Sorry, but I'm in a philosophical mode at the moment. I blame my e-pal Malcolm Pollack for starting me off this morning with an irritating conundrum concerning numbers - irritating because so many philosophical problems end up rather like driving round and round a roundabout ad infinitum! However, it is moral philosophy I wish to ponder this morning. It has been worrying away at the back of what passes for my mind for some time now and an article in Commentary by Peter Wehner, in which he draws from another article in the NYT by Peter Brooks, has brought it back again. This particular conundrum is best summed up in my title to this post 'Telling right from wrong'.
According to Brooks:
During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.
Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.
It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
This study confirms with depressing accuracy that whilst notions of 'right' and 'wrong' still exist people, and especially young people, are hopelessly inadequate when it comes to thinking their way through to some conclusions. Incoherent, when they are not actually silent, when faced with moral dilemmas, almost to a man and a woman they fall back on - feelings! As Brooks explains:
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
Well, the milk was well and truly spilled years ago and a whole new debate can be 'enjoyed' in deciding exactly who the villain was who began it all - Darwin, Nietsche, Ibsen, Marx . . . you choose! In the meantime, we must all come to terms with the fact that, like Monty Python's massed crowd, "We're all individuals" now. And so the question, if I may indulge in some cod-Latin in order to add a spurious veneer of learning to this post, ' qui iudicet?' (who decides?) is now of some importance. To give but one very recent example from these 'distinguished' columns, yesterday I told the story of a young woman who murdered her baby, lied to the police and then attempted to frame an inncocent man. I wrote of her in disparaging terms and was instantly reprimanded by one of my e-pal commenters for lack of charity. Or, if you prefer a more social example closer to home, there was the recent sight and sound of British youth indulging in pillage and murder on our streets followed by a chorus of relative 'moralists' insisting that they were simply misunderstood and lacked love!
So the question looms, like the famous elephant in the living-room, how and who decides what is moral and what is immoral? The youngsters who were interviewed, being intellectually crippled by an utterly useless education, were unable to use any criteria to decide other than - feelings!
Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”
Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”
I will now indulge myself with a couple of trite clichés: 'nature abhors a vacuum' and 'the devil makes work for idle hands - and minds'! By which I mean to indicate that a lack of moral rules will quickly be filled by evil under the guise of being the 'New Morals' under which babies will be murdered with impunity because it 'feels' right at the time.
So, what is to be done? Ah, well, that's the problem, you see, and because it's a philosophical problem there probably isn't an answer!
Comments