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From Where Does Morality Come?

by James Barringer  
9/11/2009 / Christian Apologetics

This essay originally began its life as some musings on the concept of beauty. In fact, if you go through and replace "morality" with "beauty" or even "truth," you'll find that many of the same thoughts still apply.

In conversations like this one, it's important to define the term, so that when we say "morality," we're all talking about the same thing. By morality, I mean the standard by which humans ought to treat each other, the set of behaviors which are acceptable and beneficial to humans individually and to society on the whole. The question that we must answer is, "what is the source of morality?" Who or what determines which behaviors are moral, and what are the implications? I will examine four proposed bases for morality, and critically evaluate each.

1. Morally is socially defined. In other words, if a behavior is widely accepted in society, then it is morally acceptable as well. This is probably the weakest of the four bases, for several reasons.

First, it makes morality into a moving target. Standards of right and wrong can change, meaning there is no compelling reason for a person to even attempt to be moral. Why make the attempt, if the standard of morality may be different next year, causing you to change your entire belief and behavior system accordingly?

Second, it leaves no room to protest others' cultural decisions. If morality really is socially defined, what right do we have to wag our finger at countries where they don't let women vote or speak in public? If that is what their culture and society have decided is moral, who are we to interfere?

Third, it allows for no behavior being inherently right or wrong. This is sort of a corollary to the preceding paragraph. For instance, proponents of this view are at a loss to explain why women voting is a moral necessity. The only thing that makes a behavior moral is if a society decides that it is. If there was a culture where murder was permissible, then this view would hold that it was not merely legally acceptable, but morally acceptable to murder as well.

Fourth, it allows for no admission that society might be wrong. For example, this view would argue that slavery was moral for thousands of years, because it was widely accepted both by the members of society and by the laws of the dozens of countries where it was practiced. I would contend that slavery was morally wrong all along, and it merely took society thousands of years to collide with this greater truth.

So, then, we can see that a reliance on society or culture is not a reliable standard for determining morality.

2. Morality is individually determined. Many people today hold the view, "You've got your beliefs and I've got mine," and act as if both can be equally true. There are multiple problems with this view as well.

First, every individual's opinion is held to be equally valid. This means that the morality decided by the world's dumbest human is equally valid as the opinion of the world's smartest. Uneducated members of society are assumed to still be capable of accurately determining morality, when some are not capable of accurately determining whether to stop or go at a red light. If every individual's opinion is not equally valid, this creates an intellectual or philosophical elitism, where certain individuals think they have a responsibility to render moral judgments on behalf of another who is "incapable" of doing so, which opens the door to any manner of abuse and tyranny (not to mention the offensiveness of the elitist assumption itself).

Second, this view allows no room for individual growth or change of opinion. For example, consider a person who may have been racist for a while, but grew out of it. If morality is individually determined, then it was moral for him to be a racist, because that was what his personal code of conduct led him to conclude. If his belief changes and he comes to believe that racism is immoral, that means he was behaving immorally (according to his new system) but that at the time he was behaving morally (according to the old system he was under when he was a racist, which was a valid belief system). Any change in a personal moral standard creates a contradiction. All this method really serves to do is permit a person to pretend that they are always correct.

Third, this system is utterly unworkable if two people have contradicting beliefs (which happens an awful lot). For instance, my Christian faith tells me that I have a moral obligation to share what I believe with others so that they can experience salvation and a relationship with God. Some other people believe that they are entitled to go through life without having others "push their beliefs on them." If I go up to such a person and attempt to share my faith, is it moral or immoral? It's moral according to my belief system but immoral according to theirs. Hello, contradiction!

We can see that, for a variety of reasons, holding to individual determination of morality is unworkable and illogical.

3. Morality is "non-harm" to others. This point of view has built up an absurdly large following in recent years. On the surface it seems reasonable. I am entitled to do anything I want to do so long as I am not bringing harm to others. That's both noble (I'm avoiding harm!) and empowering (I can do whatever I want with only that one limitation!). However, if you thought the previous two belief systems were illogical, just wait until I finish tearing this one apart.

First, it adopts a ludicrously vague and often selective standard of "non-harm." Let us take an example that everyone reading this note is guilty of, namely speeding. Whether we have this conscious thought process or not, our assumption when we speed is that it's okay to do because it gets us there faster and does not harm anyone else on the road. However, fifty thousand people per year are killed in car accidents, virtually all of them involving a car that was speeding. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands more are injured in speeding-related accidents. We cannot guarantee with any reasonable certainty that we will not cause the next fatality when we speed. Therefore, we really have no choice but to accept that speeding does not, in fact, fit the "non-harm" standard, and that we are morally bound to stop doing it. (But we probably won't, because we have individually determined - flawed philosophy number two from earlier - that we can do whatever we want behind the wheel.)

Homosexuality is frequently championed as an example of this hypothesis - inaccurately. People who engage in homosexual sex are as much as 50 times more likely to contract certain STDs, including HIV and cancers of the reproductive tract, and guess whose money gets diverted from education, roads, and community activities to pay for the medical costs? Homosexuality miserably fails the "non-harm" criterion, but this does not stop gay activists from screeching, "We're not hurting you!" They are; they're just too short-sighted to see the big picture and understand how.

