The Nature of Morality

For a good 20 years, Britons have looked on Sir Walter Moberly, principal of the new St. Catharine's College at Windsor, as one of their top educators. In the last three years, they have also come to think of him as one of their top Christian philosophers. His Crisis in the University (TIME, July 11, 1949) was a bold attempt to restore a sense of unity to higher education by restoring its sense of Christian purpose. Last week Britons were grappling with Sir Walter's latest work (Responsibility; Oxford University Press) --an equally bold attempt to heal the split in society's sense of moral judgment.

Moralist Moberly's thesis, first spelled out in a series of lectures at the University of Durham, is based on the fact that there are two current conceptions of responsibility and hence of moral judgment. The lawyer-moralist has one idea. The psychologist has another. And society is torn between them.

Progress & Poison. To the psychologist, says Sir Walter, the proper approach to the delinquent is "therapeutic rather than juridical; the offender is to be regarded as a sick man to be healed rather than as a malefactor to be chastised . . . Ultimately then, all praise and blame are irrational." Bernard Shaw put the moral, says Sir Walter, when he once suggested that a man should no more be punished for having an inefficient conscience than for having an inefficient lung.

But to this argument the lawyer-moralist has a stern retort. First of all, punishment is an administrative necessity--an indispensable safeguard of civilized society. More important, "to condemn and punish offenders, to insist on their responsibility ... is a phase of ... bracing strictness which has an irreplaceable educational value . . . With any individual, simply to accept his temperament and character as they are, and his impulses as they come, is death to moral progress . . . It is also disastrous to lead [a delinquent] to believe that he is more sinned against than sinning and to imply that strenuous moral effort on his own part is unnecessary. The maxim Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner is poison here."

Merit & Demerit. Is the lawyer-moralist wholly right? According to Sir Walter, he is in many ways as wrong as the psychologist. At their worst, courtroom judgments are nonmoral, stressing too much the deed and too little the doer, treating the offender simply as a nuisance that must be removed. At their best, they are sub-Christian. "They witness to a moral order which commands a deep respect. But [they miss] the supreme heights of human experience . . . for [they leave] room for no gospel and no salvation .. ."

Above both judge .and psychologist, says Sir Walter, "there is a distinctive, Christian approach to wrongdoing, which is based on a distinctive estimate of the nature of wrong and of the way to put it right ... In the first place 'Sin,' as the Christian conceives it, differs from 'Crime' not only in degree but in kind. It is a morbid condition of the whole self rather than a series of overt acts ... In a certain sense, personal responsibility ... is here at its most extreme ... It is an obligation to answer not only for particular acts or omissions but. . . for the tenor of a whole life ... It involves an admission of total moral bankruptcy, a plea of 'Guilty' without mitigating circumstances . . ."

"Put Things Right." Though the "developed Christian conscience is severe towards self, [it is] compassionate towards others." In judging others, the Christian once again looks beyond the deed and fixes on the doer, "the essential man, made in God's image . . . Exact assessment of each offender's ill-desert is not in the foreground of his attention. The responsibility of which he is chiefly conscious is his own responsibility for doing something to put things right.. ."

In putting things right, the Christian partially agrees with the psychologist. He, too, puts the criminal above the crime, is not primarily concerned with" settling "a bill in accordance with some tariff." But unlike the psychologist, he does not regard guilt as "an illusion, a form of groundless self-torment." He regards it rather as indispensable, for "in the life of the soul no magic wand is waved, no slate is simply sponged." The Christian's final responsibility is not to abolish the delinquent's guilt--the one means of redemption-- but to share it. "He will regard his own possible part in the other's rehabilitation as strictly subordinate, since ultimately all will depend on the issue of a dialogue between the man himself and God. The Christian's own effort will be to provide an environment in which God's voice may be easily heard. He will try to bring the outcast into a circle of Christian fellowship, in which 'Charity' is the mainspring of action."

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