Long before I left high school, I learned there was more than one kind of wrong. There were things that were illegal, that broke actual laws, like running stop signs and robbing banks. Less familiar to society at large, there were things I did that embarrassed my mother, an extensive list that included tucking my Levi’s into knee-high leather boots in 1968.
Somewhere in the middle were things that weren’t illegal but that my father wouldn’t do. For example, he and his fellow financial planners sometimes made evening appointments in prospective clients’ homes. He’d heard that one colleague, after failing to make a sale, had stopped on his way out the door and spoken to the visibly pregnant wife’s abdomen. “Sorry, kid,” he said to her belly. “I tried.”
My father told me he considered that behavior unethical, which, in sixth grade, I took to mean wrong but not illegal. This third uncharted moral expanse grew vaster and more complicated as I grew older. It led me to the question that occurs to most of us eventually. What makes something right or wrong besides the fact that a judge or your parents say so?
The Boy Scouts had given me one code to live by. The Scout law was a list of 12 character virtues, from trustworthy and loyal to clean and reverent.
Most people do prize loyalty. It’s the hallmark of the Marine Corps, King Lear’s daughter, Cordelia; and Buck in “The Call of the Wild.” But it was also Hitler’s nickname for Heinrich Himmler, der treue Heinrich. Surely, loyalty to Hitler can’t be virtuous. In the same way, if you tell me in confidence that you’re planning to betray someone, even kill him, and I keep your secret, is my trustworthiness morally right?
Some of us hearken to a religious text like the Bible as a source of moral authority, but even a divinely inspired exposition of good and evil still needs to be fathomed and applied. Solomon’s proverbs, for instance, instruct us, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly,” but then in the following verse to, “Answer a fool according to his folly.” My point here isn’t to discredit or defend the Bible. Its author was clearly wise enough to spot that seeming contradiction, which means it must have been intentional. My point is that, like life itself, moral choices demand reflection and wisdom, regardless of who your teacher is.
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality and the nature of right and wrong. It’s certainly possible to make wise moral choices without ever reading a book, but the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment, the era that included our Revolution, approached moral choices from a variety of perspectives that can give us something to think about.
Englishman Jeremy Bentham advanced a principle he called utilitarianism. He believed that morality consisted of taking whatever action resulted in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He was almost mathematical in his methodology. Simply put, if you’re given the choice of saving the lives of 10 strangers about whom you know nothing, or saving the life of one stranger about whom you know nothing, and you can’t possibly save both groups, the moral choice is to save the larger group.
Naturally, moral choices can get a lot more complicated. So can utilitarianism.
German professor Immanuel Kant disagreed with Bentham in very long, complex sentences. He said morality was based on obedience to what he called “categorical imperatives,” unconditional moral laws, discoverable through reason, that everyone has a duty to obey.
Since categorical imperatives are universal, meaning they apply to everyone, any moral right or power I give myself I must also give everyone else. I can claim the moral right to steal, for example, only if I treat “It’s OK to steal” as a categorical imperative, which would mean living in a world where everyone steals all the time.
If everyone stole whenever they wanted, life would be chaotic and unsafe because we’d constantly be stealing from each other and then stealing our stuff back from each other. “It’s OK to steal” can’t be a categorical imperative because it wouldn’t work as a universal moral law, which is why it can’t be morally right for me to do it.
In the same way, I can claim the moral right to lie only if I’m willing to live in a world where everyone lies all the time. Since that would make the truth unknowable, destroy trust, and again plunge us into chaos, since it wouldn’t work if everyone did it, it can’t be morally right for anyone to do it. That’s how we can know that “You should never lie” is the categorical imperative we have a duty to obey.
This can be heady stuff. I once spent half an hour reading and rereading one Immanuel Kant sentence. I haven’t begun to understand a fraction of what guys like Bentham and Kant thought and wrote about, and I don’t agree with some of what I do understand.
I present it to you for two reasons.
First, next time I’m going to tell you the story of ethics in my classroom, and I’ve told my eighth-graders some of what I’ve told you here.
Second, I want to offer you a glimpse of the exertion that can go into making a moral decision. It isn’t like choosing an ice cream flavor. It requires thought, hard thought and the patient, diligent exercise of reason.
And ours is a harrowing age when we could dearly use all the patience and reason we can muster.
Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.
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