Carried to the logical extreme, it's immoral for you to drive your car because the pollution is harmful to the lungs of six billion people on earth. If this is going to be a logical belief system, then we have to apply it consistently, correct? The problem is that very few people are willing to examine whether their actions really are causing harm (or even have the potential to cause harm); they will either perform a superficial analysis and conclude wrongly that their actions cause no harm, or make some excuse, such as in the driving example, to explain why their action may be "immoral but necessary." If your system of morality is structured properly, all necessary actions will be moral, and all moral actions will be necessary. If you ever encounter a situation where the two are opposites, it means you did it wrong.

Second, this system creates a selective and arbitrary application of the standard for morality. Take, for instance, the example of euthanasia, which is often championed as an individual's right at the end of their life. What if their choice causes emotional pain to the surviving family members? Does it not then violate the non-harm standard? There are only two responses: "Yes" or "But it's only emotional harm / it's not that bad" / other illogical attempts to justify an unreasonable belief system. Things get stranger when you consider that euthanasia would be immoral if it caused the family grief, but moral if there was nobody to mourn the person - unless that meant there was nobody to pay for the hospital bill and disposal of the body, putting that burden on taxpayers, which again makes the action immoral. So then you have the same action - euthanasia - which might be moral or immoral, for three or more different reasons, depending on the exact circumstances. And what if you simply commit a flawed analysis and fail to see all the ways the action might bring a person harm?

The standard of "non-harm" is so complex as to be unworkable, logically contradictory, and virtually impossible to implement with any sort of consistency.

4. Morality is determined by a higher power. What this essay ought to have established thus far is that humans are utterly incapable of figuring morality out for themselves. An accurate picture of moral behavior toward other humans can only be dictated by a being with the authority and credibility to make such a proclamation.

This instantly rules out the vast majority of earthbound religions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc., which are merely individual people's idea of what constitutes moral behavior (which has been addressed in flawed philosophy number two). In fact, in the interest of brevity, let me just say that the only higher power who is qualified to make such a proclamation is the God of the Bible. This is because the God of the Bible has made truth claims throughout history and has the power to prove himself correct time and again. He issued hundreds of prophecies about the birth of Jesus, for hundreds of years before Jesus rolled onto the scene, things as specific as where he was born, that he would be crucified without any bones being broken, and that soldiers would cast lots for his clothes - things that Jesus himself didn't even have any control over, so he couldn't have manipulated them into coming true about himself. After making these prophecies, God brought them to pass. There is no religious faith involved in observing that these prophecies were made hundreds of years before the fact and that there are multiple eyewitnesses to the fact that every last one of them was fulfilled in the person of Christ. That is provable scientific fact and history demonstrating the power and reliability of God; he is who he says he is.

And if he is who he says he is, then he's uniquely qualified to make statements regarding individual morality. He created earth and everything that exists on it - every man, woman, or child who has ever walked. Since humans were his creation, he loves us, and we are unique among creation in that we have the ability to love him back. This sets us apart. And if God created each of us, and if he loves us, then does it not stand to reason that he has a specific idea how he wants his beloved creations to be treated? If he loves a person, I hardly have the freedom to speak harshly or demean that person, correct? And because God made us, he is already in a position of authority over us, whether we admit it or not. Because he is in a position of authority over us, he has the ability to dictate morality. And, because he is above humanity, infinite in love, truth, justice, wisdom, and intellect, he is the only reliable source for information regarding morality.

Incidentally, although many people react badly to the claims that Christianity contains exclusive claims to truth (such as Jesus' "I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but through me,"), in reality, it HAS to. If Christianity is the only system of morality created by the only God, then which other system of belief could possibly be true? If Christianity is what it claims to be, then is it not absolutely required to issue a claim to exclusivity on moral issues? Where else could moral truth possibly come from?

Perhaps you have never thought about where your morality comes from. Perhaps you have no idea why you consider certain things to be right and others to be wrong. Your system of morality is probably riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies, and simple human error. The fact of the matter is that you don't have the ability to be moral on your own strength. Unless you have already experienced God's salvation, you are corrupted by this powerful force called sin, which causes every human to rebel against God's perfect morality and try to do things on its own. You're basically a prisoner to your own selfishness, and there is only one solution, which is salvation through Jesus Christ. Jesus, who I spoke of earlier, is the Son of God, sent to earth to live a perfect life and then sacrifice himself, through death on a cross, to pay for your sins. You may not know what all this means, but even if you don't, you can't ignore the truth of what I have written in this note. No human is capable of creating or adhering to a perfect moral standard. And if God has authored a moral standard, and if you have fallen short of his standard, then you have an obligation to be reconciled to him, before you are forced to pay the penalty for your rebellion.

If you are covered by the blood of Christ, then consider just how many times you continue to act selfishly and mistreat the other people whom God has placed on this earth. Praise him for the grace that continues to forgive your failures and consider you his child. He truly is a great God, far greater than any of us have the ability to comprehend until his full glory is revealed to us. Even more spectacular is the fact that Jesus was able to come and fulfill God's absolute standard of morality.

Even we as Christians must guard ourselves against the temptation to become the guardians of morality, as if our views of right and wrong square exactly with God's. Let us also not be so concerned with morality that we lose sight of the fact that true morality is loving God and loving other people. Getting too caught up in particulars is the fast-track to moralism and dead religon - and those are two things the world absolutely does not need from God's people.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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