To say that we denizens of the late-modern world are “moral stutterers”—as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in his magisterial if somewhat dyspeptic After Virtue—is to do a disservice to those of us who have struggled with stuttering. MacIntyre was writing about the effects of the loss of shared coherent narratives through which we in the West once learned how to think and act with moral integrity and consistency.11xAlasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). First published 1982. And his explanation for that loss is powerfully made. But at the risk of sounding petty, I would suggest that “stutterer” is not the right word. For people who stutter, the coherence of their thought or life story is not the issue; their challenge is the fluidity of their articulation.
None of this is to minimize MacIntyre’s main point that the moral incoherence of the narratives we now tell ourselves, individually and collectively, is at the crux of our ethical impoverishment. I would go further to suggest that this incoherence is largely a function of the denial of the “moral” as a category of lived experience. We now simply lack an adequate vocabulary for making moral judgments or for directing moral action in our public or private lives—a deficiency that not only underlies the contentious binaries of the ongoing culture war but one that aggravates their contentiousness. I want to emphasize that this impoverishment is not an outright rejection of moral or ethical language per se. Our public discourse is chock-full of moral evaluation. Rather, the “denial” is the net effect of a thinning out of the language of moral evaluation such that it is unable to deal with the moral complexities and quandaries of everyday life. This immiseration of our moral grammar results in the effective denial of the moral as a category of lived experience. How did this come to pass?
The Materialist Turn
Among the most progressive offspring of the Enlightenment, particularly those committed to the positivist project of explaining everything through the methods of modern science, the reframing of the moral came about mainly through an increasingly determined effort to replace the rich and complex traditions of moral thought deriving mostly from the older theisms with the supposedly objective and coldly analytical language of utility.
In the public sphere, moral agency and moral evaluation inevitably took expression in an unadorned instrumentalism that prizes procedure and is oriented, in principle, toward bureaucratic fairness. In the private sphere of personal and interpersonal affairs, utility ultimately took an expressive and therapeutic form that, in principle, was oriented toward subjective well-being—happiness, positivity, and self-esteem. The instrumental and the therapeutic are simply different sides of the same utilitarian coin. To be sure, the language of utility is a moral language, but one that is diminished by its reduction to function. As ethical languages go, it is not nothing. But in the end, it is a crude tool, ill-suited to discerning, much less negotiating, the moral and ethical complexities of everyday life.
What was behind this?
Sigmund Freud is obviously a central figure in the story. His most revolutionary contribution to history and culture lay not in his theories of psychosexual development or the irrational, or even in his development of the techniques of psychoanalysis. His more enduring legacy, rather, was his decisive role in bringing an end to the religious interpretation of the soul as being and agent and in reducing the interiority and agency of the individual to biologically driven needs and responses, including fantasies, repressions, phobias, and sublimations.22xMutatis mutandis: Marx’s greatest contribution to culture wasn’t his theory of surplus value or of commodification, but rather the end of any plausible religious interpretation of the world and its history implicit within the dialectic of materialism. This materialist turn in Freudian understandings of personhood was a world-historical event. And even though psychoanalysis is now largely passé, Freud’s thoroughly materialist conception of the human subject continues to suffuse contemporary culture and thought, high and low, intellectual and popular, even among those who consider themselves, if not religious, at least “spiritual.” The trend toward medicalization through biochemical interventions as the best practice for addressing emotional trauma—and increasingly a range of what were once considered everyday existential challenges or vexations—has only buttressed this materialist turn.
Influential as they were, Freud’s innovations highlighted a shift that was actually long in the making, adumbrated by the centuries-long Enlightenment quest to understand the nature and quality of moral attitudes as something other than a mind-independent reality. That quest continues. Indeed, by the early twenty-first century, academic psychology would conclude that moral intuitions and evaluations were nothing more than the “products of the brain… not miraculous channels to the Truth.”33xPatricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 190.
Accordingly, a concept such as “moral character” might be used as an inspirational trope, but for serious study, it was thought to lack empirical validity or practical utility. As early as the 1930s, Harvard University psychologist Gordon Allport had argued that character is merely “personality evaluated,” or, conversely, that “personality is character devalued.” Insisting that character is nothing more than an “ethical concept,” he concluded that “the psychologist does not need the term at all; personality alone will serve.”44xGordon W. Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1937), 52.
