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Tredtwo-Salcedo
A Framework for Moral Reasoning
by Kenneth W. Thompson
It would be a shame to die without winning some victory for humanity. (Horace Mann)
I would not judge a man by the presuppositions of his life but by the fruits of his life.
(Reinhold Niebuhr)
God maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just
and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)
No question assumes greater moment in these days of our years than that of right and
wrong. But what is needed and lacking is a framework for moral reasoning. In contrast
with peoples and nations of earlier stages in history, we show less zeal in our search for
a framework. The need is less to find early agreement than to fence in the problem. In
the words of James T. Burtchaell, the provost of Notre Dame: "In these matters . . . we
have no satisfying consensus not because we wrangle over them too much but because
we wrangle not enough." The one art most needful of restoration is the ancient art of
moral reasoning, of wrangling not about personalities or policies but about the moral
propositions and values underlying them.
No Simple Signs
The three quotations cited above drive anyone concerned with the question of right and
wrong immediately to the heart of the moral problem. The first by implication asks and
answers the question "What is the purpose of life?" by saying that it is to serve
humankind. The second points not to theory but to practice, not to words but to deeds,
not to faith but to its fruits as the indication of human service and fulfillment. But the third
reminds us that there are no simple signs to prove that one person has done right and
that another has not. We must await historys judgment and not the clamor of the crowd.
Both the good and the evil suffer and are blessed, not for their deeds but "as the wind
listeth."
Perhaps what these three quotations have to say is not that people fail to seek the good
but that, on the one hand, the good appears as through a veil darkly and then escapes
us while, on the other hand, we endlessly claim that our modest victories for humankind
are Gods victories. We use our advantages, our little successes, our power and
privileges as final proof that we have done Gods work -- and humanitys. If we were
merely mistaken in this, if we imagined that Gods sun had shined on us because we
were virtuous when we were not, the damage would be limited and calculable. It
becomes unlimited and incalculable and the mischief abounds when, in a kind of
uncontrolled self-righteousness, we point to material circumstances as "the fruits by
which men should be known and judged." Superior influence, wealth, prestige and
power are taken both as the signs of our having been anointed for our goodness and
the source of our authority to preside over the family, the nation or the world -- in short,
to rule those within our sight.
The problem is ever new and ever old. The Jesuit editors of America, writing on
Watergate in that journals January 1973 issue, warned that the problem for President
Nixon -- and the problem beyond Nixon -- was that absolute power had come to equal
absolute righteousness, and "absolute righteousness equaled absolute ruthlessness."
Lord Acton was even more terse: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." Whenever a strong public mandate or enormous wealth or present power is
taken to mean freedom from all those responsibilities and constraints which living
together requires, we are in the grip of a modern version of an all-virtuous chosen
people or of a latter-day Puritan elect. Some group of persons is asking us to believe
that they are a chosen people and beyond all law and morality.
Reinhold Niebuhr often told the story of two of his senior parishioners in the first church
he served in Detroit. One, a millionaire, was utterly convinced that his wealth had come
about because he had tithed from the time he was a young man. Another member in his
70s, who had given interest-free loans and credit to striking workers in a time of
widespread industrial unrest, died a broken and bankrupt man. Why was one so
conspicuously rewarded and the other so harshly treated when both had done Gods
will? What becomes of the view that material status or social prominence is evidence of
inner strength? Where are we to turn to judge the fruits of a persons life? Are there
other tests as palpable and real?
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Exchanging Old Injustices for New
Not in my lifetime have Americans been so preoccupied with right and wrong. I would
like to think that we are concerned over wrongdoing today because we hunger for rightdoing. We are drenched with reports from the media about the transgressions of
persons in public and private life; rich and poor make up the procession. Our worst fears
are confirmed; the suspicions an older generation sought to quiet or place in context for
the young, in classrooms or in the home, are back to haunt us -- in the most glaring
forms. Those who promised law and order obstructed justice; reformers worked harder,
it appears, to create new channels of influence than new ideas. It is scarcely surprising
then that
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
["The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats]
And yet the trouble with sounding the apocalypse is that life goes on. The problem
which Yeats portrayed with such piercing illumination earlier is with us still. People do
want to win a victory for humanity, but weariness and disillusionment set in. Pattern and
process are more important than personalities. Instead of personal devils, we need to
keep our eye on those forces that play on us all. The course of history follows a tortured
route: we fight injustice and seek noble goals, gain power to that end, somehow are
corrupted by power and zeal, breed new injustices, and are challenged for our excesses
and injustice. This is the dreary path of social change and corporate stagnation.
