Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Vincent MacNamara on the Authonomy of Morality


Vincent MacNamara lectured in Trinity College, Dublin, and St. Patrick’s College, Kiltegan. He also lectured in moral theology in the Pontifical University of Ireland (just before my time there). Here is what he wrote on the issue of “the autonomy of morality” that some might find interesting:

I am suggesting that morality has a certain autonomy. By this I mean that it makes its own demand: you could say that one should be oral because one should be moral. One does not need to know God before becoming aware of moral distinctions or moral demands: morality does not immediately need religion. It is true that a religious tradition, like any other group, may have arrived at certain conclusions, about how one is to be moral, may give support to the whole enterprise of morality, may have its own understanding of the ultimate significance of it. But even if religion is abandoned, a person is still let with the morality question unless being human is also to be abandoned. Morality has been so dominated by religion that young people especially seem to think that because they have given up faith they are entitled to give up morality. This is to misunderstand its origin. You might say that if there were no God there would be no morality because we would not exist. That is true. But God is not the author of the principles of morality. Morality is a human thing. What God asks of us is that we listen to ourselves, listen to the moral call within us. Neither does morality depend on reward. Many fine moral people who do not believe in God or in heaven do believe in being moral. For them virtue is its own reward i.e. the knowledge that they are living in the way in which they believe human beings should live. They are not slow to point out that if they live well it is because they believe in the value and dignity of the other and not simply because someone has told them to do so or because they hope for any reward. Some even accuse Christian morality of being anti-morality because it is so closely linked to reward in the popular consciousness. Christians, they say, are not really interested in morality but only in themselves—in saying their souls. They have a point. Morality makes its own demand: it appeals to us to recognise that there is a truth for doing, that there is a humanising way of living together, that there is a form of genuine society to be created. To collapse morality into religion, to attribute its genesis to a decree of God is to make a true appreciation of it difficult. If someone is led to believe that morality has only to do with being a Christian or that it is something that one accepts if one wishes to ensure future happiness, then it has been devalued. It is easy to have such notions in a religious morality.

Morality therefore is independent of the Churches. It is a human experience and institution which Churches must rather acknowledge. IT may be important to the religious life of Churches. They may think they are good at it or know a lot about it or protect it. (There will be those, of course, who will dispute such claims.) They may demand it from their members. But they do not have a monopoly of it. They do not make morality and cannot in any sense make things right or wrong. They have to find out what is right or wrong. They can give their opinion on such matters. But as in every other area of life the value of their opinion depends on their competence, their diligence and their honesty. Things are never right or wrong because somebody says so, but because of the way we are in the world. So the fact that a Church makes statements about war or rights or revolution or marriage does not affect the morality of such actions. They are either right or wrong in themselves. Neither can the Churches afford to ignore the fact that there are a great many honourable and intelligent non-Christians who are just as concerned about moral issues as they are. They ought to perhaps to see their role as that of sharing with all people of goodwill the struggle to discover what is best for the human community, what is the good society their concern for morality should be a passion for the welfare of society and not just a defence of established positions. (Vincent MacNamara, The Truth in Love: Reflections on Christian Morality [Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1988], 17-19)