#402: Clarity in Ethics

How do we know when to be confident in our judgments?

MLA: 100 Days of Dante starts August 31st! Join the world’s largest reading group of The Divine Comedy. If you’re interested in reading through it together here, let me know.

In a previous issue, I argued that sperm and egg donation are always impermissible. Such an unequivocal position raises additional questions about how, if at all, we can come up with such stark moral answers to contested questions—especially when the issues are only indirectly addressed in Scripture, if at all. To quote the reader who put this to me, “at what point does something cross over from a Romans 14 matter of conscience into a matter where ‘no amount of praying or agonizing about a decision is warranted’?”

It’s an important question that deserves a book in response. As I have no interest (for now) in writing one, allow me to sketch a few principles that have guided my thinking about it. While I think these principles have warrant from within the tradition of Christian moral reasoning (which itself is one way of settling on concrete positions), I will simply assert them rather than ‘showing my work.’ 

1. ‘What is to be done’ is less obvious as the situation becomes more specific, and thus our direction should be more modest. “Love thy neighbor” is a command we can all get behind, but is notoriously under-specified: it should guide our action, but says next to nothing about what I should do tomorrow. Our confidence level within our ethical judgments should reflect that disparity, which is a bit ironic given the moral milieu that I am told still exists. For many people, affirming universal norms is the problem, because we are all supposed to honor each others’ individual “values” (the standard relativism problem). Yet, ironically, the more general an ethical value becomes (truth! goodness! beauty!), and the more general the prescriptive norms derived from it are, the more confidently we can hold them.