A moral world.

This is a somewhat wacky post. People who know me will realise that feeling the need to disclaim that must mean we have a doozer of a wacky post. I hope you enjoy it.

What does an ethical realm look like?

I’ve been pondering lately the idea of morality or ethics as a language that describes an entire world in a similar way to how physical descriptions describe a physical world. Morality would describe a world composed of moral objects rather than physical objects. Moral descriptions would have certain characteristics just as physical descriptions do.  The fun of this exercise for me is that it illuminates certain assumptions I hold about morality or ethics and it raises some intriguing questions.

What are moral objects?

Physical objects are three dimensional, four if you count time. By that I don’t mean that physical objects really are four dimensional. I’m not talking about reality here. I am talking about a model or a grammar and vocabulary. A physical description of something draws on four dimensions; height, length, breadth and duration. To physically describe a table I might also describe its weight, density, the strength of its molecular bonds and so on. I wouldn’t describe the tables’ kitchness or quaintness. Those qualities lie outside the language of a physical description.  Physical objects are what you create by describing a world by its physical qualities only. In fact I’m happy to treat description and object as effectively interchangeable for this post.

Moral objects then are what we get when we describe the world by moral characteristics only. Can this include things? Can a table for example be good or bad? Can it be honest, righteous, valid, justifiable? Or for that matter can it be evil, wanton, invalid or wrong? My instinctual feeling is it can’t be. My instinctual feeling is that moral objects are acts – the act of building a table or destroying one or sitting on one can be moral – but the table itself is amoral. As an amoral object the table itself has no existence in a morally defined world in the same way that non-physical objects have no existence in a physically defined world. So the first rule of a moral world is that verbs are the new nouns – acts are objects here.

What are moral characteristics?

How do we measure or describe morality? What are its fundamental dimensions? I’m going to propose three. Just like the physical descriptors mentioned above there can be many more characteristics (weight, density, combustability even) so this isn’t the limit of our conversation.

Further its possible to just use one of these descriptors, just as its possible to describe a table by just its height. Such a description is just a poorer definition of the object but as no description is totally complete there can be no objective minimum either.

1. Harm and beneficence.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post Harm and beneficence has to be measured against some sense of the ideal. Building a casino on the top of Ayers rock for example or chopping off my healthy leg seem obviously harmful only because we have an obvious ideal. This makes this characteristic interestingly dependant on a broader context and ideas. Also as I mentioned in another post it is necessary to have a sense of a moral person (which could be an environment as well) to establish where chains of harms and benefits end.

2. Honesty or Sincerity and Duplicity

The notion that a person is trying to do the right thing is deeply fundamental to our conversations about moral actions. This comes up when adults try and understand their parents who in a different time may have had different ideas of right parenting. We can say that their choices were wrong (to us) but still moral given the knowledge they had. Likewise we can recognize that in our own parenting we can only try and do the right thing.

In making that attempt we can be honest with ourselves or we can try and sell ourselves a line. It can be hard to know which we are doing but I think we still want to and need to talk about it. The words we use are honesty, sincerity and integrity.

3. Humility

It seems strange to hang humility out there on its own however I couldn’t quite describe the broader category it belongs to. It may be that it can be covered in the first two descriptors as well. For me though it does stand alone as a necessary corrective to both unfettered beneficence and sincerity.

Sincerity on its own has produced such romantic excesses as philosophers called crimes of pure reason. Those who flew into the world trade towers committed acts of absolute sincerity. Humility could have stopped them.

Likewise the worst tyrannies justify themselves on the basis of looking after others. The victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution can attest it is a terrible thing to live in a proposed utopia. Even in smaller matters humility prevents beneficence from being something immoral. Beneficence without humility is when your mum puts holes in your condoms because you’d make a great dad.

How stable are moral objects?

We understand that physical characteristics are relative. The weight of a table is not inherent but a consequence of gravity acting on the tables mass. That’s pretty simple; on the moon the table weighs less. More confusing Einstein showed that the tables’ existence in time stretches and contracts depending on its movement relative to its surrounds. Do I know what this means? Not entirely. My guess is that it means the tables’ duration, just like its weight, is a perception that only makes sense in a context in which we too are present. When you think about it it’s not that surprising that duration (time) is basically a relationship between the table and the rest of our perception. 

