The difference between ‘moral’ and ‘moralizing’
“Moralizing isn’t quite the same as being moral,” John Sommerville says. “It’s more like parading one’s morality. Moralizing is blaming others, while ethics is examining ourselves.”
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Ironically, even though higher education has supposedly become a more tolerant place in the name of secularism, a lot of moralizing still goes on there.
The author of The Decline of the Secular University, C. John Sommerville, says there is no shortage of fashionable moralizing occurring in academia.
I like the distinction Sommerville makes between being moral and moralizing; a point that I did not have room to fit into my Saturday essay headlined: “Higher education has given up on the meaning of life.”
“Moralizing isn’t quite the same as being moral,” Sommerville notes.
“It’s more like parading one’s morality. Moralizing is blaming others, while ethics is examining ourselves.”
Conservative religious people have long been blamed for moralizing — especially about things such as abortion, homosexuality and sex outside marriage.
But Sommerville has a point when he says he also sees knee-jerk moralizing among liberals, particularly in academic departments studying politics, gender, literature and the environment.
I support his call for colleges and universities to find more ways to help students nurture finer ethical self-discernment, without all the automatic moralizing
Are we progressing morally?
Moral values endure despite our differences
The world is going to hell.
Agree?
Disagree?
Don’t know?
Rushworth Kidder shed light on this eternal question when he led 40 B.C. business people, educators, ecologists, health officials and others through some illuminating discussions about ethics.
The bow-tied author of How Good People Make Tough Choices (Morrow) tested the moral barometer of our era at a recent two-day workshop sponsored by the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of B.C.
Kidder asked members of the workshop to come up with evidence of Canada’s falling morality.
To make the case that ethics were on a downhill slide, we cited a distressing list of signs: weakening stability of the nuclear family, dropping church attendance, more people in jail, increasing teen pregnancies, a resurgence of racism, amplified distrust of politicians, an upsurge in students defaulting on loans, proliferating violence in entertainment, escalating crime among young people, an expanding attitude of self-interest and the media’s preoccupation with the negative.
Many participants found this depressing catalogue to be convincing evidence of moral decay.
But Kidder also asked us to cite evidence of rising morality.
So we tossed out: greater concern about the environment, more sensitivity to gender and race issues, an amplified interest in ethics, a declining Canadian homicide rate, a jump in the number of ethics codes for professions and businesses, increasing numbers of ombudsmen in business and politics, greater regulating of such things as car licences and pollution, more money going into ethical investments, easier access to B.C. government information, a drop in liquor consumption and less corporal punishment of children.
After debate, Kidder again asked the workshop: “Is society’s moral barometer rising or falling?”
When someone called out “Yes,” everyone laughed.
That was the point.
It’s a dumb question.
While many North Americans pine for the days of yore, when they believe morality stood on firmer foundations, Kidder said you can cite just as much evidence the world is in better moral shape now than in the past, when slavery, for example, was commonplace.
Crime statistics, in particular, have been used and abused to justify both sides of the debate, Kidder said. We’ll always be stuck in a time trap comparing our morality to another era — saying out of one side of our mouth our ancestors were morally superior; saying out of the other, “My God, How could they have done that?”
Kidder warned us not to let anyone convince us the world was going into the ethical dumpster.
Too many people have a vested interest in screaming that the sky is falling: religious leaders seeking followers, opposition politicians seeking power, police departments seeking tax dollars, journalists seeking a page-one controversy — even professional ethicists seeking an audience.
But while our ethical wellbeing compared to past societies is moot, there’s never any doubt that our morality (which he defined as “obedience to the unenforceable”) can always be improved.
That’s where our energies should focus, said Kidder, a former senior columnist for The Christian Science Monitor who now heads the Institute for Global Ethics in Maine.
How can we help society grow more ethical? Some of the group’s suggestions:
- Shine light on the heroes and moral models in society, through the media and education.
