You can’t get morality from a book. Morality is a skill, just like hitting a baseball. A book can’t give you a skill, but it can teach you how other people have learned the skill, and how other people have practiced. It can offer you suggestions for how you might improve your skill, or teach it to others. The bible is the best of these books. It is full of stories and parables that teach us how to practice the skill of morality.
One of my favorite examples is the parable of the drowning man. What if, asks Jesus, we come upon a drowning man on the Sabbath? The old teachers taught that we are to keep the Sabbath holy, and do no work. Jesus points out that this is a terrible reason to not rescue someone. The man is drowning. We must rescue him. The old rule is still valid, but the drowning man trumps it.
Philosophers call these things “razors”, because they help us cut fine distinctions in the face of complicated or confusing, or even contradictory information. Jesus gave us the best moral razor ever: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Over the centuries to follow, other philosophers have paraphrased this golden rule into all sorts of corollaries. “The greatest good for the greatest number”. “When considering any act, consider the consequences if everyone were to do that same act.” Corollaries help us think about hard issues, because they express the same ideas in ways that may fit the particular facts better.
About 1800 years after Jesus, a man named Jeremy Bentham figured out something even better than a razor. He figured out a formula for deciding which of a number of alternatives should be taken. It is simply this: When you are comparing alternatives, add up the good things and bad things of each alternative. Which ever gets the best score is the right thing to do. So, for example, what if someone is robbing you? Should you shoot the robber? Using Bentham’s system, you ask: “Do I think he plans to hurt or kill me or my family?” If you think the answer is no, then you should not shoot him. Robbing is bad, but shooting is worse. If you think the answer is yes, then the arithmetic of morality gives us a different answer. “Killing him would be bad”, you would think, “but he was planning to kill me. Moreover, the reason he was going to kill me was bad in itself, and he was going to rob me too. Three to one. I must shoot him”
Bentham’s idea is pure genius. It is one of those solutions that are completely obvious when you see it. But nobody thought of it before. The problem with Bentham’s system is that sometimes these situations come up fast, and you have no time to decide. This is why we must practice the skill of morality every day. Being good at morality is about being able to come up with the right answer fast. Memorizing a bunch of rules can help, but it doesn’t always work. Situations that surprise us happen all the time. That is why we must practice, and study current events, and think about morality all the time.
When we need to balance various good and bad things against each other, we call it relativism. Relativism is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but it is a necessary part of the skill we need when we are practicing morality.
Last week the federal and state governments dithered until public outcry became so loud that they finally brought their forces to bear. Whether this happened because they didn’t understand how serious the problem was until they heard the public outcry, or because they didn’t realize that every weatherman in the country screaming a hysterical warning was something that merited their full attention, is at this point immaterial. They needed to understand that a city with half a million people below both the poverty line and the water line, with fully a fifth of them having no access to a car whatsoever, needed help evacuating, before the hurricane hit. For either reason that they failed to understand this, it was a failure of morality. People died, perhaps thousands, because these administrations made the mistake of thinking that reading the book was enough. You can learn a lot about morality from a book, but you have to practice and study other things, every day, things like current events and science, to get good at it.
Right now, these distinctions don’t matter. Right now we need to finish the rescue and recovery, and start the rebuilding. When it will be important is when we are trying to figure out who should get extra training, and who to punish. Harry Truman had a little sign on his desk which said “The buck stops here”. That is as good a moral razor as any.
08 Sept 2005
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