Morality in the Absence of a Story

Some while back, Robert Jenson wrote “How the World Lost its Story“ (FT, October 1993), and it has provided rich grist for many intellectual mills, including Steven D. Smith of Notre Dame Law School in an article in the Wake Forest Law Review . The commonly assumed distinctions between the “religious” and the “secular” and between “religion” and “morality” are really very odd, says Smith, and make little sense to people who believe that the world has a story, as in upper case Story. The moral question, How should I live?, has an obvious answer: I should live in harmony with the Story of which my life is part. People who have lost the Story come up with sundry moral theories of a utilitarian or pragmatic sort, but they are finally of a merely prudential sort. And, as Smith notes, a problem with mere prudentialism is that its adoption is imprudent “because if people realize that the point of ‘morality’ is really to get what we want, then people will lose their incentive to respect the moral-prudential imperatives that prudence itself imposes whenever those imperatives seem to impede us from getting what we want.”

And so Smith poses his question this way:

Can we reconstruct a “morality” that is more than merely prudential without a Story? Most people (or at least most specialists) seem to believe-though perhaps out of desperation-that we can. So they set about devising what we might think of as “Story-substitutes.” There are various candidates for this role, but the leading candidates to succeed the Story seem to be, first, moral discourse itself and, second, the characters who remain-who have been left stranded, so to speak, without their Story.

The first Story-substitute proposal observes that although we may not be situated in a Story, as we had supposed, still we do find ourselves situated in a moral discourse. We still use words like “should” and “ought,” “right” and “wrong,” “naughty” and “nice”; and we still talk about things like “virtues” and “duties” and “rights.” This usage seems inescapable, as the nihilist “wannabe” quickly learns when he embarrasses himself by declaring that “we ought to stop saying ‘ought.’“ Moreover, we still recognize that some ways of using this moral vocabulary seem appropriate and broadly “grammatical;” other usages do not. Indeed, analytical philosophers can devote entire careers to studying and explaining how this moral discourse works. So perhaps this discourse can take the place of the Story; indeed, maybe we will do better-become better moral reasoners-without the Story.

The second Story-substitute proposal suggests that moral rights and duties can be squeezed out of the characters themselves, without the aid of any Story-like the odd movie that succeeds with good characters even without the benefit of a discernible plot. Probably the most influential version of this proposal observes that these characters-ourselves, in other words-aspire (at least intermittently) to behave “rationally.” Some people might be inclined to deny that this aspiration is their most important feature, and a few might try to disclaim it altogether; but it proves to be harder than you might think to deny the commitment. Try it: a philosopher will ask you to defend your denial-to explain why you are not obligated to be rational-and as soon as you try to satisfy this request the philosopher will say, “See, you can’t deny your rational nature without contradicting yourself, because you resort to reasoning even in resisting rationality.” So perhaps this innate rationality can be the source of categorical duties that would provide the substance of “morality.” Perhaps it could be shown that some responses to the question “How should I live?” are self-contradictory and hence irrational, and that other responses are not.

Obviously, this is not the occasion to enter into the labyrinthine philosophical debates surrounding these “Story-substitute” candidates. But even for present purposes I think I can notice one objection that is in a sense “pre-philosophical,” and hence that even a non-philosopher might be permitted to raise. I can explain the objection in this way: those of us who remember our upbringing in Idaho may think that these Story-substitute accounts, intriguing and important though they may be, are guilty of “changing the subject.” For all of their ingenuity and their (perhaps considerable) merits, in other words, these accounts seem not to be talking about the same sort of thing that we have all along understood “morality” to be (or that we encounter when we feel ourselves subject to “moral” constraints). “Your analysis is very impressive,” we might say to the Story-substitute proponents, “just as the consequentialists’ analysis was impressive. But you said they weren’t really talking about ‘morality’; and it seems that you aren’t either. Even you ‘moral discourse’ types are talking about how we talk about morality-not about morality itself.”

We might make basically the same point, I think, by asking a “So what?” question. Why does “morality,” thus reconceived, exert any significant moral “pull” on us in the way the Story did (or, for the devout, still does)? When we raise this concern with the proponents of the Story-substitute “moralities” (“Why should I make an effort to comply with my moral ‘duties’ as you understand them?”), the answer typically ends up being either that “That’s just what it means to be ‘moral’ (or ‘virtuous,’ or ‘good’)” or else that if we do not comply with the demands of morality we will have committed a special kind of rational blunder-a “performative contradiction.” And our attitude toward each of these responses is likely to be “So what?” The “So what?”, in this context, is a way of expressing that the Story-substitutes are not, in reality, doing what the Story did: they are, rather, ways of changing the subject.

All of which brings us back to those taken-for-granted distinctions between the “religious” and “secular,” and between “religion and morality.”

Even if it is misconceived, though, the question is still pressed upon us: Is it permissible in our political community for public decisions to be based on moral values informed by religion? So I suppose that the devout citizen will just answer “yes,” adding under her breath, “Because, in the final analysis, that’s the only kind of moral values there are.” Asking whether citizens should be permitted to rely on religious convictions in addressing moral issues will seem to the devout a bit like asking whether horses should be allowed to run in the Kentucky Derby, or whether participation in symphony orchestras should be open to musicians. The questions seem a bit peculiar, but I suppose the appropriate response is still to smile and say “yes.”

So in the end, the tough-minded, post-Story people and the more traditionally devout people may give the same short answer to our question. But their tone-and their longer answers-will be quite different. The devout citizen answers “yes” while thinking that she is putting up with a good deal of conceptual and perhaps spiritual confusion. The tough-minded post-Story survivor may (if he is an indulgent sort of person) also answer “yes”; but if he does he will believe that he is generously tolerating a good deal of backwardness and obscurantism. And as particular controversies arise (about abortion, or the “right to die,” or same-sex marriage), these deeper differences are likely to make even a surface convergence on a “yes” answer seem quite thin.

Still, there is at least a possibility of convergence, at a fairly abstract level, on the answer. It is harder to understand who ought to be really happy with the question-or with the way the culture that produces the question forces us to talk.

I’m not sure the culture “forces” us to talk that way. The pressure to do so can be defied, as Steven Smith defies it. He is among those whom he calls the devout, and he does not simply smile and say “yes” to the way the question is posed. He challenges the question, and explains why. And so should we all.