Morality is a curious concept. Arguments about its origins notwithstanding, conversations about morality present dilemmas that illustrate the complexities and fundamental dichotomies that exist within humanity.
Assuming we believe it is immoral to benefit from the suffering of another human being, who among us is moral? If I buy a nice shirt that makes me feel attractive and debonair (I realize that’s stretching things), that’s not immoral, is it? Well, perhaps not if I do not know that the cloth from which it was made was produced in a miserably hot, dangerous workplace. Perhaps not if I do not know the shirt was sewn by people who are beaten if they do not meet daily production quotas.
If, after buying the shirt, I learn of those horrendous conditions, would continuing to wear the shirt be moral? Would my refusal to wear the shirt after learning of those conditions be moral, or would it simply be a feeble attempt to absolve me of blame for the treatment of people abused in the process of supplying it to me? Once I learn of the abuse, to assert my morality in the context of buying and wearing the shirt, do I have any additional obligations to act to stop the abuse or to call attention to it?
Yes, I realize this seems too complex, too involved. But I think it illustrates the fact that morality, however it is defined, must be defined as living within a continuum in which there are few sharp lines. Somewhere between hugging a friend’s wife in greeting at the door and embracing her nude in a motel room, a sharp line is crossed, I suppose, but where is it? We seem to instinctively know when we are approaching those sharp lines; why are they so hard to define, to put into words?
I mentioned dichotomies earlier. We, as a society, are taught that we should love one another. Yet love, too, lives along that moral continuum. Love of the friend’s wife is encouraged, up to a point; beyond that point, society (and most likely the friend) condemns it. Well, which is it? Do you want me to love people or not? How much love is too much? (And I realize I may be over-simplifying things by equating love with lust (maybe), but I’m doing it on purpose and with a point.)
It’s questions like the ones I’ve posed here, I think, that give rise to reliance on religion for answers. Religion often gives easy, uncomplicated, dogmatic answers that, frequently, defy logic. My quest in thinking about and writing about them this morning is to look for the logic in the answers. It’s part of the search for a secular moral code.
