Moral Absolutes

By Volodymyr Kish

The current state of civilization and the increasingly global society we have built since homo erectus became the dominant species on this planet is truly both inspiring and perplexing.  We have no doubt mastered science and technology to an extent that even our parents and grandparents scarcely would have believed a century ago.  Our social and political structures have also evolved to where today, a majority of the Earth’s population can look forward to a quality of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that our ancestors only dreamed of.

Yet, it is equally true that despite all of these things, there are still many places in our world where brute force and the moral barbarism of our caveman ancestors still is a fact of life and creates miserable living conditions for a significant proportion of the world’s population.  The struggle for law, order and the assurance of universal human rights continues and it will undoubtedly take many more generations before our planet reaches an acceptable and uniform “civilized” state.

Our evolution towards that ideal has always revolved around finding a consensus about how we relate to each other as human beings.  This is embodied in a moral code of behaviour that obviously has personal, religious, social, legalistic and political dimensions.  The problem with moral codes has always been in determining what is absolute and what is relative or subject to interpretation depending on context and environment.

Take one of the most fundamental moral laws embodied within the core of Christian beliefs known as the Ten Commandments, namely the 6^th Commandment (5^th in the Roman Catholic version) “Thou shalt not kill”.  It would seem quite explicit, yet over the many millennia since it was first revealed, Jews, Christians and Muslims who are all theoretically bound by it have had no problem in putting countless unfortunate souls to death, sometimes in the most gruesome of ways.

Of course justification has always been argued on the grounds of war, self-defence, criminal punishment, heresy, etc. etc., all of these conveniently overlooking the fact that the original Commandment did not include any “except for…” clause.  There are also those that claim that the reference to “kill” may not be the correct translation of the original, which ostensibly should really read as “murder”.  Nonetheless, this does not really resolve the essential dilemma, since we are now faced with defining what constitutes murder.  Is killing during a time of war “murder”?  What about the case of unjust wars or wars of conquest?  What about capital punishment? What about abortion? One could argue that such situations are mitigated by law and so pass ethical muster.  But what if they occur within an oppressive dictatorial state that makes its own laws or interprets them any ways it sees fit?  

All this brings us back to the central question - is there is such a thing as absolute moral law.  Many of the established religions and faiths claim that there is, and in the case of most Christian denominations, prescribe the Bible as the authoritative source on what constitutes absolute moral law.  Yet, as in the case of the 6^th Commandment discussed above, the “laws” contained therein can and have either been interpreted in many different ways or written maddeningly ambiguous or vague.  Further, there are many contemporary moral issues today that were either not foreseen in biblical times, or on which the Bible has no specific comment or guidance.  

The usual response by most faiths has been to formulate doctrines, canonical laws or guidelines based on extrapolations of essential theological principles, combined usually with historical traditions and the wisdom of church elders.  Inevitably, this has spurred debate between the clergy and the laity on whether “moral laws” constructed in this way are absolute in a divinely ordained sense or just interim constructs subject to human fallibility that may or may not stand the test of time. There are many such issues that have arisen and troubled the established churches in recent decades – abortion, same sex marriage, married clergy, the ordination of women, euthanasia, cloning, and liberation theology, to name a few.

In the end, there are no simple answers.  What is clear is that if we accept as true that each of us as a human being has a soul or spiritual dimension in addition to our physical body, and acknowledges that we have been blessed with the gift of a thinking mind capable of reasoning, and we harbour a clear desire to be moral and productive human beings, then we have a clear obligation to at least try and seek the answers to the essential questions of our existence. We cannot simply be passive and blindly accept someone’s prescription for how we live our lives. If we are to be spiritual persons, then let’s make the effort to understand what being “spiritual” means.  If we are to be true Christians, then let us make the effort to understand what being a “Christian” really means and not just parrot stock phrases and observe memorized rituals.

Socrates may be accused of hyperbole when he stated that “The unexamined life is not worth living!”, but he makes the point that our life’s potential can never be truly fulfilled if we do not at least embark on that lifelong journey of finding the meaning of our existence and searching for those moral absolutes.