Over the generations, this way of thinking has filtered so widely through public discourse that it is now reflexively—and almost exclusively—applied to a range of public issues. Deeply disturbed young people who perpetrate mass school shootings are certainly demonstrating antisocial behavior (to say the least), but they are never judged as having “bad character.” It is considered sufficient to say that they suffer from mental illnesses such as depression, splitting, narcissism, conduct disorder, and schizophrenia, often exacerbated by substance abuse and a history of having been bullied.
Similarly, the malfeasance or even criminal behavior of prominent public figures is explained not as a manifestation or result of deplorable character but as one or another form of psychopathology. So we are told that Harvey Weinstein had an addiction to sex. Jeffrey Epstein was a sociopath. Donald Trump is a deranged narcissist. Sam Bankman-Fried has dysthymia (long-term depression) and anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure). George Santos has “dissociative identity disorder.” And so the diagnostic labels are applied. None of these bad actors are deemed wicked, at least in any deeply meaningful sense; the language of illness is the only publicly legitimate language for talking about their ways of being and acting. As Weinstein’s younger brother Bob put it, “Harvey is obviously a very sick man. I’ve urged him to seek immediate professional help.” Weinstein himself declared hopefully, “I’m trying. I’ve got to get help. I’m in counseling and when I am better, we can rebuild.”55xMaggie Fox, “Whatever Harvey Weinstein Is, He Is No Sex Addict, Experts Say” NBC News, October 12, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/whatever-harvey-weinstein-he-no-sex-addict-experts-say-n809861.
Conservatives, for their part, have no problem using moral language in public—as is evinced by their promiscuous use of words such as values, virtue, character, principles, sin, and evil. But their use of moral language also tends to be instrumentalized, typically for partisan and political ends. As such, the politicization of “family values,” likely the greatest achievement of the Christian right, has yielded unimpressive results. After all these years and billions of dollars spent fighting for family values, there is no less vulgarity in entertainment and youth culture. There is no less sexual license. And there is no less instability in marriages and families.
Should we be surprised? As among progressives, we find among conservatives a similar if differently motivated denial of the moral as a category of lived experience. We see this in the failure of follow-through—a failure to recognize that healthy moral formation is impossible without moral community; that coherent moral cosmologies only become adequate for those who aspire to their ideals when those cosmologies are rooted in the practices of local institutions, the collective memory of forebears, and the words and lives of a community’s exemplars. Within much of conservative activism, the language of morality is weaponized in ways that run roughshod over the liminal spaces of context, subtext, contingency, and subtle distinction, where the moral life is actually lived and where moral wisdom is required. The rare legislatives successes of conservative activists (such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade) become largely pyrrhic. What law, after all, can compel the love of a woman for her unborn child or faithfulness to one’s spouse or sacrificial commitment to one’s children or the bonds of family togetherness? And what policy can legislate generosity toward the needy or care of one’s neighbor? The law is not nothing, but it cannot do the slow work of moral formation or the even slower work of building a sustainable and integrated moral order.
In sum, instrumentalizing the moral, either through science, therapeutic technique, or politics, invariably produces a thin, often legalistic ethics detached from lived experience.
The Challenge of Moral Pluralism
In the American context, the slow withering away of the moral as an integral component of lived experience was reinforced pedagogically by the need to address the growing national challenge of religious and moral pluralism in the formation of the young. Because Calvinist teaching dominated British-American religious and intellectual life in the early colonial period, moral education both before and (for a time) after the founding of the new republic was thoroughly Calvinist and principally carried out by the family and local church. The educational mandate placed upon parents during the colonial period was typified by Cotton Mather’s exhortation that children should be taught to “remember four words, and attempt all that is comprised in them: obedience, honesty, industry, and piety.”66xCotton Mather, Essays to Do Good, Addressed to All Christians, Whether in Public or Private Capacities (Johnstown, NY: Asa Child, 1815), 46. First published 1710.
