Bioethics
The new moral order
By Douglas Farrow

Hardcopy Issue Date: November 2008
Online Publication Date: Nov 10, 2008, 09:39

I wrote last month in these pages (“Ontario physicians attack Freedom of Conscience”) of a new moral order that “sets no great store by conscience, none by natural law or religion; indeed, it finds the authority of conscience and of religion inimical to its aims.”   It is my business here to elaborate on that claim. 

The context in which I made it was the furore over the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ draft document calling on doctors to toe the line being drawn by the Human Rights Commission, even if that meant setting aside their own moral and religious beliefs.  That some of the most offensive language has been removed from that document, as I predicted, does not mitigate the need to examine the ideology that produced it.  As those who are following this story will know, the revised document remains far from satisfactory; meanwhile similar documents have been surfacing in other provinces and in other countries, from Europe to Australia.  Across the West, once the bastion of freedom, freedom of conscience is under attack.  The CPSO episode is but one example of that, and the medical profession but one theatre – albeit a vital one – in which the attack is being carried out.

Those who hope to resist effectively must understand what they are up against.  And what they are up against is nothing less than a new moral order that is in fact a kind of anti-morality.  The order it is trying to overturn is the Judeo-Christian one, which was built around the Ten Commandments revealed to Moses, the two Great Commandments identified by Jesus, and the virtue ethics developed by Augustine in conversation with Graeco-Roman moral philosophy.  That order has been undermined in various ways from Kant onwards – Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue remains the definitive account – but we have now reached the stage where there is a concerted attempt to demolish it altogether, using human rights legislation as the battering ram.

The old order operated concurrently on three levels:  the universal (natural law), the covenantal (religion), and the personal (conscience).  The new order substitutes on each level its own alternative.  In place of natural law it puts pluralism; in place of religion it puts secularism; and in place of conscience it puts autonomy or individualism.  These conspire together to pervert human rights discourse and to destroy the freedoms that the old order laboured so long to achieve.  I want to consider each of them in turn.  Afterwards I will give a name to this new moral order and prescribe an antidote.

Three conspiring ideologies

Pluralism
Pluralism is not normally thought of as a substitute for natural law, but that is what it is.  Harvard’s Pluralism Project defines pluralism as “the engagement that creates a common society” from the colourful diversity we see all around us.  Pluralism does not bind us together as natural law does, however; that is, by showing us what we all have in common by virtue of being human.  Rather it teaches us to celebrate our differences, and indeed becomes an instrument for ensuring, as Avigail Eisenberg puts it, “that no one principle, ideal, or way of life can dominate.” In this way of thinking there are no moral norms or absolutes, no natural order or laws that bind human beings to their humanity.  Pluralism itself is the only imperative, the only absolute – the one principle that will, after all, dominate.

Pluralism, in other words, is not so much a practical response to changing demographics and increased immigration, as it is a tactic in the culture war.  It is a technique for disenfranchising the majority who still respect natural law, not (as it pretends) for celebrating or enhancing social diversity.  Here let it be said that Christianity is not against diversity.  Indeed, its trinitarian theology and its doctrine of creation arguably provide the only real foundation for respect for the many and not merely for the one, for the different and not merely for the same.  That is one reason why societies shaped by Christianity have generally welcomed immigrants, and why the Church itself is the most marvellous illustration of diversity in unity and unity in diversity.  But of course the Church upholds natural law, and social diversity within the bounds of natural law.  The Church still believes in rightly ordered ends, hence in cooperating virtues more than in competing “values.”  It expects people to give a moral account of their values, not merely to identify and celebrate them.  And so it offends pluralists by challenging pluralism’s hegemony. 

Secularism
This brings us to secularism, which partners with pluralism to marginalize the Church and religious voices.  Secularism insists that religion must be confined to the private sphere and allowed no direct influence on public life, or on accounts of what belongs to the common good of a particular society.  A liberal democracy, it is said, cannot adhere to a moral tradition that is rooted in religion, even if a majority of its citizens (whatever their own behaviour or, for that matter, their own religious views) believe that tradition to be more or less sound.  It cannot go further in moral matters than to propound tolerance and respect for everyone.  If it did go further, it would unfairly restrict the liberty of dissenters and invite social strife between differing traditions.

It is my suspicion that many who say such things are not half so worried about civil strife, which they themselves are not afraid to stir up, or about civil liberties, which they are not afraid to curtail, as about the moral consensus that emerges when religion is not confined to the private sphere.  But let me be clear about the kind of secularism I am talking about.  I am not talking about the kind of secularism that Christendom itself generated, the kind that insists on a distinction between Church and State and refuses in principle (even if the principle was much contested in practice) to allow either to assume the rights and responsibilities of the other.   I am talking about the kind of secularism that arrogates to itself the role that religion once played in binding together the body politic.  This is the secularism that, though it denies any public role for religion, is itself a form of religion:  a civil religion (though its proponents do not have the honesty of Rousseau in naming it as such) that obliterates the distinction altogether by making the State both adjudicator and enforcer of the new morality. 

