A Liberal Gift to Parents
providing a secular ‘higher authority’ for teaching right and wrong
There are people who argue that religion is necessary for morality, to be able to know right from wrong. There are people who insist that religion is not necessary to be able to know right from wrong.
This matter is neither niggling nor nebulous. The well-being of society itself is at stake. For parents, their most important task is to let loose into society reasonably good human beings, people who know right from wrong and will opt for the latter most of the time — and all of the time when it comes to acts such as fraud and robbery and murder and rape.
Yes, parents who are not religious can manage that, but parents who have based their child-rearing on sacral ground have (had) a huge advantage. They can refer to a ‘higher authority’ in the form of a transcendent Being — or at least a form of being that is transcendent. It is that claim of transcendence, being beyond temporal existence, that puts that authority on a higher plane. A lack of a higher authority to which to appeal does make the task of raising decent human beings way more difficult.
Such authority has not existed for any secular claim regarding right and wrong — in the form of ‘ethical/just’ or ‘unethical/unjust’. Sure, people can refer to this or that philosopher or other famous thinker, but in the end those are just people who have expressed their personal conclusions about the matter of right and wrong. Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel did (in different ways) make appeals to a secular yet transcendent (one way or another) plane. Others, like John Locke and the utilitarians, sought to locate justice more temporally. In the end, though, all those approaches to right/ethics/justice are determined by beliefs their authors happen to hold that are secular as opposed to sacral. All such conclusions can be undercut with a different one from some other ‘authority’ with different beliefs. Even if those differences are slight, the fact that the conclusions are different — even if only in degree — diminishes the authority of any of them.
Of course, conflict is apparent in varying sacral approaches to morality, but for sacral approaches to right/ethics/justice — as part of a broader morality — they are held to be universal because of their claim to ‘truth’ — or Truth — whereas for secular approaches to right/ethics/justice as an end in itself, universality is a necessary condition for their validity: without universality they are reduced to mere opinion, however deeply informed or intelligently presented. That sustains a practical, if intellectually suspect advantage for parents favoring a sacral approach to right/ethical/just conduct.
I have never been a parent. (For that matter, the question of whether to have children never entered my mind.) Still, I have had plenty of friends who did have children. One thing I learned is that human children seem to be born with an innate understanding that injustice is arbitrariness. They aren’t able to know what justice is exactly, but they have no doubt whatsoever that arbitrary actions are unjust — at least, when they are on the receiving end of them.
In that they are in agreement with Locke. He was an English philosopher who lived in the 1600’s. He famously defined injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will” of any other person(s). I have read a boatload of philosophy on the subject of justice, and I have never seen anything from anyone who even thought about refuting that definition from Locke.
One concept “arbitrary” conveys is ‘not taking the other(s) into account’, but acting with disregard for their person(s) and interests. Of course, parents, in dictating to their children concerning right and wrong, are taking them into account: they have their children’s best interests at heart.
Also contained in “arbitrary” is ‘without proper authority’. That is where parents who can refer to some higher authority have a massive advantage. It is a ready response to close the door on the endless labyrinth lurking in that dreaded, single-word question, “Why?”
The lack of a higher authority to which to appeal to dissipate the taint of arbitrariness creates a problem that even Superparent, as depicted (in the U.S.) in T.V. shows from Father Knows Best to The Bill Cosby Show and books/movies like To Kill A Mockingbird, has had difficulty overcoming. It is revealed every time a parent is reduced to, ‘because I say so’.
A secular society can provide parents with a higher authority to which to appeal. One weakness of Liberal society, to the extent that it is fundamentally secular, has been that no such source has existed, at least not in an easy-to-understand, encapsulated form t parent can readily dispense. Rather, Liberal societies have promulgated a complex arrangement of rights and laws to govern people’s interactions with one a another. For the good it does parents, the whole of it might as well be written in Latin. Any Liberal society that could formulate in a few words right/just actions where other people are concerned from wrong/unjust actions would be doing its parents an incomparable favor.
There is a way.
We can go back to Locke to get there. He was the original Liberal, positing that equality and liberty are the ‘twin pillars of justice’ for a just society.
Locke went from his definition of injustice to the idea that justice must be liberty. In a way, that makes sense: if the opposite of injustice is justice and the opposite of being subject to the arbitrary will(s) of any other(s) is liberty, then justice must be liberty. Right?
Not so fast, Johnny: for justice, there is something more immediate than liberty contained in that argument. If injustice is — one more time — being subject to the arbitrary will(s) of any other(s), then what justice requires of us most immediately is that we refrain from subjecting any other(s) to our own arbitrary wills. That is a form of mutual respect. Even I can easily see how mutual respect in that form would maximize liberty as far as relations among individuals would be concerned. [Why it came down to me, of all people, all these years later, to see that is one of the great mysteries ever.]
All of this is developed more laboriously in “Shoring the Foundation of Liberal Society [1 of 3]*,” but here we can cut to the chase. What must be respected is people’s given capacity to choose for themselves. That follows from the observation that human beings have no choice but to effect choices (i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). At bottom, that means no co-opting or otherwise preempting the capacity to choose of any other person(s) in effecting any choice. That comes down to a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.) in effecting any choice. Anyone refraining from any such conduct in effecting any choice is being just — right — enough.
Any Liberal society could formally recognize respecting the capacity of other people to choose in effecting any choice as the ethic of justice, and those enumerated prohibitions as the exemplars of the minimum standard of conduct for people in society. The necessary authority comes, not from any belief any person(s) might happen to hold, but from the obvious commonality of the observation within temporal existence from which that ethic follows: no one can deny its validity. Recognizing the ethic that follows from that observation as the standard of conduct within society would make the lives of the parents in that society infinitely easier.
______________
*here in Medium, but like everything I publish here, not behind the paywall (given the pittance I would expect to earn from my words)