Mather’s simple advice was nothing out of the ordinary. A few decades before, John Locke had advised much the same in his highly influential treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693. Locke insisted that the child’s habits be shaped in accordance with the virtues of piety, loyalty, industry, and temperance. The inclusion of piety in Locke’s and Mather’s lists of virtues was rooted in the conviction, common to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century minds, that there could be no morality without God, and that virtue could not exist without reverence for God. Locke put it this way: “As to the Foundation of [virtue], there ought very clearly to be imprinted on [the child’s] Mind a true Notion of God, as of the independent Supreme Being, Author and Maker of all Things, from whom we receive all our Good, who loves us, and gives us all things.”77xJohn Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, England: Rivington, 1690), Online Library of Liberty, https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/locke-the-works-vol-8-some-thoughts-concerning-education-posthumous-works-familiar-letters. Accessed December 28, 2023. Emphasis added.
This was not mere lip service. Like others, Locke encouraged levels of spiritual discipline unimaginable today, advising parents and teachers to keep “Children constantly Morning and Evening to Acts of prayer and Devotion to God,” and to the memorization “perfectly by heart” of the Lord’s Prayer, the Creeds, and the Ten Commandments.88xIbid.
Every generation of Americans since the founding era has recognized, if not always welcomed, the need to make moral education inclusive of diversity. When colonial ministers demanded a moral education rooted in religion, they meant the particular doctrines of Puritanism. Recognizing the limitations of Puritanism in the new republic, early-nineteenth-century reformers sought to expand the foundation of moral education to the universal truths of Christianity. Yet to the chagrin of the new and expanding Roman Catholic population, universal Christianity more often than not took shape as the particular doctrines of a common, nondenominational, evangelical Protestantism. In response to the resulting sectarian frictions, the educator Horace Mann led the charge for a more cosmopolitan solution in a “nonsectarian” liberal Christianity, one that had the markings of rationalism, Unitarianism, and transcendentalism. But it was not long before he too was accused of a sectarianism of his own. In an editorial in 1847, the Boston Recorder made that charge explicitly:
Everything is sectarianism with him, except what squares exactly with the notions of Universalists and those who have been absurdly called “pious deists” and theophilanthropists. Teach one jot of truth more and you are sectarian, and shall lose your school, or your school shall lose its proportion of the public fund for education. What is this, but to establish by law, that Universalism...shall be the State religion, taught by public authority, to the exclusion of the views of evangelical dissenters of every name?99xBoston Recorder, January 14, 1847.
Going even further, another minister, Matthew Hale Smith, wrote concurrently that “it is proper to keep dogmatic theology out of school. Let it be kept out on both sides—the dogmatism of unbelief, as well as the dogmatism of belief.”1010xMatthew Hale Smith, Reply to the Sequel of Hon. Horace Mann, Being a Supplement to The Bible, the Rod, and Religion, in Common Schools (Boston, MA: J.M. Whittemore, 1847), 27. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.replytosequelofh00smit/?st=gallery. Accessed December 28, 2023. Emphasis added.
By the early twentieth century, the influential educational philosopher and reformer John Dewey had recognized the problem anew and sought to provide a yet more inclusive and cosmopolitan solution. A full-throated scientific materialist, Dewey envisioned a moral education that would reflect what he called a “common faith”—a naturalist moral philosophy that would emerge from the workings of the democratic community itself, from life together, not from a transcendent entity or a historical tradition.
The reset that Dewey introduced was, in its elemental structure, the framework American education has been living with and building upon for over a century. Every subsequent innovation has been a variation on or a refinement of Dewey’s blend of secular rationalism, psychological pragmatism, and liberal individualism. All of these elements were embedded in a range of more recent psychological programs, including the “moral developmentalism” of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, the “values clarification” thrust of Louis Rath, and the “positive psychology” formulations of Martin Seligman.
