The source of the problem

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Manchester 10 May 2006 

PRECISION

In the Apostolic Exhortation on Reconciliation and Penance, Pope John Paul speaks about the emergence of an ethical system “which relativises the moral norm, denying its absolute and unconditional value”. He goes on to say that “herein lies a real overthrowing and downfall of moral values. (1)”

That is strong language. But it is a theme that recurred again and again in his teaching, especially in Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. It is also the idea underlying the striking phrase used by Pope Benedict just before the conclave that elected him, when he spoke about “the dictatorship of relativism”.

And yet, when you reflect in the light of the culture that surrounds us and is part of us, it is not obvious how one can say that the moral norm is absolute. In some areas of life it seems that the moral norm must be relative. Aristotle says that it is the mark of the educated person “to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits” (2).

Mathematical accuracy cannot always be arrived at. For instance, one would accept from a politician or an economist a statement that all the indicators suggest that a particular policy will succeed even though the precise outcome cannot be predicted in every detail. In this area it is not possible to be more exact. Only history will be able to assess, and even then historians may not be unanimously agreed upon, the wisdom of policy decisions in Israel or Iraq or Northern Ireland.

On the other hand, if your accountant said that the indications were that the total of the cheques he had just counted was somewhere more or less in the region of £2000 but he couldn’t be more precise, you would begin to worry that your tax returns might not stand up to serious scrutiny!

Sometimes the nature of a subject does not permit absolute judgements because there is no one answer. The answer may be different for different people. A discussion as to whether oysters have a pleasant taste will lead nowhere. For some people they do, for others they decidedly do not. It is simply a discussion about people’s opinions and, if they disagree, there is little more left to say. But not everything is like this: if, on asking a pharmacist whether a particular drug would work, you were told, “that’s a matter of opinion”, you would be looking for a new pharmacist.

So where does morality come in that spectrum? What sort of certainty is the educated person looking for in moral matters? Is it like the mathematical certainty you expect from an accountant (2 + 2 = 4)? Is it an educated guess as to the likely outcome of various possible decisions, such as you expect from someone developing a political programme? Is it a matter of opinion as to whether decisions are right or wrong so that you can say no more than that what pleases one person may displease someone else?

DIFFERENT KINDS OF DECISIONS

The first point to make is that there are many different kinds of moral decisions. Sometimes we are called on to make a decision which needs to be taken with a great sense of responsibility and which may have a profound significance for ourselves and for others but where there may not be one right answer. For instance in choosing a career or a way of life like the priesthood, there may be a number of possibilities before a person, all of which could be admirable. And what is right for one person might be totally wrong for another.

Similarly, in choosing a partner in marriage, there may not be a “right and wrong”. Although people in love say, “You’re the only one for me”, it is not actually the case that there is only one person in the whole world that each individual must find if he or she is to marry the right person! And the answer will not be the same for everybody.

As William James put it, “Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which, we stolid onlookers are stone-cold” (3).

In making decisions about social issues, people will have differing priorities – and many apparently conflicting priorities may be based on moral concern for the dignity of people, which is right and necessary. There is no mathematical formula to determine how these priorities are to be weighed up or for determining the exact proportion of public money that should be spent on health care, on education, on housing, on the environment and on overseas development aid.

At the same time, there would be something very disconcerting about the notion that all moral decisions could be like that. It is a notion which is gaining ground. ‘If you sincerely believe it’, we tend to say, ‘then it’s alright for you.’ We all know that there are many areas in which, until a couple of decades ago, there was a clear moral consensus about what was right and what was wrong. There were moral rules and principles which, it was universally felt, applied to everybody. We are also aware that many of these now seem to be regarded as mere matters of opinion. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, echoes Pope John Paul’s concern about ‘the downfall of moral values’ when he refers to a phenomenon which he calls “a profound redrawing of our moral landscape” (4):

“the gradual transformation by which sin becomes immorality, immorality becomes deviance, deviance becomes choice, and all choice becomes legitimate”.

We no longer speak of virtues, he says, but of values: “and values are tapes we play on the walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others” (5). But, he points out, it is not as simple as that. We are happy enough to conclude a discussion about whether eating oysters is a pleasant experience by saying with an amused smile that “There’s no accounting for taste”. We do not, however, feel that it would be appropriate for arguments about abortion, or about the death penalty, or about honesty in the use of public funds, or about violence in pursuit of political ends, to conclude in that way. We believe that they are not just matters of taste and that our convictions on these matters are true and that those who do not see it our way have not just got different tastes, but they are wrong!.