The upshot of this is that our physical description of the table is not consistent for all situations. However as long as we don’t take it to the moon or launch the table at light speed we should be able to infer a particular table from the same physical description reliably and repeatedly. We can say that the words used to physically describe a table usually stay meaningful most of the time.

Subatomic particles however are much less stable physical objects. The physical characteristics of one of these tricky blighters are (so I’ve heard) “all over the shop.” Weight, speed, location and even existence change constantly. Each characteristic is highly interdependent on the rest and on the very act of observation. We are still trying out new vocabularies in order to have meaningful conversations about these objects.

It seems to me that the moral descriptors I have proposed produce moral objects that are also inherently unstable. Beneficence and harm are very situational while honesty and duplicity are subjective and evolving with our own self-awareness. Humility is the worst of all because it is interdependent with what we imagine we don’t know. That’s a floating parameter of the floatingest degree.

I’m about to cook up a piece of chicken for my lunch. Is that a moral, immoral or amoral action? How permanent is that description? It’s very likely battery hen chicken (no label either way) and purchased quite cheaply. I was intending to give it all to the dog but now intend to shallow fry a piece for myself. It’s very unhealthy and dirties a whole pan. Is this clearly a red light bad thing or does it flicker? Does it matter that I am sooo hungry and I’m finishing off something open in the fridge. Does it matter that having written this paragraph I am more aware than I would have been about my action? If a butterfly flaps its wings in an Amazon rainforest would we have to recalculate the moral weight of my action or am I just being silly?

How do moral objects relate to each other?

In physical descriptions we try to understand how one physical object impacts on another. In fact it’s worth recognizing that physical objects only make sense inside a lattice or web of forces that produce those objects. There is no table in isolation because without its current temperature and atmospheric pressure its atoms would behave differently. At least on a subatomic level there are constant exchanges between the table and the surrounding environment. Physical objects are not distinct or independent phenomenon.

Having now eaten the chicken what does my entire moral world look like? What is the impact from one moral object to another? If moral objects have the instability I mentioned earlier then it’s sensible to imagine that proximity to each other will result in shaping and reshaping of each other. If anything as I’ve described them moral objects are more interdependent and indistinct than physical ones. We can imagine a relationship between them.

The first word I think of to speak of a relationship between moral actions is karma. However karma is not a moral word itself. In fact karma is a way of talking in a particularly amoral way about moral actions. Karma isn’t “right”, it just is. Given that amoral objects are excluded from our moral world then amoral forces like karma would seem to have no place either. Karma, although it is about moral objects, belongs in a physical or metaphysical world rather than a moral one.

Particularly moral forces that tie together moral objects might include duty or obligation or debt. If an action can produce a debt which changes the morality of other actions then this is as if a moral object has affected the characteristics of another moral object.  That’s like a physics of morality. “How are debts between actions produced and cancelled?” is a fascinating question (not for this post though).

We don’t have to make the leap to assume that all debts must be cancelled. Maybe debt is the fundamental energy of a moral universe and if it gets extinguished then we obtain stasis – only an ideal state if you like it. It might be more interesting at least to pass debts on and around – to create states of high moral energy as well as low moral energy.

An artists challenge.

There are many points at which you may disagree with how I’ve pictured this ethical realm. Just like when we talk about physical objects two people can see two very different tables based on what’s important to them. You might even disagree that moral objects are only actions. Perhaps certain physical objects are for you sacred or profane in and of themselves.

An even more pivotal point of disagreement is on the usefulness of imagining an exclusively moral realm at all. I personally have enjoyed this as a thought exercise. I’m not committed to a moral realm as anything other than a way of exposing to myself my own moral language.

If you also found this a fun exercise I would love to receive links to pictures of how you see the moral world. If you want you can send me the pic itself and I’ll put it up alongside any others in this blog. I’ve been thinking lately the visuals of this site are a bit poor and I know too many talented artists for that to continue, surely.

So what do you think, can we do it? Can we picture moral objects interacting with each other and thus creating their world, a world we operate on in parallel to our physical one? Can we show each other what we see? Or has this blog finally gone off the deep end after a little too much Dr. Who? I’m not completely sure myself.