This transformation toward inclusivity, rooted in the sociological pressures of moral pluralism, can be traced not only intellectually and pedagogically but also institutionally in schools, faith communities, and youth organizations. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), for example, founded in Great Britain in 1844 and established in the United States in 1851, saw its mission as “developing Christian personality and building a Christian society.”1111xYMCA “State of Purpose,” quoted in “YMCA in Center of Debate in Separation of Church and State,” Washington Post, September 3, 1988, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/09/03/ymca-in-center-of-debate-on-separation-of-church-and-state/1762f903-075a-4f22-a9a8-690355a8df68/. To be accepted into the YMCA, a man had to be “a member of a Christian church, or there be sufficient evidence of his being a converted character.”1212xJohn Ernest Hodder Williams, The Life of Sir George Williams, Founder of the Young Men’s Christian Association (New York, NY: A.C. Armstrong, 1906), 131. By the early 1980s, the YMCA had abandoned any sectarian commitment in favor of “values education that helps individuals and groups examine and apply their own values in today’s pluralistic society.” Its new goal: to “promote positive self-images, increase access to meaningful social roles, and change conditions that foster alienation and anti-social behavior.”1313xQuoted in “YMCA of the United States” (New York, NY: YMCA, 1980). Sports, the organization explained, provides “an excellent means of learning personal goal setting to develop a healthy self-image and increase self-esteem.” See “YMCA Youth Sports” (New York, NY: YMCA, no date). The distinctly Christian character of the organization had been cast aside.
The sum and substance of the quest for inclusion was a comprehensive change in the underpinnings of moral formation. Over time, the substance of moral formation shifted from the “objective” moral truths of divine scriptures and natural law to the conventions of a democratic society, and ultimately to the subjective instrumentalist values of the individual person or institution. Accompanying that shift was an even more significant change in the sources of authority that underwrote moral instruction: The authority of a transcendent God was superseded by the laws of the natural order and the scientific paradigms that sustained them, which in turn were supplanted by the subjective experiences of sovereign individual selves.
Just as important, the entire social ecology of moral formation underwent transformations that reinforced those ideational changes. The primary institutions through which moral understanding was mediated passed from the family and local religious congregation to the public school and youth organizations, and, finally, to the ubiquitous distractions of pop culture and social media. It is hardly surprising that all of these changes yielded a transformation in the purpose of moral formation itself—from mastery over the soul in service to God and neighbor to the training of character in service to civic life to self-care and cultivation of personality for the sake of emotional and psychological well-being.1414xJames Davison Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), 146–47. From the acquisition of a sacredly grounded sense of good and evil, we have now transitioned to a regime of moral education devoted to largely emotive deliberations over a subjective sense of safetly and happiness.
Inclusivity, then, is the historical subtext in the evolution of moral education, an evolution driven by uneasiness over moral differences and fear of the social and political divisiveness potentially resulting from such differences. Psychology, and the subjectivity it valorized, offered a seemingly neutral way to understand and cultivate the best qualities of the human person. Reducing character to personality and morality to psychological competencies would, in principle, remove any reasons for antagonism. An inclusive program of moral education would be a politically “safe” program. With an increasingly divided public sphere, who could possibly object? But who could have imagined that it would only make matters worse?
The Loss of the Particular
A “safe” morality is not bad in itself, but this kind of safety has come at a cost. In the effort to establish a neutral and inclusive paradigm of formation, moral cosmologies are lifted out of particular cultural and linguistic contexts, detached from the social practices by which they are communally reinforced, and disconnected from the historical narratives that give them weight and significance. Emptied of these particularities, lived moralities lose the very qualities by which they could become coherent to people and binding upon them. The moral is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes.
A morality conceptualized without basic links to a living creed and a lived community imposes few if any moral demands or obligations (such as telling the truth or sharing some of one’s wealth with others), and therefore has few psychic consequences (whether remorse, guilt, or shame—or, conversely, pride in having done the right thing). What you end up with may be politically uncontroversial, but it will add little or nothing to the moral fortitude of the individual.
And in what might be the greatest irony of our ethical evolution, the impoverishment of our moral lives in these ways has contributed directly to the destructive passions that animate our contemporary political scene. Indeed, the deepest political divisions of our time are underwritten by ethical divisions we have no capacity to mediate. This is, in part, because our programs of moral formation (even those provided by many faith-based schools and institutions) have stripped out the moral resources of any and all metaphysically coherent traditions that would allow such mediation. All that is left to ground and guide moral judgments in public and private life are the subjective needs and emotions of autonomous selves. This helps to explain the ease with which even the supposedly devout transfer their allegiance from the teachings of their faith to politicians, parties, or even wild conspiracy theories that make them feel good or empowered. And so we often see the worship of false idols and other expressions of misguided piety at the extremes of our partisan political arena, whether it be illiberal woke puritanism on the left or the cultish attraction to MAGA-style authoritarianism on the right.
