August 1, 2020
Consider Latrodectus variolus, the black widow spider. The female spins her web, sets up her household, attracts a likely male, makes glorious love to him, then kills and eats him. We shudder in disgust at the moral turpitude of her actions. But in fact, her cannibalism enables her to generate more eggs, which in turn means that there will be more baby black widow spiders. Ultimately, her behavior advances her species. How can that be wrong?
Now let’s contemplate Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White Shark. As you learned from the movie Jaws, this creature kills and eats people. That’s horrid! Sharks are evil creatures, aren’t they? Well, actually, they’re just doing what they need to do to propagate their species. A vegetarian Great White Shark would starve. How can we condemn them for doing what is necessary for the survival of their species? Carcharodon carcharias is not evil; it’s just doing what it evolved to do.
OK, now let’s turn to Ghengis Khan. This guy killed a lot of people. If a city refused to surrender when his army arrived, Ghengis Khan would have all its inhabitants slain when the city was captured. This guy was definitely a mass murderer. But we are in no position to criticize his ethics. Consider this: if you were born in the yurt next to his the day he was born, you would approve of everything he did. You’d probably kill a bunch of people, too. He was a product of his time and his society.
Very well, perhaps we shouldn’t blame Ghengis Khan—instead, let’s condemn the evil society that brought him up to be a killer.
Nope, that doesn’t work, either. Let’s suppose that the Keraits, a Mongol confederacy neighboring the Mongols of Ghengis Khan, were an enlightened society that refused to accept the bloodthirsty morals of other Mongols. Let’s assume that they were a peaceful people who eschewed warfare as unethical.
If that were the case, then we’d never have known about the Keraits, because they would have been wiped out before they grew large enough to be noted by history. Back then, pacifists were easy pickings. In those days, constant warfare was the way of life of the Mongolian peoples. Anybody who didn’t keep up with the latest, greatest techniques of slaughter quickly found themselves at the receiving end of those techniques.
Perhaps then we should lay blame on the Mongolian peoples as a whole. Obviously these people were vicious, evil monsters who deserve universal condemnation.
But that doesn’t work, either. You see, the Mongols weren’t the first to adopt the lifestyle. Before them there were the Khitans, who lived the same way the Mongols did. Before the Khitans were the Turkic Khaganates; before them the Rourian Khaganate, then the Xianbei, and the Xiongnu. There Eurasian steppes were the place of origin of an endless sequence of horse-peoples who attacked the agricultural nations bordering the steppes over the course of several millenia. We can’t simply dismiss all these different societies as nasty, evil societies. They were all the products of that environment, and they all operated under the same constraints and developed the same basic solutions to their problems.
Just as the black widow spider and the great white shark are products of their environments, so too are societies the products of their environments. Sure, the Mongols killed lots of people—that was the inevitable consequence of the harsh environment in which they lived.
Much the same argument applies to every society, with the exception of some isolated societies that never interacted much with other societies. Societies don’t randomly pick and chose the moral laws by which they live; their moral codes undergo endless adjustment and refinement over the centuries, and those adjustments are responses to environmental challenges.
For example, every society in history has placed severe constraints on murder. This is not a coincidence; it is because a society with an easygoing attitude towards murder quickly runs out of members. Most societies have large and complicated moral systems, systems that have been developed over millenia and that reflect the physical conditions in which the people live.