Morality – the puzzle

People raise complaints against the “old morality” (where, for example, homosexual acts were considered a sexual perversion, abortion was a crime associated with murder, and kids born out of wedlock were “illegitimate children”).

They consider that what is wrong with this old morality is that it is “out of date”, as is indicated by their use of the expression “on the wrong side of history”, to depict those who still hold to them.

Does morality then change with the times? Does morality differ according to when and where you live? The moral relativist would say so – there is no objective morality that we can turn to with confidence. After all, who is to say what the right morality is? Will it be different tomorrow? It could well be. 

This reflection is not miles away from our daily lives, because we all make judgments about good and evil. These judgments differ from person to person, and from age to age: so there seems to be no objective standard to guide us as we face issues requiring some kind of moral judgment.

C.S. Lewis refers to this as “the poison of subjectivism”. “Until modern times,” he writes, no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments, or that what they discovered was objective”. What Lewis saw coming is the slough in which we are plunged today: the old morality is condemned by those who seem to have invented a new morality, with new sins like “homophobia” and “intolerance”.

It is well worth listening to the deep wisdom of this Oxford don and ethics specialist. C.S. Lewis insists it is a “fatal superstition that men can create values.” There needs to be “some objective standard of good”, he asserts, for any moral judgments to have meaning. He shows how it is impossible to condemn the moral values of others as evil without using an objective overarching standard. Otherwise such condemnation merely expresses the subjective opinion of one or more people. “Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring” (Christian Reflections, p99-100).

The person who wants to relax the old-time morality and impose something “better”, does so only because he judges the old values by a standard: but the standard he uses is mere variable personal preference. Thus subjectivism poisons all such judgments and undermines the very heart of morality.

Consider this further deep wisdom from Professor Lewis: “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky. Every attempt to do so consists in arbitrarily selecting some maxim of traditional morality, isolating it from the rest, and erecting it into an unum necessarium” (the one supreme moral trump-card).

He recognises that our ideas of the good may change. However, “they cannot change either for the better or for the worse if there is no absolute and immutable good to which they can approximate or from which they can recede”. 

The necessary requirement for all and any morality is such an absolute and immutable good as that which resides only in the eternal God, who is “holy, holy, holy, the Lord God almighty”. He alone is, and always has been, (despite being neglected) the objective source of moral truth. And he has communicated to us, his moral creatures, in words we can understand, how he defines good, and what human acts he condemns as evil. “To sin is to transgress God’s law” (1 John 3.4). Wisdom and moral righteousness consist in obeying it.

Clive Every-Clayton