What Does It Mean To Be "Moral?"
A 4-part post series exploring the "moral" of moral injury
What does it mean to be “moral?”
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. A disclaimer: I’m not a theologian, philosopher, ethicist, or expert in other fields that study morality. Like many of us, I’m a pragmatist, just curious enough in the day-to-day to want to know “why.”
Morality is often understood as “doing what’s right.” Yet, how do we know that we’re doing the right thing? Recently, I’ve read and experienced some things that have made me wonder if being moral is more complex than merely doing what’s “right.”
Headlines such as “Recently Axed Federal Workers Face Relatives Who Celebrate Their Firing.”
Conversations with congregation members: Trying to teach a 7-year-old daughter “not every (moral) battle is worth fighting; trying to understand their parents’ choice to reject their children’s based on views on sexuality; and reconciling feelings of hurt and confusion being on the receiving end of institutional politics in the workplace.
My church organization, alarmed at the rising influence of Christian Nationalism and its ongoing “cold war” with its conservative counterpart, engages in mission and ministry funding strategies that sound a lot like counterinsurgency.
I find myself in several workspaces where I notice prevailing attitudes of “groupthink” and confirmation bias due to social and ideological homogeneity. When this is pointed out, others respond with confusion and disinterest.
In all of these cases, I notice a trend. There is a pattern of how people and groups understand what is “right” - but it feels incomplete. I couldn’t quite name that incompleteness until I came across this insight:
The literature [on moral injury] shows violation of expected empathy from and for others, inherent in our nature, is more devastating than violation of the ethical code of our culture or sub-culture, adherence to which becomes urgent as our need emerges to belong to the culture or subculture of which we are a part, values which often contradict our innate sense of ‘‘what is right.’’1
I wonder if we have lost something in our picture of morality, namely, that “right” has been reduced to an understanding that inevitably leads to marginalization and harm at the expense of “moral” objectives and ends. That is what this project will explore. Over the next four posts, I will explore this nagging feeling of moral conflict and, drawing from my own sources of morality, offer a way forward from theological and secular perspectives. If you’re like me, feelings including frustration, outrage, betrayal, shame, guilt, despair, and helplessness indicate the presence of moral injury. However, processing and drawing insights from those emotions requires an exploration of the “moral” of moral injury, or what is moral.
I hope you’ll join me!