- Build trust relationships in families, communities and organizations, by showing vulnerability.
- Act as moral mentors.
- Challenge bottom-line thinking.
- Call attention to positive controversy, which helps us to face important challenges to our customary way of thinking.
In the cause of deeper ethics, Kidder believes it’s also important to battle moral relativism.
We’re being killed by the pervasive idea that there are no common values, no core set of moral principles, that can be shared and understood by all of us, he says.
Polls show the vast majority of Canadian and Americans want morals taught explicitly in schools. But when people propose teaching character ethics in the classroom, Kidder says someone inevitably stands up and shouts: “But whose ethics will you teach?”
The question is intended to squelch further discussion.
“What is behind it is the notion that there is no ethical commonality,” he says, “and that, if you dare to teach ethics, you are imposing your values on my kid, and I won’t have it.”
To explore this problem as a group, Kidder asked us to list five moral principles we would like to place above the door of an imaginary school for children aged 10 to 14.
The values we posted didn’t have to be explanatory. Few moral precepts are, he said, including the Ten Commandments. (“Thou shalt not kill” is short and memorable, but it’s not as clear as it may seem. It doesn’t, for example, spell out what to do about eating animals, or war.)
Our small table group — a Quebecois student, native Indian teacher, philosophy professors, businessman and myself — agreed we’d like young people to aspire to the following values: “Compassion. Creativity. Integrity. Harmony. Diligence.”
When all 40 participants in the workshop, which included a big contingent from business, entered the discussion, words such as compassion, integrity, responsibility, truth, even joyousness, kept cropping up as traits we all could affirm.
Kidder told us he’d performed a similar exercise on a global scale earlier in his journalism career. He’d asked 24 people from different cultures — New Zealand Maori to white Californian, Muslim to Buddhist, right-wing to left-wing — what values they could all share in a troubled world.
You’d expect they wouldn’t agree on much. To the contrary. Kidder found the pluralistic group held eight moral principles in common:
Love.
Truth.
Freedom.
Fairness.
Unity.
Tolerance.
Responsibility.
Respect for life.
Such shared values challenge the belief that every moral is relative.
We may disagree about the details of instituting some of these eight values. But they suggest we’re not as different as we tend to think.
Emphasizing common morals is increasingly important in a world in which technology has handed us untold power for good and evil.
When modern weapons can wipe out hundreds of thousands of civilians by mistake, when the 230-year-old Barings Bank can go down the tube because of one trader, when the human body can be kept pumping far beyond its owner’s desire to live, Kidder said we need to build on shared core values not only to prosper in the 21st century, but simply to survive.
Agree?
Disagree?
Don’t know?
Rushworth Kidder shed light on this eternal question when he led 40 B.C. business people, educators, ecologists, health officials and others through some illuminating discussions about ethics.
The bow-tied author of How Good People Make Tough Choices (Morrow) tested the moral barometer of our era at a recent two-day workshop sponsored by the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of B.C.
Kidder asked members of the workshop to come up with evidence of Canada’s falling morality.
To make the case that ethics were on a downhill slide, we cited a distressing list of signs: weakening stability of the nuclear family, dropping church attendance, more people in jail, increasing teen pregnancies, a resurgence of racism, amplified distrust of politicians, an upsurge in students defaulting on loans, proliferating violence in entertainment, escalating crime among young people, an expanding attitude of self-interest and the media’s preoccupation with the negative.
Many participants found this depressing catalogue to be convincing evidence of moral decay.
But Kidder also asked us to cite evidence of rising morality.
So we tossed out: greater concern about the environment, more sensitivity to gender and race issues, an amplified interest in ethics, a declining Canadian homicide rate, a jump in the number of ethics codes for professions and businesses, increasing numbers of ombudsmen in business and politics, greater regulating of such things as car licences and pollution, more money going into ethical investments, easier access to B.C. government information, a drop in liquor consumption and less corporal punishment of children.
