The Wisdom Of Max Abrams

In Poul Anderson's Ensign Flandry, Commander Max Abrams, Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps, looks at a picture of his wife and children, including young Miriam. (Will future generations really reapply the term, "Naval," to fleets of spaceships? We do call them "ships.")

In Anderson's A Stone In Heaven (see here), Miriam "Banner" Abrams recalls her father. I am grateful for this brief reappearance by Dominic Flandry's mentor:

"In a chamber of her spirit that was warm and softly lit, Max Abrams knocked out his pipe, leaned back in his worn old armchair, and said to his little girl with a solemnity that smiled, 'Miri, a lot of qualities are known as virtues, but most of them don't do more than please or convenience folks. Real virtue wears different faces, of course, but it doesn't come in different kinds. One way or another, what it always amounts to is loyalty.'" (XII, pp. 161-162)

Is Abrams right? What is virtue? I remember someone in a radio debate demanding of his opponent, "I get my morality from the Gospels. Where do you get yours from?" The Gospels or any other documents merely formulate precepts that we must evaluate, not blindly accept. I do not accept many of the commandments in the Hebrew canon.

(Incidentally, I pointed out to a street Evangelical that according to the Mosaic law, adulterers should be stoned to death. When I asked, "That's got to be wrong, hasn't it?" his only reply was, "Well, nowadays people have abortions. That's killing, isn't it?" Lord, save us from Thy messengers.)

I think that the bases of morality are as follows:

human beings have been naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and we experience this motivation as moral obligation/charity/compassion/kindness/solidarity, not as calculating self-interest which is what it sounds like when expressed in biological terms;

we are social beings and therefore have common interests that transcend a simplistic altruism/selfishness dichotomy, the most obvious examples being to speak a common language and to drive on the same side of the road.

Paradoxically, we cooperate in agreeing on the same meanings for words in the English language even when disagreeing totally about what we have to say using those words.

So my three bases for morality are:

(i) some people bear the same genes;
(ii) others might help us in return;
(iii) all are fellow members of a social species.

(i) and (iii) can be described as "loyalty." (ii) is a universal extension of loyalty, as in the punch line of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. So I have agreed with Abrams more than I had expected to.