Our moral sensitivity about good versus evil on various actions didn’t come to us via tradition, revealed religion, our taste buds, the desire of our eyes, or some personal quirk, and certainly not from human instinct or matter and energy.
Moral concern, moral realism, is a transcendent “ought,” not a subjective “like” or “dislike.”
When it comes to the moral compass we are talking objective, transcendent truth. (Well, many humans are).
Other millions of modern people claim that morals, like personal preferences, are subjective, relative whether of the individual or a group or a nation.
But I wouldn’t characterize my own moral struggles of the last 67 years as battling over what I like or dislike. For instance, I like salmon, but can’t stand cow tongue (which I was required to eat as a kid growing up in Nebraska because we got over half a cow each year from our grandfather, and had to eat even the rubbery tongue and the gross tail). To each his own, when it comes to “like.”
In contrast, immoral actions (and attitudes) such as slavery, war, torture, molestation, rape, inequality, oppression, prejudice, greed, lust, promiscuity, jealousy, gossip, theft, lying, dishonesty, porn, obscenity, profanity, coveting, jealousy, selfishness, egotism, gossip, human sacrifice, cannibalism…most people will agree, (at least when these actions are done to them) that they are wrong.
In most cases of human moral choice, humans of the present generation don’t need to reinvent the moral wheel of truth. We’ve had the basics of moral realism since the some society’s early bronze age rules, and the Jewish 10 Commandments,
since Buddhism’s moral precepts, since Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13, James, and many other passages from other holy books for thousands of years!
Where is the failing then?
In the carrying out of the moral truths, in the applying of the truths we expect others to observe in how we ourselves behave.
True sometimes, our moral blindness leads us astray such as when the Christian leader Robert E. Lee, for instance, spoke of how we should love our enemies as Christ said, yet was himself largely responsible for hundreds of thousands of humans being slaughtered, and many hundreds of thousands being wounded (and by devout Christians in the North who refused to let Southerners secede)!
What was their excuse?
Lee did this in defense against the invading army, the Union forces who invaded his state, his county, his home (even stealing family treasures).
Or when Christian Americans slaughter nearly half a million human civilians and declare this justified!
Or when Christian manufacturers put Bible verses on the barrel of assault guns which are used to kill others! Or when...
Or when ‘revealed religious leaders state that they should love their enemies personally, but that they ought to hate and destroy their enemies for God and country.
Yes, there are multi millions of cases back through religious histories including creedal Christian history which show humans of good will who violated the most basic of moral laws because they did it in the name of Jesus or...
And then there plenty of modern secular leaders who claim there are no moral truths.
In contrast, there are flawed moral leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. who state moral law is transcendent (fMLK—"I’m here to say to you this morning that some things are right and some things are wrong. Yes, eternally so, absolutely so. It’s wrong to hate. Yes, That’s right. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. (Amen) It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, (That’s right) and it always will be wrong.
"(That’s right) It’s wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. (Yeah) No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it’s wrong. (Yes) It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It’s wrong in every age and it’s wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute….And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we’re revolting against the very laws of God himself. (Amen)… This universe hinges on moral foundations… God has made the universe to be based on a moral law.” from “Rediscovering Lost Values”)
How can we know--prove--for sure that some actions are inherently evil, some transcendently good?
We can’t, unfortunately. We can’t prove the truth of moral realism. We can’t know. Not in the sense of factuality such as that 1,000 plus 1,000 equals 2,000 or in the sense that we can verify that the earth is a sphere, not a flat land.
In fact, even more disconcertingly, there is some experiential evidence which seems to deny the truth of moral realism.
But (with the exception of some hard Atheists, some Augustinian-Reformed and Islamic leaders), the vast majority of humans at present do think slavery is inherently evil—that the claim and act of “owning” another human being as a tool, as an object (rather than a person with inherent worth) is very immoral.
Such an institution as slavery denies equality. But we need to keep in mind that for thousands of years equality wasn’t considered truth. Even as recently as 150 years ago famous Calvinist theologians such as R.L. Dabney wrote extensively (even after the Civil War ended!) showing that there was nothing wrong with slavery.
Furthermore, secular leaders and scientists have long held that “equality” doesn’t exist in nature, that existence is based on “survival,” this most famously stated in the theory of natural selection.
Simply observe how cats treat birds or what happens when dogs, even on leases spot each other in the street—seldom any equality. It’s usually about power, not sharing.
Even in the Jewish Bible the law emphasized that if an owner of a slave beats his slave so the slave dies a couple of days later, there is to be no punishment of the owner because the slave was his “property” Exodus 21:20-21 NAB
And the Torah emphasizes that a Hebrew slave owner has the right to pass slaves down to his kids (Leviticus 25:44-46 HCSB.
But what then?
If there is no basis for objective ethics in nature and religious books often give the wrong answers, how do we go about living morally?
We discover and moral truth in a way like a tiny coral lives atop a coral reef:-)
In this existence we billions of human primates are but small finite coral on a great barrier coral reef which holds back the onslaught of Nature’s typhoon rampages, human instinctive desires bloated by selfishness and pride.
Deism, Fundamentalism, Friends-Brethren, key Scriptural passages on moral realism in such as 1 Corinthians 13, the Sermon on the Mount, James, etc.
Of course, this coral reef perception/awareness isn’t always upward and beautiful. As cited above, spiritual blindness can mislead us such as when Christians over the centuries have slaughtered millions of other humans in the name of Jesus Christ (such as when creedal Roman Catholic Bernard of C., who was known as the speaker of love called on Catholics to slaughter in the name of Jesus and when Martin Luther called on the princes to kill, slay, and “wash their hands in the peasants’ blood.” And, when most Christian leaders burned heretics at the stake, etc.
And, currently when “born-again evangelical Christians” advocate immoral actions in the name of politics which are contrary to Jesus’ clear moral truths.
Still, over all in every generation, some humans do experience the blessed hope of moral realism and share moral good actions and oppose all the immoral and unjust actions.
Let’s take a more specific look at the issue of equality and how I ended up, a tiny living coral in the early 1950’s coming to a strong stand for equality, even though so many millions of Christians during that time actually were very against equality. And, even today in the 21st century the Russian Orthodox Church opposes human equality and justify the slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians!
It’s all about looking backward down the reef of moral realism.
Secondly, this question is one of theodicy, too.
We could ask why God didn’t supply humans with accurate moral guidance from the beginning some 200,000 years ago?
But then, God. also didn’t give us knowledge of disease and how to overcome it, and thus protect billions of humans from excruciating deaths in epidemics such as the Black Plague.
For whatever reason, God requires us human primates to seek, and study, and find solutions on our own. Moral realism is a ‘coral reef’ experience to be sought with reason, experience, intuition, and history.
Like Martin Luther King pointed out, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him.”
In the LIGHT,
Daniel Wilcox
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