On my quest for goodness, I’ve been pondering for the past several years what exactly it means to be good. At first glance, it’s easy to think we know. However, when I actually get down into the weeds, I find that I don’t really think I know what it means to be good and I don’t think anyone else does either. Now, that may sound strange to say, and may even sound jarring, since most people reading this probably think they do know what it means to be good. Bear with me. I’ll explain.
First, I’ve asked myself if any one religion has the right answers. Many religions claim to. The problem is that religions are based on faith, not facts. I’ve had Evangelical Christians insist to me that the Bible is the “word of God” and, as such, they claim, they “know for certain” what good means. “Just follow the Bible,” the say.
There are several problems with this. (1) I’m not Christian. I think the Bible contains wisdom and mystical poetry, but I don’t think it’s the literal word of God. (2) The Bible, like many holy books, is full of contradictions. As such, it is impossible to use it, in its entirety, as a source of rational knowledge about morality, though it can certainly be used as a source of inspiration. If you can’t believe any two things in it that contradict each other, which of those do you choose? How could God have allowed His holy book to be so full of contradictions? That’s no problem for most Christians, since few Christians take it literally, but it would seem to be a problem for Fundamentalists. (3) My conception of Divinity isn’t precisely the Christian one. My conception of God is, first of all, an amalgam of all Deities, male, female, and other. The God of Abraham is only one face of Deity to me, and not one I focus on. Likewise, I consider Jesus to have been no more divine than the rest of us, though he may well have been much wiser. I might go with the idea that he was a holy man who, mystically, became one with God. If so, that’s indeed special, but not unique, if we believe other religions that have holy people who are said to be become one with God. (4) As I’ve said, religion is taken on faith, anyway, not based on facts.
Now, I have great respect for Christianity, and I know that Christian theologians have written elegantly and extensively on just these issues. I have profound respect for the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. I’m merely using one religion most readers will be familiar with as an example.
My own religion has this to say about morality: “an it harm none, do as ye will.” This is known as the Wiccan Rede. Avoiding harm is certainly the basis of morality, but it doesn’t mean that we know any better than Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or anyone else.
The point is that no religion really knows for absolute certain what it means to be good. Many religions suggest hypotheses about goodness. I believe all religions have wisdom to teach. However, I don’t think any religion, not even my own, really knows for sure what it means to be good. Religions are great for spiritual guidance, not necessarily for rational knowledge.
I then turn to philosophy for answers, but come up short again. Aristotle thought that being good meant being virtuous by finding balance between polar vices. The classic example is that the virtue of courage is a good balance between the vices of foolhardiness and cowardice. Immanuel Kant thought that we should all ask, “can we will it as a universal law that it be so for everyone?” John Stuart Mill thought we should try to maximize everybody’s happiness. The Buddha taught that we should have compassion.
There’s problems with all of these. Aristotle’s virtues sound good, but is that really all that good means? I could easily imagine a society that had lots of discipline, courage and honesty that, nevertheless, was full of bad people who used discipline, courage and honesty to carry out their evil.
Kant’s ethics seem to be too absolute. If we say we should never steal, for example, it seems like a poor, starving child shouldn’t be able to steal a loaf of bread, but I think most of us would say that she should be able to. So, there seem to be exceptions to every rule.
Mill tries to explain why we don’t, say, give all our money to heroin addicts by distinguishing between “gross” and “subtle” happiness. The idea is that, say, heroin doesn’t really make people happy, because it’s “gross” not “subtle”, whereas being sober would, because it’s “subtle” not “gross”. What exactly is difference, though, between “subtle” and “gross”? For example, is being gay “gross” or “subtle”? Decades ago, many people, sadly, would have said it was “gross”, but today many of us understand being gay in terms of love, comparable to straight relationships. That would seem to make it subtle.
As someone who was raised Buddhist, I certainly try to have compassion for others. Nevertheless, compassion can be manipulated by tear-jerkers. It can be misgiven. Compassion seems to me to be an important virtue, but I wonder if it doesn’t need to be tempered by self-discipline, as well. We may well have compassion to responsible people to whom bad things have happened, but may have less compassion to an irresponsible person who has caused their own problems.
So, where does that leave us? Some interfaith folks have suggested that the Golden Rule (do to others as you’d want others to do to you) is a common moral in many religions. I think it’s great… as a general guideline. However, there are some cases in which it doesn’t work. Should an extrovert run over to an introvert and yell, “hiiiiiii! Great to see you!”, if they know that will overwhelm the introvert and make them uncomfortable? Although the extrovert probably would want to be treated that way, the introvert probably would not. We know that different people want different things.
What about intuition? Am I being too logical about all this? Intuition is a wonderful thing. The problem is that different people may have different intuitions about what’s right and wrong. While it’s true that logic can only take us so far, that’s also true of intuition. Intuition does not provide us with any way to determine who’s intuition is right and who’s is wrong. Unlike reason, which can be checked, one can’t really go through the calculations of intuition, because there are none. The best we can do is say whether our intuition is the same or different as somebody else’s. It’s good to check our logic with our intuition, but we also need to check our intuition with our logic.
So, where does that leave us with morality? I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, and neither does anybody else. Most of us think we do. I used to. If someone can prove to me that one moral system is right, I’ll listen. So far, though, nobody has. That does not mean, at all, that nobody is moral, or that we should stop trying. I still have my intuitions about morality. I’ve been informed by the wisdom of various religions and philosophers. That all comes back to me when I need to make a moral decision. It’s just that I only think I know what’s right and so does everybody else. None of us actually knows for sure.
So, where do we go from here? I believe that morality is a spiritual state of mind. I’m fond of that Beatles quote, “when you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find that peace of mind is waiting there.” Having spiritual experiences of seeing beyond ourselves is the key to each one of us understanding goodness for ourselves. It doesn’t allow any of us to push our ideas on others, but it does provide us with an immediate experience of the Good.
I’m working on a new project that I call the Religion of Good. I believe that we can contemplate goodness by using the practices of religion and spirituality to develop a personal relationship with Good, just as many religious and spiritual people develop a personal relationship with God.