Morality is, to a large extent, about how we relate to one another. It is, among other things, a kind of language in which we express our attitude to one another. Some ways of behaving say, “I recognise you as my equal”; others say, “I do not recognise you as my equal.” But if it is to work as a language, both of those involved in the conversation have to be able to understand.

Take, for example, the reaction to the cartoons about Mohammed. When a charge of racism or of being offensive is made against somebody because of something he said or published, it is not enough for him to say, “I had no intention of insulting you; I sincerely thought my remark was humorous”. If the other responds and says, “I don’t see the joke; I am insulted”, the charge still stands. Language is a two-way thing – what you say and what I understand both count. I cannot simply dismiss what my words or actions mean to you as being of no account.

As Rabbi Sacks puts it, “A private morality is no more possible than a private language” (6). A private morality would be, what Pope John Paul called, ‘the overthrowing and downfall of moral values’.

Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass says that, “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”. Of course, that simply does not work. If you have no way of knowing what I choose the words to mean, no communication takes place or worse still a total misunderstanding occurs. That seems to be what is happening in many spheres. Discussions about moral issues often sound like an orchestra where some musicians are playing a symphony, others a march, others jazz and others simply tuning up! There is no harmony, no coming together.

And yet, even in decisions about choosing a career, or a set of political priorities – not to mind in areas where more precision is appropriate – we would like to think that our choice is a reasonable one. In other words, we like to think that, at least in principle, we could explain to other people why it seemed the right thing to do and, perhaps, persuade them to agree that the decision we made was reasonable; we might even hope to persuade them that our decision was correct.

SINCERITY IS NOT ENOUGH

Because morality is a language, it must be shared. No matter how convinced I am that I am making sense, if no one understands me, I am not communicating. No matter how good I feel about myself and my behaviour, other people may experience it as anything but good. No matter how justified I feel in what I have done, someone else may experience it as an entirely unjustifiable intrusion on them. It makes perfect sense for someone to disagree with my line of thinking and to say to me, “I don’t for a moment doubt that you sincerely believe that you are doing the right thing, but I am equally convinced that you are violating my rights”. And it is no use responding, “Well, there’s no accounting for taste”, or “That doesn’t matter because I feel certain I am right”

That challenge to my sincere decision does not simply arise when somebody else disagrees with me. It arises every time I look back on something I did in the past and say to myself, “If I saw things as clearly then as I do now, I would have realised that I was getting things entirely wrong.”

When I try to decide how I should act, I am not just trying to be sincere. I am not just trying to ensure that I feel good about my behaviour. I am sincerely trying to arrive at a conclusion which is true – which respects the rights of others, which respects the truth about the situation, about the people affected by my decision and about myself.

This may seem obvious enough, but it is not. There is a stream of moral philosophy which says that the idea of truth or falsehood cannot properly be applied to moral statements at all. Some would say that such statements are no more than expressions of feeling – of approval or disapproval, of pleasure or distaste. Some of them would say that moral debate is not unlike a discussion about the taste of oysters. Many philosophers would accept the argument which says that facts are one kind of thing and values are a different kind of thing, and there is no way of passing from one to another. So no matter how well you know the facts, you can never pass from that to saying what is the right thing to do. If we disagree, no facts which you can point to will prove that I am wrong. This is the attitude that was considered in the philosophical debate that became known as the Is/Ought question.

But that attitude cannot really be maintained in the face of the truth about ourselves. We were made and redeemed for a destiny which responds to our deepest longings in a way beyond what human eye has seen or ear heard or mind conceived ( I Cor 2: 9 ). That is why we are obliged to respond to that destiny. That is why we are obliged to recognise and respect that dignity in every other member of the human family.

The Is/Ought debate is one of the roots of the moral relativism that surrounds us. It asks how it is possible to pass from statements of fact to statements of obligation. The debate tended to conclude that facts and obligations are completely different things and there is no way to pass from facts to obligations. It is a short step to saying that there can be no objective, universally valid obligations because no reasoning could arrive at them because the category of truth or falsity simply doesn’t apply.

But that is a false dividing up of the human person. Faced with the promise of the superabundant fulfilment of the most profound human hunger for what is true and good and beautiful, faced with the loving invitation of the God who is the source of human life and of the universe, it hardly seems logical or sensible, to ask, ‘Does it follow from these facts that we have an obligation to accept that promise and invitation?’

To reject that invitation would be to reject who we are and what we were created to be. It would mean using our freedom – which is ultimately a search for the only destiny which can satisfy us – to refuse that destiny, to choose not to be what I am, to betray myself (7).

