A paper for the European Bioethics Network, 2006

The Current Disappearance of Moral Knowledge

^{A paper presented to the European Bioethics Network at the European Leadership Forum hosted in Eger, Hungary. 
May 20-25, 2006.}

Currently in Western Societies there is no longer a recognized body of moral knowledge, knowledge of Good and Evil and right and wrong, available to official bodies or individuals, on the basis of which decisions can be reached about what it is morally good or right to do.

This does not mean that no such knowledge exists, but it does mean that it is not available, and, especially, that it is not sponsored and inculcated by the teaching institutions of society.

Of course moral feelings, attitudes, and possibly even beliefs still exist, and form a massive part of life, which people violently disagree over.  The emergence of “political correctness” in this context.  Right and wrong, good and bad become political issues, and the state and the courts are invoked to ‘settle’ them.

Two important changes account for much of this: (1) The universities, replacing “the church,” became the cultural authority—the source of all that counts as knowledge, and (2) The universities progressively redefine “knowledge” in such a way that, first theology, and then ethics, no longer count as areas in which knowledge is possible.  Indispensable reading on how this happened is Julie Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University.  She shows how it was decided by those in charge, university Presidents and leaders, that “Religion had no relationship to the production of knowledge or the establishment of truth,” and that “The church…was dependent on the university for the content of its ideas, not the other way around.” (p. 173)  The church backed away from responsibility for knowledge and allow secularism to define what counts as knowledge.

Knowledge is crucial to human life because it guarantees truth and correct interaction with reality, and it is a necessary condition of the right to determine policy, to govern, and to act.

Ethics had been, loosely speaking, based upon religion, and could not sustain itself as a body of established knowledge once theology was removed from the cognitive side of university life.  Religion then becomes a field in the social sciences, where intellectual curiosity, not normative instructions about life, prevailed. Normative teaching of ethics finds no home in “course content.”

A brief survey of ethical theory, from a hopeful science (at the beginning of the 1900’s) to non-cognitivism ( 20’s to the 50’s) to constructionism/contractarianism (50’s to the 90’s and today).

In the course of the last half of the 20th Century, “social” ethics becomes the sole preoccupation and personal ethics disappears.  There is no knowledge of the self, the person, the individual heart and mind, which has always been the center of ethical analysis from Plato on.  That is, no knowledge acceptable as such to the prevailing institutional forces.  But it was thought what was going on in the public domain could serve as a basis for normative teaching.  This hope has proved vain.

“Social ethics” without personal virtue simply lacks the force of traditional morality of the heart and soul.  It does not have the heart-felt “respect” of traditional moral values, and therefore it cannot, as a matter of fact, form the character that must underlie routine conformity to moral standards that are, still, recognized as fundamental to a good life.

Hence what we call “professional” ethics has lost all grip on what it is to be a good person, traditionally associated with professional life (clergy, medicine, law), and concentrates on how to stay out of trouble with clients, the law, and fellow professionals.  Professional ethics standardly lays down rules of behavior, which are indeed useful for important purposes.  But conforming to those rules never guarantees that one is living for the good of the world they serve, and enterprising and intelligent people can usually find a way to satisfy the rules and yet act in obviously unethical ways.  That is always the  problem with legalism.  Still, we do need rules, and they can be used in tandem with the moral intention to serve the good, thought they cannot replace it.

Bioethics has come into prominence because the range of human choice has greatly expanded in recent decades. Some issues, such as euthanasia, are old ones, but of far greater extent because of greater capacity to keep people alive or to “help” them die.  Cloning, stem cell research, and similar issues are, by contrast, simply new areas of human choice where the question of “serving the good” has to be defined and decided anew.  If there is no basis for decisions that derive from knowledge of moral values, then these decisions will be based upon who can get their way, as decided by the courts or other governmental authority. And many will say that this is the way it should be in an egalitarian and democratic society.  (Of course there will always be some unclear cases where courts must decide.)  But democratic decisions reached though “due” legal processes are not necessarily the same as what is morally right.  That is something we should have learned by now.

The highest moral outlook that has ever come forward among humanity is the teaching of Jesus Christ about who the good person is and what is right.  This is essentially the ethic of love, will to the good of others.  It is generally recognized in similar form and independently by all the great cultural traditions.  Socrates said in his simple but penetrating way: “The good do their neighbors good and the bad do them evil.”  It is not a secret, by any means, though it requires wisdom in application and the elaboration of evidence.  When it comes to doing it, living it, there is required resources available to the ordinary person, and it is doubtful that humanism or religious traditions other than the Christian.  That something that is open to fair discussion and must be pursued.

For the disciple of Jesus in professional fields, the way forward is simply to understand the ethic of Jesus in its historical substance and contemporary application as a field of knowledge of what is good and right, and put it into practice, taking opportunities to teach it as they arise.  It will not automatically solve all concrete problems or remove all tragedies from life.  But it will provide a fairly precise framework for living a life of a high moral quality that speaks for itself.  It guides us into a life of good moral character even in cases where we don’t know what to do.