If we think that people hundreds of years ago had morally despicable views, and that now we have a better view of the truth, we ought to consider why. What beliefs and values did our forefathers foster that led them to become more moral, leading to where we are now?
And if we are now prying those beliefs and values from the public square, if we are rejecting the faith of the very people who made the world a better place, what do we expect to happen to our morality in the next hundred years?
Yesterday we talked about the external influences that society puts on us, molding us into decent and productive citizens. We talked about how there is great good in this, and that we ought not to do away with it. However, we also discussed the limitations of external influence. How it can allow for a society of moral behavior, but inwardly immoral people. How it can be eroded, and when that happens, horrors follow.
True stability in society requires internal control. It requires people to be inwardly converted to the principles of morality and civility, who will self-govern themselves, no matter what the laws or social norms say. Thus, laws of the land may be important, but laws of the heart even more so.
Consider how Jesus’s words align with this. “Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him; That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man,” (Mark 7:18, 20). We can infer that the opposite of this statement is also true, it is not that which goes into a man, but comes out of him, that justifies him and proves him good. It is the choices from the inner place, not the outer, that truly matter.
Notice, then, how sensible the work of missionaries and proselytizers is. They do not go to change public policy, to lobby for laws, to influence the external controls. They go to the individual, convict them of moral sin, reintroduce God to heal what is broken in the heart, and leave a soul that is personally committed to doing what is good. It is hard work and is only effective on those who are open to it, but it is the most important work to maintain the fabric of our societies, let alone the saving of souls.
You would think that we as a people would have learned the importance of this work. That we would trust that as we focused on the individual soul, that the collective society would improve. That as we fixed what is inside, all of the outer peripheries would correct themselves on their own.
As one who gave two years of my life to missionary efforts, I can tell you that that is not the case at all. Opposition to proselyting efforts, and a desire to banish them is everywhere. Both from governments and individuals. Not only this, but we live in a time where people who do have a strong moral compass are often ridiculed or considered suspect. Instead, people crave more legislation, more external control, more outer force, particularly on those they disagree with.
As discussed yesterday, this is a very dangerous attitude to take. The more society discourages and tears down internal control, the more its people will be uprooted from true morality, the more wildly they will start to swing, and eventually they will surely fall to debauchery, perversion, and destruction.
In summary, this question of inner or outer moral convictions may seem a small and simple thing, but its long-term implications are far-reaching. All of us should be sharply aware of our own reliance upon internal or external controls, and also our society’s. And for both ourselves and others, the most important work is to heal the heart within, connect God to the inner man, and establish internal moral control.
In this series I explored the world’s strange fascination with moral dilemmas, noted how many of them are unbelievable and contrived, and how even the ones with a historical precedent always had a moral option, even if you have to look outside the box to find it. Another key point that I mentioned was the importance of recognizing disengagement as an option. If you are presented options A and B, and both would compromise your conscience, you could always just do nothing at all.
I also pointed out how both outside-the-box thinking and moral inaction are demonstrated in the life of Jesus. It is from him that we see that the perfect path, with no moral compromise, is actually possible.
At least, it is possible in theory. I also acknowledged that each of us will, of course, compromise ourselves at some point, but that we need to accept and confess that failure, not try to sweep it under the rug by saying we had no choice but to do wrong. We can both have grace for our poor choices while admitting that they were, indeed, poor choices.
Accepting these truths can be uncomfortable as they leave us no way to hide from the reality of difficult moral choices. Believing that there is no good choice is the easier option, as it justifies us in shrinking from painful consequences. Once we accept that there is always a good path, then we can no longer betray God in ignorance. Then, any time that we do something to get what we want or to avoid pain, we do it with eyes wide open, and we know that we will have to account for it someday.
It is, therefore, both a blessing and a burden to know that choosing good is always an option. That knowledge might condemn us to dissatisfaction or pain in the short term, but it is also the path to ultimate redemption.
At the end of the last post, I acknowledged the fact that each one of us will break conscience at some point or another, but that it isn’t as though we have to do that. We do it as a choice. We have an alternative path that remains morally upright, and we reject it, and choose something wrong instead.
In my personal experience, and in my daily observations, I think that this is one of the most difficult things for us to accept. Truly owning our failures does not come easy. We shrink at the notion of saying, “I hurt someone. I didn’t have to, but I chose to because I’m selfish, and there’s no justifying it. It was just wrong, plain and simple.” I think we all know that this is true of everyone else, so certainly it must be of ourselves also, but we keep trying to distance from it. Even when we do acknowledge our failings, we prefer to do it for past versions of the self. “The old me did that, the current me never would.” Thus, even harder than admitting that we did wrong is admitting that we are wrong.
And with this in mind, I think I think one of the reasons why we would be obsessed with so-called moral dilemmas is clear. We can deny all our guilt once we assume a paradigm that this world is fraught with no-win moral dilemmas. We tell ourselves that all of us must face choices where moral compromise is the only option, that sometimes doing wrong is better than doing the worse wrong, so there’s no helping that we have soiled our souls. If we convince ourselves that all the world is gray, then it is a meaningless homogeny where our own “gray” choices can’t be held against us.
