I’ve been reading a lot about the Boy Scouts recently. A couple of days ago there was an article about the Southern Baptist Convention and their claim that it would be a “catastrophe” to lift the gay ban on Boy Scouts. Actually, the article was an interview with Richard Land, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. Mr. Land made an interesting statement: “The Scouts have said for themselves for over a hundred years that traditional morality is at the core value of scouting — teaching them to be morally straight. And now they are going to make it a local option under pressure from corporations and from some Scout groups. A core value is not a local option. When a core value becomes a local option it’s just a preference, and preferences are normally not protected by the First Amendment.”
Of course the article went on and Mr. Land expressed his opinion(s) at length. I have no intention of judging — the Scouts, the Southern Baptist Convention, Mr. Land or anyone else. I did find the article interesting and the phrase that particularly caught my eye was, “traditional morality.”
I got to thinking about “traditional morality” and wondered if I knew what it was or is… and I decided I probably don’t. Usually when people talk about traditional values or traditional morality, they’re really talking about the values or morality that they believe in or accept.
There are many morals and values in the world and of course since they aren’t all the same, people judge each other’s values and make judgements and disagree even to the point of going to war over some morality or value issue.
Today, when morality is discussed, it seems to come down “traditional morality” vs. “modern morality.” I’ve heard it said that traditional morality is character based and modern morality is action based.
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist that wrote quite a bit about ethics that included some thoughts on morality. He believed that to become a morally developed person, you had to develop virtues (courage, compassion, honesty, fortitude, etc.) by habitually behaving in accordance with those virtues. Once you got into the habit of behaving like a good person, it would start to affect your soul, making you a good person inside as well as outside. Once you accomplished that, you would naturally know what the right thing to do is. I guess that would fall into character based morality or traditional morality. The modern school of thought seems to be to come up with set of rules that set a standard for deciding what the right thing is. The problem with that is the rules are defined by people pushing their values or morality.
In my mind, the bottom line is that there is no justification for more or less virtue, more or less integrity or more or less personal responsibility. Everyone, the world over, knows what is right and what is wrong. Mark Twain once said, “Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.” But my favorite “morality” quote comes from Henry David Thoreau: “Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”
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