The Moral Life
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
All of us, I suspect, have guilty pleasures. Things we love that we know we shouldn’t, but do anyhow. And it’s not necessarily something self-evidently ‘wrong’. It’s the bar of chocolate that’s not good for our waistline, or the chick lit stupid novel that absorbs a whole day. There’s reading the trashy tabloids.
A story about the rabbi, the Catholic priest and the vicar reminds us of just such delights. When asked to share their own guilty pleasures, the rabbi acknowledged ‘I love bacon. Though everyone in the temple believes that I am a righteous kosher man, I steal away and have bacon sandwiches almost every week.’ The priest shared his own indiscretion. ‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘I take delight in eating meat on Fridays during Lent. I know I shouldn’t, I know, I know, I know, but it’s too much for me to resist! If the congregation ever found out, I’d be in big trouble, too.’ The two of them then turned to the vicar. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I, too, have a guilty pleasure. I’m a terrible gossip!’
I’ve renewed an old guilty pleasure of watching ‘Judge Judy’ an American show on which a real judge hears small claims cases for the pleasure of an audience both there in the mocked up courtroom and on the telly. If you’ve not had the pleasure – or pain – Judy Sheindlin served as a judge before launching her television career. With as thick a New York accent as could be understood in most parts of the world, she metes out justice, or at least her version of it. A journalist explains why it is such an enjoyment to watch her:
Court-show viewers don't seem to want moral conundrums or technical wrinkles. They love Sheindlin's show because she offers them a fantasy of how they'd like the justice system to operate—swiftly, and without procedural mishaps or uppity lawyers. They get to see wrongdoers publicly humiliated by a strong authority figure. There is no uncertainty after Sheindlin renders her verdict and bounds off the bench, and there are certainly no lengthy appeals.
She is always very fair and doesn’t suffer fools gladly
There is rarely moral ambiguity in her presence. She knows very clearly what is right and what is wrong and makes her judgements on that basis. She lectures people on how they should live, and occasionally will seek to reconcile families that have become torn apart with a gentleness that is startling.
But step outside such a place, and the question of morals gets a lot more murky. What are the foundations upon which we make our moral decisions? What is it that shapes our choices?
In a couple of settings recently, I’ve had the opportunity to opine about making choices. The really tough ones, I have argued, aren’t the decisions between doing something good and something bad, at least not most of the time. More often, we are confronted with judging which of two goods are more important.
The leaders of this country have been going through just such deliberations over these last few weeks. Nick Clegg and his advisors have had to sort out what the benefits and possibilities there were as they considered forming a government with the two stronger parties, and all of the major players have had to decide what elements of their programmes and plans would lose out. Do we sacrifice fairness for stability? Maybe. How about financial equity for that same stability? What are the goods, and even more important, what are the values that undergird those goods that we are choosing?
I’ve been aware, too, that my somewhat blithe statement about the more weighty matter of choosing between two goods that we value misses the truth that there are very few if any moral choices that are unambiguous. It’s not as simple as declaring that I’m against nuclear annihilation – who could imagine an argument for it? It’s navigating around the vast and complex series of decisions that lead to refining uranium, the uses of nuclear power and the importance of deterrence when there are others in possession of weapons whose moral navigation differs from my own. These are complicated issues on the global scale, but we ought not kid ourselves that our own decisions are somehow simple.
Some weeks ago, I talked about the work of a psychologist Jonathan Haidt in which he and some colleagues are attempting to describe the moral foundations for most human beings. As you heard in our reading this morning, it’s becoming clear that human beings exhibit moral behaviour very early in life. In some of the studies that Paul Bloom has done, he can show that an 8 month old child will show a preference for a puppet who is being helpful rather than hindering another puppet. Very young – under 2 years old – children will reward those who do good things, and demonstrate approval of bad-doers being punished. We are hardwired, it appears, for moral life.
Haidt suggested five areas in which this seems to be the case, five fundamental or foundational categories of moral life. They are: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. The research that he and his colleagues are conducting is seeking to describe our moral life in order to build understanding between people, and, I hope, enable us to understand our own choices more readily. What’s more, I believe that reflecting upon these categories can enable us to refine our own moral sensibilities. That is, taking time to explore and understand our own preferences and commitments, and those categories on which we place lesser value we can learn to see another’s decisions more compassionately and make more nuanced decisions ourselves.
Watching the dance this past week between politicians as the government was formed, I was struck by the degree to which they played to the roles assigned in this moral grid. Haidt has argued that liberals tend to place care and fairness at the centre of their decision making, and have much less regard for matters of authority, loyalty and purity, whereas those three are more important for conservatives. It is no big leap to recognise those three in play with the BNP and the other far right parties. Duh, as the younger folks might say. As well, Nick Clegg’s talking point of fairness played true to form. David Cameron kept hammering on the point of stability and the capacity of the Tory party to provide that for Britain. In their policies, one can see clearly the importance of loyalty to this group, the national allegiance, and there are subtle threads of the value of respecting authority interwoven in their statements.
Listening to the strange conglomeration of the two parties, I noticed that Cameron’s language began to reflect a more central place for matters of fairness, and Clegg’s broadened out to include some of the value of stability. It gives me a little hope for the future to see the moral landscape of the new government at least including some values that matter to me. How it will all play out – or if it will at all play out – is yet to be seen. In the meantime, let us hope that the leaders and those who advise them will continue to weave together these differing values and work to create a system that will truly serve the people.
It is, of course, very interesting – and not unimportant – to explore and dissect the national scene, but the moral life isn’t lived on that level. What I am most interested in is how this helps us to understand our own positions and preferences, as well as helping us to understand another’s positions and preferences. While the intellectual enterprise is a step in this, what matters isn’t ever what we can say about it, but what we can do about it. The point of the exploration isn’t most importantly to express our opinions, but to act upon them, not only in electoral politics, but in the living of our lives.
And this is that tricky bit that Daniel Budbill expresses. In nearly every way you can imagine, it is the tricky bit to see the whole, the thing in itself, clearly and simply for what it is; to see the individual thing as one with everything, and then to see both the individual and the universal simultaneously. To see the moral universe acted on the world stage and to see our individual acts in our individual lives as linked one to another, and to that wider whole, well, like Budbill, I’d have to say ‘call me when you get it’.
But this is the journey we’re called to take, isn’t it? As religious people, I believe that we are called to grow in awareness of how we live and what it all means. The navigation of what is good and bad is perhaps one of the most difficult, and to seek to live the good life is one of the greatest challenges that we face in our ever more interconnected and complicated world. We are lucky to have some frameworks that help us to grow in clarity about how we best live, how we best understand our life and what we are called to do and be. We are blessed to not be in this endeavour alone, but to have each other, too, to help us along the way.
There isn’t a final end place that we will arrive and all will be clear, no matter how much we might long for the simplicity and moral clarity of that courtroom that I watch as I indulge my guilty pleasure. The world is richer in meanings and possibilities, blessed be, so we will carry on, learning again and again how to live and how to live well.