King Solomon, acceding to the throne, is said by the Bible to have been granted one wish. He asked not for wealth or long life or the defeat of his enemies but simply this: “Grant Your servant a discerning heart to govern Your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.” Such has been at most times in most civilisations, not perhaps what people sought, but what they believed they ought to seek: discernment, wisdom, insight, understanding, judgement. In the Jewish prayer book these are the things we pray for before all else. Plato, believing that wisdom comes from reason not revelation, sought to have it enthroned in the form of philosopher-kings. Most cultures have had their wisdom literature, the sifted cumulative experience of those who had lived long, seen much, and learned to tell the difference between the desirable and the merely desired. King Solomon was not alone in knowing that even in a society with as clear a moral code as ancient Israel, there are times when it needs discernment to distinguish between right and wrong. It would be hard to find a society without its sages, and one which did not place judgement at the summit of the virtues.
Ours is one, and that is what makes it unusual, possibly unprecedented. Future historians will find one of the most remarkable features of our culture the use of the word “judgemental” to rule out in advance the offering of moral judgement. This is not a superficial feature of our language but part of the deep structure of modern morality. Today almost any public pronouncement on personal morality will be greeted by a chorus of disapproval. When a Church leader recently criticised adultery on the part of figures in public life, he was subject to a torrent of abuse, in some cases by other religious leaders. Adultery was acceptable; judgement was not. The stand taken by politicians and academics of different shades in defence of the family has been routinely greeted as a group libel against single mothers and working wives. When the age of homosexual consent was recently lowered, a journalist on The Times – himself a homosexual – lamented that the victory had been won without a fight. Where, he asked, was the voice of reasoned opposition? The answer is obvious: it had been intimidated into silence. Nietzsche, the anti-moralist, has won and we have undergone what he called the “transvaluation of values.” What other ages saw as the supreme virtue, we see as a vice. Judgement has become taboo, and to believe otherwise is, as Michael Novak puts it, to “risk excommunication from the mainstream.”
This attitude is based on a fallacy, and one which is in need of exposure. The word “judgement” has two distinct, if related, meanings. The first is what we are looking for when we seek advice. We seek wisdom, experience, sagacity. Whether the counsel we wish for is moral or practical, we turn to those who have had long and successful encounters with the problem at hand. Whether we go to a tennis coach or a master craftsman or a lawyer, the very act of taking advice presupposes that there is excellence within an activity and that it is learned rather than immediately acquired. If this applies to specialised compartments of human behaviour, how much more so does it apply to life itself taken as a whole. There may not be – indeed there is not – a single model of the good life. Even in a world as cohesive and structured as eighteenth-century East European Jewry, you went to Vilna for scholarship, to Mezerich for mysticism, and to Lubavitch for piety. But within each form of life there are exemplars and sages, and consensus tells us who they are. When we seek judgement in this sense, what we want is something forward looking, the bringing to bear of considered experience on decisions we have to make. It responds to the request, “Tell me what to do,” or “Show me how to do it.”
But there is judgement in a second sense, a metaphorical extension of what judges do in court. They pass a verdict. They acquit or condemn. Moral judgement in this second sense is, as it were, passing a sentence on what we or other people have done. It is backward looking, after the event. It is about this that we have hesitations. Who are we to pass a verdict on other people’s lives, and who are they to pass sentence on ours? This reservation is well-founded. Judgement assumes authority, and the sources of moral authority have become unclear in our time. It assumes a shared set of standards, and perhaps in a diverse society there is no such thing. Besides which, moral judgement seems to presuppose knowledge that none of us has. How are we to administer blame until we know the motives and intentions of the agent, things of which he himself may not be fully aware? Judges and juries have to come to a decision about such things on the basis of the available evidence. But that is what makes legal and moral judgement different. Law is a practical compromise, the best we can do given that we have to do something. But morality seems to admit of no such compromise. When it comes to moral rather than legal guilt, only God can be the judge.
So we are reluctant to be judgemental in this second sense. But so we always were, or were taught to be. The Judaeo-Christian tradition is full of admonitions against it. “Do not judge your fellow human being until you have been in his place,” said the rabbis. “Judge all people in the scale of merit,” and “One who calls for judgement against his neighbour is punished first.” The Christian tradition warned, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” and “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Both traditions spoke against hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Both valued generosity and forgiveness in human relationships. When the sons of Jacob feared that their brother Joseph, whom they sought to kill and eventually sold into slavery, would take revenge, he replied, “Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” That sublime note, on which the book of Genesis ends, is the common ideal of both faiths. So reticence in passing judgement is not new. It is one of our oldest moral traditions.
What is new is the confusion of one kind of judgement with the other. Most of those who speak in defence of moral principle are seeking not to condemn but to guide. That has always been the responsibility of one generation to the next, to set out the map of human relationships and point out the places of danger, the glaciers and quicksands and marshes, as well as the points where the view is worth the climb. To fail to do this – to send off children or pupils on a journey without a map on the grounds that this will inhibit their choice – would in any other civilisation be seen as a dereliction of duty of the worst kind. I believe it is in our case as well. Why has it happened?
