Democracy’s Moral Core

Posted in: News By House Divided on June 28, 2022

Whether by evolution or design, all human beings are born with a sense of morality. We have a sense of what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. Is our sense of morality purely subjective? If one person believes White Supremacy is wrong while another believes it is right can both be correct, from their own point of view? Does it even matter?

One man who took the simple question – “what is right and what is wrong” – very seriously was Russian author, Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was a Progressive, stating he believed in “progress as a rule for life…”. He embraced “the faith of progress” and said people ought to be “…free to choose the way of progress which they thought best.” But in his fiftieth year, Tolstoy began to challenge his own beliefs and concluded, “…to the simplest of all problems in life – what is right and what is wrong – we had no answer…”.

When Tolstoy asked one of life’s ultimate questions, “Why do I live?” he was told to follow the science: “Infinitely small particles, in infinite combinations, in infinite space and infinite time, change their forms in infinite combinations and when you have learned the laws of these changes, you will know why you live.” He would later say, “in the days of my mental weakness I was satisfied with this reasoning”. Tolstoy was beginning to grasp what fellow Russian author, Dostoyevsky meant when he wrote, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”

Few modern thinkers understood Tolstoy’s dilemma better than the late Yale law professor, Arthur Leff. Leff posed a disturbing question: “When would it be permissible to make the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand Sez Who?” He argued that in the absence of God, every legal and ethical system will be differentiated by the answer it gives to one key question: “who among us …ought to be able to declare ‘law’ that ought to be obeyed?” Stated that baldly, said Leff, “the question is so intellectually unsettling that one would expect to find a noticeable number of legal and ethical thinkers trying not to come to grips with it…”

Leff closed his essay stating, “…As things are now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. There is such a thing as evil… [All together now:] Sez Who? God help us”.

Many Americans believe that in a Democracy the majority ought to determine what is right and what is wrong. But does democracy only exist to ratify the desires and decisions of its majorities or is American democracy wedded to a set of fundamental propositions that those majorities are accountable to? And where do those propositions come from? Is there a moral core to our American democracy?

On July 4th, American’s celebrate Independence Day. Our Declaration of Independence has been called America’s Birth Certificate. The Declaration reminds us that America was founded upon a God-centered proposition: all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This proposition is either true or it is false. If it is true, then American democracy has never been concerned with the exercise of rights apart from doing what is right. If America’s founding principle is true, it continues to offer moral guidance for how we should view and treat our fellow man: every person has God-given dignity, meaning and worth and each person is entitled to have their God-given rights respected by others and protected by our government. The majority is never free to trample on the God-given rights of any individual or minority.

If this proposition is false, then man is merely a random combination of molecules and morality is a socially useless prejudice. We live on the political battlefield of competing and conflicting personal preferences, where “might makes right” and everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless, it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation. White Supremacy is evil… [All together now:] Sez Who?!!

God help us.