On the Morality of the Moderate

Gerald H. Paske

[June 2004]

Gerald H. Paske is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Wichita State University. Over the last 32 years he has taught ethics and medical ethics. He can be contacted with your comments at gerald.paske@sbcglobal.net

1. VALUES AND THE MODERATE MAJORITY

The majority of voters are political moderates, but our influence is much less than our numbers merit. We have been badly outfoxed by the reactionary religious right who have wisely concentrated their vote within one party. Unfortunately, they are demanding and getting an ever increasing price for that vote.

In contrast, we moderates have diluted our power. We are split between the two major political parties. We are not one issue voters. We do not uniformly support the same policies. And, most importantly, we fail to understand the moral nature of the world into which we have been thrust. While all four factors contribute to our weakness, it is the latter which is most insidious.

Our culture has undergone a moral revolution The resulting morality is portrayed by the religious right as promoting sexual license, divorce, disdain for life, and abortion. So effective has been their portrayal that moderates share their fear despite the fact that what the new morality has actually done is to reduce sexual phobias, free us from tragically failed marriages, allow us to escape prolonged hospital deaths and end disastrous pregnancies. Rather than fear, moderates ought to take pride in the moral progress we have made. But we will not do so unless we gain a better understanding of why these moral changes have occurred.

Reflective people are quite aware of living in a world radically different from that of the recent past. Although we may be uncomfortable with some of those differences -- for what revolution does not have its excesses -- we would not want to go back to all of the strictures of the past. Clearly, moderates do not want to go back to the racism and sexism we recently escaped.

Society has had to change to accommodate the world into which modern technology has thrust us. But the change has been deeper than that: Society has fundamentally changed its way of making moral decisions.

The majority of us had merely adopted our morality from our culture. For those of us over fifty, the traditional morality we adopted had survived for hundreds of years for the simple reason that technological changes were few and far between. But technological change has accelerated tremendously, and with this acceleration came the need to modify some of our long established moral practices.

We had been raised to believe that God had given us a detailed set of guidelines which were sufficient to meet all moral problems. We didn't always understand the justification for the guidelines, but we believed that our ministers, priests, or rabbis were moral experts who could explain any requirements we might come to doubt. Unfortunately, when the need for a new morality arose, we found that it was the "moral experts" who were least able to adjust. Far from being able to follow the "experts," we found that we had to think for ourselves. Eventually, most "moral experts" came to agree with us, but some did not. Those who did not have united under the banner of the religious right, and they have declared a "cultural war" against the rest of us. They are convinced that moral change means moral relativism, and that if we abandon any of our traditional morals we must abandon all of them. Once we do this, they say, we will find that anything goes and everyone can do whatever he or she wants.

But this is not correct. We don't do whatever we want, and we have a morality that is more sound than that of the past. Our moral views have changed for the better, but to fully understand this, we moderates need to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of moral change.

2. MORAL CHANGE

Morality is both simple and complex. It is simple because there are only a few moral principles. It is complex, because those principles must be applied to dynamic social environments. This is true, no matter what the ultimate source of morality: God, human reason, society, or some combination thereof.

Moral requirements change as circumstances change. Some people deny this and hold that true morals are absolute and timeless. Such a view is usually based upon a belief that morals come directly from God, along with the belief that since God never changes neither do His moral requirements. But it is easy to see that this is an inadequate understanding of morality.

Take Christianity as an example. The Old Testament contains a great many moral pronouncements, among which are: "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22) and "Such slaves as you have, male or female, shall come from the nations round about you; from them may you buy slaves." (Leviticus 25:44)

Today, some Christians take Leviticus 18:22 as the binding word of God, but they ignore Leviticus 25:44. Yet, if one picks and chooses between Biblical pronouncements, one does so on the basis of one's own preferences and only misleads oneself if one believes one is really relying solely on the word of God.

Christ was a moral reformer, and what he reformed was Old Testament morality. But he did not edit Old Testament pronouncements by selecting among them, he changed the entire method of approach. Instead of presenting a list of Do's and Don'ts, he presented the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is a general principle asserting that we should do onto others as we would have others do onto us. The principle is easy to understand but difficult to correctly apply. It's correct application requires a careful use of human reason. Human reason shows that none of us wish to be slaves, and, hence, Leviticus 25:44 can be rejected. What human reason shows about homosexuality is a current matter of dispute, but that dispute cannot be honestly settled by mere appeal to Leviticus 18:22, unless one also is willing to allow slavery.

