"Moral Values" vs. The Good

The pollsters are telling us that a significant number of voters (~22%) cited “moral values” as their preeminent concern, more than any other issue. “Moral values” here means “hot-button” issues like gay marriage and abortion. I’m not going to complain about people voting on these issues; I certainly think they are legitimate matters of public concern. Nor am I going to argue that war, poverty and the environment have just as legitimate a claim to being issues that reflect “moral values” (though they do). No, my complaint is with the very language of “moral values” itself.

The problem with the language of “values” is that it implicitly gives away the game to moral relativism and individualism. We see this in the constant refrain of “Don’t impose your values on me.” If I value x, this is thought to be simply a matter of my arbitrary will rather than a response to some objective fact about the world. You may “value” Bach; I may “value” Eminem. I may value a forest for its natural beauty; you may value it for its resale value as lumber. It’s all up for grabs.

What we seem to have lost (irretrievably?) is a public language of the Good as something that exists apart from discrete acts of the will and is binding on us independently of our “valuing.” Reality is seen not as something to which we should conform our selves, but an infinitely malleable raw material that can be re-shaped at will to reflect our “values.”

This triumph of the will (if you’ll pardon the expression), it has been argued, is the fundamental revolution of outlook that characterizes modernity and disitnguishes it from previous ages. In the medieval age, creation was shot through with sacramental significance. Each created thing had its own nature which reflected the Divine glory in a particular way. The modern outlook denies the existence (at least implicitly) of this order and its accompanying moral order. Rather than conforming our wills to the order of creation, human beings must impose an order on it. Descartes and Bacon laid the philosophical foundations for this view, and Machiavelli carried them to their logical conclusion in the realm of politics. Classical liberalism, Marxism and modern liberalism are all heirs to this revolution, since all take human desires as given and seek to mold reality to fit them.

The upshot of this perspective is a subordination of nature and human nature to an unfettered will to power and control. It also, as Alasdair MacIntyre saw, forecloses the possibility of rational argument between competing moral positions. If our “values” are individual and fundamentally subjective, what common referent is there to decide between them?

Therefore, without a shared vision of the Good, modern politics can only appear as an agonistic contest of the wills, each side seeking to impose its “values” on the other. Needless to say, this doesn’t seem like a recipe for social harmony.