Christian Democrats in the United States

Monday, July 27, 2009 3:12 PM

does morality reflect an objective truth?

American pragmatism says that because morality is necessary, to ensure the continued survival of the people and human communities in general, therefore morality exists objectively. Nihilist, post-modern interpretations of consciousness would have one believe that because we all see a different perspective of a thing, and some are blind or shut their eyes, therefore the thing does not exist. This is as clearly rubbish as if we were to stand in a room looking at a sculpture and we say that because we see different sides, or because some are looking at the wall or out the window, therefore the sculpture and the room and each other do not exist. Or, that when we break different pieces of the bread of life, because each piece is different and we cannot reassemble the loaf, therefore existence never was, and we are dead. Get over it! We've got too many real and immediate problems facing us to dwell on metaphysical paradoxes of knowledge, too many mouths to feed to listen to that kind of whispering that urges us to abandon Eden and swallow destruction.

We may not always be sure of the specifics, which is why law is difficult, and cannot be easily answered by a dictator or king, or by some select few who can continue perpetrating unjust laws without the approval of the people governed. Laws may drift from time to time out of sync with morality because the social mechanism of law tends to create greater division in the people. That is why the founders established a system which allows us to change the law, and which protects us from bullying by those who stand behind an official stamp or rule and use it to oppress the people and split those divisions further, as if a law were a shield from a greater universal judgment.

Most non-suicidal, emotionally integrated people naturally seek that greater universal fairness, which could be God's, or could merely be said to be our imagined collective ideal, something we cannot quite grasp but nonetheless strive for, looking ahead through moral darkness toward a light, a thought, that we can never quite put into words. One could say that is God's, and we are a unique creature in that we look toward it, even if we never reach the end of the way. Along the way we are offered the chance to turn back, to shut our eyes, to forget our sorrow and let go to blind rage, but it turns out most healthy people do not want that, even those who have many good reasons to be angry. We still naturally try to "do the right thing" in our lives, as best as we can.

In law as in theoretical ethics, one attempt to condense the "right thing" into a rule set involves the abstraction of principles from the body of decisions that constitute law. Then these principles are applied to create rules of behavior which we say are justifiably enforced on those who break them. Politically, other rules can sneak in, which are unfair and give some an unfair advantage over others, but that is the reason why law should be periodically refashioned to conform with how we understand our principles. But ultimately, we can only justify the ones that do not conflict with the principles that we can abstract from the body of law as a whole, the evolved mental construction of decisions that we and our ancestors have made for the common welfare of human society.

As an example of this let's look at a petty matter, I got a ticket for having dogs off leash in a public park. People let their dogs off leash there frequently, though the sign is clear and I have no problem with getting the ticket and paying the fine. The officer said they'd gotten a lot of complaints about dog poop. I always pick up poop, I often pick up other dogs' poop too because I enjoy having a clean public park. But several months later, chance gave me the opportunity to find out who complained: the owner of the condo complex next to the park. I told him, "the leash doesn't pick up the poop." He said, "you're right, the owner picks it up." That's an example of how a well-intended law is mis-used for another purpose. The owner wanted retribution against a class associated by a visual feature, dog owners who let dogs off leashes, instead of justice for a specific offensive act, dog owners who do not pick up their poop. That fits the textbook definition of fascism and is, unfortunately, how most wealthy people like this man think about law. That's how it sneaks up on us. Increased fines and enforcement of poop littering would solve the residents' legitimate complaints, but instead the park rangers were using their resources to enforce the wrong law on the wrong people.

Or, let's take a recent example in the media, the arrest of Henry Louis Gates for being angry that an officer accused him of breaking into his own home and then would not show his badge, because the officer respected Gates less than he would have respected a white man his age in the same neighborhood. The police consider the officer justified no matter what happened, expressing their full support regardless of the facts. You or I or anyone else would be angry in the same circumstances, yet the police feel they are beyond the reach of the principles behind the laws they purport to enforce fairly. The real tragedy is that the neighbor who called 911 does not know her neighbor well enough to recognize him by sight, did not know him well enough to call his home to check first, and is so frightened by our cultural associations of minorities and criminals that she felt she could not investigate personally before escalating with the police. But the cop vindictively punished Gates for being personally offensive. Of course cops should second-guess themselves and cops are obligated to show a badge when asked. Any reasonable person would be steamed in that situation and it was vindictive to arrest Gates for disorderly conduct. The cop has more power - power comes with responsibility. Cops can't arbitrarily punish people they don't like, or people will realize their power of numbers, revolt, and a much worse chaos will destroy everything that we've worked so hard to achieve. If Gates had struck the officer, arrest him - but he was just speaking his mind from his own front door. The officer arrested him because the officer didn't like Gates' words.

Another example is the "Myspace Suicide" of Megan Meier, an unstable teenage girl who was driven to kill herself by the mother of a rumor-spreading teenage rival, and the mother's assistant in her business. The assistant was the last one to chat to girl, fraudulently pretending to be a boy, and read the girl's message that she was considering suicide, but pressed on with the emotional abuse. Megan Meier was not in control of her actions and an adult pulled the "trigger" of the chatroom, driving her to death with malice aforethought. But the spotlight-seeking prosecutor gave the assistant immunity and tried the mother of the rival for computer fraud, and that guilty verdict was thrown out. It makes no sense. Prosecute the actual crime? It's not in the interests of the people for the state to grant immunity to someone a jury might judge to be a murderer, and instead go after a lesser crime seen to have a greater media value. We have lost track of what our words mean, and of what meaning itself is and how important it is to our well-being as a species to keep our sights set on the truth that our hearts know is out there.

Principles often conflict, and those who involve themselves in the production and enforcement of rules find themselves mired in difficult decisions. But these abstractions of thought that jurists call principles are themselves not the universal judgment that all men seek to appeal to, in whatever form that manifests itself in their minds. For all we know, that elusive ideal may be only a structural property of geometry, or it may be the Lord's rule set down for unintelligible reasons, or it may be the conclusion the Lord reached after an eternity of patient reflection, and thus we would too, if we lived that long. It is the endpoint of the graph, the limit at the reach of infinity, but we can nonetheless say that it is there, and its existence affects our lives.

No one can fully articulate those princples, ever, because they are mental abstractions from a large body of decisions and experiences, both legal and personal. Anyone who thinks the process has finished, that law is an inflexible, ultimate authority, has lost sight of the reality of how our minds work. Whether you think those minds are a cosmic accident or not doesn't matter, the facts of human nature are similar in all of us.

In the patterns of thought that jurists and ethical theorists go through when formulating these general principles, in terms of which laws are or ought to be written, we find the thinkers considered fair by history apply only one simple rule: consider everyone equally deserving of love, of happiness, of the abstract ideal that we cannot fully define but see as a real thing nonetheless. It's from the basic golden rule that all the other principles progress, on which the rules we accept for our lives ought to be based. Further attempts to regress the logic only arrive at a dimensional shift, to art, to music, to spirit: the connection to all in the universe that we sense but cannot explain. We may never find love, happiness, or the ideal justice, but if we do not pursue them, then we are as good as dead anyway. There may be no objective, codified, universal morality, but there is something real in the reason why we invent those things.

So there's no way to say objectively that every human being deserves to participate in democratic law because of an objective principle, other than mechanical advantages dealing with social problems effectively with large populations. However, we have abundant reason to say that every human being deserves to participate in democratic law because then democratic law would be better, and we would be one step further down the infinite road to happiness. It seems obvious to me, I don't know about you.

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