Why I Follow a Morality I Can Revise

I do not believe the world contained a finished code of right and wrong before anyone lived in it. Yet when I finish a drink, I still look for somewhere appropriate to dispose of the cup. When someone else is next in line, my convenience alone does not seem a sufficient reason to step ahead.

These rules have not lost my reasons for following them simply because they lack an eternal guarantee. Shared spaces need maintaining. Cooperation depends on reasonably predictable conduct. And my time is limited: I cannot reconstruct the conditions of living together before attending to every small task.

I am willing to inherit many of the practices society has taught me. Some need not even come to mind before my body follows them. What concerns me is whether, when something goes wrong, I can still notice and change.

In No View Is the Whole, I use preservation, composition, and return to examine how understanding forms and revises itself. A moral outlook offers a practical application. We receive norms from society, turn them into habits, use them to judge ourselves and others, and let experience return to change how we judge. This essay follows the whole process, including the difficulties faced by my willingness to go along with society.

Rules Did Not Fall from the Sky

For me, “do not litter” is a rule of life I accept. It concerns cleanliness, other people’s labour, the use of shared spaces, and how I am willing to live with others. I need not first believe in an independently existing evil of littering to have a reason to dispose of my cup properly.

This outlook does not accept that morality has an ultimate basis independent of people. Philosophically, it belongs in discussions of moral anti-realism. But that term covers different positions; it does not decide how I should live next.¹ In particular, rejecting an objective morality does not by itself entail following society, or caring only about my own interests. Those are further choices requiring further reasons.

I live among people. I need cooperation, trust, and predictable dealings, and I would prefer not to spend my days in endless argument. These needs give a reasonably workable set of norms value as a starting point.

My own commitments remain part of that choice. Efficiency alone cannot determine what I value. If an arrangement saves me trouble by transferring it to someone else, its efficiency has not yet answered whether I am willing to support it. “Useful” must specify useful to whom, and in the service of what.

Nor am I trying here to disprove every form of moral realism. I want to begin from the position I currently accept and see whether it supports a coherent, usable, and reflective way of living. The framework can help examine these connections. It cannot conjure up what anyone must cherish.

Society Has Already Done Some of the Work

Few people read a moral theory before learning to wait, apologise, or keep a promise. Usually, we begin by learning what to do at home, at school, and in everyday encounters. Only much later do we have a chance to explain why.

In Human Nature and Conduct, Dewey compares acquiring a group’s morality with inheriting its language. The life a child enters already has activities and demands in place.² I find this persuasive. Speakers need not invent grammar; people learning to live together need not reconstruct every courtesy.

For familiar, recurring rules of everyday conduct, where I have no specific reason to object, I therefore tend to comply first. I join the queue, try to arrive when agreed, and ask before borrowing. These practices save more than my own calculations. They also spare others from having to guess afresh what I will do.

Using available answers leaves time for unresolved problems. This is also what I find helpful in work on bounded rationality: it reminds us that acquiring information and comparing choices are constrained by ability and time.³ Requiring everyone to complete an adequate argument before every action may sound rigorous. In practice, it may leave even the most important matters without attention.

But society does not bequeath only good answers refined through trial and error. Rules can persist through power, fear, inertia, or accident. An arrangement’s longevity may show that it facilitates cooperation. It may also show that those bearing its costs have never had a chance to change it.

What I am willing to inherit, then, is a set of usable starting points. Ideas do not become invalid merely because they come from parents, religion, or mainstream culture. Neither does widespread observance guarantee them. Origins deserve investigation, but cannot alone decide an idea’s merits.

Following One Judgement about Litter to Its End

Consider an explicitly hypothetical everyday situation, and follow how this outlook would work.

A person walks past, leaving a piece of packaging on the ground. I see it, feel immediate disapproval, and think that they should not litter. The conclusion seems straightforward. Yet several steps have brought me to it.

First, I see packaging on the ground and identify it as rubbish. I then interpret the sequence—the person passing, the packaging appearing—as their having discarded it. Next, the rule against littering enters my judgement, making this conduct something to stop. Finally, I must decide whether to alert the person, accuse them, or first deal with what is on the ground.

In an ordinary, uncontroversial situation, I would not spell out every step. The rule is familiar; identifying rubbish as something to dispose of properly can quickly lead to action. By compression, I mean that much of the background and reasoning recedes from attention, leaving distinctions sufficient for the immediate use. This is not a complete scientific explanation of how the brain stores morality.

Nor need I assume that I once worked out those reasons myself. Many practices are first learned from others and repeated; explanations come later. What habit spares me may be work already done by predecessors, or an inheritance that has never been carefully examined.

Now add some information: the packaging slipped from a torn bag, unnoticed by its owner.

Something on the ground still needs attending to. The judgement that this person deliberately left trouble for someone else, however, has lost its basis. I can tell them their bag has torn without first treating them as someone who disregards others. The correction does not require abandoning the rule against littering. It requires separating two things I had merged: leaving litter behind and doing so deliberately.

