Knowing Right from Wrong

One of my all-time, favorite movies was produced in 1989 and was entitled, “Do the Right Thing.” Produced, written and directed by Spike Lee, “the story explores a Brooklyn neighborhood’s simmering racial tension between its African American residents and the Italian American owners of a pizzeria…,” according to Wikipedia. As the name implies, it deals with a moral dilemma.

So, how do we know how to “do the right thing?”

Francis Collins, the retired director of the National Institutes of Health and former director of the Human Genome Project – of whom I’ve written often – grew up as a “practical atheist.”

Irrelevant to Him

He wasn’t so much a denier of God’s existence. It just didn’t occur to him in all his studies to become a medical doctor, then a renowned genetic scientist, to ask the God question. It was irrelevant to him, as it seems to many people.

The awakening to this question extended over several years and began when as a young doctor he noticed how much faith meant to the recovery of his patients and to their overall emotional and physical health. Now, after years as a Christian, he writes books on the relationship between religion and science.

An important factor in his awakening to faith was his discovery of a “moral law,” the idea that a sense of right and wrong is “written on our hearts,” and that that sense comes from God.

It’s what some religions, including my own Catholic faith, refer to as the “natural law,” the proposition that every human being has the propensity to do good and avoid evil. We may not agree about what constitutes good and evil. We just know we want to do one and avoid the other.

Preposterous?

This may seem preposterous considering all the terrible things humans do to one another. But even when we do terrible things, we often think we’re doing it for good reasons. And when we mess up, we feel guilty. Sometimes it’s merely a feeling, and unhealthy, but often it’s because we are actually guilty of something.

The idea that a moral or natural law exists isn’t popular today. Many believe that right and wrong depend entirely on circumstance; what is right in one instance may be wrong in another. There are no standards that can be applied in all circumstances.

Many people determine what is right or wrong by the seat of their pants, that is, they make it up as they go along, ignoring “the golden rule,” the 10 commandments, the sermon on the mount, the good Samaritan and hundreds of other wise and centuries-old moral and ethical guidelines from Judaism, Christianity and other faiths.

Applying moral principles to the circumstances isn’t always easy. But it’s one thing to try to apply a principle to a circumstance and another to ignore principles in favor of one’s arbitrariness.

The Hidden Reality

Another person I quote often is David Brooks, a columnist and author who had a revelation about faith similar to that of Collins. He had an experience that awakened him to a “radical goodness … a glimpse into the hidden reality of things,” that made real “an ancient truth that had lain unbidden at the depth of my consciousness.

“We are embraced by a moral order,” he writes about the experience. “What we call good and evil are not just preferences that this or that set of individuals invent according to their tastes.

“Rather, slavery, cruelty and rape are wrong at all times and in all places, because they are an assault on something that is sacred in all times and places, human dignity. Contrariwise, self-sacrificial love, generosity, mercy and justice are not just pleasant to see. They are fixed spots on an eternal compass, things you can orient your life toward.”