Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times

by Jonathan Sacks

the loss of shared moral community means that we find it difficult to reason together. Truth gives way to power. Uncomfortable views are excluded from campuses. To win support, people start defining themselves as victims. Public shaming takes the place of judicial establishment of guilt. Civility – especially respect for people who oppose you – begins to die. The public conversation slowly gives way to a shouting match in which integrity counts for little and noise for much. This is not a culture whose survival can be taken for granted. It is one that is fraying at the seams.

Spinoza’s discoveries set the stage for a whole series of determinisms of different kinds, each finding the course of history in some other shaping force, but all agreed that we are what we are because we could not be otherwise than we are, and that all thoughts to the contrary are mere illusion.

Cf Don's (U3A) perspective re free will.

Biblical morality is the morality of freedom, its politics are the politics of freedom, and its theology is the theology of freedom.

The fact that we occupy a small space in the universe and a small stretch of the totality of time says nothing about our significance or lack of it.

So much of what is unique about humanity – our imagination, our ability to conceptualise and imagine worlds that have not yet been, our capacity to communicate deeply with others, to bridge distances and orchestrate our differences – cannot be analysed scientifically, but is nonetheless essential to who we are and what we are about.

When nothing is sacred, then nothing is sacrilegious. When there is no Judge, there is no justice. There is only effectiveness and the pursuit of desire.

As philosopher David Pears has argued, someone else can predict what we are going to do, but only we can decide.23 That power of decision is what makes us moral agents, and humans will always have it in a way that mere algorithms as such do not.

It is neither intelligence nor consciousness, but rather self-consciousness that makes human beings different.

Like other beings, we as ‘I’ have drives, desires, passions, but unlike any other, we as ‘Me’ can ask ourselves whether it is right to pursue or satisfy them. What if satisfying my desires means that you will go hungry? What if my pursuit of passion means putting you in a distressing situation? That judgement is what makes us moral beings, and it is not reducible to algorithms. Algorithms can predict, but only human beings can decide, and that is a crucial distinction.

It is our existence as moral agents, our ability to stand outside our own desires and drives, our capacity to refrain from doing what we can do and want to do because we know it might harm others, our very experience of choice itself as both the challenge and glory of the human situation, that makes us different and confers dignity on human life.

there is an essential connection between morality and human dignity. Remove the one, and we find it hard to make sense of the other.

the human mind has two primary modalities: science, which takes things apart to see how they work, and religion, which puts things together to see what they mean.

Morality is the domain of cooperation. It is the place where we set competition aside and say, explicitly or implicitly: let us work together for the common good.

If you start with benevolence, then apply the rules of reciprocity, you create a basis of trust on which groups can form. For this you do not need religion. All social animals work this out, because those who do not, do not survive.

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.

Westerners tend to think in terms of either/or, Chinese in terms of both/and: yin and yang, feminine and masculine, passive and active, interpenetrating forces that complete one another.

to establish the values of compassion, altruism towards kin and reciprocity towards neighbours, you do not need religion. They tend to emerge in the course of time, through what we might call the social equivalent of natural selection. Cooperative groups survive; others fall by the wayside.

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

religion has something to add to the conversation and to society regardless of its metaphysical foundations. It builds communities. It aids law-abidingness. And it helps us think long term. Most simply, the religious mindset awakens us to transcendence. It redeems our solitude. It breaks the carapace of selfhood and opens us to others and to the world.

The beautiful thing about morality, though, is that it begins with us.

When we behave towards others with care and concern, sensitivity and tact, honesty and integrity, generosity and grace, forbearance and forgiveness, we start to become a different person.

In 2019, anthropologists at Oxford University published the results of a survey of moral attitudes in sixty cultures around the world. They discovered that 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.

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.

we have no right to freedom if exercising that right harms the freedom of others. Liberal democratic freedom is collective and depends on self-restraint. A society in which everyone feels free to do what they want is not a free society. It is not a society at all. It is anarchy.