After debate, Kidder again asked the workshop: “Is society’s moral barometer rising or falling?”
When someone called out “Yes,” everyone laughed.
That was the point.
It’s a dumb question.
While many North Americans pine for the days of yore, when they believe morality stood on firmer foundations, Kidder said you can cite just as much evidence the world is in better moral shape now than in the past, when slavery, for example, was commonplace.
Crime statistics, in particular, have been used and abused to justify both sides of the debate, Kidder said. We’ll always be stuck in a time trap comparing our morality to another era — saying out of one side of our mouth our ancestors were morally superior; saying out of the other, “My God, How could they have done that?”
Kidder warned us not to let anyone convince us the world was going into the ethical dumpster.
Too many people have a vested interest in screaming that the sky is falling: religious leaders seeking followers, opposition politicians seeking power, police departments seeking tax dollars, journalists seeking a page-one controversy — even professional ethicists seeking an audience.
But while our ethical wellbeing compared to past societies is moot, there’s never any doubt that our morality (which he defined as “obedience to the unenforceable”) can always be improved.
That’s where our energies should focus, said Kidder, a former senior columnist for The Christian Science Monitor who now heads the Institute for Global Ethics in Maine.
How can we help society grow more ethical? Some of the group’s suggestions:
- Shine light on the heroes and moral models in society, through the media and education.
- Build trust relationships in families, communities and organizations, by showing vulnerability.
- Act as moral mentors.
- Challenge bottom-line thinking.
- Call attention to positive controversy, which helps us to face important challenges to our customary way of thinking.
In the cause of deeper ethics, Kidder believes it’s also important to battle moral relativism.
We’re being killed by the pervasive idea that there are no common values, no core set of moral principles, that can be shared and understood by all of us, he says.
Polls show the vast majority of Canadian and Americans want morals taught explicitly in schools. But when people propose teaching character ethics in the classroom, Kidder says someone inevitably stands up and shouts: “But whose ethics will you teach?”
The question is intended to squelch further discussion.
“What is behind it is the notion that there is no ethical commonality,” he says, “and that, if you dare to teach ethics, you are imposing your values on my kid, and I won’t have it.”
To explore this problem as a group, Kidder asked us to list five moral principles we would like to place above the door of an imaginary school for children aged 10 to 14.
The values we posted didn’t have to be explanatory. Few moral precepts are, he said, including the Ten Commandments. (“Thou shalt not kill” is short and memorable, but it’s not as clear as it may seem. It doesn’t, for example, spell out what to do about eating animals, or war.)
Our small table group — a Quebecois student, native Indian teacher, philosophy professors, businessman and myself — agreed we’d like young people to aspire to the following values: “Compassion. Creativity. Integrity. Harmony. Diligence.”
When all 40 participants in the workshop, which included a big contingent from business, entered the discussion, words such as compassion, integrity, responsibility, truth, even joyousness, kept cropping up as traits we all could affirm.
Kidder told us he’d performed a similar exercise on a global scale earlier in his journalism career. He’d asked 24 people from different cultures — New Zealand Maori to white Californian, Muslim to Buddhist, right-wing to left-wing — what values they could all share in a troubled world.
You’d expect they wouldn’t agree on much. To the contrary. Kidder found the pluralistic group held eight moral principles in common:
Love.
Truth.
Freedom.
Fairness.
Unity.
Tolerance.
Responsibility.
Respect for life.
Such shared values challenge the belief that every moral is relative.
We may disagree about the details of instituting some of these eight values. But they suggest we’re not as different as we tend to think.
Emphasizing common morals is increasingly important in a world in which technology has handed us untold power for good and evil.
When modern weapons can wipe out hundreds of thousands of civilians by mistake, when the 230-year-old Barings Bank can go down the tube because of one trader, when the human body can be kept pumping far beyond its owner’s desire to live, Kidder said we need to build on shared core values not only to prosper in the 21st century, but simply to survive.
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