Try to name one group of persons or nations which in running the course from victim to
victor has not shed some of its virtue along the way: business, labor, blacks, white
ethnics, Catholics, Jews, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The crimes committed in the
name of justice rival those that arise out of injustice. We seek through the vitality of
influence and power to arrest the injustice of others but impose in turn new forms of
injustice because we are never as just as we claim to be: parent with child, children with
parents, protesters with establishment, majorities with minorities, minorities with
majorities, rich nations with poor, and poor nations with rich. Yet in every setting, for
every group, the confrontation is portrayed as a clash between an all-virtuous force -WE -- and an evil and demonic enemy -- THEY. Only when it is too late, when much
blood has been spilled, is it discovered that there was virtue on both sides, along with a
considerable admixture of evil.
Morality: Collective and Individual
What then can we say about the moral problem, its perennial dimensions and lasting
features? First, the requirements for winning a victory for humanity differ on individual
and collective levels. Political groups and nations pursuing a worthy purpose need to
mobilize and generate popular support. Political leaders cannot speak in whispers; their
language must inspire, excite, mobilize and arouse. Citizens need to feel, apparently,
that they can achieve through the actions of states that which is denied them in their
personal lives. Not only a nations goals but also its achievements are cast in the
language of hyperbole. It is not enough to reopen contacts with communist China: the
public must be given a television spectacular and strong language about the 20th
centurys most far-reaching foreign-policy triumph -- most far-reaching, that is, until the
next. The mass media are made for overkill, and group passions will settle for nothing
less.
Individual victories for humanity are more personal and tentative, private and dispersed,
unpublicized and uncalculating. Nations and groups expect a quid pro quo, want
something in return, see good deeds in terms of trade-offs. When foreign assistance is
given, they look for expressions of gratitude. Individual morality differs because it is
closer to the flow and reality of direct human interrelationships. People as individuals do
good without being able to trace the consequences. Interpersonal ethics are less often a
bargain between parties. The individual can sacrifice self and self-interest to serve some
higher purpose ("I give my life in order to find it"). Representatives of the nation or group
do so only at great risk, given their responsibility to their publics. Because they must
claim so much, they have trouble with Wordsworths definition of morality: "That best
portion of a good mans life, -- /His little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness
and of love." Yet for most of us, this is the arena in which we serve humanity -- if we
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serve it at all. We do good -- or others do good to us -- but life rushes on before such
deeds are counted or calculated.
The Relevant Fruits
Second, society tends for the most part to judge the fruits of a persons life in the light of
its own values and priorities. Is it fair to ask what else we could expect? Where else are
society and individuals likely to turn but to their operational values? Outward signs
thrown up as valid by society become the measure of a persons inward life: goods and
possessions, prestige and power, social and economic prominence, gifts and influence.
For every example of our Puritan forebears, the suburban church today offers its
counterpart. It is as if society asked: How else but through outward signs are the elect to
be identified? Yet the sham and superficiality of these standards led to the revolt of the
1960s. However history may judge the differing facets of the youth movement, it cannot
but praise its loud denunciation of the gospel of affluent suburbia. For in the 1950s and
1960s religion and ethics, which were intended to stand in judgment of selfish
materialism, became its servants. Little wonder that families were torn asunder by the
contradictions of this union. Little wonder that inspirited youth turned against the inner
conflicts in the society of their elders. And little wonder too that those in rebellion, being
children of the culture, proved short-lived prophets and fell back into apathy.
Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of the relevant fruits of a persons life and offered them as an
alternative to the narrow judgments of a materialist society. Rather than allow society to
set the standards, Niebuhr drew on religion and philosophy to guide him. The relevant
fruits for him were "a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice."
And Niebuhr added: "Whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I judge him by his
fruits, and I therefore have many agnostic friends." Charity born of love, balance and
proportion, and moral indignation over injustice, coupled with the will to do justice, were
Niebuhrs standards. Present in a person, they reflected spiritual strengths and
resources; if they were absent, no matter a persons prominence or power, Niebuhr
resisted every social pressure to say such a person was especially chosen of God. He
spoke rather in the language of Cardinal Suhard of "living in such a way that ones life
would be inexplicable, if God did not exist." He quoted wryly but not without some
approval a statement made in the Detroit of his time that there were two Christians in
the city and that both of them were Jews.
A Viewpoint of Gott Mit Uns
Third, William James observed that the trouble with Christians was they were forever
lobbying for special favors in the courts of the Almighty. They wanted their prayers
answered instantly and precisely in the form and at the time specified. They displayed
an all-surpassing vanity in believing that God would intervene to upset the processes of
nature in their favor. They expected that the sun would rise and the rains fall at their
bidding and in their favor, thereby closing prematurely all the indeterminate structures of
meaning within which people live out their lives. They took the mystery and tragedy out
of human existence, made a success story out of the profoundest of humanitys dramas.
