A Definition Worth Having: One of Three of The Grace Series

The next three pieces are written to be read in order with time between them. They build on each other deliberately. I’m going to ask you to sit with each one before moving to the next.

I’m not going to tell you where we’re going. I’m just going to ask you to come with me.

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A question for today.

What is morality?

I want you to sit with that for a moment before we go any further. Don’t reach for the answer you were given. Don’t pull out the verse you were taught. What do you actually think morality is? What does it look like when you see it in a person? What does it feel like when it’s violated?

This matters. The next couple of pieces I’m writing need this question answered first because everything else we’re going to talk about rests on it. I don’t want to build on ground we haven’t examined.

So before you read another word — what is your definition of morality?

Think of the most genuinely moral person you have ever known. Not the most doctrinally correct. Not the most compliant. Not the one who never missed a church service or whose head covering sat at exactly the right angle. The person whose goodness felt most real to you. The one you would trust with your children or your worst secret or your darkest moment.

What is it about that person that makes them that way? When you sit with it honestly — is it what they follow or is it how they see people?

Now the harder question.

Think of someone you have known who followed every rule. Met every standard. Was by every measurable institutional standard correct and compliant. Was that person genuinely moral? Did their rule following translate into how they treated people who had nothing to offer them? The person at the margins. The one who didn’t fit. The one who was already on their way out.

You already know the answer. You felt it at the time even if you didn’t have permission to trust what you felt.

One more.

Has the rule ever failed someone you loved? Was there a moment where doing the correct thing by every institutional standard produced an outcome that felt deeply and undeniably wrong? What did you do with that feeling?

I’m asking because that feeling has a name. We’ll get there.

I’ve written about this before and most readers won’t be surprised by where I land. My definition of morality came from the time I spent as an atheist. It’s simple. Something is good, right, moral, if it increases wellbeing. It is bad, wrong, immoral, if it increases suffering. It doesn’t matter what the Buddha, Jesus, Vishnu, or Allah had to say. If it hurts people it’s immoral. If it brings wellbeing it’s moral.

Christianity has a name for this. The Golden Rule.

Here is something worth sitting with. The Golden Rule didn’t originate with Jesus. Confucius taught it five hundred years earlier — do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself. Rabbi Hillel said it before Jesus walked the earth and then added that everything else in the Torah was simply commentary on that single idea. Islam has it. Buddhism has it. Hinduism has it. Zoroastrianism has it. Cultures separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years with no contact with each other arrived at the same principle independently.

That kind of universality doesn’t happen with invented rules. It happens when something is being recognized rather than created.

Every tradition that found it found it the same way. Not through divine dictation to one chosen group. But through human beings taking the suffering of other human beings seriously. Through empathy doing what empathy does when it’s allowed to function.

Which means the most foundational moral principle in human history isn’t the property of any single religion. It belongs to every person who has ever felt someone else’s pain as if it were their own and decided to act accordingly.

The institution would have you believe morality was handed to one group in one place at one time and that they are its guardians. The evidence says otherwise. Morality kept showing up everywhere human empathy was allowed to breathe.

I know we can get into the weeds here and many religions love to keep us living in the weeds. Someone will say — but what about shunning? We cause short term pain because we’re trying to save them from something worse.

I don’t accept that.

We do not have the ability to see into the future and predict exactly how our actions will play out in another person’s life. We cannot see with certainty what pain we should inflict on someone today hoping it produces the outcome we imagine they need tomorrow. And I’m fairly certain we would not want others making that calculation about us.

Which child will treat others better? The child given strict instruction on how to be nice or the child who was ruthlessly bullied and decided — from the inside out — that they would never make another person feel that way?

One was taught. One was transformed.

If you wouldn’t do it to your own kids a higher power wouldn’t do it to you.

When we look at the moral laws Jesus gave we can always ask — what would the empathetic response be? When we find that answer it will line up with what Jesus had to say. Every time.

Empathy and morality are the same thing.

That feeling you had when the rule failed someone you loved — that was empathy. That was your moral compass working correctly. You were right to feel it.

The institution just never gave you permission to trust it.