The Revenge of Conscience (Very good article on moral relativism)

firstthings.com ^ | June 1998 | J. Budziszewski

[RoosterRedux]

Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation “intergenerational intimacy”: that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term “sodomy”: that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word “fornication” at all: that’s forgetfulness.

The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is “unwarranted” for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Please feed me,” and “I want food.” Such cases are only to be expected when food and water are now often classified as optional treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that resisted the Nazis.

Why do things get worse so fast? Of course we have names for the process, like “collapse,” “decay,” and “slippery slope.” By conjuring images—a stricken house, a gangrenous limb, a sliding talus—they make us feel we understand. Now, I am no enemy to word-pictures, but a civilization is not really a house, a limb, or a heap of rocks; it cannot literally fall in, rot, or skid out from underfoot. Images can only illustrate an explanation; they cannot substitute for one. So why do things get worse so fast? It would be well to know, in case the process can be arrested.

The usual explanation is that conscience is weakened by neglect. Once a wrong is done, the next wrong comes more easily. On this view conscience is mainly a restraint, a resistance, a passive barrier. It doesn’t so much drive us on as hold us back, and when persistently attacked, the restraining wall gets thinner and thinner and finally disappears. Often this explanation is combined with another: that conscience comes from culture, that it is built up in us from outside. In this view the heart is malleable. We don’t clearly know what is right and wrong, and when our teachers change the lessons, our consciences change their contents. What once we deemed wrong, we deem right; what once we deemed right, we deem wrong.

There is something to these explanations, but neither can account for the sheer dynamism of wickedness—for the fact that we aren’t gently wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it. Nor, as I will show, can either one account for the peculiar quality of our present moral confusion.

I suggest a different explanation. Conscience is not a passive barrier but an active force; though it can hold us back, it can also drive us on. Moreover, conscience comes not from without but from within: though culture can trim the fringes, the core cannot be changed. The reason things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its shape.

[Tax-chick]

Note that this item is from twenty years ago.

[Telepathic Intruder]

Atheists claim they don’t need God because they are guided by their inner sense of right and wrong. But there is no inner sense apart from God. They’re fooled into thinking that right and wrong depends on what feels good and what doesn’t. That’s the same set of morality guiding every evil person in history.

[buridan]

Great post!

Many thanks!

[yldstrk]

tolerate is different than approve

[mjp]

Why do things get worse so fast?

skepticism = truth is unknowable
nihilism = there is no truth

skepticism + nihilism = subjectivism + relativism = anything goes

[LouAvul]

None of the above would have been possible had not (pseudo Christians/hypocrites) put evil men into the highest offices in the land. These hypocrites would chant, "separation of church and state!" without even knowing where the phrase came from or why. These hypocrites chant that mantra whenever anyone points out the contradiction to their Christian "faith."

America was a Christian nation. But pseudo Christians abandon matters of faith when it interferes with their fun.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

When winds of conscience waft about thy head,
And brooks of rue do babble in thy brain,
Seek not thy quietude in lonely bed,
Nor utter careful words to stay thy pain.
For though words chosen well may ease the smart,
And turn the wretched, hateful wrong to right,
Alas, in sooth, they cannot touch the heart,
Nor kill Remorse, which flies upon the night,
With Satan, the Accuser, who will steal,
Betimes to whisper softly in thine ears,
Of dark deeds done; of rack, of cord, of wheel,
And play upon the pipes of hidden fears.

Thus torn asunder, none shall see thy strife;
Thy spotted hand; thy bloody, dripping knife.

[amihow]

I have Budziszewski's book. He is very difficult to read, but worth the struggle. This article is easier to read than his book. It is worth reading over and over.

It is the same Natural Law about which he writes, which informed our moral sense, the English Common Law and our Constitution ,which is almost lost

We could use a repentance and return to it in this country to MAGoodA.

[IrishBrigade]

‘But there is no inner sense apart from God.’

sorry, that’s simply not true...

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

A desire to return to a time “when every man did what was right IN HIS OWN EYES.” a return to BARBARISM.

[IrishBrigade]

‘America was a Christian nation.’

actually, America was an Enlightenment nation...the Age of Reason, and all that, acknowledging the abstract deist notion of the Creator, rather than the specific Judeo-Christian God...

[MV=PY]

Nice. Who wrote that, please?

[Telepathic Intruder]

There is no inner sense “of right and wrong” is what I said if you read it in context. You’re not born with a sense of morality. That, like many other things, is a learned behavior. How you feel doesn’t provide you with a moral compass.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

I wrote that many years ago in response to an editorial in the newspaper that simply gushed over the wonders of abortion. It's part of my worldview that conscience is a very particular little bugger that infests the mind and refuses to equivocate, no matter what rationalizations the conscious mind indulges in.

I wrote a short novel on the same theme, a Christmas story called A Fantasía for Two Lutes, which allegorizes the guilt of Western society. Coincidentally, in honor of the Christmas season, it's available for the next few days as a free on Amazon.

[aquila48]

Great article.

Kipling put it in more concise and poetic form in his “Gods of the Copybook Headings”

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

I love the ominous prophetic ending...

“And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! “

I wonder if the author is familiar with this poem.

[aquila48]

Where is that from?

[Mr Ramsbotham]

See my post #15.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

I wonder if the author is familiar with this poem.

I'd be willing to bet he is. Kipling's was a great talent.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Thanks for posting. Exceptional essay.