I was at a meeting last week with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. They looked with some horror at the decline of religion in the West, but the point they kept returning to was that we had an impoverished understanding of freedom. Freedom is not just the freedom to do whatever you wish; it is the freedom to be what you are capable of being. Freedom badly used actually enslaves us; free will becomes enslaved will.

In any case, sincerity is not enough. I want to come back to a reflection on this in the next session when we will talk about conscience.

FORMULATING THE QUESTION

If we are to think in terms of seeking the moral truth, it is necessary to begin by trying to formulate the question we are trying to answer. One question is “What is the right thing to do?” That was the question which the rich young man asked of Jesus in the Gospel. But he added something; he expressed the reason why he was asking the question: “What good deed must I do to possess eternal life?” ( Mt 19:16 ). That reason is crucial. In his encyclical Veritatis Splendor ( The Splendour of the Truth ), Pope John Paul reflects on the young man’s question:

For the young man, the question is not so much about the rules to be followed, but about the full meaning of life (8).

The question of how we should live is not just about moral rules. It is first of all a question about what human life means, what it is for, where it leads. Perhaps the most fundamental reason why there is so much disagreement about moral issues today is that we have no consensus about what life means and where it leads.

That, incidentally, is why people have such a problem about passing from facts to values. The passage is made by knowing the purpose of whatever you are evaluating. You can gather, for instance, a whole series of facts about a new model of car – its size, its fuel consumption, its road holding, its acceleration, its safety features and so on. In order to pass from these facts to a judgement about whether this is a good car, you need to know what a car is meant to be and what it was designed to do. Indeed, until you know that, you don’t even know what facts are relevant. If you have no real sense of the overall purpose and meaning of human life, then the passage from facts to values becomes difficult!

And so, Pope John Paul says,

This question is ultimately… the echo of a call from God who is the origin and goal of human life (9).

The question of how we should live is, at root, a question of how we should respond to the God who made us. It begins by trying to understand the truth about our relationship to God and then to one another, to God’s world and indeed to ourselves. In the Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliation and Penance, Pope John Paul, after speaking of the downfall of moral values, goes on to say that, “the problem is not so much one of ignorance of Christian ethics but ignorance rather of the meaning, foundation and criteria of the moral attitude” (10).

DIFFERENT QUESTIONS

Not everyone would understand or agree with that formulation. The confusion that exists in much moral discussion today goes back to the question that people think they are asking. One sort of question has, as we saw, to be satisfied in the end to say, “There’s no accounting for taste”. For that approach, moral views are an instinctive or gut reaction. If you can get me to see an angle that I had previously not been aware of, that may possibly change my feelings. But even if we are completely agreed about the facts, we may react differently and “who are you to tell me how I should feel?”

Other people will ask what seems a much more objective question which sounds as if it could be worked out almost mathematically: “Which line of action will cause the most happiness and the least pain?” But, of course, to work it out mathematically would mean being able to put a mathematically precise value on different kinds of happiness – enjoying friendship, or music, or food, or sport – and it would mean being able precisely to measure and compare different kinds of pain – physical suffering, disappointment, economic disadvantage, illness and so on. It would mean being able to weigh a particular pain in one person against a particular kind of happiness in another. A terminally ill patient, for instance, might have to try to weigh the level of pain which it might be worth enduring in order to have the benefit of being able to converse in full awareness with one’s family. Obviously, two people in exactly the same situation could quite legitimately reach different conclusions on a question like that. Once one begins to think about it, mathematical precision and proof begins to look a more and more unlikely outcome of the calculation.

There is another, more serious problem. When we reflect, it becomes clear that there is more to a moral decision than minimising pain and increasing happiness. Many kinds of fraud and dishonesty aim at doing precisely that. That was what Sir Alec Guinness told the little old lady in the film, The Lady Killers , which was remade, much less successfully, a few years ago. The vast sum his gang of crooks had robbed would do wonders for their happiness and it would only mean only the minimal, scarcely noticeable, inconvenience of something less than a penny on their insurance premiums for everyone else!

In the encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul points out another indication that this kind of calculation is not enough. Many of the martyrs died precisely because they would not do what seemed to be a minor evil, in order to accomplish the good of saving their own lives. They could have thrown a bit of incense on the fire burning before the statue of the Emperor and spared their lives for decades of dedicated missionary work. But, the Pope says:

Martyrdom rejects as false and illusory whatever ‘human meaning’ one might claim to attribute, even in ‘exceptional’ conditions, to an act morally evil in itself (11).

