In ethical discussions, an important question is what, specifically, sets moral values apart from other personal values. In other words, what makes moral values so important for people to have that other values lack? Is perseverance a moral value? What about intelligence? Beauty?
I think there are two different errors possible in a discussion like this. The first is the assumption that we do not need a definition at all for a broadly used concept like this. “Everybody knows what moral values are,” some people might be tempted to say, “so going around looking for a definition does not matter.” This is false; getting a good definition helps us better understand moral values, and might cause us to come to surprising conclusions about them in the first place.
But the other error is to think that, because a definition is hard to find, we do not have any idea what moral values are at all. But this is silly, as illustrated by a classic story about Plato and the cynic philosopher Diogenes: Diogenes wandered into Plato’s academy and asked him to define a human being. Plato gave a working definition: a human being is a featherless biped. Upon hearing this, Diogenes promptly went to the market, plucked a chicken, brought it back to the academy and held it out, declaring “Behold, the man!”
Diogenes was not wrong that Plato’s definition was a bad one. But he also did not, as far as I know, go on to make a further claim based on that: that Plato had no idea what a human being was, or that human beings did not exist. Such a claim would be fallacious. Similarly, having trouble defining moral values does not necessarily imply that moral values do not exist, or that we have no idea what they are. It just means definition is hard, sometimes.
Dietrich von Hildebrand gave five qualities that make moral values different from other personal values, and today I thought it would be helpful to offer them as an aid for future ethical discussions.
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Trait 1: You Are Responsible For the Moral Values You Have
We all have, to some degree, certain traits that we cannot avoid having, and nobody blames us for having, or not having. Intelligence is a good example. Each person has a capacity of intelligence that is not entirely up to us. We can develop or fail to develop the natural aptitude we have, but some people are just smarter than others. Moreover, nobody is required to develop their intelligence to a particular point. Your life may be successful, or less so, depending on that development, but nobody is at fault if they are unintelligent. It is more like they are unfortunate.
Moral values are not this way. While each person might find particular values (like patience) easier or more difficult to practice, we are responsible for developing them even if we do not have them. One may not accept their lack of patience, or justice, or chastity as just “who they are.” You
Trait 2: Moral Values Affect Our Consciences
Nobody feels guilty for failing to be musically talented, at least assuming no mitigating factors that makes musicality obligatory. But moral values have a bearing on our consciences. We feel good when we possess them, and guilty when we do not.
I will point out that this does not just apply to ourselves. We think that people ought to feel bad if they are a thief or a scoundrel. If someone is committing adultery and refuses to feel bad for it, our response is typically something like “what is wrong with you?!?!” But if someone is bad at baseball and starts to feel guilty about it, we would all take that as a problem; we would try to remind them that baseball does not change their value as a person, and that there is nothing to be ashamed about being unathletic. Interestingly, even if we think that morality is subjective, we know that there are some things that are fit to be the subject of a guilty conscience, and some that are not.
Trait 3: Moral Values Are Indispensable
Nobody is allowed to skip a particular virtue. It is perfectly acceptable to say “I am good at baseball, but I am hopeless at guitar.” But imagine someone saying “I am a generous person, so I do not really care that I am not chaste.” Hopefully your skin crawls at the thought. You do not get to skip certain virtues in your life with the consolation that you are good at other virtues.
Again, this does not deny that some people find certain virtues easier than others. But that is a problem to be dealt with, not a scenario you are free to accept.
Some in the Virtue tradition go even further, stating that you do not properly have any virtue, at least not wholly, unless you have all the virtues. But I will not defend that claim here since Hildebrand does not make it.
Trait 4: Moral Values Are, and Should Be, Rewarded and Punished
Imagine a law that put people in prison for being bad painters, or having ugly facial hair. Such a policy would obviously be ridiculous, because artistry or beauty are not traits that merit punishment or reward. They may merit a kind of appreciation, which Hildebrand is more than willing to grant them as genuine values deserving of proper value responses. But they do not deserve reward or punishment in the way that moral values do.
This intuition is a common trope in movies and books, in which an overbearing parent, school or institution treats being a great violinist or star athlete as the top value in their child’s life, leading to punishment or reward based solely on their achievement on the stage or gridiron. Even relatively normal punishments for moral failings, like grounding, would be completely inappropriate for messing up a violin recital even if the punishment was effective.
Trait 5: Moral Values Are Superior to Other Personal Values
Finally, Moral Values are superior to other personal values, both in value and necessity. Mother Teresa is more valuable, has lived a better life, than Steve Jobs. St. John Bosco was greater than Elon Musk. When choosing who to emulate, you should want to be more like the latter than the former. It is more important to be a morally upright person than than a professionally successful one.
I suspect that many who are skeptical of this claim might be so mostly on the grounds of my examples. But take two incredibly polarizing ones: Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Both men are, by basically any metric, as successful as anybody can be. Yet both turned out to be moral monsters in at least one area. When people learn of their moral failings, very few people say “oh that’s fine; they made it to the top, so who cares!” Instead, most people, even if they were willing to accept Clinton or Trump’s politics on utilitarian grounds, would admit that being fine presidents1 did not make them good men.
The reason for this is that moral values have a unique way of defining our quality. Those with sufficient moral values are “good” people, and with insufficient moral value are “bad” people. Really, nothing else matters in that evaluation.
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Fine from the perspective of this hypothetical “hold my nose and vote” person, not my own views. I make no claims about who you should vote for, and tried to pick the two most uncontroversially morally flawed presidents from Republicans and Democrats as I could think of rather than making equivalences or political claims.
As Catholics we have one objective, that is to achieve eternal life with God. Everyone, Catholic or not is promised the opportunity to achieve this. We thus have the obligation to seek this objective for ourselves and for others.
In other words we live in one world but our destination is another. So moral decisions are those that facilitate others in this objective and for ourselves.
This does not mean we cannot flourish in this world by being a good musician, excellent at a sport or successful at an activity, travel, well read but not if it interferes with ourselves and someone else reaching the next world.
So morality is simply how we effect others and ourselves in achieving this fundamental objective.
What I appreciate about your article is that it moves the discussion beyond moral conclusions and asks a deeper question: what vision of human nature produced those conclusions in the first place? Good article!