Moral Values for the 21st Century

The 2005 political season was dominated by the discussion of 'moral values'. This was often intertwined with the term "family values". What were the pundits talking about?

Morality and moral values appear at first glance to be equivalent expressions. Both go back to a Latin term from which we derive the word "mores", which means customs or usages. In other words, morality should be seen originally to have been an extrapolation from the customs which are passed down through the generations in a society. Now, in the modern era, when we begin to think in terms of universal morals and universal values, there has been some attempt, so far largely inadequate, to separate customs that derive their value only from their familiarity from morals that can be defended on a universal basis.

For the individual the outputs of moral values are action in the service of others, or support for such action, and living a life that you would like to see emulated by others in what you would then imagine to be a better world. The moral person lives in terms of his or her emotions and needs unless and until this interferes with the rights and interests of others.

The four essential value cluster for the moral society are freedom, empathy, truth, and contribution. All are crosscut by and interrelated by a sense of balance. No value, no concept exists that is not worthless or worse when it is treated autonomously or when it is out of balance with others on the same plane.

The most basic of all moral values is truth, for only when we value truth will be able to evaluate what the other values actually mean. Moral values must be taught through the schools and other institutions devoted to the pursuit and dissemination of truth rather than the teaching of ideology or custom. A commitment to truth means first that the moral society always takes the side of truth, in so far as its leaders can understand what is true. A society or individual dedicated to truth faces reality rather than obscures it. The members of such a society strive to escape from the childish beliefs of young children or the uneducated, beliefs that rely on little more than tradition supported by untested and untestable pseudo facts.

Honest people are those who act, speak, and live in terms of the truth as they understand it and diligently try to discover the truth when they are unsure. Therefore, the scientist, or the nonideological researcher in any field, is the most moral of people. Research and teaching according to the best available knowledge is consequently one of the most moral of professions.

Honesty is never betraying what we know deep down is true. Individuals can, of course, differ as to what is true. For example, some people may actually believe in a god that guarantees the success of America or a god who prefers one football team to another. Many persons attend a burial in the belief that the person being buried in the grave before them will go to a heaven where we can "meet again in the sweet bye and bye." But if one does not believe these things, he is dishonest to act as though he does, for in so doing he obscures truth and betrays those around him.

A common and corroding form of dishonesty in our culture is product endorsement by celebrities (unless, of course, in the rare instance that they actually believe what they are saying). Such endorsements are doubly immoral because the person both acts immorally as an individual and erodes the values of others who take him or her as a role model. The politician is dishonest when he simultaneously supports tax cuts and spending programs. He would not be dishonest if he really believed that the government would have more money to spend because of the tax cuts and he had made a sustained effort to understand the arguments for and against this position.

Another common form of dishonesty is the stretching of the truth, or what one knows to be true, in the service of what the speaker believes is a "higher value". Common examples may be found in the arguments of "ecologists". Ecology began as a purely scientific study of the relations of organisms with one another and with the inorganic background in particular environments. While many ecologists continue to follow this path in a truly scientific manner, others have taken on a more prophetic role. This has a moral side in that teaching about certain ecological dangers can contribute to the future of humanity. It can also have a romantic side that leads to emphasis on maintaining or returning to states of nature that may appeal to the ego but are not necessarily in the interest of others. Personally, I place myself among the romantics. I love nature and sometimes do not want to inquire too deeply of its secrets. But preserving all ecological balances just because they have traditionally existed has little scientific or moral justification. Striving to preserve a natural balance that has historically killed millions with viruses or hurricanes, with or without global warming: this expresses a personal value, not a moral value.

After this preamble, let us return to "family values", a category orthogonal to the four essential value clusters sugggested above. Apparently what is meant in the American political dialogue is emphasis on the importance to society of monogamous couples in which the partners love one another, produce children, love them, and take responsibility for them until they launch rewarding lives that will lead them to repeat the cycle. These would seem to be an unexceptional subset of "moral values". Unfortunately, what many tack on to the concept of family values are adherences to customary ways of living and judging one another that have little moral about them. Society must, for example, deal positively with homosexuality, which for many people is a fact of life rather than a personal choice. Yet family values has been used as a rubric to devalue homosexuals or aspects of their relationships. The discussion of family values also devalues divorce, even though it is well known that divorce is undoubtedly preferable to the alternatives in many cases. Much the same can be said for many pre-marital sexual relations: sex without marriage may often be preferable to sex with marriage, where too often, the result is a broken home with or without divorce. The requirement that sex and marriage go together has led to many marriages by those too young to take responsibility for a family. The question here is not whether what the advocates of family values condemn should or should not be condemned as "immoral". The issue is rather that it is not a moral undertaking to arbitrarily rule actions or practices immoral by reference to traditional prejudices. What is placed within the category "family values" must be open to the same search for truth and evidence as any other items that find their way onto the moral agenda.

I recently came across an article that implicitly challenges the assumption that family values exist only in a traditional society that emphasizes religious belief. It was a memoir in the New Yorker (March 27, pages 44-57) by Calvin Trillin of his wife Alice, who died in 2001 after thirty-five years of marriage. He paints a picture of an ideal woman whose life was characterized by freedom, empathy, truth, and contribution to the nth degree. Although she always worked, teaching and editing, she was wholeheartedly devoted to her daughters and her husband. On child-rearing theories he writes that he and Alice came to "agree on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they are not, and the rest is commentary." More humorously, he had written in an earlier memoir: "My wife's policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covers pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies) is pretty well known: she believes that if your child is in a school play and you don't go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinee for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child." Alice struggled through several bouts of serious illness, recovering just enough at the last to walk down the aisle for her second daughter's marriage. She felt her job was done. She went beyond the family on many occasions to help people in many walks of life. She fought against social evils, particularly smoking and what she considered excess wealth. From an enlightenment perspective, we should not be surprised that Trillin tells us that her attitude toward religion "was somewhere between uninterested and hostile."