These were nice kids-- not the kind of kids around whom you’d keep your hand on your wallet. At Prescott College, the faculty would go off on wilderness trips with the students. Asleep in the wilderness, under the stars far from any protective authorities, ensconced in a sleeping bag, in that vulnerable position that was Jack Nicholson's undoing in Easy Rider, I never had occasion to worry that the students --who had argued in class that any person's morality was just as valid as any others-- would practice the moral anarchy their beliefs would support by pouncing on me or on anyone else to kill or rape or rob. But there seemed nothing in their moral philosophy to stop them.
Back in the classroom, the exploration would continue. "Is there nothing that you are prepared to say is morally wrong, even if the people who are doing it believe otherwise? What about the Nazis at Auschwitz, murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, gassing whole families who had done nothing against them, trying to extinguish a whole people? Was that right to do?" "If the Nazis thought it was right," I recall a student saying one day, "it was right for them."
In recent months, this attachment to morality as merely subjective and therefore arbitrary, and beyond the reach of meaningful interpersonal exploration, I have discovered is still alive and widespread in the circles of those who have carried forward the counter-cultural thinking of that earlier era. I read the conversations of several forums on the Internet, where people discuss issues of life and philosophy and our humanity. Heaven help --or maybe, the Force help-- whoever lays his moral "trip" on someone else, by making any kind of a judgment, by suggesting that some way or being or acting is somehow not as "good" as some other. Paradoxically, it is only around "not laying your trip" on another that moral wrath seems to be permissible.
My question elicited expressions of fear and opposition toward the moralism of the traditionalists. "In the conservative model," one person complained, "evil is real." This belief allows them to feel they have the right to struggle against what some other people do with their lives. "It's all about judgment," was another complaint. "They think they are in a position to make judgments about whether other people are doing the right thing. How can anyone else know what's right for someone else?" Any morality that represented itself as other than arbitrary was regarded by this group as a weapon that could only be used wrongly and unjustly against other people.
From reading various other things these same people had posted, I saw that these folks, like my college students two decades earlier, were apparently "good people" in the usual moral terms. Their concern for their fellow human beings runs deep. Many of them work in the world to nurture other people in ways that the followers of Christ would recognize as doing good works. But their philosophy provides them no bedrock on which to rest an argument about why one should choose good instead of evil. If the idea that "evil is real," or that "good is real," is taken as an illusion, on what basis does one feel entitled to oppose the killing fields of Cambodia or the torture chambers of regimes around the world. If “judgment” is itself never justified, are we not disabled from speaking effectively to a young man who goes around fathering children without ever concerning himself for the fates of the human beings he helps bring into the world, or of the young women whose lives he may be devastating?
This absence of bedrock can contribute to the sufferings of the world from both sides, from the direction of those who erect rigid structures upon arbitrary and therefore false moral certainties and from that of those who maintain an ungrounded fluidity in the moral realm. The theologian from the fundamentalist university --and a very sweet man he is-- can proceed without a glimmer of doubt on the certainty that it is right to treat homosexuals as sinners. The New Age relativist can issue loving permission into the world in a form that can also encourage the spread of moral anarchy.
Of course, the fundamentalists and the moral relativists are not the only forms of moral thought we find in our culture today. There are other philosophic approaches to the search for moral bedrock, some of which will be considered in the following chapter. But these two serve well to frame the struggle for a valid and sufficient foundation for a viable moral vision. And they also act as signposts for a deep-seated difficulty embedded in the ways in which questions of value figure in how we understand our world. It is a difficulty Western civilization has been struggling with now for several centuries.
<em>The chasm uncovered by Western reason. </em>
The idea that authority cannot be questioned --even if intellectually indefensible-- at least serves the purpose of eliminating all uncertainty and ambiguity. God said it. The king is sovereign. That's the way it has always been done. No need to think for oneself.
If we overthrow authority, to where then can we turn for certain knowledge? In the West of the Enlightenment the place to turn has been to Reason. We are endowed by nature or by our Creator with a rational capacity, and from our reason we can generate reliable truth. Any discerning reader will surely know by now that in this faith in reason I, your (trusty?) guide, am a child of the Enlightenment.
But reason cannot create truth ex nihilo. Only if certain things are granted as true can reason build further truth. Even mathematics begins with axioms. (What seems self-evident in a Euclidean geometry can be rendered untrue in a geometry with other suppositions at its base, a geometry in which, say, parallel lines will meet.) Even scientific truth depends on logic, and depends also on the accuracy of observations. Without some premise, where is logic to begin? And if the premise is a given, then where is the bedrock from which we can derive certainty? Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" expresses one effort to find some kind of unquestionable bedrock. It is not, therefore, only in the realm of moral judgments --what is good? what is the basis for morally right action?-- that the problem of bedrock occurs.
But with the idea of moral knowledge in particular, the Western use of reason has seemed to discover an impenetrable obstacle to finding bedrock. With respect to the larger epistemological challenge --can we know with certainty that one plus one makes two, or that there is in fact a rock under my foot-- I have nothing to contribute. But with respect to the search for some kind of moral bedrock, I do believe that I found some way through that ostensible obstacle.
First, let me try to describe that obstacle uncovered by the reason of the Enlightenment.
Let's say that I declare, "It is not a good thing to murder someone." You then ask, "Why not?" And then I answer, thinking of Clint Eastwood's remark in The Unforgiven, "It takes away from another human being everything he has and everything he would have had in the future." You can then respond, "Yes, I know that's true. But there is nothing in that to tell my why it's not good to do that." And I can go on and talk about all kinds of things that you will grant --that the person murdered found satisfaction in living, that his death causes grief to his friends and family-- and you'll be able to say, "Yes, but how does that lead to your proposition that it's not good?" And ultimately --at least so it appears-- I will have to concede that none of my statements about what is factually true allow me to prove anything to another person about what is morally good.
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