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Kudos to my friend Daniel for thinking outside the box and suggesting the following representation of a moral world. Also fluffy.

Why are Christians such a bloodthirsty lot? – The Unpayable Debt of Salvation.

1.Introduction  
2.The Folly of Evaluating Christianity 
3.The Unpayable Debt of Salvation (You are here)

There are different ways I could break up this series on the roots of Christian violence – chronologically or thematically. Fortunately this topic comes first of all in both. Here is a possible root of violence that is present within the life of the apostles, possibly even within the life of Jesus himself. It is also a theme that is primary to Christianity and remains so.

Just a reminder, this is going to be a series of my reflections on the question at hand. I’ve said before that I’m not buying into what is “real” Christianity or not. That means I remain interested in what some might consider “merely human” developments of “real” Christianity. That also means I’m not going to pull punches in order to respect some divine core of Christianity either. There will be sacred stones upturned too.

The stone I want to turn over in this post is the identity of God that Jesus represents and the emotional relationship that evoked and still evokes from his followers. Jesus stood out from the other divine alternatives in the first century. I think there are ways that this difference can inspire Christian violence.

That isn’t to say that other ideas of God wouldn’t inspire other ideas of violence. Nor am I saying that violence is a necessary conclusion of the way in which God is described in Jesus. It is merely to say that there’s a particular Christian form of violence inspired by the particular Christian way of relating to God.

The Christian movement’s growth in the first three centuries of what we call, not co-incidentally, the Christian era is amazing. Reliable estimates don’t exist but you could guess there were as few as five hundred followers of Jesus around the time of his death (just a conservative average of Acts 1:14-15 and Acts 4:4). You could further guess that in three centuries this number could be as high as ten percent of the Roman Empire – about six million. That’s the estimate of a historian named Erwin Goodenough (and it’s good enough for me).

Amazing as this is, Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity (pp5-8) points out it’s hardly miraculous. A growth rate of just forty percent per decade (which today is matched by Mormonism) gets you from five hundred adherents to a whopping eight and a half million in three centuries. By comparison the American Religious Identification Survey has Wicca growing by 168% in the U.S.A. in the last decade of the twenty first century. That was before Twilight too!

Still as anyone who has tried to start a new religion will tell you, it’s not as easy as it looks. Christians faced persecution of differing degrees for about half those three centuries. I believe (again leaning on Rodney Stark for my view) that this persecution actually supported Christian growth. I also believe that we can, by contemplating the meaning of this persecution for Christians, come to understand a turn to violence by Christians when the persecution ends.

Firstly we need to understand how the gods were viewed by most first century people outside of Jews and Christians. The Romans’ own creation myths were about the creation of Roman civilization. They borrowed from the Greeks primarily to explain the creation of the whole world. The Greeks themselves did not have a single creation story. One consensus though was that the world had not been created by the present generation of Gods at all. A common belief attributed creation to the Gods’ forebears who had either perished or withdrawn from the world. It was sometimes argued that the world had been created by something so unchanging and perfect that it had no personality to speak of – the unmoved mover. Today we might call this something like deism. The Gods that pagan Romans and Greeks actually interacted with however were not such a God as that.

The numerous Gods that the pagan Greeks and Romans interacted with were therefore not owed fealty as the Jews and Christians owed fealty to their God. They had no authors’ rights over people. People were free to contract an alliance with one god instead of another, with several gods at once and with some but not all.

Further the Greek and Roman Gods were not all powerful. They had spheres of influence but they weren’t the sole determinant of what happened in those spheres. Mars was the god of war, but if you won a battle you did not have to thank Mars. It wasn’t necessarily to Mars’ credit. Some battles were won by luck or through another God’s influence or in fact just by human effort.

By contrast the Judeo-Christian God, Yahweh (who would later be shared with Islam) is held to be the sole creator and determinant of all things. In fact Yahweh is so omnipotent that the concept of any human agency has at times been ruled as heretical. Yahweh is understood to have complete and absolute author’s rights over all their creation including people. We are not free to contract ourselves to other Gods. We owe this Hebrew God everything.

