(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer)
It is well known that the power of a moral order embraced by a culture has wide ranging effects. Its most powerful effects, however, can be understood in the way that moral orders can construct the lenses through which we see and define the reality around us. The effects of the way in which moral ordering affects not just judgment but perception is most acutely perceived as a society moves away from a moral order to a different basis for aligning facts to fit within its system of recognizing reality.
In the corporate law the effects of the power of a moral order have been easy to see. My favorite example is the move from a regulatory system in which it was deemed offensive to require corporations to set up espionage systems to monitor employees (Graham v. Allis-Chalmers Mfg. Co., 188 A.2d 125 (Del.1963)) to one in which such espionage was viewed as a foundational duty of both economic entities and the state itself (Stone v. Ritter, 911 A.2d 362 (Del. 2006); In re Citigroup Inc. Shareholder Derivative Litigation, 964 A.2d 106 (Del. Ch. 2009)). The earlier case was decided during the Cold War, a period in which the political moral order saw such monitoring systems in moral terms--such systems were the hallmark of the totalitarian regimes against which the United States had fought during the Second World War and which confronted the nation in the form of the Soviet Union and its allies. To compel the establishment of systems that appeared to embrace the political morality of a state system whose moral basis was deemed offensive would have been impossible. But a generation later, such moral imperatives became a luxury and something of an anachronism. Without a Soviet system against which to contend, notions of morality could give way to notions of efficiency and managerialism. Shorn of its moral character, monitoring could be understood as mere "tool" and undertaken as a "natural" behavior of welfare maximizing collectives.
But its greatest effects can be seen in the way in which society manages reproductive reality. Within legal systems the moral order effectively constructed a reality of natural versus unnatural activities that served as a form policy basis for the construction of a legal order that could "see" nothing other than what the moral order permitted. See, Larry Catá Backer, Raping Sodomy and Sodomizing Rape: A Morality Tale About the Transformation of Modern Sodomy Jurisprudence, 21 American Journal of Criminal Law 37 (1993) The movement from the traditional moral order to systems of behavior management grounded in the moral order of science exposed both the way in which the older moral order infused "facts" with meaning, and the way in which that "meaning" could be altered by shifting the basic assumptions on the basis of which "facts" could be perceived.
But the moral order's power to infuse "facts" with meaning colors perceptions of activity outside of human society as well. A recent report about the behavior of bees and orchids provides a nice illustration of the point. Rebecca Morelle, More light shed on orchids that deceive bees, BBC News Online, April 21, 2010.
More light has been shed on orchids that trick male bees into pollinating them by mimicking female insects. The bees, lured by a pheromone-packed scent, attempt to mate with the flowers, but unwittingly carry away pollen after their visit. Now, scientists working in the south of France have found how the flowers' false advertising could help new species of orchids to arise. The research is published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. Lead scientist Dr Nicolas Vereecken, from the Free University of Brussels (Universite Libre de Bruxelles), said: "This pollination strategy is only known in orchids. "For flowers to attract insects by imititating the female mating signals instead of advertising nectar or oil or pollen is very peculiar." The floral odour that the flowers produced, he said, was key. To find out more about the orchid's deceptive methods, a team of researchers from Belgium, Switzerland and Italy looked at two species of orchids that grow in southern France: Ophrys arachnitiformis and Ophrys lupercalis. While both of these species draw in males by acting as female impersonators, they both emit very different scents that attract different species of bees. Dr Vereecken said: "Because they usually attract different solitary bee species, and the position of each bee on the orchid is different - for one species, the insect picks up the pollen masses on its head, on the other one, it picks up the pollen masses on its back - there is virtually no chance for cross-pollination to occur." Id.
Yet the title of the article itself gives away the underlying moral presumptions that are embedded throughout the discussion: these orchids "deceive". The bees are innocent victims. Rather than do their sole duty--to use their sexual energy to propagate only their own species, they become unwitting collaborators in inter species reproduction. Yet inter species reproduction between animals and plants is generally understood as "natural". Why is this particular expression of that general pattern of behavior problematic--deceptive? Because the orchids pretend to be what they are not--female bees. Yet if all of this is correct, then might it not be as plausible to suggest that it is natural for bees to be sexually aroused by a particular scent that occurs naturally. It is the scent rather than the gender of or species identification of the scent producer that is essential to the "natural" order. Deception might be accurate if the orchids somehow robbed female bees of the scent and then used the scent of another to lure male bees to pollinate under false pretenses. But the orchids appear to produce the scent naturally. They are equally objects of sexual reproduction for male bees as are female bees who also produce the scent. The orchid does not "trick" the male bee by imitating the scent of female bees. Instead male bees are naturally attracted to the scent produced by both orchids and female bees as a crucial element in the reproduction of each. Yet that conceptualization would upset not the natural order but the conception of the natural order necessary to reinforce the presumptions of the moral order against which these "facts" are understood. Aberration, we are thus reminded, is far more significant for its moral rather than its natural dimensions.
And that insight was also apparent in this discussion. Thus the elaboration of an insight odder than the first--that natural processes can be far more messy than possible under the conceptual reidities of the moral order through which they are understood. Thus, the research scientists noted
Video surveillance revealed that the bees, which usually were only lured to one species of orchid, had for some reason been tempted to play the field. Dr Vereecken told BBC News: "We have seen the male of one bee species that usually visits Ophrys arachnitiformis visiting the other orchid. And it picks up one pollen mass on its head and another pollen mass its back."It shows how fast this reproductive isolation can be broken down in a single visit."After the team looked more closely at the new hybrid orchid, they made another surprising discovery. The scientists had previously thought that any orchid hybrids would produce a female-enticing scent that was mid-way between the aromas that its parent plants produced. But this hybrid was producing a completely different odour, which in turn attracted the sexual advances of a third bee species.This would mean, if the hybrid was not sterile, as this one was, that an entirely new species of orchid had been created.
Id. This messiness thus produced something new and natural but also was the product of something unexpected and "unnatural". The ancient conceptions and judgments about "bastards" especially those produced when people form different groups mate are not far below the surface of discussion. Societies are not very far from the days when notions of a natural order basis for miscegenation rules in many parts of the world.
The report itself can be accessed here: Nicolas J Vereecken , Salvatore Cozzolino and Florian P Schiestl, Hybrid floral novelty drives pollinator shift in sexually deceptive orchids, BMC Evolutionary Biology 2010, 10:103doi:10.1186/1471-2148-10-103 (21 April 2010).
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