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)
