Sunday Musings – April24, 2022
The moral suitcase.
One of the podcasts to which I listen weekly is “Hidden Brain” hosted by Shankar Vedantam. A recent podcast was entitled “When Doing Right Feels Wrong”. I had reminded us humans are often faced with two or more conflicting primary moral values/beliefs. One of the examples on this podcast was that loyalty to a person or organization may conflict with stopping an action which one believes is going to result in harm to others.
When facilitating a discussion on ethics or moral behavior I have often used an exercise which I borrowed from someone whose name I no longer remember. This exercise begins with imagining that one is moving a household, but the items one is moving are moral/ethical values. One is first allowed to move 20 items and then only 10 and so forth until there is room on the moving truck for only one moral value.
Us humans, no matter what our ethical or moral background, have long pondered how one decides what is right or wrong - moral or immoral. Pre-Socratic philosophers long before Plato and Aristotle struggled with these issues. Philosophers and theologians such as Kant, Barth, Hobbs, Locke, Russell and a host of others have filled volumes examining ethical and moral issues. Some Christian theologians have posited complicated theories justifying some use of violent wars despite the commandment of Jesus to love one’s enemy. On the surface it is difficult to imagine how killing someone is loving them. As a pacifist I am often challenged with the question of whether I would use violence to protect a young child.
I have no problem justifying the use of “compassionate force” to limit the activities of someone who is unable to consider the rights and needs of a child or an adult. When working on impatient psychiatric wards I was often called upon to assist in using force to compassionately limit the harm of one patient to another patient or a staff member. Physical force was used until a nurse or doctor could administer a drug by injection to calm the patient.
Psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, building on the work of anthropologist Richard Shweder and subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, developed moral foundation theory in yet another attempt to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning. The five foundations they proposed were:
1. Care/harm.
2. Fairness/cheating Equality or proportionality
3. Loyalty/betrayal. Patriotism and self-sacrifice
4. Authority/subversion. Leadership and follow ship.
5. Sanctity/degradation Disgust and contamination
Some have proposed #6.
6. A Sixth has been propose by some: liberty/oppression
My purpose is listing these is not to suggest that all of us adopt these five or six as the foundation for making moral/ethical decisions. I, and I am sure, the readers of this blog could think of many examples when the moral choices are not that simple. There are many cases when providing care for one person or group might be harmful to another. Many of us are creative enough to convince ourselves or someone else that our motivation is altruistic when, in fact it is self-serving.
Perhaps the best we humans can do is:
· Continue to explore with ourselves and each other how our decisions affect the rest of the universe.
· Think long term and short term.
· Be humbly honest with ourselves and each other about our “true” and even “mixed” motives for our decisions and behaviors.
· Accept that we are human and not Gods. We can only do our best - just for today.
I am reminded of one of the underlying principles of the 12 step addiction recovery programs: honesty, open mindedness and willingness. I suspect that if we apply this principle to a “searching and fearless” discernment of what behaviors most closely contribute to the well-being of all which comprise these universes we will be doing our very best to approximate moral behavior.
Written April 24, 2022
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
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