Individual morality in an age of slogans and platitudes

What makes a person ‘moral’ is not his or her loud boasts or the regurgitation of ‘correct opinion’. What makes a moral person is a deep, active, interior conviction.

Racism is not wrong because Black Lives Matter says it is wrong. Police brutality is not a blight on a free society because it is trendy to tweet about it. Murder of an unarmed citizen is not immoral because a celebrity tells us it is so. These things are wrong independently of custom, posture and fashion.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of our own flourishing matter because they are eternal goods, they transcend our own moment in history, and they apply across all cultures and individuals.

It is because we know this, and that this wisdom has been so hard-won, that we recognise racism is wrong. Each of us recognises that liberty is an essential ingredient to our own fulfilment, and so we also recognise that denying it to another human being based on skin colour is repellent.

In recent weeks, however, western democracies seem to have given up on this form of robust humanism, and have adopted a system of moral thinking based on online virality and hashtag consensus. Like the worst dogmatic and schismatic religious zealots, all right-thinking people in Britain and the United States are now compelled to utter the official doctrine on the causes, realities and solutions about racism, or else face being cancelled, or worse, violently threatened.

What this culture of the moral hashtag makes us forget, however, is that a necessary part of mature, moral agency is internal discretion.

If we reduce important moral questions to slogans and platitudes, we cannot really claim to be moral at all.

True moral conviction requires deep inner commitment. To denounce racism through posting black pictures on Instagram or joining a rabble pulling down a statue (however bad the person depicted in that statue was), is to renounce one’s own ethical agency in favour of an abstract, risk-free and destructive posturing.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard used the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate this point about internal conviction in his classic work Fear And Trembling.

Abraham is called upon by God to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. As a result, Abraham finds himself in a moral paradox. He is a holy man, so must obey God. But if he obeys God, he is a murderer and therefore violating God’s law. As everyone knows, God intervenes at the last moment to stop Abraham obeying this order, and God does so precisely because he is pleased with Abraham’s moral conviction. His commitment to God is now beyond doubt.

Kierkegaard’s intention was not to say that there may be times when a holy man could kill his own son. This story illustrates, for Kierkegaard, the fact that human beings are complex and that a fully realised, nuanced and profound ethical life cannot be reduced to easy, comforting abstractions. What makes us human beings is precisely the fact that our most important characteristics are not easily subsumed in bland, convenient universals.

In normal, everyday ethical judgements, Abraham should have disobeyed God and saved his son. But Kierkegaard believed this was impossible for Abraham because he was in his fundamental essence a man of God, and his holiness is manifested in a horrifying leap of faith based on an internal, wrenching decision that is ultimately unfathomable to an onlooker. To be a fully realised human being, said Kierkegaard, we must actively make ourselves ‘the ethical individual’; the defining feature of an ethical individual is not how well we fit into some preconceived set of moral laws, but how we define ourselves as authentic, self-created persons before God.

This unsettling biblical story of a holy man agreeing to kill his son for God, teases out what is missing in public discourse right now. Slogans and lazy soundbites dominate the public space, and in allowing them to do so, we have relinquished the very moral agency that is essential if we are to become truly good people.

What makes a person ‘moral’ is not his or her loud boasts or the regurgitation of ‘correct opinion’. What makes a moral person is a deep, active, interior conviction.

Kierkegaard called this profound conviction ‘inwardness’ and in our shrill culture of shallow moral grandstanding, it is this essential quality that is sadly all too absent.