From this perspective, false moral dilemmas are not simply a misrepresentation, they are a coping mechanism for our shame. We rely on them because saying “there were no good options,” is much easier than saying, “there was one good option, but I didn’t have the courage to face its consequences.”
The solution, then, is having the honesty to admit that we are flawed individuals, guilty of choosing wrong, and needing grace to get by. We need to be able to acknowledge the perfect path that was available and how we far strayed from it. When we have courage enough for this, then we won’t need to cast the world in shades of gray, we will be able to admit the white that was there, the black that we are, and the grace that makes us pure again.
In my previous post I discussed how Jesus managed moral quandaries and snares that his enemies tried to set for him. Another example that I did not mention was how he would employ silence, rather than engaging in the problem at all. We see this in his trials before the Sanhedrin, Herod, and Pilate. With the Sanhedrin and Pilate, he did not speak until the time was right, or to correct their faulty framing. To Herod, a most wicked man, and the murderer of his cousin John, he never said any word at all.
From Jesus’s example, we see that sometimes the outside-the-box moral solution to a moral dilemma is to just not engage with it at all. When the entire framework of the problem is flawed, when the premise of the whole thing is set to entrap us, there always remains the option of moral non-engagement.
I previously gave silent non-engagement as a solution to the supposed moral dilemma of Nazis at the door asking where the Jews are hiding. Once again, if there are no good options to engage in, you can just not engage. Sometimes inaction is the most moral choice that there is.
This is a critical thing to understand, as it breaks the last parts of the illusion that sometimes we must choose one evil or another. If there are truly no good options, just choose none of them at all. No situation or contrivance can ever force us to do anything. They cannot make us break conscience. We only ever do what we allow ourselves to do.
Of course, all of us will compromise ourselves at some point. We will all break conscience. But it is important to understand in those moments that we didn’t have to do that, we chose to. That’s something I’ll explore more with my next post.
In the last post we discussed so-called moral dilemmas present us with only bad choices, each a compromise of conscience, but if we are willing and creative enough to find it, there is typically another option that sidesteps the dilemma and allows us to keep on the straight and narrow. First, we have to move outside of the manufactured box that our tester has put us in, then see the full range of possible choices, and finally be willing to accept the consequences for sticking to what is right.
Indeed, a common theme all throughout the Bible is people who are faced with exactly these sorts of situations, who then have to step outside the bounds of their initial perception and rely on a miracle to accomplish good and retain their souls. Think of Lot, who saw his only choices as letting the wicked men of the city either rape his guests or his daughters, but who was then saved by angels. Think of Joseph who could either put Mary away in secret or have her stoned for adultery, but who then received a heavenly message to show him that she truly bore the son of God. Think of Solomon who had two women claiming to be the mother of the same child, with nothing in their testimony to show him whom to believe, but who was blessed with wisdom to find out the truth.
Moral dilemmas, and their outside-the-box solutions, are a key theme in the scriptures. When the righteous are faced with no-win scenarios, that’s when the hand of God becomes manifest to show them another way. Indeed, the entire point of the gospel is that it provides a surprise solution to a damned situation. Many of us will sin and earn the suffering of hell, while those that die in their innocence are still swallowed in the grave. No matter which path we take through this life, we’re damned, at least we were until a Savior presented us a miraculous alternative.
It comes as no surprise that Jesus, himself, was a master of resolving seeming no-win, moral dilemmas. I think more than any other figure in the Bible he was put to the test with contrived situations that tried to get him to compromise himself one way or another.
Think of when the Pharisees brought him the woman taken in adultery, and asked if he would uphold Moses’s law, which required the stoning of the woman. Would he deny the law? That would be heretical. Would he condemn her to death? That would go against his mission to forgive and to save. Jesus stepped outside of their trap, though, and said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” In so doing, he touched their guilt and got them to slink away in shame.
But it’s not as though he was denying the justice of the law. Jesus was still worthy to stone her, but also, he was able to forgive her because he would take her stoning upon himself when he laid his life down as a ransom for the world. Thus, Jesus did not transgress justice, nor embrace condemnation. He found a third way to satisfy justice and make space for mercy.
Think also of when he was asked whether the people should pay taxes to their oppressor Caesar. On the one hand, he could say that yes, they were required to pay their taxes, which would offend the people. Or he could say no, that they should defy Caesar, which would make him an enemy of the state. Jesus, however, chose a third option. He showed the people that their entire framing was wrong. They were putting too much value in worldly currency, thinking that it amounted to anything of moral weight in the eyes of the Lord. He reminded them that worldly treasure and spiritual sacrifice were two separate things, one properly pertaining to the world and one to God. By helping to disentangle the two, and setting the spiritual as superior to the temporal, Jesus found a third path that both approved the paying of taxes while also diminishing its importance in the broader scheme of things.
