What is morality?

Perusing any contemporary newspaper should remove any lingering doubts that human beings, regardless of their professed positions on theism, remain ineradicable moralists. We must confess to be uniformly given to moralizing. At the core of a typical political story is, invariably, a multiplicity of usually unquestioned underlying moral judgments with which both journalists and readers alike instinctively concur. 

Corruption is a subject on which South Africans have become painfully conversant in recent times. Try as we might, for many of us a presidential homestead to the value of R200million, at tax payers expense, amidst a sea of poverty, is an idea we find simply irreconcilably repugnant.

With morality evidently as intrinsic to being human as it seems to be, one cannot help but be provoked by a jarring question attributed to one of our prominent politicians, whom a Sunday Newspaper story reports as having asked, "what is morality?"

The question is troubling at first. After all if a person in a position of such public trust confesses ignorance to this fundamental question, what hope is there for our politics? Such concerns, which I share, only betray our status as inveterate moralists. Upon deeper reflection the question becomes deceptively profound, surprisingly honest and a logical conclusion to what many consider a coherent worldview. 

Indeed, for evolved molecules and free moral agents that we purportedly are, the underlying question suddenly becomes a reasonable one. Namely, the question of what is morally right or wrong must necessarily be a personal one. It is rightly unjustifiable for a people of intrinsically equal value and worth to ascribe their moral standards to the rest of humanity. 

So, rightly we should ask, who conferred up them that authority? 

Someone might argue that what we regard as morality is simply a social contract. In other words morality consists of the evolution of values that a society has incrementally embraced through time, driven by mutual self-interest, towards collective survival.

The same question had to be contemplated by the victorious Allied forces in their dealings with a conquered Nazi Germany, relating specifically to the chilling spectre of the holocaust. Nazi Germany, whether passively or actively, collectively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of countless fellow human beings who committed no crime other than to be born into a particular ethnic community. It is worth highlighting here that those gruesome acts that constitute the holocaust occurred in a society that had for decades longed for a way of contending with the irritatingly persistent Jewish question, and thus Hitler’s “final solution” found resonance with what had become morally numb society. 

During the famous Nuremberg trials, the Allies were presented with the troublesome matter of bringing to judgment people who acted not only in concert with societal norms but in fact within the laws of their land. In convicting the Nazi officials, they were in fact making a profound statement on morality, namely, there is a standard of morality that transcends both societal norms and laws. Though they might not have been quite able to fathom it, its reality was so immanent as to be impossible to deny. Though not intending to, they were essentially compelled to unwittingly present a penetrating debunking of the social contract argument. That is, there is more to morality than merely societal norms and laws.

This leaves us face to face with a troubling conundrum. That we are moral, we cannot truthfully deny. Indeed, when we learn, as we commonly do, that one of our politicians has misappropriated public funds, a visceral sense of injustice wells up inside of us that seems to go exceedingly beyond philosophical reasoning. Invariably, we become deeply overcome by a righteous indignation by the brazen dishonesty. Instinctively, in the process, we make what are undeniable moral judgments. This immediately places us on a pedestal that presumes universality to our supposed personal moral standards that we feel at liberty to indiscriminately use to judge politicians, who may not even share them!

This conundrum leaves us with the same conclusion implied by the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials, that there exists such a thing as transcendent morality that is profoundly visceral and self-evident. If we accept morality to be necessarily personal, the question becomes who is this person whose moral values we seem to irresistibly gravitate to? Whoever this person is, they must possess intrinsically superior worth and value than all human beings. Otherwise, how else can they justifiably command a universal obligation to their personal moral standards? 

The bible reveals the identity of whom Greek philosophers of antiquity called the "Unmoved mover" as possessing the mysterious appellation: I AM. The name, speaks much about His nature, that of one who is unbound by time, eternally present and personal. Scripture reveals Him as just and untouched by corruption of any kind and in fact untouchable by it, the very embodiment of those timeless virtues that have bound nations for time immemorial, without which they seem irrevocably destined for tragic disintegration.

We are His offspring and thus possess remnants of His personal attributes from which we remain yet unable to entirely extricate ourselves, even though the grotesque imprimatur of sin continues to mar us. His holiness precludes Him from touching what is corrupt, which has accordingly created an infinite chasm between Him and us, his prodigal offspring. In the absence of this vital connection, life makes a discordant sound that leaves us helplessly aware that things are not quite as they ought to be. Though in times past He remained hid from his wayward offspring, compelled by His essence, love, on the cross he paid the penalty for our gnawing guilt. To nations therefore, the divine invitation resounds with echoes of infinite mercy, it speaks and will not be silenced: “Look to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.” (Isaiah 45:22)