Specific moral requirements have always changed in response to relevant social changes. Historically, societies changed so slowly that moral changes took generations to occur and very few people noticed the changes. For example, Christians used to believe that putting money at interest was a sin.("You shall not charge him interest on a loan" Leviticus 25:36). It took a thousand years and many subtle evasions before money lending became acceptable and even respectable. Today, bankers are pillars of the Christian community.

Many people assume that moral change means that morality is relative and transitory, but this is a mistake. Fundamental moral principles, like the Golden Rule, do not change. What is more, such principles underlie all plausible moral systems. They are indeed timeless and universal.

What is unique in our society is the rate at which social changes occur. It is so rapid that moral changes happen within the lifetime of an individual. What we were taught as children, and, often, what we were taught as being beyond question, has had to be questioned, modified, and sometimes rejected. This is the source of our current moral turmoil. This is the source of the so-called Cultural Revolution. This is something we must come to understand.

One way to understand this is to examine some moral changes that recently have been widely accepted in our society. A good example is that we now sometimes allow people to die instead of doing all we can to keep them alive. (Next: Allowing to Die.)

3. ALLOWING TO DIE

Modern Morality recognizes what has always been true, specific moral requirements change in response to changes in the moral environment. Those who reject modern morals deny this despite the fact that even they have accepted some changes. The clearest example is the acceptance of allowing some people to die rather than always doing everything possible to maintain their lives.

This new moral development is a response to technological changes that occurred about sixty five years ago. For several thousand years, it was appropriate to always do everything possible to save every human life. There was never a question about letting nature take its course for the simple reason we could do nothing significant to prevent nature from taking its course. Nature either brought about death or allowed survival. Those who attended the dying could do little more than provide compassion and comfort care. The rest was up to nature.

Historically most terminally ill patients died quickly, but there were exceptions, the most common being when the dying process extended over weeks and months. In such cases compassion wanes, giving comfort care becomes burdensome, and the temptation to give up becomes strong. Thus it was necessary to have a very stringent moral requirement that one never give up on human life. That this should be an exceptionless requirement made sense since one could never be certain that the person really was dying.

Modern technology changed all this. The advent of respirators, kidney machines, effective antibiotics, and much more, changed the exceptional lingering death into the norm. Instead of quickly dying at home under the care of loved ones, the dying began to be "cared for" by paid strangers in an impersonal hospital setting while they underwent a prolonged dying process.

In technologically supported lingering deaths, the dying person usually has no awareness of what is occurring. They are at best semi-conscious, often unconscious and even comatose, and it can be known that they will never recover mental awareness again. They would die were it not for the machines preserving their lives.

In such cases, the family and the caring staff cannot help but wonder if there is really any point to keeping the patient alive. They cannot help but wonder whether or not they should let nature take its course.

This latter question is the crucial and modern one. It could not be asked historically because we were not capable of frustrating nature. When nature required death, death came. In artificially prolonging the dying process, we confronted an absolutely new question: Should we stop treatment and let the patient die?

The answer was forthcoming, but not until society argued and anguished over the problem. Society's answer is that in those cases in which life is at best reduced to semiconsciousness, and in which it can be known that no recovery is possible, it is morally permissible to withdraw life support equipment and allow nature to take its course. This is now accepted by all. Even those who believe morals never change.

However, during the argument over this matter, those who resisted the change made much of the claim that accepting the new morality was to open Pandora's box. Once you gave up on life, even if you gave but an inch, where would it stop? Whose life would you give up on next?

Even though the Traditionalists lost the battle, they were right to worry, for embedded in the decision to allow some to die is the deeper question of the value of human life.

4. THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE

Despite vigorous opposition, society now allows the withdrawal of life support systems from some critically ill patients. Traditionalists warned that once we gave up on even one person's life, we faced the problem of where to draw the line. Whose life would we give up on next?

The warning was insightful, but the fear that there was no answer was mistaken. Traditionalists had no answer, but those with a deeper understanding of the moral and religious issues involved found an answer.

The Tradition had no answer- History had no answer-- for the problem had not existed until recently. The Tradition found the value of human life in the possession of an immortal soul which was infinitely more precious than the body. We can lose our body and still be saved, but if we lose our soul we are truly lost. Since it is the soul which underlies the value of human life, and since every living human being has a soul, every human life must be preserved.

