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| Home > Online Library > Rules For Living: Our Wellspring Of Ethics |
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Rules For Living: Our Wellspring Of Ethics
I began thinking about rules when the House of Representatives in North
Carolina, where I live, passed legislation allowing the posting of the Ten Commandments
in public school classrooms. In addition to my concerns about the threat to American
liberty posed by public schools advocating a particular religion, I began to think about what
rules are important to me. This morning I will speak about rules for living, where they
come from and how to get them. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.Indeed I am not the same man that I was then. Like the river, I continue to flow and change, as we all do. In my middle years I have looked to my Ethical Culture religious roots and found an abundance of nourishment. Nourishment from reflection and exploring ideas. Nourishment from sharing with others. And nourishment from belonging to a caring community, openly exploring and striving to understand and help, in a modest way, to improve the human condition. My re-immersion in Ethical Culture has allowed me the luxury of exploring the great thoughts of others. I have found that this process changes me. Immanuel Kant said that two things filled his mind with awe and wonder: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. For many years I was inspired by “the starry heavens above”, looking toward Science and Reason for self-knowledge. I still do. More recently I have started to include Moral Philosophy in my search for wisdom and meaning. What do I mean by Moral Philosophy? The word Moral sounds almost puritanical or prudish. It conjures up images of noble suffering and self-denial. It seems outdated. But it isn’t. Moral Philosophy is about ethics. It is about how we go about determining what is right. Well, how do we determine what is right? John Shelby Spong, who retired as the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, told us where not to look for ethical guidance in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: One cannot speak cogently to the ethical concerns of this generation by quoting two-thousand-to-four-thousand-year old authorities who claim to represent God’s final word on these subjects.Since I happen to agree with Bishop Spong, I must ask: Where do my morals and ethics come from if I do not accept scripture as divine revelation? Since I do not draw on external authority, instead, I look inside of myself, down into the depths of my humanity. I look deep inside and I ask myself: What do I truly value? What inspires me? What brings me happiness? What connects me to others, to nature, to the environment? What enhances my life and spirit? What is beautiful and good? What makes me who I am? This inward exercise produces an ethics based on the experience of humanness, on connections with others and experience with the world. This ethics developed from within is pure -- freely chosen, based on my own search for happiness, caring for others and promoting the common good. However, such an ethical system cannot be developed in isolation. I recognize that I am not an isolated individual. I am engaged in relationships that sustain me: relationships with my family, with communities, and the global community -- relationships with nature and the earth. These relationships are critical to developing ethics. An internal ethics is without meaning unless it is acted upon in connection with others. It is in this interaction with others that ethics are tested, challenged, and improved. It is through this process of social interchange that moral progress is possible. So what do I find when I look inside myself for my ethical foundations? Because I am looking within myself, is my ethics, at its core, based on “self-interest”? This is what Ayn Rand found when she looked for an ethical foundation. Her Objectivist Ethics starts and ends with self-interest. Self-interest determines what is right, moral and good. Competing self-interests determine what is right for society. Right, therefore, is determined by the ability to exercise power. It's like the old joke about the Golden Rule -- Whoever has the gold makes the rules. I cannot accept a philosophy that rejects altruism. The ethics based on power and “might makes right” is a horror that I strive to oppose. History has demonstrated time and time again that power seduces and corrupts. It is one of our human failings to willingly exploit others. For me, an ethics based on self-interest is woefully inadequate. I must look to other foundations for my Moral Philosophy. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, uses the goal of happiness as the starting point for his ethical thought. When the Dalai Lama looked inward, he found an ethic based on happiness and compassion. He wrote in The Art of Happiness: In generating compassion, you start by recognizing that you do not want suffering and that you have a right to have happiness. This can be verified or validated by your own experience. You then recognize that other people, just like yourself, also do not want to suffer and that they have the right to have happiness. So this becomes the basis of your beginning to generate compassion. We begin, then, with the basic premise that the purpose of our life is to seek happiness. It is a vision of happiness as a real objective, one that we can take positive steps toward achieving. And as we begin to identify factors that lead to a happier life, we will learn how the search for happiness offers benefits not only for the individual but for the individual’s family and for society at large as well.The Dalai Lama touches on how an internal ethical search grows outward and extends to relations with others. In this way happiness naturally extends to encompass others, to develop an ethics based on compassion and empathy for others. Felix Adler’s internal search found that human worth was of primary importance to developing ethics. Human worth and dignity formed his ethical foundation. He wrote in The Religion of Duty in 1908: Every person has inherent worth and is unique. We affirm the dignity and worth of all human beings, however different their abilities and backgrounds. Worth is independent of the idea of value. Value is dependent on the contribution a person makes to society while worth exists independent of one’s contribution. From the idea of universal human worth flows the right of every person to food, shelter, clothing, health, safety, education, work, play, respect, and affection. Every person is unique and different, and the development of each person is related to nurturing their distinct qualities and talents.This is how ethical values are developed from within and combined with the ethics of others into something greater. John Shelby Spong wrote on how a type of ethical objectivity could emerge from this process. He suggested that there is an objective wrongness in seeking to cause or increase pain in another life. This wrongness serves to place limits on the exercise of individual freedom. Other objective ethical values identified by Spong are the value of increasing knowledge and the wrongness of continuing to defend