The stories of Jesus and others in the Bible shows us that we may be given traps where it appears that there are no good solutions, but that if we have some ingenuity, or even some divine intervention, the moral way is still there for us. As Paul told the Corinthians, “With the temptation,” God will “also make a way to escape” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
Yesterday I made the assertion that most moral dilemmas are manufactured. By far, the correct moral option is apparent in our day-to-day choices, and that thought experiments like the trolley problem tie themselves in unrealistic knots to try and force a situation where every action seems to be morally compromised.
But are there any other thought experiments that are based on historical fact? Situations that people really faced where every action was wrong?
Well, another common thought experiment that seems at first glance to fit the bill is that of the Nazis at the door. This one is at least based on an actual historical occurrence. During World War Two, there were people that would hide Jews, and Nazi soldiers would be sent from door-to-door, investigating whether anyone in the community knew where the Jews were. So, the thought experiment is simply to put yourself in the place of someone who knows where the Jews are hiding, with a Nazi officer having just asked you to reveal them.
The question is, would you lie and say that you don’t know where they are? Or, because lying is wrong, would you tell them the truth, resulting in their likely death? This is presented as an example of a time where obviously the “correct” choice is to lie. The example is given to convince us that sometimes we must do wrong to prevent a greater wrong from occurring.
But the whole thought experiment is flawed. As with the trolley problem, the situation is always presented with only two choices, implicitly discouraging any sort of moral creativity. But to suggest that lying or betraying the Jews are the only options is false.
How’s this for a third choice: refuse to engage with the Nazis by principle? Whether you know where Jews are hiding or not, you could always just refuse to say a word to them. Of course, that might have some very painful repercussions on you. You might be hurt, you might be killed, but there’s no denying that this way you didn’t do anything to compromise your conscience.
Perhaps we don’t feel that we have the moral fortitude to commit to such a course of action. Perhaps we would rather compromise our soul than suffer the consequences of silence. Fair enough, we’re all a work in progress, but let us admit that the error is in us, not in the logic of the universe. There is no paradox of having to do wrong to achieve right, our dilemma is that our fear has precluded the only good option, leaving only bad ones before us.
So, once again, we have a thought experiment designed to force us into compromising our morals, but once again it is contrived and forced. Purely moral behavior still remains an option.
I do not know if moral dilemma thought experiments were a fascination of earlier ages, but they certainly are in this era. We have many theoretical situations, torturously contrived to try and force the participant into morally compromising him- or herself, no matter what choice is made.
In this series I’m going to try and discredit these false moral dilemmas and also try to see where the desire for them comes from. Why do we think that it is sometimes impossible to be moral or why do we want that to be the case?
For today, we’ll start by examining one of the most popular moral dilemma thought experiments out there.
We’ve all heard of the trolley problem, in which a trolley is barreling down the tracks towards five people tied to the railway. You, alone, stand by a switch that can divert the trolley onto a second track, but there is another person tied to that track. Is it better to remain uninvolved and let more people die, or to take action, making you personally responsible for the death of one person?
This is, of course, a ludicrous setup, one that I think we can safely say no one has ever encountered in the real world. What is more, if you try to find any creative options outside of the two originally provided, the person presenting the problem will always artificially shoot those down.
“No, you can’t signal the train to stop in time. No, you can’t untie the people on the tracks. No, you can’t throw yourself on the tracks to try and force the train to stop. Why? Because you just can’t, you have to only choose from the two options that you’ve been given.”
While the intention of the thought experiment is to get you to appreciate and consider difficult moral dilemmas, the fact that it is so unrealistic speaks to how scarce moral dilemmas really are. I’m not saying that they don’t ever exist, we’ll examine some genuine ones later, but if most of these situations have to be manufactured, then clearly moral clarity is the norm, not the exception.
No one wants to be held to another’s standards,
But they do want the rest of the world held to theirs.
I have an inconsistent level of frustration in response to the annoying behaviors of other people. Sometimes I will be very gracious and dismissive, reassuring the other person that I know it was just an honest mistake. Other times I can be deeply irritated and indignant, reproving them for a grave moral sin. In fact, I might start graciously, but when I feel the effects of the inconvenience over a prolonged period, I might change to the fire-and-damnation attitude.
Which reveals to me how fickle and self-serving my judgment of others can be. If my condemnation of another person changes according to my personal situation, then that condemnation is not based upon any principle, only upon my feelings in the moment. My indictment of that person is therefore unjustified, and as the Lord has said, “there remaineth in me the greater sin,” (Doctrine and Covenants 64:9).
If someone has done something against me that is truly, genuinely offensive, then it will be offensive no matter how large or small the negative effects on my personal life. It will be offensive on its own merits, with no further consideration of my personal hardship necessary. And if it isn’t offensive in that way, then it isn’t really offensive at all.
Spiritual Wanderings 