Morality and the Human Condition 1

How can we humans be so glorious one minute and the next so depraved, and how do we know which is which?  Why do people across the globe all seem to have a sense of right and wrong?  Who wrote the laws of morality?

People quarrel.  We don’t just fight like animals do, attempting to gain dominance.  We appeal to a standard of right and wrong, and that in itself is curious.  Our awareness of right and wrong is where C. S. Lewis began his Christian apologetics classic, Mere Christianity. (Lewis, 1945)    I’ll quote from the beginning of the book because it helps to make the point for the existence of morality:

I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things [people say when they quarrel.]  They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”— “That’s my seat, I was there first”— “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”— “Why should you shove in first?”— “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”— “Come on, you promised.”  People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. (p. 17)

When we humans appeal to a standard of right and wrong, we appeal to something that does not exist in the material universe—the world of atoms and energy.  We are appealing to a law, but it is not like a law of nature.  Laws of nature are patterns about the way nature behaves.  The law of morality or the law of human nature, to which Lewis says we appeal when we are quarreling, is a law about how people should behave.  It can’t be derived by observing what people do, because we often don’t.  When we appeal to the laws of nature, we can say, “There, see what that falling object is doing; or watch how that chemical reacts; or watch what the insect does when I touch this probe to its leg.”  When we appeal to the law of human nature, we often are appealing to what didn’t happen.  And yet we act as though the law of human nature is very real indeed, not a fiction, or a mere convention, or a personal preference.  Human trafficking is not just disagreeable, like a brand of ice cream I don’t like.  It is genuinely wrong, even though it is happening every day in this world. 

We human beings seem to have an innate awareness of right and wrong, just as we have an innate sense of color or a sensitivity to music.  The fact that some individuals lack a sense of right and wrong, or an awareness of color, or an ear for music, are the exceptions that prove the rule.  The fact that other planets in our solar system could not harbor life, helps to show how amazing our own planet is.  The harsh environment of the surface of Venus does not discount the beautiful conditions on our planet.  Quite the opposite, just as people who shoot students in schools, or fly airplanes into buildings, or abuse the elderly, or hurt the ecology of our planet help to demonstrate the existence of the law of human nature, and often the existence of evil.  We are incensed by such violations of the law of human nature. 

Curiously, awareness of right and wrong, of the law of human nature, seems to be universal, across cultures and time.  While we don’t always agree on the particulars about right and wrong (although we may agree more frequently than is obvious) we all agree that there is such a thing as morality, that it is very important, and that it is essential to being human. 

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt identified five moral foundations (Haidt, pp. 150-179) that receive a variety of emphases, depending on culture and even on subculture within a larger society.  They are:

1.      The Care/Harm Foundation

2.      The Fairness/Cheating Foundation

3.      The Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation

4.      The Authority/Subversion Foundation

5.      The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation

Haidt, an atheist, was not interested in demonstrating the existence of non-material reality.  Rather, his goal was to help people better understand one another.  He was concerned about the demise of what he called liberal politics in the United States because leftist democrats seemed to keep losing popular ground.  He attributed the relative acceptance of conservatives to the fact that they seemed to be able to address all five moral foundations in their rhetoric and policies, while the farther to the “liberal” scale the politics moved, the more the rhetoric tended to be limited just to two of the foundations: care and fairness, the first two foundations listed above.  Conservatives, it seemed, were better able to address all five foundations, and thus were able to appeal to a broader range of the populace’s moral sensibilities. 

Haidt’s thesis, born out of his research and experience across cultures, was that human beings are innately aware of morality.  While his explanation of the origins of human moral awareness encompassed an evolutionary “story” (his word), another explanation obviously is that we are wired up with moral awareness.  A sense of morality is part of being made in the image of God, and that morality reflects more or less plainly the character of God.  This is the traditional explanation for the existence of morality. 

A way to summarize the problem of morality might be in terms of a syllogism:

Major Premise: real morality exists. 

Minor premise: morality is not based on what is, but rather on what should be.  It therefore is not based on observation of what exists in the material world.   

Conclusion: awareness of morality must be based on awareness of something other than the material world.

This blog post is an excerpt from my recently published book, Is Jesus Real? available on Amazon in print and Kindle.