Description, Ideas, Concepts and Language of Morality

 We all know a fair bit about morality so we should feel reasonably comfortable with the
subject. It is not as if we were heading into unknown territory. We shall try to isolate the
word 'morality' in general, from 'Christian morality' in particular and try to reflect on what
we mean by it.

 Why be moral?

Generally, we human beings feel the call to be moral - fair, just, caring, unselfish, forgiving
etc. That is why we make distinctions between acts which we call ‘right’ or ‘good’ and the
opposite which we call ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’. In other words, we are make judgement about
what is good and what is bad.

Judgement about Good and Bad Activity

 When we use words like right, wrong, good, bad, duty, obligation, ought, praise and blame,
what do we actually mean by them?

 How do we make judgement that something or an act or behaviour is good or bad, right or
wrong?

 If you consider an act or behaviour wrong or bad, and I consider the same act or behaviour
right or good, is there anything wrong with that?

 Is it not perfectly alright for you to like one thing and for me to like another?

 What criteria do we base our judgement on?

 Where and how do we get those criteria?

 What is the authority behind these criteria? etc.

Judgement about good and bad activities entails two prepositions:

• That we label certain kinds of activity as right or good and wrong or bad.

• That we know that we ought to do what is right/good and avoid what is wrong/bad.

This means that deep within us, there is experience of the sense that by law or
obligation, we are obliged to act in a certain way, to pursue a value that is worth
pursuing in other to make life flourishing; and avoid ones that do hinder life
flourishing.

1
 In asking these questions, we are not prepare to say that in making these judgements and
statements we are merely expressing a subjective view of desirable human behaviour and
that it is perfectly fine for another to hold and act on the opposite point of view.

 We believe that there is objectivity about our statements, for example, 'torture is wrong' or
‘killing is bad’. If we hold this position we do not regard others as rationally justified in
holding the opposite: we do not mean that torture or killing is wrong for us but may be
right for other people.

 When we ask these questions or make these judgments, they help us to demarcate between
‘value language’ and ‘fact language’

Examples of fact-language questions:

 Is it true that Peter killed John?
 How did he kill him?

Examples of value-language questions:

 Why did he kill him?
 Has he the right to take someone’s life?

The insight of fact-language and value-language questions help give insight to judge
human act, behaviour or activity morally against the background of insights into values of
foundation moral judgement.

Such judgments or statements are made in relation to, for example, respect for self and
others, concern for human flourishing, a vision of a good society and a recognition that
there is a kind of life that fits our rational nature.

 In all cultures, in all times men and women have recognised this level of judgement and
assessment. They may differ about what is right and wrong, but they have no doubt that
some kinds of act, behaviour and activity are right and some are wrong.

 When we say that behaviour is immoral we recognise that it is to be avoided. When we

acknowledge that a course of action is right we mean that it is commendable, that its
pursuit by ourselves or others is worthy of praise: we recognise some kind of call to lib in
that way (Macnamara, 1988, p. 7).

 In this sense, therefore, we can say that morality is not a series of unexplained and arbitrary
commands and prohibitions coming from above. It arises rather as the human community's
awareness of the claims and demands of interrelatedness.

2
 So, all of morality in the end is about this. It is the search for the acts, attitudes, dimensions
- and more fundamentally perhaps the virtues and institutions - that make for successful
being with others (Macnamara, 1988).

 This means that there is something prescriptive in our understanding of morality that is
some sense of obligation or claim on us. Whether we follow what we know to be the
moral or not, is another matter altogether.

A Sense of Obligation or Claim

 Why do we have to do what is ‘right’ and avoid what is ‘wrong’?

 Why do we have to do what sometimes we don't want to do, but have to do?

 Where is this prescriptive idea coming from?

 Who place this sense of obligation and claim on us?

Christians

 Some Christians collapse the whole morality into religion. They operate with the ideal that
it was God who gave us our moral rules. And since morality has come from God, who is
creator and Lord of all things, they have clear notion of moral obligation: God has set out
the way of life which we must follow; he has ordered us to obey it; he will reward us with
heaven if we do so and punish us in hell if we do not (Macnamara, 1988, p. 14).

 Some Christians who hold this view would say that the Decalogue (Ten Commandments)
is the bottom rock of morality – that God has decided in the Decalogue what is right and
wrong.

 Others have some sense that the right/wrong distinction is independent of God and
somehow rooted in the natures of things: that God has given directives about morality, but
only to confirm and clarify matters.

 Still others, God is the force of morality and of obligation, but human beings are left by
God to work out the details of right and wrong.

 However, these different views maintain that God is the source of moral obligation and
claim.

 For Christians, therefore, morality and religion cannot be separated.

3
But the question is: What about those who do not believe in God and who are not
Christians?

 Macnamara (1988, p. 15) argues, that there are many who are entirely convinced of the
validity of the distinction of right and wrong and who are deeply conscious of the need to
abide by it but who do not believe in God.

 Not only do some of unbelievers live well but some of the most important movements for
moral progress have been initiated and inspired by those who were not Christian or were
even anti-Christians.
Morality as a Human Institution and Autonomous

 Unbelievers who do not believe in God and who are also not Christians would argue that
morality is a human institution, something that arises spontaneously out of our human
situation.

 It is a fact of life that as human beings become aware of life together in community certain
basic directions of action suggest themselves – with regard to the meaning and dignity of
the individual, to human welfare, to fairness and impartiality, to the creation of a just
society (Macnamara, 1988, p. 15).

 We come to realise that being true to ourselves as persons involves us in response to such
considerations, that our selfhood becomes possible in our relation with others. This
recognition of the inescapable claim of such values as truth, life, justice, equality and
fraternity has been one of the greatest and most precious insights of the human spirit (p.
16).

 One does not need to know God before becoming aware of moral distinctions or moral
demands: morality does not need religion.

 It is true that a religious tradition, like any other group, may have arrived at certain
conclusions about how one is to be moral, may give support to the whole enterprise of
morality, may have its own understanding of the ultimate significance of it; but that does
not mean morality comes from religion.

 If religion is to be abandoned, humanity still has to deal with the issue of morality unless
been human is also to be abandoned.

 Therefore, it is not Christianity that has made morality, not the Church, and not even God.
It is more fundamental, more basically human than that.

Unbelievers

4
 If there were no God, there would be no morality because human beings would not have
existed in the first place. In other words, it is God who created human beings and it is by
their existence that morality exists.

 That is true to some extent. But God is not the author of the principles of morality.
Morality is a human thing. What God ask of us is that we listen to ourselves, listen to the
moral call within us.

 If human beings live well, it is because they believe in the value and dignity of the other
and not simply because someone has told them to do so or because they hope for any
reward.

 Christians practice morality because their God has promise them heaven if they do so or
punish them with hell if they do not practice it. Christians are not really interested in
morality but only in themselves – in saving their souls

 But morality makes its own demands: it appeals to us to recognise that there is a truth for
doing, that there is a humanising way of living together, that there is a form of genuine
society to be created.

 To collapse morality into religion, to attribute its genesis to a decree of God is to make a
true appreciation of it difficult. If someone is to believe that morality has only to do with
being a Christian or that it is something that one accepts if one wishes to ensure future
happiness, then it has been devalued (Macnamara, 1988, pp. 17-18).

 Morality therefore is independent of the Churches. It is a human experience and institution

which Churches must rather acknowledge. It may be important to the religious life of the
Churches, but not to everyone.

 They may think they are good at it or know a lot about it or protect it. They may demand it
from their members. But they do not have monopoly of it. They do not make morality and
cannot in any sense make things right or wrong.