That is because there is more to our actions simply than the consequences they bring about. My actions say something about me, my values, my attitudes to other people and my attitude to God. If what the action says is not the truth, there is no point in claiming that the consequences will, on the whole, be positive. That lie, the Pope goes on to say, violates our own humanity. So there are serious difficulties about an approach which simply weighs up the good and bad consequences without considering what my choice means, what it says about my dignity and about yours.

Other kinds of approach are based on authority. People will say, for instance, “The Bible teaches that X is wrong”, or “If the Pope condemns it, that is good enough for me.” These are often perfectly good ways of approaching things. Only a fool imagines that it is possible to arrive at moral viewpoints independently of one’s own tradition and culture. A Christian believes that the Bible is a reliable guide and a Catholic also believes that the Holy Spirit guides the Holy Father and the Magisterium. But this cannot be our only way of approaching the matter; it is necessary to go further. It is not our position that our moral convictions are unintelligible to anyone who does not believe in the Bible or in the authority of the Magisterium. It should be possible speak to those who do not share our faith about why our moral teaching, the wisdom of the Christian, Catholic, tradition is in keeping with human dignity.

When we talk about the Natural Law, we are talking about something which is, in principle, intelligible to everyone. So, while it is reasonable and sensible to accept the teaching of those who express the tradition to whom you belong and, in particular, to accept the authoritative teaching of those who are charged with interpreting God’s revelation, that does not dispense us from reflecting on issues and thinking them through and attempting to understand them in ways that can be intelligibly communicated to the world of today.

We have looked at three ways of asking the question, “What is the right thing to do?” –

a) ”What is my instinct or feeling about this action?”

b)“What is the likely consequence of this action?”

c)“What does the Bible, or the Church, say about this action?”

We may be misled by the fact that in the face of particularly dreadful actions such as deliberate cruelty to children, all three will almost certainly give the same answer. The fact remains that their approaches are fundamentally different.

In order to understand the moral confusion that exists today, it is very important to recognise that these are three different questions. If people approach the question in these three ways, there is little reason to hope that they will come to the same answer about what is the right thing to do. If they succeed in agreeing, it will be something of an accident. Their discussion will in fact be incoherent because they seem to be talking about the same thing and probably assume that they are applying similar criteria when they are not.

TO POSSESS ETERNAL LIFE

The rich young man’s question was fuller and more profound than any of the ones we have looked at. It was, as the Pope puts it, “about the full meaning of life.” That is where the search for moral truth begins:

This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting which sets freedom in motion (12).

The question of how we should live is, at root, a question of how we should respond to God. Here we come to one meaning of the phrase ‘absolute truth’ as applied to our moral obligations. There is only one appropriate way of responding to God and that is wholeheartedly, without reservation. God cannot be treated as one person among the many who have claims on me. “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment.” ( Mt 22:37 ). That kind of love obviously goes beyond what a set of rules, however exhaustive, could lay down. Rules and guidelines can be a helpful minimum, but no relationship of love can survive simply on the basis of the partners offering one another only what they are obliged to give.

Moral living is not simply the observance of rules; it is a response to the freely given love of God who loves us first. That love of God is our hope. God’s commandments, the rules of Christian living, “are linked to a promise”, the promise of “participation in the very life of God” (13):

Moral existence is a response to the Lord’s loving initiative (14).

Two things follow about the search for moral truth. It is not exhausted simply by rules. It needs to go further. Our response to God is meant to be wholehearted. Our response to our neighbour is also meant to go beyond the rules:

Love of neighbour springs from a loving heart which, precisely because it loves, is ready to live out the loftiest challenges. Jesus shows that the commandments must not be understood as a minimum limit not to be gone beyond, but rather as a path involving a moral and spiritual journey towards perfection, at the heart of which is love. Thus the commandment, ‘You shall not murder’ becomes a call to an attentive love which protects and promotes the life of one’s neighbour (15).

The other thing that emerges is that moral truth is not something that should be experienced as a constricting burden:

Those who ‘live by the flesh’ experience God’s law as a burden, and indeed as a denial or at least restriction of their own freedom. On the other hand, those who are impelled by love and ‘walk by the Spirit’, and who desire to serve others, find in God’s Law the fundamental and necessary way in which to practise love as something freely chosen and freely lived out. Indeed they feel an interior urge – a genuine ‘necessity’ and no longer a form of coercion – not to stop at the minimum demands of the Law, but to live them in their ‘fullness’ (16).