This is a question of preservation. If I remember the encounter only as “an inconsiderate person”, differences among intention, carelessness, and accident have been compressed away. Later, I may retain only an evaluation, without the material from which I formed it. Keeping observation distinct from inference leaves somewhere for correction to begin.

Composition enters at the next step. Packaging on the ground supports the need to clear it away, but does not alone support blaming a person. Moving from cleanliness to responsibility requires more: how the item fell, whether its owner knew, and whether they could deal with it. Two individually reasonable ideas do not necessarily make a reasonable sequence.

Return occurs when new information actually changes my judgement. But I would like it to leave more than an apology on this occasion. Next time, I can begin by alerting the person and allowing a response. Before making a public accusation that could damage a reputation, I can check further. The original rule remains; the conditions for moving to blame have changed.

A first-order correction is recognising that I misjudged this person. A second-order revision changes how I move from observation to blame in future. If I apologise and forget, then repeat the same mistake in the same way, the experience has changed an answer without changing the method producing it.

Take the hypothetical situation further. If scattered rubbish repeatedly appears in the same place, I have reason to investigate overflowing bins, unclear signs, or collection arrangements. What needs attention may extend beyond individual attitudes. If I permit myself to ask only whose morals are deficient, I exclude other ways of improving the situation.

Only now have we completed the circuit: accepting a norm, letting habit take over, encountering contrary evidence, changing a judgement, and carrying that change into daily life. The shared space still needs care, and I have acquired a way to blame people less hastily and better locate the problem. The framework’s usefulness can be assessed through this change, rather than established merely by saying that I have reflected.

Which Errors Am I Willing to Accept?

I accept that everyday judgement cannot always be exact. If disposing of rubbish requires calculating pollution, labour, and the consequences of everyone’s conduct each time, a small, manageable task becomes an inquiry without a deadline.

But tolerating some error cannot mean merely counting mistakes. Bringing my own cup to the wrong sorting bin, noticing, and sorting it again is one mistake. Publicly accusing someone without checking is also one mistake. Their costs, who bears them, and how easily they can be repaired differ.

My willingness to save time through habit does not already give me a reason to impose any loss on others. As consequences become greater and harder to repair, a quick judgement needs more scrutiny. The point is to put checking where it may change an important outcome.

This also makes me reluctant to call my outlook an optimisation system. I have no common unit for every value, nor a proof that one allocation is best. More honestly, I am seeking affordable ways of proceeding with limited time and ability, while allowing later results to expose their inadequacies.

Why Aversion Cannot Directly Become a Prohibition

Litter is a relatively easy case because we broadly know what we are trying to maintain. Differences over ways of living go deeper. Sometimes what disturbs me is simply that someone does not live in the way I know.

Attitudes towards same-sex couples provide a test. Consider a possible psychological response: someone learns aversion in their upbringing and later finds that unease arrives even when they cannot explain it.

The feeling is real, but it initially tells us about the person feeling it. Moving from there to a claim that others should not live this way requires further reasons. Which specific conduct affects whom? What supports the feared consequences? Would the same demand still apply to an opposite-sex couple?

If all that remains after examination is unfamiliarity, I have no reason to treat it as sufficient evidence for requiring someone else to change their life. Culture may explain an aversion’s origin; origin alone cannot justify restricting others. Conversely, a feeling does not become necessarily mistaken merely because culture helped form it. What needs examination is what the feeling actually supports.

The absence of harm to me does not establish that there is nothing worth considering. Other people’s circumstances may be precisely what I have not seen. But until I obtain reasons adequate to support a restriction, I can withhold my aversion from the making of public rules.

This does not require emotion to disappear when an argument ends. People can first change how they treat others, allow more experience in, and gradually revise crude categories. If I privately acknowledge possible prejudice while continuing to act exactly as before, revisability has not yet reached my life.

Here, second-order reflection changes the way a feeling acquires authority to judge. A feeling can alert me to something worth examining. It cannot exempt the move from feeling to norm from the need for reasons.

Some Questions Can Remain Undecided

I do not think everyone needs a clear moral position on every controversy. If information is lacking, no decision currently calls for my action, and acquiring understanding would be costly, I can acknowledge that I do not yet know and give my time elsewhere.

Keeping a question open at least leaves my uncertainty visible. Casually accepting the most pleasing account may turn something barely understood into a settled position. Rather than pronounce on strangers merely to appear to have a mind of my own, I would prefer to withhold judgement for now.

Distance from my life, however, does not guarantee small consequences. If the decision is mine to make, or I have already undertaken a responsibility, difficulty alone does not make the matter irrelevant to me. Whether to invest attention must include my position and existing commitments.

