"Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering"
About this Quote
Rule slips a radical idea into an everyday analogy: morality isn’t a divine download or a private feeling, it’s a social technology. By pairing it with language, she yanks ethics out of the realm of timeless truth and plants it in human invention: a collectively maintained system designed to conserve order and make it legible to others. “Conserving” is doing quiet work here. It suggests morality doesn’t just guide behavior; it archives a community’s preferred arrangements of power, safety, and belonging. What gets preserved is rarely neutral.
The second move is sharper: morality is learned by “mimicking and remembering.” That’s a child’s toolkit, and Rule leans into it to demystify virtue. We don’t reason our way into good conduct first; we copy what we see, absorb rewards and punishments, store scripts about what is “proper,” “disgusting,” “normal.” The subtext is both skeptical and compassionate. Skeptical, because if morality is mostly imitation, then moral certainty is often just well-rehearsed conformity. Compassionate, because it implies people are shaped before they choose; blame becomes less satisfying than inquiry.
Context matters: Rule, a Canadian novelist and essayist, wrote amid late-20th-century fights over sexuality, censorship, and “public decency.” In that climate, moral language was frequently used to police queer lives while posing as eternal principle. Her comparison to language hints at the escape hatch: invented structures can be revised. If morality is learned, it can be relearned; if it communicates order, it can be made to communicate a different one.
The second move is sharper: morality is learned by “mimicking and remembering.” That’s a child’s toolkit, and Rule leans into it to demystify virtue. We don’t reason our way into good conduct first; we copy what we see, absorb rewards and punishments, store scripts about what is “proper,” “disgusting,” “normal.” The subtext is both skeptical and compassionate. Skeptical, because if morality is mostly imitation, then moral certainty is often just well-rehearsed conformity. Compassionate, because it implies people are shaped before they choose; blame becomes less satisfying than inquiry.
Context matters: Rule, a Canadian novelist and essayist, wrote amid late-20th-century fights over sexuality, censorship, and “public decency.” In that climate, moral language was frequently used to police queer lives while posing as eternal principle. Her comparison to language hints at the escape hatch: invented structures can be revised. If morality is learned, it can be relearned; if it communicates order, it can be made to communicate a different one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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