or continue to act on the basis of one’s ignorance. The essence of what he is saying is that we must look at the consequences of our actions to determine if they are right. The results of actions on all those affected are what is used to determine if an action is right or not. Such an approach is called utilitarianism or consequentialism. This approach makes sense to me. Looking at the consequences requires me to find, as the Dalai Lama does, that I must consider the interests of others as well as myself. I must replace self-interest with universal interests. In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else. I believe that to think ethically, I cannot refuse to take this step. To think ethically, I must put the interests of others in my ethical equation. Yet ethics is more than just an equation. It is not hard to consider situations where the balancing of interests can cause unacceptable violations of a particular person’s interests. For example, extreme violations of one individual to provide a small benefit to many may not be such a good idea. I favor a modified version of consequentialism. The addition of foundational values can provide a framework in which to evaluate consequences and make ethical decisions. I choose to add Felix Adler’s concept of intrinsic human worth as the framework for my consequentionalist ethical model. This limits my willingness to violate one person’s worth to benefit others. Consideration of the effects decisions and actions have on others is not always easy. Often, imperfect knowledge makes it impossible. So why do I bother to try and determine what is the right thing to do? Why make the effort to look beyond my own self-interest? For me, looking at questions of what is right is part of my religious practice. It is part of how I practice Ethical Culture. It is a necessary part of trying to live a life consistent with my values. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. This approach rings true with me. Inspired by Socrates, I struggle to examine my life and the rightness of my actions. So what are the rules? Before proceeding further, I want to share two cautionary statements. Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, said that rules are made for people who aren’t willing to make their own. I encourage you all to make your own rules. Of course, you are free to adopt mine. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote: There is a theory that states that if anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it's here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.Therefore, I will try not to be too comprehensive. Before I share my rules, I want to acquaint you with the Mars Colony Rules. The North Carolina Society for Ethical Culture meets in a Community Arts Center which we rent on Sunday mornings. We hold our Platforms in a large atrium with beautiful art exhibits on the walls. Sometimes the art is truly beautiful and enhances the experience of our meetings. Other times the art is more bizarre and aesthetically challenging. Always, the art shines as an expression of the human creative spirit. One summer Sunday I came in to find that the exhibit on the walls was from a Mars Millennium Project Summer Camp for children. Included in the art and other displays on the walls were these proposed rules for the camp’s Martian Colony, developed by some of the children attending the camp: RULES FOR OUR MARS COLONY
Thou shalt not injure nor harm thy neighbors. -- Jake
I chose these rules to illustrate that ethics and moral philosophy are not arcane knowledge found only in the realm of philosophers. Eight-year-olds have a knack for it, too. They have opinions about right behavior and are capable of evaluating their actions. Now for some of my rules. I like the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Its sensible reciprocity is appealing. Yet it doesn’t seem to go far enough. The restatement of the Golden Rule in the Christian tradition goes one step further. I find “Love your neighbor as yourself” to be more pro-active. It starts to break down the barriers that separate us. Felix Adler’s restatement of the Golden Rule takes it one step further. His version is to act so as to elicit the best in others and thereby elicit the best in yourself. Adler’s version is pro-active. It requires us to cultivate the best that is in each other. It sees the best expression of our own personality is dependent on helping to develop others. It requires us to see others’ interests as equal to our own. But the rule I really like the best is “: Everyone can play.” It goes even further. I first encountered a version of this rule when I heard Vivian Paley give a keynote address at a conference on “Moral Education in a Diverse Society”. Ms. Paley, a winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Award, spoke about her experience implementing a new rule, “You can’t say you can’t play”, at the University of Chicago Lab School. This rule had a profound affect on the school. This mandate of inclusion let everyone participate. Many of these children had never been included before. It was a brilliant application of consequentialist ethics. The benefits to the self-esteem of those who were usually left out outweighed the limits imposed on the freedom of those who previously exercised the ability to exclude. Benefits also were experienced by these “excluders” as they came to realize that everyone has rights and feelings deserving of respect. Rather than saying, “You can’t say you can’t play”, I prefer a positive restatement of this principle, “Everyone can play.” “Everyone can play” has benefits in the school setting but I believe that it has broader implications.
I believe that we have a moral obligation to open our circle so that others can play, too. This obligation means that we should use our wealth and resources for development, not destruction. Our foreign policy should help feed the world, not arm it. For this change to occur, first we must change ourselves, our society and our government. We must change ourselves by reducing our own consumption in order to share our bounty with others. We must change our society to recognize that continuing to consume more and more is morally unacceptable. We must change our government to one that promotes peace, education, and human rights abroad, not violence, suffering and narrow self-interest. We must change in order to make the ethic of human worth real. I ask you today to reflect on what I have said and consider making a commitment to change. Think about letting everyone play. Closing Words In closing, I will share a quote that I found on the wall of a Universalist Retreat Center in Murray Grove, New Jersey where the Ethical Society Leaders often hold their meeting. It was written by Harold Dean, a New Jersey Universalist minister. I believe in a creative power at work in the universe. In the mystery and wonder of life. In the redemptive power of love. In the increase of knowledge through the use of reason. In the honoring of those who fought for new ideas. In the possibility of a better world. In respect for my own thoughts. In taking responsibility for my own actions and in reverence for all that is good and true and beautiful. | ||
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