Our problem today is less that of people fervently praying for the early fulfillment of their
interests. We have few recent cases, if any, that parallel President McKinleys praying to
God to ask his guidance on whether to annex the Philippines -- receiving, of course, the
answer he sought. Yet in another sense, leaders of sovereign nations and of political
movements and parties all too often look out on the world from a viewpoint of "Gott mit
uns." They justify the use of blemished means to achieve supposedly unblemished
ends. In this limited sense, at least, Richard Nixon and William Sloane Coffin, in their
struggles in the 1960s, had something in common.
Every true believer in religion and politics should listen periodically to Cromwells words:
"Believe by the bowels of Christ ye may be wrong." Even when we sense the tragic and
fragmentary character of our acts, we are likely to place them outside the framework of
history. Even so brilliant a diplomat as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger observed, in
an extended interview with New York Times columnist James Reston:
History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that werent realized, of wishes that
were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as an
historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one
has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved [New York Times, October
13, 1974, p. 341.]
In an earlier period, this separation of the tragic dimension of history and of practical
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immediacy was not as sharply drawn. President Lincoln saw himself as acting under the
judgments of history and of God. For him not only history but policy had its tragic
character. It would never have occurred to Lincoln to see himself solely as a problemsolver. Dr. Kissinger seems, elsewhere in his interview, to be saying that because
Americans prefer statesmen who solve each and every problem, this is how statesmen
must look at their task. The further assumption which others make -- though perhaps not
Dr. Kissinger -- is that the American solution is always best.
Moral indifference can be excused neither by apathy ("The best lack all conviction . . .
the worst/Are full of passionate intensity") nor by wallowing in uncertainty. There is
injustice and human need all around us; catastrophe for individuals, institutions and
communities can happen here. For those who look around them at almost every form of
institutional life, actions little short of the human barbarism which happened in Nazi
Germany are happening here. Nor is it any excuse to say that moral values are emotive
and cant be proven. If justice cannot be defined, injustice can surely be recognized.
Addressing the question of right and wrong, then, is pre-eminently a first-order task in
the United States. We have left behind for ill or good "the ceremony of innocence."
Overreacting, there are those who doubt that one person, one political party, and one
set of values can be better than any other. To politics and social efforts they appear to
be saying "ohne mich" (without me). If enough people were to choose this route,
America could follow the path of Weimar Germany and other nations and civilizations
before it which declined as a result of inner decay and loss of will.
Second, judgments on right and wrong come down to on-balance discrimination. Not
only right and wrong compete, but right and right are in rivalry. Moreover, operating
moral principles are not absolutes but are related to other principles. Freedom of
speech and assembly does not guarantee the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
Freedom of scientific inquiry may not protect the right of a graduate student to build a
nuclear weapon in his kitchen. In personal life, choices of right and wrong come down to
balancing the competing moral claims of self and family, personal security and
professional interests, short-term and long-run good.
Living with Ambiguity
Yet apathy, however serious, is only one of our difficulties. The central issue is the moral
problem. From Tocqueville to the present, every sensitive observer has noted the
persistent concern of Americans with questions of right and wrong. For decades it has
been possible for Americans to speak to the world in sweeping moralistic tones. The
United States, it seemed, stood above Europes ancient rivalries; our politics did not
require entangling alliances designed to turn back forces that threatened a whole
continent. Today we no longer claim immunity from the harsher side of world politics, for
we are in the front line. For example, as Secretary of State Kissinger journeyed to
Moscow for his late October meetings with Soviet leader Brezhnev, the military
announced that the U.S. had launched an antiballistic missile from an aircraft. As we
struggle to maintain an equilibrium of power, we are caught up in necessities of
international politics far exceeding those of 19th and early 20th century Europe.
It is not surprising, therefore, that we have left moralism behind us. Our task as a great
power is too immediate and too compelling for us to speak down to the world from a
high pulpit. But this leaves us with a responsibility to define what we mean by right and
wrong. First, moral judgment is not silence or tolerance for evil in the face of complexity.
Above all, moral judgment involves living with ambiguity. We cannot know the
consequences of our acts, however noble our intentions. The French Revolution gave
birth to crusading nationalism, the Protestant Reformation to the nation-state. Moral
judgment, which is closer to action than to thought, demands that we live with the
consequences of our acts, some of which are irretrievable.
Finally, right and wrong include the thoughts we think and the actions we take under
Gods judgment. The practical and proximate take, their strength from higher principles
enshrined in religion and philosophy. The nations founders far more than our
contemporaries saw themselves as acting under the judgment of history. There were an
almost infinite number of rights and wrongs for individuals in their public and private life.
By comparison we have tended, in Paul Tillichs words, to see morality as slavish
adherence to a narrow moral code. Dean Acheson said of a contemporary: "He believes
there is only one kind of immorality, outright thievery." Because the higher truth sets
forth goals toward which men and women strive but never fully realize it understands
and forgives.
