Harold's Story - Part 3 |
Friday Oct 30 2009
I
read somewhere that good decision-making—indeed, good relations—depends
upon a virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candour (which takes some
time to establish, but which can easily be interrupted). Attitude,
after all, is everything. Perhaps that last statement needs a bit of
refinement: the ethical attitude is everything. By that
I mean the determination of the answer to the age-old question: who is
right? Was Harold right to express his annoyance with conduct he
perceived as racist and excessive, in coarse language? Was the police
officer right to arrest Harold in his perceived perception that Harold
was instigating a threat to the public peace? Was the security guard
right to expel the children from his shop and continue to press for
their departure from the vicinity? We don’t have enough facts, a lawyer
might argue. In a courtroom, various perspectives and motives would be
put in play, with neither party being satisfied by the result. Forensic
justice cannot answer competing claims for rightness in a manner
satisfying for everyone. But here, I stand with Harold.
We
react to moral decisions at a deeply emotional level. Goodness makes us
glad; we recoil from evil. Very early on, religious teachings
identified good and bad as beauty and ugliness, light and darkness.
‘Fairness’ has two meanings, one of which connotes beauty. Fairness as
a generalized principle of equity took some time to be formally
incorporated into the narrow arteries of justice, and in the minds of
many, they are—or should —be the same thing.
What stands in
the way of an ethical attitude is the lack of clarity about judgement
and the allocation of moral choices, which is to say, what we ought
to do in any given situation. Each of us is driven by what we feel to
be right, based on the way in which our life experience has conditioned
us to think. (I use the emotive word ‘feel’ here deliberately, for
moral choices are a complex of rational and emotional processes of
evaluation, with the emotions being dominant—after all, such choices go
to the very root of who we are as human personalities.) We are
introduced to a moral universe in which certain assumptions are
instilled into us before we achieve personhood. Some actions are bad
regardless of motivation. If a man abandons his family, it is a bad
thing. But a mature mind, a loving state of being, would seek the
circumstances: would mental illness in the offender make a difference?
Of course. An infantile sense of justice allocates blame in the result,
regardless of circumstances. Arrogance has a blinding potency.
Unfortunately, this leads in some cases to the lawyer’s ephemeral
answer to a request for an opinion: “It depends.” What I am trying to
get at here is the need for a discipline of discernment, the refinement
of our capacity to see what is essential in any set of circumstances,
and from the other’s point of view. Thinking critically is essential to
finding the true course. That doesn’t always come with age and
experience—but it usually does. Somewhere at the root of our humanity,
almost at a cellular level, there is a duty to share that wisdom.
I have always wanted to do the right thing
but absolutes are for children
whose sense of justice is exaggerated
and the world is nicely managed
by simple allocations of good and bad
but the starting point for decisions
and in particular the nettlesome matter
of what to do about mistakes, or
that which readily inspires fear in us,
is not reductio ad simpliciter
but a recognition of a moral stance
—one of empathy—which recognizes that
not everything is always as it seems
everything beyond that, the whole rich palette
of emphases, principles, values and possibilities
that could have been imagined in the love of you,
especially in its spiritual dimension,
can be grasped and explained only
as a consequence of this essential quality
I want to do the right thing. I do.
what that will be, in any given situation,
from now on until the end of days, will
try to comprehend the wonder that is you
© 2009 Stuart J. Whitley. All rights reserved.
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with: age candour decision-making ethical_attitude experience judgement justice moral_choice respect trust wisdom
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