad, but in what contexts to employ which behaviors. We transition out of the naïveté that causes so much friction in our personal and political lives.

People tend to grandstand with their chosen moral codes. For example in politics, the naive notion that one party is for conserving everything and the other party is for changing everything, that one party wants loose liberty and the other party wants tight regulation.

That’s all grandstanding nonsense. Conserving and changing things, loosening and tightening things are in everyone’s repertoire. The question isn’t whether to be in favor of one coded virtue or another but in which situations to be in favor of which of these opposites.

Moral codes make us talk as though, in navigating the winding roads of life, some of us are always in favor of turning left and others of us are always in favor of turning right. In contrast, moral language gets us thinking about when to turn left and right on the winding roads.

Treating words as code-like with one-to-one correspondences is a useful habit one has to give up in order to transition to moral language. The transition enables us to be more expressive but it also opens a can of promiscuous worms. Interpreting language is harder than interpreting codes. Part of us wishes language was as simple as a code.

Alas, people often make life harder than it has to be by pretending that it’s easier than it can be.

Moral codes are especially convenient. We can pretend we live by such codes and dump the confusion onto others when we act hypocritically, talking like we’ve got the right moral code, always right or always left, while we weave on life’s winding roads like everyone else.

The leap from code to language is worth making. To do so, stop pretending that a particular behavior is either all good or all bad.

Here's this article as a video with the Helen Keller scene: