morality and mocking

I  was driving down the beautiful Mt Ousley road the other night when I switched my radio to Triple J’s Hack program. The topic for the night was explicit text messaging and MMSing, and the legal ramifications for the youth engaging in it.

One of the discussants (I surmised him to be a teenager from one of the catholic youth organisations) said something to the effect of

“What our youth need is not more laws, but greater discernment and moral fibre”

At which point one of the other experts (who sounded much older) began openly mocking, interrupting the young speaker. “Moral FIBRE,” he  scoffed.

The presenter handled the situation well, but when given the chance to speak, the older speaker said

“I do not believe in any such thing as a lack of moral fibre. As a humanist I believe it is inherent”

This gobsmacked me.

It seems self evident to me that, even if humans do possess the ability to make moral decisions, we choose not to exercise it most of the time – which says very little of our inherent “moral fibre”.

Humanist interventions for social problems tend to revolve around harm-minimisation, education, and legal liberalisation. I do not deny there is a place for these things. However, the perspective from which they proceed is an incomplete one.

The dogmatic denial of the inherent corruptness of human nature can only lead to well-intentioned adjustment of social facade. If indeed the very human-ness of humanity is corrupt, this presents a much deeper problem to address when we see social brokenness.

supererogation and Jesus

I’ve just started reading Principles of Biomedical Ethics, by Beauchamp and Childress,  and have been introduced to the ethical concept of supererogation. A rough definition might be “exceeding one’s obligations”. [Be warned: it's not a word to use in conversation.]

I’ve been reflecting on the place of supererogation in christian thinking. As our example is God Himself, and as we are called to “Be holy, as I am holy”, it seems that supererogation is irrelevant for the christian.

But then we think about Jesus’ words (Matt 5:47):

And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,^* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?

He’s clearly applying a supererogation-like idea here, but there is a difference.  Jesus invites his disciples to supererogate the common morality, using the comparison with the unspiritual to show the insufficiency of meeting an imagined minimum.

We are called to “Be holy, as I am holy”. This clearly precludes supererogation of the true moral standard, but mandates the supererogation of every other.