Not only has social division become more prevalent but our inability to converge on a common moral framework stops us from being able to settle disputes.
First Principles: Rules are important.
Beneath the Surface: What happens when a society cannot define good and bad? I turn to Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, C.S. Lewis, and Tom Holland to help me answer this question.
From the Archives: A case for uniting moral principles across time and space.
"You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever."
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Rules Are Important
Every argument has two layers, but we only pay attention to one.
The surface layer consists of the waves splashing across a body of water: policies, verdicts, decisions, news stories, and so on.
Then there are the currents causing the commotion: values and moral judgements.
People argue endlessly about whether the waves are good or bad while disagreeing on what those words even mean.
Disputes about moves in a game can only be resolved so long as both parties agree on the rules.
Before you argue with someone, find out what game they think you’re playing.
The Death of Morality
Social divisions are constant and unavoidable. Any significant number of people are bound to disagree on any given topic. This is nothing to be concerned about. However, Western civilization faces a much more frightening problem: we still use words like good, evil, right, wrong, justice, dignity, and rights, but we have no shared framework for understanding what they mean.
It is not merely that the growing factions of society have different opinions because we are receiving different sets of facts about important issues. The problem is much more severe. We have completely different conceptions of the moral language we use to argue. This is why debates seemingly never end.
A thought experiment by Alasdair MacIntyre helps us better grasp this phenomenon. Imagine that a series of environmental disasters is blamed by the general public on scientists. The people riot, burn laboratories, lynch physicists, and destroy all the books, as well as scientific instruments. Generations later, people try to revive science from half-finished chapters, broken tools, and theorems detached from their proofs.
These people begin to think of themselves as enlightened, using words such as neutrino, mass, and atomic weight. They even argue about them passionately but fail to ever settle a dispute because the substance, rationale, and truths that gave the words their meaning are gone.
This is effectively what has occurred with our moral traditions. For decades, Hollywood, academia, and bureaucracy have attacked our history, values, and stories, dismantling our shared moral framework. How do you win a debate when there is no shared ground to fall back on? The secularist, Freudian, Humean, utilitarian, Christian, Nietzschean, Marxist, conservative, Muslim, Jew, humanist, and so on each start from a premise of what is good and bad that the others do not hold. Even if two sides accept the exact same data points as true, an argument will still ensue.
Then there is the added problem of people who no longer even believe in the concepts of good and bad. Fifty-five per cent of U.S. adults say morality is context-dependent. Religious beliefs are a major factor with 61 per cent of highly religious Americans saying clear and absolute standards exist, while 69 per cent of the religiously unaffiliated say right and wrong are situational.
This has brutal consequences. A recent survey found that 53 per cent of U.S. adults describe their fellow citizens’ morality and ethics as somewhat or very bad. This belief had a 14-point partisan gap, with 60 per cent of Democrats and 46 per cent of Republicans viewing their fellow countrymen as morally deficient.
We still use the language of good and evil, right and wrong, but we no longer share any sense of what those words mean. Often, if you ask someone for the criteria that make something good—independent of their personal preferences—they’ll stare back at you, dumbfounded.
We Are Not Playing the Same Game
Political arguments appear to be disputes over facts, but this is not the case. It is common for people to make the analogy that liberals are the gas pedal of a car and conservatives are the brakes. However, they forget that the most important part of getting into a car with someone is deciding where you are going. If my preferred destination is east and yours is west, then every use of the brakes or gas is going to make one person happy and the other upset.
This is the issue of our age, and it is a direct consequence of trying to disconnect our common morals from the theological worldview that provided them. We effectively poisoned the roots of a tree and then acted confused when it bore rotten fruit—or none at all.
If life were a game, we would no longer agree on the rules, largely because the worldview that currently dominates our social institutions casts rules themselves as bad or arbitrary restrictions on the individual’s freedom.
This worldview is wrong. Rules do not restrict play as much as they make play possible. Consider a game of chess. If two players share the same understanding of how the pieces can move and what it means to win or lose, they can play. There is a common authority to which the players can appeal if they debate whether a move was wise, legal, or fair. Now consider what happens if one player thinks all the pieces move according to the rules of checkers. No amount of factual information about where the pieces are located on the board can resolve the disagreement about how they are allowed to move.
