Customary Morality Cannot Be a Guide to Modern Life

On 4 December 1829 the Governor General of India, William Bentinck, signed a regulation that made the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres illegal. For centuries the practice of sati had been sanctioned in some communities by custom and defended by many learned men as a duty and a sign of devotion. It ended in law because reformers, among them Raja Ram Mohan Roy, argued that it was murder, whatever tradition said. The episode shows what the topic claims, that customary morality cannot be a guide to modern life. The inherited sense of right and wrong may be wrong, and it needs to be tested.

Customary morality is the set of rules that a community follows because they have always been followed. It governs manners, marriage, food, family duties, the treatment of strangers and the roles of men and women. It is learnt from childhood, usually without argument, and enforced by approval and shame. Such morality is not trivial. It lets people coordinate without negotiating every question afresh, and it embodies the experience of generations. Edmund Burke argued that the prejudices of a people are often a store of wisdom that no individual reason can replace.

There is truth in this. Chesterton compared custom to a fence across a road. A reformer who sees no use for it and wants to pull it down should first find out why it was put there. Many customs that appear arbitrary turn out to have had good reasons, such as food taboos that protected health or rules of hospitality that reduced conflict. A society that discards its customs in haste may find that it has lost a structure that held its members together. Custom is an accumulated solution to problems of living.

But customary morality has also endorsed grave wrongs. Slavery was accepted by the custom of most societies for millennia. Untouchability was sanctioned in India by a social order that claimed religious authority, and the foot binding of girls in China persisted for a thousand years. Women have been denied property, education and a voice by custom nearly everywhere. The history of moral progress is largely the history of challenging customs, from the abolitionists to the suffragists to the movement that ended caste discrimination in law. If custom had been the final guide, none of these changes would have occurred.

If custom had been the final guide, none of these changes would have occurred.

India's reformers made the point repeatedly. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar campaigned for widow remarriage and secured the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act in 1856. The Sarda Act of 1929 raised the age of marriage for girls, against fierce resistance from those who invoked tradition. Dr Ambedkar burned the Manusmriti in 1927 as a protest against its sanction of caste hierarchy. The Constitution itself, by abolishing untouchability in Article 17, set the rule of equal citizenship above the customs that denied it. Recent years provide further instances. The Supreme Court in August 2017 declared instant triple talaq unconstitutional, and in September 2018 it struck down the colonial law that criminalised consensual same sex relations, noting that history owes an apology to those who had been persecuted by it.

The philosophical tradition has explained why custom is inadequate. Lawrence Kohlberg described stages of moral development, in which the conventional level, where a person does right because it is what the group expects, gives way in the most mature thinkers to a post conventional level, in which rules are judged by principles of justice and welfare. Hannah Arendt, observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, was struck by how ordinary he was. He had followed the rules of his society and obeyed orders, and she called this the banality of evil. A person who does only what is customary can take part in atrocity without feeling any guilt.

Modern life also raises questions that custom cannot answer because they are new. Custom has no guidance on genetic editing. In November 2018 the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had created twin girls whose genes had been edited as embryos, and the world reacted with alarm, finding that there was no agreed rule to apply. Custom is silent on artificial intelligence, on data privacy, on the ethics of social media and on the climate obligations of one generation to another. Its authority arises from long practice, and the problems that matter most are those without a practice.

A third difficulty is that modern societies are plural. People of different faiths, cultures and backgrounds live together in cities, and no single custom commands the assent of all. A customary morality that works in a village where everyone shares the same background cannot settle the quarrels of a metropolis. Public life requires principles that people with different customs can accept, such as equal rights, fair procedure and the harm principle that John Stuart Mill formulated in 1859. These principles are the product of reasoning and not tradition.

Yet the argument should not be taken to mean that custom is worthless. Reason without roots can become arrogant. The revolutionaries who tried to remake society from first principles, in France in 1793 and Russia in 1917, caused enormous suffering. Principles need the support of habits and feelings, which only custom provides. People are moral partly because they have been brought up to be, and not because they have worked out the proofs. A rational morality has to be lived, and to be lived it must become habit.

The sensible position is to treat custom as evidence and not as authority. It is a starting point carrying information about what has worked for a community, to be examined, kept where it passes the test and revised where it does not. Gandhi, who drew heavily on tradition, also condemned untouchability as a blot on Hinduism and fasted against it. The reformers who ended sati also appealed to texts and traditions that supported their view. Change is often won by showing that a custom has betrayed the values it was meant to serve.

The topic assumes a sharp line between custom and reason, but the line is blurry. Today's reasoned principle becomes tomorrow's custom, and what we call custom was once an innovation that someone had to defend. The rule against sati was a reformer's argument in 1829 and has become, in most places, an unthinking moral instinct. So the question is not whether custom or reason should lead, but how a society can keep the habit of questioning what it has learnt to take for granted, which is a custom that has been rare and is easily lost.