To the contrary, once medical technology made lingering dying processes commonplace, many of us asked whether we really wanted our lives to be preserved under these conditions. Did we really want our loved ones to suffer through our lingering dying when we were at best semiconscious and could not interact with or even be aware of them? Did we really want our children or our estates to be faced with staggering medical bills so that we could be kept in a semiconscious state for an extended period of time? What was the point? What was of value to us and to our families that could justify such a sacrifice? It surely was not the preservation of our soul, for it is immortal. It could only be the preservation of our soul in our body, but what is so important about that?

Keeping the soul in an individual's body is of value to that individual only if the body can be used to engage in activities, including mental ones, that the individual can find worthwhile. Once one is permanently incapacitated and no longer even has access to their own mind, the soul might as well leave the body, for the soul no longer can have any use for it.

The upshot of this insight was to recognize that the value of human life lies in having the capacity for engaging with the world in ways that we find worthwhile. Once this capacity is gone, life in this world has no meaning. Once this capacity is gone, we might as well be dead.

Today the vast majority of us have reached this conclusion. We do not want to be kept alive when we can no longer either physically or mentally engage with the world. We certainly do not want our loved ones to agonize through our long dying process once we have lost this capacity. We would rather choose death, and we insist that we have the right to do so. We insist on the right to die.

Although society has now settled on the right to die, as is true of all innovations, there are unforeseen consequences. One has to do with humanity's place in the universe, a question which still needs to be worked out.

The new morality has generated many similar questions, but what is important is that these questions cannot be answered by reference to the past, for they did not and could not arise in the past. Those who believe that the answers are already there- in the Bible or the Koran- want to use those sources to impose their views on the rest of us. They fear to have their traditions questioned and they seek to use the law, Constitutional Amendments, or force to protect their beliefs. They lack the courage to be truly moral.

5. THE COURAGE TO BE MORAL

Moral change is a necessary fact of modern life. Modern technology has forced us to rethink our views about the right to die, birth control, sexual freedom, sexual orientation, divorce, abortion, and family values. Thinking through these issues has been a fearsome and painful process, and few of us are totally comfortable with all the changes society has accepted.

These changes have been worrisome, and they have been so brilliantly opposed by the propaganda of the Religious Right that many of us forget that in every area -- as in the case of the Right to Die -- modern morality is an improvement over the tradition.

There are those who are so embedded in the tradition that they refuse to recognize this. They claim that accepting moral change means replacing an absolute morality with a relative one, and that doing so entails a moral collapse. But this is not true. What is true is that allowing moral change does involve a risk.

But all change- indeed, all action- has its risk. Risk is a fact of life and we must not let the fear of risk paralyze us. Often we must -- with due caution -- take a risk. In the modern world, this means we have to have the courage to be truly moral.

It does take courage to be moral. It does take courage, as well as compassion, knowledge, and understanding to be able to allow a loved one to die. It is much easier to believe that we merely need to follow God's instructions, even if doing so means we allow the unnecessary suffering of lingering deaths to continue.

Historically, the moral orientation of the vast majority of people was to assume that there was a detailed list of moral prescriptions underwritten by God. On that list, of course, was the prescription that one should always do everything possible to save every human life.

The rejection of that prescription entailed the rejection of the validity of such a list. For Christians, this means abandoning the Old Testament as a detailed moral guide and taking Christ seriously when He said "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.." (Matthew: 7:12)

This Golden Rule is fearsome indeed, for it moves the responsibility for determining what one ought to do from God to we poor humans. We, and not God, are responsible for discovering what we should do. We can no longer use God as an excuse.

It is clear that religious fanatics, such as the various Christian Inquisitors and the Muslim Taliban, have gone badly astray. It is not so clear, but it is equally true, that those who rely on a religious snippet approach to moral issues have also gone astray. To be truly moral, whatever ones religious orientation, one must have the courage to take responsibility upon one's self for what one does.

The moral revolution has presented society with a huge number of new moral problems. These problems are so fundamental that they have spilled over into the political realm, for the problems we face are political as well as moral. Moral issues such as abortion, birth control, sexual freedom, sexual orientation, divorce, and family values clearly have their political side, as well as being both moral and highly emotional. But these issues have been presented in a new form generated by modern technology. These modern problems cannot be answered by reference to the past.

Political Moderates need to take morality seriously and they need to recognize that morality has become a serious political issue. We need to understand moral change so we can free ourselves from the propaganda of the Religious Right.