MY UNIVERSAL MORAL THEORY

What is happening is I am going through my journal and reading all the entries for the past year, as one more way of reflecting and remembering and moving on, and I am finding several entries that have stuck with me, which therefore seem worth sharing.  I wrote this entry in a flash after a heated debate with Shawn Scott, in which we both jokingly pretended we could "solve" the world situation right there between us, like we were college kids or something, as if there's a way of seeing things that we in our baby experience can perceive, and if we could just say it, the rest would work itself out.  (Actually, if I remember correctly, I was pretending, and Shawn was trying to crush my hopes.  Typical.)  I don't quite take myself seriously enough to still assert it, but it's exhilarating, and so I play, I pretend.  I never quite said it plainly in the journal, but I think what I was getting at was: If we think of socialization as the process by which a society teaches its children what matters, which people matter, and how we acknowledge which people matter, we can avoid the unconstrained moral relativism that a multicultural awareness is sometimes accused of bringing.  BECAUSE that would mean that the socializing process (which every society participates in) implicitly values life, so we could take the valuing of life as a transcultural moral good.  Here is what I wrote.

Here is my universal moral theory: that all ethical action should fundamentally spring from the valuing of (human) life.  I have been shy in asserting this because it seems so Western and American, which means that to impose it would be imperialistic, and imperialism is exactly the opposite of freedom, equality, autonomy, valuing of individual persons, all those values we wish everyone in the world subscribed to.  But I maintain that without a fundamental valuation of life, it will be impossible to talk across cultural boundaries about ethical principles, so we have to find some way to agree upon this, and here is what Shawn (unwittingly) helped me realize: that socialization, inculturization, is really just the process of teaching children that the human enterprise matters, that LIFE matters.  Cultures vary on which lives matter and how they demonstrate the valuing of life, but none is able to completely disregard human life altogether.  If they did, as a whole, they would self-destruct.  And since formally, due to the human creature's process of meaning-making, life of some stripe is valued, then this really can be our starting point, and it is quite a compelling starting point.  Those incapable of valuing human (or other) life, I classify as sociopaths.  I classify sociopathy as an illness and a dysfunction, it is precisely the inability to behave ethically, and if all people are either life-valuers or sociopaths, then I've got the world covered.  That's all there is, the world makes sense, I don't lose the moral authority to call certain acts morally reprehensible, and I can still be a pluralist.  It is a puzzle and I feel I have solved it.

BECAUSE.  This means that by the very fact of a society's BEING a society, it holds the seeds of moral transformation within it.  It implicitly affirms the value of human life as fundamental.  We don't have to usurp any culture, even the most brutal.  We just have to work within it.  It is possible.  And that is heartening.

*Photo courtesy of Craig Henry Tichelkamp.