A Thinking Reed

Levels of morality?

Written by

Lee M.

in

Maybe it’s bad blog etiquette to elevate one of my own comments to the status of it’s own blog post, but, well, it’s my blog after all.

Anyway, in a comment to this post I said (comments slightly edited):

It seems there can be at least three “levels” of morality:

1) Specifically Christian morality

2) The “minimal morality” that is accessible to everyone (natural law?)

and

3) The morality that can or should be enforced by the government/law.

Do we want to say that 2 is a subset of 1? Or might 1 and 2 actually conflict in places? And do we want to say that 3 is a subset of 2? (i.e. only moral truths that can be agreed to, in principle, by everyone are candidates for state enforcement, but not necessarily all of them?)

This seems relevant to the topic of liberalism since what’s at issue is whether there is an ethic that “moral strangers” (i.e. people who disagree about questions of religion, the good, the meaning of life, etc.) can agree on and that offers a sufficient underpinning of a tolerable, decent society. Despite whatever qualms we may have about “secularism” it seems to me that this kind of pluralism is simply a fact of modern societies, and we need some way to negotiate our interactions with others who may not share many of our assumptions about morality.

UPDATE: Joshie sez:

I’m sort of treading on unfamiliar ground here, so bear with me. I don’t how helpful thinking of subsets and the like is, but if pressed I would say 1 is a subset of 2.

Both 2 and 1 are from God. I would hesitate to call 2 natural law, since I think Paul makes it clear this is a law on the heart of every person (and perhaps creature), it comes from God (thru Gos’s Wisdom, thru the Spirit) into the person testified to by that person’s conscience, not from God to nature to the person.

1 is a hightened, clarified, completed version of 2 due to the highened clarified, completed level of communion with the Spirit one experiences in the church. This is a fuller revelation through the Spirit via the preaching and teaching of the Word, study, dialogue, and meditation on the scriptures and the rest of the tradition, and personal revelations trough prayer (ALWAYS clarified and controlled by the tradition and teaching of the church, and intended for the church at large, not a secret intended for one or a select few).

As for 3, just laws should A. be a reflection of 2; B. be a reflection of the culture and C. deal with the problem of sin and the limitations of human knowledge and action. Those are my unrefined thoughts at the moment.

Comments

6 responses to “Levels of morality?”

  1. Rilina

    My instinct is quite different from Joshie’s: I’m inclined to think that #2 is a subset of #1. That is, the “minimal morality” that everyone agrees on seems like it has to be smaller/less comprehensive than the morality that some people agree on.

    Though I’m still unclear on what the minimal morality is. I’m reminded of the link you posted a while back critiquing Radical Orthodoxy’s claims for the church. That is, the church in their dialogue seems to become an abstraction, something hard to pin down. Minmal morality seems an awful lot like that too.

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  2. Lee

    Well, there is that venerable tradition which identifies the “law written on the heart” with the Ten Commandments.

    I think things are complicated by the fact that the influence of Christianity is so deep and pervasive in a society like ours (even if it’s waning) that many people identify some version of Christian morality as “common sense” morality. So it may not be possible or helpful to draw a bright line between Christian and non-Christian morality.

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  3. Rilina

    I suspect that many non-Christians would object to the Ten Commandments being representative of the minimal morality; it doesn’t strike me as very accessible to them.

    So often it seems that moral discussions end with someone saying, “Well, this is something we can all agree on…” and another person interrupting, “Actually, it’s not.” If you truly come up with some ethic of behavior that is accessible to all, what’s actually left? Not much, if anything. At what point is the minimal morality up for negotiation, and at one point does something simply become immoral?

    Reading the passage, I’m actually not very clear on what Romans 2 is saying. To me, it seems like Paul is saying that what’s absolute about the “law written on the heart” is the awareness of it–in other words, even people who have not heard God’s law can have feelings of right and wrong, which they do or do not listen to. It doesn’t actually sound to me like Paul’s claiming that they have some mystical natural agreement on what those basic right things and what those basic wrong things are. Or maybe I’m just misreading horribly because I’m tired?

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  4. Lee

    Both good points. It’s not clear to me either if Paul is saying that we have innate knowledge of the content of morality (and if so, how detailed?), or if we just have feelings of guilt for not living up to what we think is the right thing.

    Thomas Aquinas, for one, thought that there were very basic principles of morality that it was essentially impossible for us not to know – things like “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” But that doesn’t really give us much in the way of specific guidance!

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  5. Anonymous

    If the topic is levels of morality, I wouldn’t start with your 1, 2, and 3. I would say that your 1 is actually Traditionalist Morality and, along with specifically Jewish, Muslim, Confucian, Taoist, or whatever tradition, say that it is “below” 3, which is Rationalist Morality that is enforced by modern pluralistic societies. Your 2 is a confusing “level” of morality, but if I interpret it as some sort of natural law, then it is identifiable with the entire evolutionary matrix of Morality, including 1 and 3, transcending and superceding them. Since you asked… all the best,

    – Joe Perez
    http://www.joe-perez.com/

    Reply
  6. Lee

    Joe, thanks for that insightful comment. I think what you’re calling traditional morality is similar to what C.S. Lewis called “the Tao” in the Abolition of Man – the universal morality common to the great religious and philosophical traditions. And what you’re calling Rationalist Morality might be that thinner kind of morality that is based on things like contract and consent rather than virtue and obligation.

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