Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

We need some kind of moral community for there to be a society as opposed to a state. States function on the basis of power. But societies function on the basis of a shared vision of what unites the people who comprise it. Societies are moral communities.

democratic freedom to rest: religion, community, family and the sense of the nation as a moral community. As these eroded from the 1960s onwards, individualism was left as the order of the day, and so it is today. The individual trumps society. The ‘I’ prevails over the ‘We’. We have the market and the state, the two arenas of competition, one for wealth, the other for power, but nothing else, no arena of cooperation that would bridge the difference between wealthy and powerful and the poor and powerless.

A society of individualists is unsustainable. We are built for cooperation, not just competition. In the end, with the market and the state but no substantive society to link us to our fellow citizens in bonds of collective responsibility, trust and truth erode, economics becomes inequitable and politics becomes unbearable.

Americans look to resolve conflict by universal principles of justice. The Chinese prefer mediation by a middleman, whose goal is not fairness but the reduction of animosity and the mending of relationship.

Men saw morality as a set of rules for the avoidance of violence. Women were more likely to think of it as a style of relationship based on empathy and compassion.

morality comes in myriad forms. The word itself comes from the Latin mores, meaning the customs and conventions of behaviour within a group. The related word ‘ethics’ comes from ethos, the Greek word for the character of a community.

Particularly telling in this context are the distinctions made between the emotions people experience when they do wrong. Tradition-directed individuals feel shame. Inner-directed individuals feel guilt. Other-directed individuals feel anxiety.

There are, in short, different lenses through which to view morality wherever we look. There is the thin morality of liberal individualism, where the only constraints on behaviour are fairness and the avoidance of harm, and there is the thick morality of loyalty, reverence and respect. There are the four broad types of moral tradition: civic ethics, the ethic of duty, codes of honour and the morality of love. And there are the three different kinds of moral personality: tradition-, inner- and other-directed.

the distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’. ‘Freedom from’ means the absence of constraints, but ‘freedom to’ is, in his words, ‘choosing the right restraint’.

Politics may give us ‘freedom from’, but morality gives us ‘freedom to’ – to dance the choreography of interpersonal grace and be part of the music of loving commitment to the lives of others.

A mature understanding of the many ways there are of organising a society and a life may make us more tolerant of the people not like us, but it does not preclude the knowledge that, if we are to find meaning, depth and resonance in life, we must choose a language of deeds as we choose a language of words. Out of the many moralities available, there is one that is ours, and we do not have to denigrate the others to make that one our own.

The basic problem that had to be solved in order for complex civilisations to emerge was how to organise cooperation and establish relationships of trust on a large scale. Reciprocity is fine for small groups whose members know one another, but not for larger associations.

by establishing moral communities on a large scale through shared beliefs and rituals rather than by frequent face-to-face interaction, religion solved the problem of establishing trust between strangers.

in the Hebrew Bible the human person as such became God’s ‘significant other’. Each individual was ‘in the image and likeness’ of God. The intimacy of this relationship gave rise to a new kind of morality – based not on justice only but also on love:

From individual freedom flows social freedom. If human beings are free, they can change, and if we can do so as individuals then we can do likewise as societies. This led to the radical idea, first expressed in the Hebrew Bible, that time is an arena of change.

If social order is not written into the structure of the cosmos, if individuals may not be sacrificed to the state, and if kings have no special access to godlike powers, it follows that society flourishes only when people behave well to one another.

Religion creates community, community creates altruism, and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good.

the conclusion that religion, as a moral force, is more about belonging than believing.

Religion creates communities, and communities create moral people.

Trust cannot be restored by the market or the state, because these are arenas of competition, not cooperation. It cannot be restored by smartphones and social media, precisely because these are not face to face.

there are seven basic moral rules that they all held in common: help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect other people’s property. In all the studied cultures, these seven behaviours were held to be morally good, and this was true across continents. They were not the sole preserve of the West.

Aristotle defined happiness as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.

The ‘I–It’ relationship of taxation and benefit will increasingly be replaced by the ‘I–Thou’ of fellowship and community.

Morality matters because we believe that there are other and more human ways of living than instinctual gratification tempered by regret.

We feel enlarged by doing good, more so perhaps than by doing well, by material success.

A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.

Covenantal politics, by contrast, is about ‘We, the people’, bound by a sense of shared belonging and collective responsibility; about strong local communities, active citizens and the devolution of responsibility.