The problem, then, is not moral stuttering. It is a kind of invincible ignorance rooted in a cultural amnesia resulting from a radically depleted and diminished ecosystem of morally informed civic institutions. Against the ethical thinness of our culture, all we are left with to address the deep differences among us are gestures of grievance born in a heightened sense of woundedness and demands for retribution.
On Recovering the Moral
Make no mistake, moral pluralism is a serious and at least potentially incendiary challenge. Nationally and globally, it may be the most serious challenge we face. That we have sought to address this challenge in a moral grammar that aspires to be inclusive is entirely understandable. Inclusivity is not only an entirely legitimate aim, but addressing it justly is a fundamental requisite of a humane future.
But seeking inclusivity at the cost of evacuating the moral of all particularities that ground it in lived reality is not only unwise but woefully insufficient. Historically, there has never been a truly generic morality. And the instrumentalist morality that has been developed for children during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is a lifeless corpse, incapable of even approximating the flourishing it promises.
This is why we need a new paradigm—a new school of thought—that addresses the challenge of moral difference, but in ways that recover the particularities of moral language and the moral ecosystems that underwrite them. Only such a reframing can make “the moral” both binding on the conscience and authoritative within our pluralistic communities.
I don’t use the word paradigm here loosely, but rather in many of the ways intended by philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: as the assumptions, conceptual frameworks, exemplary figures, and experimental practices that underwrite what is considered the “normal science” of the day. A paradigm defines for a field what is reality—what is significant and insignificant, what are the relevant and irrelevant questions, what constitutes data and therefore must be observed, and what can safely be ignored.
A paradigm shift in our understanding of ethical formation will entail a philosophical, theoretical, and empirical reconsideration of such basic concepts as morality, values, virtue, character, citizenship, and education in ways that re-embed them within history, culture, and the social order. It will require the recognition that the moral life is every bit as institutional as it is individual, every bit as cultural as it is subjective, and every bit as much an inheritance of the past as it is bound by emotional, cognitive, and behavioral exigencies of the present. Formation is invariably, even if not comprehensively, a reflection of the community within which it occurs.
That is to say that both the formation of character and the ethics by which individuals live are invariably embedded within an ecosystem of institutions, including the family, peer relationships, youth organizations, the Internet, places of worship, entertainment, and popular culture. Character and its formation are inextricably entwined within community and its culture. Because none of these institutional spaces are morally neutral, the ecosystems to which they variously contribute will be more or less conducive to the fostering of good character and good citizenship. How do family structure and the presence or absence of ancillary organizations such as sports teams, boys and girls clubs (scouting and the like), and youth groups in churches, mosques, and synagogues factor in? What difference does the type of school or the school environment make to the formation of the young? How important is social thickness or thinness, or the relative presence or absence of adult authority? And what differences do social class, race, ethnicity, and gender make—not to mention community and neighborhood, whether urban, suburban, or rural? Especially important is an understanding of the distinct role played by the unavoidable plurality of religious and ethical traditions—some established and others emergent—and the moral communities that aspire to abide by those traditions. Does the coherence or fragmentation of these traditions make a difference?
The young will be formed. The question is how. Precisely because of the inescapable relationship between persons and their communities, it is only within the particularities of the distinct social and moral ecologies they inhabit that it will be possible to discover the conditions in which a moral and civic formation oriented toward decency, kindness, generosity, respect, fairness, justice, and beauty can be cultivated. Only through acknowledgment and respect for the particularities of distinct moral and ethical traditions and communities, including emerging ones, can there be a hope of addressing the deep differences intrinsic to a demographically, religiously, and ethnically diverse democracy. Instead of engineering an inclusive moral culture independent of our many differences, there is now a possibility of finding common ground through our differences. That task is certainly more difficult than the strategy pursued by the current regime of formation, yet taking on that task may be the only way to adequately address the ethical needs of the young, the obligations of citizenship, and the requirements of our fragile and divided democracy.