In large measure it has been the combined impact of two fateful modern ideas: the relativity of morality and the quasi-scientific explanation of human behaviour. We know more clearly than our ancestors that other people do things differently. Thirty years ago you could walk along the sea front in Southend and see one cafe after another offering the same fish and chips. Today the average supermarket offers a choice of cuisine from West India to China. And what applies to food applies to moralities. Instead of a single tradition we are faced with lifestyle options. So morality becomes a matter of taste and choice, and de gustibus non est disputandum: there is no point in asking an expert which to prefer.
If the significance of choice has been expanded in one direction, it has been contracted in another. A whole range of human sciences – biological, sociological, physiological and psychological – has been constructed on the idea that what we do is caused rather than chosen. It has its origins in external forces, not the human will. So our behaviour is not the proper subject of praise or blame, and the concept of moral responsibility has been placed in doubt. We are what our genes or early childhood or human instinct or social class have made us, and if we are to change what people do, we must change those external forces rather than address the responsible self, for there is no such thing. The dual impact of moral relativism and scientific determinism has been to weaken the metaphor of the journey and the map. For on this interpretation of the human condition there is no map and no considered journey, only our unchosen desires and the techniques of satisfying them.
I believe this to be a disastrously diminished view of human life, and moreover, few of us believe it. Which of us, faced with a plumber who does not show up, or a lawyer who gives us the wrong advice, seriously believes that no one is to blame; that it is genetic determinism or maternal deprivation? Which of us would defend wife-battering on the grounds that there are cultures in which it is a male prerogative, even a legitimate assertion of patriarchal authority? Blessedly, we are neither determinists nor relativists. We know that people can be disadvantaged in different ways, and we work to minimise them. But we also know that human will triumphs over circumstance. We know that different civilisations have their own moral conventions. But we know brutality and injustice when we see them, and we do not defend them because they have their own cultural integrity. The illusion of relativity may be fostered by television programmes on ethical dilemmas to which ten experts give ten different answers. But we know that the existence of hard cases does not prove that all cases are hard, any more than the existence of grey refutes black and white.
What has added to our confusion, however, has been a blurring of the boundaries between politics and morality, most notably in the failure to keep apart the quite different concepts of “right” and “rights.” Not everything that we have a right to do are we right to do. The first is a matter of politics, the second, of morality. We have a legal right to be rude but it remains morally wrong. We have a right to do what the law of the land does not forbid. But within the range of legally permitted acts are some which are morally right, some wrong and others neutral. How could we confuse the two? Yet confusion there is.
Much of it is the legacy of John Stuart Mill. More than most, Mill found Victorian society deeply oppressive. He wrote a famous tract, On Liberty, in which he argued against what he called, following de Tocqueville, the “tyranny of the majority.” Liberty, he argued, depends not only on the form of government but on its limits. Democracy could threaten freedom if it meant that the majority passed laws which excessively intruded into private life. The principle he advocated was that “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” A century after he wrote it, that argument was victorious throughout the democracies of the West, as one country after another liberalised laws relating to divorce, abortion and homosexuality. The result was – or should have been – to open a gap between law and morality. Acts might be wrong, but it was against the principle of a free society to punish them with the force of law. Legal right and moral right became two quite separate things.
However, Mill went significantly further. He argued that not only laws could be oppressive; so could public opinion. We can be as inhibited by censure as by a court of law:
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by means other than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
Society should refrain from judgement. In this further step, Mill was wrong, even incoherent. For if a society has any moral principles at all, it will seek to inculcate them. And it cannot do so without holding up some conduct for approval and some for disapproval. To call this a form of tyranny is stretching language beyond the bounds of sense. It is one thing to sentence a writer to death for blasphemy, quite another to express moral outrage and censure. The one is a clear limitation on freedom. The other is one of its inevitable conditions. There can be no experiment without risk, nor can we eliminate from the moral life the occasional need for courage. It was not tyranny that Stravinsky experienced when his audience booed the first performance of “The Rite of Spring.” It is not tyranny when we express our disapproval of a way of life. Without disapproval there can be no approval, and hence no moral teaching, and hence no moral community.
The greatest of modern libertarians, Friedrich Hayek, said that for Mill, “freedom means chaos.” He added:
Whether or not we wish to call coercion those milder forms of pressure that society applies to nonconformists, there can be little question that these moral rules and conventions that possess less binding power than the law have an important and even indispensable role to perform and probably do as much to facilitate life in society as do the strict rules of law.
Despite this, Mill’s second argument today holds sway, in the form of violent antipathy to public expressions of traditional moral judgement. Had Mill foreseen how his essay had given rise to the concept of “political correctness” he would have been appalled, for what he saw as the tyranny of the majority has been replaced by the tyranny of an influential intellectual minority. The political battle for legal rights has been succeeded by the moral battle to render “lifestyle choices” immune to criticism: to turn what I have a right to do into what I am right to do. This is intolerance in the name of tolerance, and will indeed lead, unchecked, to chaos.
Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. We owe it to our children, as parents, to our pupils, as teachers, and to our fellow citizens, as heirs to a civilisation, to hand on what we have learned. Just as we fight for the conservation of ancient buildings so we must fight for the conservation of moral traditions. Just as we protest the destruction of rain-forests, so we must protest the destruction of the institutions which sustain our moral environment. That is the imperative of moral judgement: not to blame but to build, not to condemn but to guide. And if it now needs courage, we owe it no less.