You might think that if God is owed everything then first century Jews could say they owe God some smackdown for their woes. However in Judaism and Christianity our positive debt is so huge that no amount of misfortune affects the scale of it. We are in debt for the ability even to have a bad day! In Roman culture it would be considered churlish to not thank the goddess Ceres for a good harvest. It would be considered wise to ask for another good year in the next and to do so respectfully with appropriate rituals. In Jewish culture thanks is due in a bad year or a good year - exactly as much thanks. The Jew or Christian holds that God owes them nothing. Also that God owes other people nothing too. The debt of the created is all one way and beyond our comprehension.

As if this wasn’t enough the Christian takes this debt and effectively doubles it. Both Christian and Jew believed in the first century that the subjugation of the kingdom of the Jews was a consequence of their failing God in some way. The shared conundrum of all Jews in Jesus’ time was how if Yahweh was indeed in charge that Yahweh’s temple was defiled, their people were diminished and their law was flaunted. A few sects believed they lived in the end times when God would soon restore their temple, people and law. But God, it was believed did not want these things in an unholy condition. They needed to be purified before restoration.

Jesus comes to represent at least two messages of purification and restoration which are a little too complicated for this post. What’s important to stress is that Christianity universalizes the condition of the Jews. The entire world is somehow suffering and tarnished and not how it should be. This is particularly evident by the lack of regard the world holds for its supposed creator. Jesus is the means of purification and restoration for the whole world and for each individual who turns to him. In order to be that Jesus had to suffer and die.

Many Jews did not recognize the means of their purification and restoration in Jesus. Moreover they understood the whole idea differently to the idea that their monotheistic deity Yahweh would send a son to do this. As the Jews understood it the covenant with God was to be restored by a human messiah who would be a perfect Adam, hence undoing the damage done by a flawed Adam in the beginning.

In this way Jews shared with a Pagan view that a person is in a healthy state if they have resolved any imbalances between themselves and the divine. Outstanding debts are unhealthy. Actually it would be fairer to say that Judaism lies somewhere between Christianity and paganism in this regard. The debt of creation can never be repaid but humanity and Israel in particular can at least hope to restore the covenant.

When Christians declared Jesus to in fact be divine from before birth, and equal with God (the Father) in essence though not function* they destroyed any hope of a human resolution to the broken covenant. This was now achieved entirely by God and in a painful and humiliating way as well. This effectively doubled humanity’s debt. It placed us in a position of virtually never being able to repay it. For a Pagan recently Christianised this was a position of ill health with almost no cure.

Contemporary Christians may baulk at the use of “virtually” and “almost” to describe the un-reparability of our salvic debt with God. A modern Christian probably can’t imagine any feasible repayment. However the Christian of the first three centuries had a solution at hand - martyrdom.

He (Jesus) said to him “Yes Peter, I am being crucified again.” And Peter came to himself and saw the Lord ascending into heaven: then he returned to Rome rejoicing and giving praise to the Lord, because he said, “I am being crucified”; since this was to happen to Peter.

–Acts of Peter where the apostle decides to return to Rome to be seized and executed. He is later crucified at his request upside down.

“The truth is, I am afraid it is your love that will do me wrong. For you, of course, it is easy to achieve your object; but for me it is difficult to win my way to God, should you be wanting in consideration of me… Grant me no more than that you let my blood be spilled in sacrifice to God.”

– Ignatius of Antioch asking his fellow Christians not to try and prevent his martyrdom around AD100.

In these records of early Christian attitudes (whether the Acts of Peter are accurate they were shared and believed) there is a rejoicing in martyrdom itself not just a lack of fear of death. These are not reluctant martyrs. This is consistent with the hope that martyrdom repays a Christian’s debt to the divine.

We can also look at the recurring religious phenomenon of self-mortification. Here the feebleness of human worship as a response to the crucifixion prompts some people to re-enact the suffering of Jesus. Mortifications are chosen which correspond to those sufferings i.e. whipping, a crown of thorns, carrying a cross or even, in the Philippines today, actual crucifixion. This is just sharing in Jesus wounds though. Martyrdom is an opportunity to fully respond in kind to Jesus. This would have been a great relief for Christians struggling with an inability to “close the circle” of exchange between them and the divine.