This is what is happening when people argue over politics. Consider the following words and tell me what you think: Is justice equal treatment or equal outcomes? Is freedom a lack of coercion or the ability to achieve a goal? Does equality mean moral worth or material sameness? Are human rights limits placed upon power or benefits guaranteed by power?
This is why almost every public debate today should revolve around semantics. Many view this as an attempt to evade a point, but it is a prerequisite for even having a conversation. These definitions are not isolated opinions. Instead, they sit at the bottom of an entire worldview, supporting political positions, social judgements, and the facts a person considers relevant. Change the definition of a moral word—or claim everyone is entitled to their own definition—and the possibility of agreement collapses.
Religions and philosophies are value systems that direct our perception. They do not merely determine which facts people notice, but also which facts they consider important and which questions they believe are worth asking. You cannot “follow the facts” to resolve a moral disagreement because moral frameworks are required to rank the importance of the facts being evaluated.
Once a society no longer shares the same rules, arguments don’t get settled by reason, but by power.
The Shadow of the Dead God
Western civilization was built upon three pillars. Christian theology taught us what to value, Roman law taught us how to organize socially, and Greek philosophy taught us how to think. These are the backbone of our world—the seeds from which all else grew.
Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the consequences of a civilization that discarded its uniting principles and predicted the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. When a socially uniting principle collapses, a vacuum is created, and competing principles rush in to fill the void—often through force and dominance. Nietzsche is famous for declaring the death of God, but this declaration was not made triumphantly. Despite his ruthless aversion to Christianity, Nietzsche predicted that nihilism, ideologies, nationalism, and hedonism would erupt in the absence of shared faith.
In Dominion, which traces the influence of Christianity throughout Western history, Tom Holland observed that secularizing societies still borrowed its theological principles. Phantom phrases like “the dignity of man” and “the dignity of labour” were Christian through and through. People could argue that God was dead, but his immense shadow would fall across the cave of Christendom for centuries.
In an ironic turn of events, the moderns most passionate about human dignity and rights are quoting a tradition they have publicly disowned. They are fighting their own shadows. A great example of this is the common narrative that a return to Christianity would result in women being treated like birthing cattle. Yet the theology they fear gave them the principle of consent they cherish. Roman law already spoke of consent, but canon law made it the sole foundation of marriage. Overriding fathers and clans, a Christian priest could marry a couple without their parents’ knowledge.
One might say they are biting the hand that fed them their morals. In its absence, a more Nietzschean world arises, where virtue is whatever the strongest decide it is.
The Tao
Whereas Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Christianity was used by the weak to restrain the strong, and Karl Marx cast religion as an opiate propagated by elites to pacify the poor, C.S. Lewis rejected the premise outright.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that there is no plurality of moral systems. Rather, there has only ever been one, and everything presented as a rival is but a piece of it. Although a Christian himself, Lewis called this singular morality the Tao. He purposefully used a Chinese word so that it could not be read as Christian property.
Lewis points out that you cannot get outside this universal moral order to critique it because every moral word you would use against it would have to be borrowed from it. He illustrates this by drawing principles from Egyptian, Babylonian, Jewish, Old Norse, Hindu, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Australian Aboriginal, and Christian sources, all converging on the same prohibitions and duties among peoples who had no contact with one another.
These include the law of general beneficence; duties to parents, elders, and ancestors; duties to children and posterity; the law of justice; the law of good faith and veracity; the law of mercy; and the law of magnanimity.
One of the fundamental differences between how people approach moral systems is whether they view them as arbitrary rules that they get to force others to accept or as a discovered order to which we subject ourselves. The 55 per cent of people who view morality as context-dependent often do not recognize that their belief opens the door to the former, where the strong impose their will on the weak. At that point, all that is left is conflict.
Uniting Principles
In the appendix to The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis brought together overlapping principles from civilizations separated by geography, culture, and time. The following is what he proposed as evidence that true morality has been discovered many times rather than invented by any one people.