Following an existing practice and withholding judgement each have their place. Standing before a queue, I need to decide where to join, and can usually adopt the familiar rule. Reading an unfamiliar dispute need not require my immediate enlistment on either side. One borrows a practice; the other acknowledges that sufficient understanding has not yet been acquired.

Both can change as circumstances develop. An emergency may require reconsidering an ordinary first-come order. A once-distant issue may require more investigation when it becomes part of a decision at work. I am trying to manage attention, not declare that a problem left unattended today will never deserve it.

“I Can Always Change My Mind” Is Not Enough

Here lies the hardest difficulty in accepting society’s guidance: if society also teaches me what deserves doubt, how can I know that I am not continually overlooking something important?

Promising to reflect when necessary may leave that difficulty untouched. If I encounter only one group’s accounts, dismiss every dissenter as ignorant, and make disagreement increasingly costly, the material that might prompt reflection may never arrive. I can still believe that judgement is mine while losing the conditions for judging again.

Revisability therefore requires some room left open in ordinary life. In important disagreements, retain the original account and its reasons. When deciding something that affects others, allow them to supply material I lack. Occasionally check whether a rule relied on for years still addresses the problem it was meant to address. These practices take time, but need not turn every small matter into a fresh research project.

The hypothetical litter case also reveals conditions beyond the individual. Suppose a management rule imposes penalties solely from photographs, while those accused have no way to explain that a bag tore without their knowledge. An official willing to be fair might still be left with a procedure permitting only the selection of a penalty.

Adding a field for explanations would be a beginning. Who will read it? What material can be supplied? Once a mistake is established, can anyone withdraw the penalty and change the way the next case is judged? Filing a complaint and letting new information change a decision are different things. None of this settles in advance whether an accident removes all responsibility. It first allows different circumstances to be considered separately.

Whether people can change cannot therefore be judged by will alone. Time, sources of information, other people’s responses, and the actions institutions permit all participate. An injunction to remain open-minded can easily become mere self-appraisal if those conditions are removed.

I consequently do not mind that many of my ideas are learned. If someone calls all social influence brainwashing, I will not reject it all to prove my innocence. But if the word means blocking information, punishing questions, or disabling the re-examination of belief, that undermines the very conditions under which I am willing to go along. Accepting that I am shaped does not mean accepting every way of shaping me.

This is also where I locate a freedom of thought worth keeping. Others can teach me how to think; I can accept their guidance and follow it for years. But when new reasons emerge, I still have room to obtain information, reconsider, and change what I do. This is not the whole of freedom, but it is a part I am unwilling to surrender.

Valuing Revision Is Itself a Commitment

One question remains. Why do I value revisability? Might this, too, be something society has taught me?

Very possibly. My language, my ways of identifying error, and my willingness to hear reasons all have histories. I have no position free of influence from which to pass final judgement on every other influence.

Having a history does not deprive a choice of reasons. I can still explain which past mistakes proved costly, when hearing another account opened a way forward, and why I want to preserve opportunities for future change. Those reasons may be challenged. That does not make them no reasons at all.

Nor can I guarantee that reflection makes people better. Someone can learn well in order to pursue ends I oppose more effectively. Revisability provides a capacity to change. Where change should lead still requires attention to what we value, what we are prepared to bear, and whether we can account for it to those affected.

This is what I ask of my moral outlook: let workable daily practices become habits that require little effort. When an important counterexample, conflict, or change in costs appears, unfold what habit has left out. After revision, practise, so that new understanding has a chance to become the next spontaneous response. Reason and intuition change one another; neither occupies the seat of an infallible judge.

Returning to the empty cup, I will still dispose of it appropriately. But when someone else leaves something behind, I am willing to distinguish a little more before judging. When an existing rule cannot handle a situation, I also allow the question to reach the rule.

What I inherit is a way of living. It lets me avoid starting over each morning while leaving room for something I may learn tomorrow.

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This is an independent application of No View Is the Whole. The book’s framework does not automatically entail this moral position. Its work here is to make relations among purpose, material, representation, judgement, action, and revision available for examination. Continue with the complete book, especially Chapter 2 and Chapters 9–16.

1. Richard Joyce, “Moral Anti-Realism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Article. This essay locates its discussion here without treating anti-realism, nihilism, and pragmatism as synonyms or claiming that anti-realism alone entails the practical approach developed above. ↩︎

2. John Dewey (1922), Human Nature and Conduct, Part One, sections IV–V, and Part Three. Full text. The essay draws on his discussion of custom, habit, and reflection. “Compression” and the hypothetical examples are this essay’s analysis, not Dewey’s wording, and do not imply his acceptance of its entire metaethical position. ↩︎

3. Herbert A. Simon (1978), “Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations”. Nobel Memorial Lecture. The essay applies bounded rationality’s attention to informational and computational limits to the allocation of attention in moral judgement. This extension does not mean the research proves any moral outlook optimal. ↩︎