If we are to help our young people to resist the forces enjoining them to abandon their moral convictions to carry out their “professional duty” or to avoid being “out of step” with their peers, we will need to create social structures and communities in which intellectual training and moral formation in the virtues can happen. We need a culture that respects all life and does not make some lives secondary; that inculcates sensible moral reasoning skills to enable people to recognize more readily specious arguments and rhetorical misdirection; that builds self-awareness to recognize when self-interest is masquerading as moral argument or taking refuge in specious post-facto rationalizations; that makes clear that “being a somebody” is not bound up with having, but with being; and that being is achieved by identifying oneself and acting in accord with certain moral norms and virtues.
And we must, at long last, reject the notion that we are fundamentally autonomous individuals—dispassionate, neutral thinking things that choose freely and choose best without influence from outside ourselves. This was always a foolish and dangerous illusion, and it is one we can no longer afford.
2 comments:
What we need is the gospel. Without regeneration virtue is a facade that will come crumbling down in the face of adversity. Social structures and communities giving training in moral virtue might expose our lack of it, but they aren't the cure. We need to realize how fundamentally broken we are, and how much we need Christ to change us.
As for "being", we don't "achieve it". We have it already as a gift from our creator. We can't lift ourselves, we can't create ourselves, and we can't improve ourselves. Only the Lord who made us can do that.
Perri,
I agree that what we really need is the gospel, but we can still teach moral virtues in a secular world, and we should do so.
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