Rambling Through the Land of Moral Confusion

What we’ve been calling “culture wars” would be more appropriately called “moral wars,” except that morality is a verbal stink bomb. It reminds me of the hit song by Genesis, “Land of Confusion,” especially the line, “There’s too many men, too many people making too many problems, and not much love to go ’round.” I’ve been struggling to construct an essay about values and politics for a couple of weeks. However, I can’t find a starting or endpoint that would dictate a coherent structure. So, I decided to take you, Dear Reader, on a ramble through my thoughts.

What Does “Morality” Mean?

Here they are, in something of the order in which they occurred to me:

1. From my observation, the word morality suffers unnecessary freightage from association with churches and religion. However, there are no clear, universally accepted distinctions between morals and values. For example, some would argue that values are personal while morals are social, but other sources define values as social, or both personal and social. So, whether you say political controversies are moral conflicts or conflicts of values, it comes to the same thing.
2. A strain of postmodern thinking runs thus: “Language is a social construct, and words are merely arbitrary assignments of symbols and sounds to concepts. Therefore, words can mean whatever I/we darn well please.” Great idea if you’re deliberately trying to be unintelligible or misunderstood. Here we have a crucial ingredient in the word salads that clog up public discourse. Even more discouraging, the authors of these blizzards of babble and blither sometimes possess advanced degrees. (I once heard Dr. Peter Kreeft describe an idea as “so stupid only a Ph.D. could believe it!”)
3. How many people really know what morality is, what values are? If more people understood that values or morals are the principles we use to determine right from wrong, we would rarely hear anyone say, “You can’t legislate morality!” as if it were an obvious fact. On the contrary, precisely because laws encode ideas of right and wrong, laws impose morality—even if it’s an imperfect, negotiated morality. More to the point, all voters are “values voters;” we’re not a demographic bloc unto ourselves. But this is the sort of nonsense propagated in our culture’s state of moral idiocy.

Thought-Terminating Clichés and Self-Evident Platitudes

4. Consider the following verbal fluff: “Consenting adults should be permitted to do whatever they want in private, so long as nobody is harmed.” This statement is worse than a platitude—it’s a thought-terminating cliché. Who gets to define what constitutes a “consenting adult,” “privacy,” or “harm”? All these terms need clear definitions for bright-line borders. And who decides when and where those borders are crossed? What recourse do we have when those borders are transgressed? Especially that word “harm”—so much of our spiraling regulations concern an ever-expanding world of harms. Don’t tell me these aren’t moral issues!
5. Here’s another instance: People on both sides of the political aisle would agree with the statement Children should not be harmed. But one side insists that children are emotionally harmed when they’re not permitted to undergo “transgender-positive” therapies (e.g., hormone blockers) at early ages. In contrast, the other side insists that children are physically harmed by those same therapies—physical harms that can translate into later emotional damage. Each side is confident that their idea of harm takes precedence, but on what grounds can they justify that certainty?
6. America, then, is a funny place where people try to impose their moralities on each other while vigorously denying that they’re doing any such thing and claiming that they’re just trying to protect various rights. (Not recognizing, of course, that they’re acting on the moral principle that rights ought to be protected.) These battles involve plenty of shopworn applause lines and bumper-sticker slogans uttered as self-evident moral truths, particularly by people who insist that “moral fact” is a contradiction in terms.
7. Speaking of “obvious,” I propose that the appeal to self-evidentiality should not only be listed as an informal logical fallacy (appellum ad obvium) but also treated as an argument loser. (Especially if it’s defended by an ad-hominem sneer like: “If you can’t see it, it’s because you’re stupid!”) It’s tantamount to an admission that you don’t know why it’s true. You haven’t thought about it—it sounded true when somebody said it, you’ve been told it so many times that you’ve just taken its truth for granted, etc. And you don’t want to think it through just now.