Those words might be the basis for an examination of conscience which we could all make. Sometimes one is tempted to feel that one would be better off if one was not a Catholic and knew nothing about the rules that the Church lays down.

How have we moved so far from the attitude expressed in the long psalm (118 or 119), which occurs especially in Midday Prayer, where every verse proclaims how wonderful God’s law is!

However common and even understandable that approach may be, it looks on the Law of God as if it were some arbitrary imposition. It presumes that it would be no loss to us not to know what God’s plan for us was. Jesus came that we might have life more abundantly ( Jn 10:10 ). The glory of God, Saint Irenaeus said, is the human being fully alive (17). The moral law is about living fully in the truth which makes us free ( Jn 8:32 ). The more our life is in harmony with God’s will for us, the more fully human we are.

We tend to think of God’s will primarily in terms of rules. Saint Paul tells us clearly what God’s will is: “God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” ( Eph 1: 9,10 ). We are talking about the path towards the fulfilment of all that we hope for and infinitely more. It is extraordinary, therefore, to imagine that we might be better off if we did not know!

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it quite clearly in the paragraph I mentioned a moment ago:

The Commandments, properly so-called come in the second place: they express the implications of belonging to God through the establishment of the covenant. Moral existence is a response to the Lord’s loving initiative. It is the acknowledgement and homage given to God and a worship of thanksgiving. It is co-operation with the plan God pursues in history (18).

Even in speaking to people who do not believe in eternal life, we ought to begin with the conviction that there can be no contradiction between the Creator’s will for human life and what is best for human beings.

The young man’s question was about the full meaning of life. Indeed that is just another way of talking about morality – it means living life to the full, in the realisation of its full meaning and destiny.

And so the most fundamental questions are about who we are as human beings and what our relationship to God and neighbour, what our responsibilities to God’s creation in which we live, demand of us. How can we be true to these relationships and to their potential?

In responding, how do I recognise God as the meaning of my life, or do I, for instance, try to construct and grasp and hold my own meaning? In responding, how do I recognise that the purpose of my freedom is to accept God’s gift? In responding, how do I make myself more fully what I am called to be and am capable of becoming? Does my decision and action make me more fully human, more of a Kingdom person, more open to the universal communion to which God calls us?

In responding, how do I recognise that the other people affected by my decisions – or my failures to decide – are called equally with me to the eternal banquet? How do I recognise them as unique reflections of the God who is my hope? Or do I, perhaps, seek to diminish, ignore or exploit them?

In responding, how do I recognise the world in which I live as God’s gift to be cherished and cared for? How do I recognise it as a gift to be shared with others, and not just others of this generation?

If the moral question has to recognise the full richness of human freedom it has to reflect the full truth about myself and my relationships and to build up the truth and goodness of both.

Perhaps the real problem about the approaches that I mentioned earlier is that they do not do justice to the kind of beings we are and to the real meaning of our freedom. Our freedom is not designed to ensure that we feel good, it is not designed simply to produce results, it is not merely an act of obedience to some external rule, it is about living life to the full in all our relationships. Any suggestion that moral reasoning could stop short at feeling good, or producing good results, or even conforming with rules, however wise and enlightened, falls short of that truth.

We come back to the inescapable truth of the insistence of Pope John Paul that, to live and communicate the Good News of Life, we need a contemplative spirit (19). That may not sound very practical, but it is the truth. Unless we begin to understand ourselves and our destiny, we cannot begin to understand the moral challenge we face. We cannot begin to face the confusion and the ‘overthrowing and downfall of moral values’ that surrounds us.

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Footnotes

• JOHN PAUL II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, [R et P]18.
• 2 ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.3.
• 3 JAMES, W., What Makes Life Significant? in Essays on Faith and Morals, Meridian 1962, p. 285.
• 4 SACKS, J., The Persistence of Faith, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991, p.50.
• 5 SACKS, p. 41
• 6 SACKS, p. 44.
• 7 Cf. G. Marcel, Being and Having, tr. A & C Black: London, Fontana: 1965: 116.
• 8 JOHN PAUL II, Veritatis Splendor [VS], 7.
• 9 VS 7.
• 1 0 R et P 18.
• 1 1 VS 92.
• 2 VS 7.
• 3 VS 11.
• 4 Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 2062.
• 5 VS 15.
• 6 VS 18.
• 7 IRENAEUS, Adversus Haereses, 4, 20, 7.
• 1 8 CCC 2062.
• 9 Cf Evangelium Vitae, 83

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick