A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.
Totally kidding, I don’t even know that joke. The truth is, priests, ministers, and rabbis are supposed to be symbols of morality and I was struggling to come up with a cutesy hook to start talking about it.
Morality is a universal truth of human nature. (For more on that, I highly recommend you look up Professor Jonathan Haidt.) The problem is that morality doesn’t have a universal definition. Different cultures, different religions, instill different rules and values. And even when people can agree on the rules and values themselves, they rank them differently based on their own personal experiences and opinions.
This moral diversity inevitably leads to conflict. But if we can accept each other for our diversity, a lot of that conflict can be avoided.
“We may have our private opinions, but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?”
Mohandas Gandhi
An example of moral diversity that I think will resonate with a lot of people is what I call “social libertarianism” versus “social puritanism”.
A lot of us grew up learning the stance of social libertarianism, the idea that every individual has the right to live up to or fail to live up to their own code of morality.
Social puritanism, on the other hand, is the belief that all of society should live by one code of morality, and that laws should be instituted to encourage moral behavior.
Examples of social puritanism include prohibition, because alcohol often leads to a variety of immoral behaviors, the legally enforced wearing of the burka, because the female form can incite the passions of men, the illegalization of gay marriage, because homosexuality is considered immoral or impure, and making it illegal for someone to refuse service to anyone for any reason that they see fit. (Like refusing to cater a gay wedding, for example. I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong to force people to cater a gay wedding, only that it is social puritanism.)
So that’s an example of two contradictory moral stances. Now I want to give an example of the different hierarchies within moral codes
Both we in the Western tradition and radical Islamists believe that it is wrong to kill people. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any moral system on the planet that doesn’t consider killing people to be on the bad side. But there are very few people who think that killing people is completely inexcusable.
For instance, I think we’d all agree that a man would be fairly justified in stabbing a man in the throat with a pair of scissors if that man were, say, raping his child. And how much of a leap is it from that to saying that it is okay to blow up an airplane if it helps unite the entire world under the one true God?
Honestly, when both sides are fighting from the moral high ground, any evil is justifiable.
Regardless of how I titled this video, I don’t actually expect my little blog to solve any world conflicts. But maybe I can reach a few individuals.
My message to you individuals out there is: anytime you’re having a conflict with someone you love – a friend, a spouse, a family member – and you’re starting to question whether, deep down, they’re a good person, just remember that they are. Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they just define morality a little bit differently than you do.
Quick example: say there’s a couple, going steady, a year and a half in now. She lost her virginity in her last relationship. It was a big deal and it took a long time to get over that guy. He, on the other hand, let’s say, “had a few lovers” over the ten years before he met her.
Say he cheats. To her, that’s a deep betrayal. The relationship might be over. To him, it was a mistake. It was a big mistake, but just a mistake. See what I’m saying? They both agree that cheating was wrong, but they disagree on how wrong it was.
And just like that example, when you experience something like that in your own life, you have to decide what’s more important: the relationship or the moral gap.
I’m not suggesting that you should stay with someone who cheats on you. You probably shouldn’t. But with smaller issues…
I’ve heard things like, “He forgot my birthday therefore he must not really care about me.” Or, “She’s always criticizing me therefore she must just keep me around to stroke her own ego.”
It’s probably not true.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a relationship end not because they disagreed that something wrong was done but because they disagreed on how wrong a thing it was.
One person says, “I can’t believe you did that!” And the other person says, “I can’t believe you’re throwing away this relationship over that!”
Actually, I can tell you how many times I’ve seen it. It was once. One relationship. But I imagine it’s happened before.