I don’t believe it was necessary for every Christian who felt this way to actually be martyred. It would have been enough to share in the possibility of martyrdom for all but the most determined. Just such mass public declarations of Christianity under persecution did occur. In the second century the entire Christian population of the region paraded past the house of a Roman governor in Asia Minor. They protested a policy of persecution and were strong enough to go unpunished for it. (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, p192)

In AD 312 however martyrdom opportunities dried up. The Roman Emperor Constantine converted. By 314 Christianity was officially tolerated. This upstart and rebel religion was on its way to political dominance. If my theory of a desire to repay divine debt has any validity the question has to be asked, “What does a martyr do when they are in power?” How is the colossal double debt of Christianity lived with?

I have good reason to believe that turning to violence against others is a natural response to these circumstances. That’s not due to any ancient document but the testimony of my own heart. When I recall the debts I feel burdened with and then think of people I consider fellow debtors who fail (refuse even?) to acknowledge that debt… something like anger and disgust can emerge.  I haven’t only seen this in others. I have been it.

When our desire to honour the debt is frustrated the next best way to “honour” the creditor is sought. That search is charged by our guilt. That can mean zealously teaching some respect to those who also should be grateful. At the very least abiding people who didn’t acknowledge their creator and saviour would have been a new challenge for a pagan mindset to overcome. It would be like watching a great hero who had suffered terribly to save everyone from danger being disregarded and defamed.

This kind of Christian violence is not only political. It is not merely a top down consolidation of power by a Christian elite. It is an emotional and irrational force. Jewish and pagan proselytizing was punishable by death by the mid 400s. However before that it was necessary to pass laws stating that “Jews are not to be attacked or synagogues burnt, but they must not outrage Christianity.” and that “Synagogues (are) not to be pulled down or confiscated” though “New ones not to be built”. (Medieval Sourcebook: Legislation Affecting the Jews from 300 to 800 CE) This suggests that the government was following even trying to minimize public violence rather than creating it.

In addition to motivating religious persecution Christian theology tended to legitimize it much more than paganism had. After all if you are a creation of Yahweh what right do you have to worship or even consider other Gods? If you have been additionally purchased by Yahweh’s son what right do you have to offend him with temples or synagogues that deny his salvation? It would be much more than a thousand years before Christians would substantially say anything other than “no right at all” to these questions. Religious persecution in pre-Christian Rome was actually limited and aberrant. Rodney Stark’s Rise of Christianity considers it overstated. Motivated by the burden of untouched debt to Christ it eventually became the unquestioned norm.

If any among them seek to introduce impious vanities, denying the resurrection or the judgment, or the work of God, or that angels are part of creation, we require them everywhere to be expelled forthwith; that no backslider raise his impious voice to contradict the evident purpose of God. Those who utter such sentiments shall be put to death, and thereby the Jewish people shall be purged of the errors which they introduced.

- Emporer Justinian 527-565 A.D.

It’s certainly not necessary to respond with violence to the catastrophic debt levels described by Christianity. Many people accept that they do not repay their creditors (God or parents or teachers) but instead pay it forward as best they can. This attitude, also founded on a sense of debt, can be found in the lives of many modern Christians. Volunteers at my local op shop, I’m thinking of you.

Similarly when plague killed a tenth of the Roman Empires civilization Christians tended to the sick and dying. They didn’t limit their service to their own and gave more care to pagans than the pagans own priests and leaders. We have received our concept of universal public health care from these people. We can guess they too were motivated by a theology of being owned by and owing God.

However many people have desired to pay God back for creation and for salvation. Those people have often viewed sacrifice in its literal and physical form. When sacrificing themselves becomes impossible I suggest that it’s a natural step to sacrificing others. There is nothing particularly unorthodox about their theology either. It is built on solid Judeo –Christian beliefs. These early martyrs are still taught as Christian heroes but it’s the martyrs you actually want to be afraid of.

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*Christology is in my opinion a massively tiresome area of theology. I hope no-one minds if I keep my coverage of it simple. I find the hairsplitting between essence and substance and actuality and so on to be largely meaningless; basically most Christians declare Jesus is God.