Shouting Over Cognitive Dissonance

8. Having said that, it should be apparent (he grinned) that whatever else you can say about moral relativism, perspectivism, emotivism, and all that, they don’t lend themselves to consistent political positions. If morality is relative, then tolerance as a moral principle can be no better than intolerance. Likewise, with subjectivism: tolerance might be a better principle for you, but not necessarily for me. It may be better from one perspective but not from another. I may like tolerance just as I like peach preserves, but who says you have to like it, too?

(Like the Communist agitator says in the old joke: “Come the revolution, you’ll eat strawberries and cream, and you’d better like it!”)

9. Inconsistency may be one reason many rely on thought-terminating clichés as placeholders for authentic principles. One way they act is to suppress cognitive dissonance, the mental stress created by holding two or more contradictory ideas. Consider the person who scoffs at people who advocate free healthcare, “So, you think healthcare workers should go unpaid?” (a straw man if ever there was one). Yelling, “TAX IS THEFT!” prevents them from wondering if they’re demanding that police officers, firefighters, soldiers, and so forth should work for free.
10. Another reason may be that thought-terminating clichés are better suited for emotional manipulation. You can often yank a person’s chain of reasoning past twisted logic, questionable facts, and wishful thinking with rhetoric that amps up enthusiasm, fear, rage, pity, and especially self-righteousness. You can dismiss reams of careful, close reasoning with a well-chosen demon label (“woke,” “misogynist,” etc.), a popular trope, or an allusion to one of the many, many myths about the past that “everyone knows is true.” It’s easier to play armchair psychologist and divine your opponents’ real intentions than to actually examine their arguments.

Just the Moral Facts, Ma’am

11. Some people try to tell us that moral values aren’t the same as facts, that they exist in a subordinate, truth-neutral zone of “opinion.” (“That’s your opinion” is another thought-terminating cliché.) On the contrary—values play a significant role in determining what we accept as fact. Indeed, what defines “good science” or “scientific fact” for many people isn’t methodological rigor but rather moral acceptability. Even science’s most basic, fundamental assumptions go out the window if they yield “fake facts” or “hate facts.” Bad philosophy, I contend, doesn’t only drive bad science. It also drives out good science.
12. In other words, many talking heads and professional screamers are attempting to claim the moral high ground but haven’t yet begun to articulate, let alone defend, a hierarchy of values on which they could convincingly base that claim. To be fair and honest, I’m not sure I could do it, either. Real critical thinking is hard and requires epistemic humility, which is likely why “critical thinking” today is little more than contradicting other people. We scream to cover up the sound of cognitive dissonance and suppress the queasiness of uncertainty.
13. I think C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man still makes the most lucid case for moral first principles, even natural law. Then, there’s “moral foundations theory,” which looks at values as a soft-wired component of human behavior. The point is, I think we Catholics can make a better case for not only an objective physical reality but also an objective moral reality, one on which we can build a stable hierarchy of values that can appeal across cultural borders. Would it find universal agreement? Of course not. But if we require universal agreement, we won’t get anything.

Conclusion

“Conflict arises,” wrote the Jesuit philosopher Fr. James V. Schall, “when both sides of an issue realize that something basic is at stake, that our ideas do make a difference” (Catholicism and Intelligence, loc. 2997). Our ideas of right and wrong, whether we call them values or morals, are among the most basic facts of our identities. They’re intrinsically bound up with our ideas of what it means to be human and to live in community with each other. And so, we have vicious political conflicts because there are moral principles on which we can’t just “agree to disagree.”

Which, by the way, is another thought-terminating cliché.

Thank you for joining me on this meandering stroll through the Land of Moral Confusion. There’s plenty of land here that we haven’t explored, and of the ground we’ve seen, we’ve only gotten snapshot views. It deserves much greater coverage than I can give it here. But, if anything, I hope I’ve stimulated some thought, even if it’s not necessarily agreement. And I ask you to pray for all of us in the U.S.A. that we may find the epistemic and moral humility to discover an authentic, shared ethical universe.