Again, let it be said clearly that Christianity has no aversion to the secular.  Christianly speaking, “secularity” refers to the ordering of various offices, activities, or objects to the needs of the present age (saeculum).  Embedded in the concept of the secular is a recognition that the present age, while penultimate and (unlike the age to come) strictly provisional, remains worthy of our concern and attention.  Yet its affairs should be conducted with a certain modesty.  They should not be conducted as if the kingdom of God were already here, or could be produced by human efforts, but rather with the humility and sense of accountability that derive from the knowledge that God – having already revealed the king – will Himself produce the kingdom when He brings the present age to an end.  But for those who refuse to acknowledge the king, secularity implies something quite different. It implies liberation from any concern with that which does not belong exclusively to the present age; that is, from everything that concerns the age to come.  Consequently it invites utopian enterprises of various kinds: hubristic enterprises like communism, fascism and, yes, “human rights” regimes, whose own fascist character is revealed most clearly in their attacks on conscience.

Individualism
To speak of conscience is to come to the third level, where the emphasis falls on the individual.  At first glance it may seem odd that conscience should be displaced and even attacked.  Conscience, after all, though informed by natural law (knowledge of which is universal or innate) and by religion (which is learned in community), is a faculty that involves the individual in a dialogue with himself; it belongs to one’s self-awareness.  So why should those who wish to exalt the individual to the highest place, and to emphasize moral autonomy, make themselves the enemies of conscience?

They do so because the dialogue that conscience demands is not merely a dialogue of the self with itself.  It is a dialogue in which the self is questioned, in which the self is called upon to side against itself; that is, to discipline itself by taking up the cause of natural law or of religion.   And this is precisely what individualism – the idolatry of the autonomous individual – cannot stand for.  Conscience acknowledges autonomy, the freedom of the individual to choose.  But it also acknowledges heteronomy, the claim of the Creator and of the common good.  It asks the self to choose to submit itself to what is higher than itself.  For the individualist, however, there is nothing higher than the self.  Conscience is therefore the last enemy to be overcome in the battle for the new moral order.

The morality of despair
If the new moral order is not really a morality but an anti-morality, such order as it can bring will of necessity be built on violence.  But its proponents are very shrewd.  What better weapon to turn against conscience than human rights?  Human rights discourse arose historically on a theological foundation, combining the concerns of natural law, religion, and conscience.  But what if essential elements of that discourse – equality, dignity, autonomy, freedom, etc. – were to be dislocated from their foundation and rearranged as a protective silo against the conscience, so that modern man might get on with his experiments at the edge of morality?  What if the Human Rights Commissions themselves were to declare conscience the real threat to rights, and to prohibit its public manifestation?  What if it were in the name of human rights that dissident physicians – those, that is, who have dared to resist the culture of death that has now penetrated even the medical arts – were told: “Treat anything you like, but do not treat the conscience. Do not let your patients see that you yourself have a conscience!”

Of course this transformation of rights is a denial of rights, this hyper-individualism a denial of individual freedom, and this use of the law lawless. The new moral order cannot disguise the fact that it is self-contradictory, dishonest, and unjust.  But we should see that it is also desperate, or rather that its advocates are desperate.  They are desperate to avoid conviction in the court of conscience, lest they have to acknowledge a still higher court, the court that will sit at the end of the age. 
 
What then shall we call this new morality, if not the morality of despair?  And with what shall we confront it, even and especially where it is most menacing, if not with the gospel of hope?  For despair, as Kierkegaard argued in Sickness unto Death, is the refusal to be oneself before God, and Christian hope is the right antidote to that.  Christian hope is grounded in the knowledge that God himself is for us in Christ, not against us, so that in Christ we may indeed be ourselves, and be ourselves before God.  This, I think, is what Pope Leo XIII also had in mind when he said in Jesus Christ the Redeemer:  “The world has heard enough of the so-called ‘rights of man.’ Let it hear something of the rights of God.”

Christian hope liberates the conscience, and can liberate society too.  It is not mere optimism, which is no more than a postponement of despair.  Christian hope is guided by faith and governed by charity, because it is anchored in the verdict of God already delivered in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.  Christian hope is what Cosmas and Damian, the patron saints of medicine, exercised when they combined in their practice treatment of body with treatment of soul – receiving payment for neither – and when they refused to hide or recant their faith in Christ or to conform to Diocletian’s edict of religious uniformity.  Christian hope is what our doctors need today if they are to think and act in the spirit of Cosmas and Damian.  Christian hope is what we all need if we are to resist our country’s descent into despair.

Douglas Farrow is associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University, and the editor of Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society (McGill-Queen’s 2004).